Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe 9042025387, 9789042025387

Table of contents :
Transcultural Modernities
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
NEW EURO-AFRICAN LITERARY SPACES
Voices Lost in a Non-Place
Kossi Komla–Ebri and Migrant Writing in Italy
Poetics of Transition
Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia
African Voices in Finland and Sweden
LITERARY PERSPECTIVES
Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature
Euro-African Trans-Spaces?
Culture in Transit
Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis
Polyphony, Old ‘Lyonnais’ and Animism
Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam
‘Occupying the Isolated Terminal Space and Silent’
Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s
VISUAL AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES
New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling
North African Modernities
Spies in the Sixteenth Arrondissement
Emigrants and Immigrants of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France
Towards an Aesthetic of the Migrant Self
Critical Dialogues
IMAGINING LIFE – NARRATING STORIES
Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony
Refugee Life Narratives
Shared Paradoxes in Namibian and German History
From Utopia to Atopia to Diaspora?
“Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult”
“Performing ‘Africa’” in Germany
Misunderstandings
CREATIVE WRITING
Le Pyjama bleu
Cotton Candy
Notes on Contributors and Editors
Notes for Contributors

Citation preview

Transcultural Modernities Narrating Africa in Europe

Matatu Journal for African Culture and Society ————————————

———————————

EDITORIAL BOARD Gordon Collier Geoffrey V. Davis

Christine Matzke Aderemi Raji–Oyelade †Ezenwa–Ohaeto

Frank Schulze–Engler Chantal Zabus

TECHNICAL AND CARIBBEAN EDITOR Gordon Collier ————————————

———————————

BOARD OF ADVISORS Anne V. Adams (Ithaca N Y ) Eckhard Breitinger (Bayreuth, Germany) Margaret J. Daymond (Durban, South Africa) Anne Fuchs (Nice, France) James Gibbs (Bristol, England) Johan U. Jacobs (Durban, South Africa) Jürgen Jansen (Aachen, Germany)

Jürgen Martini (Magdeburg, Germany) Henning Melber (Windhoek, Namibia) Amadou Booker Sadji (Dakar, Senegal) Reinhard Sander (San Juan, Puerto Rico) John A. Stotesbury (Joensuu, Finland) Peter O. Stummer (Munich, Germany) Ahmed Yerima (Lagos, Nigeria)

— Founding Editor: Holger G. Ehling —

Matatu is a journal on African and African diaspora literatures and societies dedicated to interdisciplinary dialogue between literary and cultural studies, historiography, the social sciences and cultural anthropology. Matatu is animated by a lively interest in African culture and literature (including the AfroCaribbean) that moves beyond worn-out clichés of ‘cultural authenticity’ and ‘national liberation’ towards critical exploration of African modernities. The East African public transport vehicle from which Matatu takes its name is both a component and a symbol of these modernities: based on ‘Western’ (these days usually Japanese) technology, it is a vigorously African institution; it is usually regarded with some anxiety by those travelling in it, but is often enough the only means of transport available; it creates temporary communicative communities and provides a transient site for the exchange of news, storytelling, and political debate.

Matatu is firmly committed to supporting democratic change in Africa, to providing a forum for interchanges between African and European critical debates, to overcoming notions of absolute cultural, ethnic or religious alterity, and to promoting transnational discussion on the future of African societies in a wider world.

Transcultural Modernities Narrating Africa in Europe

Edited by

Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff, and Daniela Merolla

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009

Matatu

Number 36

Cover design: Gordon Collier & Pier Post Cover picture: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Tree

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents - Prescriptions pour la permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-2538-7 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-2816-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2009 Printed in The Netherlands

T ABLE OF C ONTENTS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Acknowledgements | ix Illustrations | xi Introduction | xiii

N E W E U R O -A F R I C A N L I T E R A R Y S P A C E S SABRINA BRANCATO Voices Lost in a Non-Place: – African Writing in Spain | 3 PETER PEDRONI Kossi Komla–Ebri and Migrant Writing in Italy

| 19

DANIELA MEROLLA Poetics of Transition:

– Africa and Dutch Literary Space | 35 ELISABETH BEKERS Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia:

– African Writing in Flanders, Belgium | 57 EILA RANTONEN African Voices in Finland and Sweden

| 71

LITERARY PERSPECTIVES FRANK SCHULZE–ENGLER Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature SUSAN ARNDT Euro-African Trans-Spaces?

– Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies | 103 ELISABETH BEKERS Culture in Transit:

– The Migration of Female Genital Excision to Europe in Euro-African Writing

|

121

SUSANNE GEHRMANN Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis: – A Reading of Simon Njami’s African Gigolo | 141

| 87

ELISA DIALLO Polyphony, Old ‘Lyonnais’ and Animism:

– Africa in Urban Europe in Un Rêve utile de Tierno Monénembo | 157 NADIA BUTT Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator | 167 OBODODIMMA OHA ‘Occupying the Isolated Terminal Space and Silent’:

– The Rhetoric of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode | 181 DARIA TUNCA Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner | 195

VISUAL AND CINEMATOGRAPHIC NARRATIVES ALEX ROTAS New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling:

– Ibrahim El Salahi and Mohamed Bushara as ‘Asylum Artists’ in the UK | 215 MARIE–CHRISTINE PRESS North African Modernities: – Myth Stripped Bare | 239 DAPHNE PAPPERS Spies in the Sixteenth Arrondissement:

– Myriam Mihindou Exhibits at the Musée Dapper in Paris | 255 JACOBIA DAHM Emigrants and Immigrants of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France:

– Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire De ... | 277

and S. Pierre Yameogo’s Moi et mon blanc

MARIE–HÉLÈNE GUTBERLET Towards an Aesthetic of the Migrant Self:

– The Film Le Clandestin by José Zeka Laplaine | 287 NWACHUKWU FRANK UKADIKE Critical Dialogues:

– Transcultural Modernities and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary Films

|

297

IMAGINING LIFE – NARRATING STORIES GRAHAM HUGGAN Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony | 315

SI S S Y H E L F F Refugee Life Narratives:

– The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer | 331 KATRIN BERNDT Shared Paradoxes in Namibian and German History: – Lucia Engombe’s Kind Nr. 95 | 347 ANNIKA MCPHERSON From Utopia to Atopia to Diaspora?

– Social (Re-)Organization in a German Refugee Home | 363 BETTINA HORN–UDEZE “Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult”:

– A Nigerian Migrant’s Narration of Initiation into the System of Migration | 377 CHRISTINE MATZKE “Performing ‘Africa’” in Germany:

– Members of abok Theatre Company in Conversation | 391 FOUAD LAROUI Misunderstandings:

– Working Euro-African Life into Fiction | 405 CREATIVE WRITING FOUAD LAROUI Le Pyjama bleu | 417 CHIKA UNIGWE Cotton Candy | 423

Notes on Contributors and Editors | 433 Notes for Contributors | 441

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

We are grateful to the Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Afrikaforschung (Z I A F ) of the University of Frankfurt for its generous financial support. Furthermore, we are indebted to the Musée Dapper, Paris, for their permission to print the images by the artist Myriam Mihindou and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, for their permission to print images by the artist Ibrahim El-Salahi. We also wish to express our gratitude to the authors Chika Unigwe and Fouad Laroui for kindly contibuting their short stories. Since the submission of the final manuscript of the book in July 2007, unforeseen delays have tried the patience of our contributors; we deeply regret any inconvenience caused by this unconscionably protracted gestation. This book would never have been published without the warm and continuous support of the technical editor of Matatu, Gordon Collier, who handled the publication process remarkably well in the face of changing deadlines. Last but certainly not least, many thanks to our families for their loving patience during the editorial process entailed in bringing out this volume.

ELISABETH BEKERS, SISSY HELFF, AND DANIELA MEROLLA

I LLUSTRATIONS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

FIGURES 1:

Dutch Literary Space: Historical Trends – Intersections and Interactions

2: Ibrahim El-Salahi, Funeral and a Crescent (1963). Oil on hardboard, 93x97 cm. Gift of Mariska Marker, courtesy of the

55 233

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca NY. 3: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Inevitable (1984–85). India ink on paper, 9 panels total 530x604 cm, courtesy of the Herbert

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F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca NY; image courtesy of the artist. 4: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Untitled (2000). Collage, 30x21 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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5: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Untitled (2003). Collagraph, 18x18 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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6: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Tree (2001).

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Coloured ink and watercolour on paper, 35x26 cm. Courtesy of the British Museum; image courtesy of the artist. 7: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Painting 37 (2003). Ink drawing on paper, found material, 20.3x29.3 cm. Asylum Years exhibition, Oxford, 2004; image courtesy of the artist.

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8: Zineb Sedira, Mother, Father and I (2003).

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Video triptych projected onto two walls, (‘mother’ and ‘father’ on one wall, with sound; ‘I’ on opposite wall, silent). Duration: 20 minutes each video. (Commissioned by the St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri, U S A . Private collection: Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris. Collections: Cité Nationale de l’Histoire et de l’Immigration, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). Extracts from the performance can be viewed on www.sonicgenes.co.uk/zineb/MothFath_v.html; stills are available on the artist’s website www.zinebsedira.com 9: Zineb Sedira, Self Portrait or the Virgin Mary (2000).

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C-Prints triptych (Collections: Arts Council of England; Musée Réattu, Arles, France). 10: Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Dansons [Let’s Dance]. Video installation, 5 minute D V D (2003) © the artist.

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11: Myriam Mihindou, La Colonne Vide (2004, Paris, Place des Invalides). Video diptych projected onto the wall. Duration: 6 hours 20 min.

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12: Myriam Mihindou, Fleurs de peau (1999, Île de La Réunion).

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Series of sculptures of soap, needles, hemp, paraffin. Between 6 and 10 cm high (soap parts). 13: Myriam Mihindou, L’Ange et le cygne noir / Angel and Dark Swan (2001, Alexandria).

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Series of sculptures of cotton, felt, kaolin, hemp, thread, needles, paraffin, c. 31x25 cm high. 14: Myriam Mihindou, Division plastique (1999–2000, Île de La Réunion). Series of colour photographs, 24x36 mm.

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15: Myriam Mihindou, Sculptures de chair (1999–2000, Île de La Réunion). Series of colour photographs, 120x80/90x60 cm.

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I NTRODUCTION ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

T

from Africa towards Europe have aroused interest not only in the socio-political consequences of the migrants’ insistent appeals to ‘fortress Europe’ but also in the artistic integration of African migrants into the cultural world of Europe. While in recent years the creative output of Africans living in Europe has received attention from the media and in academia, little critical consideration has been given to African migrants’ modes of narration and the manner in which these modes give expression to, or are an expression of, their creators’ transcultural realities. This special issue on Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe responds to this need for reflection by examining the manner in which migrants compose and negotiate their Euro-African affiliations in their narratives. The urgency of such reflection was confirmed by the overwhelming response to the call for contributions to this volume and by the lively discussions generated at a conference on this same subject, organized by the editors of the present volume in June 2006 at the University of Frankfurt, in collaboration with the universities of Antwerp and Leiden. Some of the ideas and arguments that are presented in this volume germinated and ripened in the course of conference discussions. One such consideration that found its way into this volume is a strategic use of the reversed label ‘Euro-African’ in order to challenge the eurocentric understanding of identity-formation implied by the commonly used term ‘Afro-European’ and to invite critical engagement with European identity-politics. Transcultural Modernities brings together scholars in the fields of literary and art criticism, cultural studies, and anthropology for an extensive interdisciplinary exchange on the specific modes of narration displayed in Euro-African literatures, the visual arts, and cinema, as well as offering ethnographic case studies. The result is a wide range of reflections on how African artists, writers, and ordinary people living in Europe experience and explore their transcultural and/or postcolonial environments, and how their experiences and explorations in turn contribute to the construction of modern Euro-African life-worlds. HE SWELLING FLOWS OF MIGRATION

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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While anthropology, cultural studies, literary and art criticism for a long time invested in discourses emphasizing the binary opposition between the West and ‘the rest’, between ‘enlightened Europe’ and ‘the dark African continent’, this perspective has been challenged in the last decade. We are now entering a phase in which “the ontology of difference has been used up,”1 and simultaneously the imaginary space needed for constructing a global “other” is shrinking.2 The resulting amalgamation of cultural practices generates various modes of transcultural imagination, which the articles in this volume seek to illuminate. At the same time, perspectives which place some societies outside modernity’s ‘reach’ are being challenged, so that “late modernity produces a situation in which humankind in some respects becomes a ‘we,’ facing problems and opportunities where there are no ‘others’.”3 Also, the discipline of anthropology has reinvented itself as an anthropology of modernity by considering practices and narratives relayed by such modern mass-media technologies as radio, television, film, video, and the Internet. In this anthropology of modernity, imagination and storytelling are regarded as central to the performing and describing of cultures.4 While the title of this volume, Transcultural Modernities, is deliberately tautological, it serves to highlight the transcultural dimensions that are inherent in all projects of modernity. The first part of the volume introduces ‘New Euro-African Literary Spaces’ and provides a series of overviews of creative writing by Africans living in Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Flanders (Belgium), Finland, and Sweden. Although these regions are adjacent to nations with more established traditions of creative writing by Africans, such as Great Britain and France, literature in Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Flemish, Finnish, and Swedish by African immigrants has only recently appeared in print, and has hardly been heard of beyond the regions’ borders. Another striking deflection from the British and French situation is the fact that the newly emerging Euro-African authors generally do not hail from the former colonies of their European countries of residence. Even so, these ‘new’ writers of African descent are claiming a place in European litera-

1 Kinder der Freiheit: Wider das Lamento über den Werteverfall, ed. Ulrich Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Edition Zweite Moderne, 1997): 347 (tr. Sissy Helff). 2 See Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995). 3 Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Oxford: Polity, 1991): 27. 4 Arjun Appadurai, “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard G. Fox (Santa Fe N M : School of American Research, 1991): 191–210.

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tures with a fervour equal to that of their anglophone and francophone predecessors and contemporaries. The authors of this volume’s ground-breaking overviews present their personal reflections on these new and overlooked Euro-African literatures by examining the latter’s historical developments and thematic and stylistic choices. Whether the ‘new Europeans’ opt for poetry, short fiction, fiction or life-writing, plain or convoluted styles, they often display a keen awareness of their own and other migrants’ positions in their new places of residence. Not seldom, the Euro-African writers are also concerned with their marginal status within the literary traditions of the regions in which they have settled, and rightly so: several authors note in their overviews the (initially) poor recognition of their regions’ writers of African descent, whether within or beyond academia. The increasing attention devoted to these recent Euro-African literary productions, to which this volume testifies, nevertheless holds out promise that in the decades to come they will enter mainstream European literature. In “Voices Lost in a Non-Place: African writing in Spain,” S A B R I N A B R A N C A T O demonstrates that, compared to the other new Euro-African literatures introduced in this book, Spanish-African writing has a longer history and a clear connection with Spain’s imperial past. The authors introduced hail not only from the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea, but also from Cameroon and Benin. Despite the rising popularity of migrant literatures and postcolonial studies and despite thematic parallels with the politically committed films that some Spanish directors have produced in recent years, their writing has so far been virtually ignored in Spanish academia as well as by the general public. Their colleagues in Italy have fared little better, as P E T E R P E D R O N I notes in “Kossi Komla–Ebri and Migrant Writing in Italy.” Central to his discussion of Italian-African literature is the Togolese-born Komla–Ebri, a notable figure in Italian letters as well as politics, whose very recent oeuvre is compared with other Italian-African migrant writings and the fiction of older Italian authors such as Elio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese. Drawing on Komla– Ebri’s life-story and artistic trajectory, Pedroni points out convincingly the clashes between discourses of interculturalism and intraculturalism in Italy’s multicultural society. The 1990s witnessed the breakthrough of authors of African descent in Italy as well as in the Netherlands. D A N I E L A M E R O L L A ’s “Poetics of Transition: Africa and Dutch Literary Space” considers this recent development in relation to historical migrant contributions to Dutch literature, and explores publishers’ marketing strategies, the authors’ critical reception, and public discussions on (the limits of) literary and cultural definitions such as ‘writers in between two cultures’ and ‘allochthonous writers’. A notable figure among these Dutch-African writers is the Moroccan-born Fouad Laroui. After

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migrating to the Netherlands via France, Laroui has published in French as well as in Dutch; he contributes to this volume with a short-story entitled “Le Pyjama bleu.” The popularity of Laroui and his colleagues in the Netherlands has, in the last few years, helped to pave the way for writers of African origin in neighbouring Flanders (Belgium). In “Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia: African Writing in Flanders, Belgium,” E L I S A B E T H B E K E R S tries to account for this relatively late emergence of the first Flemish-African writers by examining the publishing circumstances operating in Flanders. While initial publications, as she shows, were situated in the realm of non-fiction, recently established writing contests and collections of short stories dedicated to new talent are encouraging ‘new Flemings’, especially young Moroccan women, to venture onto the Flemish literary scene. Bekers pays special attention to the young Nigerianborn author Chika Unigwe, whose debut novel, published in the autumn of 2005, was the first book-length work of fiction by an African author in Flanders and whose short-story “Cotton Candy” is included in this volume. The youngest of all the Euro-African literatures discussed in this volume are introduced by E I L A R A N T O N E N in “African Voices in Finland and Sweden.” Placing the twenty-first-century publications by Finnish and Swedish authors of African descent in the context of a growing interest in cross-cultural dialogue, she shows how these poems, (fictional) autobiographies, and novels testify to the cultural hybridity of what she calls Scandinavia’s “hyphenated writers.” The second part of the volume offers more detailed readings of literary texts produced by Euro-African writers and opens with a theoretical enquiry by F R A N K S C H U L Z E – E N G L E R into the debate on transcultural modernity. His “Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature” provides a comprehensive overview of a shifting critical landscape by highlighting recent developments in literary and cultural studies. In his article, he links the debate on a globalized modernity to a critical interrogation of the paradigm of transculturality when he asks “Why modernities”? and “Why transcultural”? The theoretical discussion is then connected to African literary studies and the still ‘hot’ question of whether anticolonial politics should be at the core of critical discourse and reflect the political edge of literary and cultural criticism. Arguing that anticolonialist thought has too often been misused by the new ruling elites, Schulze–Engler defends his preference for critical enquiries centred on modernity and sociocultural complexity. In “Euro-African Trans-Spaces? Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies” S U S A N A R N D T examines ‘black diaspora writings’ and European discourses, concluding her critical excursion by reaffirming the need to rely on complex, flexible, and contextoriented categories in a perspective “that both ‘provincializes Europe’ and ‘globalizes Africa’.” E L I S A B E T H B E K E R S ’s “Culture in Transit: The Migration

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of Female Genital Excision to Europe in Euro-African Writing” compares the novel Abyssinian Chronicles by Moses Isegawa (whose exceptional linguistic position is also discussed in the overviews of African writing in the Netherlands and Belgium) with the autobiographical writings of two anti‘F G M ’ (female genital mutilation) activists, Mutilée by Khady Koita and Desert Children by Waris Dirie, and with the novel Rebelle by Fatou Keïta. Bekers’s close reading reveals how Isegawa fails to contextualize adequately the practice of female genital excision, in contrast to his three female colleagues, who do acknowledge the conventional cultural and religious discourses on female genital excision but nevertheless remain adamant in their abolitionist stance. The complications of cultural integration are also discussed in S U S A N N E G E H R M A N N ’s article “Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis: A Reading of Simon Njami’s African Gigolo.” Gehrmann reads the construction of African male blackness against the backdrop of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that has informed the writings of Njami as well as of authors such as Dambudzo Merechara, Dillibe Onyeama, and Daniel Biyaoula. Njami’s African Gigolo, Gehrman demonstrates, exposes the “pathological patterns” of male behaviour and the mythical image of black male sexuality as structurally rooted in (historically established) reciprocal assumptions about Euro-African gendered encounters. In “Polyphony, Old ‘Lyonnais’ and Animism: Africa in Urban Europe in Un Rêve utile by Tierno Menénembo,” E L I S A D I A L L O shows how the situation of economic migrants in France is highlighted by the novel’s complex narrative structure, a polyphonic ensemble of alternating narrative voices and perspectives revealing the characters’ traumatic memories and their failure to conceive of a new future. In Diallo’s analysis, the fragmented but shared reality of migrant lives in Un Rêve utile functions as an ironic subversion of the cliché of successful integration based on individual merit and determination. The next group of articles take the reader from France to Great Britain. In “Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator,” N A D I A B U T T tackles a central issue in transcultural traffic, translation, by examining the motif of ‘untranslatable Islam’ in The Translator. Focusing on the (un)communicability of religious and cultural experiences as represented by Aboulela, Butt points to the growing tensions between secular lives and orthodox Islamic worlds in contemporary Euro-African ‘contact zones.’ Practices of inclusion and exclusion in contemporaneous British society are also central to O B O D O D I M M A O H A ’s analysis in “‘Occupying the Isolated Terminal Space and Silent’: The Rhetoric of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode.” Instead of exposing the obstacles to intercultural understanding, Oyebode uses his narration of African historical and artistic values as a means

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to undermine the perceived isolation and silencing of the African migrant. The poet’s struggle over space and identity, Oha argues, needs to be read as a therapeutic rediscovery of the self that allows the migrant poetic voice to ‘reinvent’ Europe. In “Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner,” D A R I A T U N C A delves into the multilingual intricacies of Agbenugba’s 1991 novel, a Nigerian ‘echo’ of the 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners by the Trinidadian Samuel Selvon. Tunca analyses Agbenugba’s use of Nigerian pidgin, Caribbean creole, Black British English, cockney and Yoruba. She succeeds not only in establishing the communal connotations of the different languages and registers but also in revealing how Agbenugba makes use of abrogation and re-appropriation of British Standard English to highlight the cross-culturality in and of his fictional world. The novel’s linguistic instability, however, points to the unresolved difficulties of such a literary project. ‘Visual and Cinematographic Narratives’ are presented in the third part of this volume. The relationship between artistic creation and social referent is critically discussed by A L E X R O T A S in her analysis of a recent exhibition of U K -based visual artists from Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Mohamed Bushara. Engaging questions of labelling and interpreting in the context of an ‘asylum artists’ exhibition, Rotas shows that the label of asylum art “acts to diminish what is seen and to impose limits on how it is absorbed.” In “North African Modernities: Myth Stripped Bare,” M A R I E – C H R I S T I N E P R E S S investigates how ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in the postcolonial condition are negotiated in the famous travelling exhibition Africa Remix. She focuses on what she calls the ‘myth-making’ display that is operated by the works of the video artists Zineb Sedira and Zoulika Bouabdellah included in the exhibition. The artists, both of Algerian descent, utilize the technique of subverting cultural objects and icons (such as voiles, flags, and the concept of the freedom fighter) and, thanks to appropriation and mimicry, return the gaze of Europe and question ethnic and family linkages at the same time. In her article “Spies in the Sixteenth Arrondissement: Myriam Mihindou Exhibits at the Musée Dapper in Paris,” D A P H N E P A P P E R explores the art of the Gabonese-born Mihindou against the artist’s family background. Highlighting hybridity as an energetic cultural and creative space, she stresses the conceptual importance of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the Third Space for a critical engagement with Euro-West African art. Turning our attention to the cinema, J A C O B I A D A H M ’s “Emigrants and Immigrants of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France: Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire De and S. Pierre Yameogo’s Moi et mon blanc” compares two West African films dealing with African migration to Europe. Acknowledging the films’ different temporal and production contexts, Dahm shows how the paral-

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lel geographical movement of the protagonists – the original migration to France and the ultimate return to Africa – leads to opposed discourses in the two films. While division and incommunicability reign in the classic La Noire de… by the recently deceased pioneer of African film, Yameogo’s twenty-firstcentury film Moi et mon blanc reveals correspondences, and even suggests new utopian connections, between Europe and Africa. The representation of migrant arrivals in Europe is also at the centre of the investigation of M A R I E – H É L È N E G U T B E R L E T in “Towards an Aesthetic of the Migrant Self: The film Le Clandestine by José Zeka Laplaine.” The associative structure of the 1996 short film is discussed in the context of the African cinematographic tradition of earlier, more conventional, migrant narratives. In Le Clandestine, a postmodern use of irony and magical realism calls into question the possibility of secure and easy transcultural communication. In “Critical Dialogues: Transcultural Modernities and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary Films” N W A C H U K W U F R A N K U K A D I K E challenges the idea that the colonial experience is buried in the past. Focusing on the works of the Cameroonian Jean–Marie Teno, he shows that African directors force viewers to acknowledge the pervasive influences of the colonial experience on the lives of Africans today. Films such as Teno’s documentaries Colonial Misunderstanding and Afrique, je te plumerai operate a careful ‘dissemination’ of knowledge and demystify “the so-called civilized European” who is – particularly in the missionary-colonial alliance – “the savage in civilized custom.” The articles in the final section, ‘Imagining Life – Narrating Stories’, deal even more directly with Euro-African discourses and modes of narration. In the first article, “Imagining Disaster in the African Postcoloniality,” G R A H A M H U G G A N connects the three analytical sections of this volume when he discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and the literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. Huggan introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The mediated images and motives of such disaster writings, he argues, easily become the objective of touristic curiosity. Questions about negotiating modernity are also discussed in S I S S Y H E L F F ’s “Refugee Life Narratives: The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer.” In her analysis of Slave, the recently published life-writing of the Sudanese refugee Nazer, Helff combines dimensions of aesthetic, social, and cultural modernity. By reading the discourse of modernity against the backdrop of the emerging genre of what she calls ‘refugee life narratives’, Helff points to the need to perceive literature, with its intertwined historico-political and cultural-aesthetic dimensions, as both a distinct layer and an agent of modernity. In “Shared Paradoxes in Nami-

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bian and German History: Lucia Engombe’s Kind Nr. 95,” K A T R I N B E R N D T examines the autobiographical writing of the Namibian Engombe, who relates to a quite specific form of migrancy. Sent to East Germany as a child to be educated in order to become a member of her country’s elite, Engombe returned to an unfamiliar Namibia after Germany’s reunification. Berndt focuses on the parallels between East German totalitarianism and the ideology of the South West African People’s Organization. The final four articles treat storytelling as performance by pointing to the performative potential of interviews. Annika Lieby–McPherson and Bettina Horn–Udeze discuss individual negotiations and experiences of migration in their interrelated ethnographic case studies. In “From Utopia to Atopia to Diaspora? Social Re-Organization in a Refugee Home,” A N N I K A M C P H E R S O N presents fieldwork on the Sierra Leonean residents of a refugee home in Northern Germany. She demonstrates how the harsh living conditions and uncertainties the asylum seekers experience during the application process shatter any utopian views of a ‘European paradise’. In “‘Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult:’ A Nigerian Migrant’s Narration of Initiation into the System of Migration,” B E T T I N A H O R N – U D E Z E is able to reconstruct the geographical and psychological move of the young economic migrant Nduka and his interpretation of migration as a form of initiation that destabilizes and re-establishes his family relationships and social position in new forms. How migrancy, stereotypical imagery, and racism impinge on creative processes and storytelling is considered from a very personal perspective in the two final articles in this volume. C H R I S T I N E M A T Z K E ’s interview “Performing ‘Africa’” in Germany: Members of abok Theatre Company in Conversation” vibrantly portrays the recent foundation of the first German-speaking theatre company devoted exclusively to the production of African and African-European theatre texts. The interviewees point to the situation of black people in post-reunification Germany and reveal what it means for African actors to live and work on a predominantly white theatre scene. Finally, in “Misunderstandings: Working Life into Fiction,” F O U A D L A R O U I gives insight into his own experiences as a Moroccan writer-cum-academic who has decided to spend part of his life in Europe. He offers a refreshing approach to transculturality as transdisciplinary dialogue by highlighting common ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘cross-cultural expectations’ pertaining to Euro-African writers and their creative work. The volume concludes with the earlier-mentioned short stories by L A R O U I and U N I G W E , “Le Pyjama bleu” and “Cotton Candy.” 

N EW E URO -A FRICAN L ITERARY S PACES ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

S ABRINA B RANCATO ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Voices Lost in a Non-Place — African Writing in Spain

ABSTRACT: This overview traces the relatively ‘long’ history of Spanish-African writing while pointing to the multi-regional origin of some selected authors, who hail not only from the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea but also from Cameroon and Benin. It is further argued that, despite the rising popularity of migrant literatures and postcolonial studies and despite thematic parallels with the politically committed films that some Spanish directors have produced in recent years, African writing in Spanish has so far been virtually ignored in Spanish academia as well as by the general public.

I

B W A N A ( 1 9 9 6 ), which narrates the (dis)encounter of a working class Spanish family with an illegal immigrant from sub-Saharan Africa just shipwrecked on Spanish southern shores, the director Imanol Uribe points an accusatory finger at the ignorance and narrow-minded provincialism of a Spanish vision of Africa which is all the more striking as it seems to be stuck in the centuries-old European imaginary on precolonial life in the continent. Anachronistic images of mysteriousness and danger, murderous tribal rituals and cannibalism are here resuscitated and presented as part of a widespread view that associates Africa with the heart of darkness and deprives the continent of its history, its civilization, and even its humanity: “those black people are so uneducated,” “those people are prehistoric,” “he’s never seen a car in his life,” and “black people are full of germs.” These are but some of the N THE FILM

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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absurdly genuine utterances of one of the main characters, whom Uribe depicts as the typical Spanish housewife whose vision of the world is primarily shaped by cheap T V programmes and soaps. On the other hand, Ombasi, the African protagonist, conveys all of what his continent means in Spanish eyes. At the beginning, the white family (the ‘bwana’) regard him as a highly dangerous threat – he could do God knows what to the children (even eat them maybe?). But, after Ombasi has rescued the family from violent harassment by a group of Spanish smugglers, he becomes an object of repressed sexual desire for the white woman and, consequently, a cause of jealousy and phallic envy for the white macho. In the end, he is merely an African in need, a destitute without a history or a name, whom the family abandon naked in the street, into the hands of a group of armed skinheads (two Germans and a Spaniard). Uribe is unsparing in his indictment of Spain’s own version of racism and of its indifference towards its neighbouring continent, and maybe his representation pitches over into caricature, but the film is nonetheless symbolic of Spain’s cultural backwardness with regard to race and immigration issues as well as of the nonplace accorded to people of African descent in Spanish society. Spain has, in fact, only recently started to recognize and deal with the changes brought forth by the increasingly multiracial and multicultural configuration of its society. People of African origins (both sub-Saharan and northern Africans) are largely perceived as a source of trouble. A quick glance at the daily press suffices for one to see how, even if other immigrant groups outnumber them (Latin Americans, for example), Africans are presented as the most visibly problematic group. Yet, as citizens in their own right and as agents of cultural renewal, they are rendered wholly invisible. This invisibility is, as a matter of fact, not unrelated to a particular form of colonial amnesia which seems to have struck southern European countries, prompting them to erase the memory of past guilt. In Spain, as in Italy, there is hardly any public talk about the consequences of the country’s imperial involvement in Africa. On the cultural level, it is particularly striking that, while Latin American countries have been embraced as part of the increasingly cherished hispanidad, the former Spanish colony of Equatorial Guinea does not figure on the map, despite the fact that the majority of Guinean writers presently reside in Spain. Moreover, Spain seems to be similarly amnesiac – although in this case wilfully so, especially after the terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid – about its Arab heritage and its historical and cultural ties with the countries of the Maghreb. Even within the field of postcolonial studies, quite popular in Spanish academia, hispanophone Africa is conspicuous by its absence. In his Historia del África

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Negra [History of Black Africa] (1998),1 addressed to students of history as well as to the general public, the Spanish scholar Ferran Iniesta devotes several sub-chapters to individual African countries in order to analyse better their specificities in the postcolonial era, but Equatorial Guinea does not feature in the table of contents, and throughout the book very little attention is given to the Spanish colonial enterprise. In Estudis Africans [African Studies] (1996),2 written in Catalan by the African Studies scholar M. Carme Junyent, a long section on language and literature offers not a single reference to Guinean intellectuals or to the existence of an hispanophone Africa. The Catalan association Translit, committed to spreading knowledge about non-European literatures written in European languages, has organized several conferences in Barcelona in the past decade and has published several anthologies, without ever featuring a hispanophone writer. In their introduction to Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (2005), Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi offer the first comparative overview of migrant cultural production from seven European countries. Their section on Portugal and Spain, though, is in fact solely about lusophone literature, with the exception of a few, albeit very significant, lines about the Spanish case: In Spain, recent immigrant conditions are mainly “spoken about” in literary and film productions by Basque writers and directors. Artistic exchanges and reciprocal influence between the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa, notwithstanding their historical importance and richness, are accorded little attention. This is shown by the absence of institutional support for artistic and literary developments by Berber artists either in Spanish or in Tamazight in Melilla, the important Spanish outpost in Morocco.3

While Merolla and Ponzanesi stress Spain’s disregard for the cultural expressions produced by North Africans, particularly in its Moroccan outposts, it is not surprising, at this point, that they do not mention the work of Equatorial Guinean writers resident in Spain. If this work is largely ignored by local scholars of African and postcolonial studies, how should it be visible to scholars based abroad and specializing in other fields? Apart from the missing institutional support, one of the main reasons for this lack of visibility is the fact that African writers in Spanish are usually published by small local publishers with

1

Ferran Iniesta, Kuma: Historia del África Negra (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 1998). Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from Spanish are my own. 2 M. Carmen Junyent, Estudis Africans (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 1996). 3 Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe, ed. Daniela Merolla & Sandra Ponzanesi (Lanham M D : Lexington, 2005): 30.

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a very limited distribution. While even the most recent titles are not easily available, finding older ones one may require the skills of an archaeologist! Although disconnected, fragmented, and barely visible, there exists an AfroHispanic literary community. If one had to draw a map of such a configuration, one would have to go beyond geography and look deep into the transnational and transcultural connections both within and beyond hispanidad. Nevertheless, even if one only takes language as the criterion for drawing the boundaries of Afro-Hispanic literature, the family is already big enough to call for further research, bibliographical cataloguing, and, above all, institutional sponsorship and promotion. First of all, Afro-Hispanic literature is constituted by the texts produced by hispanophone Africans both in the continent and in the diaspora (this group consists of Equatorial Guineans, a small number of subSaharan Africans whose mother tongue or language of education is Spanish, and a number of hispanophone northern Africans, particularly Moroccans). Secondly, Latin Americans of African ancestry would also benefit from the fostering of Afro-Hispanic literature, since they occupy a very peripheral space in the literary configuration of the South American continent (Afro-Cubans are in fact the only group that has been granted some degree of recognition, thanks especially to the internationally well-known figure of the poet Nicolás Guillén). Finally, a map of Afro-Hispanic literature should feature the literary production of allophone sub-Saharan and northern Africans who live in hispanophone countries and have adopted Spanish as a means of literary expression.4 The only hispanophone country in sub-Saharan Africa, and with a history marked by brutal oppression both in colonial and postcolonial times, Equatorial Guinea occupies one of the most marginal spaces – if one at all – in past and current scholarship in the various research fields to which it should belong by right – Hispanic, African, and postcolonial studies.5 This condition of latecomer and neglected child is probably the reason why the few scholars involved in the study of its cultural production feel the pressing need to define its boundaries, point out its particularities, and distinguish it from other national literatures in Africa. According to Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, the originality of hispanophone Guinean literature lies in the fact that it finds expression in a 4 For reasons of space, I will here address only the literary production of Equatorial Guineans and of a small number of allophone Africans active in Spain. 5 If hispanophone Guinean literature is today at all accessible to the general public, the merit goes entirely to the bibliographical research and collecting of source material conducted by Donato Ndongo and Mbare Ngom. Ndongo published the first anthology in 1984, which was then updated in collaboration with Mbare Ngom and brought out in 2000 by a publisher with a larger distribution. In 1996, Ngom published a collection of interviews with Guinean writers. These are the most exhaustive sources available at present.

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three-dimensional cultural space: i.e. the space of “Afroiberoamericanism.”6 Following the same line of reasoning, Antonio Uribe places Guinean literature at the crossroads of three main traditions: a dominant Hispanic classical formation, the strong influence of (hispanophone) Afro-Caribbean poetry of the 1920s and 1930s as well as of the Latin-American magical realism of the 1950s and 1960s, and the oral African tradition. At the same time, he points out that the linguistic isolation of the country in the African continent determined the lack of interaction with other colonial and postcolonial African literatures.7 Donato Ndongo, on the other hand, not without a pinch of essentialism, sees Guinean literature as the result of the merging of the cosmogonic values of Africanness with the perspective and language of Hispanism.8 While stressing the importance of the symbolic dimension, which he ascribes to an animist perception of the world,9 he also points out that, on the thematic level, Guinean literature is almost exclusively about manners, and this he sees as one of the most notable marks of distinction in comparison with other sub-Saharan African literatures.10 Other important aspects he points out are an obsessive preoccupation with issues linked to the long period of dictatorial regime in the post-independence era (trauma, the nostalgia of exile, everyday hardships) and a common concern with religious values contraposed to the rejected remnants of paganism.11 Mbare Ngom, finally, observes that, in consequence of a number of socio-historical factors, Guinean literature pursued a radically different trajectory from that of the rest of the continent: Guineans made their entrance in the world of letters writing prose; there was no properly anticolonial literature; the echoes of nationalist ideologies (such as the Négritude movement) arrived much later and were rejected.12 Above all, though, one must not forget that the most salient characteristic of hispanophone Guinean literature is the 6

Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, “Panorama littéraire en Guinée Équatoriale: Un espace afroibéroaméricain,” Africultures 28 (2000): 63. 7 Antonio Uribe, “La littérature de Guinée Équatoriale: Une littérature tricontinentale? Analyse des recines espagnoles, latinoámericaines et africaines,” in Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written/Interfaces entre l’ecrit et l’oral: Versions and Subversions in African Literatures 2, ed. Alain Ricard & Flora Veit–Wild (Matatu 31–32; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 151. 8 Donato Ndongo, “El marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” in Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología), ed. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo & Mbare Ngom (Madrid: Sial Ediciones, 2000): 31. 9 Ndongo, “El Marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” 34. 10 “El Marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” 42–43. 11 “El Marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” 43. 12 Mbare Ngom, “Introducción” to Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología), ed. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo & Mbare Ngom (Madrid: Sial Ediciones, 2000): 18–19.

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fact that it is a literature mostly produced in the diaspora, and that this diaspora is mostly located in Spain.13 Guinean diasporic literature has an antecedent in the figure of a black African known as Juan Latino, who was brought to Spain as a slave in 1528 at the age of twelve and later became one of the major erudite scholars of the Golden Age. Although his verses occasionally address the peculiarity of his position and stress his blackness as a marker of identity, most contemporary Guinean writers do not identify him as a forerunner. Donato Ndongo, who insists on a definition of Guinean literature in national terms, argues: “we do not find enough formal elements to make him the founding father of our letters.”14 This kind of perspective is actually indicative of important differences between the Guinean diaspora and other afrosporic15 communities located elsewhere. One cannot help but compare, for example, this (however understandable) dismissal of the importance of Juan Latino with the revindication, within the British context, of slave narratives as foundational texts of the Black British literary tradition. If it is true that race has historically had a more prominent role in the anglophone context, one should also admit at this point that the myth of Spaniards being essentially non-racist has somehow hindered minority groups from successfully identifying the reasons for their exclusion from the public sphere. In fact, the late development of Guinean literature and neglect of this literature by the Spanish cultural establishment cannot be disentangled from long-enduring racist views that are usually not recognized as such. Analysing the racist attitudes implicit in the prologue by Carlos Gonzáles Echegaray to the first Guinean novel, Leoncio Evita’s Cuando los Combes luchaban [The Struggle of the Combes],16 published in 1953, Onomo–Abena draws parallels with a later prologue by Vicente Granados to María Nsue’s novel Ekomo, published in 1985. He argues that the two prologues reveal a similar discriminatory and contemptuous view of the Guinean writer and concludes that from the origins of the literature produced in Guinea to the present day the views of the representatives of the Spanish literary establishment have not changed “with regard to the linguistic, mental and cultural capacity of the Equatorial Guinean” and that 13 The anthology compiled by Ndongo and Ngom contains thirty-one authors (four are women; six are no longer alive). Of these, twenty-six live, or have spent long periods, outside Guinea (the large majority in Spain). 14 Ndongo, “El Marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” 34. 15 The term ‘Afrosporic’ is introduced by the African–Canadian author Marlene NourbeSe Philip. See Kristen Mahlis, “A Poet of Place: An Interview with M. Nourbese Philip,” Callaloo 27.3 (Summer 2004): 682–97. [Editors’ note] 16 Leoncio Evita, Cuando los Combes luchaban (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1953).

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this can explain “the difficulty of Guinean literature to become known in Spain’s intellectual circles.”17 In one of the few scholarly studies of hispanophone colonial literature about Africa, Antonio Carrasco Gonzáles La Novela colonial hispanoafricana [Colonial Hispano-African Fiction] (2000), such views are unfortunately still clearly discernible. Apart from the regrettable misuse of possessives in references to “our colonies,” the dismissal of native authors in a study that pretends to be exhaustive is strikingly offensive. The few lines that Carrasco devotes to writing by native Guineans have a disturbingly colonial resonance: “Public funding from Spain has facilitated the publication of these books, but from authors we must demand rigour in their work so to achieve minima of quality.”18 Seen in the light of such hostility on the part of the establishment, the development of hispanophone Guinean literature can itself be read as a long struggle to gain access to the public space. Hispanophone Guinean literature can be said to begin in 1947, when the colonial missionary review La Guinea Española instituted a section inviting natives to contribute with legends and tales from their traditional heritage. The first authors, then, were supposed to have the role of colonial mediators, transcribing and translating into Spanish the oral tradition of their ethnic groups. Soon, however, they spontaneously started to manipulate their sources and to introduce personal elements into their narratives. Such was the creative space conceded to the colonized at that time. Amidst a double oppression marked by the combination of colonialism with the dictatorial system of Franco’s regime, a nationalist awareness such as one could find in francophone and anglophone Africa was slow to develop, so that no strong cultural movements emerged and anticolonial sentiment was much more muted than in other areas. In 1953, the first novel by a Guinean author appeared. Although underrated by later authors as the direct product of a colonized mind, Leoncio Evita’s Cuando los Combes luchaban, which provides detailed descriptions of the life habits and rituals of the Combes people, nevertheless constitutes a breakthrough in the cultural history of the colony. Stressing its importance, Onomo–Abena identifies it as the inaugural text of written Guinean literature for bringing to a close the previous “impersonal” phase.19 Evita’s writing project, he argues, was in itself a challenge to prevailing racist assumptions about the intellectual capacity of indigenous Africans, and, despite its apparent compliance with colonialist views, the 17 S. Onomo–Abena, “Sujeto cultural colonial y producción literaria en Guinea Ecuatorial: Lectura sociocrítica del prólogo de Cuando los Combes luchaban (1953) de Leoncio Evita,” Epos 18 (2002): 220–21. 18 Antonio Carrasco Gonzáles, La novela colonial hispanoafricana: Las colonias africanas de España a través de la historia de la novela (Madrid: Sial Ediciones, 2000): 248. 19 Onomo–Abena, “Sujeto cultural colonial y producción literaria en Guinea Ecuatorial,” 223.

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work expresses, however shyly, a sense of insubordination.20 Daniel Jones Mathama, educated in England and then permanently resident in Spain, was the author of the second Guinean novel, Una lanza por el Boabi [A Spear for the Boabi],21 published in 1962. This work is no less colonial in its viewpoint than its precursor, which explains why it has enjoyed little popularity among contemporary Guinean intellectuals. The decade after the achievement of independence in 1968 was a tragic period for Equatorial Guinea. Francisco Macías’ dictatorial regime was one of the most ferocious and sanguinary experienced on the African continent, proceeding as it did to the total repression of the intellectual elite as well as of any form of modernity or independent thought. Spanish was forbidden, as it was considered an imperialist language, and, in the eleven years of Macías’ power, the rate of illiteracy rose from ten to seventy percent.22 Opponents of the dictatorship were systematically imprisoned and executed; such was also the fate of many writers who stayed in the country and refused to be silenced. It is estimated that, during the 1970s, some 110,000 people: i.e. one third of the population, fled the country.23 In Spain, still under Franco, Equatorial Guinea was declared material reservada (off-limits to the media and public debate), and exiles – considered students or economic migrants rather than political refugees – received no institutional support of any kind. This was the decade which Donato Ndongo calls “the years of silence,” since even the voices in the diaspora were drowned in despair and hardly anything by Guinean writers was published. As Mbare Ngom observes, Guineans, postcolonial subjects who were supposed to operate from the recently recovered ‘metropole’ and, in this way, to participate in the construction of a national culture, continued instead to be confined to the margins, and “their space of practice was once more limited to the periphery.”24 The marginal and semi-clandestine status of Guineans in Spain was, according to Ngom, the main reason why the discourse of the diaspora never entered the public sphere nor was known to sectors outside the underground circuit. Such discourse thus articulated itself in the form of a “subculture which transformed precariousness and marginality into a forum and space for resistance, from which to open a breach in the wall of the Culture of

20

Onomo–Abena, “Sujeto cultural colonial y producción literaria en Guinea Ecuatorial,” 224. Jones Mathama, Daniel, Una Lanza por el Boabi (Barcelona: Tipografía Casal, 1962). 22 Donato Ndongo, “Literatura moderna hispanófona en Guinea Ecuatorial,” in I Jornadas de Estudios Africanos, ed. Marta Sofía López Rodríguez (Universidad de León: Secretariado de Publicaciones, 2001): 127. 23 Ngom, “Introducción,” 16. 24 Ngom, “Introducción,” 21. 21

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Silence.”25 Many Guineans in exile found in poetry their means of expression, and their nostalgia for the lost country translated itself into an obsession with the idyllic landscape of Guinea. The only works in prose to be published in this period were four short stories collected in a small volume entitled Nueva narrativa guineana [New Guinean Fiction]26 in 1977, among which we find two of the most beautiful tales of exile: Francisco Zamora Loboch’s “Bea” and Donato Ndongo’s “El sueño” [The dream]. The Golpe de Libertad (freedom coup) led by Macías’ nephew Teodoro Obiang Nguema in 1979 marked the end of what is commonly – and significantly – referred to as the ‘first dictatorship’. It was a moment of enthusiasm and restored hope for the future of the country in general and for its cultural development in particular. Diasporic intellectuals, together with the few homebased who had survived the repression, set about working for the reconstruction of the country and its cultural revival, fostered especially by the foundation in 1981 of the Centro Cultural Hispano-Guineano de Malabo (Malabo Hispano-Guinean Cultural Centre). But the country never developed a truly democratic system, and repression and censorship continue to be common practices to this day. As a direct consequence of a series of unfavourable conditions (including high rates of poverty and illiteracy, lack of infrastructure and of governmental support of cultural initiatives), Guinean literature is still mostly produced in the diaspora. The first significant works produced in this third phase of development of a national literature, a phase characterized by a concern with Guinean identity, were Juan Balboa Boneke’s El re-encuentro [The Re-Encounter] (1985)27 and María Nsue Angüe’s Ekomo (1985).28 Balboa’s work centres on the return to the home country after long years of exile and explores the dilemma of the role of intellectuals in the reconstruction of the nation. Nsue’s novel, the first Guinean novel to be written by a woman, addresses the complex conflict between tradition and modernity and interrogates the position of women in a postcolonial context. In 1987, Donato Ndongo published his first novel, the first in a trilogy designed to explore colonial and postcolonial times in Equatorial Guinea; Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra [Darkness of Your Black Memory] treated the profound impact of colonization on the mind of the Guinean subject and on the most intimate dimensions of the dialectic between tradition and modernity. This was followed, in 1997, by Los poderes de la tempestad [Powers of the Storm], a reflection on the post-independence 25

Ngom, “Introducción,” 22. Various Authors, Nueva narrativa guineana (Madrid: U.R.G.E., 1977). 27 Juan Balboa Boneke, El Re-Encuentro (Madrid: Ediciones Guinea, 1985). 28 María Nsue Angüe, Ekomo (Madrid: U N E D , 1985). 26

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period;29 1987 also saw the publication of the poetry collection Voces de espuma [Voices of Foam],30 by Ciriaco Bokesa, who is one of the finest poetic voices from Guinea. Francisco Zamora is among those who have explored the frustrations of exile: his Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca [How to Be Black and Not to Die in Aravaca] (1994)31 addresses the manifold forms of racism suffered by blacks, while his poetic work Memoria de laberintos [Memory of Labyrinths] (1999)32 gives voice to the thousands of African immigrants whose hopes for a better life shatter in the face of the cruelty of Spanish society. Another significant diasporic work is the philosopher Eugenio Nkogo Ondó’s La encerrona [The Trap] (1993), in which the author narrates his experience as a black scholar in Spanish academia.33 Finally, among the few plays produced by Guineans, Pancracio Esono Mitogo’s El hombre y la costumbre [Men and Their Manners] (1990)34 is a fine comedy of manners, once again with a focus on the tradition vs. modernity debate, but with a moralistic side that somehow blunts the edge of its portrayal. In recent years, a new generation of writers has been exploring new themes, experimenting more with style, and thus widening the spectrum of and giving new directions to Guinean literature. Significant works produced by this group are the poetic collection Ramblas (1994), by Tomás Ávila Laurel, the shortstory collection Adjá–Adjá y otros relatos [Adjá–Adjá and Other Stories] (1994), by Maximiliano Nkogo, and the novel El párroco de Niefang [The Vicar of Niefang] (1996), by Joaquín Mbomio.35 Compared to their forerunners, these younger authors, who have not gone through the trauma of political exile, are focused more on the present. Their work is giving new impulse to Guinean literature, but little can be achieved if the distribution of these works takes place within a restricted circuit and if the literary establishment and the academic circles – in Spain as elsewhere – continue to ignore the existence of this literature and to deny it access to the public sphere. As Donato Ndongo so

29

Donato Ndongo Bidyogo, Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1987; Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce, 2000); Los poderes de la tempestad (Madrid: Editorial Morandi, 1997). The third part of the trilogy is about to be published. 30 Ciriaco Bokesa Napo, Voces de espuma (Malabo: Ediciones C C H G , 1987). 31 Francisco Zamora Loboch, Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 1994). 32 Francisco Zamora Loboch, Memoria de laberintos (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 1999). 33 Eugenio Nkogo Ondó, La encerrona (self-published, 1993). 34 Pancracio Esono Mitogo, El hombre y la costumbre (Madrid: U N E D , 1990). 35 Maximiliano Nkogo, Adjá–Adjá y otros relatos (Malabo: C C G H , 1994); Joaquín Mbomio Bacheng, El párroco de Niefang (Malabo: Ediciones C C H G , 1996).

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clearly states, “Hispanic culture will not be complete until the full incorporation of Equatorial Guinea.”36 While both home-based and diasporic writers from Equatorial Guinea have been concentrating their efforts in creating and establishing a national canon for their literature, the pressure of increasing migration from Africa with all its implications and consequences – particularly the often tragic fate of illegal immigrants crossing the Mediterranean on makeshift boats – has resulted in a number of literary and film productions addressing the issue of the African presence in Spain. Imanol Uribe’s earlier-mentioned Bwana, based on Ignacio del Moral’s play La Mirada del hombre oscuro [Dark Man’s Gaze] (1992),37 is one of those films that also has great resonance at the international level, though it was not the first one to tackle old and new forms of xenophobia and the difficult conditions of immigrants in Spanish society. Several politically committed Spanish directors have addressed these issues: among others, Montxo Amendáriz’s Las cartas de Alou [Alou’s Letters] (1990), Lorenç Soler’s Saïd (1998), and Ignacio Vilar’s Ilegal [Clandestine] (2003) explore the experiences of illegal immigrants from Africa. These films constitute something of a breakthrough, since they present the public with a vision of Spain which goes against the widespread view that Spain is in general a welcoming country and that Spanish people are not racist, or at least not as racist as other Europeans. They have, therefore, the merit of drawing the attention of Spaniards to certain urgent problems in their society and of stimulating much-needed self-scrutiny. Nevertheless, their limitations lie precisely in the good intentions of the directors, since, in their effort to promote the acceptance of immigrants in their country, they tend to portray them as good and harmless people. As a result, their characters are rather unconvincing, and their depictions may very easily fall into the very same racist stereotypes they are trying to counter. This is, for instance, the case in Bwana, in which Ombasi, called to represent the quintessence of immigrant innocence, is in fact deprived of individuality and reproduces once more the trite cliché of the good savage. Although films on migration reach a wider public compared to books, the latter generally offer a much higher degree of detail and complexity. Moreover, while I have no knowledge of any migration films directed by a non-Spaniard, a number of migration narratives (either literary or documentary texts) are written first-hand by authors who have undergone the experience of migration.

36

Ndongo, “Literatura moderna hispanófona en Guinea Ecuatorial,” 134. Ignacio del Moral, La mirada del hombre oscuro (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores de España, 1992). 37

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Dormir al raso [Sleeping in the Open] (1994),38 written in collaboration by Pasqual Moreno Torregosa and Mohamed El Gheryb, is one of the groundbreaking texts which have reported on the experience of African migrants in Spain. Though without literary pretensions, this book is one of the most interesting and detailed testimonials of pre- and post-migratory experiences in North Africa and Spain. A much more literary endeavour is Moroccan Rachid Nini’s Diario de un ilegal [Journal of a Clandestine] (2002),39 which first appeared in a Moroccan newspaper as a series of reports from Spain, to be then published in book form in Arabic in 1999, and later translated into Spanish. This text, which escapes classification by merging elements of autobiography, testimony, fiction, and poetry, offers a fascinating account of the emotional turmoil and highly intimate responses of a North African immigrant wandering through a territory imbued with the historical memory of the lost paradise of Al-Andalus. The author evokes the solitude and devastation of the last Arab kings defeated by Christians and suggests a parallel with the desperation of present-day immigrants burning their papers in order not to be sent back. Nini’s sharp eye catches all the nuances of the complex relation between Spaniards and North African immigrants, who are still labelled with the derogatory epithet of moros. African migrant writers from non-hispanophone countries are adding a new dimension to Spanish literature and to African literature in Spanish. These writers generally maintain a strong connection with the homeland (a second generation of Spanish-born afrosporic writers is yet to emerge) but are active participants in the cultural scene of the host country. Often they are committed to spreading and promoting knowledge of African traditions, culture, history, and politics. They therefore write for the host country and act as mediators between Spaniards and Spain-based African communities. While they tend to articulate a discourse of difference (aimed at promoting respect for cultural diversity) and while their work is generally marketed as exotic (publishers tend to stress their African origins, to the detriment of their Spanish experience), elements of transculturality are actually strongly visible in their work, and this is precisely what makes it vibrant and original. The recognition of productive forms of cultural hybridity, though, is something that does not come naturally in the Spanish context, where the internal identity-politics of the different comunidades autónomas are already divisive enough. Actually, this typically Spanish strong sense of local identity could be one of the reasons for the frag38 Pasqual Moreno Torregosa & Mohamed El Gheryb, Dormir al raso (Madrid: Ediciones Vosa, 1994). 39 Rachid Nini, Diario de un ilegal (Madrid: Ediciones de oriente y del mediterráneo, 2002) [tr. ‫( ڍو ﻣﻳﺎت ﻣﻬﺎﺟﺮ ﺳر ي‬Manshurat Wizarat al-Shúun al-Zaqafiyya, 1999)].

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mentation of African communities across Spain. In fact, networks seem to work mostly on the regional level. Just as exiles from Equatorial Guinea have found their cultural centre in Madrid and the region around the capital city, allophone African migrants are mostly active in Catalonia and its modern, Europe-oriented capital. It is in Barcelona that three of the best known AfroHispanic intellectuals – Inongo-vi-Makomé, Agnés Agboton, and Sidi Seck – are based. Inongo-vi-Makomé, who was born in Cameroon and educated in Equatorial Guinea and Spain, is a prolific writer who has to his credit a number of stories for children as well as essays on migration and a novel. In España y los negros africanos: ¿la conquista del Edén o del infierno? [Spain and SubSaharan Africans: A Path to Heaven or Hell?] (1990),40 he explores the specificities of Spain as a host country in the European context. Starting from his own experiences, he alternates objective analysis with personal responses. The book is particularly conspicuous for its insights into local forms of racism and interrogates the possibility of a productive multiculturalism in the Spanish context. Vi-Makomé’s novel Rebeldía [Rebellion] (1996)41 relates the dilemmas and disillusionment of an émigré returning to his native Cameroon after twenty years of hardship in Spain. Agnés Agboton was born in Benin and moved to Barcelona with her Spanish husband. She is one of the most genuinely transcultural afrosporic writers and is deeply committed to fostering intercultural dialogue among culturally diverse communities sharing the same space. Apart from promoting oral literary forms (which she does by visiting schools and other institutions with her wonderful skills as storyteller and griot), she publishes poetry, fiction, cookbooks, legends and essays, and writes in Spanish, Catalan, and Gun. Her autobiography, Más allá del mar de arena [Beyond the Sea of Sand] (2005),42 one of the few Afro-Hispanic books to be brought out by a major publisher, is a fascinating account of a woman’s transnational experiences and an outstanding testimony to the transcultural processes involved in a life across continents. Sidi Seck, from Senegal, already known as a poet, has just brought out his first novel, Amina (2007), published in Spanish but originally written in French, about the vicissitudes of a woman moving between Spain and Senegal. Seck is now a key figure in the cultural life of the Catalan capital: with his recently founded publishing house, Takusan Ediciones, he has devoted himself to publishing and translating works otherwise located outside the usual commercial circuits. 40 Inongo Vi-Makomé, España y los negros africanos: ¿La conquista del Edén o del infierno? (Barcelona: La llar del libre, 1990). 41 Inongo Vi-Makomé, Rebeldía (Barcelona: Biblària, 1996). 42 Agnés Agboton, Más allá del mar de arena (Barcelona: Lumen, 2005).

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If Afro-Hispanic literature is to grow and flourish as it deserves, institutional support is of paramount importance. At present, this is a phantom literature known only to a few, a literature moving in underground cultural circuits, with books either self-edited or appearing with small local publishers with little or no distribution. Last year, for the first time, a conference on Afro-European cultures and identities, organized by Marta Sofía López Rodríguez, was held at the University of León, where a number of Afro-Hispanic intellectuals and scholars of Afro-Hispanic literature were able to debate key issues with their counterparts from other linguistic contexts. This event was followed by the first issue, in January 2007, of the online review Afroeuropa, also run from León. These kinds of initiatives have the double merit of granting more visibility to Afro-Hispanic literature, on the one hand, and of encouraging a debate around afrosporic identities at a European level, on the other. More of this is needed – promotion, sponsorship, the creation of networks, and, last but not least, the cataloguing of existing sources to enable researchers around the globe to explore this other bit of the afrosporic world.

WORKS CITED Agboton, Agnés. Más allá del mar de arena (Barcelona: Lumen, 2005). Ávila Laurel, Tomás. Poemas (Malabo: Ediciones C C H G , 1994). Balboa Boneke, Juan. El re-encuentro (Madrid: Ediciones Guinea: 1985). Bokesa Napo, Ciriaco. Voces de espuma (Malabo: Ediciones C C H G , 1987). Carrasco González, Antonio. La novela colonial hispanoafricana: Las colonias africanas de España a través de la historia de la novela (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 2000). Esono Mitogo, Pancracio. El hombre y la costumbre (Madrid: U N E D , 1990). Evita, Leoncio. Cuando los combes luchaban (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Africanos, 1953). Iniesta, Ferran. Kuma: Historia del África Negra (Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra, 1998). Jones Mathama, Daniel. Una lanza por el Boabi (Barcelona: Tipografía Casal, 1962). Junyent, M. Carmen. Estudis africans (Barcelona: Editorial Empúries, 1996). Mbomio Bacheng, Joaquín. “Panorama littéraire en Guinée Équatoriale: Un espace afroibéroaméricain,” Africultures 28 (2000): 61–65. Mbomio Bacheng, Joaquín. El párroco de Niefang (Malabo: Ediciones C C H G , 1996). Merolla, Daniela, & Sandra Ponzanesi, ed. Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham M D : Lexington, 2005). Moral, Ignacio del. La mirada del hombre oscuro (Madrid: Sociedad General de Autores de España, 1992). Moreno Torregosa, Pasqual, & Mohamed El Gheryb. Dormir al raso (Madrid: Ediciones Vosa, 1994). Ndongo Bidyogo, Donato. “Literatura moderna hispanófona en Guinea Ecuatorial,” in I Jornadas de Estudios Africanos, ed. Marta Sofía López Rodríguez (Universidad de León: Secretariado de Publicaciones, 2001).

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——. “El marco de la literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial,” in Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología), ed. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo & Mbare Ngom (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 2000): 31–57. ——. Los poderes de la tempestad (Madrid: Editorial Morandi, 1997). ——. Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (1987; Barcelona: Ediciones del Bronce, 2000). ——, ed. Antología de la literatura guineana (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1984). Ndongo Bidyogo, Donato & Mbare Ngom, ed. Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología) (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 2000). Ngom, Mbare. “Introducción,” in Literatura de Guinea Ecuatorial (Antología), ed. Donato Ndongo Bidyogo & Mbare Ngom (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 2000): 11–29. ——, ed. Diálogos con Guinea: Panorama de la literatura guineoecuatoriana de expresión castellana a través de sus protagonistas (Madrid: Labrys, 1996). Nini, Rachid. Diario de un ilegal (Madrid: Ediciones de oriente y del mediterráneo, 2002) [tr. ‫( ڍو ﻣﻳﺎت ﻣﻬﺎﺟﺮ ﺳر ي‬Manshurat Wizarat al-Shúun al-Zaqafiyya, 1999)]. Nkogo Ondó, Eugenio. La encerrona (self-published, 1993). Nkogo, Maximiliano. Adjá–Adjá y otros relatos (Malabo: C C G H , 1994). Nsue Angüe, María. Ekomo (Madrid: U N E D , 1985). Onomo–Abena, S. “Sujeto cultural colonial y producción literaria en Guinea Ecuatorial. Lectura sociocrítica del prólogo de Cuando los Combes luchaban (1953) de Leoncio Evita,” Epos 18 (2002): 215–29. Seck, Sidi. Amina (Barcelona: Takusan, 2007). Uribe, Antonio. “La Littérature de Guinée Équatoriale: Une littérature tricontinentale? Analyse des recines espagnoles, latinoámericaines et africaines,” in Interfaces Between the Oral and the Written / Interfaces entre l’écrit et l’oral: Versions and Subversions in African Literatures 2, ed. Alain Ricard & Flora Veit–Wild (Matatu 31–32; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi 2005): 145–55. Various Authors. Nueva narrativa guineana (Madrid: U.R.G.E., 1977). Vi-Makomé, Inongo. Rebeldía (Barcelona: Biblària, 1996). ——. España y los negros africanos: ¿La conquista del Edén o del infierno? (Barcelona: La llar del libre, 1990). Zamora Loboch, Francisco. Cómo ser negro y no morir en Aravaca (Barcelona: Ediciones B, 1994). ——. Memoria de laberintos (Madrid: Sial ediciones, 1999).

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P ETER N. P EDRONI ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Kossi Komla–Ebri and Migrant Writing in Italy ABSTRACT: This discussion of the emerging field of Italian-African writing focuses on the Togolese-born Komla–Ebri, a distinguished author and central public figure in Italy. Drawing on Komla–Ebri’s life story and artistic trajectory, the author convincingly points out the clashes between discourses of interculturalism and intraculturalism in Italy’s multicultural society.

T

of what can be termed ‘migration literature’ in Italy were the autobiographical statements made in the author’s language and transcribed into Italian by a collaborating Italian writer. The best example is that of the Senegalese Pap Khouma whose novel Io venditore di elefanti [I am an Elephant Salesman] (1990) was dictated in French and transcribed into Italian.1 An element common to many of these statements is the image of Italy as a land of wealth, but almost as common is the desire for return to the native country. Many authors express disappointment with Italy and with their personal experience there, while there are also favourable impressions and pleasant experiences. The Moroccan Mohamed Bouchane’s “Call Me Ali” (1990) reveals the problems faced by an immigrant HE FIRST MANIFESTATIONS

1

For a discussion of this collaboration, see Graziella Parati’s very instructive introduction to Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy (Madison W I & Teaneck N J : Fairleigh Dickinson U P , 1999), an anthology of such works in English translation. © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that he already speaks standard Italian. Pap Khouma’s experience is that of the much more difficult and sadly typical life of the ambulant street vendor in Italy. The Tunisian Mohsen Melliti’s story “Pantanella: A Song Along the Way” (1992) is based on facts involving the immigrant occupation of an abandoned pasta factory in Rome. Maria Viarengo’s “Shirshier N’demma (Let’s Go for a Stroll)” (1990) expresses the challenges of living in Italy after growing up in Ethiopia as the daughter of an Italian father. The difficulties of entering Italy are expressed by the Senegalese Saidou Moussa Ba’s “Hamadi’s Promise” (1991).2 Since 1995 the Italian publishing company Fara has published the best short stories and poetry submitted to the annual competition called Eks&Tra. These are pieces written by immigrants directly in Italian. In “La Mia tradizione in valigia” [My Tradition in a Suitcase] (1997), the Ugandan Sinan B. Wasswa expresses the sense of exclusion that he feels in relation to the European world. He talks about the “white circus of the knights of the round table, the stock from which descended a noble people, of transparent heart and spirit pure as snow.” And he goes on to say that “you get to enter only when you become a full fledged member of the clan.” He uses the term “extracircolari” (outside the club) with obvious reference to the Italian political term extracomunitari (outside the European Union) to define, by contrast, his own African world where the dominating law is “equality for all.”3 The Togolese Kossi Komla–Ebri also expresses the difficulties of cross-cultural conflict, but with a large dose of hope for the future, in his short story “Sognando una favola” [Dreaming a Fable]. The third-person narrative voice is situated two generations in the future. The autobiographical African grandfather and Italian grandmother, using the historical past tense, tell stories to their incredulous grandchildren, who have come from Italy with their parents for Christmas vacation, about the way things used to be: “mixed couples in Italy were considered strange because it was something new for people.” By 2 All works referred to in this paragraph are included in Parati’s Mediterranean Crossroads as follows: Bouchane: 43–57; Khouma (with Oreste Pivetta): 58–68; Melliti: 106–120, Viarengo: 69–7; Moussa Ba (with Alessandro Micheletti): 79–98. Their original publications are as follows: Mohamed Bouchane, Chiamatami Alì, ed. Carla de Girolamo & Daniele Miccione (Milan: Leonardo, 1990); Pap Khouma, Io, venditore di elefanti, ed. Oreste Pivetta (Milan: Garzanti, 1990); Mohsen Melliti, Pantanella: Canto lungo la strada, tr. Monica Ruocco (Rome: Lavorao, 1992); Maria Viarengo, “Andiamo a spasso?” Linea d’ombra 54.75 (November 1990); Saidou Moussa Ba & Alessandro Micheletti, La promessa di Hamadi (Novara: DeAgostini, 1991). 3 Sinan B. Wasswa, “La Mia tradizione in valigia,” in Memorie in valigia, ed. Robert Sangiorgi & Alessandro Ramberti (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1997): 179, 182. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations in this article are my own.

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contrast, the world of the grandchildren is one of cultural harmony: the grandfather can now tell his grandchildren that, “beyond our differences, we are first of all citizens of the earth.”4 The fable or dream in “Sognando una favola” is an idyllic image of what Komla–Ebri calls “interculturalism,” which is fundamental to his political ideology. In a 1999 interview, a translated version of which appears in Sante Matteo’s ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures (an anthology of articles about cultural relations between Italy and Africa written by geographers, classicists, historians, and economists, as well as Italianists),5 he explained that he is opposed to multiculturalism because the latter is characteristic of a ghetto society, based, at best, on coexistence, but without interaction. He is also opposed to the notion of assimilation, which he calls “intraculturalism,” and which was the spirit of the American melting-pot, in which particular cultural identities were intended to be lost in the blend called Americanism. In an intercultural society, each cultural component maintains its identity while evolving and being enriched by reciprocal interaction with each of the other cultural components. The basic problem, as suggested by Komla–Ebri, is ignorance, even among those who might consider themselves open-minded. For example, a review of twentieth-century Italian fiction reveals an almost complete absence of African characters. Some exceptions found in the work of Alberto Moravia serve only to underline the fact that Africans are unknown and therefore exotic and unexplainable. Even after Moravia’s travels in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s and in the three travel books and one novel that result from them, there is no evidence of a changing attitude. In fact, these books reveal the author’s apparent need for Africa to be unknown, mysterious, and different. He often refers negatively to modernized cities as “europeanized” or “americanized” and positively to undeveloped areas as the “real Africa.” He also shows little interest in contemporary African writers whose works might serve to diminish his sense of inexplicability regarding Africa. Instead, his interest is in the primitive beauty of a dangerous and irrational nature. In his novel La Donna leopardo [Leopard Woman] (1991), “woman,” incarnated in the ambiguous, mysterious, and irrational wife of the protagonist, is a reciprocal metaphor for ‘Africa’, as explained by Giuseppe Stellardi in his excellent article on this subject.6 Neyla, the 4 Kossi Komla–Ebri, “Sognando una favola,” in Destini sospesi di volti in cammino, ed. Roberta Sangiorgi & Alessandro Ramberti (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1998): 141, 136. 5 Peter N. Pedroni, “Interview with Kossi Komla–Ebri,” in ItaliAfrica, ed. Sante Matteo (Stony Brook N Y : Forum Italicum Press, 2001): 404. 6 Giuseppe Stellardi, “L’Africa come metafora femminile (e viceversa) ne La Donna leopardo di Alberto Moravia,” in Studi d’italianistica nell’Africa australe 6.1 (1993).

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female protagonist of Komla–Ebri’s eponymous novel (2002), is also a reciprocal metaphor for Africa, but she is, by contrast, direct, sensitive, caring, and explainable. In fact, Neyla serves as a means by which the narrator recovers his own readjusted African identity. While the novel is highly lyrical in tone, it is also a means by which the author reveals a less exotic and more familiar Africa. While the story-line exposes the reader to an abundance of peculiarly African customs and traditions, the underlying message is the universality of basic human values, goals, and desires. In Paolo Volponi’s Il Sipario ducale (1975, tr. Last Act in Urbino 1995), Africa seems to evoke a kind of prehistoric religious mysticism for the female protagonist Vives: “She thought nostalgically about Africa […]. She had seen how it was even easier to die in Africa […] and as soon as he was dead he did not become a cadaver, but a monkey... or a little bagpipe.”7 But a reading of Komla–Ebri’s short story “Quando attraverserò il fiume” [When I Cross the River] (1997) reveals a different attitude toward death. The narrator explains that “it is believed among our people that life and death are found on the opposite banks of the same river, and dying is nothing more than crossing the river.” This is a religious concept that makes dying easier for a believer in the same way that the Christian Paradise makes dying easier for Christian believers. But the same story reveals that this religious concept does not necessarily apply any more in the African context than in the European. The plot of the story is based on the fact that Nukuku, who is dying, had, many years before, after a furious argument with her daughter, said: “when I cross the river... you’ll cross the river with me.” Now it is up to the young narrator to win his place among the village leaders by convincing the old woman before she dies to forgive her daughter and thus save her from dying with her. He succeeds, and is a hero, because he indeed saves the younger woman from premature death. The name Nukuku means ‘dead thing’, and, as the narrator explains, her mother gave her that name “to make her live because by naming her that way she was sure that Death would not take her away. What would Death want with something dead?”8 This would certainly suggest that death is something more than a change of identity or the crossing of a river; that instead death is something to avoid. Nevertheless, Komla–Ebri is fundamentally a lyricist who measures the success of his work by its effectiveness in provoking emotional reactions in his

7 Paolo Volponi, Last Act in Urbino, tr. Peter N. Pedroni (Il Sipario ducale; Milan: Garzanti, 1975; tr. New York: Italica, 1995): 144. 8 Kossi Komla–Ebri, “Quando attraverserò il fiume,” in Memorie in valigia, ed. Alessandro Ramberti & Roberta Sangiorgi (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1997): 60, 58.

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readers and it is precisely in the notion of universally shared feelings that the social-political message of his narrative lies: And if it’s an immigrant that is writing, it can be useful in as much as it causes others to realize that immigrants experience the same sensations that everybody experiences, and think and dream like everyone else.9

For example, in his novella “Abra (All’incrocio dei sentieri)” [Abra at the Crossroads] (2003), Abra, the female narrator, tells the story of the events that led up to her decision to leave home and the subsequent curse placed upon her by her mother. The reader is thus exposed to a multitude of peculiarly African cultural traditions, including a family assembly which is called to settle a question of burial rights but which unexpectedly has to also consider a marriage proposal. However, we never have the feeling that this is why the novella was written. On the contrary, we are more impressed by the universality of the story of the protagonist, torn by her inclination to respect the traditions of her society and her desire to marry the man she loves despite her mother’s objections. It is at once culturally specific and universal: I was about to take a big step, to leave for good my village that had seen me born, grow up, play, laugh, cry, dance, and fall in love. I was leaving my innocence, my childhood, and my carefreeness. I was leaving my mother and my best friend that I would never have again. I was leaving a part of me in Ablomè.10

It would suffice to substitute a different place name for Ablome for these thoughts and emotions to be experienced in any place at any time. The result is the opposite of what Moravia or other Europeans might express about Africa. Certainly, Komla–Ebri expresses specifically African cultural differences; but, more importantly, he expresses human emotions common to Africans and Europeans. The difficulty of living between two cultures is also the theme of the short story “Mal di...” [Homesickness] (1998), whose title plays ironically on the expression “mal d’Africa” with reference to the nostalgia that some European visitors experience when they are back in Europe. Here, instead, it is the “mal d’Europa” experienced by the female narrator when she reflects back on her life in Italy. In the process, the reader is exposed to images of Italy that reveal the African point of view and contrast with the usual stereotypes. For example: “I think that here [in Italy], the rhythm of life is such that time washes away feelings, devouring life and people,” and “this country, this fog, aren’t for me, I 9

Pedroni, “Interview,” 396. Kossi Komla–Ebri, All’incrocio dei sentieri, ed. Giovanna Stanganella (Milan: E M I , 2003): 85–86. 10

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miss the sun, the village festivals, the weather, people laughing, living together with the people.” But after she has established her life back in Africa she recalls positive images of Italy and tries to re-create them in Africa. Thus she and her friend go out for an aperitif at the “Gattobar,” a pizza ‘da Silvia’, a movie with Mastroianni and Sofia Loren, and listen to the songs of Baglioni, Ramazzotti or Zucchero. In fact, she had been positively affected by Italian culture. Conversely, earlier in the same story an elderly Italian woman for whom she had worked, had told her that she and her friends had brought “light and the joy of living into her home.”11Thus we have a literary representation of the author’s concept of interculturalism. A secondary theme of “Mal di ...” is the necessity perceived by the narrator’s brother’s to be assimilated into the Italian community: He had become like a white man: cold and indifferent toward his people […] he claimed his right to live the life of individual freedom and not collective life as predicated by African solidarity […] here in Europe – he proclaimed – everyone has to think for himself.12

In his interview, Komla–Ebri explained the brother’s situation as the first of three phases that immigrants typically go through. In the first phase, the immigrant tries to become as European as possible. In the second, he re-evaluates his own culture; for example, Muslims who never went to the mosque when they were in Africa start doing so in Italy. Then, in the third phase, that of interculturalism, the immigrant realizes that, in Komla–Ebri’s words, “humanity is the basis of all cultures.”13 For the reader interested in Africa, Komla–Ebri’s novel Neyla is a treasuretrove of experiences recorded through the eyes of Yawo, the African narrator/ protagonist, who is at once a participant and an observer, the latter due to the fact that he has come home from Europe on vacation. The story-line exposes the reader to middle-class life, urban slums, an adventurous trip to the hinterland, and life in a village, including the work of a witch doctor. The narrator’s particular status also legitimizes comparisons between Africa and Europe. Thus we have comparisons between African and European cities, medical practices, family relations, and reciprocal stereotyping and prejudices: “I beg you my son, Kokuvino went on, don’t marry a Yovo [white woman], she’ll make you un-

11 Kossi Komla–Ebri. “Mal di …,” in Destini sospesi di volti in cammino, ed. Roberta Sangiorgi & Alessandro Ramberti. (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1998): 132, 134, 131. 12 Komla–Ebri, “Mal di…,” 131, 132. 13 Pedroni, “Interview,” 408.

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happy.”14 And there is certainly no lack of criticism of Africa. For example, after witnessing the payment of a bribe, the narrator comments, “I thought that we were on the edge of the abyss, but instead we had already fallen to the bottom.”15 And when criticizing the lack of adequate sewerage, he adds, “To think that already at the time of the Romans we had sewers. It’s incredible: we Africans are not capable of learning from the positive experiences of others; we go on, unperturbed, making the same mistakes.”16 Komla–Ebri’s expression of the theme of nostalgia and return compares favourably with that of Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia (1941, tr. In Sicily, 1973) and Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò (1950, tr. The Moon and the Bonfires, 2002), both classics of twentieth-century Italian fiction and analyzed most recently and extensively in Vittorio Spinazzola’s Itaca, addio17 [Farewell to Ithaca]. In Conversazione in Sicilia, Silvestro is a Sicilian who had migrated to northern Italy and feels compelled to return to his homeland, where he undergoes a spiritual purification. In La Luna e i falò, Anguilla, a native of the Langhe area of Piedmont, returns to Italy after twenty years in the U S A . His status, or lack thereof, is similar to that of the protagonist of Luigi Pirandello’s dramatic masterpiece Enrico I V (1929, tr. Henry I V , 1952), who, after twenty years of real and then feigned belief that he is the medieval emperor Henry I V , is forced to return to everyday reality. In Komla–Ebri’s words, the returning migrant is destined to discover that “‘they’ have continued to live without him, and his place, like an abandoned field, neglected by its proprietor, has been invaded by others.”18 The three novels can be compared under several aspects, beginning with the narrative structure. Each writer narrates in the first person through a presumably autobiographical protagonist. However, while Silvestro and Anguilla appear to speak directly to an imagined interlocutor, the narrative structure of Neyla is one side of a dialogue between the narrator, Yawo, and the deceased female protagonist, Neyla, a structure reminiscent of that of Vasco Pratolini’s novel Cronaca familiare (1960, tr. Family Chronicle, 1988), in which the narrator speaks directly to his deceased brother. Because of this structure, Yawo’s choice of language is more personal, intimate, and emotional. Each 14

Kossi Komla–Ebri, Neyla, tr. Peter N. Pedroni (Neyla; Milan: Dell’Arco-Marna, 2002; tr. Madison W I & Teaneck N J : Fairleigh Dickinson U P , 2004): 38. 15 Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 29. 16 Neyla, 30. 17 Vittorio Spinazzola, Itaca, Addio (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2001). 18 Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 11, from an online interview with “Voci dal silenzio” (January 2002): www.kossi-komlaebri.net/interventi.php and reprinted in Kossi Komla–Ebri, All’incrocio dei sentieri, ed. Giovanna Stanganella (Milan: E M I , 2003): 114.

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narrator begins abruptly in the first person (Silvestro: “That winter I was haunted by abstract furies,”19 Anguilla: “I had a reason for coming back to this town,”20 Yawo: “It was summer and I was coming home from Europe”), but Yawo follows quickly with “When I arrived you were there at the reception,”21 thus establishing a dialogue and the illusion for the reader of being able to listen in on this private and imagined conversation. Furthermore, by not addressing himself directly to the reader, the narrator avoids the didactic tone characteristic of much Italian migrant literature and some of Komla–Ebri’s earlier stories, in which expressions like “da noi” [at home] and “dalle nostre parti” [in our parts] revealed the assumption of a nonAfrican reader and the writer’s attempt to educate his readers about the customs and rituals of Africa. In Neyla, the representation of African culture appears to be casual because of the illusion that the reader is simply listening in. On the other hand, African proverbs, effectively translated into Italian, continue to pepper the text of Neyla, as they did his earlier stories. However, in the novel, they are used characteristically by the various friends and relatives that the narrator talks about to Neyla as he recalls their experiences together in Africa. Similarly, the oral storytelling quality, reminiscent of the traditional African griot and prevalent in the earlier stories, is maintained in certain episodes of the novel, such as the visit to the narrator’s witch-doctor uncle. But even in these episodes it is the narrator Yawo who is recalling to Neyla their common experiences; thus we have the continued use of the second person, as opposed to the more common first or third person, as the dominant narrative voice. Another structural element, explicit in Vittorini’s title (Conversazione in Sicilia) but common to the three novels, is conversation. It is through Silvestro’s conversations with a series of Sicilians culminating in those with his mother and his deceased brother that Vittorini expresses his fundamental themes and Silvestro achieves purification. In La Luna e i falò, the dominant interlocutor is Nuto, on whom Anguilla depends to re-create the reality lost by his own absence. In Neyla, too, there is a series of conversations between Yawo and his mother, his brother, and various relatives, with the difference that these conversations are all recalled within the larger imagined one-sided conversation between Yawo and Neyla. And Neyla, while serving as the static foil to the migrant Yawo, differs from Silvestro’s mother and Nuto, in that, since she is de-

19

Elio Vittorini, In Sicily and other novels, tr. Wilfred David (1941; Conversazione in Sicilia; Turin: Einaudi, 1966; tr. New York: New Directions, 1951): 3. 20 Cesare Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, tr. R.W. Flint (1950; La luna e i falò, Turin: Einaudi, 1966; tr. New York: New York Review Books, 2002): 3. 21 Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 25.

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ceased, she is only an imaginary interlocutor, and also because she is the object of Yawo’s romantic love. Indeed, on one level Neyla is a love story, but as Komla–Ebri himself explains in his epilogue, “Regarding Neyla,” it “is above all the schematic representation of my love for Africa and a vision of the Africa of today.”22 In fact, Neyla embodies the conflict between traditional and modern Africa and as such serves as a means by which the narrator recovers his own adjusted African identity: “Thank you, Neyla for having reconciled me with myself, with the colour of my skin, with my people.”23 But as Remo Cacciatori notes in his “Postfazione” [afterword] to the original novel, not only has Neyla been used and abandoned by a European man: The Africa that Neyla represents, therefore, is not any idyllic land: it has known the exploitation of the West and is still living in its seduction. Nevertheless it is exactly this Africa that the protagonist with a sense of realism beyond allegory, loves, torn between desire and repulsion, acceptance and the utopian will for change.24

But if Neyla dies, does this mean that Africa also dies? Komla–Ebri would answer “no.” He explains in “Regarding Neyla” that “Neyla-Africa dies but gives birth to a new awareness of her that is the premise for a rebirth because it is a love that ‘prunes’ in order to grow.” The relationship with Europe results in a changing and healthier Africa: “Neyla dies but the ‘eyes of her soul’ remain.”25 We might interpret this as saying that, like a Pirandellian “personaggio” [character], Neyla, as a result of the author’s work, continues to live on indefinitely. On still another level, Komla–Ebri expresses lyrically his situation as the classic migrant, living between two cultures, or, as his narrator, Yawo, puts it, “no longer totally Afican but not European either.”26 Silvestro and Anguilla find themselves in a similar situation. When Silvestro senses his attachment to Sicily through the cheese he is eating and says, “There’s no cheese like our own,” the response of his Sicilian interlocutor is: “A Sicilian never eats in the morning […] Are you American?”27 When Anguilla is enjoying his vacation in the Langhe area of Piedmont he realizes that “Nobody recognized me […] Nor

22 23 24 25 26 27

Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 107. Neyla, 102. Neyla, 96. Neyla, 108. Neyla, 59. Vittorini, In Sicily, 8, 10.

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did I recognize anyone in town.”28 Yawo, on the other hand, expresses the good feeling of being back in Africa by thinking: it was a real delight […] being home, anonymous among so many others, with no one looking you over, without feeling like a rare animal, as was so often the case in Europe.

But, ironically, at his first exposure to some more peculiarly African rituals, like kissing the lips of spinster aunts, he realizes that “I had become decidedly more ‘white’ than I thought.” Most importantly, through Neyla, hence through his renewed attachment to Africa, he discovers his ability to cry, and in a central passage that reveals the author’s strong sense of lyricism he expresses all the things over which for years he would have liked to cry, from the personal: “oppressive anguish that held me in its grip” to the societal: “Africa, always on the edge of misery, over my people, whose lives I shared and felt so closely as to break my heart.”29 The economic and social depression that Yawo left behind and finds hardly changed on his return (“So many young people without work, without a future, that would come that far, so early in the morning, around four o’clock, hoping to earn enough to survive that day”30) is similar to that of Silvestro’s Sicily (“And our employer pays us like this. He gives us the oranges.… And we don’t know what to do with them. No one wants them. We’ve come on foot to Messina – and no one wants them here”31) and of Anguilla’s Langhe (“And where do the ambitious families get the money? They make their servants work, their maids, their peasants. And their land, where did they get it? Why should it be that some have everything and some nothing?”32). But also similar are the expressions of cold, loneliness, and indifference in the places from which they are returning. Silvestro on Northern Italy: There was nothing but the rain, the slaughters on the newspaper placards, water in my dilapidated shoes and my taciturn friends. My life was like a blank dream, a quiet hopelessness.33

Anguilla on America: “It wasn’t a country where you could resign yourself, rest your head and say to others: ‘For better or worse, you know me.’”34 Yawo on Europe: 28 29 30 31 32 33

Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, 8. Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 27, 38, 59, 60. Neyla, 44. Vittorini, In Sicily, 13. Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, 20. Vittorini, In Sicily, 3.

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One of the things that had troubled me in Europe was indifference; the ability to pass by a human being in difficulty and not stop to help, or worse, totally ignore or be almost irritated by him.35

Just as myths and superstitions are important in Conversazione in Sicilia (“The Great Lombard,” “America”) and in La luna e i falò (“‘Then you also believe in the moon?’ ‘The moon,’ Nuto said, ‘you have to believe in whether you want to or not. Try to cut a pine during the full moon, the worms will eat it for you’”),36 so are they also in Neyla. This is especially evident during an episode in which Yawo, accompanied by Neyla, pays a visit to his witch-doctor uncle. Yawo explains to Neyla that he identifies intellectually with “the scientific determinism of Western culture […] which […] put me on constant guard against credulousness and superficiality.” But, in the process of his visit and through his relationship with Neyla, he discovers that he is still emotionally African: “That return to my roots was decidedly undermining my sense of certainty and causing it to crumble.”37 Differently from Anguilla, who rejects Nuto’s superstitions and with them his ability to be again a real Langarolo, Yawo, during his vacation in Africa and through his relationship with Neyla, discovers that he is still emotionally African. Another fundamental link between the three novels and their pagan-Christian underpinnings is the sacrifice of an innocent person. It is through his imaginary conversation with his younger brother Liborio, a fallen soldier, that Silvestro begins to cry, thus purging himself of his indifference. Although Santina, a childhood acquaintance of Anguilla, is executed as a traitor in La Luna e i falo, the fact that she is dressed in white suggests her innocence, inasmuch as she is a victim of the socio-political situation in which she lived, and her burnt body becomes a bonfire that will serve to regenerate Italy, just as, according to Nuto, “wherever you lit a bonfire on the edge, the cultivated land always grew a juicier, livelier crop.”38 In Komla–Ebri’s novel, the innocent victim that must die in order to regenerate Africa is Neyla. Her material death is a result of European abuse (a French diplomat had made her pregnant and abandoned her) and African inadequacies (she died in hospital from a miscarriage). Each of our three migrant protagonists had left his homeland more or less to increase the possibility of success (Silvestro for independence and work, Anguilla to escape arrest, Yawo for education) and each succeeds but returns to 34 35 36 37 38

Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, 16. Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 80–81. Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, 44. Komla–Ebri, Neyla, 83, 86. Pavese, The Moon and the Bonfires, 44.

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the homeland in search of a remedy for the psychological dissatisfaction that he feels. Nostalgia and return are themes expressed throughout literary history from Homer through Dante to the migrant writers of the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries, including the literature of Italian emigrants to the U S A and elsewhere, studied extensively by scholars such as Fred Gardaphè, Paolo Giordano, and Anthony Tamburri.39 This theme is a manifestation of a basic human dilemma. Mankind suffers from two opposing stimuli: the one that makes us seek a better life through change, exploration, and migration; the other that makes us yearn for stability, identity, and security. Because of these opposing stimuli, the static person suffers from a lack of self-fulfilment, while the migrant person suffers nostalgia and a need to return. By returning, Silvestro is able to recapture the sense of being Sicilian and thus to overcome his indifference; Anguilla, by reaching outside of his nostalgic egotism to help the otherwise unfortunate Cinto, succeeds in re-inserting himself into the life-cycle of the paese [home town], and Yawo, through his experiences with Neyla, re-establishes his identity with, and dedication to, the well-being of a changed and evolving Africa. Just as he believes that he is no more writing “for his people” than practising medicine “for his people,” Komla–Ebri rejects the label of “African-Italian” writer, preferring instead to be considered simply a writer who expresses himself in the Italian language. Writers who live in a country where a language different from their own is used must make a fundamental decision whether to write in their native language or in the language of their host country. Komla– Ebri’s native tongue is Ewe, a language spoken in parts of Ghana and Benin as well as in Togo, and his first acquired language was French. However, since he lives in Italy, he has made a conscious decision to write in Italian. Therefore, to the extent that it is necessary to categorize writers on a national basis, he can be considered an Italian writer. Similarly, Italo Svevo is considered an Italian writer even though Italian was not his native language. Indeed, this is a common phenomenon among Italian writers from Dante through Manzoni to Pirandello, for all of whom a regional dialect, and not Italian, was their native language. Komla–Ebri prefers to be considered and judged simply as a writer who writes in Italian on grounds of practical circumstance. He would rather not be characterized as an African-Italian writer; as he explains, “I don’t start out with

39 See, for example, Fred L. Gardaphe, Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1996); Anthony J. Tamburri, To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate: The Italian American Writer: Or An “Other” American? (Montreal: Guernica, 1991); From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Fred L. Gardaphe, Paolo Giordano & Anthony J. Tamburri (1991; West Lafayette I N : Purdue U P , 2000).

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the idea that I am an African who is writing […]. I start out in Italian and I write directly in Italian.”40 One of the characteristics of Komla–Ebri’s style is his creative use of neologisms. The term “imbarazzismi” is a combination of imbarazzi and razzismi easily rendered in English by ‘embarracisms’. Imbarazzismi: Quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero [Embarracisms: Everyday Embarrassments in Black and White] (2002) and its sequel, Nuovi imbarazzismi: Quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero… e a colori, [New Embarracisms – Everyday Embarrassments in Black and White… and in Colour] (2004), are collections of anecdotal sketches of unintended but embarrassing acts of racism. While the author is never antagonistic, he does inject a large dose of good-natured irony. This tolerant attitude is possible because of the author’s apparent understanding of the usually innocent use by others of stereotypes and prejudices, based on ignorance. In May of 2001, Kossi Komla–Ebri took a giant step forward for the status of immigrants in Italy by being the first African-Italian to run for election to the Italian Chamber of Deputies. As a candidate for the left-centre Ulivo coalition he received a surprisingly strong 36% of the vote in the city of Erba, a traditionally right-wing stronghold in northern Italy. This ‘moral’ victory established him as an individual political force to be reckoned with and brought needed attention to the significance of the immigrant population in Italy. He was born in Togo in 1954 and is a naturalized Italian citizen. He studied medicine at the Universities of Bologna and Milan and is a practising physician at the Fatebenefratelli Hospital in Erba. He is a leading figure among immigrant writers in their attempts to organize themselves into a cohesive literary group. Although Italy began the twentieth century as a country of emigration, it has entered the twenty-first century as a country of immigration attracting millions of people from almost every part of the world, including Africa. In a relatively short period of time, a body of literature has emerged to express the immigrant experience, a considerable part of which is the challenge of moving toward integration while at the same time maintaining cultural identity. This increasingly important element of Italian literature has been extensively studied, analyzed, and documented in the U S A and Italy by scholars such as Graziella Parati, Sante Matteo, and Armando Gnisci.41 While the number of migrant writers increases, some will distinguish themselves, and like Komla–Ebri, will enter the mainstream of contemporary Italian literature. 40

Pedroni, “Interview,” 397, 398. See, for example, Armando Gnisci, Creoli mettici migranti clandestini e ribelli (Rome: Meltemi, 1998); La letteratura italiana della migrazione (Rome: Lilith, 1998); and Poetiche africane (Rome: Meltemi, 2001). 41

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WORKS CITED Bouchane, Mohamed. Chiamatami Alì, ed. Carla de Girolamo & Daniele Miccione (Milan: Leonardo, 1990); excerpt tr. by Gerry Russo as “Call Me Alì” in Mediterranean Crossroads ed. Parati, 3–57. Cacciatori, Remo. “Postfazione,” in Kossi Komla–Ebri, Neyla: Un incontro, due mondi (Milan: Dell’Arco-Marna, 2002): 98–102. Gardaphe, Fred L. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1996). ——, Paolo Giordano & Anthony J. Tamburri, ed. From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana (West Lafayette I N : Purdue U P , 1991; 2000). Gnisci, Armando. Creoli meticci migranti clandestini e ribelli (Rome: Meltemi, 1998). ——. La Letteratura italiana della migrazione (Rome: Lilith, 1998). ——. Poetiche africane (Rome: Meltemi, 2001). Khouma, Pap. Io venditore di elefanti (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), excerpt tr. by Carmen di Cinque as “I am an Elephant Salesman” in Mediterranean Crossroads, ed. Parati, 58–68. Komla–Ebri, Kossi. “Quando attraverserò il fiume…,” in Memorie in valigia, ed. Alessandro Ramberti & Roberta Sangiorgi (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1997): 55–66. ——. “Mal di…,” in Destini sospesi di volti in cammino, ed. Sangiorgi & Ramberti, 125–35. ——. “Sognando una favola,” in Destini sospesi di volti in cammino, ed. Sangiorgi & Rambert, 135–50. ——. Neyla: Un incontro, due mondi (Milan: Dell’Arco–Marna, 2002). ——. Imbarazzismi – quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero (Milan: Dell’Arco–Marna, 2002). ——. “Abra, all’ incrocio dei sentieri,” in All’ incrocio dei sentieri, ed. Giovanna Stanganella (Milan: E M I , 2003): 55–84. ——. Neyla: A Novel by Kossi Komla–Ebri, tr. Peter N. Pedroni (Neyla: Un incontro, due mondi; Milan: Dell’Arco-Marna, 2002; Madison W I & Teaneck N J : Fairleigh Dickinson U P , 2004). ——. Nuovi imbarazzismi – quotidiani imbarazzi in bianco e nero… e a colori (Milan: Dell’Arco-Marna, 2004). Matteo, Sante, ed. ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures (Stony Brook N Y : Forum Italicum Press, 2001). Melliti, Mohsen. Pantanella: Canto lungo la strada, tr. Monica Ruocco (Rome: Lavoro, 1992). Excerpt tr. Gabriella Romani & David Yanoff as “Pantanella: A Song Along the Way” in Mediterranean Crossroads, ed. Parati, 106–20. Moravia, Alberto. La Donna leopardo (Milan: Bompiani, 1991). Moussa Ba, Saidou, & Alessandro Micheletti. La Promessa di Hamadi (Novara: De Agostini, 1991); excerpt tr. Mark Schuhl as “Hamadi’s Promise” in Mediterranean Crossroads, ed. Parati, 79–98. Parati, Graziella, ed. Mediterranean Crossroads: Migration Literature in Italy (Madison W I & Teaneck N J : Fairleigh Dickinson U P , 1999). Pavese, Cesare. La Luna e i falò (Torino: Einaudi, 1950). ——. The Moon and the Bonfires, tr. R.W. Flint (La Luna e i falò; Torino: Einaudi, 1950; tr. New York: New York Review of Books, 2002). Pedroni, Peter N. “Interview with Kossi Komla–Ebri,” in ItaliAfrica: Bridging Continents and Cultures, ed. Matteo,393–410. Pirandello, Luigi. Enrico I V (Florence: Bemporad, 1929).

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——. Henry I V , tr. Edward Storer, Enrico I V , in Naked Masks, ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Dutton, 1952): 139–208. Pratolini, Vasco. Cronaca familiare (Milan: Mondadori, 1960). ——. Family Chronicle, tr. Martha King (Cronaca familiare; Milan: Mondadori, 1960; tr. New York: Italica, 1988). Ramberti, Alessandro, & Roberta Sangiorgi, ed. Memorie in valigia (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1997). Sangiorgi, Roberta, & Alessandro Ramberti, ed. Destini sospesi di volti in cammino (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara, 1998). Spinazzola, Vittorio. Itaca, Addio (Milan: Il saggiatore, 2001). Stellardi, Giuseppe. “L’Africa come metafora femminile (e viceversa) ne La Donna leopardo di Alberto Moravia,” in Studi d’italianistica nell’Africa australe 6.1 (1993): 74–93. Tamburri, Anthony J. To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate – the Italian American Writer – Or An “Other” American? (Montreal: Guernica, 1991). Viarengo, Maria. “Andiamo a spasso?” Linea d’Ombra 54.75 (November 1990); tr. “Shirshi N’demna? (Let’s Go for a Stroll),” in Mediterranean Crossroads, ed. Parati, 69–78. Vittorini, Elio. Conversazione in Sicilia (Milan: Bompiani, 1941). ——. In Sicily [and other novels], tr. Wilfred David (Conversazione in Sicilia; Milan: Bompiani, 1941; tr. New York: New Directions, 1973). Volponi, Paolo. Il Sipario ducale. (Milan: Garzanti, 1975). ——. Last Act in Urbino, tr. Peter N. Pedroni (Il Sipario ducale; Milan: Garzanti, 1975; tr. New York: Italica P, 1995). Wasswa, Sinan B. “La Mia tradizione in valigia,” in Memorie in valigia, ed. Ramberti & Sangiorgi, 179–84.

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D ANIELA M EROLLA ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Poetics of Transition — Africa and Dutch Literary Space

ABSTRACT: This essay discusses current trends and debates on ‘migrant literature’ in the light of historical intersections in Dutch literary space and with particular attention to contemporary publication / reception by writers from Africa. Dutch writing is not monolithic; stratifications and interactions date back well into the past. The position of African writers in contemporary Dutch literature is discussed, particularly writers from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia). These ‘new Dutch’ writings have created a literary phenomenon since the mid-1990s and have affected – and reacted to – the sociological debate on migrancy, ‘allochtonous’, ‘Dutch Moroccan’, and associated definitional discussions. Strategies connected with growing interest in media and public interest in these new writers are illustrated by the ‘dutchification’ of anglophone manuscripts and the literary case of ‘Yusef El Halal’. The essay concludes by indicating the difficulty involved in naming and positioning writers, via the works of Hafid Bouazza, a writer who adopts an antagonistic attitude towards any definitions that threaten to limit the creative activity of writing by valorizing ‘origins’ and ‘ethnic’ attributes.

T

H E M O V E M E N T O F P E O P L E A N D I D E A S during the flows of migration has always created space for artistic expression in European literatures. What we could call the colonial and postcolonial ‘poetics of transition’, a feature of English and French writings since the beginning of the nineteenth century, has progressively characterized Dutch, German, Italian,

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Finnish, Spanish, and other European literatures, thanks to new writers who have attracted public attention and criticism. A growing number of migrants and children of migrants have become artistically active in the Netherlands over the last few decades, and some of these new writers and artists have managed to establish a reputation in the literary field as well as in theatre, cinema, and music. This artistic renewal has prompted discussion of matters pertaining to creation and language, cultural essentialism, social identity, and political choices. At the same time, international and national events have changed the social, political, and artistic atmosphere in the Netherlands. The present article focuses on writers of African origin who are active in the Netherlands. Their literary production is located within the historical context of Dutch artistic renewal and in the light of the current public debate on literary belonging and multiculturalism.

Poetics of Transition: Historical Background Literary renewal related to the poetics of transition is not an exclusively present-day phenomenon in Dutch literature. As in the case of other European languages, Dutch writing has never been monolithic. Multiple intersections and contributions date far back and are linked to old and more recent migratory flows. The tradition of domestic tolerance in the Netherlands has always encouraged flows of immigration. Religious tolerance was the reason for Jews to migrate to the Netherlands from Spain and Portugal and from Poland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively, and in more recent times from Germany and again from East Europe. There have also been other instances of religiously motivated immigration to the Netherlands – for example, the Huguenots who fled from France in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Dutch domestic tolerance was, however, but one face of the Netherlands, and contrasted markedly with Dutch foreign policy towards Indonesia, the Antilles, and Suriname from the seventeenth century onwards.1 Foreign policy was characterized by aggressive mercantile and military exploitation of distant territories, as can be seen from one of the most critical Dutch novels of the nine1

Francis Gouda, Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies,

1900–1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 1995); Daniela Merolla & Sandra Ponzanesi,

“Introduction” to Migrant Cartographies, New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post–Colonial Europe, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi & Daniela Merolla (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield & New York: Lexington, 2005): 27–29.

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teenth century, Max Havelaar (1860) written by Multatuli,2 the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker, who worked in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. Migration to the tolerant Netherlands for religious or political reasons continued up to the Second World War. In the postwar period, the initial migratory flows were those of repatriates from ex-colonies that had become independent – the Moluccas and Indonesia, and subsequently Suriname. Others groups, and other writers, arrived as political refugees from Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, as well as from China, Pakistan, Somalia, and, more recently, the former Yugoslavia. Another important reason for migration to the Netherlands was the employment opportunities offered by recruitment agreements between states. After the 1960s there were numerically important flows of immigrants from southern Europe (Spain, Italy, Greece), then from Morocco and Turkey, and, more recently, from sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ghana. New immigrants and refugees have encountered progressively more restrictive domestic policies, in contrast to the Dutch liberal tradition, a cosmopolitan cultural habitat, and a professed progressive multicultural policy, but more in line with the Dutch foreign policy of previous centuries. Unlike the Gastarbeiter who were seen as temporary residents in Germany, the permanent presence of immigrants in the Netherlands was recognized at the end of the 1980s. Since then there have been various strategies of integration, from the initial assimilationist policies to the multiculturalism of the 1990s, then the switch to the recent more restrictive policy that is currently in place. The strategies of integration, although differentiated, have mainly taken separatist forms: each group was recognized as having the right to constitute separate organisms and institutions in the religious field as well as in education and socio-economic activities. This system followed the traditional formula of the Dutch being an internally divided society, as a result of the parallel ‘pillars’ or social groups that were considered as being more or less internally homogeneous and had collective rights based in religious, social and economic organizations. These pillars encouraged parallel lives, with the exception of the elites, which frequently sought compromise at the uppermost level when necessary.3 After 2

Multatuli, Max Havelaar (Amsterdam: De Ruyter, 1860). Historically, there were four ‘classic’ pillars of Dutch society (Roman Catholic, Calvinists, Liberal Protestants, and the Socialists / Humanists), with each pillar including organizations and institutions, such as trade unions and schools, that were based on the same religious or political principles. As a system of socio-political and cultural segmentation fixed in law, rules, and regulations, this structure was characterized by intensified mediation and cooperation among elites, a search for maximum consensus, and paternalism. This ‘pillarized’ system was progressively abandoned after 1960. See M. Peter van der Hoek, “Does the Dutch Model Really Exist?,” International Advances in Economic Research 6.3 (August 2000): 387–403, Ernst Heinrich Kossmann, De Lage Landen, 1780–1980, Deel II, 1914–1980 (Amsterdam & 3

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the progressive dissolution of the pillars in the 1970s, their influence could still be felt in the social separatism within the state-subsidy system, which supported mosques and Muslim schools alongside migrant social and cultural associations.

Literary Renewal The immigration flows mentioned above have created room for new writers – immigrants and their children – to express themselves, their experience, and their imaginative world in the field of Dutch literature. I have tried to summarize the different contributions in a visual sketch of Dutch literature from the nineteenth century onwards in relation to colonial expansion. Although limited in scope, this sketch [Figure 1, end of essay] shows the stratifications of literary and artistic production in the Netherlands, with arrows pointing to reciprocal interaction, indicating that the various contributions have never been isolated units. The labels attributed to literary streams or movements are intended merely as signals, since they could easily lead to conflation, particularly when controversial notions such as colonial/ postcolonial / migrant literatures are being debated. The sketch starts with (the formation of) the Dutch literary canon as constituted in opposition to regional languages and to other European national languages and literatures since the fifteenth century.4 Dutch literature – and its canon – was also constituted by stratifications and migrant contributions as expressed in the writings of several writers born into refugee families, which were integrated in the national canon, from the philosopher Spinoza (1632–77) to Anne Frank (1929–45), who wrote in Dutch but was the child of German immigrants. Other authors, less well-known to the international public but central to the Dutch canon, include Isaac Da Costa (1798–1860), Jacob Israël De

Brussels: Elsevier, 1986), and Arend Lijphart, Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek (Haarlem: Becht, 1990). 4 Regional variations are spoken in Limburg and Brabant, while Frisian is the second language of the Netherlands but used only by a minority in the northeast. When the Frisians lost their political independence in 1498, Dutch progressively replaced Frisian as their written language (a famous exception is the seventeenth-century Frisian poet Gysbert Japiks). See Jurjen van der Kooi, “Het Fries eigene. Historie, taal of ...?” in Constructie van het eigene: Culturele vormen van regionale identiteit in Nederland, ed. Carlo van der Borgt, Amanda Hermans & Hugo Jacobs (Amsterdam: Meertens-Instituut, 1996): 141–54, and Teake Oppewal, Zolang de wind van de wolken waait: Geschiedenis van de Friese literatuur (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2006).

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Haan (1881–1924), and Conrad Busken Huet (1826–86), all offspring of former immigrant families. Colonial expansion also created room for new contributions and postcolonial movements. European officials and administrators gave literary shape to their colonial world as well as to the ambiguous experience of repatriation. Among them, there are the critical work by Multatuli and other literary witnesses such as Augusta de Witt and Edgar du Perron. Dutch-Indonesian writings, including the works of all authors who were involved in the Dutch-Indonesian colonial and postcolonial encounters, also contributed to the formation of the Dutch literary canon. Many writers and journalists have been active and are well-established in publishing, literary criticism, and public debate, as shown at once by the imposing anthologies by Robert Nieuwenhuis and Alfred Birney. It should be added that the majority of established Dutch-Indonesian writers were (and are) active in the Netherlands, since authors in Indonesia continued to use their mother tongues and national language.5 By contrast, the literary position of writers from the Caribbean was more difficult. Unlike the Dutch-Indonesian stream, the works of writers such as Tip Marugg, Frank Martinus Arion, and Cola Debrot did not enter, or only with much difficulty and delay, the Dutch literary canon.6 Literature in Afrikaans (Dutch African) as developed by the Dutch settlers in South Africa assumed a marginal position in relation to the political situation created by racism and apartheid, but progressive writers such as André Brink and Breyten Breytenbach (publishing in both English and Afrikaans) did obtain recognition in the Netherlands. The process of migration from the ex-colonies to the Netherlands intensified during the periods of decolonization and depolarization. It involved different social classes of migrants or repatriates, among them a number of writers who maintained interest in and communication with the respective migrant communities and homelands, such as Talje Robinson and Rob Nieuwenhuys from the former Indonesia, Frans Lopulalan and Eddy Supusepa from the Moluccas, and Edgar Cairo from Surinam. The past fifteen years have produced authors who are enriching the Dutch-Indonesian and Dutch-Caribbean streams such as Anton de Kom, Alfred Birney, Klark Accord, Ellen Ombre, and Astrid Roemer. Since the 1990s, Dutch publishers have sustained the explosive growth of ‘migrant literature’ in Dutch, by including writers who immigrated as adults

5

Merolla & Ponzanesi, “Introduction,” 28. See, for example, the article on the Dutch literary canon by Marita Mathijsen, Herman Pleij & Thomas Vaessens, “Een canon van de Nederlandse literatuur,” N R C Handelsblad (5 March 2005), and the subsequent discussion by readers, journalists, and literary critics. 6

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and second-generation migrants.7 There has been wide recognition of the works of authors such as Kader Abdollah, a political refugee from Iran; Lu Wang, a woman writer who emigrated from China; and Nilgün Yerli, a woman writer, journalist, and dramatist from Turkey. It is, however, the migrant flows from Africa that have nurtured a strikingly high number of successful writers.

Africa, the Maghreb, and Dutch Literary Space First- and second-generation writers from Africa and more particularly from the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia) have created a literary phenomenon in Dutch literature since the mid-1990s. This is not to say that there was no prior African presence in the Netherlands or that contacts have only recently been established. On the contrary, the Netherlands had strongholds in Africa in the seventeenth century, particularly on the West Coast and in Angola,8 and at a certain moment Africans were also arriving in the Netherlands, whether as servants, interpreters, or envoys. Literary evidence of the early African presence in the Netherlands can be found in (anti-)slavery essays, novels, travel diaries, and folksongs from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but it is clear from studies by Allison Blakely and Michiel van Kempen that no novels or autobiographies in Dutch by Africans from this period are known.9 A limited number of portraits bear visual witness to the first contacts.10 A painting by Willem 7

The ‘second generation’ is usually used as a flexible definition, including both writers born in the Netherlands of migrant parents and writers born in Morocco but who migrated as children to the Netherlands and were educated in the Dutch school system. 8 In the seventeenth century, the Netherlands was known for expanding its commercial enterprises and its dominant position in world trade thanks to its huge fleet, its strong commercial companies worldwide, and its extensive land possessions in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The Dutch (West-Indian) companies participated in the slave trade, particularly from Africa to Brazil and Suriname. 9 Allison Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1993). An anonymous novel, Geschiedenis van een neger (History of a Negro, 1770), tells the story of a well-off family travelling with a black man from Suriname. According to Blakely, such a novel draws inspiration from the life of Jacobus Capitein, the first black predicant in the Reformed Church in 1742, who wrote a dissertation in theology and numerous philosophical essays defending the moral necessity of slavery. An essay-letter against slavery – allegedly written by the ex-slave Karera Akotie (but attributed to the predicant Cornelius van Engelen) – was published in 1764; see Michiel van Kempen, Een geschiedenis van de Surinaamse literatuur, vol. 3 (Breda: De Geus, 2006): 57. 10 As indicated by Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 104–105, portraits of Dutch burger families in the seventeenth century often present a young black boy or girl (also represented in the form of a bust or head) as a symbol of prosperity and acquired social status. However, few

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Cornelisz Duyster (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK A 203, c.1620–25), for example, represents a well-to-do Dutch family with a black man in the background. His light-coloured clothing differentiates him from the adult members of the family, who are all wearing black, as dictated by the Protestant fashion of the time. We are, however, left to wonder about his position in the Dutch family and about his story, since there are no further details visible in the painting.11 More information is available on the African corporal Jan Kooi, portrayed twice in the nineteenth century by the famous Dutch painter Isaac Israël and by J.C. Leich because of his military bravery at Aceh.12 Historical works13 explain that Jan Kooi was one of the 3,000 African recruits from Elmina in Ghana who were engaged by the Dutch army and shipped to Indonesia between 1831 and 1872. Although the slave trade had been formally abolished in 1833, these African recruits had to buy their freedom in the Dutch army, but many died during the war in Indonesia. At the end of their contracts, only a few of them went back to settle near Elmina at Fort Saint George, where they gave the name to a quarter called Java Hill. Most of them remained in Indonesia, where they had married, forming there the beginnings of an Indo-African community, some of whom moved to the Netherlands after Indonesia gained independence in 1949. This early phase of enforced ‘globalization’ has been vividly narrated in the recent novel De Zwarte met het witte hart (1997)14 by the Dutch-Indonesian author Arthur Japin, who investigated historical sources relating to the story of two young Ashanti princes sent to be educated in the Netherlands as part of the recruitment contract between King William I of the Netherlands and Kwaku Dua I of Ashanti. Since the Second World War, the ‘new’ writers from Africa – active in the various artistic fields of Dutch literature, theatre, and music – have largely been

biographical depictions exist, such as the portrait of the Congolese envoy to Recife in Dutch Brazil (attributed to Albert Eckhout, reproduction in Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 122) and an engraving of Jacobus Capitein (in Blakely, Blacks in the Dutch World, 125). 11 Daniela Merolla, “Plural Africa and Panafricanism in the Dutch literary space,” African Literature Association, Thirty-Second Annual Meeting & Conference, Accra, Ghana, 17–21 May 2006. 12 See Ineke (W.M.J.) van Kessel, Zwarte Hollanders: Afrikaanse soldaten in NederlandsIndië (Amsterdam: K I T , 2005). Jan Kooi was awarded several military distinctions in Aceh. 13 Van Kessel, Zwarte Hollanders, and Gisella Molemans, In het voetspoor van de panter (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2005). The title of the historical reconstruction by van Kessel refers to the Indonesian denomination (Belanda Hitam, Black Hollanders) of these African soldiers in Dutch uniforms. 14 The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, tr. Ina Rilke (De Zwarte met het witte hart, 1997; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000).

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from Morocco and only very recently from sub-Saharan countries.15 It should be added that, from an internal perspective and because of long-term historical developments, Moroccans have tended to place themselves in the Arabic and/or French cultural and literary fields and do not usually consider themselves ‘African’.16 This attitude is slowly changing under pressure from international events and local perspectives in the Netherlands.17 The first writings focused on the experiences of Moroccan migrant workers – the essayistic narrative of Hassan Bel Ghazi (1984), the novels of Mohammed Nars (1984, 1987), and the juvenile fiction of Zohra Zarouali (1989, 1993, 1996). Their works were noted for their documentary interest in migrant life and their perspective on the host country.18 A huge change took place with the advent of Hafid Bouazza and Abdelkader Benali, whose works have now been translated into several languages and have received prestigious literary prizes in the Netherlands and in Flemish-speaking areas of Belgium – Bouazza for his collection of short stories titled De Voeten van Abdullah (1996, tr. Abdullah’s Feet, 2000) and for his most recent novel, Paravion (Gouden Uil, 2004), and Benali for his first novel Bruilof aan zee (1996, tr. Wedding by the Sea, 1999) and for De Langverwachte [The LongAwaited], winner of the Libris Prize in 2003. Both authors have published a rich array of short stories, plays, and novels.19 Other well-known writings in15 See singers, painters, film and theatre actors and directors such as Ali B. and Yes-R, Mohamed Abettoy, Rachid ben Ali, Mimoun Aissa, Chaib Massaoudi, Samba Schutte and Karim Traïdia. 16 Berber speakers however sometimes affirm their African connection to counterbalance the hegemonic Arabic component of the Maghreb. 17 See, for example, the new migration trajectories from sub-Saharan regions to Morocco and further to the North; and the Dutch use of the label “black schools” for primary and secondary schools hosting a majority of migrant children, largely from Morocco and Turkey. This ‘outside’ perspective finds a response in the practice of cooperation in cultural and social migrant associations such as Zami, an organisation for “black, migrant and refugee women” (see http://www.zami.nl). 18 Mekaoui–Jansen, “Littérature néerlandophone de l’Immigration aux Pays-Bas,” in Littératures des immigrations, ed. Charles Bonn (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995): 84–85. 19 Abdelakader Benali, De Ongelukkige (play; 1999), Berichten uit Maanzaad Stad (personal miscellany) 2001, Jasser (play; 2001), Het Tikken van de kraai (play; 2003), Laat het morgen mooi weer zijn (2005), Berichten uit een belegerde stad (epistolarium) 2006, Feldman en ik (2006), Wie kan het paradijs weerstaan (exchange of letters with Michael Zeeman, 2006), De Marathonloper (literary sport essay) 2007. Bouazza Hafid, Apollien (play; 1998), Momo, 1998, Schoon in elk oog is wat het bemint (Arabic poetry, 2000 / 2005), Salomon (2001), De Slachting in Parijs (play; 2001), Een Beer in bontjas (essay) 2001), Othello (play, adaptation, 2003), Het temmen van een feeks (play, adaptation, 2005), De Zon kussen op dit nachtuur (Arabic poetry, 2006), Om wat er nog komen moet (Arabic poetry, 2006), and Alanna (novel, 2007; forthcoming).

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clude the street-language novels of Hans Sahar,20 collections of poems by Mohamed Stitou,21 the short stories and novels of Rachid Novaire22 (finalist in the Cultuurprijs 2000 and shortlisted for the Libris Literary Prize 2004), Said El Hadji’s De Dagen van Sjaitan [The Days of Sjaitan, 2001),23 and Khalid Boudou’s Het Schnitzelparadijs [Schnitzel Paradise], which was made into a migrant film comedy in 2005. Fouad Laroui,24 an acclaimed writer in France, where he won the prestigious Albert Camus Prize in 1996, started to publish in Dutch with Vreemdeling: aangenaam [Stranger: Pleased to Meet You] in 2001 and a collection of poems Verbannen woorden [Forbidden Words] (2002), followed by Hollandse woorden [Dutch words] in 2004. Attention has also been paid to the dramatic fiction of Naima El Bezaz, De Weg naar het noorden [The Way to the North] (1995); her more recent novels include Minnares van de Duivel [Mistress of the Devil], which came out in 2002, and De Verstotene [The Outcast] (2006). Another recent novel by a woman writer is the teenage story El Weswes [Making a fuss] (2001) by Najoua Bijjir. The El Hizjra literary prize, recently awarded to a Flemish writer, Rachida Ahali, indicates how young authors from the Moroccan community who are writing in Dutch are also starting to emerge on the scene in Flanders.25 A recurrent question is why and how migration from Morocco has fostered such an artistic boom in Dutch literary space. The answer is not clear, since here we delve into the conundrum of historical, sociological and artistic relationships, of individual and collective motivations. However, I risk mentioning two possible ‘literary’ reasons. The first could be related to the annual El Hizjra prize that has offered a unique podium in the Netherlands for new writers from ‘Arabic countries’ since 1992.26 A second reason is the ‘model’ function of a few well-known writers, thanks to the success of Bouazza and Benali’s first 20

Hans Sahar, Hoezo bloedmooi (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 1995), Zoveel liefde (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 1996), De Heimwee-karavaan (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2000). 21 Moustafa Stitou, Mijn vormen (Amsterdam Vassallucci: 1994), Mijn gedichten (Amsterdam: Prometheus 1998), Varkenroze gedichten (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2006). 22 Rachid Novaire, Reigers in Cairo (Breda: de Geus, 1999), Maisroest (Amsterdam: de Geus, 2003), and Het Lied van de rog (Breda: de Geus, 2007). 23 Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own. 24 See Fouad Laroui’s article and short story in this volume. 25 See the article “Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia: African Writing in Flanders, Belgium” by Elisabeth Bekers in this volume. 26 Five authors mentioned above won the El Hizjra prize (Benali 1994, Boudou 1998, El Haji 1999, Novaire 1996, Stitou 1992). Also Mohamed Benzakour, known as an essayist and polemicist, won it in 1995 for his poems published in En de woorden stroomden [And the Words Flowed] (Amsterdam: El Hizjra, 1995): 13–19.

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novels and the cultural activity of others,27 such as Fouad Laroui, who, having emigrated to the Netherlands, has been influential in public debate on recent artistic productions in Dutch and won the E. Du Perron Prize in 2002 for his work in French and Dutch. The complex and sometime conflictual relationships of communities and language ideologies in North Africa find new forms in Dutch literary space. Moroccans living in the Netherlands largely belong to the North African Berber minority and speak Tamazight, or the Berber language. Tarifit is the local variation used in the Rif Mountains in the north of Morocco, an area that has experienced massive migration to the Netherlands. Less known to the public at large is the fact that a few writers – such as Mohamed Chacha, Ahmed Essadki, Mimoun El Walid, and Ahmed Zian – have published bilingual poems and novels in Dutch and in Tarifit, their mother tongue. Moreover, a number of the young writers know Tarifit from home and the language is therefore treated as a narrative element in their texts. A couple of examples can be found in Abdelkader Benali’s and El Hadji’s novels. In Benali’s Bruilof aan zee, the doubtful hero Lamarat returns to Morocco and discovers that he is the only one in the family who cannot understand his grandmother (because she speaks Tarifit) and that “he was the illiterate of the family at that moment.” Without approaching it explicitly, Benali displaces the stereotypes of Rif Berber backwardness, something he achieves even more playfully in the ironic description of an encounter between Lamarat and a Dutch salesman who misspells and misplaces his few Arabic and Berber words, claiming he knows how to treat Berbers in order to sell his cheap plastic chairs.28 De Dagen van Sjaitan by El Hadji treats the theme of (being unaware of) Berber history in a satirical dialogue between the imam and other older migrants from the Rif, in which the imam decides to remain silent about events and figures from Berber history because his public does not know about them

27

A recent phenomenon is the more active participation of these new writers in public debate on matters of general political concern, whereby writers such as Abdelkader Benali, Hafid Bouazza, Naima el Bezaz, and Fouad Laroui offer different views and suggestions. 28 “One day, for example, Lamarat opened the door to a young man – ‘Jacob-Jan, just call me Jake – with a stack of lawn chairs behind him, who exclaimed, Sallam-u-alaykum, kane bak vie dhar.’ ‘I suppose you think I speak Arabic,’ Lamarat said, thinking out loud, ‘but unfortunately I do not understand a word of what you are saying.’ ‘Oh, in that case, ehlel ye sehlel ouid wewesch e mis n tefkecht’ (which, freely translated from Berber, means: ‘Good afternoon, can I speak to your father, son of a kingsized portion of spit’). You had to be brash with Berbers, even crude, Jake had been told, otherwise they didn’t respond.” Abdelkader Benali, Wedding By the Sea, tr. Susan Massotty (London: Phoenix House, 1999): 73–74.

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in any case.29 The Berber/Tamazight language and cultural heritage are not treated ethnographically or didactically. On the contrary, an attempt is made to expose social and individual contradictions by means of irony, play on words, and a phantasmagoric style. At the end of the 1990s the first publications by writers from Uganda, Liberia and Somalia appear: Abessijnse kronieken (1998, tr. Abyssinian Chronicles, 2000) and Slangenkuil [Snakepit] (1999) by Moses Isegawa,30 Het Land van de vaders [The Land of the Fathers] (1999) by Vamba Sherif, Idil, een meisje [Idil, a Girl] (1998) and De Generaal met zes fingers [The General with Six Fingers] (2000) by Yasmine Allas. All of these novels have an African setting and African characters. For example, Sherif’s first novel takes up one of the main themes of pan-Africanism – the diasporan ‘return’ to Africa – by drawing a historical portrait of the foundation of Liberia and the tensions arising between African Americans and African local populations when the new nation was created. The theme of unity and reconciliation, expressed in the fundamental importance of telling stories as a binding force among people, characterizes the whole novel and interacts with the still-present destabilizing effects of the contradictions inherent in the African-American creation of Liberia. The most recent novels by Sherif, Isegawa, and Allas, by contrast, treat the experiences of migrant characters in the Netherlands – Vamba Sherif, Het Koninkrijk van Sebah [The Kingdom of Seba] (2003); Moses Isegawa, Voorbedachte daden [Premeditated Acts] (2004), and Yasmine Allas, De Blauwe kamer [The Blue Room] (2004). An important literary phenomenon concerns the so-called ‘dutchification’ (or ‘netherlandization’) of the writings of Moses Isegawa and Vamba Sherif. Dutchification refers to the fact that these writers, who wrote their manuscripts in English, were offered the financial means and technical support to get their books translated into Dutch and published in that language. The Dutch version thus appeared before the English original, which followed later. Such a literary phenomenon indicates that there is a very clear publication and marketing strategy on the part of Dutch publishers, connected with growing public and media 29 “You grew up in the Rif and do not know what is taking place here […] .The Dutchmen boast about their history: they have Julius Civilis, William of Orange, and Thorbecke, they have Cruyff and Lubbers, one after the other great national heroes, but what do you have…? He avoided speaking of the Berber king Juba II […], he avoided speaking of the brave bladessiba, thousands of revolutionary Moroccans […] he avoided speaking of the Rif hero Abdelkrim El-Chattibi, who founded the Rif Republic […] Nobody knew those names – and that itself spoke volumes.” Said El Hadji, De Dagen van Sjaitan (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2001): 143. 30 See Elisabeth Bekers’s discussion of Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles in “Culture in Transit” in this volume.

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interest in such new writers and their new Dutch literature.31 It also indicates that the Dutch language has not yet been fully acquired by the writers, with an initial phase of Afro-Dutch writing through translation. However, the role of the translator (sometimes also seen as a ghost writer) is probably less influential than in other cases, since both Vamba Sherif and Moses Isegawa know Dutch, even write in Dutch, and were co-translators. On this basis, Moses Isegawa’s publisher submitted his novel for a Dutch national literary prize. Although it had received glowing reviews and in 2002 was listed among the best hundred African books,32 the jury refused to consider it because of the translation. The jury’s view was based on an established approach to ‘original’ literary creation (and perhaps on a conservative relationship between literature and national language), but everybody living with and among several languages knows that we constantly translate, and that the matter of translation is less relevant than it might seem at first sight.33 An exception to the trend toward dutchification is Yasmine Allas, who writes in Dutch. She worked in the theatre and her first novel was drawn from one of her plays. Her writing is characterized by a quite simple, direct style, as also in two other novels and an essay by her, in stark contrast to the exuberant language of Vamba Sherif, Moses Isegawa, and the best-known of the writers emerging from the Moroccan migrant community. 

31 More recent reactions, however, have been judgmental: see, for example, Elbeth Etty’s review of De President (Khalid Boudous) in N R C Handelsblad (9 December 2005), and Arjen Fortuin on El Bezaz’s De Verstotene, N R C Handelsblad (17 November 2006). Yasmine Allas’s Blauwe kamer was shortlisted (together with books by Clark Accord and Tessa de Loo) for the 2005 Gouden Doerian (‘the worst-book prize’; named after the durian, a vile-smelling South-East Asian fruit). 32 The drawing-up of the list of ‘Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century’ was inspired by the near-absence of African writers in the list of ‘100 Great English Books of the Twentieth Century’ published by the Modern Library Board in the U S A (africahistory.about .com). The Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century list is online: www.columbia .edu/cu/lweb/indiv/africa/cuvl/Afbks.html. See also Elisabeth Bekers, “Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia,” in this volume. 33 The position of South African-born authors living in the Netherlands, such as Elisabeth Eybers, who continue to write in Afrikaans (Dutch-African), is different. She published her first collection of poems in 1957 and recent works appeared in 1995 and 2001. See Jena Jansen, “The Risks Migrating Words Take: Some Thoughts on the Afrikaans Poetry of Elisabeth Eybers in a Context of Transmigration,” in Migrant Cartographies, ed. Ponzanesi & Merolla, 189–202.

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Reception The works of writers such as Abdelkader Benali, Hafid Bouazza, and Moses Isegawa have stimulated awareness of their ‘location’ in the Dutch literary arena. The term used by the press was ‘allochthonous literature’, and these texts were either welcomed as a new trend in Dutch literature or criticized as being over-hyped and a temporary fashion with no solid literary basis. Either way, they have been acknowledged, sometimes feared, and often welcomed as the fulfillment of a multicultural society, expressing the present métissage between ‘allochthonous’ and ‘autochthonous’ cultures in Dutch society.34 In the late 1990s, publishers such as Vassallucci, de Geus, Arena, and later on De Bezige Bij, Prometheus, and Meulenhoff understood that there was social interest in literary texts labelled ‘allochthonous’, and they developed a marketing strategy to emphasize this.35 The dutchification phenomenon can be seen in this newly discovered interest in writers and works considered as ‘exotic.’ In this light, we can also consider the literary case of Man zoekt vrouw om hem gelukkig te maken [Man Seeks Woman to Make Him Happy] (2004), which was enthusiastically received, winning the 2004 Hollands Maandblad Schrijversbeurs. This novel, consisting of picaresquely linked short stories, is presented on the back cover as “an attractive description of a Moroccan youth in a land with no caftans and Q’urans in its streets.” The writer was Yusef El Halal, a very active young writer and journalist born in Morocco, who “migrated with his family to the Netherlands when he was three years old.” In April 2004, the national newspaper N R C Handelsblad announced that Yusef el Halal (lit. ‘Joseph the Pure’) was a nom de plume for the writer Ernest van der Kwast, whose aim was to mystify readers and particularly critics who wanted to make Moroccan-Dutch writers fashionable by hyping their multiculturality and thereby denying it to other authors on the literary scene.36 The 34 Daniela Merolla, “Deceitful Origins and Dogget Roots: Dutch Literary Space and Moroccan Immigration,” in Forging New European Frontiers: Transnational Families and Their Global Networks, ed. Deborah Bryceson & Ursula Vuorela (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2002): 103–23, and Daniela Merolla, “Hafid Bouazza: De Voeten van Abdullah” [Abdullah’s Feet], Le Maghreb Littéraire 2. 3 (1998): 117–21. 35 See interview with Annemiek Neefjes and Xandra Schutte, “We staan goed op markt,” Vrij Nederland (18 September 1999). 36 Ward Wijndelt, “Sluier valt van Yusef el Halal,” N R C Handelsblad (29 April 2004); Pieter Steinz, “Koken met een kanonskogel,” N R C Handelsblad (30 April 2004): http: boekrecensies.nrc.nl [accessed 4 June 2006]. The committee that awarded the prize announced that it had done so because of the quality of the novel, but apparently they were already aware of the possible pseudonym on account of the narrative play with the writer’s identity in the text. See N P S website (section “Chris vindt”): www.omroep.nl/nps /ietsmetboeken/welcome _highres.html [accessed 7 May 2004].

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story “Geef jezelf uit” (publish yourself) is indeed a satirical tirade against publishers’ obsession with the so-called knuffelallochtoon (lit. cuddly allochthonous),37 a mocking term for what might be translated as ‘domesticated stranger’, a figure sought by institutions of all kinds, including political parties, that are interested in attracting a few (‘integrated’) representatives of cultural minorities. Whether used in a sarcastic form or not, ‘allochthonous’ is a definition of ethnic type, since it refers not only to the writer’s place of birth (whether he/she was born in loco or not) but also to their parents’ place of birth (i.e. if one of them was not born in the Netherlands) and whether or not they have Dutch nationality. Such a definition is linked to the problematic concept of multiculturalism – problematic because it defines ‘cultures’ as internally homogeneous and having somehow parallel existences in society. It therefore assumes that recent flows of immigrants make present European societies multicultural, imputing the existence of a distinct ethnic and culturally ‘pure’ hidden heterogeneity.38 One effect of the definition ‘allochthonous literature’ is that it tends to erase the stratification, integration, and modification of the literary canon resulting from the various migrant components that, as we saw earlier, have contributed to shaping Dutch literature over the course of time. Moreover, this definition locates a number of writers in a separate literary space that can initially help them to find a publisher but, like all forms of separation, can also become a true obstacle to their creativity. The definition of ‘allochtonous’ literature has been strongly criticized by several writers for being inhumane and discriminatory. In particular, one of the first successful new writers, Hafid Bouazza, refused such a label by asking ironically whether ‘allochtonous literature’ meant that one wrote in the ‘Allochthonous language’ and by stating that, since he wrote in Dutch, he was a Dutch writer.39 Abdelkader Benali initially dismissed the relevance of such labelling to his work.40 Yet a year later, he hardened his position41 and gave his

37

See Stephen Sanders, De Volkskrant (19 April 1997). Jean–Loup Amselle, Logique métisses (Paris: Payot, 1990). 39 See quotations from Bouazza’s interviews: “Both my feet are in Dutch culture. This does not mean that I deny being born in Morocco – this certainly plays a role in my stories. Childhood is always a good background for stories”; Janny Groen, ‘Kijken wat dit aapje kan’: Jonge allochtone schrijvers ambivalent over ‘migrantensoep’,” Volkskrant (25 August 1995); “A French writer writes in French. An Allochthonous writer writes in Allochthons and a Dutch writer writes in Dutch”; Elsbeth Etty, “Berichten uit de Blauwbaardburcht; Gesprek met schrijver Hafid Bouazza,” N R C Handelsblad (21 June 1996). 40 “Oh, this so-called hype concerning allochthonous writers is passing. And what now? Do you know what is going to happen with such a literature? The more it is published, the 38

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own definition of the new generation of writers of Moroccan origin in the Netherlands. A new literary stream has developed during the last five years. It is not entirely Moroccan, it is not entirely Dutch. Neither. It is something in between, which would be too easy. No, it is an action […]. To me migration means storytelling, telling stories to the world. After all, we are Mother Migration’s impatient children who can only become quiet thanks to stories.42

The vehement rejection of the label and the switch by some writers to publishers who pursued this marketing strategy less obviously have helped to moderate the use of the term ‘allochthonous’ for a while, at least in literary criticism and on the literary circuit. For example, in 2001, the week that is annually dedicated to Dutch literature was devoted to writers indicated as being ‘between two cultures.’43 The use of this expression was probably intended to avoid the use of the word ‘allochthonous’, although the basic idea did not really change, because the initiative was presented as the concretization of the multicultural mixing of cultures in the Netherlands, once again as a form of communication and interaction between groups considered to be basically separate and different. This connects up with the already-mentioned Dutch system of almost segregated social groups coming into contact only through the respective elites. The debate around the definition of ‘allochthonous’ literature has recently lost its impact because there are new urgencies, new debates focusing on Islam and ‘terrorism’ and the U S -led war in Iraq. But the questions surrounding migrant contributions to Dutch literarature have clearly not gone away, and definitions such as ‘poetics of transition’, ‘migrant literature’, and ‘Euro-African or African-European literatures’ once again question the relationship between literary creation and social referent. This question remains, and will remain open, I believe.

less it is special or strange”; Tarik Pehlivan, “Proza met Lamsballen,” Karavan (August 1996). 41 “No, I do not sense any allochthonous quality in what I write. The opposition ‘allochthonous–autochthonous’ makes no sense on either a literary or a human level. What counts is whether my work is acknowledged, not my origins”; Marije Vlaskamp, “Abdelkader Benali,” Het Parool (5 April 1997). 42 Abdelakader Benali, “Voorwoord” to Koorddansers: Jonge Marokkaanse en Arabische auteurs in Nederland [Showing Their Paces: Young Moroccan and Arabic authors in the Netherlands] (Amsterdam: El Hizira, 2000): 13. 43 Boekenweek 2001: Het Land van herkomst: Schrijven tussen twee culturen [Book Week 2001: The Land of Origin: Writers Between Two Cultures]: http://www.cpnb.nl /index2.html

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Defamiliarized Dutch Literary Space It maybe be argued that the past is a country from which we have all migrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity […] the writer who is out-of-country and even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form.44

An example of the difficulty involved in naming and positioning is provided by the works of Hafid Bouazza, a writer who adopts an antagonistic attitude towards definitions involving attributes of ‘origin’ and ‘ethnicity’ that threaten to limit the creative activity of writing. Hafid Bouazza published a first collection of ironic short tales (De Voeten van Abdullah, 1996; tr. Abdullah’s feet, 2000) which were set in Morocco and in the immigrant community in the Netherlands. A few years later, he published a novella, Momo, about a child who had a peculiar, almost magical quality that made him different from all the other children at school, although the child is not explicitly marked by any linguistic, cultural, or ethnic difference. Bouazza also published the novels Solomon (2001) and Paravion (2003). Solomon tells the story of a young man, living on the margins of a Dutch town (probably Amsterdam), who is involved in discovering his sexual universe, which centres on his relationship with a female character, almost his female double. Paravion was presented as “an Arab fairytale in its composition, poetic and exotic, but its theme is rooted in the current social reality of the emigrant.”45 It takes the readers into a fabulous space, called Morea/ Moorlant, which looks like an African setting although it is clearly a fictitious land. The story concerns a couple – Baba Balouk and Mamoerra – and their descendants. The man, Baba Balouk, has to leave because of the economic difficulties, departing on a flying carpet towards a country of dreams that is called Par avion, like the word on letters destined for a foreign country (i.e. by plane), which becomes Paravion, the name of the country of dreams. Bouazza’s texts are very different in their narrative themes but show a marked stylistic continuity, characterized by the innovative use of the Dutch language (activating outdated forms and creating neologisms to refer to unexpected realities and to defamiliarize expected ones) and by a mix of fantastic elements and realism that has been compared to the magical realism of LatinAmerican writers. Another level of continuity is provided by Bouazza’s questioning of society from its margins, something that is expressed by characters who are liminal in the sense that they are always on the periphery of the group 44 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991): 12. 45 Presentation N L P V F (Foundation for the production and translation of Dutch Literature): www.nlpvf.nl/book

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or in the context where they act, although their individual differences are apparent in relation to their country of origin and to their status as ‘immigrant’, or because of individual characteristics, whether in sex, gender, or in the almost magical quality of childhood. In all cases, attention is paid to the distance of the characters from the various contexts they are in but in which somehow they are always unfamiliar and displaced. Whether reference to emigration is direct or indirect, the cultural baggage and the lived or imagined experiences of a writer mark his literary creation. Although personal and family displacement does not always go hand in hand with historical and collective displacement, the search for identity is carried out in the unfamiliar intersections that displacement creates between the self and the other in space, language, and time. Through this process, however, displaced and defamiliarized voices and visions are repositioned at the centre of narratives that assume universal significance.

WORKS CITED Ahali, Rachida. “Rahmatallah,” in Vrijpostige brieven in een dwaze tijd (Amsterdam: van Gennep, 2005). Allas Yasmine. Idil, een meisje (Breda: De Geus, 1998). ——. De Generaal met zes fingers (Breda: De Geus, 2000). ——. De Blauwe kamer (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2004). Amselle, Jean-Loup. Logique métisses (Paris: Payot) 1990. Bel Ghazi, Hassan. Mythen: buitenlandse arbeiders tussen kulturele konfrontatie en overheidsfalen (Amsterdam: De Populier, 1985). Benali, Abdelkader. Berichten uit een belegerde stad (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2006). ——. Berichten uit Maanzaad Stad (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2001). ——. Feldman en ik (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2006). ——. Jasser (Amsterdam/Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2001). ——. Laat het morgen mooi weer zijn (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2005). ——. De Langverwachte (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2002). ——. De Marathonloper (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2007). ——. De Ongelukkige (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1999). ——. Het Tikken van de kraai (theater, 2003). ——. “Voorwoord,” in Koorddansers: jonge Marokkaanse en Arabische auteurs in Nederland (Amsterdam: El Hizjra, 2000): 11–13. ——. Wedding by the Sea, tr. Susan Massotty (Bruiloft aan zee, 1996; London: Phoenix House, 1999). ——, & Michiel Zeeman. Wie kan het paradijs weerstaan, Romeinse brieven (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2006). Benzakour, Mohamed. En de woorden stroomden (Amsterdam: El Hizjra, 1995): 13–19. Bijjir, Najoua. El Weswes (Amsterdam: Vassallucci / Mutinga, 2001).

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Blakely, Allison. Blacks in the Dutch World: The Evolution of Racial Imagery in a Modern Society (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana U P , 1993). Boekenweek 2001: Het Land van herkomst: Schrijven tussen twee culturen [Book Week 2001. The Land of Origin: Writers Between Two Cultures]: http://www.cpnb.nl/index2 .html Bouazza, Hafid. Abdullah’s Feet, tr. Ina Rilke, (De Voeten van Abdullah, 1996; London: Review, 2000). ——. Alanna (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2007, forthcoming). ——. Apollien (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998). ——. Een Beer in bontjas (Amsterdan: CPNB/Prometheus, 2001). ——. Momo (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998). ——. Om wat er nog komen moet (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2006). ——. Othello (adaptation from Shakespeare) 2003. ——. Paravion (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2003). ——. Salomon, (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001). ——. Schoon in elk oog is wat het bemint (2000; Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2005). ——. De Slachting in Parijs (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001). ——. Het Temmen van een feeks (adaptation from Shakespeare) 2005. ——. De Zon kussen op dit nachtuur (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2006). Boudou, Khalid. De President (Amsterdam: Rothschild & Bach, 2005). ——. Het Schnitzelparadijs (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2001). El Bezaz, Naima. Minnares van de Duivel (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Contact, 2002). ——. De Verstotene (Amsterdam/Antwerp: Contact, 2006). ——. De Weg naar het noorden (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Contact, 1995). El Hadji, Said. De Dagen van Sjaitan (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2001). El Halal, Yusuf (pseud.). Man zoekt vrouw om hem gelukkig te maken (Amsterdam: Nijgh & van Ditmar, 2004). Etty, Elsbeth. “Berichten uit de Blauwbaardburcht; Gesprek met schrijver Hafid Bouazza,” N R C Handelsblad (21 June 1996). ——. “Stik in asperges en verdwijn!” (review of De President by Khalid Boudous), N R C Handelsblad (9 December 2005). Fortuin, Arjen. “Gelazer is wat mensen bindt” (review of De Verstotene by El Bezaz), N R C Handelsblad (17 November 2006). Gouda, Francis. Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies, 1900– 1942 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 1995). Groen, Janny. “‘Kijken wat dit aapje kan’: Jonge allochtone schrijvers ambivalent over ‘migrantensoep,” Volkskrant (25 August 1995). Isegawa, Moses. Abyssinian Chronicles (Abessijnse kronieken, 1998; London: Picador, 2000). ——. Slangenkuil (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2002). ——. Twee chimpanzees (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2001). ——. Voorbedachte daden (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2004). Jansen, Jena. “The Risks Migrating Words Take: Some Thoughts on the Afrikaans Poetry of Elisabeth Eybers in a Context of Transmigration,” in Migrant Cartographies, ed. Merolla & Ponzanesi, 189–202. Japin, Arthur. The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, tr. Ina Rilke (De Zwarte met het witte hart, 1997; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000). Kossmann, Ernst Heinrich. De Lage Landen 1780/1980, Deel II, 1914–1980 (Amsterdam & Brussels: Elsevier, 1986). Laroui, Fouad. Hollandse woorden (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2004).

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——. Verbannen woorden (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 2002). ——. Vreemdeling: aangenaam (Amsterdam: van Oorschot 2001). Lijphart, Arend. Verzuiling, pacificatie en kentering in de Nederlandse politiek (Haarlem: Becht, 1990). Mathijsen, Marita, Herman Pleij & Thomas Vaessens. “Een Canon van de Nederlandse literatuur,” N R C Handelsblad (5 March 2005). Mekaoui–Jansen, Yvonne. “Littérature néerlandophone de l’Immigration aux Pays-Bas,” in Littératures des immigrations, ed. Charles Bonn (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995): 79–87. Merolla, Daniela. “Deceitful Origins and Dogget Roots: Dutch Literary Space and Moroccan Immigration,” in Forging New European Frontiers: Transnational Families and Their Global Networks, ed. Deborah Bryceson & Ursula Vuorela (Oxford & New York: Berg, 2002): 103–23. ——. “Hafid Bouazza: De Voeten van Abdullah (Abdullah’s feet),” Le Maghreb Littéraire 2.3 (1998): 117–21. ——. “Plural Africa and Panafricanism in the Dutch literary space,” African Literature Association, Thirty-Second Annual Meeting & Conference, Accra, Ghana, May 17–21, 2006. ——, & Sandra Ponzanesi, ed. Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield & New York: Lexington, 2005). Molemans, Gisella. In het voetspoor van de panter (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2005). Multatuli. Max Havelaar (Amsterdam: De Ruyter, 1860). Nasr, Mohammed. De Elfstedentocht, with Willem van Dongen (Breda: De Geus, 1987). ——. Het Verhaal van een gastarbeider (Amersfoort: De Horstink, 1984). Neefjes, Annemiek, & Xandra Schutte. “We staan goed op markt,” Vrij Nederland (18 September 1999). Novaire, Rachid. Het Lied van de rog (Breda: De Geus, 2007). ——. Maisroest (Breda: De Geus, 2003). ——. Reigers in Cairo (Breda: De Geus, 1999). Oppewal, Teake. Zolang de wind van de wolken waait: geschiedenis van de Friese literatuur (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2006). Pehlivan, Tarik. “Proza met Lamsballen,” Karavan (August 1996). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991): 12. Sahar, Hans. Hoezo bloedmooi (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 1995). ——. Zoveel liefde, (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 1996). ——. De Heimwee-karavaan (Amsterdam & Antwerp: Arbeiderspers, 2000). Sanders, Stephen. De Volkskrant (19 April 1997). Sherif, Vamba. Het Koningrijk van Sebah (Breda: De Geus, 2003). ——. Het Land van de vaders (Breda: De Geus, 1999). ——, & Hanka de Haas–de Roos. Zwijgplicht (Breda: De Geus, 2006). Steinz, Pieter. “Koken met een kanonskogel,” N R C Handelsblad (30 April 2004): http: boekrecensies.nrc.nl [accessed 4 June 2006]. Stitou, Moustafa. Mijn gedichten (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 1998). ——. Mijn vormen (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1994). ——. Varkenroze gedichten (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 2006). van der Hoek, M. Peter. “Does the Dutch Model Really Exist?” International Advances in Economic Research 6.3 (August 2000): 387–403.

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van Kempen, Michiel. Een Geschiedenis van de Surinaamse literatuur, vol. 3 (Breda: De Geus, 2006). van Kessel, Ineke (W.M.J.). Zwarte Hollanders: Afrikaanse soldaten in Nederlands-Indië (Amsterdam: K I T , 2005). van der Kooi, Jurjen. “Het Fries eigene. Historie, taal of ...?,” in Constructie van het eigene: Culturele vormen van regionale identiteit in Nederland, ed. Carlo van der Borgt, Amanda Hermans, & Hugo Jacobs (Amsterdam: P.J. Meertens-Instituut, 1996): 141–54. Vlaskamp, Marije. “Abdelkader Benali,” Het Parool (5 April 1997). Wijndelt, Ward. “Sluier valt van Yusef el Halal,” N R C Handelsblad (29 April 2004). Zarouali, Zohra. Amel en Faisel (Houten: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1993). ——. Een Marokkaans meisje in Nederland (Houten: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1989). ——. Sanae (Houten: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1996).

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Poetics of Transition: Africa and Dutch Literary Space

ESTABLISHED OR CANONICAL LITERATURE

‘Classic,’ central, hegemonic vs. regional literatures and other national literatures

POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Initially marginal, it can become ‘classic’ (literature by writers from ex-colonies: Tip Marugg, Frank Martinus Arion…) COLONIAL LITERATURE

Initially marginal, it becomes ‘classic’ (literature by European colonizers and administrators: Multatuli, Augusta de Witt, Edgar du Perron) NATIONAL LITERATURES AFTER INDEPENDENCE

MIGRANT LITERATURES (IN DUTCH AND OTHER LANGUAGES)

National literatures of Suriname, Aruba, Indonesia etc. in Dutch (often in interaction with recent ‘migrant literatures’)

Initially marginal, it can become ‘classic’ (Anne Frank; literature issuing from recent migratory flows, not always linked to the Dutch colonial empire: Abdelkader Benali, Kader Abdollah, Vamba Sherif…)

FIGURE 1:

Dutch Literary Space Historical Trends – Intersections and Interactions

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E LISABETH B EKERS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia 1

— African Writing in Flanders, Belgium

ABSTRACT: While neighbouring regions boast more established traditions of EuroAfrican creative writing, Flanders, Belgium’s Dutch-speaking region, has only just begun to see publications by authors of African origin. The author endeavours to account for this relatively late emergence of Flemish-African writing by examining the publishing circumstances in Flanders. While mainly non-fiction was published initially, recently established writing contests and short-story collections dedicated to new talent are encouraging ‘new Flemings’, especially young women of Moroccan descent, to venture onto the Flemish literary scene. Special attention is paid to the milestone event of the 2005 publication of Chika Unigwe’s De Feniks, the first book-length work of fiction by an African author in Flanders.

A

R U N N I N G J O K E A B O U T B E L G I U M asks one to name famous Belgians. Although the humorous question begs no answer, national pride invariably obliges me to refer the joker to the Flemish

1 This article is an expanded version of a paper presented at the African Literature Association’s annual conference on “Pan-Africanism in the 21st Century: Generations in Creative Dialogue,” in Accra, Ghana, May 2006. I wish to thank the participants in the session on “African Identity, Creativity in the Diaspora” for their insightful comments. Thanks also to Sarah De Mul for her useful suggestions. Unless otherwise indicated, translations in this article are my own.

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Primitives Van Eyck and Memling and their Baroque successors Rubens and Van Dyck. Strictly speaking, these Flemish-Renaissance painters are not Belgian, as they pre-date the establishment of the small Northern European kingdom in 1830. But there is no denying the invaluable contribution of Rubens & Co. to the international artistic reputation of Belgium, and that of Flanders in particular. One of the finest treasures in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels is Rubens’s “Four Heads of a Negro” (1613–15). This renowned oilon-canvas study of a black man’s head testifies to both the Flemish painter’s talent and the presence of Africans in the Low Countries in the early seventeenth century.2 If Rubens’s unknown African model has been doomed to a mute existence in the shadow of the Flemish artist who gave him pictorial eternity, writers of African origin living in Flanders today are expressing themselves through their own artistic creations. Some can even be said to be on their way to attaining the popular status of ‘BV’ (‘Bekende Vlaming’, meaning ‘Famous Fleming’). Their appearance on the Flemish literary scene, however, is extremely recent and hardly known beyond Flanders’ borders. In this overview of Flemish-African3 writing I introduce these brand-new literary voices in Flanders; I also try and account for their comparatively late emergence by exploring the socio-political, educational, and publishing circumstances with which they have had to contend. Although relatively small on a European scale, Flanders is the most prosperous of Belgium’s three economic regions and counts for sixty percent of the country’s population. Situated in the North, this Dutch-speaking region of Belgium borders the Netherlands, where the official language is also Dutch.4 In Belgium and the Netherlands combined, over twenty million people live in a Dutch-language environment. Of these twenty million, about six million live in Flanders and over ten percent 2

Generally attributed to Rubens and commonly known as “Four Negro Heads,” the painting finds its subject-matter more accurately described by the title currently in use, “Four Heads of a Negro,” as it is composed of four portraits of the same man. No historical records of the unknown black model have been found, though the American author Ken Greenhall conceives a life-history for the man in his historical novel Lenoir (Cambridge M A : Zoland, 1998). 3 The inversion of word order is a deliberate challenge to the eurocentric understanding of identity-formation implied by the commonly used terms ‘Afro-European / Flemish’. 4 Although the variant of Dutch that is spoken in Flanders is also referred to as ‘Flemish’, it is essentially the same language as that spoken in the Netherlands. For a concise history of the Dutch language and its current situation, see Omer Vandeputte, Dutch: The Language of Twenty Million Dutch and Flemish People (Rekkem: Ons Erfdeel, 1992). Since the adjective ‘Dutch’ can relate to the Netherlands, its people and culture as well as to the Dutch language, which is shared by the people of Flanders and the Netherlands, I will use the adjective ‘Dutch’ in this article only with reference to the language, unless the context disambiguates its use.

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are immigrants. Among immigrants from outside the European Union, those of Turkish origin form the largest group in the Netherlands,5 while in Belgium Moroccan immigrants are the most numerous, followed by Turkish and Congolese immigrants.6 Since this demographic situation is hardly new, it is remarkable that in Flanders the first literary texts by authors of African descent have only just begun to appear in print. The region’s larger-sized neighbours, in particular Great Britain and France, certainly boast more established traditions of creative writing by Africans. In England, for example, the first Africans began to publish in the context of the anti-slavery movement towards the end of the eighteenth century. Among them are Ignatius Sancho (letters, 1782), Ottobah Cugoano (essay on slave trade, 1787), and, most notably, Olaudah Equiano, whose abolitionist autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789) has made its way into contemporary anthologies of English and American literature. Across the Channel, a century and a half later, a group of African and African-Caribbean literary authors living and publishing in Paris, among them Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Léon Damas, founded the Négritude movement, which not only stimulated the development of African literatures, in both Africa and its diaspora, but also left its mark on francophone literature. The domain of Dutch literature, too, has received notable contributions from immigrant writers, though until recently they tended to originate in the (former) Dutch colonies in the West and East Indies, rather than in Africa.7 Since the early 1990s, however, a steadily growing number of authors of African descent have conquered Dutch letters, a feat that has earned them a few pages in the latest history of Dutch literature, Altijd weer die vogels die nesten beginnen (2006), by Hugo Brems. Although this literary history covers writing from Flanders as well as the Netherlands, all the immigrant authors it includes have emerged in the Netherlands. The absence of writers from Flanders is not an 5 “Foreign population growing more slowly,” Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek) (11 January 2007): http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/dossiers/allochtonen /publicaties/artikelen/archief/2004/default.htm 6 “De Immigratie in België: Aantallen, stromen en arbeidsmarkt (2006),” Rapporten, studies en statistieken, Publicaties, De Federale Overheidsdienst Werkgelegenheid, Arbeid en Sociaal Overleg (Belgium) (11 January 2007): http://meta.fgov.be/pa/paa/framesetnle00 .htm 7 For further information on (post)colonial writing in Dutch, see Hugo Brems, Altijd weer die vogels die nesten beginnen: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur, 1945–2005 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2006). Internet users can also consult the Literature in Context website hosted by the Institut für Germanistik of the University of Vienna, which provides an easily navigable overview of the history of Dutch literature: http://www.ned.univie.ac.at/lic /periode.asp?per_id=8

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omission on the (Flemish) author’s part but, rather, an appropriate reflection of the current situation in the Low Countries. If Flanders and the Netherlands can be said to be “divided by one language,” as Ton Anbeek remarks in his comparison of the literature of the two neighbouring regions,8 the gap seems really wide when one contemplates ‘migrant writing’ in Dutch.9 Among the African immigrants in the Netherlands who in recent years have made a name for themselves in the field of Dutch literature are the Moroccanborn authors Abdelkader Benali, Naima El Bezaz, Hafid Bouazza, Fouad Laroui,10 Hans Sahar, and Mustafa Stitou, as well as Moses Isegawa from Uganda, Vamba Sherif from Liberia, and Yasmine Allas from Somalia. These writers have been acclaimed both in the Netherlands and abroad, and have been awarded such prestigious literary prizes as the French Prix du Meilleur Premier Roman Étranger (Benali, 1999), the Dutch Libris Literatuurprijs (Benali, 2003), the Dutch V S B Poëzieprijs (Stitou, 2004), and the Belgian Gouden Uil (Bouazza 2004) – the latter three prizes are open to creative writing in Dutch from both the Netherlands and Belgium. In 2002, Isegawa’s literary debut was even listed among Africa’s 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century. These authors have all benefitted from a publishing climate in the Netherlands that in the last decade and a half has favoured the publication of “‘exotic’ literature,” to cite the rather dubious formulation – admittedly between citation marks – on the website of Benali’s and Laroui’s publisher, Vassallucci.11 Vassallucci’s more broadly marketed competitor De Geus, literary home to Yasmine Allas and Vamba Sherif, was in the early 1980s among the first publishing houses in the Netherlands (along with In De Knipscheer, Corrie Zelen, and FlamboyantP) to develop an interest in literary talent in the contemporary multicultural society.12 Since then, larger publishing houses, including De Bezige Bij (Isegawa), Meulenhoff, and Prometheus (Bouazza) – the latter has taken over Vassallucci – have also started to promote non-Western authors in translation as well as migrant voices from the Netherlands. 8

A.G.H. (Ton) Anbeek van der Meijden, “Het Vlaamse verschil,” Dietsche Warande & Belfort 141 (1996): 199. 9 In the present volume, Daniela Merolla presents a more extensive introduction to African writing in the Netherlands; the following paragraphs merely enable comparison with the situation in Flanders. 10 Laroui migrated to the Netherlands via France, where he obtained his first literary successes. See also his contributions to this volume. 11 Founded in 1994, Vasallucci has in the meantime been taken over by Prometheus, but for now its website is still accessible: “Uitgeverij Vassallucci” (11 January 2007): http://www .vassallucci.nl/vassa/a-vassallucci.htm 12 Corrie Zelen and Flamboyant-P are no longer active. See Lisa Kuitert, Vleugelspelers: uitgevers tussen twee culturen (Utrecht: Forum, 2001): 9.

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However, as Daniela Merolla demonstrates more extensively in her overview of African writing in the Netherlands in this volume, not all immigrant writers in the Netherlands have responded favourably to such labels as ‘migrant writers’ or ‘allochthonous authors’.13 While authors such as Kader Abdolah and Al Galidi, political refugees from Iran and Iraq respectively, have asserted their unique position as writers in between two cultures, others have not appreciated being relegated to this migrant niche and have claimed a place on the same bench as other Dutch writers. Bouazza, for instance, pointedly rejects the ‘allochthonous’ label as nonsensical by reasoning that if a French or Dutch writer is one who writes in the said language, “an allochthonous writer is one who writes in Allochthonous.”14 In Flanders, however, authors of African descent have had to face more fundamental problems than the question of their status within Dutch letters. Although Belgium’s colonial connections with Africa might suggest a significant and established presence of authors with African roots in Flanders, the reality is different, and for several reasons. In comparison with other European imperial powers, King Leopold II’s (1865/1885–1908) and later Belgium’s (1908–1960) colonial involvement in the Congo was relatively short: less than a hundred years. The Netherlands, by contrast, was engaged in colonization for a period that was four times as long, and had only one language to introduce into its colonies: Dutch. Until the late 1930s, French was the only language used in political circles in Belgium, hence also the only language passed on to the Belgian Congo (and, after World War I, also to Ruanda–Urundi, presentday Rwanda and Burundi). After independence in 1960, French became the single official language in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Not surprisingly, this has affected the subsequent course of migration to Belgium. If Flanders has 13 The terms ‘allochthonous’ and ‘autochthonous’ originate in geology, where they refers to rocks, deposits, etc. found in another place than where they and their constituents were formed; in current demographic discussions in Belgium as well as the Netherlands, ‘allochthonous’ is used as a (supposedly) non-judgemental term to refer to non-Western immigrants and, by extension, their descendants, even when the latter were born in the Low Countries. The very fact that it generally does not apply to Western migrants, however, proves that the term is rarely used in the neutral geological sense of ‘from elsewhere’. Not surprisingly, the term has been criticized, as have alternatives such as ‘Marokkaanse Belg,’ meaning ‘Moroccan Belgian’ or ‘Nieuwe Belg/Vlaming’, meaning ‘New Belgian / Fleming’, as in Jamal Boukhriss’s short story “Alleen tegen de wereld / Seul contre nous [Alone Against the World],” in Kif Kif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Vlaanderen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Antwerp: Manteau, 2006): 55. In this article I will therefore place the terms ‘migrant / allochthonous writer’ and ‘New Belgian / Fleming’ between quotation marks. 14 Hafid Bouazza, “Ik zie voornamelijk domheid en fanatisme om me heen: Interview met Piet Piryns,” Knack (29 October 2003). In this interview, Bouazza somewhat despondently restates a comment he made when he was first published in 1996.

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known relatively few immigrants from former colonies, certainly in comparison with England and France but also with the Netherlands, those Central Africans who have settled in Belgium have largely done so in the country’s francophone region or its bilingual capital. Accordingly, the few authors with Central African roots in Belgium have tended to write in French. The two most notable figures are undoubtedly the Congolese-born authors Charles Djungu– Simba and Pie Tshibanda, both of whom had actually established themselves as writers before migrating to Belgium. They have published in French since the mid-1980s, as has their Moroccan-born colleague Leïla Houari (currently living in France).15 These francophone Belgian-African pioneers have in recent years been joined by a younger generation, whose writing is even more modestly available in print, if at all, including Dominique Aguessy (Benin), Saber Assal (Morocco), Malika Madi (Algeria), Dominique Kisalu (Angola), and Daniel Tuyizere (Rwanda). The linguistic context, certainly, has made it difficult for literary Flanders to count on African contributions through Belgium’s colonial connections, but other non-Western immigrant groups in Flanders have not produced many writers, either. The largest influx of non-Western immigrants in Flanders took place between the 1960s and the mid-1970s, when Belgium attracted large numbers of guest workers from Morocco and Turkey to work in the coal mines, and later in the metal industry and in construction.16 The cultural integration of this first generation, as well as that of their descendants, has in Flanders been less thorough than in the Netherlands. Even today, notwithstanding Flanders’ internationally highly reputed educational system, most children born to immigrant parents are conspicuous underachievers at school, not only compared to Flemish children but also to migrant children in other Western countries, as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reported in 2006.17 If migrant children in Flanders tend to end up in vocational training, a pathway to careers other than literary ones,18 authors of Flemish descent writing in Dutch have not always found it easy to get their works published either. Not 15

Catherine Gravet & Pierre Halen. “Sensibilités post-coloniales,” in Littératures belges de langue Française (1830–2000): Histoire et perspectives, ed. Christian Berg & Pierre Halen (Brussels: Le Cri, 2000): 559. 16 Moroccans and Turks replaced Italian and Polish immigrants, who refused to come and work in Belgium after the mining disaster at Marcinelle in 1956. 17 “Achterstand allochtone leerlingen nergens zo groot als in Vlaanderen,” De Standaard (16 May 2006). 18 Rita Ghesquiere & Griet Ramaut, Hoe anders lezen migranten? Een onderzoek naar het leesgedrag van Turkse, Marokkaanse en Italiaanse migrantenkinderen in Vlaanderen (Antwerp: Plantyn, 1994).

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only do authors writing in minority languages have fewer publishing opportunities, the development of Dutch literature in Flanders has also suffered from the region’s long history of political and cultural domination, first by Spain, Austria, France, and the Netherlands, and later by Belgium’s largely francophone ruling classes. Even in the present day, publishing circumstances in Belgium in some ways continue to be tougher than in the Netherlands, as most Flemish publishers have had to affiliate themselves with publishing companies in the Netherlands in order to survive.19 Longer than their colleagues in the Netherlands, writers of African descent in Flanders have, moreover, had to contend with a serious lack of interest. As recently as October 2004, the Moroccan-born columnist Jamila Amadou complained in De Standaard, one of Flanders’ quality newspapers, that no migrant voices have been heard in Flemish literature, for the simple reason that no one has been prepared to “really listen.”20 For many years the only African writing in Flanders available in print was the booklets with African stories and legends published by the Centre d’Information et d’Encadrement des Étudiants Africains, which to this day are sold in the streets of Flanders to raise funds for African students in Belgium. Translated from the French and published on a tight budget, these booklets are typically full of typographical and language errors, a sad confirmation of the precarious predicament of African writing in Flanders. Despite these daunting circumstances, in the past few years the presence of, and interest in, ‘allochthonous writing’ in Dutch has grown in Flanders, a trend preceded by the increasing participation of migrants in local politics. The publications of these ‘new’ Flemings – and I focus on authors of African descent – were initially situated in the realm of non-fiction, such as the book-length, politically inspired essays on multicultural Flanders by Mimount Bousakla (2002) and Tarik Fraihi (2004), Bachir Boumaâza’s diary (2002), Saida Boujdaine’s account of her forced marriage (2005, ghost-written by Tom Naegels), the performer Zohra Aït-Fath’s personalized collection of Moroccan tales (2005, co-written by Yurek Onzia), and the newspaper columns by Bousakla and two other young women of Moroccan descent, Naima Albdiouni and Jamila Amadou. The latter two columnists are particularly relevant to this over-

19 In the French-speaking region of Belgium, the situation is possibly even grimmer, with virtually no francophone Belgian publishing houses surviving, so that authors of African descent are generally published by houses based in France, in particular L’Harmattan. 20 Jamila Amadou, “Een knuppel in het boekenhok: Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren,” De Standaard (13 October 2004). That Amadou’s remarks stirred little reaction only confirms the point she made in her column.

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view of Flemish-African literature, as they have also ventured into creative writing. In 2005 the Dutch–Flemish publishing house Meulenhoff/ Manteau included Albdiouni’s first short story “F.” in Gelezen en goedgekeurd [Read and Approved], a volume collecting, quite significantly, “new stories by Flemish writers” (back cover, my emphasis). Illegal African migration to Europe is the story’s theme, but Albdiouni neither explores her Moroccan protagonist’s difficult integration into Spain nor intimates that his relocation to Europe is economically or politically motivated. Instead, she relates how Faris leaves Tanger to escape the strains of an unhappy, stifling marriage to a woman who “more frequently veiled herself in silence than was customary in that land.”21 Dizzy with joy at his arrival in Spain, he welcomes his paperless status as a chance at a new life. Albdiouni’s “F.” was not the first short story written in Dutch by a Flemish-African author to appear in print. 2004 saw the publication of “De smaak van sneeuw” [The Taste of Snow] by the Nigerian-born Chika Unigwe.22 She wrote the story for a creative-writing contest for young authors sponsored by the Flemish unemployment office (Vlaamse Dienst voor Arbeidsbemiddeling en Beroepsopleiding) in the context of a scheme that each year seeks to promote another profession to youngsters. Of the 450 submissions received, Unigwe’s short story was the only one by a non-native author to be retained in the volume published by Manteau and suitably entitled De Eerste keer [The First Time]. Unigwe’s story, too, focuses on the motives for African migration, but is more conventional in its approach to the theme. It invokes women’s inferior gender predicament as the motive for the migration of a young Nigerian girl and her mother to London, and concludes with the girl’s bitter disappointment at the utter tastelessness of snow upon their arrival at Heathrow, an ending that implicitly connects the newly-landed pair to the disenchanted masses of migrants already settled in England. Praised for her sharply observant eye and powerful depiction of her characters’ emotions, Unigwe may have been unknown to the Flemish reading public, though she was not quite a beginning author. By the time her first story in Dutch appeared, she had already published several short stories, poems, and easy readers in English, both in print and online, and to great success. In 2003, one of her stories won a B B C Short Story Award and was radio-broadcast in Britain; the following year another story was shortlisted for the prestigious Caine Prize, also known as the African Booker Prize. In September 2005, 21 These marital strains are also felt by Faris’s wife Zainab, as becomes clear when the story briefly adopts her perspective. 22 A more recent short story by this author, “Cotton Candy,” is included in the present volume.

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Unigwe presented to the Flemish press her first novel, De Feniks [The Phoenix], allowing Manteau to take pride in achieving another ‘first’ in Flemish letters: the publication of the first book-length work of fiction by an African author in Flanders. In the novel, Unigwe tells the story of Oge, a young Nigerian woman in Flanders – certain parallels with the author are hard to miss – who tries to negotiate between her daily life in a provincial Flemish town and her youthful memories of Nigeria, between the ways of her Flemish husband and the traditions of her African relatives, between her will to live and the omnipresence of death. Oge’s slow coming to terms with her migrant experiences as well as her young son’s fatal accident and her own breast cancer are mirrored in the novel’s structure: the reader has to navigate through the novel’s many flashbacks in order to piece together the tragic events that continue to shape Oge’s life and which the young Nigerian shares with the reader in a rather unusual but gripping second-person narrative voice. If in other times and other respects women of colour have been doubly marginalized, Albdiouni and Unigwe appear to be profiting twofold from a current interest in migrant and female literary voices in the Flemish publishing world. They and their fellow young Flemish writers of African descent are undoubtedly benefitting from, and contributing to, the positive take on multiculturalism promoted by cultural events such as Africalia, Cinéafrique, and organizations such as Afrikaans Platform, Passa Porta, and Kif Kif. The latter, for instance, not only hosts columns, poetry, and short fiction on its website but also organizes a yearly creative writing contest that especially, though not exclusively, targets upcoming authors of foreign descent. Incidentally, the first prize in Kif Kif’s Kleur de kunst [Colour the Arts] contest has so far gone to young women of Moroccan descent: in 2005 to Saddie Choua’s multilingual short story “Le Roi du Chips au paprika” and last year to Rachida Lamrabet’s “Mercedes 207,” about two men driving back from Morocco to Flanders. They follow in the footsteps of the Antwerp social worker Rachida Ahali, also of Moroccan descent, who had to go to the Netherlands to win the second (2001) and first prize (2004) in the El Hizjra contest for young writers of Moroccan or Arab descent. The prize-winning stories by Choua and Lamrabet are included in Kif Kif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Vlaanderen (2006), Meulenhoff/ Manteau’s latest volume of new literary voices from Flanders. To this volume have also contributed other young Flemings of Moroccan descent: the above-mentioned Jamila Amadou, who has been reciting her poetry at recent literary festivals and cultural events, the male actor and performer Jamal Boukhriss, who has been touring Flanders with his autobiographically inspired one-man show, Malika Chaara, who as a teenager won prizes with her juvenile fiction and whose first novel Gezegend boven alle vrouwen has just appeared, and, last not least, the

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actor and poet Ali Wauters. Unigwe is working on a second novel and was nominated for the Flemish Literatuurprijs Gerard Walschap 2006, while Albdiouni’s story “IJsjes met Pasen” [Ice-Cream at Easter] was one of the dozen Flemish and Dutch literary ‘radio books’ broadcast in 2006 by Klara, one of Flanders’ public radio stations, in an acclaimed series jointly sponsored by the governments of Flanders and The Netherlands.23 The “Flemish Hafid Bouazza” may not yet have emerged, as one of De Feniks’s reviewers writes,24 but all this literary activity does confirm that authors of African descent are indeed breaking through in Flemish letters. Nevertheless, the rosy picture I have sketched above needs some qualifying. Although at its publication De Feniks was embraced, in quality newspapers and popular magazines alike, as a hopeful trendsetter for other ‘new Flemings’, Unigwe’s accomplishment in the field of Flemish / Dutch literature is to some extent complicated by the fact that her novel – unlike her short story “De smaak van sneeuw” – was originally written in English. Consequently, while an English edition of the novel has not yet been planned, De Feniks may well suffer the same fate as that of its famous predecessor, Abessijnse kronieken / Abyssinian Chronicles (1998/2000).25 Isegawa’s much-discussed literary debut, which also first appeared in Dutch translation, then was left off shortlists for Dutch literary prizes, although it was argued in the author’s favour that he did also write in Dutch and had been involved in the translation of the English manuscript of his novel. Still, writing in Dutch is no automatic guarantee of recognition, even when a Flemish-African writer appears to meet the criteria. For instance, in its March 2006 issue the Flemish literary magazine Deus ex Machina decided to heed “intercontinental calls” with a special issue on “African writers on European soil” (as the issue’s title and subtitle proclaim), but it failed to introduce any author writing in Dutch, let alone one based in Flanders.26 Similarly, Said el Haji and Annelies Verbeke a few months later proudly presented no fewer than twenty-five promising young (under thirty-five) writers from Flanders and The Netherlands in 25 onder de 35: 25 verhalen van 23

Although the radio books were only broadcast once, they are now available as podcasts and on C D (http://www.deburen.eu). 24 Pieter Verstraeten, “Een Berg van leed: De Feniks van Chika Unigwe” De Morgen (1 October 2005). 25 This novel is also dealt with in my article “Culture in Transit” in the present volume. 26 The authors are based either in France or in Britain, with Abdourahman A. Waberi professing the closest link with Belgium, though not with Flanders or Dutch letters. His first novel, Le pays sans ombre [The Land Without Shadow] (1994), won the Grand Prix de la nouvelle francophone, awarded by Belgium’s Royal Academy of French Language and Literature (Académie Royale de Langue et Littérature Française) to new francophone writers.

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jonge, veelbelovende Nederlandse en Vlaamse schrijvers, but of the various ‘allochthonous writers’ included not a single one is from Flanders. Bouazza’s remark cited earlier, moreover, also indicates that there are drawbacks to being singled out as a writer of foreign descent rather than as a writer full stop. Albdiouni, in her above-mentioned column, for instance, did not hesitate to blame the dearth of ‘migrant writers’ in Flanders on the fact that (potential) authors detest being made into spokespersons for their respective communities. Such spokespersons, after all, are not free to write what they like, but have to contend with the demands of the Flemish reading public. As the Flemish literary journalist Mark Cloostermans remarks in a recent opinion piece, “We like to read allochthonous writers but only if they meet our criteria and, like Bouazza, make bold statements we secretly enjoy.”27 This mentality can also be observed in the many reviews of Unigwe’s De Feniks. As a Western reader of the novel, one finds oneself presented as “the Other”; and the picture is hardly a flattering one: the Flemish appear in De Feniks as extremely reserved, cold, and sombre. Visits have to be announced weeks in advance. The food is tasteless. The church services are boring. Whether in quality newspapers or in popular women’s magazines, the reviewers of Unigwe’s novel all agreed that the novel was riddled with clichés and were disappointed that Unigwe did not adopt a more surprising perspective.28 “To draw our attention to this kind of banalities,” the same Cloostermans objected in his review of De Feniks in September 2005, “we really did not need a Nigerian writer.” The Nigerian Oge, after all, did not have “a particularly interesting view on our country.”29 Whether or not Cloostermans intended his later remarks in De Standaard as a confession, with his review he clearly proves that we are only ready to really listen to authors of foreign descent if they meet our expectations. Hopefully our Flemish-African writers, and those to be, will not be deterred by the presumptuousness of some of their readers and increasingly produce great literature, whatever its subject or perspective may be. 

27

Mark Cloostermans, “Een stem te weinig,” De Standaard (25–26 April 2006). A notable exception is Daria Tunca, who praises the novel’s “deep sensitivity” and attributes the poor reception it has received to the fact that it “has touched a raw nerve in Belgian society”; see her review “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie en Chika Unigwe: Stemmen die aandacht verdienen,” tr. Lode Demetter, Rekto:verso: Tweemaandelijks tijdschrift voor kunstkritiek 16 (March–April 2006): 18–19 (English quotations from Tunca’s original article). 29 Mark Cloostermans, “As en confetti: Grote emoties bij Chika Unigwe,” De Standaard (22 September 2005). 28

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WORKS CITED “Achterstand allochtone leerlingen nergens zo groot als in Vlaanderen,” De Standaard (16 May 2006). Aït-Fath, Zohrah, & Yurek Onzia. Zohra en de gezellen: Volksprookjes en verhalen uit Marokko (Leuven: Van Halewijck, 2005). Amadou, Jamila. “De Ijzeren vogel,” in Kif Kif (2006), 27–44. ——. “Een Knuppel in het boekenhok: Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren,” De Standaard (13 October 2004). Anbeek van der Meijden, A.G.H. “Het Vlaamse verschil,” Dietsche Warande & Belfort 141 (1996): 199–210. Boujdaine, Saida, & Tom Naegels. Het Boek van Saida (Antwerp: Meulenhoff/Manteau). Bouazza, Hafid. “Ik zie voornamelijk domheid en fanatisme om me heen: Interview met Piet Piryns,” Knack (29 October 2003). Boukhriss, Jamal. “Alleen tegen de wereld/Seul contre nous,” in Kif Kif (2006), 45–65. Boumaâza, Bachir. Mijn Egotrip (Antwerp: Manteau, 2002). Bousakla, Mimount. Couscous met frieten: Marokkaanse vooroordelen over Belgen [Couscous and Fries. Moroccan Prejudices about Belgians] (Antwerp: Houtekiet, 2002). Brems, Hugo. Altijd weer die vogels die nesten beginnen: Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse literatuur 1945–2005 (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2006). Chaara, Malika. Gezegend boven alle vrouwen (Antwerp: Standaard, 2007). ——. “Mr. Van Selst,” in Kif Kif (2006), 67–85. Choua, Sadie. “Les Chips au Paprika,” in Kif Kif (2006), 87–119. Cloostermans, Mark.“As en confetti: Grote emoties bij Chika Unigwe,” De Standaard (22 September 2005). ——. “De grote verdwijntruc: Over allochtone schrijvers,” De Tak waarop wij zitten: Berichten uit de boekenbranche (Antwerp: Epo / U N E S C O , 2006): 71–89. ——. “Een stem te weinig,” De Standaard (25–26 April 2006). “De immigratie in België: Aantallen, stromen en arbeidsmarkt (2006),” Publicaties (Rapporten, studies en statistieken), De Federale Overheidsdienst Werkgelegenheid, Arbeid en Sociaal Overleg, Belgium, http://meta.fgov.be/pa/paa/framesetnle00.htm [accessed 11 January 2006]. el Haji, Said, & Annelies Verbeke. 25 onder de 35: 25 verhalen van jonge, veelbelovende Nederlandse en Vlaamse schrijvers (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2006). “Foreign population growing more slowly,” Statistics Netherlands (Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek): http://www.cbs.nl/en-GB/menu/themas/dossiers/allochtonen/publicaties/artikelen /archief/2004/default.htm [accessed 11 January 2006]. Fraihi, Tarik. De Smaak van ongelijkheid (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2004). Ghesquiere, Rita, & Griet Ramaut. Hoe anders lezen migranten? Een onderzoek naar het leesgedrag van Turkse, Marokkaanse en Italiaanse migrantenkinderen in Vlaanderen (Antwerp: Plantyn, 1994). Gravet, Catherine, & Pierre Halen. “Sensibilités post-coloniales,” in Littératures belges de langue Française (1830–2000): Histoire et perspectives, ed. Christian Berg & Pierre Halen (Brussels: Le Cri, 2000). Greenhall, Ken. Lenoir (Cambridge MA: Zoland, 1998). Jacobs, Herman. “Bergen van leed,” Knack (14 September 2005). Kif Kif: Nieuwe stemmen uit Vlaanderen (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Antwerp: Manteau, 2006).

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Kuitert, Lisa. Vleugelspelers; Uitgevers tussen twee culturen (Utrecht: Forum, 2001). Lamrabet, Rachida. “Mercedes 207 (Mitien oe sebh’a),” in Kif Kif (2006), 127–51. N E D W E B , Institut für Germanistik of the University of Vienna (11 January 2007): http://www.ned.univie.ac.at/lic/periode.asp?per_id=8 “Nigeria in Turnhout: De Fenik’s van Chika Unigwe,” Che (November 2005). Tunca, Daria. “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie en Chika Unigwe: Stemmen die aandacht verdienen,” tr. Lode Demetter, Rekto: verso: Tweemaandelijks Tijdschrift voor Kunstkritiek 16 (March–April 2006): 18–19. Unigwe, Chika. De Feniks, tr. Hans van Riemsdijk (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Antwerp: Manteau, 2005). ——. “De smaak van sneeuw,” in De Eerste keer: Tien jonge talenten aan de start van hun schrijversloopbaan (Antwerp: Manteau / Standaard Uitgeverij, 2004): 82–97. Vandeputte, Omer. Dutch: The Language of Twenty Million Dutch and Flemish People (Rekkem: Ons Erfdeel, 1992). Verstraeten, Pieter. “Een Berg van leed: De Feniks van Chika Unigwe,” De Morgen (1 October 2005).

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E ILA R ANTONEN ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

African Voices in Finland and Sweden ABSTRACT: Nordic writers of African descent have recently gained mainstream recognition in their new home countries. This survey shows how they deal with cultural differences, migration, and African identities. Fine examples of such new voices are the Kenyan-born Joseph Owindi and Wilson Kirwa, both of whom vividly recount their experiences in Finland. Also introduced are second-generation immigrant writers such as Jonas Hassen Khemiri and Ranya Paasonen (ElRamly), who have gained attention for their depiction of the ‘New Finn’ or ‘New Swede’ – citizens born in the Nordic countries with one or both parents of African origin. New tendencies in poetry and children’s literature are also discussed. It is argued that African literature in Finland and Sweden opens up a fascinating area of cross-cultural dialogue, challenging Western literary forms by merging African and Nordic poetic and cultural traditions. Something will happen. Something has happened. Senegalese have come to Sweden and planted a tree, a Baobab tree. — Swedish-Senegalese society

O

V E R T H E P A S T T W E N T Y Y E A R S , the Nordic capitals have become increasingly multicultural. Sweden, for example, has been a popular destination for immigrants and refugees from around the world. After World War II, Swedish industry grew rapidly and required an expansion of its labour force. From the 1970s onwards, an increasing number of refugees from Africa, Asia, and Latin America ended up in Sweden. The

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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contribution of these migrants to Swedish society has recently reached new political heights, culminating in last year’s appointment of the Burundian-born Nyamko Sabuni (b. 1969) to the office of Minister for Integration and Gender Equality. Sabuni is the first person of African descent to enjoy ministerial status in a Swedish government.1 Most migratory streams to Europe can be traced to former colonial countries. However, compared to the major imperial powers, such as Britain and France, the involvement of the Nordic countries in colonial enterprise outside Europe was limited. Yet both Denmark and Sweden entertained colonial interests in the West Indies and were involved in the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 Finland, on the other hand, was never a colonial power, and its closest connections with Africa have been through Finnish missions in Namibia and development projects in Tanzania. Today most immigrant literature in the Nordic countries is produced in Sweden, and these publications reflect the increased immigration to that country since World War II.3 As a result, Sweden has books published in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya, Swahili, Somali, Mandingo, and the Akan languages. However, this overview will concentrate on immigrant works published in Finnish and Swedish. At present, the Somalis who escaped the civil war in the 1990s constitute the largest African diaspora in the Nordic countries, but not enough time has lapsed for a specific generation of Somali writers to have emerged. Nevertheless, despite the fact that stories depicting the African immigrant and refugee experience are rather rare in Nordic fiction, some writers of African descent have recently gained mainstream recognition. I will explore how these writers deal with cultural differences and migration and will delineate the African themes embedded in their texts. In addition, these writers of African descent in Finland and Sweden will be examined in the light of the literary genres they have chosen to work in. 

1

Her Zairean parents were granted political asylum in Sweden in 1981. For example, navigation of the Congo River was dominated by Scandinavians at the end of the nineteenth century. Their involvement also helped Belgians to strengthen their colonial rule in the Congo. Raoul J. Granqvist, “‘Virvlande svarta lemmar’ och ‘goda svenskar’ i Kongo i hundra år. – Om svensk rasism i vardande,” in Sverige och de Andra. Postcoloniala perspektiv, ed. Michael McEachrane & Louis Faye (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2001): 111. 3 Satu Gröndahl, “Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i Sverige: Från förutsättningar till framtidsutsikter,” in Litteraturens gränsland: Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv, ed. Satu Gröndahl (Uppsala University, 2002): 63. 2

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Poets of African Descent One especially popular and productive genre in Finnish and Swedish migrant writing is poetry.4 In Finland, writers of African descent have not yet published poetry collections, although their poetry has appeared in anthologies alongside the work of other authors. Nevertheless, some poets of African descent in Sweden have been critically acclaimed. For instance, Johannes Anyuru (b. 1979) of Gothenburg, who belongs to the second generation of Africans in Sweden (his father is Ugandan), has been praised for his distinctly personal poetic voice. Anyuru writes within the Black Atlantic tradition5 (his models include Derek Walcott and African-American writers) and has also been influenced by the Beat generation. In his debut collection, Det är bara gudarna som är nya [Only the Gods are New] (2003),6 Anyuru rewrites Western myths in a postcolonial vein. Using Homer’s Iliad as a poetic frame, he measures the realities of immigrants in contemporary Sweden against the Trojan Wars. His modern Troy is an urban environment where immigrants and refugees are under siege: figures such as Black Achilles and the pizza baker Ulysses are confronted with the challenges of a suburban world, with its police cars, asphalt jungles, and yearning and struggling souls. The poems embody ‘ghetto’ writing: the Greek epic form is interwoven with allusions to the American hip-hop band Mobb Deep’s songs about the hardships of urban life. Some black American vernacular forms are also transformed into Swedish. The main figure, Black Achilles, with his many disguises, is described as “an Angel from Buenos Aires” and “the most Dangerous Nigger on Earth.”7 In his poetry and interviews alike, Anyuru emphasizes a strong sense of ‘weness’. In Det är bara gudarna som är nya, he conveys this through the bonds of the migrant community. The mothers and grandmothers from Somalia and Uganda reinforce continuity and security in the homeless and destructive environment that threatens the urban wanderers: “I try to locate a star / that I when twelve / gave to my dead grandmother / in Uganda.”8 The poem Svart neon [Black Neon] portrays the migrants who have been left out of the “big integral of daylight” of Swedish society. Their foreign surnames are “pasted on 4 Satu Gröndahl, “Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i Sverige: Från förutsättningar till framtidsutsikter,” 64. 5 Paul Gilroy’s term in his book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993). It signifies the transnational connections between black people in Africa, the Caribbean, America, and Britain. 6 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own. 7 Johannes Anyuru, Det är bara gudarna som är nya (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2003): 9. 8 Anyuru, Det är bara gudarna som är nya, 57.

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their doors as a diagnosis of incurable illnesses.” Here the swords of the urban environment have been transformed into words. These words are described as “the helmets that are halved into a bronze bowl and filled with the tears of our fathers.”9 These fathers, who tell about wars in Africa, are foregrounded in the book. They also resemble impressive urban warriors in Sweden, whereas sons are depicted as “black-haired thunders” disappearing from their fathers to the new continents. The contemporary and ancient killing fields are compared, as the title Det är bara gudarna som är nya [Only the Gods are New] indicates. Poetry becomes an act of scanning and sampling languages and literatures as well as a zone of resistance.10 Anyuru’s collection is filled with figures of blackness, heroes and saints who tell “the black story of the Creation.” It also articulates visions of the future and ends up depicting homecoming and signs of reconciliation. Another poet, the Nigerian Cletus Nelson Nwadike (b. 1966), who fled to Sweden in the 1980s, also handles Swedish skillfully, although it is not his mother tongue (he speaks Igbo, Hausa, and English). His three collections include short, aphoristic poems that are derived from oral storytelling. African wars especially constitute a recurrent theme in his poetry, and his third volume, En sida av regnet som faller (2003) [One Side of the Rain That Falls], pays homage to those who have been sacrificed in wars. It highlights the tragic consequences of the Biafran war and addresses the violence of contemporary African wars: “The white man says that Africa is poor / and I laugh at him”; “I know that Africa is not poor but / dangerous to itself.” The yearning for home is alleviated by intercontinental dialogue. To Nwadike, Africa resembles a mother, whom the son calls: “I call to Africa and say that I’m still alive.”11 In Nwadike’s first book, En kort svart dikt (1998) [A Short Black Poem], too, the dead crave to be remembered: “The dead came to me / and begged / that I read their poems / and translate them.” Poetry and friendship are described as giving meaning to life, and figures of blackness seem to represent the speaker’s bond with Africans: “When I die / I want to be buried / in two graves. / In the hearts of my friends / and in a short black / poem.”12 An emphasis on blackness is also emblematic for the Angolan-born Kiluanji Kush, who aims to evoke a black literary style called “Etu” in his poetry collection Sun Woman (1991). The word ‘etu’ comes from the Angolan Kimbundu

9

Anyuru, Det är bara gudarna som är nya, 35. Johan Lundberg, “Lyrisk sampling i förortens Troja,” Svenska Dagbladet (3 April 2003). 11 Cletus Nelson Nwadike, En sida av regnet faller (Torsby: Heidrun, 2003): 66. 12 Translated into English by Cletus Nelson Nwadike. 10

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language and signifies ‘us’ or ‘we ourselves’.13 Kush’s views are also reminiscent of the Négritude movement, promoting as he does the idea that black art should infuse a strong sense of black consciousness and transcend racist misconceptions. Since Somalis constitute the largest and the most prominent group of Africans in the Nordic countries, it is not surprising to find that Anyuru’s poems include observations of Somalis in Gothenburg: “The Somalis in my work tell about people who have died for love: it burns them inside, they lie under the tree on the savannah and are shaking with fever.”14 In Finland and Sweden, Somali writing, however, flourishes mainly in the Somali language.15 The Somali poetic tradition is performed primarily in oral forms – the orthography of the Somali language is, in fact, still being developed – so that Somalis abroad are helping to shape Somali oral poetry into written form. An important example of this work is the anthology Sagaal Dayrood – Nio höstregn – Yhdeksän syyssadetta [Nine Autumn Rains] (2000), which includes poems collected and written by sixteen Somali women now living in Finland. It contains religious lamentations, work songs, trance poems, and wedding eulogies. Significantly, its trilingual title16 indicates that it is directed at Somali, Swedish, and Finnish readers. Traditional Somali poems often react to a certain event and include political messages. Accordingly, Somali women poets in Finland strongly denounce the war in Somalia. That war is condemned as “men’s war”, as in Sahra Xuseen Faahiye’s poem “Dhambaal Hooyo” [Mother’s Prayer]: “Before the poems were by the male poets / Those who could find the right words no longer utter the slightest sound / Since the reign of terror took the inspiration with it […] Women’s rebellion will be my salvation / If mothers could speak up for me, I will be at peace again.”17 Similarly, Ardo Xaashi Samatar’s poem “Qabqablayaasha Dagaalka” [Masters of War] blames the warmongers: “Cursed be you who destroyed the peace. […] You who believed that the tribes are more im-

13

Kiluanji Kush, Sun Woman: Praise-poems of Love, Written in Etu (Stockholm: Författares Bokmaskin, 1991): 13. The book has been published only in English. 14 Anyuru, Det är bara gudarna som är nya, 26. 15 For instance, Mohamed Hassan has edited Somali poetry collections. Shaafici Xassan and Ahmad Arten Hanghe have edited Somali folktales. A considerable amount of Somali literature is published by the Swedish publisher Scansom. 16 Sagaal Dayrood [Somali]. Nio höstregn [Swedish]. Yhdeksän syyssadetta [Finnish] 17 Sagaal Dayrood – Nio höstregn – Yhdeksän syyssadetta, ed. Marja Tiilikainen, Axmed Tiilikainen, Amran Maxamed Axmed & Muddle Suzanne Lilius (Helsinki: Helsinki U P , 2000): 233.

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portant than the nation […] You who chased me away as a refugee and skinned me naked […] You who dig separate graves for a wife and a husband.”18 The women give expression to their mixed feelings about migration, as Ardo Xaashi Samatar does in her poem “Dhaqan iyo Dhulkeenna” [Tradition and Our Country]: “If they really would make a peace respecting the laws / I would not preserve my liver in this biting coldness / My name would not be ‘refugee’ for ever. […] / You Finland […] / If you are not rich but really poor / If you moan every day / Why were we invited here and received?”19 However, the anthology also includes prayers and blessings for the new country, as in Hibo Garaad Ibraahin’s “Duco” [Blessing]: “O God, why you do not stop the cry of Finland? / They love snow, let it be good for them / Give them the Economy that they so eagerly talk about / O God, Russia, cut their arm, help them / There are a lot of Muslims, God give them strength!”20 Moreover, the traditional dance songs in Sagaal Dayrood – Nio höstregn – Yhdeksän syyssadetta are given novel contemporary dimensions. Reflecting the musical quality of Somali poetry, which is often based on songs and the rhythms of speech, the translators have tried to appropriate Somali rhythmic and alliterative models.

Writing for Children Another popular genre among migrant writers is children’s literature, which serves as a bridge between generations and offers a shared history to peoples living scattered throughout the world. For instance, Ahmed M. Mahdi of Finland and Hassan Roble of Sweden have published Somali folktales. Another writer, Gambian-born Kebba Sonko (b. 1953), has published books of fairytale in Sweden. In Finland, Kenyan-born Wilson Kirwa (b. 1974) has published Amani-aasi ja sisäinen kauneus [Amani Donkey and Internal Beauty] (2005) in Finnish. Moreover, children’s books in such African languages as Tigrinya and Amharic have been published in Sweden.21 Nordic readers especially enjoy the ethical dimensions embedded in these African fables.

18

Sagaal Dayrood, ed. Tiilikainen et al., 241. Sagaal Dayrood, ed. Tiilikainen et al., 233. 20 Sagaal Dayrood, ed. Tiilikainen et al., 217. 21 For instance, Tegle Embaye’s Kab sab aykafenya/be Taxla Embaya; seéli: be Suléman baxit (Uppala: T. Embaye, 1998), and Tseggay Minya’s Adey itayn Aahchiwan: Wekharyanchira-an (Sundbyberg: Admas, 2001). 19

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Novels: In Search of African Fathers Some writers of African descent have gained attention for their depiction of the ‘New Finn’, or ‘New Swede’ born in the Nordic countries with one or two immigrant parents. Second-generation writing articulates the ways in which ‘Africanness’ is reinvented and reinterpreted by each generation. The Swede Jonas Hassen Khemiri (b. 1978), whose father is Tunisian and mother Swedish, made his debut with the novel Ett öga rött [One Eye Red] (2003). It tells the story of Halim, who lives in Stockholm with his Moroccan parents. The novel employs a diary form through which the reader can closely empathize with Halim’s slightly naive, boastfully fanatical teenage perspective. The representation of youth talk in the novel was first labelled by critics as “broken Swedish,” as typically used in such migrant-dominated suburbs as Stockholm’s Rinkeby. Instead of “twisted Swedish,” Khemiri calls the language employed in Ett öga rött “creole language,” since writing with an accent, in hybridized Swedish, is his deliberate literary strategy. This conveys the state of living between cultures and different languages. Khemiri’s novel shows how traditional values are strengthened under threat. At school, Halim becomes a rebel when he finds out that the Arabic lessons are going to be cut. To face his bullies at school, he draws strength from his heroes, such as a wise Arab Sultan, and Hannibal, who defeated the Romans. In affirmation of his Moroccan heritage, he starts to display symbols of Arab culture, which Swedish society perceives as the rebellious gestures of an outsider. Eventually, Halim, against his father’s will, is drawn to Islamic fundamentalism. Although autobiographical writing is a popular genre among migrants, their writing may be too readily be thought of as autobiographical. Ett öga rött was thus misread by critics as an autobiographical account of Khemiri’s own experiences, although it tells the story of a Moroccan family in Stockholm, whereas Khemiri’s father hails from Tunisia. Khemiri’s second novel, Montecore: En unik tiger [Montecore: A Unique Tiger] (2006), nevertheless has some autobiographical references, and its protagonist even bears the same name as the author. Blending fiction and autobiography in a postmodern way, the novel recounts Jonas’s attempt to reconstruct the life story of his Tunisian father Abbas. While Montecore is a moving depiction of the relationship between son and father, it is also an incisive study of Swedish society in the 1980s and 1990s. Khemiri’s portrayal of contemporary Swedish society with its migrant Africans provides irony that characterizes the rewriting of nation and ethnicity. The book also refers to the murder of the Prime Minister Olof Palme and the growth of neo-Nazi movements in the 1990s. Striving for acceptance, Abbas starts to

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mimic the Swedes. He ends up taking a Swedish-sounding stage name, “Krister Holmström Abbas Khemiri,” in order to gain success as an art photographer; instead, he winds up making portraits of people’s pets. The novel gives a keeneyed depiction of generational conflicts: Jonas is critical of his father’s efforts to assimilate and integrate into Swedish society. He even begins to deliberately speak Swedish with an Arabic accent, and starts a political movement promoting the rights of migrants. By contrast, Abbas’s artistic dreams collapse when his shop is burned down by neo-Nazis. These tragic events prompt Abbas to leave his family and return to Tunisia. What is fascinating about Montecore is that it is partly written in epistolary form, including letters which Jonas writes from Sweden to his father’s friend Kadir in Tunisia. This intriguing literary device, which involves a bifocality of perspectives, as both the sender’s and the receiver’s views are incorporated and Kadir’s African views are introduced, gives the novel a multicultural focus. The letters in Montecore also present an intercultural dialogue that tries to transcend cultural boundaries, so that the embedded dialogic letter formula subverts the more limited perspective of first-person narration. Whereas a postcolonial reading of Montecore would focus on the meaning of the culture-specific resonances and the criticism of racism in the novel, a postmodern reading would emphasize its textual playfulness and generic infusions. Indeed, the novel employs metafictional elements, since the narrator, Jonas, constantly reminds the reader that the book is a fictional construct. In addition, it juxtaposes multiple realities, with the narrator suggesting to the reader two alternative endings for the story. The first version encompasses the happy ending of a love story. In this positive version, Jonas’s father returns from Tunisia and the family live together happily ever after. This imaginary ending serves as the son’s romantic dream. However, in the novel’s diegetic reality, emphasis is more on the pessimistic and ‘realistic’ version in which the parents are divorced and the father cuts off contact with his family. Montecore thus blends, in postmodernist fashion, seemingly autobiographical elements with fabulation. Similarly, Ranya Paasonen’s (b. 1974) first novel Auringon asema [The Position of the Sun] (2003), published under her former name Ranya ElRamly, conveys autobiographical reminiscences that have been moulded into fictional form. Born of an Egyptian father and a Finnish mother, Paasonen has lived in India, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Egypt, and Finland. Like Montecore, the novel explores the cultural differences in a bicultural family. Here the young female protagonist recalls her parents’ love story. Paasonen’s narrative style gained attention because of its originality in Finnish literature. The novel is written in the decorative language of prose poetry,

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with thought-patterns, rhythms, and structures that critics attribute to Arabic poetic language. Although Paasonen has claimed that she does not write consciously in an Arabic style, her sensual poetic style is rare in Finnish prose. Not only does she repeat nouns and entire sentences in rhythmical patterns, she also interweaves shifting Finnish, Egyptian, and Libyan contexts, whereby the novel’s metaphoric language is marked by elements signifying cultural differences – heat and coldness, day and night, sunshine and moonlight. Moonlight is also associated with imminent night-time bombing raids in the Middle East, and the text also shows, from different angles, how Northern daylight differs from Southern daylight. The novel incorporates a multicultural conception of time as running in circles,22 and this cyclical narration of time reinforces its poetic texture. Paasonen depicts the everyday dilemmas of all those who must survive inbetween different cultures and languages. The cultural perplexity is shown through everyday habits such as food culture, as in the scene in which the narrator discusses her parents’ different ways of peeling an orange. Whereas her Egyptian father peels the orange elegantly, making a spiral of the peel that the daughter slips on her wrist like a bracelet, her mother peels it in an efficient Finnish way by cutting the skin into four slices. The protagonist, however, asserts that she has to make a choice: one cannot peel the orange both ways at the same time.23 The daughter’s bicultural background may present her with more choices than people generally have; these choices, Paasonen shows, present a dilemma. The above-mentioned Anyuru, Khemiri, and Paasonen are among those ‘hyphenated’ or multicultural writers whose ethnic and national identities are “somewhere in between” European and African identities. Their writing reflects the double consciousness that has been described as typical of migrant identity. Many second-generation writers have rewritten their parents’ life stories, as have Khemiri and Paasonen. On the other hand, like many writers belonging to the second generation of immigrants, both Khemiri and Paasonen dislike the label ‘migrant writer’. By contrast, Khemiri calls himself a writer who is conscious of migration, racism, and power-structures in a multicultural society. 

22

Tapani Ritamäki, “The Orientalization of Ranya ElRamly: A Solstice in Finnish Prose,” Nordic Literature 3 (2003): online. 23 Ranya ElRamly, Auringon asema (Helsinki: Otava, 2002): 13.

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Memoirs and Autobiographical Essays The emotional component of identity has its roots in ethnicity and nationality and is often explored in the genre of autobiography. Cultural autobiographies often serve as filters for the different kinds of bonds between ethnic and national communities which are all part of the migrant experience. For those African writers living in multicultural environments, a European often collaborates with them to help create their novels and autobiographies. A prominent example of such a collaborative effort is the Kenyan-born Joseph Owindi (b. 1943), whose memoir, provocatively entitled Kato, kato nekru [Look, Look, a Nigger!] (1972), was edited and translated from English into Finnish by his friend Risto Karlsson. On his cold safari into Finnish culture, Owindi recounts his experiences as a sociology student in Finland in the 1960s. At that time, Finland had very few foreigners. The book is a humorous, ironic, personal account of an African man who is the target of racism. In the Fanonian sense, Owindi is aware that, as a black man, he is a construction in the Western racist imagination. One of the first migrant autobiographies to be published in Finland, Kato, kato nekru offers a bold description of the racism and ignorance of African culture in Finland. Following the book’s publication, the Finnish media extensively debated these issues, stimulated by Owindi’s powerful and acutely critical observations. Another Kenyan mentioned earlier is Wilson Kirwa, who dictated his life story Juoksijasoturin ihmeellinen maailma [The Runner-Warrior’s Fabulous Life] (2006) to Heikki Saure. Saure notes that by listening to Kirwa, he learned the importance of oral tradition as a way of observing life.24 Born of a Nandi father and a Maasai mother, Kirwa has lived in both communities. His book opens with descriptions of his poor but colourful childhood, and also includes details from the history of the Nandi tribe, such as the challenge that the freedom fighter Koitalel Arap Somoei presented to the British colonial power. Kirwa goes on to relate how he came to Finland as a tourist in 1997 and ended up as an athlete representing Finland in the World Athletics Championships. Kirwa’s exhilarating book is permeated with humoristic insights into Finnish and Kenyan society. The memoir records his days as a penniless athletic trainee who could not speak Finnish. Although self-irony is prevalent in the text, by the end postcolonial resistance also reveals itself. When describing the humiliating treatment he received from Italian customs officials, Kirwa asserts that “the Europeans used to rob the riches of Africa, take Africans as slaves, seize their best lands, kill and murder masses of Africans. But when Africans today 24

Heikki Saure, Wilson Kirwa: Juoksijasoturin ihmeellinen elämä (Helsinki: Otava,

2006): 9.

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step onto European ground, they are immediately suspected as criminals and held under surveillance.”25 Here Kirwa’s account brings to mind the Malian Manthia Diawara’s account, in his memoir We Won’t Budge (2003), of racist incidents in Paris.26 Kirwa’s postcolonial defiance is also apparent in the anecdote of the quarrelsome brother, who was expelled to cold and dark Europe. There his skin was worn and became white. One day the bad-tempered brother heard about Paradise, and finally he returned to Africa with the Bible and the Rifle.27 Since Kirwa uses this rhetorically accusatory mode only sparingly, he is all the more forceful when he does. The Kenyan-born Solomon Mwambua (b. 1952), who moved to Sweden in 1980, has also written about his childhood in his autobiographical novel Gingo: En afrikansk pojkes uppväxt [Gingo: Growing up as an African Boy] (1998). This work highlights the importance of the fairytales and myths that the protagonist learned from his grandmother in his childhood. The Moroccan-born M’hammed Sabour’s autobiography Suomalainen unelma [A Finnish Dream] (1999) also contains acute observations of the Finnish and Western way of life. It is based on his diary and offers his views on the political changes in Finland from the 1970s to the 1990s. Louis Faye, who has been living in Sweden since the 1980s, combines autobiography and postcolonial criticism in his essay Piknicken under baobabträdet [Picnic under the Baobab Tree] (2001). Like much postcolonial writing, it displays a generic hybridity (autobiography, documentary mode, and historical study) and offers counter-histories to Western historical narratives. Faye calls his writing a rhapsodic essay that combines fact and fiction and expresses his feelings about racism, love, and resistance from a diasporic position. His search for cultural identity starts with the symbol of Senegal, the baobab tree, which serves as inspiration for poets and is a metaphor for growth, the shaping of identity, and the reproduction of the riches of the past. The essay consists of retrospective passages concerning his Senegalese father and German mother and his growing up in an intercultural family in Africa and Europe. It dwells on the racist rhetoric of the German journals that interviewed and photographed the family in the 1960s and emphasized the skin colour of the Senegalese father and his children. When describing how he grew up as a ‘hybrid’ child, 25

Saure, Wilson Kirwa, 362. Diawara claims that the French merchants had taken more out of Africa than the African immigrants would ever have got out of France, and the French soldiers had destroyed African empires and would continue to fight any African government today to maintain and protect French political and economic interests in Africa, which would always be bigger than African interests in France; Diawara, We Won’t Budge (Oxfordshire: Ayebia, 2003): 33. 27 Saure, Wilson Kirwa, 364. 26

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Faye echoes Frantz Fanon’s autobiographically inspired theorizing on racism in his Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). He also refers to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Éthiopiques (1956), which blends the African and Biblical and Nordic myths in two symbolic figures, the Queen of Sheba and the Princess of Belborg, as well as to Mariama Bâ’s novel Chant écarlate (1981), which deals with intercultural marriage. Faye concludes by suggesting the Wolof word ‘diggante’ as a dynamic metaphor for the relation between different cultures; the word signifies distance, interval and connection, in-between place and intermediate time.28

Conclusion For years Nordic literary studies underrated multiethnic issues and writing. However, there is currently a surge of interest in migrant literatures in the Nordic countries. As Ingeborg Kongslien emphasizes, migration and exile also include feelings of freedom and creative challenge. While migrant writers look at society from an outsider’s perspective, they are at the same time also insiders; their texts are therefore examples of cultural interpretation.29 Indeed, migrant literature by authors of African descent in the Nordic countries opens up a fascinating area of cross-cultural dialogue as it challenges Western literary forms by merging African and Nordic poetic and cultural traditions.

WORKS CITED Anyuru, Johannes. Det är bara gudarna som är nya (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2003). Diawara, Manthia. We Won’t Budge (Oxfordshire: Ayebia, 2003). Embaye, Tegle. Kab sab aykafenya/be Taxla Embaya; seéli: be Suléman baxit (Uppala: T. Embaye, 1998). ElRamly, Ranya. Auringon asema (Helsinki: Otava, 2002). Faye, Louis. “Piknicken under baobabträdet,” in Sverige och de Andra: Postcoloniala perspektiv, ed. Michael McEachrane & Louis Faye (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2001): 19–48. Granqvist, Raoul J. “Virvlande svarta lemmar” och “goda svenskar” i Kongo i hundra år. – Om svensk rasism i vardande,” in Sverige och de Andra: Postcoloniala perspektiv, ed. Michael McEachrane & Louis Faye (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2001): 107–32. Gröndahl, Satu. “Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i Sverige: Från förutsättningar till framtidsutsikter,” in Litteraturens gränsland: Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur I nordiskt per28 Louis Faye, “Piknicken under baobabträdet,” in Sverige och de Andra: Postcoloniala perspektiv, ed. Michael McEachrane & Louis Faye (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2001): 44. 29 Ingeborg Kongslien, “Migrant or multicultural literature in the Nordic countries,” in Nordic Voices: Literature of the Nordic Countries (Oslo: Nordbok, 2005): 44.

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spektiv, ed. Satu Gröndahl (Uppsala Multiethnic Papers 45; Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2002): 35–70. Khemiri, Jonas Hassen. Ett Öga rött (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2003). ——. Montecore: En unik tiger (Stockholm: Månpocket, 2006). Kirwa, Wilson. Amani-aasi ja sisäinen kauneus: Afrikkalaisia satuja (Kärkölä: Pieni karhu, 2005). Kongslien, Ingeborg. “Migrant or multicultural literature in the Nordic countries,” in Nordic Voices: Literature of the Nordic Countries (Oslo: Nordbok, 2005): 34–45. Kush, Kiluanji. Sun Woman: Praise-Poems of Love Written in Etu (Stockholm: Författares Bokmaskin, 1991). Lundberg, Johan. “Lyrisk sampling i förortens Troja,” Svenska Dagbladet (3 April 2003): http://www.svd.se/dynamiskt/rec_litteratur/did_8636200.asp [accessed 20 April 2007]. Mahdi, Ahmed M. Iltatarinoita lapsille Somaliasta (Tixanaha Sheekooyinka caweyska carruurta) (Pietarsaari: Kaah Books, 1999). Minya, Tseggay. Adey itayn Aahchiwan: Wekharyan-chira-an (Sundbyberg: Admas förlag, 2001). Mwambua, Solomon. Gingo: En afrikansk pojkes uppväxt (Stockholm: Svartvitt, 1998). Nwadike, Cletus Nelson. En kort svart dikt (Torsby: Heidrun, 1998). ——. En sida av regnet faller (Torsby: Heidrun, 2003). Nyberg, Mattias. “Akilles 2003,” Dagensbok.com (29 July 2003): http://dagensbok.com /index.asp?id=599 [accessed 20 April 2007]. Owindi, Joseph Wandera. Kato, kato nekru (Porvoo, Helsinki: WSOY, 1972). Rantonen, Eila, & Matti Savolainen. “Postcolonial and ethnic studies in the context of Nordic minority literatures,” in Litteraturens gränsland: Invandrar- och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv, ed. Satu Gröndahl (Uppsala Multiethnic Papers 45; Uppsala University, 2002): 71–94. Ritamäki, Tapani. “The Orientalization of Ranya ElRamly: A Solstice in Finnish Prose,” Nordic Literature 3 (27 November 2003): http://www.nordic-literature.org/2003/english /articles/120.htm [accessed 20 April 2007). Saure, Heikki. Wilson Kirwa: Juoksijasoturin ihmeellinen elämä (Helsinki: Otava, 2006). Sonko, Kebba. Sagoberättarens Barn (Stockholm: Studiefrämjandet, 1998). Tiilikainen, Marja, Amran Maxamed Axmed & Muddle Suzanne Lilius, ed. Sagaal Dayrood – Nio höstregn – Yhdeksän syyssadetta (Helsinki: Helsinki UP, 2000).

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L ITERARY P ERSPECTIVES ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

F RANK S CHULZE –E NGLER ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Transcultural Modernities and Anglophone African Literature ABSTRACT: This essay provides a comprehensive overview of a shifting critical landscape by highlighting recent developments in literary and cultural studies. Schulze–Engler links the debate on globalized modernity to the critical interrogation of the paradigm of transculturality by asking “Why modernities?” and “Why transcultural?” The theoretical discussion is then connected to African literary studies and the still ‘hot’ question of whether anticolonial policies should be at the core of critical discourse and reflect the political edge of literary and cultural criticism. Arguing that anticolonialist thought has too often been misused by the new ruling elites, Schulze–Engler defends his preference for critical inquiries centred on modernity and sociocultural complexity.

F

to define “authentic” African literature at African writers’ congresses in the 1950s and 1960s1 to the scathing attacks of the Kenyan writer and critic Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o on “AfroSaxon” writing as a neocolonialist dead end in African literature in the 1970s and 1980s,2 the social role and aesthetic feasibility of modern anglophone literature in Africa have been hotly debated in terms of a wide array of critical ROM EARLY ATTEMPTS

1

See, for example, The Writer in Modern Africa, ed. Per Wästberg (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968). 2 See, for example, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey & Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986). © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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frameworks such as Commonwealth Literature, cultural nationalism, ThirdWorldism, and postcolonialism. More recently, transculturality has added a new range of questions and concerns to the debate, which this essay will seek to explore. I shall be taking a critical look at the notion of ‘African modernities’ and at recent debates on ‘multiple modernities’ in cultural anthropology and the social sciences, and will go on to argue that transculturality should be seen as a constitutive feature of these modernities. The essay will then discuss the possible uses of adopting the idea of transcultural modernities in the study of anglophone African literature and argue that such a move is likely to strengthen rather than undermine the social relevance of cultural and literary studies.

Why ‘Modernities’? What is the point of pluralizing a category that to many seems an inherently eurocentric construct anyway, or just another marker of assumed superiority of one part of the world (that is said to be ‘modern’) over another part (that is somehow ‘not modern’)? And why should thinking about modernity (or modernities) be helpful in coming to terms with African or Afro-European social, cultural or literary realities? The editor of a special issue of the American social science journal Daedalus on ‘Multiple Modernities’, Shmuel Eisenstadt, sums up what might be called the traditional perception of modernity by characterizing the views of the founding fathers of ‘classical’ sociology (Marx, Durkheim, and Weber) in the following terms: They all assumed, even if only implicitly, that the cultural program of modernity as it developed in modern Europe and the basic institutional constellations that emerged there would ultimately take over in all modernizing and modern societies; with the expansion of modernity, they would prevail throughout the world.3

This view of modernity, Eisenstadt suggests, has been overtaken by events: what emerged in the long-drawn-out process of the globalization of modernity was not a homogeneous, one-dimensional entity, but a constellation of widely varying yet interlinked varieties of modernity or multiple modernities: The actual developments in modernizing societies have refuted the homogenizing and hegemonic assumptions of this Western program of modernity. While a general trend towards structural differentiation developed across a wide range of institutions in most of these societies – in family life, economic and political structures, 3

Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129.1 (2000): 1.

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urbanization, modern education, mass communication, and individualistic orientations – the ways in which these arenas were defined and organized varied greatly, in different periods of their development, giving rise to multiple institutional and ideological patterns. Significantly, these patterns did not constitute simple continuations in the modern era of the traditions of their respective societies. Such patterns were distinctly modern, though greatly influenced by specific cultural premises, traditions, and historical experiences.4

This insight, Eisenstadt argues, opens up new possibilities of linking an understanding of the structural features of globalized modernity to an awareness of the complicated local arenas in which multiple modernities shape – and come to be shaped by – different histories, cultures, and traditions. This change of perspective also implies a refutation of ‘proprietory’ notions of modernity in the West and a “de-Westernization” of the modernity debate: One of the most important implications of the term “multiple modernities” is that modernity and Westernization are not identical; Western patterns of modernity are not the only “authentic” modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.5 The undeniable trend at the end of the twentieth century is the growing diversification of the understanding of modernity, of the basic cultural agendas of different modern societies – far beyond the homogenic and hegemonic visions of modernity prevalent in the 1950s. [...] All these developments do indeed attest to the continual development of multiple modernities, or of multiple interpretations of modernity – and, above all, to attempts at “de-Westernization”, depriving the West of its monopoly on modernity.6

Interestingly enough, the editors of a recent essay collection on African Modernities, published in 2002, come to similar conclusions, although the editors of and contributors to that volume were not aware of the ‘multiple modernities’ debate launched by Eisenstadt. Drawing on a variety of postmodern and postcolonial theories and on interdisciplinary perspectives from ethnology, cultural anthropology, cultural and literary studies as well as philosophy and the social sciences (rather than on the ‘internal’ critique of the great tradition of classical modernity performed by Eisenstadt), the editors of African Modernities nevertheless suggest that a ‘decentred’ approach to modernity is of paramount importance for coming to terms with the sociocultural realities of Africa:

4 5 6

Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities,” 1–2. “Multiple Modernities,” 2–3. “Multiple Modernities,” 24.

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the contributors to this volume subscribe to the project of the ‘post-’ as a way not to reunite but to accept and to analyse the fragmentary character of modernity as a distinct form of lived practice and experience which had and continues to have its impact in social worlds different from the West. [...] Over time people have developed their own culturally embedded definitions of what they consider to be modern.7

A similar move away from eurocentric ‘monologic’ perceptions of modernity towards a ‘dialogic’ analysis of specific modernities can also be discerned in the rapidly growing literature on Indian modernity. While Partha Chatterjee has asserted that “one cannot be for or against modernity; one can only devise strategies for coping with it,”8 Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that eurocentric accounts of modernity in India based on “the equating of a certain version of Europe with ‘modernity’” have been incapable of grasping the specific characteristics of an Indian modernity emerging under colonial /postcolonial conditions, and he has advocated a project of “provincializing Europe” that would “write into the history of modernity the ambivalences, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it.”9 What is at issue, then, in talking of ‘modernities’ is the insight that dividing the world into the modern and the non-modern has become an aporetic move, or, to put it in the binary terms cherished by earlier modernization theory, that traditional approaches to modernity no longer work. This insight can be readily related not only to societies, cultures, and literatures on the African continent, but also to Afro-European realities that are neither bridgeheads of traditional Africa in Europe nor insufficiently assimilated versions of a universal model of modernity. The specific modernity of these African and Afro-European realities, however, only becomes visible once we become aware of their transnational and transcultural features.

Why ‘Transcultural’? ‘Transculturality’ is, of course, another category that has been received with some suspicion by many in the fields of African and postcolonial studies. It has often been taken as a marker of a somewhat rarified and possibly utopian 7 Peter Probst, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt, “Introduction: Cherished Visions and Entangled Meanings,” in African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Peter Probst, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 3. 8 Partha Chatterjee, Our Modernity (Rotterdam & Dakar: South–South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development [S E P H I S ] and Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa [C O D E S R I A ], 1997): 19. 9 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000): 43.

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approach to culture and society and perceived as a concept debated by wellmeaning if slightly starry-eyed academics that is of little use in dealing with the everyday realities faced by ordinary people in a world still dominated by the harsh logics of capitalism and the nation-state. Transculturality and transnationality are, of course, much more closely related to these harsh realities than the conventional critique I have just outlined is aware of; in fact, as I will presently argue, it is the nostalgic epistemology of holding on to nation-states as the sole frame of reference in talking about society and of clinging to distinct or even incommensurable cultures as the sole frame of reference in talking about culture and literature that – together with a wistful hypostatization of anticolonial politics – risks turning social and cultural analysis into a well-meant, but increasingly irrelevant academic pastime. I have just mentioned transnationality together with transculturality, and in what follows I would like to look briefly at both of these terms side by side, before arguing later why transculturality may be a particularly helpful concept in literary studies. What is really at issue, then, when we talk about the system of interconnected varieties of modernity or modernities in terms of transnationality and transculturality? The first and most obvious consequence is that we start to question the widespread assumption that societies and cultures should be primarily seen in terms of the nation-state. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck has formulated a classical critique of this idea, which he refers to as ‘the container theory’ of society and culture: according to this theory, the power-space of nation-states is the ultimate container of societies, and any kind of social practice is defined and determined by the conceptual frame constituted by the nation-state. According to Beck, this ‘container theory’ of society is inevitably also a ‘container theory’ of culture: Talking of ‘culture’ in everyday life or in academia often implies that differences between people can be primarily deduced from their specific historical origins. This derivation of cultural differences is in turn based on the container theory: culture, understood territorially, essentializes differences.10

The challenge is thus to move beyond this dysfunctional ‘container theory’ and to become aware of the new, complex realities created by transnational and transcultural processes in the contemporary world. To cite Ulrich Beck again:

10

Ulrich Beck, “Wie wird Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung möglich? Eine Einleitung” [How Does Democracy Become Possible in the Age of Globalisation? An Introduction], in Politik der Globalisierung [Politics of Globalisation], ed. Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 53–54 (emphasis in the original, my tr.).

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There are thus exactly two modes of defining “world society”: either as the sum of internally homogeneous individual societies based on the antagonism of nationals and strangers (or foreigners); or as the ubiquity of cultural, religious, political and economic differences and world problems characterized by the precise opposite to the dictatorship of the universal that has also been referred to as the “McDonaldization” of the world. […] Exposing the fact that geographical and social spaces are no longer identical or, rather, that geographical spaces increasingly lose their importance means undercutting the territorial understanding of state and society. […] The term “world society” thus comes to designate a giant riddle, a veritable adventure quest: where does the path lead that has opened up after the national myths of society have come to an end? How can we open up and sharpen our perceptions of the concrete, ambivalent, and quotidian features of transnational forms of life?11

This sociological diagnosis of the challenges transnationality presents to the analysis of societies corresponds to the anthropological diagnosis of the challenges transnationality and transculturality present to the analysis of ‘cultures’. In a famous passage in his “Introduction” to The Predicament of Culture, James Clifford has delineated these challenges in the following manner: In cities on six continents foreign populations have come to stay – mixing in but often in partial, specific fashions. The ‘exotic’ is uncannily close. Conversely, there seem no distant places left on the planet where the presence of “modern” products, media, and power cannot be felt. An older topography and experience of travel is exploded. One no longer leaves home confident of finding something radically new, another time or space. Difference is encountered in the adjoining neighborhood, the familiar turns up at the ends of the earth. [...] ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness; self-other relations are matters of power and rhetoric rather than of essence. A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and in art is thrown in doubt.12

It is not only migration, however, that has caused this erosion of ontological difference and cultural authenticity. As Ulf Hannerz has argued, processes of cultural and social globalization have created a world in which cultures virtually everywhere have become linked and transformed in new and unexpected ways: As people move with their meanings, and as meanings find ways of travelling even when people stay put, territories cannot really contain cultures. And even as one accepts that culture is socially acquired and organized, the assumption that it is 11

Ulrich Beck, “Vorwort” to Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft [Perspectives on World Society], ed. Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 8–9 (emphasis in the original, my tr.). 12 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988): 14.

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homogeneously distributed within collectivities becomes problematic, when we see how their members’ experiences and biographies differ.13

What is at issue, then, in using the term ‘transculturality’? Understanding culture and literature in terms of a transcultural framework shifts the focus of attention away from the quasi-diplomatic ‘international’ relations between cultures and towards the productive communicative processes by which individuals and social groups make sense of culture in the contemporary world. The primary subjects and actors in this transcultural scenario are no longer cultures but people, and the main interest no longer lies in the problem of how cultures shape social groups and their perceptions but, rather, in the question of what individuals and social groups do with culture in an increasingly globalized world. At this point, both the connections between transnationality and transculturality as well as the differences between them become obvious. ‘Transcultural’ clearly has a much wider historical and epistemological catchment area, since ‘transnational’ is inevitably tied to the idea of the nation-state. We can thus talk about transculturality, but not about transnationality, in the European Middle Ages or in precolonial Africa. At the same time, a globalized world shaped by transnational connections forms an environment that is particularly conducive to transcultural processes, which is why questions of transculturality have become particularly pressing in a world of globalized modernity. To quote Ulrich Beck once more: If experiencing world society is a decisive feature of world society, multicultural society is not an intellectual abstraction, but a global reality. This reality can be neither elected nor voted out of office; it does not automatically lead to tolerance, but also to segregation and xenophobia. When the ambivalences of world society erupt in local conflicts, this does not signal the failure of “multicultural social experiments,” but possibly marks the beginning of a new social epoch when transnational and transcultural forms of life become the normal state of affairs.14

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13

Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (1996; London: Routledge, 1998): 8. 14 Ulrich Beck, Was ist Globalisierung? Irrtümer des Globalismus – Antworten auf Globalisierung [What is Globalization? Errors of Globalism – Answers to Globalization] (1997; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999): 154 (my tr.).

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Transcultural Modernities and African Literary Studies: Towards Depoliticization? If it is true that globalized modernity can most productively be engaged by perceiving it in terms of multiple modernities, and if it is also true that these modernities are increasingly shaped by ‘transnational and transcultural forms of life’, it seems plausible to combine both these insights and to consider the idea of ‘transcultural modernities’. What are the possible uses of this idea in literary studies, particularly with regard to anglophone African literature? First of all, the idea of ‘transcultural modernities’ opens up new ways of addressing the specific modernities from which anglophone African literature has emerged and which it has in turn explored and shaped. These modernities are significant both in the arena of ‘big politics’ (i.e. the ways African societies and cultures are shaped by and contribute to modernization processes taking place in a world of interlinked modernities and globalization) and in the arguably no less important arena of the ‘micropolitics of modernity’, where gender and generational relations, values, and norms, or religious beliefs are transformed in a myriad of individual and collective conflicts and renegotiations. If the assumptions outlined in the previous section are true, neither ‘public’ nor ‘private’ forms of social life and their literary representations can any longer be defined simply in terms of an absolute rejection of Western models of modernity or a general ‘resistance to globalization’, but need to be conceptually explored, made sense of, debated, and, last but not least, imagined under new and complex conditions. Secondly, focusing on the transcultural dimensions of these modernities allows literary studies to engage with what might be termed the ‘blurred boundaries’ of African literature. These ‘blurred boundaries’ are, of course, not a recent phenomenon, but go back to its very beginnings, as works such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative strongly testify. Equiano’s autobiographical account of his life within and beyond slavery is, in fact, an excellent starting-point for an appraisal of the transnational and transcultural dimensions of African literature, because it is located at the intersection of at least three literary traditions: it has been hailed as one of the starting-points of African literature (and thus as a ‘West African’ text), as an ‘ancestral text’ for Black British literature (and thus as part of ‘British’ literary history), and as a classic slave narrative in the North-American tradition (and thus as part of ‘American’ literature). In twentieth-century African literature, examples of writers whose work can no longer be related to one national or regional background abound: M.G. Vassanji’s novels can be seen in terms of East African, Canadian, and Indian writing, while writers such as Diran Adebayo, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Jackie Kay, Ben Okri, and numerous others negotiate a transcultural continuum

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encompassing Africa as much as (black) Britain. Against this background, the cultural-nationalist idea that African (or, indeed, any other) literature can be neatly defined in terms of ‘national’ or ‘regional’ literatures has become implausible: the nation-state clearly can no longer serve as the single social frame of reference for literary studies. But will the shift towards transculturality not imply a defusing of social and political concerns that have been of central importance to the study of the new literatures in English and thus lend support to a tacit depoliticization of literary studies, as concerned voices from within postcolonial studies have been anxious to warn? In addressing this question, it seems of paramount importance to identify precisely the routinely invoked political qualities of postcolonialism and to assess their actual uses for literary and cultural studies. Since a generalized account of the hotly debated politics of postcolonialism is clearly beyond the scope of this essay, I will briefly discuss two fairly influential strands in the current postcolonial debate and show that their particular take on the political location of theory constitutes a liability rather than an asset for cultural and literary studies. The first of these is Fredric Jameson’s notorious theory of “Third-World literature” as “national allegory,” which, despite the controversies that it has given rise to, continues to enjoy widespread acclaim in postcolonial studies and has recently been reappraised as an eminently useful example of ‘postcolonial metacritique’.15 Jameson’s original essay of 1986 (which did not refer to the term ‘postcolonial’ at all) suggested that “Third-World literature” produced in ‘real’ Third-World settings necessarily takes the form of a “national allegory” and that Third-World culture – as opposed to its more sophisticated Western counterpart – is characterized by the collective revolutionary consciousness associated with Marx rather than with the individual cultural self-reflexivity associated with Freud.16 More recently, this idea has been reformulated in terms of a ‘metacritical’ position: what is at issue now is not so much the real ‘Third World’ but, rather, the discursive construct that ‘Western’ critics are said to 15

For the original debate, see Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88, and Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25. For more recent reformulations of the ‘national allegory’ hypothesis, see Ian Buchanan, “National Allegory Today: A Return to Jameson,” in On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization, ed. Caren Irr & Ian Buchanan (Albany N Y : State U of New York P ; 2006): 173–88; Imre Szeman, “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” in On Jameson, ed. Irr & Buchanan, 189–211; and Julie McGonegal, “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory and the Always-Already-Read Third World Text,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7.2 (2005): 251–65. 16 Jameson, “Third World Literature,” 69.

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inevitably refer to in assessing ‘Third-World’ texts: “we always already read Third World texts as national allegories because of our inability as readers to bracket off our interpellated positions (e.g. our inability to not read Third World texts allegorically).”17 While it is, of course, possible to see this position as ‘political’ (in the sense of an ongoing self-criticism of Western discourses on the ‘Third World’), this ‘politics’ seems to have a lot more to do with the self-justificatory rhetorics of an increasingly scholastified academic debate than with the contemporary political realities that writers and critics in the new literatures see themselves confronted with. Both in its original form and in its ‘metacritical’ reincarnation, the ‘national allegory’ hypothesis negates the specific modernity and the cultural complexity that characterizes ‘non-Western’ literary texts; the ‘metacritical’ version in addition imprisons the reception of these texts in a narcissistic epistemological framework that admits no interest beyond that of an exclusively ‘First-World’ autocritique and systematically precludes even the possibility of entering into meaningful dialogue on experiences of globalized modernity with anyone not belonging to ‘us First World readers’. If this type of ‘politics’ were to become eroded in the wake of an increased emphasis on transcultural modernities and a concomitant concern with the internal complexity of African societies and cultures as well as their long-standing transnational and transcultural dimensions, this would arguably constitute an advance rather than a loss for literary and cultural studies. The second facet of the ‘politics of postcolonialism’ I would briefly like to comment on relates to critical debates on globalization and transnational social relations. Since an in-depth survey of these debates is once more beyond the scope of this essay, a brief glance at a recent contribution will have to suffice to point out more general shortcomings. In their “Introduction” to a special issue of Interventions on “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance,”18 Elleke Boehmer and Bart Moore–Gilbert draw attention to the fact that “transnational resistance has represented till recently an area of relative empirical and theoretical neglect within postcolonial cultural studies”19 and suggest that historical as well as contemporary instances of transnational resistance and protest should be more closely addressed in order to overcome a “characteristic failure” prevalent in the field.20 While Boehmer’s and Moore–Gilbert’s Introduction (as well as several articles in the special issue) does indeed provide a 17

McGonegal, “Postcolonial Metacritique,” 253 (emphasis in original). Elleke Boehmer & Bart Moore–Gilbert, “Introduction to Special Issue Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance,” Interventions 4.1 (2002): 7–21. 19 Boehmer & Moore–Gilbert, “Introduction,” 7. 20 Boehmer & Moore–Gilbert, “Introduction,” 19. 18

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wide array of instructive examples of transnational alliances against colonialism and imperialism, the theoretical framework in which the whole perception of transnational connections and globalization is formulated in much of this special issue seems to preclude rather than to stimulate a sustained interest in globalized modernity, transnational life-worlds, and transcultural practices as core concerns of postcolonial studies. Interestingly enough, globalization figures mainly as an extrinsic phenomenon in Boehmer’s and Moore–Gilbert’s text, and transnational practices in ‘postcolonial’ cultures and societies are presented as more or less ‘naturally’ linked to ‘resistance’. While their final assessment that “cultural struggle provides an important stimulus or adjunct to political forms of transnational resistance but cannot be a substitute for them” may be quite plausible, “the lesson for the contemporary era” that the authors take from this insight is anything but clear.21 Should cultural and literary studies really be primarily concerned with ‘cultural struggle’ as an ‘adjunct’ to politics, or shouldn’t they, rather, seek to explore the complexity of culture and literature not only as an agent of political change, but also as a resource of the social imaginary that makes such change possible in the first place? A focus on transcultural modernities may help to overcome economistic perceptions of globalization as an extrinsic encroachment upon non-Western societies and to widen the scope of responses to globalization in literary and cultural studies to encompass the social and cultural complexity engendered by the globalization of modernity. After all, societies, cultures, and literatures in the contemporary world have been shaped and transformed not only by a ‘transnational resistance’ staged in the public arena of ‘big politics’ but also by transnational life-worlds emerging from myriads of transnational connections and transcultural practices that have changed norms, values and self-perceptions of individuals and social groups all over the world. In this respect, the future relevance of ‘postcolonial’ cultural and literary studies will arguably not depend on whether they are ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalization, but on whether they are capable of making an original contribution to the analysis of globalized modernity. A general problem with the often invoked ‘political edge’ of postcolonial studies thus lies in the fact that it all too often harks back to the political and intellectual constellations of the ‘heroic phase’ of anticolonial resistance: although postcolonialism as a theoretical venture and academic practice emerged long after the anticolonial revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century, a

21

Boehmer & Moore–Gilbert, “Introduction,” 18.

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number of its practitioners routinely identify it with these revolutions.22 The ‘politics of theory’ evoked in this manner are highly problematic, however, since anticolonialism in its various ideological guises has become a ‘soft’ option in present-day academia. After the demise of the modern empires, there are practically no defenders of colonialism left, and any argument based on an anticolonial stance can automatically count on a broad moral and political consensus. Indeed, one reason for entering the anticolonial arena at the present time may lie precisely in the absolute clarity of moral vision to be encountered there: in contrast to the often baffling political constellations and issues to be faced in the contemporary world, the battle-lines are clear, the just and the unjust easily separable, and the committed academic knows where to throw in his or her lot – undoubtedly one of the reasons why the notion of referring to vast stretches of Africa, Asia, and Latin America as the ‘postcolonial world’ continues to be so popular in international academia. Yet, as Richard Werbner has pointed out, the insistence on ‘Western hegemony’ can easily turn into a selfsatisfying mechanism precluding an understanding of the complexities and ambivalences of contemporary modernities: The temptation is to fall back on ‘dependency’ theory, on the sociology of underdevelopment as the key to contemporary marginalised Africa. With that comes the addictive desire for all-purpose explanation: Western hegemony, whether met in practice by resistance or collusion, serves as cultural machine; it is as if Western hegemony manufactures the stuff of local sociality, even the contentious stuff, as its own invention. Be it a struggle vital for identity or agency or subjectivity, it all collapses into the reactive response to Western imperialism. But to yield to such temptation – the global fix for the superabundance of local contradictions – is to end the postcolonial analytic engagement virtually at the start, well before the urgent questions are asked, never mind answered.23

While the normative orientation generated along the divide of colonialism/ anticolonialism may well seem attractive in a world where orientation among a multiplicity of conflicts is often hard to come by, thinking of the contemporary world in terms of ‘the West vs. the Rest’ or a nostalgic anti-imperialism is unlikely to be of much help in coming to terms with the intricate political, social, economic, and cultural realities to be encountered in the formerly colonized regions of the world. 22

See, for example, Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), and Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003). 23 Richard Werbner, “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner & Terrence O. Ranger (London: Zed, 1996): 5.

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In the African context, it is thus more than doubtful whether an anticolonialism that has often enough become the dominant ideology of new ruling elites (as in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe) is capable of providing a viable normative framework. Arguably, it is not only academic accuracy or methodological clarity that suffers from oversimplified accounts of the hegemony of ‘the West’ over ‘the Rest’. Insisting on the primacy of ‘extrinsic’ explanations for the predicament of modern societies can – despite the best of anticolonial intentions – easily have quite dubious political results: Silence is complicity, mainstream postcolonial studies often remind us in rightly speaking out against the living force of our heritage of colonial racism. But what about the impact of and responsibility for state violence against internal ‘enemies’, genocide and quasi-nationalism? Who, among the diasporic spokespersons for postcolonial studies, puts that on the critical agenda?24

Moving beyond the largely illusory verities of anticolonial politics into the variegated landscape of contemporary sociocultural complexity is thus likely to strengthen rather than to undermine the social relevance of cultural and literary studies. Such a move might also enable cultural and literary studies to address urgent new challenges: the role of democratization movements, the politics of civil society, and the struggle for accountable government in Africa; the dynamics of Afro-European relations that have been shaped not only by the legacy of colonial and neocolonial relationships but also by the attractiveness of the ‘New Europe’ as a model of political integration and as migrant destination; Afro-European realities in a Europe characterized both by internal processes of multicultural transformation and by a rigid ‘fortress Europe’ mentality that materializes itself in increasingly militarized border regimes. Against this background, the most important social task for cultural and literary studies may well lie in undermining political and cultural discourses based on the notorious ‘clash of civilizations’ myth, on the one hand, and in contributing to an extended understanding of cultural complexity in a world of globalized modernity, on the other. Shifting critical attention to the concept of ‘transcultural modernities’ can help challenge what Paul Gilroy has called a “brazen and complacent civilizationism” based on “the idea that civilizations are closed and finished cultural units which must be preserved at all costs” and to confront this fallacy with an understanding of “alternative figurations of culture, power and ethnicity”: “Culture becomes open, fluid, and amenable to change. Then, the clash within civilizations is more important than the supposed battle between them.”25 24 25

Werbner, “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” 13. Paul Gilroy, “A New Cosmopolitanism,” Interventions 7.3 (2005): 287–88.

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Taking transcultural modernities as a frame of reference in African literary studies is unlikely to provide ready-made methodological or political answers to the intricate socio-cultural conflicts and transitions in contemporary Africa – but, as I hope to have shown, it can help to formulate the sort of questions that will ensure that literary studies remains a socially relevant player in the struggle to come to terms with globalized modernity.

WORKS CITED Ahmad, Aijaz. “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory’,” Social Text 17 (1987): 3–25. Beck, Ulrich. “Vorwort” [Preface] to Perspektiven der Weltgesellschaft [Perspectives on World Society], ed. Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 7–10. ——. Was ist Globalisierung? Irrtümer des Globalismus – Antworten auf Globalisierung [What is Globalisation? Errors of Globalism – Answers to Globalization] (1997; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1999). ——. “Wie wird Demokratie im Zeitalter der Globalisierung möglich? Eine Einleitung” [How Does Democracy Become Possible in the Age of Globalisation? An Introduction], in Politik der Globalisierung [Politics of Globalisation], ed. Beck (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998): 7–66. Boehmer, Elleke, & Bart Moore–Gilbert. “Introduction to Special Issue Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Resistance,” Interventions 4.1 (2002): 7–21. Buchanan, Ian. “National Allegory Today: A Return to Jameson,” in On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization, ed. Caren Irr & Ian Buchanan (Albany: State U of New York P ; 2006): 173–88. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Chatterjee, Partha. Our Modernity (Rotterdam & Dakar: South-South Exchange Programme for Research on the History of Development –S E P H I S –/Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa – C O D E S R I A , 1997). Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129.1 (2000): 1–29. Gilroy, Paul. “A New Cosmopolitanism.” Interventions 7.3 (2005): 287–292. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (1996; London: Routledge, 1998). Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. McGonegal, Julie. “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory and the Always-AlreadyRead Third World Text,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 7.2 (2005): 251–65. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey & Nairobi: Heinemann Kenya, 1986. Probst, Peter, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt. “Introduction: Cherished Visions and Entangled Meanings,” in African Modernities: Entangled Meanings in Current Debate, ed. Peter Probst, Jan–Georg Deutsch & Heike Schmidt (Oxford: James Currey, 2002): 1–17.

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Szeman, Imre. “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization,” in On Jameson: From Postmodernism to Globalization, ed. Caren Irr & Ian Buchanan (Albany: State U of New York P ; 2006): 189–211. Wästberg, Per, ed. The Writer in Modern Africa (Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968). Werbner, Richard. “Introduction: Multiple Identities, Plural Arenas,” in Postcolonial Identities in Africa, ed. Richard Werbner & Terrence O. Ranger (London: Zed, 1996): 1-25. Young, Robert J.C. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). ——. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003).

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S USAN A RNDT ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Euro-African Trans-Spaces? — Migration, Transcultural Narration and Literary Studies

ABSTRACT: This essay examines ‘black diaspora writings’ and European discourses; the critical excursus concludes by reaffirming the need to rely on complex, flexible, and context-oriented categories in a perspective “that both ‘provincializes Europe’ and ‘globalizes Africa’.”

‘E

UROPE’ WAS AND REMAINS AN INDISTINCT TERM changing with the times, a metaphor like ‘the West’, ‘Occident’, ‘Orient’, and many others. Europe is not a religious or culturally homogeneous ‘naturally given’ entity but, rather, an historical and political construct that seeks to attain its form through demarcations to the outside. In terms of political structures, identity-patterns, and cultural processes, however, Europe has emerged historically as a trans-space. The formation of the new diasporas that have re-situated Europe’s internal and external borders are symptomatic of this. In fact, postcolonial readings of diaspora, migration, and exile offer an analytical approach by means of which Europe is ‘provincialized’1 and

1

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2000); “Europa provinzialisieren: Postkolonialität und die Kritik der Geschichte,” in Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, ed. Sebastian Conrad & Shalini Randeria (Frankfurt am Main & New York: Campus, 2002): 283–312. © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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the complex character of transnational European identities and transcultural processes in Europe can be specified.2 To explore this notion is the aim of this contribution. After approaching the conceptual and terminological interweavings and complexities of migration, exile, and (African / black) diaspora, I wish to elaborate on Europe’s diasporic realities and on how narratives from African diasporas in Europe have created literary trans-spaces that challenge conventional concepts of Western literary studies.

Exile, Migration, and Diaspora Just as much as ‘Occident’ and ‘Europe’, the terms ‘exile’, ‘migration’, and ‘diaspora’ range among those widely used terms which are difficult to define, while yet many seem to know (or claim to know) what they mean. In fact, the three terms come from different areas of knowledge. Diaspora is originally a religious term, exile a term with primarily political denotations, and migration basically a sociological one. Conceptual overlaps can be seen in the fact that all of these terms are based on a transnational crossing of borders by people – and not, as in transnationalism, also of goods, products, capital etc. Moreover, the three terms meet, inasmuch as they refer to experiences of displacement and alienation, loss and new beginnings, pain and longing, memory and (dis)identification. With respect to arriving and the notion of home, however, the terms convey different meanings. Apart from being closely linked with the notion of being spread (widely) and scattering, the term diaspora also constitutes itself on the basis of arrival as a transnational and collective experience, in which connection there seems to exist a “taboo on return,” which shifts the idea of return into the distant future and strives to establish the diaspora as “home away from home.”3 This notion of both leaving and arriving (often implying a permanent or at least long-term stay in the land of residence) is shared by the terms ‘diaspora’ and ‘migration’. Etymologically, semantically, and historically inhabited by notions of wandering, the latter focuses prominently on the connotation of ‘emigration’ or moving somewhere else. Although migration is a term of movement (of groups as well as of individuals), it may also refer to the resultant state of living some2 See Susan Arndt, “Introduction: Rereading (Post)Colonialism: Whiteness, Wandering and Writing,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 13–79. 3 Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997): 224.

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where else. In fact, the relationship between migration and diaspora is causal, migration causing diaspora, whereas exile is to be read as a sub-form of migration. The term ‘exile’, which is etymologically bound to Latin exul, exsul (staying away from home, banned) and politically informed, however, seems not only to be determined by implying a reason for the migratory movement. Inasmuch as exile presents itself as a purely individual experience, in fact seemingly as “a solitude experience outside the group,”4 it differs from migration (which can be experienced collectively or individually) as well as from diaspora, which is by definition a collective and transnational experience. Moreover, there are further semantic differences between exile and its hyperonym ‘migration’. Just as much as exile, migration can be read as a political act which takes place in a (geo)political context. But while the term ‘migration’ seems to partially convey the notion of voluntariness or, better, choice, exile focuses on the aspect of (political) force, and in this sense also functions as a term of political self-location. It has here experienced a semantic extension, insofar as it seems recently to involve any form of existentially necessary escape. In this respect, the temporality of the sojourn in the foreign land and the wish to return to the ‘parent country’ seems to be – in contrast to diaspora and migration – inherent in the term ‘exile’. Interestingly, however, it is the term ‘exile’ that combines the semantic fields of both migration and diaspora, not only describing a process of movement (to migrate/to go into exile), but also (like diaspora) the results of this process: the person in exile, the span of time in exile, as well as the very state of exile. Inasmuch as exile can also be read as a reference to location (to live in exile), it can also be located in semantic proximity to diaspora. One lives in exile or in the diaspora, or in exile in the diaspora; even living in exile within the diaspora is possible.

(African) Diaspora(s) In the 1950s and 1960s, the term ‘African diaspora’ emerged, largely prompted from within the field of historical scholarship. Terminologically, this was a radical turn, since the term ‘diaspora’ had previously only been used with reference to either the settlements resulting fom ancient Greek imperial expansions or, most commonly, the expulsion of the Jews from Palestine and their being scattered all over the world. Wishing to appropriate the semantic implication of 4 Edward E. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Min-ha & Cornel West (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1990): 359.

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the latter, it was now applied to refer to the traumatizing dispersal of Africans through the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent expectation of a return to the Promised Land, based on notions offered up by a history of salvation. Interestingly, this academic shift paralleled developments in the political sphere, where, on the one hand, the continent of Africa was striving for independence, and the civil-rights movement in the U S A , on the other, demanded fulfilment of the promise of democracy for all citizens. The two movements definitely served as an inspiration to each other, and awareness of the link between the continent and the African presence elsewhere increased in this decisive historical moment. If Israel served as a symbol of identification and hope for the Jewish Diaspora, African independence promised a similar opportunity of renaissance for black people.5 Despite obvious parallels between the Jewish and African diasporas, scholarship tends to aim at marking decisive differences between them. Hence, the notion of diaspora (as implied by African diaspora) is demarcated from the concept of the Jewish Diaspora by capitalizing “Diaspora” when referring to the latter. Partly inspired by the semantic extension of the term to cover Africa, and in connection with the globalization theories of the 1990s, ‘diaspora’ has become a key term in social studies. Today, it is applied to all kinds of mass migrations of the second half of the twentieth century which have resulted in the formation of new sub- and supranational cultural structures. The extension of meaning inscribed in it makes it possible to assume a coexistence of a multiplicity of diasporas and to locate these on different levels.6 As Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur point out, The term ‘diaspora’ has been increasingly used to describe the mass migrations and displacements of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in reference to independence movements in formerly colonized areas, waves of refugees fleeing war-torn states, and fluxes of economic migration in the post-World War II era.7

In order, at the same time, to avoid the danger of characterizing the outcome of every migratory situation as diaspora, Robert Cohen suggests nine characteristics of a diaspora:

5

See Katharina Schramm, “Struggling Over the Past: The Politics of Heritage and Homecoming in Ghana” (dissertation, Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004): 6. 6 See George Shepperson, “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1993): 41–49. 7 Jana Evans Braziel & Anita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization. Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies,” in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel & Anita Mannur (Malden: Blackwell, 2003): 4.

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Dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically, to two or more foreign regions; Alternatively, the [voluntary] expansion from a homeland; A collective memory and myth about the homeland; An idealization of the putative ancestral home and a collective commitment to its maintenance […], even to its creation; The development of a return movement; A strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time and based on a sense of distinctiveness, a common history and the belief in a common fate; A troubled relationship with host societies, suggesting a lack of acceptance at the least or the possibility that another calamity might befall the group; A sense of empathy with co-ethnic members in other countries of settlement, and; The possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in host countries with a tolerance for pluralism.8

Cohen’s approach may seem to be limited, insofar as it does not prove capable of covering the whole dimension of complexities and dynamics of diasporas, bound, for example, to internal heterogenities and existing interfaces.9 After all, the idea of a multiplicity of diasporas raises questions concerning the nature of their coexistence and interrelatedness. Interesting and important, however, is the fact that Cohen accords central relevance not only to the home but also to the conditions of the diasporic situation in the country of residence. This aspect is even more strongly pursued by James Clifford,10 who describes the idea of the return to the homeland as being merely fictional in nature, thus conceiving it as at best secondary for the selfperception of a diaspora – the homeland becoming an ‘imagined community’, to adopt Benedict Anderson’s term.11 As a logical continuation of this approach of qualifying the centrality of the ‘home’, Clifford and Paul Gilroy stress the need to focus on the complex conditions within the diaspora and the ambivalent situatedness of the diasporas 8

Cohen, Global Diasporas, 26. See Schramm, Struggling Over the Past. 10 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993), and Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. 11 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), and Wumi Raji, “Looking Back / Looking Forward. Identity and Memory in African Fictions of Exile,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 279–93. 9

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within the host nations. Having doubtlessly become an integrative constituent of the host nations (and of Europe, in more general terms), the diasporas nevertheless remain ‘island societies’ within the residential societies and Europe, being faced with all sorts of discrimination and marginalization. As a consequence, many find it advisable to seek identifications beyond national models in order to maintain the difference between the dominant and diaspora cultures as established via history and development.12 In extending this argument, Clifford and Gilroy complement the term “roots,” classically ascribed to the notion of diaspora, with the term “routes,” which focuses on the aspect of ‘historical becoming’ as central constituent of diasporal identity.13 In the face of the common cultural inheritance, a common history, and the tradition of a racializing construction of blacks, some theorists such as Gilroy and William Safran have tended to speak of a “black diaspora”14 – in line with a political understanding of ‘blacks’ that assumes a political and historical unity of all those who have been constructed and racialized as ‘non-whites’. However, the Indian scholar Gayatri Gopinath challenges Gilroy for tending to apply the term ‘black’ with sole reference to blacks of African descent, hence failing to write Asians fully into his diasporic counter-narative and discourse of black cultural production.15 Starting from this observation, she suggests responding terminologically to the complex network of commonalities, differences, and interweavings that exist within the ‘black diaspora’, but with due consideration of commonalities. A contextualized speaking about the respective diasporal situation may lead to a complementary coexistence of the term ‘black diaspora’ and more focused terms such as Indian diaspora, African diaspora etc. Still, the term ‘African diaspora’ seems to be somewhat general, following the quite common pattern of asymmetrical naming, with a homogeneous concept of Africa being applied where in other cases a more specific (countryoriented) regional term is used, as when the Armenian, Polish or Indian diaspora is spoken of. Thus, even though there are historical and current political 12 See Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” 225, and James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997): 250. 13 See Clifford, Routes, and Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. For a more detailed discussion of this issue, see Katharina Schramm, “Imagined Pasts: Present Confrontations. Literary and Ethnographic Explorations into Pan-African Identity Politics,” in Africa, Europe and (Post) Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 243–56. 14 See Ronald Segal, The Black Diaspora (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). 15 Gayatri Gopinath, “Bombay, U.K. Yuba City: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora,” Diaspora 4.3 (1995): 305.

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processes which seem to support the use of the term ‘African diaspora’, ultimately it would appear to be problematic. To get around this tendency, it seems appropriate either to pluralize the term and thus speak of ‘African diasporas’ or, whenever fitting and supported by the context, to specify the focus and speak of the ‘Somalian diaspora’, ‘Nigerian diaspora’ etc.16 This terminological turn within the diaspora debate makes it possible to describe the global presence of, for example, the Nigerian or Somalian diaspora – also (theoretically) detached from a sub-presence in Europe or the U S A . Moreover, it seems to be more suited to embracing both “diasporic border crossings”17 and the plurality and dynamics within African diasporas. These result, on the one hand, from the interweaving of further parameters such as gender, ‘race’, and religion, but also nation and the language of both homeland and the land of residence.18 On the other hand, the fact that migratory flows feeding into the African diasporas are still continuing along with the multitude of past and present inner-diasporal movements – for example, from the Southern States to the north in the U S A , from the Caribbean to the U S A or to Britain – has subjected the African diasporas, like any other diaspora, to a constant, dynamic process of transformation.

The Impact of the ‘New Diasporas’ on the European ‘Self’ Despite all attempts at denying large-scale and/or easy immigration, the new diasporas have become an integral part of Europe – its nations and cultures. Insofar as these diasporas take shap independently of the boundaries of nationstates, they are a prime example of European identities manifesting themselves beyond nationalities and of Europe being lived transnationally. Hence, they are the precursors of a many-layered European house and challenge, which, as Étienne Balibar has indicated, is the prime feature of current models of European citizenship for determining what is ‘European’. In consequence of these quests for political identity, it is not simply a matter of ‘white’ national cultures in Europe being abrogated, appropriated, and therefore creolized vis-à-vis diasporic presences. It is, rather, that the dialogicity (in the Bakhtinian sense) occurring between dominant and diasporic cultures is also constituted by the fact 16

Nuruddin Farah, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (London & New York: Cassell, 2000). 17 Vera Alexander & Sissy Helff, “The Politics of Shifting Boundaries in Moyez G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and Farida Karodia’s Other Secrets,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 328. 18 Gopinath, “Bombay; U.K., Yuba City,” 305–306.

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that the latter also affect and re-situate the cultures of the countries of residence – even if (in willed ignorance) largely unnoticed by the mainstream culture. The Angolan José Eduardo Agualusa has written an exemplary book about this phenomenon. He traces African influences on Portuguese culture in general and on the city of Lisbon in particular.19 In fact, throughout history, Europe has emerged as a geopolitical and cultural trans-space that has been decisively resituated and provincialized by its migrants and diasporans. But just as much as Europe has been provincialized, processes of migration and the emergence of diasporas in Europe have also shaped identity processes in Africa, of Africans, and, of course, of African migrants and diasporans living in Europe. I wish to approach this by looking at the way in which exile, migration, and diaspora have influenced African (diasporic) writers and their narratives.

The Loneliness of the Migrant: Phantom Pain of Loss and Questions of (Un)Belonging in African (Diasporic) Writing Half of all the writers hailing from African countries are said to have lived abroad.20 People who stay in a foreign country temporarily as students, researchers or teachers, or on a writers’ scholarship, need to be distinguished from exiles, migrants, and diasporans with longer-term residency. While Wole Soyinka and Nuruddin Farah seem to remain wanderers, oscillating between different homes, there are also writers such as Buchi Emecheta and Chinua Achebe, who were both born in Nigeria but have settled permanently elsewhere. They belong to the African / Nigerian diaspora just as much as Bernadine Evaristo, who was born in Britain to a white English mother and a black father who was born in Nigeria. Although, as blacks, these writers may share experiences in a society that is historically rooted in racist discourse, their individual situations will be as varied as their motives (or those of their parents, or a parent) for having left their original home, long-term or permanently, and/ or to live in a country that marks them as ‘aliens’ or migrants. Reasons may be found, if we take the examples of Buchi Emecheta and Calixthe Beyala – the intention to escape gender discrimination, to pursue promising opportunities in education and/or employment, or to seek shelter for a wounded body or soul. This, again, is to be distinguished from the situation of exiles such as Lewis Nkosi and Sénouco Agbota Zinsou who were forced to flee or were even expelled by their countries’ governments or became objects of persecution cam19

See Agualusa in Manfred Loimeier, Wortwechsel: Gespräche und Interviews mit Autoren aus Schwarzafrika (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2002): 14–15. 20 Manfred Loimeier, Zum Beispiel afrikanische Literatur (Göttingen: Lamuv, 1997): 58.

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paigns by the state and /or society, for political and religious reasons. And while most writers have migrated to Europe or North America, some, such as Ama Ata Aidoo and Bessie Head, have resettled within Africa. Moreover, there is a form of exile that is ‘internal’ – a state of ‘house-arrest’ or being in exile (like that of the Roman poet Cicero) without being expelled from one’s home country. Conceptually, this is also associated especially with writers in Germany during National Socialism.21 A more recent example would be the Nigerian Femi Osofisan. He has suggested that a writer who wants to survive in a dictatorship and still keep doing his work should operate within the confines of cultural guerrilla tactics. It may have been Osofisan’s understanding of these tactics that prevented him from going into exile like many of his colleagues, and instead to survive while challenging the various dictatorial regimes of Nigeria from within.22 In the biographies of many writers from Africa, such as Nawal El Saadawi, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Jack Mapanje, Bloke Modisane, and Breyten Breytenbach, the experience of exile or migration often runs parallel to periods of undisturbed work in their own country – whether without inner distance from the political circumstances or while in a state of ‘internal exile’ – and /or experiences of political persecution, torture, imprisonment or death sentences. The Nigerian filmmaker, civil-rights activist, writer, environmental activist, journalist, and teacher Ken Saro–Wiwa is a tragic example of the coexistence of various experiences of exile and non-exile as well as of the many dangers of ‘internal exile.’ In the 1980s, Saro–Wiwa’s socially critical television series “Basi & Company” was broadcast weekly on Nigerian T V , making him a superstar in Nigeria.23 Just a decade later he was killed by the Nigerian government under General Sani Abachi because of his resolute opposition to the exploitation and pollution of the Ogoni area. If one agrees with Ottmar Ette that literature is a “storage medium of life knowledge,”24 then it is hardly surprising that the African history of migration and exile as well as experiences from the African diasporas have been absorbed into literary expression. Obviously, these experiences are an important point of fracture in the lives of authors. In fact, many writers have described how, after leaving their original background, they lost their inspiration and suffered from 21 Jost Hermand & Wigand Lange, “Wollt Ihr Thomas Mann wiederhaben?” Deutschland und die Emigranten (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1999). 22 Nwagbo Nnenyelike, “The Dramatist as a Rebel,” Daily Sun (1 February 2005). 23 Ken Saro–Wiwa, Basi and Company: A Modern African Folktale (Port Harcourt: Saros International Publishers, 1987). 24 Ottmar Ette, ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004).

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writers’ block. Some were afraid of being unable ever to write again, cut off as they were from the materiality of their homeland. Others no longer wished to write about what they had left behind, but were unable to write about the new environment. There are, however, writers such as Buchi Emecheta who might never have started writing if she had not had to deal with the traumatic experiences and challenges of a single migrant mother in London.25 “To be driven from one’s mother country is first and foremost a shocking spectacle,” writes Lewis Nkosi, “which goes a long way to explain the power which exile exerts upon the imagination.”26 The phantom pain of loss and the question of (un)belonging are central constituents of the migrant imagination, “neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with halfinvolvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another.”27 Francis Bebey confirms this in his answer to the question “Where do you feel at home most?”: There is an African proverb which says: “You can put the branch of a tree in water for a hundred years, but it will never turn into a crocodile.” Yes, I live in Europe, but I’ll never be a European. This is simply not possible. But it is also wrong to call myself an African like 200 years ago – no, I am someone from modern Africa, which means I am someone with an African culture, but thank God also with nonAfrican cultures.28

Besides discussing experiences arising directly from the situation of exile and migration, authors also depict their concrete experiences (as migrants and /or members of African diasporas) in Europe, whereby, along with continuities, interesting divergences and caesurae are to found, depending on factors such as 25 The literature in this field is rich. Recommended as a brief introduction to this subject is Eberhard Lämmert, “‘Oftmals such’ ich ein Wort’: Exil als Lebensform,” T R A N S : InternetZeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15 (April 2004). For African literature, see also Winifred Woodhull, “Exile,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 7–24, and Woodhull, Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literatur, ed. Rowland Smith (London: Longman, 1976). 26 Lewis Nkosi, “The Wandering Subject. Exile as ‘Fetish’,” in Africa, Europe and (Post) Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 212. 27 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994): 49. 28 “Il y a un proverbe africain qui dit: ‘Le tronc d’arbre peut passer cent ans dans l’eau, il ne deviendra jamais crocodile.’ Je suis en Europe, mais je ne deviendrai jamais européen, ce n’est pas possible. Dire que je suis un africain comme il y a deux cents ans – non, je suis un homme de l’Afrique moderne, c’est-à-dire un homme avec une culture africaine et Dieu merci aussi des cultures non-africaines.” Quoted in Loimeier, Wortwechsel, 25, my translation from the original interview.

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country of origin and residence, gender, ‘race’, class and also (migrant) generation. Europe is thereby presented as a fixed point of hopes and visions of the future. “With a foothold on European soil, the hope of reprieve appears nearer, almost palpable.”29 On the other hand, diasporic texts also tell of the death of these very hopes and visions of a future in the face of experiences of exclusion and discrimination which obviously deny migrants from Africa living in Europe the opportunity to take part in the freedom and democracy which they hoped to find. Consequently, many seem to enter a kind of “internal exile within the exile.”30 Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou, who lives as a political refugee from Togo in Germany, has focused on this aspect in his Le Médicament.31 Other prominent examples are Buchi Emecheta and Dambudzo Marechera, who write about their experience of being discriminated against in Britain.32 As a result, many of these texts follow the pattern of a Bildungsroman, ranging from hope through disillusionment to catharsis.33 Abdulrazak Gurnah, for whom (not least thanks to his own biographical background) migration is a recurring theme, raises another, but related, issue. In By the Sea, for example, he describes how people in exile try to survive by attempting to assimilate to both the white Western culture and the colonialist fantasies about “their Others” – which in fact turns out to be a dilemma, because this assimilation demands that they deny both their ‘roots’ and their ‘routes’.34 In the process, however, the characters also tend to mimic and subvert white myths. A further central motif of recent literature by African writers living in Europe, such as Amma Darko, El Loko, Buchi Emecheta, Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou, and Thomas Mazimpaka, is European policies toward asylum seekers and (illegal) refugees. The writers reflect on a wide range of experiences, starting with life in illegality, to meetings with social workers and foreign

29

Farah, Yesterday, Tomorrow, 65. For some of the many examples, see Chima Oji, Unter die Deutschen gefallen: Erfahrungen eines Afrikaners (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1992); Osman A. Sankoh, “‘Ich setze mich nicht neben einen Neger’: Alltagserfahrungen eines Afrikaners in Deutschland,” in Afrika: Mythos und Zukunft, ed. Katja Böhler & Jügen Hoeren (Freiburg: Herder, 2003): 11– 17; Farah, Yesterday, Tomorrow. 31 Sénouvo Agbota Zinsou, Le Médicament (Paris: Hatier international, 2003). 32 See Dambudzo Marechera, “Black Skin, What Mask,” in House of Hunger (London, Ibadan & Nairobi: Heinemann, 1978): 93–99; Buchi Emecheta, In the Ditch (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972), and Second Class Citizen (London: Allison & Busby, 1974). 33 Emecheta, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen. 34 Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). 30

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offices, as well as shelters for asylum seekers and deportation.35 Amma Darko has, in Beyond the Horizon, explored how her protagonist’s status as an illegal immigrant makes her a member of German society, but one without rights, which again reinforces African patriarchal power and discrimination. Insofar as Europe itself has become a common scene for African (diasporic) writers, new and challenging perspectives on Europe and its cultural, social, and political processes open up, provincializing Europe, pluralizing European (self-)perceptions, and necessitating new categories with which to approach writing in Europe.

Globalization, Literature, and Literary Studies: Perspectives on a ‘Poetics of Global Relationships’ Without Permanent Residence In accordance with the fact that writers from Africa have emerged as wanderers between worlds (between and into nations and national literatures), border crossings, not only in a physical but also in a literary sense, are part and parcel of many African (diasporic) writers’ life experiences – thus also allowing them to cross these borderlines. “I wasn’t born into a little part of the earth, I was born into the world,” says Ben Okri. “And so the world is my home, and I’m at home in the world’s myths.”36 These border crossings often cause irritations when it comes to labelling. Cyprian Ekwensi holds that “you are an African writer because you are a writer living in Africa. When you live in Europe, whatever you will be doing will no longer be African.”37 Femi Osofisan’s model is more inclusive, in that he sees a common foundation between authors in Africa and the diaspora, but nevertheless finds a differentiated localization sensible. “When postcolonialism talks of the ‘Centre,’ and locates it in the West, our own ‘Centre’ is on the contrary Africa itself.” Ultimately, this “African Centre” needs to be contrasted with two categories of the ‘Other’ – “one 35 János Riesz, “Autor/innen aus dem schwarzafrikanischen Kulturraum,” in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch, ed. Carmine Chiellino (Stuttgart & Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2000): 248–62; Leroy T. Hopkins, “Sprich, damit ich dich sehe! Eine afrodeutsche Literatur,” in Schreiben zwischen den Kulturen: Beiträge zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1996): 196–210. 36 Ben Okri, in Loimeier, Wortwechsel, 156; cited from the original interview. Analogous to this, Alain Patrice Nganang – who has lived and worked in Cameroon, France, Germany and the U S A – also stresses that he is at home in the libraries of this world. See Nganang, “Das Bewusstsein der Sprache, ihr Gewissen,” in Exophonie: Anders-Sprachigkeit (in) der Literatur, ed. Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski & Robert Stockhammer (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007): 114–24. 37 Quoted in Loimeier, Wortwechsel, 65, cited from the original interview.

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constituted by the white world, and the second by our brothers and sisters in exile in the diaspora.”38 Osofisan’s understanding seems to come close to what is implied by the term ‘African diasporic literature’, which – like its portmanteau form ‘Afrosporic literature’ – indicates that the literature referred to is in one way or the other ‘rooted’ in and ‘routed’ through Africa, but has moved to and settled somewhere else. When wishing to emphasize more clearly that this literature has entered the European narrative tradition, it would seem apt to speak of African European writing, or, with different foci, black European, Black British, black German writing and so on. All such terms, however, are of limited persuasiveness, since they reproduce conventional asymmetries of thinking and labelling. Informed by a strategy of ‘Othering’, black European /British /German writing is, as a rule, not paired with ‘white European / British /German writing’, but simply with what is actually its hyperonym: ‘European / British / German writing’. Here, ‘white’ is a default position, hence functions as an unmarked marker of invisible normality. This implicit positioning of European (national) literatures as writings by white authors corresponds discursively to the fact that European countries (and their literary institutions) seem to have difficulty in taking up migrant and diasporic writers into their canons. In connotative analogy with ‘Othering’ terms such as ‘African diasporic literature’ or ‘black European literature’, the literatures thus labelled are positioned within peripheralized niches of mainstream disciplines such as English or German studies. It is true that earlier classifications such as ‘Commonwealth literatures’ are increasingly challenged and now only rarely used, because they topographically and semantically focus on the former colonial empires. But new terms labelling academic disciplines such as ‘new English literatures / new literatures in English’39 or ‘francophone literatures’ are not uncontroversial, either. These terms generalize and homogenize divergent literary arenas and are characterized by a rhetoric of ‘Othering’ which implicitly assumes the existence of a 38 Femi Osofisan, “Theater and the Rites of Post-Negritude Remembering,” Research in African Literatures 30.1 (1999): 5. 39 The inscribed ambivalence of ‘new’ in ‘new English literatures’ – indicating, in different contexts, either the latest publications of British literature or non-British and non-U S literatures in English – can be avoided by relying on the term ‘new literatures in English’ (German: ‘neue englischsprachige Literaturen’). However, the problem remains that the term homogenizes and alterizes, opening up a binarity that does not do justice to the inside status of diasporic literature nor takes into account that it may be reasonable to distinguish between literatures from Nigeria and India and also between more recent and older tendencies in Nigerian and Indian literatures, as is done for British literatures. The study of English literature knows of, and discusses, these pitfalls but will have to keep skirting them until agreement on a less controversial terminology is reached.

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literary norm, a literary centre, that corresponds to well-worn concepts of ‘national literature’ to which, ultimately, neither the ‘Other’ in the African diaspora nor in Africa belongs. These kinds of generalization, exclusion, and demarcation revitalize the occidentalized symbolic order of centre and periphery, of ‘the West and the Rest’, hence seem to domesticate the discussed complexity of global cultural and literary networks.40 In order to challenge the tendency to reaffirm an invented ‘Otherness’ (with the aim of setting off the ‘European white Self’ from it) it might, at times, be helpful to rely on complex and flexible categories that are interdependent, context-oriented, and fluid. These might be a way to do justice to the dynamic complexity of global trans-space literature, without any rhetoric of exclusion, without negating or reproducing mainstream strategies of alterization, and without neglecting the writer’s ‘roots’ and ‘routes’. Following this approach, Buchi Emecheta would then, depending on the context, be a British author from the Igbo /Nigerian / African / black diaspora, belonging equally to the British, black, and Nigerian literary arenas. In a symmetrical perspective, Joseph Conrad could be categorized, again depending on the context, as a white British author coming from the Polish diaspora with a French (language) socialization, a globetrotter biography, and a colonialist experience and poetic. These terminological approaches may, though irritating and intricating, accord with the realization that national literatures no longer are (if they ever were) constituted by one’s being ‘rooted’ (i.e. born or patriated) in a given country, but work according to a “new, mobile and migratory logic.”41 In presenting literature as a transnational storage medium of transcultural life knowledge, Ette suggests re-situating the concept of ‘national literature’. He argues that “the literature of migration cannot just be added to national literature; rather, it transforms it fundamentally.”42 After all, living between cultures has an effect on writers’ works, in terms both of content and of poetic. The permanent situation of migration corresponds to a long-term language movement of migration between cultures, creating a potentiated literature in motion on the level of content and expression, and also a literature without a permanent domicile.43

Decisive in this respect is the fact that space and time are, of course, fluid and protean. Positions that essentialize authenticity, cultural roots, monolingualism, mother tongue, and the nation-state are critically examined and identified as 40 41 42 43

For an alternative approach see Ette, ÜberLebenswissen. Ette, ÜberLebenswissen, 234. ÜberLebenswissen, 242. ÜberLebenswissen, 238, my tr.

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temporal and spatial constructs. The multiple, the break, decentralization and heterogeneity, hybridity, de-territorialization, multilingualism and simultaneity are now shifted to the centre, thus moving it. Édouard Glissant argues that all the cultures of the world are interrelated, not just in bipolar encounters, but polydirectionally, thus forming a global and multilayered net of cultures and literatures which performs as a “unity of liberating diversity.”44 One may call it a “chaos-world,”45 as Glissant admits, but desperation will only arise if attempts are made to tame, arrange, classify, and understand the complexities and dynamics of this global literary ensemble by negating everything that is not understood by the centre and not educible by means of its conventional tools. By contrast, chaos is informed by beauty when it is allowed to remain opaque and unpredictable. Glissant argues that the West has always aimed at transparency, which, in fact, is synonymous to him with attempts at reducing the ‘Other’ to the West’s own categories and paradigms. But to reduce the ‘Other’, forcing it to imitate the ‘Self’, is a form of ‘barbarism’ to him. But to accept that one is incapable of understanding the ‘Other’ completely is a manifestation of ‘civilization’.46 In order to approach literature as a discoverer of the “Tout-Monde” [AllWorld] and inhabitant of the non-system of the “All-World,” a new way of approaching literature is needed, an approach identified by Glissant as “poétique de la relation” [poetics of relation].47 The underlying idea of relating cultures is to perform variety as a basic condition for unity – without, however, executing exclusions or disregarding historically grown and discursively and structurally anchored hegemonies and hierarchies. Glissant illustrates his idea of the ‘poetics of relation’ by referring to Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s metaphor of the rhizome.48 The root – which would be a suitable metaphor for Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s and Erich Auerbach’s notion of ‘Weltliteratur’49 –

44 Édouard Glissant, Kultur und Identität: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt (Introduction à une poétique du divers, 1996; Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2005): 54; excerpt repr. in Édouard Glissant, Pierre Joris, “From Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse,” boundary 2 26.1 (“99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium”; Spring 1999), 119–21. 45 Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 54. 46 Glissant, “Interview,” Les périphériques vous parlent 14 (2005). 47 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation, 1990; Ann Arbor: U P of Michigan, 1997). 48 Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1993). 49 See Manfred Koch, Weimaraner Weltbewohner: Zur Genese von Goethes Begriffe ‘Weltliteratur’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002); Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: Francke, 1946), and “Philologie der

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extends linearly, genealogically, solitarily, and predictably into the depths of the earth. Accordingly, Glissant reads it as a metaphor for long-established cultures and territories. The rhizome, conversely, spreads out, encountering and cross-linking with others.50 As such, it presents itself in an unpredictable, fluid, and polyphonic way, hence is most suited as a metaphor for complex cultures shaped by processes of cultural creolization.51 Consistent with Glissant’s argument and notion of the “All-World” and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s view that Europe has been provincialized by its ‘Others’, the so-called long-established cultures would likewise seem to have long since become organized in a complex way that allows them to be read as rhizomatic. Allowing for, and expressing, the diversity of interests and composite nature of a ‘literature in motion’52 from the perspective of a ‘poetics of global relationships’ that aims at conceptualizing humanity in all its hybridity and at discussing cultural experiences against a background of universal patterns, Ette suggests forming a transdisciplinary, transcultural form of literary studies “without permanent residence.” For him, this would be informed methodologically by cultural studies and would realize itself via individual, isolated literary studies, thereby overcoming national – or, as in the exceptional space of African studies, continental – borderlines.53 This approach offers a framework with which to handle what postcolonialist theoretical perspectives have taught us: that literatures need to be conceived of in a perspective that both ‘provincializes Europe’ and ‘globalizes Africa’.

WORKS CITED Alexander, Vera, & Sissy Helff. “The Politics of Shifting Boundaries in Moyez G. Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack and Farida Karodia’s Other Secrets,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 327–42. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Arndt, Susan. “Introduction: Rereading (Post)Colonialism: Whiteness, Wandering and Writing,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 13–79. Weltliteratur,” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern & Munich: Francke, 1967): 301–10. 50 Glissant, Kultur und Identität, 39. 51 Kultur und Identität, 51. 52 Ette, ÜberLebenswissen. 53 ÜberLebenswissen, 88–92.

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——. “The Racial Turn. Kolonialismus, Weiße Mythen und Critical Whiteness Studies,” in Koloniale und postkoloniale Konstruktionen von Afrika und Menschen afrikanischer Herkunft in der deutschen Alltagskultur, ed. Marianne Bechhaus–Gerst, Sunna Gieseke & Reinhard Klein–Arendt (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2006): 11–26. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Bern: A. Francke, 1946). ——. “Philologie der Weltliteratur,” in Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur romanischen Philologie (Bern & Munich: A. Francke, 1967): 301–10. Braziel, Jana Evans, & Anita Mannur. “Nation, Migration, Globalization. Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies”, in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Jana Evans Braziel & Anita Mannur (Malden M A & Oxford: Blackwell, 2003): 1–22. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Clifford, James. “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38. ——. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997). Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Mille plateaux, 1980; Minneapolis: U P of Minnesota, 1993). Emecheta, Buchi. In the Ditch (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1972). ——. Second Class Citizen (London: Allison & Busby, 1974). Ette, Ottmar. ÜberLebenswissen: Die Aufgabe der Philologie (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004). Farah, Nuruddin. Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora (London & New York: Cassell, 2000). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Glissant, Édouard. Kultur und Identität: Ansätze zu einer Poetik der Vielfalt (Introduction à une poétique du divers, 1996; Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2005); repr. (excerpt) in Édouard Glissant, Pierre Joris, “From Introduction to a Poetics of the Diverse,” boundary 2, 26.1 (Spring 1999; “99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium”), 119–21. ——. “Interview,” Les périphériques vous parlent 14 (2005). ——. Poetics of Relation, tr. Betsy Wing (Poétique de la Relation: Essay, 1990; Ann Arbor: U P of Michigan, 1997). Gopinath, Gayatri. “Bombay, U.K., Yuba City: Bhangra Music and the Engendering of Diaspora,” Diaspora 4.3 (1995): 303–22. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. By the Sea (London: Bloomsbury, 2001). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. Hermand, Jost, & Wigand Lange. “Wollt Ihr Thomas Mann wiederhaben?” Deutschland und die Emigranten (Hamburg: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1999). Hopkins, Leroy T. “Sprich, damit ich dich sehe! Eine afrodeutsche Literatur,” in Schreiben zwischen den Kulturen: Beiträge zur deutschsprachigen Gegenwartsliteratur, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1996): 196–210. Koch, Manfred. Weimaraner Weltbewohner: Zur Genese von Goethes Begriffe ‘Weltliteratur’ (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2002). Lämmert, Eberhard. “‘Oftmals such’ ich ein Wort’: Exil als Lebensform,” T R A N S : InternetZeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 15 (April 2004): online. Loimeier, Manfred. Zum Beispiel afrikanische Literatur (Göttingen: Lamuv, 1997).

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——. Wortwechselm: Gespräche und Interviews mit Autoren aus Schwarzafrika (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 2002). Marechera, Dambudzo. “Black Skin, What Mask,” in House of Hunger (London, Ibadan & Nairobi: Heinemann, 1978): 93–99. Nganang, Patrice. “Das Bewusstsein der Sprache, ihr Gewissen,” in Exophonie: AndersSprachigkeit (in) der Literatur, ed. Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski & Robert Stockhammer (Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007): 114–24. Nkosi, Lewis. “The Wandering Subject. Exile as ‘Fetish’,” in Africa, Europe and (Post) Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 207–28. Nnenyelike, Nwagbo. “The Dramatist as a Rebel,” Daily Sun (1 February 2005). Oji, Chima. Unter die Deutschen gefallen: Erfahrungen eines Afrikaners (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1992). Osofisan, Femi. “Theater and the Rites of Post-Negritude Remembering,” Research in African Literatures 30.1 (1999): 1–11. Raji, Wumi. “Looking Back/Looking Forward. Identity and Memory in African Fictions of Exile,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 279–93. Riesz, János. “Autor/innen aus dem schwarzafrikanischen Kulturraum,” in Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: Ein Handbuch, ed. Carmine Chiellino (Stuttgart & Weimar: J.B. Metzler, 2000): 248–62. Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Min-ha & Cornel West (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1990): 357–66. ——. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Sankoh, Osman A. “‘Ich setze mich nicht neben einen Neger’: Alltagserfahrungen eines Afrikaners in Deutschland,” in Afrika: Mythos und Zukunft, ed. Katja Böhler & Jürgen Hoeren (Freiburg: Herder, 2003): 11–17. Saro–Wiwa, Ken. Basi and Company: A Modern African Folktale (Port Harcourt: Saros International, 1987). Schramm, Katharina. “Imagined Pasts: Present Confrontations. Literary and Ethnographic Explorations into Pan-African Identity Politics,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora in African Literatures, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinski (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies, 2006): 243–56. ——. “Struggling Over the Past: The Politics of Heritage and Homecoming in Ghana” (doctoral dissertation, Freie Universität, Berlin, 2004). Shepperson, George. “African Diaspora: Concept and Context,” in Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora, ed. Joseph E. Harris (Washington D C : Howard U P , 1993): 41–49. Smith, Rowland, ed. Exile and Tradition: Studies in African and Caribbean Literature (London: Longman, 1976). Segal, Ronald. The Black Diaspora (London: Faber & Faber, 1995). Woodhull, Winifred. “Exile,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 7–24. Zinsou, Sénouvo Agbota. Le Médicament (Paris: Hatier international, 2003).

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E LISABETH B EKERS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Culture in Transit — The Migration of Female Genital Excision to Europe in Euro-African Writing

ABSTRACT: While past discussions of female genital excision concentrated on its incidence in Africa, attention of late has been shifting to the emergence of the tradition in the African diaspora. This essay examines how four authors of African descent explore the migration of female genital excision to Europe. It compares a remarkable passage in the novel Abessijnse Kronieken (Abyssinian Chronicles) by Moses Isegawa with the autobiographical writings of two anti-‘F G M ’ (female genital mutilation) activists, Mutilée by Khady Koita and Desert Children by Waris Dirie, and with the novel Rebelle by Fatou Keïta. Although these authors share a critical outlook on the practice, the discursive and narrative strategies they adopt differ greatly. A close reading of the four texts reveals that Isegawa fails to contextualize adequately the practice of female genital excision; this contrasts with his three female colleagues, who do acknowledge the conventional cultural and religious discourses on female genital excision yet remain adamant in their abolitionist stance.

A

A B E S S I J N S E K R O N I E K E N / Abyssinian Chronicles (1998 / 2000) was received to mixed reviews, Moses Isegawa’s literary debut is undoubtedly a remarkable specimen of Euro-African creative writing. Within four years of its publication, the novel had accrued enough celebrity status to be included among Africa’s 100 Best Books of the LTHOUGH

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Twentieth Century. Parading in this list as new kid on the block, one from the diaspora to boot, it has boldly claimed its place among such long-standing icons of African literature as Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958), Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Œuvre poétique (1964), and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967). The novel has also earned the Uganda-born Isegawa considerable recognition in the Netherlands, his country of residence since 1990. Together with authors such as Kader Abdolah, Abdelkader Benali, Hafid Bouazza, Fouad Laroui,1 and Astrid Roemer, he is regarded as one of the major representatives of ‘migrant literature’ in the Netherlands. Isegawa’s prominence on the Dutch literary scene is particularly noteworthy since he writes in English. First published in the Netherlands in Dutch translation, his first novel and later writings have since found their way to audiences across the globe in various languages, including English. Abyssinian Chronicles – the manuscript’s original title has since 2000 graced the covers of U K and U S editions2 – thus testifies to some of the linguistic complexities of writing and publishing in the African diaspora. If the novel’s position in African (diasporic) literatures merits further attention, I mention Isegawa’s first book here for a different reason: namely, the author’s references to female genital excision (I will justify my use of this cover term presently) and its practice in Europe at the recent turn of the millennium. Explorations of female genital excision in both African fiction and lifewriting3 are neither as rare nor as recent as one might think. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the practice has been explored in African literatures ever since the rise of the latter in the 1960s, by men and women, from the early African pioneers to contemporary writers, and from both the continent and the diaspora.4 Among the authors are the Kenyan Ngũgĩ, the Egyptian Nawal El

1

See Fouad Laroui’s article and short story in this volume. Moses Isegawa, Abessijnse Kronieken, tr. Ria Loohuizen (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1998); Abyssinian Chronicles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf & London: Picador, 2000). Unless indicated otherwise, all page references in this article are to the Picador edition. 3 The terms ‘African fiction’ and ‘African life-writing’ are used in their broadest sense to refer to fiction and life-writing produced by African authors from the continent as well as the diaspora. The term ‘life-writing’ covers the whole spectrum of (auto)biography and refers to writing that is subjected to varying degrees of fictionalisation. 4 For a comparative diachronic study of female genital excision in literary texts from Africa and the African diaspora published in the last four decades of the twentieth century, see Elisabeth Bekers, Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , forthcoming 2010). An outline of this study can be found in Elisabeth Bekers, “Painful Entanglements: African and African-American Literary Engagements in the International Debate on Female Genital Excision,” in Africa and 2

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Saadawi, the Somali Nuruddin Farah, the Cameroonian-born Calixthe Beyala, and the African American Alice Walker, to name but a few.5 The topic is also addressed in African life-writing, with or without an ethnographic or sociographic slant, ranging from Jomo Kenyatta’s positive appraisal of the Gikuyu initiation ritual in his 1938 auto-ethnographic study of the Gikuyu of Kenya to the recent autobiographical narratives of excised women, including Waris Dirie’s widely translated Desert Flower (1998) and Desert Dawn (2002).6 The Somali-born anti-‘F G M ’ (female genital mutilation) activist Dirie was not the first to raise the subject of female genital excision in her memoirs. A decade earlier, the Guinean Kesso Barry, writing her autobiography Kesso Princesse peuhle [Kesso, a Fulani Princess] (1988), had used her own experience of excision to denounce the practice as an oppressive gender practice, and her example has been followed by Fauziya Kassindja, Nura Abdi, Fadumo Korn, and Khady Koita.7 If most of these fictional and non-fictional texts examine

Its Significant Others: Forty Years of Intercultural Entanglement (Thamyris 11; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 45–59. 5 For discussions of individual literary texts dealing with female genital excision, see, for example: Elisabeth Bekers, “Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s The River Between: Romeo and Juliet in a Postcolonial African Context,” B E L L (Belgian Essays on Language and Literature): 29–37; “Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change: Female Genital Excision in Two African Short Stories and in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy,” in Africa on the Cusp of the 21st Century (Thamyris 6.2; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 255–71; “Captive/ating Women Warriors: Nawal El Saadawi’s Firdaus and Calixthe Beyala’s Tanga,” in North-South Linkages and Connections in Continental and Diaspora African Literatures, ed. Edris Makward, Mark Lilleleth & Ahmed Saber (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2005): 66–77. 6 Jomo Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (1938; New York: Vintage, 1965); Waris Dirie & Cathleen Miller, Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad (New York: William Morrow, 1998); Waris Dirie & Jeanne D’haem, Desert Dawn (London: Virago, 2002). For a discussion of Dirie’s and other life-writing on female genital excision, see, for example, Chantal Zabus, “Acquiring Body: Waris Dirie, Infibulation, and New African Female Self-Writing,” in Africa and Its Significant Others: Forty Years of Intercultural Entanglement (Thamyris 11; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 61–76, and, more generally, Zabus, “Between Rites and Rights: Excision on Trial in African Women’s Texts and Human Contexts,” in Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’-Colonial World, ed. Peter H. Marsden & Geoffrey V. Davis (A S N E L Papers 8, Cross/Cultures 76; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004): 109–34. 7 Kesso Barry, Kesso Princesse peuhle (Paris: Seghers, 1988); Fauziya Kassindja & Layli Miller Bashir, Do They Hear You When You Cry (New York: Delacorte, 1998); Nura Abdi & Leo G. Linder, Tränen im Sand (Bergisch Gladbach: Ehrenwirt/Lübbe, 2003; Fadumo Korn & Sabine Eichhorst, Geboren im Groβen Regen: Mein Leben zwischen Afrika und Deutschland (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2004; Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, tr. Tobe Levin (New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 2006); Khady [Koita] & Marie–Thérèse

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female genital excision as it is (or has been) practised in Africa,8 attention has of late been shifting to the migration of the tradition to the African diaspora. The focus is thereby usually on an excised woman’s migration to the West, as is the case in Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992),9 undoubtedly the most widely read novel dealing with female genital excision. My attention here is devoted to four texts that specifically address the migration of the practice itself, albeit in very different ways and in very different genres: Isegawa’s novel Abessijnse Kronieken10 and Koita’s “deeply moving testimony”11 Muti-

Cuny, Mutilée (Paris: Oh! Editions, 2005). Although this last book does not mention Khady’s surname, it provides sufficient information to identify her as the activist Khady Koita. Not all life-narratives criticize the practice so explicitly. For instance, in the autobiographical novel Daughter of Mumbi (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969), the Kenyan Charity Waciuma, unexcised herself, nevertheless denounces colonialist intervention in the practice. In Two Lives: My Spirit and I (London: Women’s Press, 1986), her fellow countrywoman Jane Tapsubei Creider does not oppose her excision but, rather, the way in which her suitor uses it as a means to marry her against her will. The anonymous narrator of Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl (New York: Pantheon, 1994) even openly pleads for the medicalization of the operation. 8 In Africa, genital operations are routinely performed on women as gender-constructing rituals in the vast sub-Saharan region stretching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean as well as in the Arabic Northeast of the continent, regardless of their social position or religious affiliation. Although female genital excision is often associated with Islam, no reference is made to it in either the Q’uran or the shari’ah (Islamic law), and the hadîth (the tradition of sayings and actions attributed to Mohammed) have been interpreted both as supportive and dismissive of the practice. Female genital excision, however, is not an exclusively African practice. It is also performed by some population groups in the Middle East, Mexico, Columbia, Peru, Malaysia, and Indonesia, and by the Bohra Muslims in India and Pakistan. It is not unknown in the West either, where it was practised during the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century as a cure for female insanity, frigidity, or masturbation. But even in our present “Surgical Age,” to borrow Naomi Wolf’s term, different types of cosmetic operations on women’s genitals are becoming increasingly fashionable. The focus of this essay is on female genital excision as a gender ritual upheld by some African population groups in the diaspora. There, as in Africa, the practice is not necessarily embedded in a ceremonial frame and other (e.g., religious) motivations may also be cited for its continuation. See also, for instance, Efua Dorkenoo, Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Its Prevention (London, Minority Rights, 1995). 9 Alice Walker, Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). 10 Since my discussion focuses on a passage missing from the English-language editions, the Dutch translation Abessijnse Kronieken is the text under review here, although at first sight Abyssinian Chronicles would be a more obvious source-text in an essay written in English. 11 The expression “témoignage bouleversant” appears on my copy’s promotional wrapper.

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lée [Mutilated] (2005), both mentioned above, as well as Fatou Keïta’s novel Rebelle [Rebel] (1998) and Waris Dirie’s Desert Children (2005).12 The increase in references to the migration of female genital excision in literature and life-writing is consistent with the growing number of reports, whether in the general media, by legal or medical authorities, or by academics in various disciplines, that specifically address the growing number of (attested) cases of excision performed on young African immigrants in Europe, North America, and Australia. If excision has become contested in Africa itself, with individual countries and pan-African organizations banning the practice and population groups opting for alternative rituals (e.g., the “Circumcision Through Words” ritual developed by Kenya’s national women’s association), female genital excision has certainly also become “a very emotive issue in the Western world,”13 on which universalist human-rights perspectives tend to clash with culturally relativistic attitudes, and on which African migrants upholding their ancestors’ traditions find themselves in bitter conflict with the customs and laws of their new countries of residence.14 Taking Isegawa’s approach to the issue as my point of departure, I will examine how three African authors living in Europe and one European-educated but African-based writer15 discuss the migration to Europe of the culturally sensitive practice of female genital excision. Aimed at scrutinizing the writers’ textual contributions to, and positions within, the broader debate on female genital excision, my enquiry is not guided by the writers’ sex, ethnic background or geographical location,16 or 12

Fatou Keïta, Rebelle (Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes & Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998); all translations are mine; Waris Dirie & Corinna Milborn, Desert Children, tr. Sheelagh Alabaster (Schmerzenskinder; Berlin: Marion von Schroeder, 2005; tr. London: Virago, 2005); all references are to the English translation. All translations from Mutilée are my own. 13 Dorkenoo, Cutting the Rose, 126. 14 For instance, between 1988 and 1993 no fewer than ten excision cases went before the courts in France, with both parents and traditional excisers being sentenced to imprisonment. In Europe such criminal prosecutions for female genital excision have only occurred in France, Italy, and Spain. See Els Leye & Jessika Deblonde, Legislation in Europe Regarding Female Genital Mutilation and the Implementation of the Law in Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden and the U K (Ghent: International Centre for Reproductive Health, University of Ghent, 2004): 12–19. I am well aware that my sketch of the debate on female genital excision in Europe is a rather simplified one and I hope to show more of its complexities through my discussion of the four texts that are the subject of this essay. 15 Although Fatou Keïta currently resides and works in Ivory Coast, she studied in France and has lived in Great Britain and the U S A . 16 While the authors’ personal background has undoubtedly affected their views on female genital excision, rather than conducting a biographically oriented enquiry into the authors’ motives for their textual explorations of the practice, I prefer to focus on the narrative and

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even by their more general choices of genre, but rather by the specific narrative and discursive strategies Isegawa, Koita, Dirie, and Keïta adopt to explore the topic. Given that Isegawa’s epic novel essentially narrates the life of a young Ugandan male against the background of his country’s brutal history up until his migration to Europe, one does not immediately expect to find allusions to female genital excision in Abessijnse Kronieken. Nevertheless, the particular passage in the novel that holds my interest in this essay is preceded by a number of (brief) references to the practice. On these occasions, it is situated in a continental African context, as when the narrator disparagingly describes the political situation of Uganda in the late 1970s – “writhing like a dying moth on the floor” under General Amin’s reign – and throws in references to the Somali–Ethiopian Ogaden war raging in the “Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness” and to the equally conflict-ridden Sudan, where bombs and guns “devastated the land while circumcision razor blades terrorized virgin vulvas.”17 Although both phrases support the narrator’s depiction of a world on the brink of destruction, female genital excision here features merely as a figure of style, as an emblem of the physical and psychological devastation sweeping across early post-independent Northeast Africa. Neither of these references to the practice adds to the novel’s plot, nor do the other minor allusions in Isegawa’s book. They are also too cursory to offer any real insight into the debate on the practice, even if they do reveal that Isegawa takes care not to generalize the spread of female genital excision to the whole African continent, in spite of the narrator’s above-cited sweeping statements. On two different occasions, attention is drawn to the fact that the novel’s protagonist Mugezi (Moegezi in the Dutch spelling) and his family are quite unfamiliar with the practice.18 At the beginning of the novel, when Mugezi’s Catholic grandfather is teasing his daughter Nakatu about her conversion to Islam, his “attempt at humour” about the surgical prerequisite for such a conversion (essential for males) meets with her curt reply: “Whoever had heard of women getting circumcised?”19 Later, in the novel’s final chapter, Mugezi himself admits to the reader that he “didn’t even know what a circumcised woman looked or felt like,” even if he sarcastically confirms his Amsterdam lover’s prejudices about Africa by telling her

discursive strategies writers employ in realizing their fictional or non-fictional constructions of female genital excision. 17 Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles, 286. 18 Female genital excision is practised only in Eastern Uganda, in districts bordering on Kenya. 19 Abyssinian Chronicles, 19.

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that, if she and her “mother and sisters had been born there,” they too would have appeared in the continent’s female genital excision statistics.20 Although Isegawa thus implicitly dissociates the practice from Islam, the characters’ and, in particular, the narrator’s use of the misleading terms ‘circumcision’ and ‘circumcised’ is far less commendable. Even if it can be argued that Mugezi and his aunt are using what in the 1980s was the most common term, ‘female circumcision’ has since come under serious attack for being incorrect in the vast majority of cases. While the term does acknowledge the equivalence of male and female genital operations in many of the societies that practise female genital excision, the operations performed on women are ordinarily far more invasive physically than male circumcision and rarely limited to the cutting of the foreskin of the clitoris.21 The narrator’s discursive vagueness here is in stark contrast to the precision and elaborateness he displays in a longer passage on excision at the end of the novel.22 But why this turn-around? And, is it really one? In the last chapter of Abessijnse Kronieken, dealing with Mugezi’s settlement in a predominantly African quarter of Amsterdam and wittily entitled “Ghettoblaster,” Isegawa at first sight appears not to treat female genital excision simply as a figure of style, but to explore the practice itself. The narrator23 uses the arrival in the ghetto of a renowned and wealthy (if nameless) practitioner of female genital excision in order to offer a detailed explanation of her 20

Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles, 433. Hence my use of ‘female genital excision’ (or ‘excision’ for short) as a more transparent cover term than ‘female circumcision’, one that moreover avoids the judgmental term ‘female genital mutilation’ and should facilitate discussion of both affirmative and negative evaluations of the practice. 22 This passage occupies some five pages in the Dutch edition I consulted: Moses Isegawa, Abessijnse Kronieken (Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1999): 584–589; all further references are to this fragment and all translations are mine. In the British Picador edition the passage would have started a new paragraph after the one ending with “I was repelled by the stories they told, especially about how cruelly some of their bosses threated them” (Isegawa, Abyssinian Chronicles, 437). 23 In the opening line of this passage, which zooms in on the criminality of the street gang by referring to its most recent and “most famous victim,” the infibulator, Mugezi still functions as focalizer, but Isegawa quickly switches to an omniscient perspective in order to transcend the limitations of his protagonist’s point of view. In fact, Isegawa’s use of perspective is flexible throughout the novel, which has led some critics to observe admiringly that the author’s “subtle shifts between first-person and omniscient narrators serve his ambitions well” (Annmarie S. Drury, Times Literary Supplement [20 October 2000]), while others simply have been irritated by the “inconsistencies in the narrator’s point of view” (Ellen Williams, amazon.co.uk.review of Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles: http: //www.amazon.co.uk /Abyssinian-Chronicles-Moses-Isegawa/dp/0330376659 [accessed 18 April 2006]). 21

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operative procedures. These involve the complete removal and suturing of the female genitals, a procedure referred to as ‘infibulation’ in the literature on female genital excision, so that the narrator accurately calls the woman an “infibulator.” Through the woman’s own infibulation experiences, the reader is further informed that, as non-fictional documents on the subject also testify,24 women who have undergone this most drastic type of genital operation need to be cut open on their wedding nights and before each delivery, only to be sewn up again post partem. The narrator, however, goes beyond the impartial explication of the procedure and (some of) its practical consequences to laud the infibulator’s expertise, which even surpasses the skilfulness attributed to the Gikuyu exciser figuring in Kenyatta’s ethnography. If the latter is said to operate with the dexterity of a “Harley Street surgeon,”25 the Somali infibulator in Abessijnse Kronieken is called “a natural talent, one in a thousand,” “an artist” even. In her home country, situated in the earlier-mentioned “Horn of Clitoris- and Labialessness,” she is employed as the “private infibulator of the families of two government leaders and many ministers and dignitaries,” and Isegawa’s narrator speaks of her current “tour” round Western capitals as if she were a pop star. Her professional career, the narrator proudly adds, had “launched like a rocket” and had brought her so much money that she had taken to giving it away. In this laudatio of the infibulator, the narrator’s Chaucer-like encyclopaedianism and praise is so exaggerated that it becomes as satirical as in some of the portraits in The Canterbury Tales’ General Prologue: She utilized knives, razors, pangas, daggers, broken glass, anything which had a sharp edge, and then felt a divine omnipotence rush through her. She was convinced that she, if she had to, could cut a little girl with a machete without doing any damage.

The underlying tone becomes even more acid when the narrator takes to praising the infibulator’s incredible drive. She travels to African ghettoes in the diaspora purely out of love for her work and is unperturbed by the French authorities’ denunciation of the practice.26 Parents can either send their daughters to her in Somalia or wait for her return to Europe the following year. It is precisely this unswerving determination that costs her her life. The passage ends with the infibulator being brutally stabbed by a gang of male ghetto thugs for refusing to hand her money to such trash, “stinking of cheap scents, drugs and alcohol.” The narrator’s persistent overstatement, here and elsewhere in Abessijnse Kronieken, drives home the author’s scorn. 24 25 26

See, for instance, Dirie, Desert Children, 9. Kenyatta, Facing Mount Kenya, 140. This is an historical reference. See footnote 14 above.

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However, even though the cynicism of the passage dealing with the migration of female genital excision to Europe is in keeping with the novel’s style, the fragment is not unproblematic. With his larger-than-life portrait of the infibulator and his extensive detailing, Isegawa may well confirm his denunciation of the woman and her harrowing procedures; he nevertheless fails to contextualize the practice adequately. Although the African infibulator figures in a diasporic setting in the novel, Isegawa chooses largely to ignore the cultural dilemma that arises with the migration of female genital excision to the African diaspora. He also disregards the traditional motivations for the practice (the infibulator wields her knife almost obsessively) as well as the French authorities’ reasons for opposing it, and he completely bypasses African immigrants’ experiences with female genital excision. Isegawa further complicates his approach to the practice by mirroring this lack of socio-cultural context on a narrative level by poorly integrating the infibulation passage into his story. The arrival and subsequent death of the infibulator in Abessijnse Kronieken are barely, if at all, relevant to Mugezi’s lifestory. Although there is some narrative justice in the fact that the woman dies through the very instrument by means of which she has gained her wealth and fame and bleeds to death not unlike a haemorrhaging excision victim (though the narrator explicitly states nothing of the kind ever happened to any of the girls she infibulated), her violent death only superficially resembles the murder of her fellow fictional practitioner of female genital excision, M’Lissa in Possessing the Secret of Joy. Whereas in Walker’s narrative this event constitutes a turning-point in the life of the deeply traumatized protagonist (Tashi experiences her killing of the woman who had excised both her and her [Tashi’s] sister as a vengeful and therefore liberating act),27 Isegawa’s infibulator is the unfortunate victim of a random if brutal mugging that essentially serves to illustrate the danger of life in a crime-ridden ghetto.28 As a result, although female genital excision is more elebarately dealt with here than in the very brief passages preceding it, its appearance in the narrative is merely emblematic. The relative inconsequentiality of the whole episode in Abessijnse Kronieken is further confirmed by the fact that the entire fragment about the infibulator is missing from the English-language editions, which from 2000 onwards have 27

See also my discussion of the murder of M’Lissa in Bekers, “Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change,” 266. 28 The stabbing of the infibulator demonstrates the rampant impunity reigning in the ghetto – “the boys were not taken in, not even for routine questioning” – and so scares Mugezi that he locks himself up “in his room for weeks and engrossed himself in the Dutch language” (Isegawa, Abessijnse Kronieken, 590). This confession of Mugezi’s concludes the passage dealing with the infibulator.

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moved anglophone readers across the world.29 Even though Abyssinian Chronicles retains all the minor references to the practice of female genital excision that were included in the Dutch translation published two years earlier, there is no trace of the infibulator and her experiences in the English editions. Precisely this double absence of embeddedness renders Isegawa’s detailed references to female genital excision gratuitous and suspect. The protagonist Mugezi may express his disgust at the questionable methods of the fund-raisers for Africa he meets in Amsterdam, in the infibulator episode of Abessijnse Kronieken Isegawa himself appears to play the ‘hot topic’ card and pander to sensationalism by focusing exclusively on the operative procedures and the violent murder of the infibulator. The removal of this passage from Abyssinian Chronicles, which to my knowledge has not been noted in reviews or interviews, does suggest that in the two years between the publication of the Dutchand English-language versions, Isegawa, too, may have changed (or been asked to change) his mind about the episode. The intensification of the debate on female genital excision in the late 1990s – undoubtedly stimulated by the publication of Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower and Fauziya Kassindja Do They Hear You When You Cry, both of which appeared the same year as Isegawa’s Dutchlanguage edition – may have convinced him that his narrative strategy of overstatement and especially his failure to integrate the practice into either a sociocultural or a narrative context were not the most appropriate ways in which to approach an issue as sensitive as female genital excision. Unlike its representation in Isegawa’s novel, the migration of female genital excision to Europe is an essential concern in the recent autobiographical narratives of Khady Koita, a Senegalese immigrant in France, and of Waris Dirie, a Somali-born former super-model who obtained Austrian citizenship in 2005. Both women underwent some type of ritual genital operation as young girls (i.e. before their emigration from Africa) and have since acquired a considerable reputation across the globe as anti-‘F G M ’ activists. Since disclosing her own infibulation trauma in an interview in the women’s magazine Marie Claire in 1995 and subsequently being appointed Special Ambassador of the 29 The British Picador edition of 2000 refers to a “revised English language edition copyright” for Isegawa, taken out the same year, in addition to a copyright for the Dutch translation and a general copyright, both taken out in 1998. Although this suggests that the 2000 English-language editions differ from Isegawa’s original anglophone manuscript, it does not necessarily imply a discrepancy between the British edition and the Dutch translation that appeared in 1998. Nevertheless, the passage about the infibulator is not the only passage that has disappeared in the Picador edition, though it is by far the longest. It is also the only time a particular episode is deleted in its entirety; the other deletions are merely reductions in the amount of narrative space awarded to a particular event or situation.

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United Nations in the campaign against genital excision, Dirie has been travelling the world to raise international awareness of the often devastating physical and psychological consequences of the practice.30 Similarly, Koita joined the French anti-female genital excision association G A M S in the 1980s, and in 2002 became president of Euronet-F G M , a European network dedicated to the prevention and eradication of female genital excision, which she helped to found. Both Dirie and Koita strongly believe in the role of education in the abolition of the practice and regard their autobiographical writings as an integral part of their activism, as “an instrument for reflection” – more specifically, as a way to convince “everyone in Europe to put into action [Dirie’s] dream of an end to genital mutilation.”31 Although the women’s perception of female genital excision as “mutilation” and “torture”32 is categorical and their message straightforward – “it just has to stop; it just has to stop,” Dirie insists in one of her chapter-titles – their discursive and narrative constructions show more of the complexities of the migration of female genital excision to the diaspora than do those of Isegawa. As Khady Koita’s title Mutilée (‘mutilated’) indicates, female genital excision is an important issue in her autobiographical account, although this largely deals with her forced marriage at sixteen to an older cousin who took her with him to live in France. Now divorced and approaching her fifties, Koita has, by her own admission, “evolved.”33 Her retrospective narrative consequently contains two perspectives: the views she upheld at the time; and her present perspective as a more mature, better-informed woman and a women’srights activist. Nowhere is this dual perspective more manifest than when she brings up the clitoridectomy – Koita mostly uses the French equivalent, “excision” – of her own daughters in France. This occurs in the middle of her narrative, when she relates how her newly arrived cousin, a professional exciser, excised her two eldest in her absence, and a third daughter shortly afterwards, this time with her “full knowledge.” Straightaway the older narrator remarks on her own resigned attitude at the time and its complete incongruity with her own traumatic childhood experiences of the practice. Koita refers to Soninké tradition when she explains how she had been “unaware, at that time, that by following the tradition she was showing herself to be as ‘barbarous’ as at home the Wolof [another ethnic group living in Senegal who do not practise female 30

On the physical and psychological health implications of female genital excision, see, for instance, Dorkenoo, Cutting the Rose, and Nawal El Saadawi, The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed, 1980). 31 “un outil de reflexion” (Koita, Mutilée, 232); Dirie, Desert Children, 211. 32 Dirie, Desert Children, 11. 33 “évolué” (Koita, Mutilée, 231).

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genital excision] considered her to be” and how she had automatically accepted the intervention of the exciser, who, “in her position as someone from the blacksmith caste and as a relative, had done what she had considered her duty.”34 In contrast to Isegawa, whose infibulator appears to operate in a cultural void, Koita explicitly considers the traditional Soninké motivations for the practice. If her daughters’ exciser here speaks only briefly of having “purified [the girls]” in France so that they would not remain unexcised past the customary age – “If one were to wait until they went to Africa, they would be too big” – the reader already knows from Koita’s earlier account of her own clitoridectomy that the Soninké regard the operation (being ‘salindé’ in Soninké) as a religious requirement, as a “purification” necessary “to be able to enter into prayer,” as well as a gender ritual ensuring a girl’s virginity as a bride and her chastity as a wife.35 Koita thus places the practice, and herself as an excised woman and mother of excised daughters, within a Soninké cultural context. However, by including in her narrative these affirmative discourses of female genital excision, she potentially complicates her own argument against the practice, just as Walker does in her novel. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, young Tashi’s initial construction of her infibulation as a means to preserve her community’s tradition in the face of colonial pressures becomes problematic when Walker goes on to show how the girl’s intended contribution to the anticolonial struggle turns out to be a serious blow to her own fighting spirit. As the novel’s discursive emphasis shifts to female genital excision as a women’s health / rights issue, discourses in defence of the practice make way for Walker’s feminist (womanist) agenda.36 So, too, in Mutilée, when Koita undermines her people’s traditional motivations for the practice in order to give precedence to her abolitionist message. In her description of her own clitoridectomy at the age of seven, she highlights her own pain and sense of abandonment at the time and also shares with the reader her adult understanding of the practice. Not only has it “nothing to do with religion,” as it is performed by adherents of all kinds of beliefs in Africa; it is, Koita adds,

34

“Je ne me suis pas rendu compte, à cette époque, qu’en acceptant de suivre la tradition je me montrais aussi ‘barbare’ que le disaient chez nous les Wolofs”; “cette personne, en qualité de forgeronne et appartenant à ma famille, avait fait ce qu’elle estimait être son devoir” (Koita, Mutilée, 112). 35 “Si on attend qu’elles aillent en Afrique, elles seront trop grandes, il valait mieux le faire maintenant”; “purifiées pour accéder à la prière” (Mutilée, 112; 15–16). 36 For a more elaborate discussion of Walker’s feminist (womanist) approach to female genital excision in Possessing the Secret of Joy, see Bekers, “Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change,” 255–71.

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motivated by men’s desire for “domination.”37 Later in her narrative, when she relates her three eldest daughters’ genital operations, a deeply penitent Koita emphasizes her regrets about her younger self’s acquiescence and bemoans the fact that she can now only beg her children’s pardon. Although she does not overlook the Soninké motivations for the custom and is frank about the traumatizing effect of her change in attitude towards her people’s tradition, in her narrative she prefers not to explore the cultural quandary in which diasporic people like herself are caught. Instead, she allows her political agenda to prevail and resolutely dismisses all conservative considerations, including her own. Abolitionist discourses also dominate in Desert Children by her fellow activist Waris Dirie, which appeared almost simultaneously with Mutilée in 2005. Although autobiographical like Koita’s book, Desert Children is a quite different kind of text. While Koita does not elaborate on her struggle against female genital excision until her final chapter – and largely reserves the term ‘female genital mutilation’ for this part of her book – this campaign is the focus of Dirie’s entire book. Whereas her previous publications were more conventional, personal memoirs, prompted by her own infibulation as a child in Somalia,38 in Desert Children Dirie describes her investigations into the “taboo” of female genital excision in Europe:39 i.e. the process of investigating as well as the results of her investigations. Aided by various researchers, including her coauthor Corinna Milborn, she gathers information from medical and legal specialists, social workers, journalists, and scholars about the estimated 500,000 women of African descent living in Europe who have undergone, or are at risk of being subjected to, some type of genital operation, whether in Europe or on a visit to their or their family’s African country of origin (what Dirie sarcastically calls an “F G M -Holiday”40). What stands out among the many reports in Desert Children, for Dirie as well, are the first-hand accounts she includes in her book of the young contributors to a chat-room dedicated to female genital excision. Using the “anonymous safety” of the Web, these girls, the “desert children” of Dirie’s title, are reporting their experiences to the world, some with resignation, others with desperation. All these abolition-oriented accounts are woven together by Dirie’s own reactions and observations, and they are crowned by a

37

“rien à voir avec la religion”; “domination” (Koita, Mutilée, 16). In Desert Flower, Dirie recounts her transformation from desert nomad into international fashion model and anti-‘F G M ’ activist, while her second book Desert Dawn (2002) is devoted to a brief return visit to Somalia in 1998, twenty years after her escape from Africa. 39 Dirie, Desert Children, ix. 40 Desert Children, 114. 38

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manifesto-like epilogue in which the former super-model stipulates her “fifteen goals” in “her fight against Genital Mutilation in Europe.”41 Like Koita, Dirie does not pass over the traditional justifications for the practice. By widening her enquiry in Desert Children to include her fellow Euro-African women, the Somali activist also broadens her (and consequently the reader’s) perspective beyond her own ethnic group. She also discusses the contested connections of the practice with Islam and the cultural quandary of those confronted with female genital excision in Europe: How must they be feeling when the talk is of ‘barbaric practices’ and ‘indescribable torture’? It’s their families we’re discussing. No wonder that most of them clam up and prefer to keep their problems to themselves.42

Notwithstanding her sympathy for those who “clam up” in the face of (especially Western) feminist and human-rights denunciations of female genital excision, Dirie, too, repeatedly refers to the misogynism and “barbarism” of a custom that she herself labels “torture,” and focuses in her narrative on the denunciatory reactions of those subjected to the practice and / or involved in the struggle for its abolition. Quite predictably for a text written by a United Nations Special Ambassador against female genital excision, in Desert Children, even more so than in Mutilée, discourses of women’s health and women’s rights reign supreme. Isegawa’s disregard for the diasporic context in which his infibulator is operating and Koita’s and Dirie’s strategy of giving absolute priority to abolitionist discourses in their respective narratives is in marked contrast to the attention the Ivorian woman writer Fatou Keïta pays to the cultural challenges presented by the migration of female genital excision from Africa to Europe. Even so, interviews with the author, as well as her novel Rebelle, which appeared the same year as Dirie’s first autobiographical narrative and Isegawa’s novel, confirm that Keïta shares the other three writers’ disapproval of the practice. Her 1998 novel presents a positive evaluation of the life-story of the Ivorian Malimouna, who as a young girl prevents her own clitoridectomy and ends up an activist in the fight against female genital excision. However, in contrast to her colleagues discussed earlier, Keïta is also adamant about “comprehend[ing] what goes on in the minds of the people who still practise the ritual.”43 In fact, she is the first fiction writer to include expatriate Africans in 41

Dirie, Desert Children, 210–11. Desert Children, 18. 43 “Comprendre ce qui se passe dans la tête des gens qui pratiquent encore ce ritual.” Keïta, quoted in Martine Camacho, “Profil: Fatou Keïta, celle qui dérange,” Jeune Afrique 1946 (1998): 87, my tr. 42

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this group when, in the seventeenth and eighteenth chapters of Rebelle, she relates the experiences of Malimouna’s neighbours in Paris, a young family of immigrants from Mali. One of the principal events during Malimouna’s prolonged stay in France is the fatal clitoridectomy of her neighbours’ daughter Noura, as a result of which the parents and exciser are put on trial. Rather than focus on the impersonal court proceedings, as Dirie does in her account of an actual excision trial in Paris in the seventh chapter of Desert Children, Keïta explores the tragic event and the cultural predicament of those involved through an acrimonious exchange between Malimouna and the girl’s mother, Fanta, which takes place before the girl’s genital operation. Echoing the traditional gender motivations cited in Malimouna’s home village, Fanta insists that the ritual serves to prepare her eleven-year-old daughter for adult life and that without it she will not be able to marry. Quite significantly, she further justifies her decision by making a telling reference to her family’s diasporic location. Noura’s clitoridectomy, Fanta continues, is a crucial means to restore the girl’s lost affinity with her African roots, since these “children who grow up in France do not understand anything anymore about our traditions and their importance.”44 Malimouna’s harshly critical reaction to Fanta’s plan and to her request for help in convincing Noura of the value of the genital operation and Malimouna’s subsequent disclosure of her own unexcised state only confirm to Fanta the indispensability of her daughter’s excision. Fanta’s reasoning clearly illustrates how, in a diasporic context, the gender ritual also becomes significant on an ethnic, ideological level,45 a reinterpretation that is not unique to Fanta, nor to those adhering to the tradition of female genital excision in the diaspora. The sociologists Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval–Davis concur with Keïta: in contexts of cultural conflict, women and women-related practices tend to function as “symbolic figuration[s]” of the “cultural and ideological traditions of the ethnic group.”46 As a result, these practices become untouchable; it is as if they are permanently ‘stuck in transit’. In such circumstances, rejecting female genital excision is as difficult for Keïta’s Fanta as it was for Koita in real life. This cultural dilemma resulting from the migration of female genital excision is, in Rebelle, illustrated not just by the women’s diametrically opposed 44

“Nos enfants qui grandissent en France ne comprennent plus rien de nos traditions et de leur importance” (Keïta, Rebelle, 123). 45 As I have argued elsewhere, a similar reinterpretation of female genital excision takes place in the anticolonial conflict. See Bekers, Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000, and “Painful Entanglements.” 46 Floya Anthias & Nira Yuval–Davis, Woman–Nation–State, ed. Anthias & Yuval–Davis (London: Macmillan, 1989): 9.

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stances but in particular by Malimouna’s discomfort about her own insensitive response to her erstwhile friend. Keïta’s protagonist regrets using the “crude and superficial discourse” that usually comes from “the mouths of Westerners” who “consider themselves authorized to proclaim to the whole world sterile and unjust condemnations.”47 Although Malimouna is unable to communicate her understanding to her Malian neighbour, the reader is told that she does recognize that “Fanta was only thinking that the proof of her love lay precisely in her wish to excise her daughter: that was H E R truth, H E R reality.”48 Malimouna’s (admittedly unexpressed) sympathy for Fanta’s predicament is contrasted with the sensationalized reports in the media. Uninterested in the human tragedy behind the events, they merely depict “bloodthirsty monsters, savages incapable of loving their children.”49 Malimouna is likewise disgusted by the all-“too simplistic” negative reactions experienced in her immediate surroundings: “the fact that strangers to this culture could criticize it without understanding all the ambiguity and difficulty of the problem irritated her.”50 Although she fails her Parisian neighbours, Malimouna’s awareness of the complexities of the issue of female genital excision does benefit the anti-excision campaign that, towards the end of the novel, she will set up in her home country. While Malimouna successfully expands her childhood rebellion against female genital excision (as a result of which she has not been excised) upon her return to Africa, Noura’s second objection to her own clitoridectomy in the diaspora has an utterly tragic outcome. Having previously run away from home to avoid being excised, Fanta’s daughter this time offers resistance during her operation, paying for her defiance with her own death. By nipping Noura’s diasporic resistance in the bud and by relocating her activist protagonist to Africa, rather than having either character tackle the cultural dilemma that arises as a result of the migration of female genital excision to Europe, Keïta confirms that the possibility of change is greatly complicated by the highly complex cultural reality of life in the diaspora. By emphasizing how her characters’ African cultures are divested of their inherent transformative potential in France, she also suggests that it may be more practical to effect cultural change in Africa before

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“Malimouna se rendait compte que ce discours creux et superficiel était celui qu’elle avait elle-même tant de fois entendu de la bouche d’Occidentaux. Ces gens se croient autorisés à lancer au monde entier des condamnations stériles et injustes” (Keïta, Rebelle, 124–25). 48 “Fanta justement pensait que c’était bien là une preuve d’amour que de vouloir exciser sa fille: là était S A vérité, S A réalité” (Rebelle, 125). 49 “monstres sanguinaires, des sauvages incapables d’aimer leurs enfants” (Rebelle, 126). 50 “trop simpliste,” “le fait que des étrangers à cette culture puissent critiquer sans vraiment comprendre toute l’ambiguité et la difficulté du problème l’irritait” (Rebelle, 128).

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the custom migrates to Europe and is ‘arrested’ in transit, in both senses of the verb. The four authors of African descent under review in this essay may share a critical outlook on the practice, but the discursive and narrative strategies they use to discuss the migration of female genital excision from Africa to Europe differ greatly. While Isegawa complicates his (cursory) literary denunciation of infibulation by his use of overstatement bordering on sensationalism and his failure to contextualize the practice adequately and to integrate it into his narrative, his female colleagues deal with the practice and its migration to Europe far more elaborately. Rather than treating female genital excision as a figure of style, Koita, Dirie, and Keïta explore the experiences of Euro-African women with the practice, whether by relating the sufferings of actual women, including themselves (Koita and Dirie), or by depicting the lives of fictional characters (Keïta). They also emphasize the difficulties of life in the diaspora, but in their texts excised women appear neither as victims of random violence, as does Isegawa’s infibulator at the end of the fragment, nor simply as voiceless, “sacrificial victims of immigration.”51 Koita and Dirie, instead, use their own and other women’s experiences to make a strong appeal for the eradication of female genital excision. Although they do include traditional discourses in their narratives, they both have little regard for misguided cultural relativism or “cultural protection”52 and are adamant that women’s rights should take precedence over tradition. Keïta certainly does not preach cultural inertia, either, but in her novel she does express sympathy for the plight of expatriate Africans adhering to the practice of female genital excision. More so than Koita and Dirie, she exposes how the struggle against the practice in the diaspora is complicated by the cultural complexities arising from the migration of female genital excision. Nevertheless, in the hopeful eyes of Koita and Dirie, and even Keïta, the practice is not ‘stuck in transit’ but, rather, ‘in transition’; how and where this transition may be realized is still a matter of discussion. In this, it may be enlightening to heed also the next generation of Euro-African women. Though we do not yet hear the voices of Keïta’s Noura or Koita’s daughters and only get to read brief electronic postings by young excised women in Dirie’s book, girls in the African diaspora are beginning to speak out about their experiences with female genital excision – whether it is to launch a complaint against their exciser, as a 23-year-old French law student of Malinese origin did in 1999, or to disclose their motivations for choosing to submit to the practice, as an Ameri-

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“sacrifiées de l’immigration” (Koita, Mutilée, 220). “protection culturelle” (Mutilée, 178).

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can college girl of Sierra Leonean descent did in 2002.53 Like the texts by Isegawa, Koita, Dirie, and Keïta discussed in this essay, the accounts of these second-generation migrants, as yet virtually absent in fiction as in life-writing, may also contribute to a better understanding of the complexities of the migration of female genital excision to the West.

WORKS CITED Abdi, Nura, & Leo G. Linder. Tränen im Sand (Bergisch Gladbach: Ehrenwirt/Lübbe, 2003). Ahmadu, Fuambai. “Rites and Wrongs: An Insider/Outsider Reflects on Power and Excision,” in Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, ed. Bettina Shell–Duncan and Ylva Hernlund (Boulder C O & London: Lynne Rienner, 2001): 283–312. Aman: The Story of a Somali Girl (New York: Pantheon, 1994). Anthias, Floya, & Nira Yuval–Davis, ed. Woman–Nation–State (London: Macmillan, 1989). Barry, Kesso. Kesso Princesse peuhle (Paris: Seghers, 1988). Bekers, Elisabeth. “Captive/ating Women Warriors: Nawal El Saadawi’s Firdaus and Calixthe Beyala’s Tanga” in North–South Linkages and Connections in Continental and Diaspora African Literatures, ed. Edris Makward, Mark Lilleleth & Ahmed Saber (Trenton N J & Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press, 2005): 66–77. ——. “Daughters of Africa W/Riting Change: Female Genital Excision in Two African Short Stories and in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy,” in Africa on the Cusp of the 21st Century (Thamyris 6.2; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1999): 255–71. ——. Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , forthcoming 2010). ——. “Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between: Romeo and Juliet in a PostColonial African Context,” B E L L (Belgian Essays on Language and Literature) (1997): 29–37. ——. “Painful Entanglements: African and African-American Literary Engagements in the International Debate on Female Genital Excision,” in Africa and Its Significant Others: Forty Years of Intercultural Entanglement (Thamyris 11; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 45–59. Camacho, Martine. “Profil: Fatou Keïta, celle qui dérange,” Jeune Afrique 1946 (1998): 86–87. Creider, Jane Tapsubei. Two Lives: My Spirit and I (London: Women’s Press, 1986). Dirie, Waris, & Cathleen Miller. Desert Flower: The Extraordinary Journey of a Desert Nomad (New York: William Morrow, 1998). ——, & Jeanne D’haem. Desert Dawn (London: Virago, 2002). ——, & Corinna Milborn. Desert Children, tr. Sheelagh Alabaster (Schmerzenskinder, Berlin: Marion von Schroeder, 2005; tr. London: Virago, 2005). Dorkenoo, Efua. Cutting the Rose: Female Genital Mutilation: The Practice and Its Prevention (London, Minority Rights, 1995).

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Women’s International Network Newsletter 25.2 (Spring 1999): 67–68; Fuambai Ahmadu, “Rites and Wrongs: An Insider / Outsider Reflects on Power and Excision,” in Female “Circumcision” in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change, ed. Bettina Shell–Duncan & Ylva Hernlund (Boulder C O & London: Lynne Rienner, 2001): 283–312.

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El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World, tr. Sherif Hetata (London: Zed, 1980). Isegawa, Moses. Abessijnse Kronieken, tr. Ria Loohuizen (1998; Amsterdam: De Bezige Bij, 1999). ——. Abyssinian Chronicles (New York: Alfred A. Knopf & London: Picador, 2000). Kassindja, Fauziya, & Layli Miller Bashir. Do They Hear You When You Cry (New York: Delacorte, 1998). Keïta, Fatou. Rebelle (Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Ivoiriennes & Paris: Présence Africaine, 1998). Kenyatta, Jomo. Facing Mount Kenya: The Tribal Life of the Gikuyu (1938; New York: Vintage, 1965). [Koita], Khady, & Marie–Thérèse Cuny. Mutilée (Paris: Oh! Editions, 2005). Korn, Fadumo, & Sabine Eichhorst. Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival, tr. Tobe Levin (Geboren im Groβen Regen: Mein Leben zwischen Afrika und Deutschland, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2004; New York: Feminist Press at C U N Y , 2006). Leye, Els, & Jessika Deblonde. Legislation in Europe Regarding Female Genital Mutilation and the Implementation of the Law in Belgium, France, Spain, Sweden and the U K (Ghent: International Centre for Reproductive Health, University of Ghent, 2004). Waciuma, Charity. Daughter of Mumbi (Nairobi: East African Publishing House, 1969). Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). Williams, Ellen. Amazon.co.uk.review of Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles”: http: //www.amazon.co.uk/Abyssinian-Chronicles-Moses-Isegawa/dp/0330376659 [accessed 18 April 2006]. Women’s International Network Newsletter 25.2 (Spring 1999): 67–68. Zabus, Chantal. “Acquiring Body: Waris Dirie, Infibulation, and New African Female SelfWriting,” in Africa and Its Significant Others: Forty Years of Intercultural Entanglement (Thamyris 11; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2003): 61–76. ——. “Between Rites and Rights: Excision on Trial in African Women’s Texts and Human Contexts,” in Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Human Rights in a ‘Post’Colonial World, ed. Peter H. Marsden & Geoffrey V. Davis (A S N E L Papers 8, Cross / Cultures 76; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2004): 109–34.

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S USANNE G EHRMANN ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Black Masculinity, Migration and Psychological Crisis — A Reading of Simon Njami’s African Gigolo

ABSTRACT: The construction of African male blackness is read against the backdrop of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, a text that informed the writings of Simon Njami as well as of authors such as Dambudzo Merechara, Dillibe Onyeama, and Daniel Biyaoula. Njami’s African Gigolo exposes the ‘pathological patterns’ of male behaviour and the mythical image of black male sexuality to be structurally rooted in (historically established) reciprocal assumptions about Euro-African gendered encounters.

A

S A C O N S E Q U E N C E of processes of migration, everywhere in the world, and on a daily basis, the confrontation of cultural differences takes place. Whether these cultural differences are experienced as a mutual enrichment or as a conflict of interests is very often not a question of culture as such but, rather, depends on a series of social categories. Gender, sexuality, class, ‘race’, ethnicity and religious affiliation are markers through which social differences and hierarchies are constructed within a given society, on a discursive level and through performative practices. Literature functions as a complex text system where such differences and their interdependencies are re-inscribed. Because of the long-lasting effects of the colonial system based on ideological and aesthetic binary oppositions, postcolonial literatures, in particular those that have emerged in situations of migration, prove to be a fertile ground for critical reflection on cultural, sexual or ethnic differences as proble-

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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matic constructions. Fictions enable the dense narration of the constitution and negotiation of differences through personal stories which may outline the tragedy of the process of ‘othering’ or may challenge and even overcome such a process. While considering texts by authors of African descent produced in a context of migration, it becomes obvious that besides gender, sexuality, class, religious affiliation and cultural habits, the importance of ‘race’ as a social category cannot be ignored. The mainstream of white Western thinking considers Africans who have migrated to their hemisphere less as the representatives of a significant different culture than as part of a particular, mythical ‘race’. As far its genuine cultures are concerned, Africa is still often terra incognita. Owing to the power of traditional colonial and racist discourses, the tendency is to view the continent as an undifferentiated, homogeneous, and stereotyped entity, in popular culture as well as in academia. In many texts of the younger generation of Euro-African writers in France, the problems of daily life as migrants form the focus. While earlier francophone novels such as the classics L’Aventure ambiguë [Ambiguous Adventure] by Cheikh Hamidou Kane (1961) and Valentine Y. Mudimbe’s L’Écart [The Rift] (1979) elaborated a philosophical approach to the colonial ‘clash’ of different world-views, authors such as Ken Bugul, Calixthe Beyala, J.R. Essomba, Daniel Biyaoula, Alain Mabanckou, and Fatou Diome, to name but a few, have written about the difficult social status of Africans in migration since the 1980s. Besides the problems caused by racism and social-economic exclusion, gender, sexuality, and the body play an important role in these texts. As the black body is the visible starting-point for perception as ‘Other’ through the white gaze, narratives about the construction of difference often centre on the body. In particular, white Western mythology feeds off sexual phantasms about blacks. The protagonists of Euro-African migrant writing thus tend to develop strategies to deal with their bodies and sexualities and to reinvent their personalities within the given framework of migration.1 In this essay, I will focus on a novel in which the migrating male African protagonist goes through a difficult psychological process which proves the power of specifically genderbased inscriptions or prescriptions of difference. At the same time, the narration of this story is a means to reveal such mechanism and processes, and mounts a literary attack on myths of black masculinity. Accordingly, the starting-point for my reading of Simon Njami’s African Gigolo (1989) is Frantz Fanon’s 1

See Susanne Gehrmann, “Bodies in Exile. Performativity in Ken Bugul’s and Calixthe Beyala’s Migrant Texts,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinki (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies 77, 2006).

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psychoanalytical and political insights into ‘race’, sexuality, and colonialism, which are, in effect, to be understood as a subtext of Njami’s novel.

The Literary Heritage of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) As a postcolonial thinker avant la lettre, Frantz Fanon counts as one of the few francophone intellectuals to be consecrated into the canon of postcolonial studies.2 In his seminal essay Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon clearly points to the imaginary and constructed nature of ‘race’: “the Negro is not, any more than the white man.”3 At the same time, Fanon reveals the power of the category ‘race’ as a generator of differentiation in his native Caribbean society of Martinique in particular, and in any society marked by colonialism in general. The complex interplay of the mythical and imaginary dimensions that construct ‘race’, with its consequent social (dis)advantages of the groups marked as essentially different, make ‘race’ real in the sense of a well-established, functioning category of division and discrimination or empowerment. It is in this sense that I use the indices ‘white’ and ‘black’ throughout this essay, just as Fanon did to express the truly manichaean conception of the world, which still persists in many fields of thought. Fanon reveals the long-lasting, disastrous effects of ‘race’ on the psyche of the individual and how they contribute to the perpetuation of the concept. He bases his comments on clinical case studies as well as on observations in popular culture and literature. Consequently, his insight into the psyche of the colonized and raced subject has fascinated more than one writer. My skin sticks out a mile in all the crowds around here. Every time I go out I feel it tensing up, hardening, torturing itself. It only relaxes when I am in shadow, when I am alone, when I wake up early in the morning, when I am doing mechanical actions, and, strangely enough, when I am angry.4

These are the first words of Dambudzo Marechera’s short story “Black Skin What Mask”, published by the Zimbabwean author in 1978, shortly after his 2 Homi K. Bhabha, “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger & Phil Mariani (Seattle W A : Bay, 1989), and Gautam Premnath, “Remembering Fanon, Decolonizing Diaspora,” in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, ed. Laura Chrisman & Benita Parry (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999): 57–73. 3 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1956, tr. 1967; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967): 231. 4 Dambudzo Marechera, “Black Skin What Mask,” in Marechera, The House of Hunger (London: Heinemann, 1978): 93.

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expulsion from New College Oxford, a piece of fiction which, starting with its title, is most obviously based on an intertextual relation with Fanon. The tortured skin of the first-person narrator is a literary response to what Fanon names “an atmosphere of certain uncertainty,”5 an unease of the body subdued by the white gaze that constantly points him out as the Other. Skin becomes an embodied image of the psychological process of self-estrangement due to racialization, a surface of inscribed pain because of its status as “the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype.”6 The protagonist in Marechera’s story is a cynical black student, a drunkard from Rhodesia who will be admitted to psychiatric care because of his ‘uncivilized’ misbehaviour on the campus. He is also the observer of one of his fellow students and compatriots who is on the verge of a psychological breakdown because of his desperate attempt to put on a perfect white mask. The man suffers from a compulsive disorder, washing constantly, and generally tries to imitate white culture in his clothing as well as by speaking ‘good’ English: “It was painful to listen to him, as it was painful to watch him trying to scrub the blackness out of his skin.”7 If Fanon’s chapter on language8 is clearly situated within the French colonial system which particularly cultivated language purity, Marechera shows that the mechanism of linguistic self-control does occur in postcolonial British contexts as well. The full-blown neurosis of the man is, moreover, linked to suppressed sexuality, as he is unable to find a partner: while he feels despised by white Englishwomen, he is equally dismissed by West-Indian and African women from independent nations for being a Rhodesian. The humiliation is thus both racial and political. It challenges his masculinity and destabilizes his gender identity. The first-person narrator cynically suggests that he may have to turn to homosexuality or simply to masturbation, the state of sexuality he considers most prevalent among black students in Britain. The two characters in Marechera’s short story stand for two possibilities of handling the difficult situation as an African migrant: you either struggle for acceptance by wearing a white mask, or you succumb to the idea of being a black outsider and take drugs to sustain this image. While in both cases the person experiences psychological disorder, it is the impossible aspiration to whiteness that leads to a complete breakdown of the individual. However, Marechera is not the only African author to re-inscribe a process of neurosis into a literary text, linking it to the experience of black masculinity. 5 6 7 8

Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 110–111. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 78. Marechera, “Black Skin What Mask,” 93. Fanon, “The Negro and Language,” in Black Skin, White Masks, 17–40.

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The context of migration and transcultural experiences between Africa and Europe, in particular, favours narratives of psychological processes that often reveal a debt to the Antillean psychoanalyst. Several texts are obviously informed by the knowledge of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks as a pre-text when narrating psychological experiences linked to the construction and perception of blackness and gender through personalized, fictional stories. This sample of texts includes novels by male authors such as Sex is a Nigger’s Game (1976) by Dillibe Onyeama (Nigeria/ U K ), African Gigolo (1989) by Simon Njami (Switzerland/Cameroon / France), and L’Impasse [Dead End] (1996) by Daniel Biyaoula (Congo/ France).9 In spite of the feminist criticism of Fanon’s superficial depiction of black women,10 he has also inspired such a radical feminist author as Calixthe Beyala (Cameroon / France), who uses the motive of “la négresse blanche” [the white Negro woman]11 in her novel Comment cuisiner son mari à l’africaine [How to cook /cheat one’s husband the African way] (2000), while echoes of ‘lactification’ as a psychological process played out on the body can be found in Yvonne Vera’s (Zimbabwe/ Canada) novels Without a Name (1994) and Butterfly Burning (1998), where she refers to the practice of skin-bleaching in colonial Rhodesia.12 These texts are not merely literary versions of Fanon’s ideas but can be considered as postcolonial reinterpretations of his concept of ‘mask’ and the psychological dilemmas of black people in a world still ruled by colonial settings which construct a white hegemony. Some of the underlying questions for an approach to such texts are: how does the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial and transcultural situation change the use and understanding of Fanon’s concepts in literature? How do transcultural African or Euro-African writers deconstruct the myths of African /black masculinity / femininity in different spatial and historical contexts? How are the hegemonies of gender and ‘race’ renegotiated in these narratives? 9 On Biyaoula’s novel, see Lydie Moudileno, “Re-bonjour à la Négritude: La question de la ‘race’ dans un roman des années 90, L’impasse de Daniel Biyaoula,” Présence francophone 58 (2002): 62–72. 10 See Lola Young. “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Reid (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996): 86–101, and Tracy Denean Sharpley–Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). 11 Fanon himself borrowed this image from Mayotte Capécia’s novel La Négresse Blanche (1949). 12 See Jessica Hemmings, “Altered Surfaces. The Ambi Generation of Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning,” in Body, Sexuality, and Gender: Versions and Subversions of African Literatures, vol. 1, ed. Flora Veit–Wild & Dirk Naguschewski (Matatu 29/30; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 173–85.

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Simon Njami is an internationally renowned art critic. He was the director of La Revue Noire in Paris (1991–99) and the curator of numerous expositions: for instance, the successful Africa Remix exposition of 2005. Njami was born in Switzerland in 1962 as the son of Cameroonian parents; he has never lived in Africa for any longer period, but is well established in Paris. His literary career is less known, although he published four novels in the 1980s.13 For Bennetta Jules–Rosette, his books are part of the literary movement which she calls “Parisianism,”14 a literary investigation of Paris as a postcolonial space which has been increasingly appropriated by writers with a migrant background. Given his personal situation, Njami can also be called a diasporic writer. However, in African Gigolo he chooses to focus on the story of a first-generation migrant.

Sexual Performance and the Illusion of Freedom Njami’s African Gigolo is a text built on the mythical phantasms about black male sexuality and the pathological patterns of behaviour resulting from this particular form of racism. The protagonist and figure of the African gigolo15 in the novel of the same name is a young Cameroonian in Paris, Moïse, who quits his studies to make a living from his numerous love affairs with white women. As the term ‘gigolo’ suggests, it is not a straightforward form of male prostitution, but Moïse is clever enough to get housed, clothed, and fed by young as well as elderly women. His powers of seduction seem to be limitless and are clearly based on the myth of black supersexuality, as Fanon described it: The Negro is the incarnation of a genital potency beyond all moralities and prohibitions. The women among the whites, by a genuine process of induction, invariably view the Negro as the keeper of the impalpable gate that opens into the realm of orgies, of bacchanals, of delirious sexual sensations […] We have shown that reality destroys all these beliefs. But they all rest on the level of the imagined, in any case on that of a paralogism.16

13 Cercueil et Cie (1985), Les enfants de la cité (1987), Les clandestins (1988) and African Gigolo (1989). For a bibliography of his numerous essays, see: http://people.africadatabase .org/en/person/15727.html [accessed [13 December 2006]. 14 See Jules–Rosette Bennetta, Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1998). 15 The English title of the novel written in French may count as an allusion to Paul Schrader’s film American Gigolo (1980), with Richard Gere as an ‘intellectual’ involved in a Pygmalion situation with a callgirl. 16 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 177.

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These persistent pathological phantasms of white people about black men described by Fanon are part of the daily experience of Moïse in his encounter with white women: “In the eyes of young girls, of women, the gleam of curiosity was not directed at him alone, but to the living phantasm he represented.”17 While Fanon diagnosed phobia, a fearful rejection of the black male as a common pathological feature in the thinking of whites in the 1950s – a phobia which expresses a suppressed desire – in the postcolonial metropolis of the late 1980s, Moïse is confronted with an open philia: “Most of the Western women were willing victims of the phantasm of the male Negro.”18 Racial phobia and philia are, in fact, two sides of the same dilemma: “To us, the man who adores the Negro is as ‘sick’ as the man who abominates him.”19 Although, intellectually, Moïse is very well aware of what is going on, the constant attribution of sexual superiority has an effect on his behaviour, leading him to adopt the supposed role of the black male. For a long time, he firmly believes he can control the situation and exploit to his advantage his specific position as a raced and gendered object of desire, but in the course of the narrative a process of disillusionment and psychological crisis of the black male subject sets in. To read this process, I will turn again to Fanon, who, in the last chapter of his psychological analysis, describes the universal quest for recognition: Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, that other will remain the theme of his actions. It is on that other being, on recognition by that other being, that his own human worth and reality depend. It is that other being in whom the meaning of his life is condensed.20

The racial division established by the white superiority complex limits the possible domains of recognition of the black subject. These limits, which ultimately signify the denial of full humanity, reinforce the desire to be accepted by the Other. Not because The Other is the ultimate objective of his action in the sense of communication between people […], but, more primitively, because it is The Other who corroborates him in his search for self-validation.21 17

“Dans les yeux des jeunes filles, des femmes, la lueur de curiosité ne s’adressait pas à lui seul, mais au fantasme sur pied qu’il représentait.” African Gigolo (Paris: Seghers, 1989): 99. My tr. 18 “Les femmes occidentales étaient pour la plupart des victimes consentantes du fantasme du mâle nègre” (Njami, African Gigolo, 99). 19 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 177. 20 Black Skin, White Masks, 216–17. 21 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 213.

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Moïse is a critical observer of French society and is fully aware that African migrants hardly have a chance of succeeding as professionals or intellectuals. Thus, for him, the possible Other who constantly affirms his being in the world is White Woman. In his role as an African gigolo, the pleasure of conquering, the desire to display sexual power, his cynical but playful exploitation on behalf of women, the response to his seduction – all this gives, momentarily, a precarious sense of meaning to his life. Moïse’s special relationship to white women does not correspond to a wish to become white, but it confirms his being in the world as a black man, a recognition of sorts which compensates him for an absence of opportunities in a white-dominated society as far as intellectual and general human achievements are concerned. While Moïse is not subjected to wearing a white mask, we may say that he wears a black mask insofar as he plays up to white fantasies and stereotypes about black men. Judith Butler’s concept of performativity, as established in Bodies That Matter (1993), offers a useful explanation. With a focus on the body, performativity can be understood as a series of reiterated corporeal performances, which are not to be understood as conscious acts of self-representations but, rather, as acts that are constituted / forced through the power of the dominant discourse.22 It is not only the social agenda but also the biological body that is bound by the construction of heteronormativity, sex, and gender. Butler also confirms that the performative construction of ‘race’ functions through similar procedures. With regard to ‘race’, whiteness counts as a dominant discourse of the norm, similar to heterosexuality. Several identifications of the subject also affect each other: A gender identification can be made in order to repudiate or participate in a race identification; what counts as “ethnicity” frames and eroticises sexuality, or can itself be a sexual marking. That implies that it is not a matter of relating race and sexuality and gender, as if they were fully separable axes of power.23

In his figure of the African gigolo, Njami convincingly shows this interdependence of ‘race’, gender, and sexuality. Through narrative flashbacks, we learn that Moïse’s present attitude of the cynical gigolo is, in fact, the result of an earlier phase of disillusionment. When the young African comes to France, he firmly believes in romantic love. He is ready to fall in love and longs for a serious relationship. Yet he must soon learn that the white French women take him as an object of pleasure without considering him as a human being with feelings – he is turned into a sex toy.

22

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London & New York: Routledge, 1993): 94. 23 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 116.

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Simon Njami’s African Gigolo He judged the women who robbed him of his last illusions with the bitterness of a deceived lover. His mother had taught him that the first one he would make love to would be the woman of his life; instead, all those who he had seemed to please and with whom he had found himself in bed mocked his sufferings and his naivety.24

At the same time, the sexual spell he casts over white women and the way he can easily arouse their desire engenders an irresistible feeling of power: “He was fascinated, then blinded by the enormous power he gradually discovered to have over the women.”25 In discussions with his few intimate friends, Moïse refuses to admit that his behaviour has anything to do with ‘race’ as a problematic category. His ambition is to appear as a non-classifiable personality, changing the masks of his appearance frequently: He was suspicious of every ultimate conviction which condemned you to be faithful to a certain form of behaviour, which would mean running the risk of being unmasked one day for having played the same game too often. At the beginning, Mireille thought that this eagerness to perform always as masked was a simple conflict of races. A black/white conflict. […] – If I suffered from a complex, he said then, it would certainly be that of superiority. I am an untouchable species. I have neither struggle nor credo. I am wholly free.26

Fanon analysed this possible transmogrification of the classical inferiority complex of the colonized into a superiority complex: “Since in all periods the Negro has been an inferior, he attempts to react with a superiority complex.”27 

24

“Il jugea les femmes qui lui volaient ses dernières illusions avec l’amertume d’un amant trompé. Sa mère lui avait enseigné que la première avec laquelle il ferait l’amour serait la femme de sa vie, et voilà que toutes celles auxquelles il avait semblé plaire, et avec lesquelles il s’était retrouvé dans un lit, se moquaient de ses souffrances et de sa naïveté” (Njami, African Gigolo, 60–61). 25 “Il fut fasciné, puis aveuglé par ce pouvoir énorme que de jour en jour, il se découvrait sur les femmes” (Njami, African Gigolo, 65). 26 “Il se méfiait de toute fin en soi, qui vous condamnait à être fidèle à une certaine ligne de conduite, donc vous exposait à être démasqué un jour ou l’autre, à trop souvent donner dans le même registre. Mireille avait mis, au début, cet acharnement à avancer masqué sur le compte d’un simple conflit de races. Un conflit Noir/Blanc. […] Si je souffrais d’un complexe, disaitil alors, ce serait assurément de celui de supériorité. Je suis une espèce intouchable. Je n’ai ni combat ni credo. Je suis libre, totalement” (Njami, African Gigolo, 17). 27 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 213.

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Depression and Madness as a Result of Racist Structures and Sexual Ambivalence The (self-)construction of black masculinity as a means of survival and supposed power over his precarious situation as a migrant in Paris reveals its hollowness once the figure of the self-contented gigolo gets back in touch with his reality as a son of African parents. A letter from Cameroon announcing the probable death of his father erupts into his artificial world. His parents are still convinced that he is a busy student in Paris. In a process of becoming more conscious about his life, the gigolo starts to reflect on the impossibility of his situation: an existence build on lies. During a period of profound depression, Moïse comes to understand that his “absolute liberty” never existed and that his feeling of mastering the situation was an illusion, or a trap. Rendered complacent by the preconceived image of the black man and represented what was expected of him by the racist phantasms of his white environment: He could no longer ignore the fact that he had been a plaything in an immense misunderstanding; for far too long, he had believed himself to be the master. The evidence of his error became clear to him with unbearable cruelty: he had followed a clear path laid out before him, and it was only his propensity to inertia that had made him progress. […] He had believed he was living in absolute freedom with the incomparable privilege of moving to and fro as he liked, whereas he was actually doing nothing but reproducing what was expected of him.28

It is important to note that the main conflict in the text does not refer to the oppositions between the African migrant and his white-European environment, although these function as a motor in the story. Rather, it is the splitting of self that is decisive, the inner conflict of the black male subject exposed to the specific, powerful, sexualizing, and racializing discourse he is exposed to. In a similar vein, Stuart Hall cautions readers not to misunderstand Fanon’s text as a simple denunciation of colonial dichotomies. Writing about the current importance of Black Skin, White Masks, he states: Since the text so remorselessly returns to the binary opposition black / white, coloniser / colonised, I wonder how many of his readers unconsciously slip into reading him as if binaries are the exclusive focus of the tale? As if the real title of the book was ‘Black Skin, White Skin’? Ignoring the fact that, though the subject is, of 28

“Il ne pouvait plus ignorer qu’il avait été le jouet d’un immense malentendu dont trop longtemps il avait crû être le maître. L’évidence de son erreur lui apparaissait avec une cruauté insupportable: il avait suivi une pente toute dressée sur laquelle seule sa force d’inertie l’avait fait progresser. […] Il avait cru vivre dans la liberté absolue, dans le privilège incomparable d’aller et de venir à sa guise, lorsqu’il ne faisait que reproduire ce que l’on attendait de lui” (Njami, African Gigolo, 147–48).

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course, framed throughout by the dichotomous and Manichean structure of racism as a binary system of representation and power, it is the split of divided self, the two sides within the same figure – the colonial negro – which centrally preoccupies him. The central figure of the book is the colonial negro, (…) who is obliged, in the scenarios of the colonial relation, to have a relationship to self, to give a performance of self, which is scripted by the coloniser, producing in him the internally divided condition of ‘absolute depersonalisation.’ 29

Although the situation of postcolonial migrants is no longer identical to that of colonized Africans, in Njami’s novel it becomes clear that the racist structure into which black migrants move when coming to the European metropolis is still likely to produce an inner division of the self. This may provoke an ambivalent adoption of masks and bodily performances, and ultimately fosters a psychologically dangerous self-estrangement. The structure of racist thinking/ acting and its consequences for the subject discriminated against may have changed on the surface – from phobia to philia, for instance – but its impact on the psyche still remains powerful and damaging. It is true, as Pius Adesanmi states, that the motif of the inner splitting of the self is a classic feature of francophone African writing about migration to Paris,30 but Simon Njami is the first author to negotiate this problematic within a specifically gendered context, by looking at the perception and situation of the male black migrant as a sexualized being.31 When the protagonist of African Gigolo discovers that he has fallen into a trap while playing the game of the black male expected of him, his new consciousness leads him to reconsider his relationship to black women, whom he calls his forbidden fruit.32 When he meets Sarah, an Ivorian, his desire for her 29 Stuart Hall, “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1996): 18. 30 Pius Adesanmi, “Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and African Migritude Fiction,” Modern Fictions Studies 51.4 (2005): 963. 31 Notably Ken Bugul has already broken the unwritten taboo to speak about the link between racism and sexuality in Le Baobab fou (The Abandoned Baobab, 1982), where she exposes the ambivalent desire of white men for black women and vice versa. See Susanne Gehrmann, “Désir de/du Blanc et écriture autobiographique chez Ken Bugul,” in Le Blanc du Noir: Représentations de l’Europe et des Européens dans les littératures africaines, ed. Susanne Gehrmann & János Riesz (Münster: L I T , 2004). For further examples of difficult and ambiguous love-relationships between black and white, see the studies of Roger Little, Between Totem and Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature (Exeter: U of Exeter P , 2001), and Pia Thielmann, Hotbeds: Black–White Love in Novels from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean (Zomba: Kachere, 2004). Meanwhile, most examples in African literature remain very discreet about sexuality. 32 Njami, African Gigolo, 98.

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troubles him, because he can no longer distinguish between his longing for a mother/ Africa, the wish to overcome his general inhibitions with black women as a means to prove his masculinity, and the possibility of being, probably, really in love with her. Again a flashback is used and the focalization on Moïse’s inner thoughts reveals his adolescence reminiscences. In Cameroon, he used to be an outstanding pupil, but was mocked by girls as unmanly. His sexual experience was limited to an initiation with an elderly prostitute, arranged by his father when Moïse was twelve years old. The fact that the protagonist, who later becomes a gigolo, arrives in Europe as a virtual virgin deconstructs the myth of African promiscuity. Sexual license and decadence are re-located into the European space. As the novel also utilizes the motive of travelling from Paris to Southern France, Venice, and Amsterdam, these are the places where Moïse gradually loses his innocence. Following several further sexual adventures, his neurotic behaviour becomes increasingly linked to a state of extreme depression and finally leads to a psychosis, a mad state, out of control. From a psychoanalytical angle, the father’s intervention in the life of a young boy of twelve – meaning the sudden, unprepared sexual experience with a mother figure – is also an indicator for the problematic sexuality the protagonist develops. At this point, Njami adds to his critique of sexual promiscuity in Europe a critique of certain ‘African’33 initiation practices that construct masculinity. This first experience of sexuality is an overwhelming but violent one, where the mature woman overpowers the helpless boy, who does not yet understand the reactions of his body. Later on, during his trip to Venice, Moïse will be paid in cash for the first time by a woman he has just made love to; ironically, it is a woman who is herself a former prostitute. This evident commercialization of his body leads him a step further towards crisis. The experience with Sarah, as an incarnation of the black woman, is again characterized by violence. This overwhelming experience pitches him into psychological breakdown – Sarah displays the same pattern of behaviour as white women: she prefers to hang on to her white, French boyfriend and only wants Moïse as an occasional lover. His anger at his own self-deception explodes in mad fury at a black prostitute he accidentally meets while travelling to Amsterdam. When he proves impotent, the prostitute mocks him and he beats her up. The girls’ white pimp punishes him by crudely raping him, a sexual humiliation which is experienced by Moïse as the ultimate denial of his humanity. He gets a weapon and shoots the pimp – a concrete murder of one white man who serves as an allegory of racism and sexual exploitation of black people. This 33

Of course, similar practices of initiating young boys into sexuality via the service of sex workers also exist in Europe.

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murder is a symbolic act for the madness that racism can produce, and at the same time an absurd reaction: “He had murdered a man, and this made him calm. This was the opposite of everything he had been taught. It didn’t make sense.”34 The illusion of a stable position as a black male who mocks and exploits white phantasms is tragically turned upside down in the novel. In the closing lines of African Gigolo, Moïse plans to travel to Cameroon. His return to Africa seems to be the only way to escape his desperate psychological condition and identity-crisis. The movement back home, with the longing for psychological and spiritual healing after a profound identity-crisis, is a classic feature of francophone African migrant writing.35 Yet, as novels such as Ambiguous Adventure or The Abandoned Baobab show, the promise of return can prove to be a tragic failure, as the culturally hybridized migrant cannot fully re-integrate into a society which in itself is in the process of transformation. Simon Njami opts for an open ending. Africa is set up as a space for the possible reconciliation of the self, while Europe, with its postcolonial, multicultural cities like Paris or Amsterdam, remains the setting of corruption and self-degradation for the black man, entangled in his static image of the Other.

Conclusion Simon Njami’s novel is based on the mythical image of black male sexuality and represents the pathological patterns of behaviour which may occur in this specific context of sexualized racisms against African men in migration on both sides: the white subjects of mainstream society in Europe who succumb to morbid sexist-racist phantasms, and the black men who are exposed to the dominant discourse and who may react via the neurotic performativity of the stereotypical black male, a role which can ultimately engender self-estrangement and psychological disorder. If the problem of racism is clearly not an individual but a structural question, the narration of personalized stories is nevertheless a valuable way of bringing it to public attention and of touching the conscience of the reader. With regard to black male migrants in Europe, Njami’s novel offers an opportunity for identification, but also strongly appeals to a refusal of the role incarnated by its protagonist. In fact, African Gigolo stands out as a warning against the traps of sexualized and gendered racism against black men. Njami exposes this struc34

“Il avait tué un homme, et cela lui procurait du calme. C’était contraire a tout ce qu’on lui avait appris. Cela n’avait pas de sens” (Njami, African Gigolo, 208). 35 See Adesanmi, “Redefining Paris,” 963.

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tural sexism/ racism and shows how literature can make a contribution to negotiating such structures. He applies much of Fanon’s thinking to a contemporary, postcolonial situation, thus proving once more the current significance and perennial value of Black Skin, White Masks.

WORKS CITED Adesanmi, Pius. “Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and African Migritude Fiction,” Modern Fiction Studies 51.4 (2005): 958–75. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). ——. “Remembering Fanon: Self, Psyche, and the Colonial Condition,” in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger & Phil Mariani (Seattle: Bay, 1989): 131–48. Beyala, Calixthe. Comment cuisiner son mari à l’africaine? (Paris: Albin Michel, 2000). Biyaoula, Daniel. L’Impasse (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1996). Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (London & New York: Routledge, 1993). Bugul, Ken. Le Baobab fou (Dakar: N E A , 1982). Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1956, tr. 1967; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967). Gehrmann, Susanne. “Bodies in Exile: Performativity in Ken Bugul’s and Calixthe Beyala’s Migrant Texts,” in Africa, Europe and (Post)Colonialism: Racism, Migration and Diaspora, ed. Susan Arndt & Marek Spitczok von Brisinki. (Bayreuth: Bayreuth African Studies 77, 2006): 295–314. ——. “Désir de/du Blanc et écriture autobiographique chez Ken Bugul, ” in Le Blanc du Noir: Représentations de l’Europe et des Européens dans les littératures africaines, ed. Susanne Gehrmann & János Riesz (Münster: L I T , 2004): 181–94. Hall, Stuart. “The After-Life of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1996): 12–37. Hemmings, Jessica. “Altered Surfaces. The Ambi Generation of Yvonne Vera’s Without a Name and Butterfly Burning,” in Body, Sexuality, and Gender: Versions and Subversions of African Literatures 1, Matatu 29/30, ed. Flora Veit-Wild & Dirk Naguschewski (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2005): 173–85. Jules–Rosette, Bennetta. Black Paris: The African Writer’s Landscape (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1988). Kane, Cheikh Hamidou. L’Aventure ambiguë (Paris: Julliard, 1961). Little, Roger. Between Totem and Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature (Exeter: U of Exeter P , 2001). Marechera, Dambudzo. “Black Skin, What Mask?,” in Marechera, The House of Hunger: Short Stories (London: Heinemann, 1978): 93–99. Moudileno, Lydie. “Re-bonjour à la Négritude: La question de la ‘race’ dans un roman des années 90: L’Impasse de Daniel Biyaoula,” Présence francophone 58 (2002): 62–72. Mudimbe, ValentineY. L’Écart (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1979). Njami, Simon. African Gigolo (Paris: Seghers, 1989). Onyeama, Dillibe. Sex is a Nigger’s Game (London: Satellite Books, 1976).

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Premnath, Gautam. “Remembering Fanon, Decolonizing Diaspora,” in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, ed. Laura Chrisman & Benita Parry (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999): 57–73. Sharpley-Whiting, Tracy Denean. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 1998). Thielmann, Pia. Hotbeds: Black–White Love in Novels from the United States, Africa and the Caribbean (Zomba: Kachere, 2004). Vera, Yvonne. Butterfly Burning (Harare: Baobab, 1998). ——. Without a Name (Harare: Baobab, 1994). Young, Lola. “Missing Persons: Fantasizing Black Women in Black Skin, White Masks,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (London: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1996): 86–101.

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E LISA D IALLO ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Polyphony, Old ‘Lyonnais’ and Animism — Africa in Urban Europe in Un Rêve utile by Tierno Monénembo

ABSTRACT: This essay offers a close reading of the novel Un Rêve utile (1991) by the Guinean writer Tierno Monénembo. It argues that this text is representative of francophone immigrant writings, as it focuses on the contemporary phenomenon of massive flows of migration towards rich Western countries. Furthermore, while narrating the experiences of African immigrants in France, Un Rêve utile also challenges the idea/l of a homogeneous (French) national identity, and raises the issue of the Other/s within. Through its complex narrative structure, and the incorporation of varieties of French, Monénembo’s text unveils the hierarchical structure of the French national space as a whole, and undermines the fiction of a naturally uniform and integrative identity.

T

H E G U I N E A N W R I T E R T I E R N O M O N É N E M B O knows displacement from his own life experience. He fled his country of birth in 1969, and has lived successively in Ivory Coast, Senegal, Algeria, and France, where he is currently based. It is thus hardly surprising that his work should foreground the themes of migrancy, dislocation, and homelessness. His novel Un Rêve utile (1991) in particular is centred on these questions, as it thematizes the peripheral position of African immigrants within French society. However, as I argue in this essay, this novel offers an excellent example of how contemporary im/migrant writings not only articulate the themes of uprooted-

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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ness and exclusion but also challenge the very idea of belonging and inclusion. In fact, while narrating immigrant experiences in France, Monénembo’s text unveils the hierarchical structure of the French space itself, and exposes it as an assortment of margins, rather than a uniform centre.

Immigrant Writings Un Rêve utile is the third novel by Monénembo. It addresses once more topics central to the author’s earlier works: namely, the dictatorship of postcolonial Guinea and the exile that is one of its most painful consequences. However, this novel does distinguish itself from the others through content as well as form. First, Un Rêve utile focuses on the topic of contemporary economic immigration, with its specific concomitant issues. Certainly, experiences of displacement have always been addressed in African literatures in European languages, which more often than not engage with the themes of exile and the African diasporas. But the theme of immigration in this novel refers to, and is located within, the specific geopolitical context of globalization and of massive flows of migration towards rich Western countries. Since the 1980s, francophone African literatures have shown a great interest in this issue, and have thus taken part in the discourse of immigrant writings.1 As Un Rêve utile clearly focuses on the specific question of African economic immigration to France, I will argue that it forms part of this recent literary trend. As mentioned earlier, Un Rêve utile also differs from Monénembo’s previous works in its form, specifically its style and structure: several critics have drawn attention to the novel’s complexity, which some even perceive as a narrative imbroglio. However, it is precisely this narrative construction, and its complication, that I intend to examine here, since it is the aspect of the novel that carries the major part of its meaning. Indeed, the narrative mode in Un Rêve utile conveys a specific vision and a specific discourse on the reality of African immigration to France. 1

See, for example, on francophone im/migrant writings: Christiane Albert, L’Immigration dans le roman francophone contemporain (Paris: Karthala, 2005); Littératures des immigrations, vol. 2, ed. Charles Bonn (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995); Odile Cazenave, Afrique sur Seine: Une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003); Michel Laronde, Autour du roman beur: Immigration et identité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993); Abdourahman A. Waberi, “Les enfants de la postcolonie: Esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire,” Notre Librairie 135 (October–December 1998): 8–15. I will use the term ‘immigrant writing(s)’ in the rest of this essay, when referring to writings that focus mainly on this postcolonial phenomenon of massive immigration flows to rich Western countries.

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Narration The first narrator of the story is a young exiled Guinean student, son of a minister, who finds himself a stranger in Lyon. He joins up with a group of African immigrant workers, inhabitants of a shelter, as a consequence of his own social and economic difficulties: his lack of money, coupled with his ignorance of the French housing system, prevents him from finding decent accommodation and he ends up on a mattress in the middle of a dormitory room in the shelter. This initial narrative voice, however, soon mingles with others, those of Uncle Momo, Astrid, and Gaby, each of whom is a vehicle of traumatic memories. The first of these belongs to Astrid, an old local woman. A few pages later, the African Momo starts speaking, and narrative alternation continues throughout the novel. However, despite this alternation, the first narrator remains the novel’s main protagonist as well as its central voice; from a quantitative point of view, the student is responsible for the largest part of the account; further, each chapter, of which there are eleven in total, starts in the voice of this young Guinean, so that the other voices seem to be interacting with his, or even emerging from his story. The student’s voice thus assumes a central position within this narrative system. In spite of this linkage, the principal result of this narrative mode is a multiplicity of voices and points of view, hence the impression of cacophony that characterizes the novel. The most striking aspect of Un Rêve utile is not the presence of a main narrator but the jamming of the narration by the alternation of voices. This alternation is never really announced and follows neither an apparent logic nor a particular rhythm. Only the device of ellipsis points announces the changes of narrative voices, and not even these are always present, as when Momo starts speaking.2 Furthermore, this mode is different from the technique used by Monénembo in his previous novel, Les écailles du ciel,3 which was also characterized by a complex narrative system. The principle, then, was that the first and main narrator would regularly let protagonists or direct witnesses of events speak, suggesting greater authenticity in the story. The alternation of narrators in this case followed the organization of the subnarratives without disturbing it. In Un Rêve utile, the process is very different: the various narrators are different voicings of the same narrative, all intervening on the same level, as if, in a theatre play, all the different actors present in one scene spoke in turn without communicating with each other, each of them tell2

Tierno Monénembo, Un Rêve utile (Paris: Seuil, 1991): 66. Further page references are in the main text. All translations are mine. 3 Monénembo, Les écailles du ciel (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

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ing their own history, mixing memories and immediate observations. The narrative thus takes on a polyphonic character. However, here the polyphony is all the more disturbing because, as mentioned earlier, the changes between voices are hardly noticeable, and thus do not seem to be the result of an organized schema. In fact, the narrative mode in Un Rêve utile reminds one of the stream-ofconsciousness technique. The text jumps from one voice to another following the association of ideas, as does the stream-of-consciousness technique when promoting the illusion of tracing the thoughts of one character as they come into and pass through his mind. But it seems as if the author is here using this technique to subvert, or perhaps even to parody, the technique, which is expanded to encompass an imaginary thought-process moving among different characters, as if the various narrators shared the same thoughts. Because of its recurrence, one of the most noticeable triggers of these narrative jumps is the evocation of the bridge: when Astrid mentions the bridge, in Lyon, from which Galant–Métro jumped a few days earlier, the text returns to the central narrator, who in turn brings up the bridge at Conakry (capital city of Guinea) where his father was executed. The mere mention of the word ‘bridge’ thus shifts the narrative voice from Astrid to the exiled young Guinean narrator, and from the present in Lyon to the past in Guinea, the sole indication of transition being ellipsis points (31, 53, 92, 189). An analogous trigger is the mention of trains and the sounds they produce, which makes it possible for the text to move from the train station in Lyon to the memory of trains in Fria, in Guinea, and thus to the childhood memories of the central narrator. Here again, the text associatively jumps from one thought to another, this time within the thoughts of a single narrator as well as between the thoughts of two distinct narrators (43, 47, 80). The author uses this technique of association of ideas with conscious irony, highlighting it by sometimes using word-games to jump from one thought to another, or even from one narrator to another (91, 123). These wordgames, in particular, draw the attention of the reader to the construction of the text, and therefore to the narrative as a ‘manufactured’ entity. The text of Un Rêve utile abounds in such word-games and in ironic allusions to the French language and French culture, focusing in particular on the rigidity of accepted norms. One of the most significant examples of this is the incorporation into the text of advertising slogans popular at the time the novel was written (203). In this way, the reader is invited to take a step back from the narrative, and to question its intent. By pointing so blatantly towards its own construction, the text suggests a crucial connection between its form and its deeper meaning.

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Memory and Fragmented Reality The construction of the text as described above – the alternation of narrative voices and the ‘association of ideas’ technique – highlights the essential topics of the novel, all of which are related to the central issue of immigration and African reality in France. First, it draws attention to the theme of memory: more particularly, to psychological distress as a result of traumatic experiences. The recurrence of certain memories, specifically when they are associated with places, indicates that the characters are mired psychologically in the past. This is precisely the effect generated by the narrative construction delineated earlier: the jump from one narrator to another takes place through the evocation of a word, itself often associated with a place. It is as if with each of these evocations an unconscious memory phenomenon took place, which triggers the appearance of a new narrator. The memories and thoughts of the narrators are all circuitous, so that the characters continuously return, in spite of themselves, to the same episodes in their past. The theme of memory is, of course, related to that of exile, and of displacement in general. The most haunted character is the central narrator, who has fled Guinea after the execution of his father. However, the other figures are also tormented and limited by their memories. A prime example is Gilles, a Frenchman, initiated into animist beliefs, who is grossly maltreated by the new regime in postcolonial Guinea. He brings back to Lyon voices of African gods, and the conversations he holds with them are less a sign of madness than of a traumatized memory. The character of Galant–Métro commits himself fully to living in France; all his energy is turned to the past and his African fiancée, who is supposed to come and join him in Lyon. He waits for her, absurdly, every Wednesday, week after week and year after year, at the train station. There is a psychological blockage in the past, and this leads to his inability to conceive (and conceive of) a new future. Astrid and Gaby run the bar where the group of African immigrants meets each day. They also re-shuffle their memories. Not having personal experience of exile or immigration, the two women assimilate the traumas of their surroundings: Astrid returns continuously to the suicide attempt of Galant–Métro, in all probability struck by the cruelty of his fate. Her daughter Gaby, who married an amnesic African man right after the Second World War, takes upon herself the story of his life – literally, since it is she who tells the whole of their history together, and offers up speculations about his forgotten past. She does not, however, appear to enjoy the responsibility. While her husband, Toussaint, appears free of any anguish or trauma, Gaby asserts: “This black hole he has in the head, it should have been mine. To forget is a kind of ecstasy. The damnation in fact, is this unbearable memory” (217). These words, which occur in the last part of the novel, could be claimed

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by any of the other characters mentioned above, all of whom are more or less ‘damned’ with their past and their memory. The narrative construction of Un Rêve utile, as well as the themes of memory and trauma, makes it possible to address the idea of a manifold and fragmented reality. Indeed, the alternation among various narrators, each one fixed on his own memories and obsessions, creates a multiple narrative in which different languages and places mix. Past and present images of Conakry and Fria blend with images of Lyon. The different characters seem to evolve out of a scattered reality, one that could correspond to the reality of immigration, in particular of African identity in France: an identity which is, at the same time, composite, wandering, and sometimes lost. From this point of view, one must note the importance of places – often recurring – in this novel, which underline, by contrast, the dislocation of the characters. The many enumerations of topographic names in particular, regularly recited by the central narrator throughout the novel, give an almost frenetic character to his relationship to places. Astrid, in the same manner, returns mentally, each time she speaks, to the same places in the city, to the same bridge and the same streets, whose names she repeats again and again. Dislocated or psychologically disturbed, the characters in Un Rêve utile all try in vain to anchor themselves in their environment through the power of words.

Immigration and Peripheral Conditions As stated earlier, Un Rêve utile explicitly refers to the particular context of contemporary African economic immigration to France. Of course, themes such as those of memory and dislocation go beyond this single issue, and the characters of the novel do not only suffer from their immigrant status. However, aside from traumas of the past, the text clearly points a finger at the concrete difficulties of immigration, particularly that of contemporary, postcolonial immigration from Africa to the old colonial centre. Many well-known and stereotypical aspects of this condition are referred to in the novel; the author offers, for example, the racist behaviour of the French government as embodied in a policeman, as well as the anger of the French public (in particular that stratum at the bottom of the social ladder), as embodied by Pico, towards these newcomers from whom they fear competition. The difficulties that Galant–Métro encounters in trying to have his fiancée join him illustrate the increasing restrictions on family regrouping the French government has been imposing since the mid1980s. Hence Momo’s conclusion: “And Papa Édouard says that this country will show some hard time to the brothers. Just why do you think one meets more and more of them talking to themselves in the street” (123). The singular-

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ity of the ‘new’ immigration experience as juxtaposed to earlier situations is thrust to the forefront. On several occasions, the central narrator and Gaby mention other times, before decolonization, when the status of Africans in France was different. Both characters, independent of each other, use the same phrase: “Back then, Negroes were not compelled to have a visa” (55–56). Gaby adds: “Back then, Negroes were not as ordinary as they are today. There aren’t even any Negroes or blacks anymore” (212). Since Africans nowadays are immigrants among others, their status is essentially different from that of the lonely and exotic ‘nègre’ of the 1940s or 1950s. To underline this point, the author makes an ironic allusion to a famous French book, La Valise en carton,4 published in 1984 and adapted into a musical in 1986; it tells the exemplary but old-fashioned story of a Portuguese immigrant woman who arrives in France with nothing but a cardboard suitcase, but who eventually reaches the top of the social ladder thanks to her determination. In France, at the end of the 1980s, this story became emblematic of the cliché of successful immigration built on nothing but individual merit. Thus, when the central narrator of Un Rêve utile mentions that he arrived in France with a cardboard suitcase as his only piece of luggage (62), the French reader cannot help but be reminded of the famous story. It is clear that Monénembo, by using such a cliché, seeks to compare contemporary immigration with its older counterparts. The narrator himself makes an ironic comment on his suitcase, stating that it must be a Southern habit to carry such flimsy containers (62). He includes himself in this modern immigration phenomenon, the journey from the poor South to the rich North. However, here the suitcase becomes a symbol of the failure of the narrator’s own immigrant undertaking. His suitcase slowly falls apart, because it is raining at the time of his arrival, and because, in all his wandering, he cannot find a place to put it down (62, 108–109). Hence, the author seems to be pointing out the contrast between contemporary African immigration and that of the South European countries which took place in the first half of the twentieth century, which is generally considered to have been a successful process.5 Un Rêve utile can thus be read as immigrant writing, as it focuses on current African immigration and its specific character. However, as mentioned in the introduction, contemporary immigrant writings have a broader concern than the 4

Linda De Suza, La Valise en carton (Paris: Carrère/Michel Lafon, 1984). In France, a distinction is commonly made between European (Christian) immigration of the first half of the twentieth century, and the more recent postcolonial immigration, mostly from Africa and North Africa. This distinction usually includes pointing out the specific difficulties of recent immigration and questioning the possibilities for integration of people with a non-European cultural background. 5

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experiences of dislocation and exclusion of the migrant subject. They reveal the instability and fundamental plurality of all identities, in particular national identity. In this regard also, Un Rêve utile forms part of this literary trend. Indeed, one of the most salient aspects of the novel is the fact that it endeavours to describe a social reality broader than that of immigration alone: it thematizes the variety of peripheral conditions within French society. Once again, it is the narrative construction that makes it possible to create a community of various individuals, mixing classes (illiterate economic immigrants and highly educated political refugees) and cultures (African and French). In this regard, language plays a key part. The text juxtaposes different kinds of unofficial French, old local jargon and African-French idioms, which all have in common the singular characteristic that they fall outside the standard language. In this manner, Astrid, a Frenchwoman, appears as alien to the world of French administration as Galant–Métro, an African immigrant. Both have problems communicating with the representatives of authority, because neither of them speaks or understands this sort of French.

Conclusion In France, marginal status is not only equated with being a foreigner: it is a social phenomenon as much as, if not more than, it is a cultural one. In pointing towards this reality, Un Rêve utile raises the issue of the Other/s within: out of the text emerges a variety of marginal positions, not only on the periphery of francophone space but also within France and French culture itself. Beyond the immigrant condition, the characters of Un Rêve utile embody a general condition of liminality that includes various realities. By showing this, the novel reveals the multiple lines of fracture within the geographical and cultural French space, as well as its normative and constraining tendency to cover over these cracks.

WORKS CITED Albert, Christiane. L’Immigration dans le roman francophone contemporain (Paris: Karthala, 2005). Bonn, Charles, ed. Littératures des immigrations, vol. 2 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). Cazenave, Odile. Afrique sur Seine: Une nouvelle génération de romanciers africains à Paris (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2003). De Suza, Linda. La Valise en carton (Paris: Carrère/Michel Lafon, 1984). Laronde, Michel. Autour du roman beur: immigration et identité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1993). Monénembo, Tierno. Les Écailles du ciel (Paris: Seuil, 1986).

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——. Un Rêve utile (Paris: Seuil, 1991). Waberi, Abdourahman A. “Les Enfants de la postcolonie. Esquisse d’une nouvelle génération d’écrivains francophones d’Afrique noire,” Notre Librairie 135 (October–December 1998): 8–15.

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N ADIA B UTT ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Negotiating Untranslatability and Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator ABSTRACT: This article discusses the theme of ‘untranslatability’ of Islam in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator. Against the background of an increasingly transcultural world characterized by worldwide migration, the very idea of the ‘untranslatability of Islam’ points to what the Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi and others have diagnosed as ‘the crisis of modern Islam’. Aboulela’s novel highlights this untranslatability as the fundamental attribute of Islam: Islam, the novel suggests, seems above all translations. Aboulela’s narrative in fact stages the idea of the untranslatability of Islam as an undisputable fact of life in the interaction between a European man and an African woman, and thus throws up intriguing questions with regard to the role of religions in a globalized world characterized by far-reaching processes of social and cultural change. The Islamic solution means that the entirety of life is molded into a fundamentally Islamic form and character […] The Islamic solution means the establishment of a totally Islamic society.1 Modern Islam is […] not a pure autochthonous entity. It is itself an expression of the continuing argument with the penetrating colonial, industrial West.2

1

Yusuf al-Qurdawi, Al-hal al-islami, farida wa darura (Beriut: Beriut Press, 1974): 47, 88. Quoted in Bassam Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age, tr. Judith von Sivers (1981; Salt Lake City: Utah U P , 1988): 27, 28. 2 Tibi, The Crisis of Modern Islam, 39. © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Introduction

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H I S E S S A Y S E T S O U T to negotiate the idea of the ‘untranslatability of Islam’ in Leila Aboulela’s novel The Translator (1999). In her portrait of the main protagonist as a traveller between Sudan and Scotland, Aboulela depicts cultural encounters between Africa and Europe on the one hand, and between Islam and secularism on the other. This essay will explore the extent to which travel and various transcultural phenomena in the novel generate a cultural exchange between two disparate worlds and how the infallibility of Islamic laws comes to define the travelling individuals. Against the background of an increasingly transcultural world characterized by worldwide migration, the very idea of the ‘untranslatability of Islam’ points to what the Islamic scholar Bassam Tibi and others have diagnosed as “the crisis of modern Islam.” Ironically, Aboulela’s novel highlights this untranslatability as the fundamental attribute of Islam: Islam, The Translator suggests, seems above all to be translations. Set against Christian Scotland and Islamic Sudan, The Translator presents a cross-stitching of contrary cultural setups. In describing the life of the young Sudanese widow Sammar, who works as an Arabic translator at a British university, the novelist presents a god-fearing Muslima undergoing culture-shock in the Western world. Following the sudden death of her husband Tarig in a car accident and a painful estrangement from her five-year-old son Amir, Sammar migrates to Britain as a sad and lonely woman. Life begins to change when she finds herself falling in love with Rae, a Scottish scholar of Islam. Despite inhabiting entirely different worlds, they are drawn to each other. In unfolding a transcultural tale of both human and divine love, The Translator depicts a modern woman’s confrontation with the Western perception of Islam, on the one hand, and the idea of Islam as an absolute truth, on the other.

Travelling Religions Travel and translation are vividly reflected in the story of The Translator as the female protagonist migrates from Sudan to England and then back to Sudan. Rather than blending Afro-Islamic culture into European-secular culture and vice versa, however, Aboulela has opted for a different story: the wholesale conversion of a non-Muslim to Islam, which precludes any substantial form of blending, merging or mixing of cultures and religions. In response to the theme of human interaction against a backdrop of conflicting cultures, Aboulela acknowledges that it is understandable when some people choose to reject cultural fusions, because they regard them as inimical to their indigenous cultural

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identity: “because of greater diversity and greater choice, some people will take the option of not mixing.”3 Aboulela’s novel, in fact, stages the idea of the untranslatability of Islam as an indisputable fact of life in the interaction between a European man and an African woman, and thus throws up intriguing questions with regard to the role of religions in a globalized world characterized by far-reaching processes of social and cultural change. With an increase in transnational and transcultural connections all over the globe, the impact of travel, migration, and translation on languages, cultures, and life-worlds testifies to the centrality of modernity in both Western and nonWestern societies. In discussing African modernity, it would be a mistake, however, to trace processes of modernity in African Islamic cultures according to a universal model of ‘Western modernity’. Instead, we need to focus on the idea of African modernities,4 which presents a challenge to the monocivilizational narratives of ‘Western modernity’ that have dominated the perception of modernity in non-Western parts of the world.5 In discussing Islam and modernity, what is thus at issue is not how far Islam can be adapted to Western modes of modernity, but how Islam is able to position itself in a world of globalized modernity.6 Theories of cultural translation as a product of mass migration, diasporic communities, and transnational families have become increasingly important in contemporary appraisals of the evolution of modernity.7 Indeed, travel, migration, and cultural translation seem to epitomize the fluid character of our contemporary times, as cross-cultural translations become increasingly inevitable in the wake of (both voluntary and involuntary) global mobility. In fact, rootlessness and mobility are now often considered one of the key aspects of mod3

Saleh Eissa, “The Witness: Interview with Leila Aboulela”: http://iwitness.co.uk /features /0705fe03.htm [11 November 2006]. 4 For a detailed view of ‘African modernities’, see Ali A. Mazrui, “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest” (1995), in The Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, ed. Ricardo Rene Laremont & Fouad Kalouche (Trenton & Eritrea: African World Press, 2002): 449–71. 5 For deeper insights into modernity as negotiated beyond Europe, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Introduction: The Idea of Provincializing Europe,” and Chapter One: “Historicism and the Narrative of Modernity” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2000): 3–23, 27–46. 6 For further perspectives on Islamic modernities, see Nilüfer Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities” Daedalus 129 (“Multiple Modernities”; Winter 2000): 91–117. 7 For a detail review of a connection between travel and translation, see Between Language and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts, ed. Anuradha Dingwaney (Pittsburgh P A : Pittsburgh U P , 1994), and The Translatability of Cultures: Figuration of the Space Between, ed. Sanford Budick & Wolfgang Iser (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1996).

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ernity. Globalized modernity thus demands a revision of all kinds of ‘purity’: of culture, nationality, religion or identity. Edward Said has pointed out with regard to twentieth-century movement and migration: No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind.8

Travel and translation are thus integral to the dialectics of transcultural theory. James Clifford brings out the connection between the two by asserting that travel emerges as an increasingly complex range of experiences: “practices of crossing and interaction that trouble the localism of many common sense assumptions about culture and translation.”9 Indeed, Clifford’s conception of our constantly changing globe points towards the emergence of an interconnected world in which religion and culture cannot stay aloof from external or global influences. Although Aboulela’s novel hinges on the metaphor of translation, the novelist insists on the impossibility of translating Islam as a constant cultural system. There is thus an irony in the staging of cross-cultural translations as embodied in the leitmotif and running metaphor of ‘the translator’, because in reality no cultural translation takes place. Instead, a secular man from Europe becomes a Muslim in order to marry a Muslim woman and to rise in Allah’s favour. Amid diverse cultural interactions and communication in our increasingly transcultural age,10 modern cultures have increasingly become sites of plurality. But, in The Translator, these sites of multiple cultural encounters are reduced to the singular space of an Islam that celebrates singleness in the form of God, Mohammed, and the Q’uran, and dismisses multiplicity. Throughout the novel the female protagonist remains determined that she cannot believe in a hybrid but only in a pure Islam. 8

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994), 336 (emphasis in original). James Clifford’s reading of movement and mobility under the title “The Pure Products Go Crazy” in his The Predicament of Culture further articulates the dynamics of our transcultural era: “This century has seen a drastic expansion of mobility, including tourism, migrant labour, immigration, urban sprawl […] An older topography and experience of travel is exploded […] ‘Cultural’ difference is no longer a stable, exotic otherness […] A whole structure of expectations about authenticity in culture and art is thrown in doubt.” Clifford, “Introduction: The Pure Products Go Crazy”; The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988), 13–14. 9 Clifford, Routes, 3. 10 See Wolfgang Welsch “Tranculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999): 194–231.

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Untranslatability and the Crisis of Modern Islam The Translator demonstrates the crisis of modern Islam as much as the crisis of modern-educated Muslim women – despite the happy reconciliation of a Muslim woman with her converted husband at the close of the novel. In the transnational setting of the novel, the relationship of people to their religions raises the fundamental question of the extent to which Islam can be translated in the contemporary age. According to Islamic law, a Muslim woman is expelled from her religion if she marries a non-Muslim. This fear of expulsion from the circle of Islam by allowing a non-Muslim man to enter her life is at the heart of the female protagonist’s transcultural and transnational saga. As Bassam Tibi has pointed out, Islam has not yet undergone a phase of cultural adaptation to secular modernity (as Christianity did during the Enlightenment), and for many Muslims all over the world the fact that the Prophet Mohammad declared the Q’uran to be the last word of God fourteen hundred years ago literally means that there is no room for alteration and amendment in the Islamic religion.11 Consequently, it is still a heretical act for a Muslim woman to marry a non-Muslim man, and Aboulela carefully steers clear of fictionally endorsing what a rigid understanding of Islam would consider blasphemy. The Translator is thus not only a representation of an Afro-Islamic woman’s lonely struggle with Western liberal and secular values, but also the literary site of a struggle within Islam itself, since what is regarded as inviolable Islamic law must not be allowed to open to the flow of modernity and modernization. Due to her ardent wish to stay loyal to the Q’uranic injunctions and shari’ah law, the female protagonist faces a conflict between her duty to Allah and her passion for a non-believer. She is convinced, however, that love for the divine has to be superior to human love because the physical world is supposed to be temporary for every true Muslim while “only Allah is eternal.”12 Various articles and reviews have discussed The Translator as a feminist text. Indeed, the novel can be read in terms of a manifest feminist perspective from the African continent, as the plot-line maps the triumph of a sheltered Sudanese Muslim woman over a secular European man and thus resembles an inverted, female rendition of the taming of the shrew. The Translator is also the story of the triumph of Islam over the ‘godless’ West; reading the novel 11

It has to be noted that to doubt and to question the existence of God and His revelations in any intellectual or philosophical form is blasphemous in Islam. A Muslim sceptic is wajabul-Katal: i.e. he is punishable with the death penalty. 12 Leila Aboulela, The Translator (New York: Black Cat, 1999): 9. Further page references are in the main text.

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exclusively in terms of a feminist critique13 is tantamount to marginalizing the more significant conflict between Islam and modernity that pervades the story of the African ‘translator’ in Europe. A large majority of Muslims today consider it an obligation to keep Islam in a water-tight compartment lest any outside influence may tarnish its codes and character. This is, in fact, the fundamental aim of the female protagonist in the novel. When she returns to her African homeland as a penniless, dependent woman, she is happy to imagine her sacrifices and sufferings as a necessary consequence of keeping her faith and love for Allah intact. In view of her selfinflicted misery, Rae’s declaration to Sammar during his visit to Sudan that “ours isn’t a religion of suffering […] Not a religion of pathos, not a religion of redemption through sacrifice”14 is anything but convincing. Religious rigidity, in fact, produces the highest emotional barrier between Sammar and Rae throughout the novel – a barrier which reflects religious and social anxiety among Muslims in our “runaway world.”15 The global flows of modernity have created “contact zones” which can no longer be seen exclusively in terms of “colonial encounters,”16 and where translations of religion as well as culture have become a constant process. For radical Islamists, this process of cultural translation on a local and global scale constitutes a permanent threat, however, since it may taint the incontrovertible rules of Islam which are supposed to denote the perfect code of life. As Islam is considered to be in no need of any external influence, it has to be guarded from translation. These rigid notions of religious sequestration also permeate Aboulela’s text: as an epitome of the true Islamic spirit, the female protagonist is portrayed as a translator who is paradoxically supposed to remain untranslated – like Islam itself – in order not to compromise her Islamic fervour. The protagonist’s obsession with religion does little to restore her position as an independent woman and hinders her liberty and freedom. She not only gives up her job in Aberdeen but happily becomes a servant of her aunt-cum-motherin-law Mahasen, wears the cast-off clothes of other family members (69) and 13 See Nash, “Re-Siting Religion and Creating Feminised Space in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela.” 14 Aboulela, The Translator, 198. 15 See Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping Our Lives (London: Profile, 2002). 16 Mary Louise Pratt, “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone,” in Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London & New York: Routledge, 1992): 6. While Pratt employs the term ‘contact zone’ in the sense of colonial encounters, ‘contact zone’ as employed in this essay aims at a wholly new interpretation. It is neither synonymous with Pratt’s ‘colonial frontier’ nor with a space of interaction among subject peoples but denotes, rather, a space of temporal and spatial plurality in today’s transcultural world.

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expresses a wish to become the third wife of an old semi-literate but godfearing man who, she believes, “is religious and feels a duty towards widows” (13). This is done under the sign of rendering her duty to Allah and keeping her character unpolluted. Unlike more pragmatic and liberal Muslim women like Mahasen, Sammar firmly believes that adherence to Islamic laws such as polygamy and devotion to the needy is the only yardstick by which to judge a man’s calibre. The title of Aboulela’s novel thus projects a double-edged irony as well as an ambiguity that links Sammar and Rae, the two protagonists from contrary cultural landscapes. Sammar as ‘the translator’ chooses to translate neither herself nor her religion into her adopted homeland, Scotland. Scotland is always “another man’s land” (4), whereas Africa is home, since she is not ready to convert Aberdeen into home. Even when she has a feeling of home there, she inevitably connects it with the feeling of her “home in the past” (41): i.e. her Sudanese homeland. When she finds herself falling deeply in love with Rae, she once more expresses the warmth of love in terms of discovering Africa in Scotland: “Like him Africa was arrived at and loved” (45). The paradox of her situation is that she is devoted to the task of translating Arabic texts, especially the Koran and the Hadith, into English at a Scottish university, but never makes an effort to translate herself into the Western culture with her Islamic beliefs. She not only wears a headscarf as a symbol of her Islamic identity,17 but also stays aloof from the Christmas or New Year’s celebrations in Britain. Sammar prefers to say her prayers five times a day in seclusion to escape people’s surprise at her isolated prostration before God. Since worldly engagements are conceived as a burden on her soul, her prayers are a refuge for her: “They were the only challenge, the last touch with normality, without them she would have fallen, lost awareness of the shift of day into night” (16). In this way, she imposes isolation on herself, believing that the way to spiritual elation is a loner’s journey. In addition, she considers spirituality more rewarding than any material longings, because a rigid understanding of Islam dismisses worldly and sensuous pleasures such as the consumption of alcohol and sexual contacts outside marriage. Having lived a life devoted to Islam, she never imagines joining Islam with secularism, but prefers to make Rae accept Islam so that she can marry him according to the shari’ah and keep the Islamic laws intact. 

17

For more perspectives on the role of women and headscarf in Islam see Nadia Butt, “Veiled Arguments,” Daily Times Pakistan (11 May 2004): 4.

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Euro-Islam versus the Untranslatability of Islam The final resolution of the latent conflict in the novel can best be grasped by contrasting the idea of the untranslatability of Islam with the concept of an emerging Euro-Islam. Sammar is categorically opposed to reconciling herself with the idea of having a dual identity, Islamic and secular, in the wake of her migration to a foreign country. The idea of mixing an Islamic identity with a European one, of keeping your Islamic identity intact yet becoming a European, is totally absent from the tale of Sammar’s transcultural encounter. This idea has been most forcefully articulated in Bassam Tibi’s concept of “EuroIslam,” which posits a way of accommodating Islam in a largely Christian and secular Europe by highlighting the necessity of fusing an Islamic identity with a Western or secular identity in order to further a new cultural richness rather than cultural assimilation or the clash of civilizations.18 Rae’s charisma and his cultural background fascinate Sammar, but once she is convinced that he can never be converted to Islam, she gives up on him. She imagines that his opposition to Islam creates a state of exile for both of them: “If Rae said no, what exile would he put himself in? If he said no, she would walk out on to the snow, an exile she would take with her wherever she went” (125). Eventually she abandons her job and her social status in Britain to trace her roots in Africa, without facing the bitter reality that she is a complete misfit among her own people and in her Islamic culture after her long absence – particularly since she does not have any financial independence despite her education and work experience in Britain. The final meeting between Rae and Sammar before their marriage in Khartoum is staged in terms of a melodramatic celebration of Islamic ideals. First, Rae confesses that Islam has made him clean for a clean woman: “‘In the Qur’an it says that pure women are for pure men […] and I wasn’t clean enough for you then’” (96–97). This refers to the fact that all other non-Muslim men and especially non-Muslim women are considered unclean by Islamic orthodoxy. Second, Rae proclaims that he has acquired dignity after recognizing Allah, which clearly implies that non-Muslims have no dignity. Third, he uses the word “ours” (198) for religion, making Sammar feel that Islam has finally united them. It was thus religion, and not love, that could finally unite Sammar with Rae. While religion, in fact, causes enormous suffering and pain to both Sammar and Rae, Aboulela presents it as a rational way to find God and 18

For further insights into the concept and use of ‘Euro-Islam’, see Bassam Tibi, Kreuzzug und Djihad: Der Islam und die christliche Welt (Mumich: Bertelsmann, 1999). For further details on Tibi’s conceptions of Islam and European Muslims see Nadia Butt, “Bassam Tibi: Bridging Civilisations,” Friday Times (Pakistan; July 2004): 7–8.

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to discover oneself. In effect, man is portrayed as compelled to translate himself into religion, while the idea of religion translating itself to his exigencies is absent from the novel. Moreover, Sammar is hailed as a saviour who will save Rae’s soul from the hellfire predicted time and again in the Q’uran for nonbelievers. Even before he becomes a Muslim, Rae confesses to her: “You make me feel safe. I feel safe with you” (64). Existential fear, it seems, can only be overcome by espousing Islam. Both Sammar and Rae are, in fact, products of cross-cultural encounters, since their lives have been shaped by transcultural experiences. Despite Sammar’s associations with Islam and African culture, she was born in England and underwent an English education. Similarly, Rae is well-versed in the Q’uran and in Islamic law, and has connections with the Islamic world. Yet, for Sammar, the experience of living between cultures and continents is not enough to enter a marriage with a non-Muslim, or even to go for a ride with him from Aberdeen to Stirling (57). All kinds of prejudices and taboos come to her mind that exist in Islamic societies whenever unmarried men and women meet or enjoy any kind of intimacy. She is not satisfied with Rae’s understanding of Islamic culture and acceptance of the Q’uran as a sacred text alone, because as a true Muslim, she wants his absolute submission to Allah and His Prophet. Hence she dismisses the possibility of inhabiting multiple worlds in favour of withdrawing to “the One World of Islam” where Oneness of Allah and His words are to be hailed as the ultimate truth. Sammar makes Rae plunge into an untranslated world of Islam simply by saying “the Shahadah” (123),19 and thus ensures the triumph of Islam over atheism. The untranslatability of Islam is further emphasized in one of the conversations between Rae and Sammar about the Q’uran. When Rae tells Sammar “Translations don’t do justice […] Much is lost,” Sammar replies: “Yes, the meaning can be translated but not reproduced. And of course the miracle of it can’t be reproduced” (124). This idea clearly harks back to the Islamic practice of maintaining Arabic as the language of revelation in a Muslim world constituted by hundreds of millions of non-Arabic speakers: as the Q’uran was revealed to Mohammed in the Arabic language, Asian and Africans were expected during Islamic colonization (and are expected even today) to read it in its original Arabic version so that they do not miss anything in God’s words which a translation is likely to miss – which accounts for the mushrooming of the Q’uran Schools, popularly known as madarasa, in non-Arabic Islamic regions like Pakistan and Afghanistan. 19

The Shahadah is the first pillar of Islam: There is no god except Allah and Mohammed is His last prophet.

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Both Rae and Sammar blissfully ignore the significance of linguistic and cultural translation in our contemporary times while discussing the translation of the Q’uran and its miracle. Sammar tries to impress upon Rae that since the Q’uran is “Divine revelation, certain truths” (124), no translation can ever do justice to it. This monolithic understanding of Islam tends to isolate it and to sever it from the inescapable processes of transcultural change in a globalized world. In this context, it is particularly helpful to consider Bassam Tibi’s reflections on the dilemma of Islam and the cultural accommodation of social change: According to the orthodox Islamic conception, the revelation of the Koran, to the Prophet Muhammed, is the ultimate truth, valid for all times, all religions, and the whole of humanity. Within this interpretation, the Islamic religion is unalterable and cannot be adopted to any reality, for it is itself the ultimate religion, revealed by the Seal of the prophets (Koran: “Khatam an-nabiyin” sura 33, verse 40); Muhammed is said to have proclaimed the final revelation of God. It is here that the question arises of how Muslims react to change, how they understand development and progress, or whether such concepts even existed before Islam’s encounter with the West. In Islam, there is only one absolute truth, valid for all time and not at all conditioned by history. The tendency of every religion toward the Absolute is of course a universally observable phenomenon, but in Islamic theology it is manifest more intensely than in any other religion.20

In the light of this statement, the religious logic behind the peculiar staging of Sammar’s and Rae’s transcultural relationship becomes visible. Even though Sammar is aware of the spuriousness of religious, cultural and racial divisions, she is preoccupied with them to such an extent that she looks upon Rae not in terms of friendship and love, but only in terms of Islamic do’s and don’ts: Sammar felt separate from him, exiled while he was in his homeland, fasting while he was eating turkey and drinking wine. They lived in worlds divided by simple facts – religion, country of origin, race – data that fills forms. (34)

The distinction between halal and haram (i.e. between what is permitted and what is forbidden), which is central to the content of interpretative Islamic law, is also central to Sammar’s perception of her social world. It is unbearable for Sammar that Rae is not conscious of halal and haram and, above all, of Allah’s existence, whereas Rae is not disturbed by her religious fervour at all (94).. At first, she questions her selfishness for wishing him to become a Muslim for her sake and not for his own salvation: 20

Bassam Tibi, Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, tr. Clare Krojzl (1985; Boulder C O & Oxford: Westview, 1990): 9.

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She had never, not once, prayed that he would become a Muslim for his own sake, for his own good. It had always been for herself, her need to get married again, not be alone. If she could rise above that, if she would clean her intentions. He had been kind to her and she had given him nothing in return. (175)

As the novel progresses, Sammar as a righteous Muslim woman is resolved to purge herself of selfish intentions, however, and thus wishes Rae to become a Muslim for his own betterment. She is convinced that if you die as a Kafir (an infidel or unbeliever), your eternal fate will be damnation in hell: What kept her going day after day: he would become a Muslim before he died. It was not too much to want, not too much to pray for. They would meet in Paradise and nothing would go wrong there, nothing at all. (184–85)

Since the idea of ‘rescuing’ Rae by transferring him into the ultimate truth of Islam is so central not only to Sammar’s personal life story, but also to the overall project of Aboulela’s novel, it can hardly come as a surprise that the Muslim News described The Translator as “the first halal novel written in English”21 – as opposed to countless “haram novels” that do not celebrate the triumph of Islam and the defeat of secularism as a disobedience to Allah and His Prophet.

Conclusion As numerous theories of travel and translation have endeavoured to show, today’s global cultural scenario is characterized by the multidimensional nature of cultural flows and a wide variety of transcultural experiences and practices. Yet the peculiar staging of cultural encounters in The Translator clearly dismisses cultural mélange in favour of cultural authenticity. Aboulela maintains that she celebrates spiritual and not political Islam in her fiction, and that this is also true of her latest novel, Minaret (2005). She believes that “religion in Third World Countries in general is strong in people’s lives”;22 as an African writer in Britain, where religion is marginalized in literature, she thus feels a need to represent it in fiction in an interesting manner. Like her heroine Sammar, however, the author ignores the significance of addressing the dilemma of Muslims in adapting themselves to a new social and cultural order while staying loyal to their belief. Aboulela takes it for granted that Islam has to remain unchanged, no matter which directions world society takes:

21 22

Saleh Eissa, “The Witness: Interview with Leila Aboulela.” Eissa, “The Witness.”

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I am interested in writing about Islam not as an identity but going deeper and showing the state of mind and feelings of a Muslim who has faith. I want also to write fiction that follows Islamic logic. This is different than writing ‘Islamically correct’ literature – I do not do that. My characters do not behave necessarily as a ‘good Muslim’ should. They are not ideals or role models. They are, as I see them to be, ordinary Muslims trying to practice their faith in difficult circumstances and in a society which is unsympathetic to religion.23

It is not necessarily true, however, that secular societies are always unsympathetic to religion. Religion becomes a problem when people with religious beliefs choose to inculcate their religious doctrines in secular individuals and their society instead of blending their native religion into the foreign social setup. Aboulela is undoubtedly justified in saying that, especially after 9/11, Western societies must strive to be more tolerant towards Islam, but in emphasizing this angle, she forgets that Muslims need to be ready for change in the form of cultural hybridization, too, by seeking some form of common ground in secular societies. If Muslim immigrants should opt for a strategy of creating parallel societies within their adopted homelands, Western or non-Western, they will necessarily endanger their acceptance as loyal citizens of that society and contribute to an inevitable social crisis. In a world of globalized modernity where social and religious truths are inevitably confronted with processes of change and mutation, newness and innovation, there is thus indeed an urgent need to translate Islam into “the global ecumene of modernity”24 and to initiate a productive dialogue that can bridge the growing gulf between religious orthodoxy and secular cultures, between tradition and change, and above all between Islam and modernity.

WORKS CITED Aboulela, Leila. The Translator (New York: Black Cat Press, 1999). Butt, Nadia. “Veiled Arguments,” Daily Times (Pakistan; 11 May 2004): 4. ——. “Bassam Tibi: Bridging Civilisations,” Friday Times (Pakistan; July 2004): 7–8. Budick, Sanford, & Wolfgang Iser, ed. The Translatability of Cultures: Figuration of the Space Between (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 1996). Cesari, Jocelyne. “Islam in the West: Modernity and Globalization Revisited,” in Globalization and the Muslim World: Culture, Religion, and Modernity, ed. Brigit Schaebler & Leif Stenberg (Syracuse N Y : Syracuse U P , 2004): 80–92.

23

Eissa, “The Witness.” For further details, see Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996): 44–55. 24

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Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton N J & Oxford: Princeton U P , 2000). Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). ——. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997). Dingwaney, Anuradha, ed. Between Language and Cultures: Translation and Cross-Cultural Texts (Pittsburgh P A : Pittsburgh U P , 1994). Eissa, Saleh. “The Witness: Interview with Leila Aboulela” 11 November 2006. Eisenstadt, Shmuel. “Multiple Modernities,” Daedalus 129.1 (2000): 1–30. Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process, vol. 2 (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973). Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives (London: Profile, 2002). Göle, Nilüfer. “Snapshots of Islamic Modernities,” Daedalus 1.129 (2000): 91–117. Hannerz, Ulf. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). Mazrui, Ali A. “Africa and Other Civilizations: Conquest and Counter-Conquest” (1995), in The Collected Essays of Ali A. Mazrui, ed. Ricardo Rene Laremont & Fouad Kalouche (Trenton N J & Eritrea: African World Press, 2002): 449–71. Nash, Geoffrey. “Re-Siting Religion and Creating Feminised Space in the Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif and Leila Aboulela,” Wasafiri 35 (2002): 28–31. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London &New York: Routledge, 1992). Qurdawi, Yusuf al-. Al-hal al-islami, farida wa darura (Beriut: Beriut Press, 1974). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta / Penguin, 1991). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Vintage, 1994). Tibi, Bassam. The Crisis of Modern Islam: A Preindustrial Culture in the Scientific-Technological Age, tr. Judith von Sivers (1981; Salt Lake City: Utah U P , 1988). ——. Islam and the Cultural Accommodation of Social Change, tr. Clare Krojzl (1985; Boulder C O & Oxford: Westview, 1990). ——. Kreuzzug und Djihad: Der Islam und die christliche Welt (Munich: Bertelsmann, 1999). Welsch, Wolfgang. “Tranculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (London: Sage, 1999): 194–231.

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O BODODIMMA O HA ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

‘Occupying the Isolated Terminal Space and Silent’ — The Rhetoric of Inclusion and Exclusion in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode

ABSTRACT: Being included in or excluded from the European world in which they have relocated is a major issue that some African writers address in their writings. The host / stranger relationship that exists is something that is fundamentally performed in various symbolic ways that are captured in the rhetoric of these writings, and which deserve some critical reflection, especially because they reveal the experience of the politics of otherness in actual everyday practice. The article discusses the poetic responses of Femi Oyebode to the inclusive and exclusive shibboleths of his migration to Britain, and his return to his African cultural and historical values in an attempt to redefine his identity in the new contested cultural space. It is argued that more than exposing the attitude to difference as the main obstacle to intercultural understanding in the relationship between the migrant Self and the European host, the poet uses his narration of his African values as a means of undermining the perceived isolation and silencing of the migrant African Other. In celebrating Africa where he is located in Britain, Oyebode actualizes the notion of the ‘Third-Worlding’ of Europe – the transformative presencing of the Third World in the European space – within the domain of literature.

 © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Introduction

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A F R I C A I N E U R O P E , by which is meant the representation of Africa, the re-creation of African cultural aesthetics and rhetorical practices, as well as the representation of Africa as a text performed within the European context, is a crucial issue especially at a time when the pressure to escape to Europe has increased in African countries. Given the growing disenchantment with political and economic life within many African countries, the fantasies that some Africans have about the West as the Heaven of Rest, a place where the good life is guaranteed, appears to be growing every day. Similarly, Africans resident in the West might, when faced with the realities of the host society, especially those that marginalize them, could also turn to rediscover and romanticize their Africanness. African writers resident in European countries might, through works reflecting their experiences of the European world, have some important frameworks of knowledge that could help us in comprehending the issue of the insertion of Africa in Europe and the problem of identity that attends Africa–Europe migrations. Rüdiger Kunow has drawn our attention to the fact that, from a postcolonial standpoint, HE WRITING OF

space is always already inhabited, “full,” and for that reason also contested. For such an organization of social and cultural space, the critical instant lies in the mo(ve)ment of transgression, the passage across boundaries, dividing lines, demarcations. Borders, limits, fault-lines of culture are in this perspective no longer merely the end point of a definable, circumscribed space, but in a sense its beginning, the point at which or from which the inscription of a revisionist, differential cultural location will have to start.1

The transcultural is also the transgressive: it violates cultural boundaries, and creates a dialogism that challenges cultural hegemony. The return to African roots in the writings of Africans who have migrated to the West clearly represents the notion of “mo(ve)ment of transgression,” not only in terms of crossing cultural borders and seeking to reinvent the past that was left behind, but also in terms of the implied challenge and interrogation of the hegemonic Western value-system. This article discusses the rhetoric of inclusion and exclusion of the African living in a European cultural context, as it is performed in the poetry of Femi Oyebode, a Nigerian who has lived in self-exile in Britain for many years. 1 Rüdiger Kunow, “At the Borderline: Placing and Displacing Communities in Postcolonial Narratives,” in Postmodernism and the Fin de Siècle, ed. Gerhard Hoffmann & Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2002): 184.

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Despite his long stay in Britain, Oyebode, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Birmingham, exhibits nostalgic attachment to his African roots in his writings. Writing in an essay in the special issue of the Nigerian literary journal Ase focusing on the poetry of Femi Oyebode, Onookome Okome explains that The pain of exile is consciously inscribed in the poetry of Oyebode, but the pleasure of that backward glance to the root, [home] is retold in the magnificent lyricism of a past with all its history of primordial orality.2

It is as if the difficulty of locating and situating the Self in the exile space provokes memory of home. In other words, the quest for a place to call home in exile brings to mind the existence of a home that has been left behind. Writing about this home that has been left behind is therefore more than nostalgia: it is also about a psychological relocation of this African home into the European. In this case, there is, within the psychology of the exiled, a conflict between homeland and other-land as texts. Okome asserts that Oyebode’s poetry “refigures the tensions of home and exile in a way which is both personal and communal,” arguing further that the poet’s “personal universe” in this case “is constantly invested with the mythic history and cultural matrix of home,” and that this home is historical. It is mythical. It is cultural. It is political. Home is sometimes profaned, but it has its special spiritual essence too. Essentially home is a cultural map on which Oyebode writes his personal history, desires, hopes, frustrations. Home is the map which guides his weary body in the geography of exile.3

If Oyebode re-creates his African home in his poetry this intensely, then it would be interesting to juxtapose the rhetoric of this imagined African home with the rhetoric of presence in the European space. What is the nature of the language that represents and reports this European space? What does the language suggest about the writer’s relationship with this European space and cultural text? What does the language suggest about his attitude to the European context in which he is located? 

2

Onookome Okome, “Home and Exile in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode,” Ase: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Contemporary Nigerian Life and Literature 3.3 (1996): 4. 3 Okome, “Home and Exile in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode,” 5.

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Speech, Silence and the Psychology of Exclusion Language and other forms of communicative behaviour tell us a lot about the nature of inter-personal and inter-group relationships in society. Both the linguistic and non-linguistic forms of the mediation of relationship are engaged in Oyebode’s dialogue with British and African cultural worlds in his poetry. He focuses on aspects of symbolic behaviour that reveal the British practice of exclusive shibboleth against African migrant populations, using a personalized narrative. These symbolic forms of behaviour, which become clearer when examined from the standpoints of semiotics and psychology, include keeping silent (i.e. avoiding talking with the outsider), facial expressions (especially the type that would either subdue or make the Other uncomfortable), and trained speech. It is important to understand the two levels of silence that are reported as operating in the poet–persona’s encounter with the British cultural world: the silence of the host in responding to the African exile, and the silence of the African in responding to the silence of the host. The silence of the African is not necessarily an acceptance of discrimination or even a counter-strategy of exclusion, but a condition of painful withdrawal and being with the Self. The avoidance of speaking with or to the Other is a clear message about exclusion, for interacting in language symbolizes one level of communing or sharing of community. In some ‘primitive’ societies, when an individual is ostracized, every other member of the community is forbidden to talk with the individual. Sharing speech is a means of creating and servicing community. Thus, to avoid talking to an individual is to keep that individual out of community, something that can be psychologically devastating. Indeed, it is a form of psychological torture, which clearly underlines the inhumanity in this form of verbal discrimination. Oyebode, in his collection of poems entitled Wednesday Is a Colour (1990), captures this form of discrimination suffered by the African living among the English: i have lived amongst the english, in the genteel orderliness of their damp afternoons, surrounded by well-bred pink roses and lawns, terrified into my place by gestures and postures, largely by silence and the determined look.4

Silence and “the determined look” are two interactive strategies in the cultural politics of exclusion used by the English host in resisting cultural dialogue between the African and European worlds. As a ‘language’, silence withdraws 4

Femi Oyebode, Selected Poems, comp. Onookome Okome (Ibadan: Kraft, 1998): 39.

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Self from the Other, or the world of the Self from the world of the Other. This language of silence is supposedly required to perform the difference between the two racial worlds – indeed, to keep them apart. Yet it undermines the civilized being of the English host: well-kept lawns and pink roses have not translated into well-kept cross-cultural or inter-racial relationships; civilized environments do not necessarily imply civilized behaviour – even though it is assumed that keeping the racial Other out of community is a way of preserving the purity of Self and civilization. It has been observed elsewhere that “many migrant and exiled people would want a Europe that includes them, not only a Europe that provides accommodation or refuge,”5 and that “the impossibility of being included, of being in the Order of the Other, would make such a poet to retreat further into a mental exile where those desires (for a ‘home’) are fictionally satisfied.”6 An individual who is kept out of community by oppressive silence is, paradoxically, there but not-there, present but indeed absent. Making the Other absent appears to be one way of reassuring the Self that it is present and dominant. But, as a matter of fact, cultural presence of the Self is determined in the presence of the Other, not the Other’s absence. It appears, as Oyebode writes, that the English host prefers this absence of the present Other: i participate in the circle which excludes by occupying the isolated terminal space and silent i participate in their circle nodal unacceptable border of unreflective cohesion […] i remain, silent drop of scalding rain, tense and vengefully black.7

Discrimination is constructed in the poem as a spatial and cultural struggle: the nominal group, “the circle which excludes,” vividly conveys an interesting them-versus-us image. Being within a circle and yet at its margins (“isolated terminal space”) suggests the prevalence of a shibboleth, a recursive, primordial, discriminatory system that creates circles within circles. In Wednesday Is a Colour, he identifies the existence in Britain of a system of “private privacy” that contrasts with the African system of “public privacy,”8 which partly accounts for the imagined circle of exclusion. “Public privacy” is inherently para5

Obododimma Oha, “En/countering the New Language of Exile in Uche Nduka’s The Bremen Poems,” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 2.1 (2005): http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/70/44 6 Oha, “En/countering the New Language of Exile in Uche Nduka’s The Bremen Poems.” 7 Oyebode, Selected Poems, 39. 8 Femi Oyebode, Wednesday Is a Colour (Birmingham: Ijala, 1990): 2.

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doxical, just as “private privacy” is clearly tautological. The latter reveals the over-emphasis on privacy and indeed the harmful impact of modernity on community. “Private privacy” overstretches the significance of personal space, as if this space no longer intersects with or needs other personal spaces to have its full meaning. The undecidable semiotic of “public privacy,” on the other hand, reveals the complexity of the definition of personal space in the African context: the personal space is not personal but public, does not represent a boundary as such but the beginning of an openness, not an independence but a representation of mutual dependency. In line with this perception of intersubjectivity, the poet–persona attempts to re-establish link with the motherland, with the cultural and spiritual spheres, a quest which agrees with the Yoruba world-view that the dead are not gone but do interact with or influence the actions of the living. The following excerpt presents the poet–persona’s recuperation of the Yoruba notion of the living dead: at night, the dead speak, shrilly piercing this temporary veil, quickly my dead, whose earth is far away. at night, the dead sing, soaring darkly into this isolated pool like my eyes at night my dead, whose earth you are now at night, the dead move, rustling through dreams leaving tracks in the corridor but powerless in the eye like vision. My dead, whose debt are you now.9

It could be seen that, to construct the livingness of the dead through language (precisely through transitivity), the poet–persona uses the verbal material process “move” (as in “at night / the dead move…”), “sing” (as in “at night / the dead sing …”), and “speak” (as in “at night / the dead speak …”). The impression created about the dead is that they are language-using agents, too, and that they do things with words, as well as moving about just like the living within the context of time. Language is thus an important tool in creating the 9

Oyebode, Selected Poems, 33–34.

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fantasy of links between worlds and between spaces. Oshita O. Oshita observes, with regard to this return to Yoruba spirituality: Oyebode’s works betray bland animism, a feature typical of his traditional Yoruba worldview according to which things are full of spirits. Everything has a god-soul which purpose and direction it manifests. This is the case in both the concrete, the ideal and the possible worlds. This ontological elasticity favours some rather bizarre contrivances such as non-being and unicorns, as well as being itself. […] The poet is unrepentantly nostalgic about the beautiful world of his reminiscences in contrast to his temporality in Europe, the latter evoking curiosity, adventure and envy.10

It is perhaps in Forest of Transformations (1991) that the poet engages in the most extensive reflection on his rediscovery of his Yoruba tradition of supernaturalism, which is an important level of discourse on “public privacy,” for the divinities (Obatala, Oduduwa, Oranyan, Shango, etc) are communal. As a matter of fact, these divinities are not just entities, but texts of collective consciousness, which are now used in framing the postcolonial presence of the past. One finds in the case of Wole Soyinka a similar appropriation of the Yoruba pantheon as a semiotic system in the quest for a re-articulation of social experience, although he charts a course that, as Lewis Nkosi has noted, celebrates the action of “the isolated individual.”11 The identification of the British cultural context as “the circle which excludes” is a confirmation of the fact that language reveals as well as promotes attitudes of discrimination. It represents an important perception of the British cultural Other by an African writer. Ironically, the persona self-reports as a participant in this circle “which excludes.” What does it mean to be a participant? In what way does he participate? Obviously, participation underlines or draws attention to agency. He is not only located within but also functions in the circle that excludes. In other words, he, too, perhaps in responding to the practice of exclusion, also becomes guilty of exclusion. He invariably excludes those that exclude him, which, far from being a self-justification, indicates that even the victim of discrimination may also become a victim of his or her own attitude or response. In “occupying the isolated terminal space and silent,” the persona has facilitated the accomplishment of the intention to exclude him in the first place, and perhaps his own perception of and feelings about the cultural Other also amount to distancing that Other. His own unwanted presence 10 Oshita O. Oshita, “The Metaphysics of Oyebode’s Poetry,” Ase: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Contemporary Nigerian Life and Literature 3.3 (1996): 26–37. 11 Lewis Nkosi, Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981): 160.

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may also have become a weapon for fighting back the Other psychologically. Onookome Okome has argued quite convincingly that the metaphor of the phrase “tense and vengefully black” is very significant to the whole body of Oyebode’s poetry. This is not only because it is a metaphor of defiance. It is also a metaphor of an acknowledged difference based on racial prejudice. The difference which this suggests is that which is akin to the Derridan usage, difference as a cultural and racial assertion. While the poet maintains his solitude, he speaks without words. It is his blackness that positions this strategy of defiance, which is a reminder of Britain’s engagement with the poet’s original home. His ‘tense and vengeful blackness’ is therefore a reminder of the history of colonialism. And it is because post-colonial Britain would have wished this part of the history of encounter away that the insertion of that body in the poet’s historization of his position in exile becomes very effective. His blackness asserts a right to stay in Britain and the presence of his cultural difference.12

The body is articulated as a site of this cultural struggle and practice of exclusion; it is also a language in responding to exclusion, especially because its presence makes the coherence and homogeneity of whiteness impossible. Paradoxically, its silence is always already eloquent; its presence defers absence and interrogates difference. Inserting difference (and therefore the differance) into the text of Englishness that is imagined to be coherent (or coherently whitened) is projected by the poet–persona as vengeance. It is vengeance because it interrupts and undermines coherent white presence, or the stability of English whiteness. Vengeance involves a presupposition: namely, that the actor or his blackness had somehow been a victim of English whiteness. One does not talk of revenge unless there has been an offence. What, then, is this offence? Colonization? Racial discrimination? Obviously, the adjectival phrase “vengefully black” suggests that colour is at the centre of the offence and vengeance. Colour (of the skin) is constructed as a language in the cultural and racial struggle, and is used in the contestation of space. It is part of the body that fills physical space, and that dominates the space of the mind.

Archaeology of Memory and the Invention of the Ex-Included Self The poet–persona invokes memory of home: i.e. his African origin, in imagining a space where he is culturally included, what seems to be a psychological journey to a re-constitution of his diasporic identity. Remembering thus is a 12 Onookome Okome, “In the Fourth Dimension: Femi Oyebode and the Poetry of Selfdiscovery,” Introductory essay in Femi Oyebode, Selected Poems, comp. Onookome Okome (Ibadan: Kraft, 1998): 17–18.

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strategy of re-membering, of identifying and inserting a threatened selfhood within a context where the Self is welcome. In “Dreamtime,” one of the long poems in Oyebode’s Naked to Your Softness and Other Dreams (1989), this journey to memory of African cultural context is an important concern. To foreground this theme of memory, the expression “I remember” is repeatedly used in the poem. A narrative text, the poem takes us into the African past and childhood of the persona. The African world that is represented in the poem is very much similar to the exotic and fantastic world of Ben Okri’s The Famished Road (1996), an African world “of midnight spirit and shadows,” a world “of inconsolable beauty and dereliction.”13 It is a world where, in the persona’s imagination, it seems difficult to distance the physical from the spiritual, beauty from ugliness, and rationality from emotion, much like the fictional African world described by Okri’s protagonist, Azaro. It is a world which, from the Western standpoint, is uncivilized, brutal, and unattractive, but which nevertheless recognized the persona’s humanity, included him, and did not condition his mind to hate and exclude the Other. Social psychologists have shown that prejudice, indeed hostile imagination, is something that is partly acquired from the social environment where one grows up. Rupert Brown, in this regard, explains: The most obvious explanation for the appearance of prejudice in children is that it is acquired through direct socialization by their parents and from other sources such as peer group influence and the usual channels of cultural transmission.14

Prejudice is not necessarily innate in the human being, even though part of our humanity is the aggressive instinct or hostile imagination, which Sam Keen says makes us enemy-making humans.15 The persona grew up in an African world where his black complexion did not constitute a text that was read and misread as a representation of his inferiority: i grew up wearing my skin, without prejudice without the necessary armour; the world was easy then, it rained hailstones, then thundered. the hare and bullfrog, termites and their hills the weather, were certain, and my thoughts, fragile and wonderful, spoke a musical language; that was long ago, before the forests collapsed 13

Oyebode, Selected Poems, 32. Rupert Brown, Prejudice: Its Social Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 149. 15 Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986). 14

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and magic retreated beyond the outskirts of my youth and a curious leprosy attacked my dreams, before myth failed to thrive in the new swamp, in the new language, and the liturgy atrophied in the heat and steam, before one gold shed its weariness, and another fell ill and spellbound; I grew up wearing my skin without prejudice.16

Certainly, there are other forms than skin colour that could have constituted shibboleths in the African world romanticized by the poet. Perhaps returning to and romanticizing the African world is a strategy of consolation for the persona who is in search of acceptance. Innocence of the persona, which is suggested in the above excerpt, is also symbolic of the innocence of the African world that Oyebode writes about, an innocence that is now lost to colonial and cultural encounters. It is significant that foreign incursions that eroded this innocence are negatively metaphorized in the poem as “leprosy.” The attack of this “leprosy” on the persona’s “dreams” is itself metaphoric and hyperbolic: many African poets who have written about the negative impact of Western culture on African societies seem to adopt this pattern of rhetoric, using metaphors that amplify the impact and thus seek to seduce the reader into adopting an emotional attitude towards the discourse on Western contact with Africa. With such rhetoric, the African writer textually seeks an alienation of the West from the African mind. In Naked to Your Softness, the poet is consistent in this negative configuration of the impact of the West, even on psychological and cultural distance between / among Africans both in the homeland and the diaspora. He imagines the cause of his separation from “mr. boyle oluwole boyle,” a forebear, as “the English rain,” an expression that is reminiscent of Chinua Achebe’s popular Igbo idiomatic statement about Africa’s encounter with the West: “We must know where the rain started beating us” (emphasis mine). This clearly resonates with the trope of “return to the roots” (in postcolonial, resistance narrative) “in which a story finds its proper closure through enclosure, the (re)discovery of an authentic albeit hidden territory of marginalized cultures” and in which “Displacement is […] healed through an act of replacement, a movement by a fictional character from the periphery of hegemonic culture to the core of his/her own.”17 The persona’s return to his African past and reunion with mr. boyle in Naked to Your Softness is a therapeutic re16

Oyebode, Selected Poems, 33. Kunow, “At the Borderline: Placing and Displacing Communities in Postcolonial Narratives,” 186. 17

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discovery of the Self and dignity that have been seriously distorted by temporal and cultural dislocation: we cannot recognize ourselves across the four century gulf, across the mirror which distorted and then tarnished, language, even music were lost midsea and movement, dance, everyday gestures, the slow steady pulse, my laugh which roars, even my nose became alloyed on your dissimilar face. […] we try to reclaim our darkness, our cultivated dignity, and our language and movement we reclaim in the tones and tenses, in the arabesque in the final athleticicism our own authentic structure.18

Time – which is an important element in the deictic representation of the cultural encounter – is conceptualized, not just as creating distance, but as distance itself – a “gulf” – which separates or creates boundaries. This separation is thus a challenge, for the gulf asks to be bridged and crossed. Time, which separates, also alters, and so the reconstitution of selfhood would involve crossing temporal boundaries, which explains why the poet–persona makes the trip to his African and historical past. It suggests that the new cultural identity is always already incomplete. This raises a very important issue about the difficulty of breaking with the cultural and historical past, in spite of the apparent “ugliness” of this past. Reclaiming the “darkness,” which nevertheless gives a sense of being, is considered a necessary pursuit by the poet–persona. It is interesting that “darkness,” which features as a decivilizing metaphor in Western colonial discourse, is given a positive meaning in the excerpt above. In Western colonial discourses – for instance, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1963) – the term “darkness” is associated with barbarity, ignorance, violence, and horror.19 The words “dark,” “darkness,” and “night” are often used as primordial metaphors to suggest the fearful, while “light” or “dawn” is often used to suggest hope and redemption. As in many cases of self-writing or self-reporting, the poet–persona constructs desirable and praise-oriented images of African values: “our cultivated dignity,” “our language and movement,” “our authentic structure.” The use of the modifier “cultivated” suggests that “dignity,” which it modifies, is some18

Oyebode, Selected Poems, 35. Obododimma Oha, “Night as a Semiotic of Post/colonial Condition,” in Aspects of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Steven Ekema Agbaw (Nitra: Department of English & American Studies, 2006): 26. 19

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thing that Africans have trained themselves to possess, and so is not innate. Nevertheless, the collectivization of this dignity (“our cultivated dignity”) creates the impression that it is now characteristic of the African, an obvious attempt at positively stereotyping and advertising Africanness. It is interesting that he foregrounds the rediscovery of African language(s) and movement as important values being reclaimed – indeed, as part of the “cultivated dignity” – and not just as media for expressing the dignity. Movement, in this case, could mean gait or the kinesics of dance, which is also a (symbolic) language that communicates cultural aesthetics and may be appropriated as a signifier of cultural identity. The African body in motion is thus once again articulated as a site of discourse and means of constructing the “authentic (African) structure.” The use of the word “authentic” in this case presupposes that there exists an inauthentic notion or discourse on African structure, perhaps invented by or operational in the West. There is something Negritudean, though, about this quest for a rediscovery of African “authentic structure.” Whatever an “authentic (African) structure” might mean, it appears to be merely utopian and may never be found. The poet–persona’s excavation of memory would certainly prove futile, not only because memory is unreliable and predisposes one to invention, but also because that structure is not lying somewhere fossilized and waiting to be dug up. Stuart Hall puts it more instructively: “The past is not waiting for us back there to recoup our identities against. It is always retold, rediscovered, reinvented….” This means that, in the case of Oyebode’s attempt to write his African past into his Western present, he is inevitably “bringing new narratives into play” which we must not misconstrue as the reality “back there, by which history can be measured,” as Hall has argued, warning that “There is no guarantee of authenticity like that in history.”20 The African, both on the continent and in the diaspora, has changed and is still changing. As Kunow authoritatively puts it, Postcolonial identities are […] not just constantly in motion but constituted by motion. Their production as well as their maintenance both intersect with local, regional, national, and international flows of power and people, money and migrants. Identities under these conditions becomes terrains of struggle, always already enmeshed in “overlapping territories,” in contrasting and conflicting practices of signifying cultural difference within postnational cultural field.21

20 Hall, “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: Macmillan, 1991): 58. 21 Kunow, “At the Borderline: Placing and Displacing Communities in Postcolonial Narratives,” 202.

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The “authentic (African) structure” may even be unrecognizable to Africans whose identity and values it is supposed to capture or express. Moreover, the challenge that faces the African writer who narrates the exiled Self from a European context is not necessarily the Negritudean celebration of preferred African cultural world; rather, it is that of moving beyond solidarity, which requires, as Giles Gunn argues, a willingness “to determine what difference difference makes in a world increasingly defined under the sign of the global.”22 In this regard, the interrogation of difference is not a denial of difference, nor is it a replacement of one politics of difference with another. It is an attempt at reconstructing difference as a productive, progressive, and accommodating transcultural experience.

Concluding Observations Transcultural encounters between Africa and Europe feature struggles over identity, space, and belongingness. The present essay has explored the response of Femi Oyebode in his poetry to the practices of inclusive and exclusive shibboleth in Britain, as well as his return to African artistic and historical values in the attempt to redefine his identity in a new and contested cultural space. Meanings generated about prejudice and discrimination in the poetry are generally affective, and also reveal prejudice towards hegemonic Englishness. I have argued that, more than verbalizing attitudes to difference as the main obstacle to intercultural understanding in the relationship between the migrant Self and the European host, the poet uses his narration of his African values as a means of interrogating and undermining the perceived isolation and silencing of the migrant African Other. In this case, his writing throws up the interesting issue of the inevitable “Third-Worlding” of Europe, as imagined by Gyan Prakash,23 and the role of the literary imagination in this cultural reinvention of Europe. The Third-Worlding of Europe is an apt metaphoric configuration of an ongoing process in which Europe is being transformed as a result of ThirdWorld cultural presence. Within the narratives of this presence, as seen in Oye22 Giles Gunn, Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001): 195. 23 The concept of “The Third-Worlding of Europe” is credited by Homi K. Bhabha to the Indian historian Gyan Prakash. Bhabha quotes Prakash as asserting, in an essay, “PostOrientalist Third-World Histories,” that “it is difficult to overlook the fact that […] third world voices […] speak within and to discourses familiar to the ‘West’ […]. The Third World, far from being confined to its assigned space, has penetrated the inner sanctum of the ‘First World’ in the process of being ‘Third Worlded’ – arousing, inciting, and affiliating with the subordinated others in the First World […] to connect with minority voices.” Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995): 247.

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bode’s poetry, there are attempts at reconstructing, inserting, and promoting an African selfhood within the contested European space, perhaps as a way of containing a perceived (British) resistance. Whereas the Third-Worlding of Europe further makes the concept of “Europe” plural and unstable (as is already the case in the existence of individual identities in Europe that are “inbetween” and undefined), it may nevertheless arouse fears about fin d’Europe, which may be seen as the basis for the practice of exclusion. The rhetoric that interrogates this exclusion and finds consolation in an imagined African cultural world is also ironically presenting itself as an obstacle to inclusion in a new, globalized Europe.

WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). Brown, Rupert. Prejudice: Its Social Psychology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness (1902; New York: W.W. Norton, 1963). Gunn, Giles. Beyond Solidarity: Pragmatism and Difference in a Globalized World (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 2001). Hall, Stuart. “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities,” in Culture Globalization and the World System, ed. Anthony D. King (New York: Macmillan, 1991): 41–68. Keen, Sam. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986). Kunow, Rüdiger. “At the Borderline: Placing and Displacing Communities in Postcolonial Narratives,” in Postmodernism and the Fin de Siecle, ed. Gerhard Hoffmann and Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 2002): 175–202. Nkosi, Lewis. Tasks and Masks: Themes and Styles of African Literature (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1981). Oha, Obododimma. “En/countering the New Language of Exile in Uche Nduka’s The Bremen Poems,” Portal: Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 2.1 (2005): http://epress .lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/70/44 ——. “Night as a Semiotic of Post/colonial Condition,” in Aspects of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Steven Ekema Agbaw (Nitra: Department of English & American Studies, 2006): 25–34. Okome, Onookome “Home and Exile in the Poetry of Femi Oyebode,” Ase: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Contemporary Nigerian Life and Literature, 3.3 (1996): 1–14. ——. “In the Fourth Dimension: Femi Oyebode and the Poetry of Self-Discovery,” in Femi Oyebode, Selected Poems, comp. Onookome Okome (Ibadan: Kraft, 1998): 9–22. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road (Ibadan: Spectrum, 1996). Oshita, Oshita O. “The Metaphysics of Oyebode’s Poetry,” Ase: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Contemporary Nigerian Life and Literature, 3.3 (1996): 26–37. Oyebode, Femi. Forest of Transformations (Birmingham: Ijala, 1991). ——. Master of the Leopard Hunt (Birmingham: Ijala, 1995) ——. Naked to Your Softness and Other Dreams (Birmingham: Ijala, 1989). ——. Selected Poems, comp. Onookome Okome (Ibadan: Kraft, 1998). ——. Wednesday Is a Colour (Birmingham: Ijala, 1990).

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D ARIA T UNCA ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Linguistic Counterpoint in Gbenga ∗ Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner ABSTRACT: This essay examines Gbenga Agbenugba’s Another Lonely Londoner (1991), a rarely discussed novel recounting the experiences of a young Nigerian man living in London. The narrative is written in an experimental style mixing English with Nigerian Pidgin, and including elements of Nigerian English, Black British English, Cockney, and Yoruba. By way of introduction, Agbenugba’s work is briefly discussed in relation to the novel that inspired it, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). An analysis is then undertaken of the interaction between English and Nigerian Pidgin in Another Lonely Londoner, both in dialogue and in narrative passages, with a view to assessing the impact of the combined use of these languages on possible literary interpretations of the novel. The other codes, varieties, and linguistic influences revealed in the book also receive systematic treatment, and it gradually appears that all these elements combine to produce a complex polyphonic work mirroring the main character’s multifarious identity.

∗ I would like to thank Prof. Bénédicte Ledent for her valuable advice and encouragement during the writing of this article. I am also greatly indebted to Dr Dagmar Deuber, Prof. Ayo Kehinde, Mr Obiora Udegbunam and Mr Dele A. Sonubi for providing me with linguistic information on Nigerian Pidgin and Yoruba.

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Nothing can contain me1

S

I N G I N G A P I E C E I N C O U N T E R P O I N T is a difficult exercise. The performers must intently follow the conductor’s directions while keeping their eyes on a series of elaborately disseminated notes and bars; despite their concentration, they may at times fail to hear their own voices, take in all the mingling tunes, and be in turn absorbed into a polyphonic whirlpool. Let us now go beyond this brief sensory description, and imagine an attempt at transposing such a chorus of intertwined voices into language. The result of this endeavour could well be Another Lonely Londoner (1991), Gbenga Agbenugba’s rarely discussed novel.2 Admittedly, the musical concept of polyphony has been widely applied to the field of literature, from Bakhtin’s pioneering work to recent applications in the context of postcolonial studies. In Agbenugba’s case, however, polyphony transcends the Bakhtinian paradigm according to which “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses” may coexist in a single text.3 Indeed, in Another Lonely Londoner, the multiplicity of voices seems to have been internalized by a multi-faceted, yet unique, narrator. This entanglement of speeches finds expression through constant linguistic shifts, resulting in the creation of an unconventional literary idiolect. This experimental style, I intend to demonstrate, acts as a crucial complement to the thematic developments found in the novel. As the title of Agbenugba’s book indicates, the narrative echoes Trinidadian Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners.4 First of all, Selvon’s influence can be felt strongly in terms of subject-matter, since both novels relate the day-to-day experiences of black immigrants who have settled in London in the hope of finding work, and more generally a better life. Even though Selvon’s and Agbenugba’s protagonists come from regions as distant as the Caribbean and Africa – Selvon’s Moses and Galahad are of Trinidadian origin, while Akin, Agbenugba’s central character, spent his childhood in Britain before returning to his parents’ native Nigeria – both novels tackle the phenomenon of “colonization in reverse,” as Louise Bennett put it,5 in a somewhat tragicomic mode. 1

Diran Adebayo, Some Kind of Black (1996; London: Abacus, 1997): 1. Gbenga Agbenugba, Another Lonely Londoner (London: Ronu, 1991). Page references to this edition are in the main text. 3 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & tr. Caryl Emerson (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963; tr. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1984): 6. 4 Samuel Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Longman, 1972). 5 Louise Bennett, “Colonization in Reverse,” Jamaican Labrish (Kingston, Jamaica: Sangster’s, 1966): 179–80; repr. in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): 32–33. 2

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Thus the observation of Selvon’s narrator is echoed by Agbenugba’s: the West Indians “invading the country by the hundreds”6 have given way to the “Nigerian Brothers and Sisters who invading London” (29). Numerous as the thematic convergences may be, the most striking parallel between the two books is the originality of the language used. Selvon’s novel develops, in narration as well as in dialogue, a fabricated idiom that mainly bears features of Trinidadian English and Trinidadian Creole,7 alternating with Standard English (henceforth S E ).8 The linguistic code used by Agbenugba may be said to be even more daring than Selvon’s, as it mixes not only S E and Nigerian Pidgin (henceforth N P ), but also Nigerian English,9 Black British English10 and, to a lesser extent, Cockney and Yoruba. The authors’ decision to depart from S E 11 and its many imperialistic connotations is, of course, not without significance. Both novelists have deliberately chosen to ‘abrogate’ S E and ‘reappropriate’ the language on their own terms12 by incorporating elements of so-called ‘dialects’ and allegedly ‘in6

Selvon, The Lonely Londoners, 9. As is the case for other varieties of Creole and English in the Caribbean, these two languages are generally not regarded as watertight codes. Admittedly, the notion of a ‘creole continuum’ popularized by DeCamp and Bickerton has been widely denounced for its oversimplification; see John Holm, Pidgins and Creoles, vol. 1: Theory and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988): 52–60, for a brief historical overview of the reception of the concept. Nevertheless, it is still widely acknowledged that Caribbean creoles are currently in a process of decreolization, and that their various registers range from a ‘basilect’ to an ‘acrolect’ that approximates Caribbean English. 8 For an analysis of the language used by Selvon in his fiction, including the novel The Lonely Londoners, see Clement H. Wyke, Sam Selvon’s Dialectal Style and Fictional Strategy (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 1991). 9 Unlike Caribbean Creoles in relation to varieties of Caribbean English, N P and Nigerian English are distinct languages. See Dagmar Deuber, Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos: Language Contact, Variation and Change in an African Urban Setting (London: Battlebridge, 2005). 10 The common phrase ‘Black British English’ here refers to ‘black London speech’ (which has developed under the influence of Caribbean Creole), but I use the term with caution, not wishing to imply that there is an essentially ‘black’ speech. Moreover, I realize that, as Mark Sebba puts it, “Caribbean usages have spread outwards beyond the Caribbean community itself, so that there are a number of expressions of Caribbean origin now in use in London both within and outside the black community”; Sebba, London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction (London & New York: Longman, 1993): 59. 11 I am aware of the artificiality behind the theoretical notion of a ‘standard’. S E here refers to the standard British English used in prescriptive grammars: i.e. the grammatical equivalent to Received Pronunciation. 12 This terminology was used by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 37–76. 7

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ferior’ languages – when they are considered languages at all. The disparaging attitudes towards regional varieties of English, pidgins, and creoles signal that the writers’ chosen media of expression do not simply consist of words inscribed on a blank page: these languages carry the burden of prejudices accumulated through the centuries. In this regard, one of the objectives behind Selvon’s and Agbenugba’s respective uses of creole and pidgin may be the rehabilitation of ‘vernaculars’ that have long been stigmatized. N P , for example, still tends to be associated with ignorance, poverty, and a lack of education, even though scientific studies have consistently reported that its use has spread to all socio-economic groups in Nigeria.13 N P is said to be the most widely spoken language in the country,14 and it is used in radio programmes, television shows, newspapers, songs, and even creative writing. Among the research that focuses on the presence of N P in literature, the most wide-ranging study seems to be that by Chantal Zabus, who, in her extensively documented analysis, argues that, since N P is not intelligible to the average speaker of English, the forms of pidgin found in most West African europhone novels only qualify as “pseudo-pidgin.” Nigerian writers, she states, regularly “[retain] the ‘feel’ of N P but not its deep structure, possibly as a concession to a non-Pidgin audience.”15 The literary functions assigned to this “pseudo-pidgin” largely reflect the purposes fulfilled by its counterpart in reality. In line with the dismissive attitudes mentioned above, the language is often attributed to uneducated characters.16 Nevertheless, N P is also assigned the more neutral role of lingua franca between protagonists of different ethnic backgrounds, especially in urban contexts, where it serves as a language of integration.17 Moreover, it can act as an intra-ethnic medium of communication, in which case its utilization is, according to Zabus, motivated by “a panoply of human emotions and ‘acts of identity’ ranging from solidarity to small talk.”18 Unlike many of the novelists examined by Zabus, Agbenugba does not restrict N P to occurrences in dialogue. Challenging established literary practices, 13 See, for example, Rebecca N. Agheyisi, “Linguistic Implications of the Changing Role of Nigerian Pidgin English,” English World-Wide 5.2 (1984): 212, and Nicholas G. Faraclas, Nigerian Pidgin (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 2. 14 Faraclas, Nigerian Pidgin, 1–2. 15 Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (Cross/Cultures 4; Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1991): 67 (2nd rev. ed. 2007, 73). 16 Zabus, The African Palimpsest, 70 (2nd rev. ed. 2007, 77). 17 The African Palimpsest, 68–69 (2nd rev. ed. 2007, 75–76). 18 The African Palimpsest, 81 (2nd rev. ed. 2007, 89).

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as Selvon did with the use of Trinidadian English and Creole, Agbenugba recurrently (yet unsystematically) introduces a number of N P characteristics into narrative passages.19 The rendering of N P in dialogue and the presence of features of the language in the third-person narration rapidly emerge as different stylistic exercises; for this reason, they will be examined separately. This double analysis will be followed by an overview of the other languages and varieties used in the novel and a brief commentary on the meaning of their inclusion. The overwhelming majority of the conversational passages in N P contained in Agbenugba’s novel are broadly intelligible to the English-speaking reader. Therefore, on merely empirical observation, it may be posited that the language found in these dialogues are adaptations of the language rather than accurate transcriptions. This is clearly illustrated in the following extract, in which Debo, a young Nigerian, complains to his cousin Akin about how difficult it is to find a job in London: “See me, see trouble. This your London na wa O. How person day day overqualified? Tell me my Brother. [...] Sebi if you day overqualified for a job that mean to say you go fit do am well, well?” Debo clap him hands together again. “Hey-ei-ye! Hm! Hmmm! For Monday I go interview, them tell me say I day too old for the job: Sorry, we day look for someone who be teenager, patapata 20, 21. For Tuesday I go interview, I talk about all the things way I know, them ask me about myself, them ask me about my father, about my mother, even grandfather self, all of them I answer. For Wednesday them come knack me letter: you are too inexperienced for the job. Today now I go interview, Sorry you are overqualified. I don tire O. Them no go kill me for this London!” (86)

While the above passage may be perceived by the layman as being in N P , understanding the drift of Debo’s intervention does not require an initiation into pidgin. At first sight, one could then postulate that Agbenugba, like the writers whose work was examined by Zabus, fails to capture the deep structure of N P to privilege surface elements intelligible to the non-N P speaker. However, a rigorous linguistic analysis of this passage invalidates this hypothesis. The language used in the extract can clearly be distinguished from English, whether standard or ‘broken’, by the introduction of a high number of distinctively N P 19 The main sources used in this essay for the analysis of N P elements in Agbenugba’s work are Faraclas, Nigerian Pidgin, Deuber, Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos, B.O. Elugbe & A.P. Omamor, Nigerian Pidgin: Background and Prospects (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1991), and Smart N. Eze, Nigerian Pidgin English: Sentence Complexity (Vienna: Veröffentlichungen der Institut für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien, 1980). Owing to the high number of N P lexemes examined here, precise bibliographical references will not be included after every single item.

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features, including the N P tense/ aspect/ modality system, the N P preposition “for,” which can express a wide range of spatial, temporal, and other relationships,20 and N P pronouns.21 Admittedly, the passage also contains a few un-N P features that rule out the possibility of regarding Debo’s speech as N P ‘proper’, e.g., the S E indefinite article “a” (in “overqualified for a job”), which is not an established determiner in N P , and the S E relative pronoun “who” (in “who be teenager”), used instead of the N P relative clause introducer “way.”22 Yet it is in my view significant that these S E components do not necessarily have a decisive impact on the linguistic transparency of the text. This highlights the fact that the author’s use of a modified form of N P is not motivated solely by a concern to be understood by the English-speaking audience; rather, his hybrid code (i.e. language) aims mainly at capturing the influence exerted by Western values, linguistic habits, and even music on the younger urban generation in Nigeria and abroad. The use of a modified form of N P by young educated Nigerians also indicates that the language is no longer used exclusively by the unschooled who do not master S E . Quite the opposite: N P has become a trendy code used by youths in informal situations, even when they have other languages in common.23 If the use of N P in conversational passages may be interpreted as an attempt to enhance the image of a language often looked upon with contempt, the insertion of N P features into the narrative account may be viewed as a continuation of this effort, insofar as it confirms the language’s ability to perform ideational and poetic functions simultaneously.24 The second function, which em20

See Faraclas, Nigerian Pidgin, 60–61, and Deuber, Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos, 100–101. It must be noted that, since N P does not have an official orthographic system, creative writers are forced to make a personal decision as to the spelling they use. Agbenugba has, as is usual among Nigerian novelists, made a choice that does not reduce readability for the English-speaking audience. 22 The relative pronoun ‘who’ may occur in what Eze calls “hyper-anglicised” N P (Eze, Nigerian Pidgin English, 54–58). 23 Another linguistic strategy that abounds in the novel’s conversational passages is codeswitching between N P , S E , and sometimes Yoruba. Like the use of pidgins and creoles, codeswitching was long considered a sign of linguistic incompetence rather than a motivated conversational performance; see, for instance, Carol Myers–Scotton, Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1993): 47–48. 24 The “ideational function” is one of the three metafunctions of language identified by M.A.K. Halliday & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985; London: Hodder Arnold, 2004); in simplified terms, it corresponds to the “us[e of] language as a symbolic code to represent the world around us,” Geoffrey Finch, How to Study Linguistics (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1998): 42. The poetic function, extensively discussed by Roman Jakobson, is the “focus on the message for its own sake, […] the dominant, determining function” of verbal art; Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in 21

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phasizes the creative potential of language, is far more prominent in narration than in dialogue. Indeed, in narrative passages, the constant alternation between S E , N P , Caribbean Creole/ English, and sometimes Yoruba, indicates that the linguistic flexibility displayed by Agbenugba’s narrator far exceeds the variations typically recorded in studies of codeswitching.25 In other words, unlike the conversational passages of the novel in which different languages occur, the heteroglossic variation found outside dialogue is so dense that the narrative lect may not reasonably be considered an “artistic [image]”26 of an existing sociolect. If the N P lexical and grammatical items scattered throughout the narrative passages are not fundamentally different in nature from those found in conversation, the fictional singularity of the narrative idiolect adds another layer to the novel’s stylistic strategy. I shall briefly develop this statement by referring successively to the conventional linguistic categories of lexis and grammar. The N P lexical items found in narrative passages seem to serve a double purpose: first, the use of N P words alternating with S E ones points to the presence of several cultural influences within the narrative discourse. Secondly, the fact that they are mostly integrated into this discourse: i.e. contextualized rather than cushioned,27 suggests a ‘blending’ of languages that highlights the dynamic, absorbent nature of codes: there is no isolated language, just as there is no pure ethnic identity. This flexibility also identifies language, which cannot be dissociated from society, as a prime site of cultural interaction. This linguistic decompartmentalization is also perceptible in the novel’s use of N P grammatical words. Most of the auxiliary verbs, relative pronouns, and prepositions found in narrative passages are akin to those previously encountered in dialogue, but when these N P function words are introduced into a S E context, their similarity to S E words becomes even more clearly marked: [1] Akin thinking about the Y.M.C.A. way the Old woman done mention […]. (15) [2] The physical condition of the lift been look alright, if not for the cigarette burns and, the floor of the lift which look like it could cave in at any moment. (24)

Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1960): 356. The idea of grouping these aspects of Halliday’s and Jakobson’s theories into a single model is not mine, but Finch’s, see Finch, How to Study Linguistics, 42–47. 25 By way of example, a close examination of a narrative passage of Agbenugba’s novel (55–56) reveals a minimum of twelve code-switches involving four languages, varieties and/or registers – all in fewer than one hundred words. 26 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981): 417. 27 In Zabus’s words, to contextualize is to “provide areas of immediate contexts” and to cushion is to “tag an explanatory word or phrase” onto an African word, see Zabus, The African Palimpsest, 158 (2nd rev. ed. 2007, 176).

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[3] Akin had said it at last, now him waiting, he soon hear waiting him day expect. (31) [4] Him Cockney soon better pass Prince him own, and Akin trying it on everywhere he went. (33) [5] […] Prince only talking that way because of him present condition, and when him back hale and hearty, him go want to resume him retailer business. (51) [6] So Akin all dressed up, he ready to go to the Jobcentre when Bisi appear for him doorstep. (54) [7] Akin about to ask how him know say na because of him accent that them no give am the job, but him check himself, him say OK, and accept the man’s apology. (62)

The majority of the N P function words contained in theses sentences, in the spelling opted for by Agbenugba, find their homographic equivalents in various registers of the English language. For example, the relative clause introducer “way” found in [1] is also a noun in S E and an adverb in informal English; the N P auxiliary “done,” which appears in the same sentence, is optionally used to mark the completive aspect of a non-stative verb, but it has the same form as the S E past participle of the verb ‘do’. The N P auxiliary “been” (see [2]), which signals incompletive aspect, is spelled like the past participle of the S E verb ‘be’, while the N P question word “waiting” ([3]), meaning ‘what’ and used in headless relative clauses, is sometimes found in the novel with the same spelling as the present participle (or gerund) of the SE verb ‘wait’. Both the N P and the S E form can be found in [3]. In the same sentence, the N P auxiliary “day,” used with non-stative verbs to indicate incompletive aspect, is spelled like the S E noun ‘day’, and the N P verb “pass,” part of a serial verb construction expressing a comparative relation in [4], also has a homograph in S E . In [5], N P “go,” which is both a content word and an irrealis modality auxiliary indicating future tense, corresponds to the S E infinitive of the verb ‘go’, while in [6], the N P preposition “for” has the same formal characteristics as the S E preposition and coordinating conjunction ‘for’. Sentence [7] further contains the optional complementizer “say,” which introduces a subordinated object noun clause and finds orthographic correspondence in the present infinitive of the S E verb ‘say’. Also found in [7] is N P “no,” which can be a determiner or, as is the case here, a marker negating an entire sentence; both forms are spelled like the S E determiner ‘no’. Finally, the bound personal pronoun in object position “am” has the same spelling as the S E verb ‘be’ in the first person of the present indicative.

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Although the implied author may not have gone through this extensive analysis28 and may have applied the spellings somewhat instinctively, the presence of these words need nevertheless not be considered coincidental. Indeed, whether the technique be unintentional or carefully planned, it achieves a similar result: as grammatical categories and semantic boundaries collapse, the gap between S E and N P is bridged, and the two languages are merged into a crosscultural code that lies even beyond the hybridity suggested by N P . The narrative sections of the novel do not appear to follow coherent grammatical patterns. For example, an S E preterite form can be preceded by either “he” or N P “him”; for no apparent reason, the novel abruptly shifts from the S E system to the N P one, sometimes within a single sentence, or indeed within a single phrase. The lack of a prescriptive system results in a sense of linguistic imbalance, most perceptible in the alternation between S E preterites and N P uninflected verbs. Because the latter are formally similar to S E present-tense forms, the confrontation of the two systems introduces constant temporal disruption into the narrative. This absence of linearity may parallel the protagonist’s switchback course in London, which ends with a return to his point of departure. The heterogeneous linguistic influences may also reflect the manifold facets of Akin’s cultural background and symbolize the impossibility of indefinitely circumscribing his fluctuating, ever-evolving identity. In this linguistic crisscross where codes and cultures collide and intertwine, some features seem to belong neither to S E nor to N P , the two systems mainly considered until now. In the search for the possible sources of these additional linguistic traits, the most obvious pointers for further analysis are provided by the novel itself. This is more grist to my methodological mill, so to speak, for these textual indications emphasize the connection between the book’s thematic developments and its formal components. One such clue can be found in the narrative when Akin is introduced to Liz, the white partner of his Nigerian friend Prince: [Prince:] “Liz meet Akin; Akin, Liz my wife and, Rob my son.” […] Liz been nod her head at [Akin], and ask the customary “How are you?”, to which Akin give the expected “Fine” and go on to add “Thank you.” For many Nigerians always switch on their best manners when them meet up with Europeans. [Prince:] “This is my friend I told you about. The one whom we both went to school and got into a lot of trouble together.” (25)

28 He probably has not, for “done” is sometimes spelled “don” (15, 23, 24, 50, 98, 141, 195, 225), “waiting” is more often than not spelled “wetin” (14, 23, 50), and the N P copula “na” found in [7] has no equivalent in S E .

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Prince utters the slightly awkward “this is my friend I told you about,” followed by the contrived and ungrammatical “the one whom we both went to school,” which contains the relative pronoun “whom,” rather formal and uncommon in spoken discourse. The linguistic clumsiness displayed by Prince in this passage might at first seem out of character, for his command of English is usually flawless. However, his self-consciousness may be an allusion to the fact that “many Nigerians always switch on their best manners when them meet up with Europeans.” This passing comment can, of course, be read as a veiled reference to colonial history – all the more so since “switch[ing] on [one’s] best manners” involves another switch: namely, a codeswitch to a (supposedly) sophisticated register of the former colonizer’s language. As a result of Nigeria’s colonial past, English is still the most widely used medium of formal instruction in the country. Nevertheless, after the coming of independence in 1960, most British teachers of English residing in Nigeria went back to Europe, and pupils were sometimes taught by local instructors with limited competence in the language. As there has been no policy determining which linguistic standards should be adopted, Nigerian varieties of English are said to be “drifting away from the proclaimed ideal of [British English].”29 As a consequence, Nigerian English appears to be used, often inadvertently, by those who want to signal their high level of education and are in fact just attempting to speak S E . In the novel, these sociolinguistic associations seem to be occasionally reflected in dialogue – for instance, in Prince’s convoluted relative clause mentioned above – and they are frequently mirrored in narrative passages. The relative pronoun “whom,” which Prince uses in his infelicitous replica, is used hypercorrectly by the narrator on several occasions (30, 75). Even more conspicuous than such grammatical ‘errors’ are some of the stylistic peculiarities associated with N E . Because English is, in Nigeria, used in formal rather than informal situations, where N P or African languages are preferred,30 formal styles tend to predominate over informal ones.31 This pompousness, combined with a willingness to adhere scrupulously to S E stylistic models, sometimes results in pleonasms, clichés, or a mixing of registers.32 It is thus not surprising that Agbenugba’s novel should contain semantic redundancies (e.g., “another 29 Manfred Görlach, Even More Englishes: Studies 1996–1997 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 1998): 127–28. 30 A.E. Odumuh, Nigerian English (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello U P , 1987): 66. 31 This is also the case in other varieties of African English. See Joseph J. Schmied, English in Africa: An Introduction (London & New York: Longman, 1991): 53. 32 Listed as being features of Nigerian English in Görlach, Even More Englishes, 134, and David Jowitt, Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction (Ikeja: Longman, 1991): 142–47.

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black man other than himself” [172]), clichés (e.g., “To cut a long story short, it was a close call” [37]), and passages that mix several registers (e.g., the noun “faction,” generally found in political contexts and implying dissent or hostility, is employed to refer to the families who peacefully share a house with Akin in Forest Gate: “Akin always polite whenever him meet any member of the household while using the shared facilities, but none of them was he close to, every faction doing their own thing” [40]). In comparison to these stylistic elements, the grammatical ‘deviances’ typical of Nigerian English are rather modestly represented in the novel. Therefore, what Agbenugba seems to mildly mock are not so much the features of an imperfectly acquired second language as the traces of mental colonization that underlie efforts at excessive linguistic conformism, apparent in the presence of formal structures, pleonasms, clichés, overused literary quotations, and hypercorrect forms. If the stylistic features of N E betray the influence of (neo)colonial values on its speakers, Caribbean Creole (henceforth C C ), which has heavily influenced Black British English (henceforth B B E ), occupies the other end of the sociolinguistic spectrum: it is spoken in informal or intimate situations – for example, by Akin’s Caribbean friend Doreen when she tells him about her failed marriage. In British society, second- and third-generation black Britons of Caribbean descent are typically fluent in S E , and the presence of C C features in their speech has above all “symbolic significance” and acts “as a marker of black identity.”33 This is, to some extent, replicated in the novel, for the introduction of C C features into dialogue represents a move away from S E that achieves an identificative purpose, not unlike the one carried out by modified N P . The comparison between C C and N P does not end here. As Eva, a Barbadian girl with whom Akin briefly talks in a night club, puts it: “your pidgin English is very similar to our patois” (114). This similarity, which characterizes pidgins and creoles worldwide,34 is particularly marked in the case of West African pidgins and C C , since the former were “learnt by the [African] slaves […] before, during or after their passage across the Atlantic to the Americas,”35 and evolved into the latter in the ‘New World.’ This linguistic proximity emphasizes the diachronic similarities in the Afro-Caribbean and African experiences, while the differences between the two codes occasionally appear in the novel as markers of the interaction between the Caribbean and African commu33

Susanne Mühleisen, Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles (Amsterdam & Philadephia P A : John Benjamins, 2002): 168. 34 See Isthla Singh, Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction (London: Arnold, 2000): 37. 35 Sebba, London Jamaican, 3.

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nities in present-day London. For instance, West Indian forms such as “gwan” are used in dialogue by characters of Caribbean and African descent, showing the influence of C C on non-Caribbean black people. This linguistic intertwining is also echoed in narrative sequences, where C C traits that are not shared by N P , such as the absence of an equative copula between a subject and a predicative noun phrase, regularly occur. The parallels between and interlacing of these languages may reflect not only the Afro-Caribbean and African communities’ shared roots but also their common struggle for the assertion of a new identity in Britain. Unlike most Caribbean people, however, Africans usually have “a different language other than English” (67) to fall back on. Such is also the case of the Yoruba characters in Another Lonely Londoner, who occasionally converse in their mother tongue, thereby appealing to their common ethnic origin and, in a manner not dissimilar to N P , creating a feeling of community. Since knowledge of Yoruba is not possessed by all – especially by white Britons – in the novel’s London setting, mastery of the language becomes an asset to be exploited by the Nigerian characters. Debo, who is tired of working in a security firm, applies for a position as an administrative officer in a company, filling in the application form “with unlimited lies” (159). He lists, among his many imaginary qualities, fluency in Yoruba, Russian, and Swahili. Following his second interview with the firm’s representatives, he learns that he has been appointed to the job. As he is about to leave the room, one of the interviewers asks: “Just out of curiosity, how do you say ‘see you later,’ in Russian?” […]

[Debo:] “See you later, in Russian? That is: Ko ni da fun awon Baba E.” Debo had uttered the first words of Yoruba that had come to his mind. [Interviewer:] “Very impressive, brilliant. Maybe you’ll teach us all Russian then. Bye, Ta-ta.” (161)

This incident demonstrates Debo’s resourcefulness and exposes the interviewer’s ignorance, but also confers on Yoruba an opaque quality, since the code is neither understood nor recognized by Debo’s future employer. The veil is only partly lifted by the narrator, who identifies the language but does not translate Debo’s utterance. As a result, the reader who does not speak Yoruba is unable to understand Debo’s words and fails to appreciate fully the comic impact of the sentence – a curse which could be translated as ‘may your fathers always experience misfortunes’. The elusiveness associated with Yoruba is illustrated on another occasion by the presence of an untranslated saying, which concludes a letter that Tolu, Akin’s fiancée, writes to him: “Oju lon pe si”

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(219).36 In both cases, the language is synonymous with a form of empowerment: Debo deceives the interviewer with his use of Yoruba, and the code in which the proverb is rendered forbids access to the outsider, perhaps hinting at the fact that certain cultural values remain inaccessible to whomever does not master the language associated with them. The link between knowledge of a linguistic code and efforts to fit into a community is also represented in the novel by Cockney. Often dismissed as the speech of the working class, the variety loses its usual negative connotations in Akin’s eyes: Akin learning from Liz, he quickly re-learning the English he once spoke as a child living in East London. All the slangs and terminologies returning to him speech. Him Cockney soon better pass Prince him own, and Akin trying it on everywhere he went. At work him white colleagues telling him how he quickly pick up the way them speak; that some people would arrive in London and still have an accent after two, three years. Them say him doing very well, and Akin feeling very proud of this. Him trying harder to polish him Cockney. (33)

Cockney is, just like N P , no longer disparaged as the speech of the uneducated but is associated with integration in urban circles, considered a way of “successfully blend[ing] in with the crowd” (130). Akin’s re-acquisition of Cockney may be instinctive, but his use of the variety is part of a conscious process: just as “him trying harder to polish him Cockney” (33) to be accepted by his white workmates, he later seduces Bisi, a young Nigerian woman who wants to marry the holder of a British passport, by “impressing [her] with him Cockney talk” (52). Akin’s impeccable mastery of the London slang and accent certainly disrupts the racist cliché claiming that “Africans speak ‘Hula! Hula!’” (150), and it demonstrates the protagonist’s potential for absorbing different cultures. Nevertheless, this act of linguistic mimicry never allows Akin to be regarded fully as a British citizen. His colleagues’ praises are tinged with condescension, as their racist jokes later reveal, and even though Akin is British, his fiancée Tolu is denied access to the country. His return to Nigeria at the end of the novel clearly suggests that, unless white Britons adopt a more positive attitude towards racial and cultural diversity, all attempts at adaptation on the part of immigrants will be in vain. Perhaps because of Akin’s limited success with Cockney, typical features of the variety are relatively few in narrative passages. Yet various instances of slang, not specifically identifiable as Cockney but more generally associated 36

This proverb is used to assert the fact that time flies and that, with patience and courage, a long period will come to pass.

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with urban speech, can be found throughout the novel. One may, for example, cite numerous examples of drug-related vocabulary, including “E” (91-93), “reefer” (32), “hash” (37, 92, 201–206), “dope” (50), and the West Indian “ganga” (201), all of which are typical of colloquial speech. This informality is also reflected in the use of discourse markers, conjunctions, and prepositions: for instance, paragraphs in the narrator’s account are sometimes introduced by words such as “anyway” or “well,” which are markers of spoken rather than written discourse. If linguistic casualness, Cockney, and urban slang bring to the fore associations with London and its fast city life, these types of speech seem to have been blended with another, altogether different form of oral discourse: namely, that associated with African rhetorical strategies and storytelling. Indeed, several passages contain repetitions typical of orature, but the words repeated in these sections – for example, “business” (117), “queue” (217) or “guy” (213) – are not items one tends to relate to traditional African tales. This linguistic tight-rope walking is also illustrated by the use of proverbs, a feature frequently found in African oral and literary discourses. Throughout the novel, Yoruba and pidgin proverbs alternate with awkwardly ‘pasted’ English ones that seem quite out of place,37 thus illustrating the difficulty of transposing African cultures into a European context, and vice versa. In conclusion: I hope that I have managed to establish the fact that all languages and registers used in the novel carry their own significance. African languages and non-standard varieties of English are, in dialogue, largely associated with a will to integration within a community: N P and Yoruba are used among Nigerian family members and friends; C C and B B E evoke the historical and contemporary connections between the Caribbean and African communities; and N E and Cockney symbolize Akin’s need for acceptance into white urban circles. The heteroglossia of narrative passages is different on a number of levels. Formally, the narrator’s idiolect diverges from the artistic representation of reality found in dialogue. The high number of languages, varieties and registers involved in individual paragraphs or even single sentences results in a mingling of competing voices that offer an imaginative portrait of 37

This rather incongruous use of S E proverbs is exemplified in the intrusion of the clichéd “Once bitten, twice shy” into a passage set after Akin’s misadventure with Bisi: “Anytime him come across a Niger girl way him fancy, the first thing Akin want to determine was if the girl a Britico or not; from she not a Britico, Akin would give her a wide berth. Na the oyinbo man talk: ‘Once bitten, twice shy,’ and Akin not about to allow himself get caught in the same trap twice” (109). “Oyinbo” is a Nigerian Pidgin term of Yoruba origin meaning “white man,” see Herbert Igboanusi, A Dictionary of Nigerian English Usage (Ibadan: Enicrownfit, 2002): 214.

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the main character’s heterogeneous linguistic and cultural background. Not only are the voices that have been identified different in terms of the language they use, but they also express an attachment to different areas, different traditions, different belief-systems, and each bears witness to a specific cultural heritage. Although they ultimately extend beyond individual experiences, they can all directly or indirectly be linked to the protagonist, Akin. The voices of narration can be isolated from each other on a theoretical level, as I have done in this essay, but they emanate from a single multilingual consciousness symbolizing the character’s struggle with the many facets of his identity. In my view, the fact that the multitude of languages can not only be attributed to one narrative consciousness but also linked back to a single character distinguishes Agbenugba’s strategy from typical applications of polyphony like those examined by Bakhtin.38 While the novel’s cross-linguistic code represents, or at least should embody, the richness of cultural diversity, the abrupt changes of languages and registers at times convey a sense of inadequacy. The apparent linguistic instability, which is never resolved, seems to express the difficulty – or, indeed, impossibility – for Akin to reconcile, in this time and place, all the voices he has unconsciously interiorized. Cross-culturality is counterbalanced by remnants of colonialism, and Akin is caught between traditions, as suggested by the final image, where, on his way to Africa, he is floating in mid-air between “the City aglow and the starry overhead sky” (233). His return to Nigeria may also be viewed in more positive terms, since he escapes the gloomy prospect of becoming one of those immigrants who have no place to call home, who have “adjusted to London the best they could, […] [and have] accepted the fact that they would never entirely fit in with the indigenous race of England” but who “[can] no longer relate to [Africa]” (169), either. Akin’s vow never to return to Britain as “Another Lonely Londoner” (233) illustrates his resoluteness not to passively experience rejection again or ever be left in a state of emotional limbo, thereby hinting at the possibility of a utopian moment of racial, cultural, and linguistic reconciliation. Agbenugba’s formal experiment is undeniably creative and reveals the writer to be a Selvon-like “alchemist of style,”39 but the novel’s original use of language also appears to be a highly appropriate way of rendering migrant experience. Exiles are catapulted into a new or, at most, vaguely familiar landscape, and have to make sense of it; such is also the case, on a linguistic level, for the 38

See Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 302–24. Susheila Nasta, “Introduction” to Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006): vii. 39

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reader of Another Lonely Londoner. The defamiliarizing effect of N P entraps one in a semantic guessing-game, and the interaction between S E , N P , N E , C C , and Yoruba also demands constantly renewed adjustment. As languages, varieties, and registers mingle throughout the novel to the sounds of dance, house, reggae, and afrobeat, one can only attempt to grasp a multifarious identity that no country, no culture, no single language can contain.

WORKS CITED Adebayo, Diran. Some Kind of Black (1996; London: Abacus, 1997). Agbenugba, Gbenga. Another Lonely Londoner (London: Ronu, 1991). Agheyisi, Rebecca N. “Linguistic Implications of the Changing Role of Nigerian Pidgin English,” English World-Wide 5.2 (1984): 211–33. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). ——. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. & tr. Caryl Emerson (Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, 1963; tr. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1984). Bennett, Louise. “Colonization in Reverse,” Jamaican Labrish (Kingston: Sangster’s, 1966): 179–80, repr. in The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse in English, ed. Paula Burnett (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): 32–33. Deuber, Dagmar. Nigerian Pidgin in Lagos: Language Contact, Variation and Change in an African Urban Setting (London: Battlebridge, 2005). Elugbe, B.O., & A.P. Omamor. Nigerian Pidgin: Background and Prospects (Ibadan: Heinemann, 1991). Eze, Smart N. Nigerian Pidgin English: Sentence Complexity (Vienna: Veröffentlichungen der Institut für Afrikanistik und Ägyptologie der Universität Wien, 1980). Faraclas, Nicholas G. Nigerian Pidgin (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). Finch, Geoffrey. How to Study Linguistics (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan, 1998). Görlach, Manfred. Even More Englishes: Studies 1996–1997 (Amsterdam & Philadelphia P A : John Benjamins, 1998). Halliday, M.A.K., & Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen. An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1985; London: Hodder Arnold, 2004). Holm, John. Pidgins and Creoles, vol. 1: Theory and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1988). Igboanusi, Herbert. A Dictionary of Nigerian English Usage (Ibadan: Enicrownfit, 2002). Jakobson, Roman. “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Style in Language, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1960): 350–77. Jowitt, David. Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction (Ikeja: Longman, 1991). Mühleisen, Susanne. Creole Discourse: Exploring Prestige Formation and Change Across Caribbean English-Lexicon Creoles (Amsterdam & Philadephia P A : John Benjamins, 2002). Myers–Scotton, Carol. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1993).

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Nasta, Susheila. “Introduction” to Sam Selvon, The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Penguin, 2006): v–xvii. Odumuh, A.E. Nigerian English (Zaria: Ahmadu Bello U P , 1987). Schmied, Joseph J. English in Africa: An Introduction (London & New York: Longman, 1991). Sebba, Mark. London Jamaican: Language Systems in Interaction (London & New York: Longman, 1993). Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners (1956; London: Longman, 1972). Singh, Isthla. Pidgins and Creoles: An Introduction (London: Arnold, 2000). Wyke, Clement H. Sam Selvon’s Dialectal Style and Fictional Strategy (Vancouver: U of British Columbia P , 1991). Zabus, Chantal, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel (Cross / Cultures 4; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 1991; 2nd rev. ed. 2007).

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V ISUAL AND C INEMATOGRAPHIC N ARRATIVES ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

A LEX R OTAS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling — Ibrahim El-Salahi and Mohamed Bushara as ‘Asylum Artists’ in the UK

ABSTRACT: Focusing on a recent exhibition of two U K -based visual artists from Sudan, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Mohamed Bushara, Alex Rotas examines the relationship between artistic creation and social referent by critically discussing common labelling practices. She demonstrates that the label of asylum art “acts to diminish what is seen and to impose limits on how it is absorbed.”

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tend to be well aware of the marginalizing effects of showing work in an exhibition context that draws attention to aspects of their personal biography or ethnicity. Certainly the category of ‘African art’, with its undertones of anonymity, unchanging and timeless authenticity, and the allure it presents for the (non-African) ‘collector’, has a resonance and specificity that places it in opposition to the mainstream of Western cultural production.1 Artists simply want to be known as ‘artists’, without being tethered to any diminishing adjective that labels their work, however much such categories of difference may offer shortterm funding and marketing opportunities in a climate of late capitalism.2 ONTEMPORARY VISUAL ARTISTS

1 Sidney Kasfir, “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,” in Reading the Contemporary, ed. Okwui Enwezor & Olu Oguibe (London: inIVA, 1999): 88–113. 2 See Rasheed Araeen, “The Art of Benevolent Racism,” Third Text 51.4 (2000): 57–64, as well as his “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Poli-

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Within this market-driven quest for difference, however, a new category of art is emerging in the U K and this is one that singles individuals out in terms of their political exile from the countries of their birth. Artists from refugee populations, in whatever way they are loosely defined, are finding themselves becoming labelled as a new, quasi-ethnic group. A case in point occurred in late 2003, early 2004, when two well established U K -based artists from Sudan agreed to show their work in an exhibition that drew attention to their exile. This was a well-intentioned exhibition, with an articulate curator who had given considerable thought to the issues involved. Nonetheless, the inevitable outcome was for constraints to be put on the ways that viewers ‘read’ their work while continuing to position this work in unchallenging opposition to the cultural mainstream. Asylum Years was an exhibition by three artists “living in Oxfordshire as a result of forced migration,” two of whom were the Sudanese artists Ibrahim ElSalahi and Mohamed Omer Bushara.3 It was held at Oxford Brookes University from 5 December 2003 to 24 January 2004. El-Salahi and Bushara are artists whose long and distinguished international careers have been widely discussed in numerous critical texts, although they have followed very different individual trajectories.4 This is not the place to linger over the details of their tics,” in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt & Ziauddin Sardar (London and New York: Continuum, 2002): 333–46. See also Gen Doy Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), and Kobena Mercer, “Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness,” Third Text 49 (1999–2000): 51–62. 3 Asylum Years exhibition publicity flyer. The third was David Odwar, a potter, who came to the U K from Uganda in 1985 when he was ten. 4 For a more detailed discussion of El-Salahi’s work, see, for example, Sarah Adams, “‘In My Garment There is Nothing But God’: Bodies, Trees and Prayer in Ibrahim el Salahi’s Work,” African Arts 39.2 (2006): 26–35; Ulli Beier, Ibrahim El-Salahi: Identity and Exile (Bayreuth: Iwalewa, 1990); Salah Hassan, “El Salahi,” N K A Journal of Contemporary African Art 9 (1998): 28–33; Olu Oguibe, “El-Salahi” in Ibrahim El-Salahi: Images in Black and White, exhibition catalogue (London: Savannah Gallery, 1992). A major retrospective of his work (Ibrahim El-Salahi: An African Modernist) had been planned in collaboration with InIVA and the Africa Centre at S O A S for the Brunei Gallery, London in 2006, but has been re-scheduled for the Museum for African Art in New York (personal correspondence with Katherine Salahi, 4 January 2007). The Brunei retrospective has been postponed until 2008/9 because lenders could not meet the deadline. He is signalled as a distinguished figure at the Slade School of Art during the 1950s (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/slade/aboutus /history.html, site visited May 8, 2006). There is also a wealth of material written about El-Salahi in other languages, especially German and French. On Bushara, see, for example, Sondra Hale’s “Mohamed Omer Bushara (portfolio)” African Arts 27.1 (U C L A , 1994): 66–71, her “Mohamed Omer Bushara Emerges from Artistic Exile,” Aljadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts 28 (1999): 1–3, Hale’s

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professional lives but, given the very different emphasis often placed on the impact of individuals from Africa migrating to Europe, it is perhaps appropriate to give some indication of the international stature of these two artists, forcibly displaced and now living in the U K .5 El-Salahi has lived in exile since his release from prison in Sudan in 1975. Having worked as an advisor for the previous government, he was imprisoned by the Nimeiry dictatorship in Sudan for six months, falsely accused of conducting anti-government activities. Initially, he divided his time between Qatar and the U K , but since the mid-1990s he has been residing full-time in Oxford. In early 2004, his work The Tree [Figure 6 below] was chosen to front the invitation cards for The Oxford Show, an exhibition at Modern Art Oxford of work by local artists, a fact that delighted him. Used to being described as an ‘African artist’, he enjoyed (and was amused by) now being called an ‘Oxford artist’. Described more typically in the Asylum Years exhibition notes as “an elder statesman of Sudanese art,” his name features prominently in any account of Sudanese (and indeed ‘African’) art6 and he has been described as “one of the most impressive figures of Modernism in Africa.”7 He is closely associated with the so-called ‘Khartoum School’, the label used for the group of talented, young Sudanese artists who went overseas to the “Imagery and Invention: Sudanese at Home and in the World; Conversations with Mohamed Omer Bushara and Musa Khalifa,” in Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Cairo: American U in Cairo P , 2000): 187; Hale, “Bushara and his Indelible Art,” David Lillington, “Golden Birds in Thousands,” and Olu Oguibe, “Mohamed Omer Bushara,” all in Leroi W Coubagy, Bushara: Recent Works (exh. cat.; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993); Tom Freshwater, “Asylum Years: Review” (unpublished M S , for Oxford Brookes University, 2004); also Alex Rotas, “In Conversation with Mohamed Bushara,” http://www.sudan-for-all.org/sections/plastiic_arts/pages/essays-recherch /plasticart_mbushara01.html [accessed 4 April 2007]. 5 Nor is this the place to explore the contentious, and continually changing, definition of the word ‘refugee’ and the different rights accorded individuals so defined by different international bodies such as the U N and the European Court, nor indeed how the category of the refugee is in itself an increasingly fragile or, some would say, obsolete construction – see Patricia Tuitt, The Law’s Construction of the Refugee (London: Pluto, 1996), for example. This essay’s discussion of the Asylum Years exhibition, and the issues it raises, makes the assumption that the artists’ alignment with the exhibition acknowledges that their migration and subsequent exile can be described as ‘forced’ rather than voluntary. Focusing on the issues the exhibition raises for the artists, moreover, deliberately circumvents a more prurient (and, for present purposes, somewhat off the point) investigation of the precise details of their involuntary flight. 6 For example, A History of Art in Africa, ed. Monica Visona, Robin Poynor, Herbert M. Cole, Michael D. Harris, Rowland Abiodun & Suzanne Preston Blier (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000): 76. 7 Hassan, “El Salahi,” 28.

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best-known art schools of London in the 1950s and through whom, on their return, Sudanese artists were exposed to Western artistic traditions in terms of techniques, materials, and forms.8 The route he followed, studying first at the School of Design in the then Gordon Memorial College in Khartoum, spending three years on a scholarship at the Slade School and Royal College of Art in London, before returning to Khartoum to teach at the now re-named College of Fine and Applied Art, placed him in an influential and powerful position within the country’s art-world. His training at prestigious institutions overseas, coupled with his personal experience of the workings of the art institutions at home in Sudan, established his credentials there as an insider with appropriately impeccable qualifications from the outside. He was thus well placed to take a leading role in the development of modernist-based art in Sudan, both through his teaching and through the example of his practice. He found, however, when he returned to Sudan from England that local audiences perceived his work, and subsequently that of his students, as being too Western and having little relevance for them. He consequently turned to studying Islamic calligraphy, Coptic manuscripts, and local handicrafts such as carpets, camel blankets, wood carvings, and home decorations. Once he began to incorporate these motifs into his practice, his appeal to local audiences became stronger, as his work thereby became more accessible to them; at the same time, he developed these motifs into aesthetic forms in their own right.9 In this way, his work has been signalled as serving as a point of departure for younger Sudanese, and other African, artists, whose practice is characterized by an interweaving of modernist forms of expression with African iconography, symbolism, and technique.10 He became a key figure in the African art movement outside of Sudan, too, participating in the Mbari Club in Ibadan, Nigeria in the early 1960s,11 leading a delegation of Sudanese artists to the first Black Arts festival in Dakar in 1966 and the First Pan-African Arts and Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969. Both of these are, as Salah Hassan, Chair of the Department of History of Art and Professor of African and African Diaspora 8

Hassan, “El Salahi,” 28–29. El-Salahi’s observations to this effect were made at the “In and Out of Africa: Art and Identities” conference at the British Museum on 11 February 2005, as recorded by Nadège Tchotchoe at http://www.royalafricansociety.org/reports_publications/recent_meetings/artinsideout [accessed 17 July2005]; see also Salah Hassan’s “Khartoum Art School: Intellectual and Cultural Origins,” in Seven Stories of Africa, ed. Jane Havell (exhibition catalogue; London: Whitechapel Art Gallery/Flammarion, 1995): 114, and his “El Salahi,” 29. 10 Hassan, “Khartoum Art School,” 114, and Hassan, “El Salahi,” 28. 11 The Mbari Club was founded in 1961 as an association of African artists, writers, musicians, and actors. 9

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art history at Cornell University, points out, “important events in the formation of a trans-African movement which contributed to the evolution of a transAfrican aesthetic among African and African diaspora artists.”12 Hassan concludes that El-Salahi’s contributions to modernism in African art can be measured in many ways: by his intellectual engagement as an artist, as a writer and poet; and by his record as a teacher to a generation of Sudanese, African and diaspora artists, and by the remarkable breadth and complexity of his work in which he has exhausted all kinds of painterly strategies.13

The light, earthy colours of his early work Funeral and a Crescent (Figure 2) may be evocative of the Sudanese soil, as El-Salahi himself attests,14 but they also hint at the palette of Marcel Duchamp, while the abstracted and linear forms are reminiscent of Miró, the mask-like faces perhaps evocative of Emil Nolde. Yet the coffin-less body held aloft does not make for a European scene and the significance of the fine crescent of the new moon, so important as a marker in the Muslim calendar and here aligned horizontally as though to cradle and to welcome the newly dead figure, suggests origins beyond the confines of the West. The exaggerated phallus is also similar in style to some traditional African sculpture. In The Inevitable [Figure 3], a later work, El-Salahi demonstrates what he believes to be the falsity of the distinction placed traditionally in Western art between painting and drawing. “There is no painting without drawing and there is no shape without line […] in the end, all painting can be reduced to lines,” he asserts.15 Hence he refers to The Inevitable, part of a series of black pen and ink works, as a study in “shades of black and white.”16 The separate panels of this work make it of monumental dimensions when they are assembled together. A commentary on the civil strife in the Sudan, this work has a graphic quality to it, reflecting El-Salahi’s continual fascination with the rhythm and structure of Arabic calligraphy. The raised fists in the upper triad of the grid, however, are strongly suggestive of Bolshevik poster iconography, representing, possibly, the fanaticism of the different ideological factions aligned against each other in Sudan. The density and the energy of the figures evokes Max Beckmann’s Hell series or the woodcuts of other German expressionists such as Otto Dix, Käthe Kollwitz or Constantin von Mitschke–Collande, all working, like El-Salahi, in 12 13 14 15 16

Hassan, “El Salahi,” 29. “El Salahi,” 28. “El Salahi,” 30. “El Salahi,” 32. “El Salahi,” 32.

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equally troubled times. Stylized faces that take on the appearance of masks and the shaman-like figure in the central panel, however, hint at a more African connection in a work that Hassan describes as “a masterpiece of skill and philosophical vision.”17 Mohamed Bushara, in contrast to El-Salahi, describes himself as an outsider both in his native Sudan and in the U K .18 He has practised as an artist from his student days, but he studied geography at the University of Khartoum rather than art at the Khartoum School of Fine Art. He was awarded a scholarship by the British Council to study at the Slade for two years between 1975 and 1976 but, having never studied art in Sudan, he feels he is viewed as “an intruder” in the Sudanese art-world, with no claim to being part of any contemporary Sudanese movement. There is some evidence, however, to suggest that Bushara is being overly diffident, as his name appears on the most cursory visit to almost any website associated with ‘Sudanese art’.19 But, as Professor Sondra Hale of U C L A ’s Department of Anthropology observes, Bushara’s “extreme modesty,” coupled with the clique-ish and self-protective nature of the ‘Khartoum School’, mitigated against a welcoming reception towards someone who could be perceived as a self-taught interloper. It was not, therefore, until he began to earn scholarships, win prizes, have his work published, and exhibit that any attention was given to him by the major artists in Sudan.20 Like ElSalahi, he has been living in exile since the 1970s. He sought asylum in the U K in 1999, having lived in Saudi Arabia for eighteen years previously, finally (after a long period of uncertainty) receiving full residency status in June 2005. Bushara has thus been the more isolated of the two artists, having been exiled younger than El-Salahi (and consequently for a greater proportion of his life). He has always been a prodigious practitioner, even throughout the Saudi years, when his only contact with the art-world was through subscriptions to American magazines.21 His exhibitions have included venues in Sudan, Eritrea, Ghana, Tunisia, the U S A , and throughout Europe, he has provided numerous book covers and illustrations for magazines, including New Internationalist in the U K , and has led drawing, painting, and printmaking workshops in many different international locations. 17

Hassan, “El Salahi,” 32. Personal interview, Oxford, January 15, 2004. 19 For example [all sites accessed 8 May 2006]: http://www.insideafricanart.com/IAA /Contemp_art_sudan.htm http://www.sudanartists.org/biography.htm http://www.sudan-for-all.org/sections/plastiic_arts/pages/plasticart_mohamedomer_bushara.html 20 Hale, “Bushara and his Indelible Art,” 10. 21 Lillington, “Golden Birds in Thousands,” 14. 18

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Bushara’s passionate involvement with art is embodied in his personal relationship with his materials. He talks of being “in love” with the media he works with and alert to their response to the marks he makes on and with them.22 Printing is his favourite process; he produces etchings, prints, collagraphs, and paintings (using inks, colours, and found objects), and even his paintings have a printerly quality to them. Through his work, he expresses every aspect of his life; sometimes weighed down with the burden of feeling other people’s suffering (or his own), sometimes playing and having fun and sometimes feeling companionably engaged in the process, as though, he says, he is “chatting with a friend or just strolling around.”23 He may work with a composition in mind or enjoy the ambiguity that arises from the purposeful yet chaotic interaction he has with whatever materials he is using at the time. An occasion when he was studying in London in the mid 1970s seems to have been of signal importance in instilling in him the pleasure he gains from negotiating the contradictory qualities of structure and chaos, of choreography and anarchy, in his work: The sculptor Barry Flanagan came to the Slade as a visiting artist. He brought with him two dancers (a woman and a man) and played classical music in an empty studio. There was nothing there except for the whiteness and poetry of the bodies and our hunger to capture these two bodies in our drawings. They were floating in the emptiness of the room carried by the rich fabric of the music and, unlike drawing from a sitting model, here, with the dancers moving, our lines became freer and more dynamic, rather than dead and academic. We all belonged to the moment; we were both free and committed, serious yet full of joy.24

Untitled [Figure 4] is a carefully worked composition, in which meticulous inked lines create patterns like the fine whorls of fingerprints, bearing associations thereby with official identification procedures and the policing machinery of the state. Scraps of magazine images appear as though hastily torn out and affixed to the surface, bits of photographs perhaps of fencing or of barbed wire (it is hard to tell), although dark ridges continue and intensify the sweep of finely drawn horizontal lines in the central shape. A forbidding red X bars entry to a hand, adding to the work’s underlying graphic design. Meanwhile, the sense of different layers of visual images lying on different flat coloured planes

22

Personal interview, 25 January 2004. Personal interview, 25 January 2004. ‘Strolling around’ was a reference to what he thought was a line in an Auden poem that, between us, we eventually discovered to be “suspect those bright mornings where you whistle with a light heart,” in The Sea and the Mirror (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1944): 20. 24 Personal correspondence, 3 March 2004. 23

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is reminiscent of the work of Kitaj as he grappled with imagery inspired by the Holocaust. The collagraph in Figure 5 demonstrates the pleasure Bushara takes in working on the cusps of both representation and abstraction, the fragile and delicate membranes of what is clearly a leaf emerging horizontally into the visual plane while graceful and elusive shapes extend and swirl above and below its stem. Bushara adamantly refuses to label either himself or his work, dismissing descriptions of his work as ‘postmodernist’25 (“it’s up to you – you can call it what you like”), or ‘representational’ or ‘abstract’ (“it’s both”), and refusing also, in true modernist spirit, to be pinned down about who and what has influenced him (“everything” and “everyone”).26 Regarding the thorny question of whether his art is ‘political,’ he is equally evasive: “all art is political,” he replies. But, as Hale points out, it is important to recognize that the term ‘political artist’ is neither an oxymoron nor even problematic in much of Africa, since the artist is a purveyor and repository of all aspects of culture.27 Bushara’s interests in dance, poetry, theatre, and fiction, all of which provide inspiration for his work, bear this out; “for me, painting is not just a matter of ‘painting,’ it is part of the whole thing – it is part of life and part of creativity”, he observes.28 In many ways, therefore, it was curious that both El-Salahi and Bushara agreed to show their work in the galleries of Oxford Brookes University in an exhibition called Asylum Years. The campus site precluded casual visitors from dropping in, and stringent car-parking restrictions meant that even determined visitors had to make special pleas to be allowed access. (Even so, the curator, Janine Charles, describes this as a highly publicized project that turned out to be one of the University’s most visited exhibitions.29) The exhibition title deliberately drew attention to the artists’ quest for asylum, past or present, suggesting to the viewer a particular context within which to look at the work. However, Charles put no curatorial remit to the artists to address asylum issues. Knowing the calibre of their work, their political status, and their geographical location in Oxfordshire, she seized the opportunity to offer them the space to exhibit their work at a time when positive associations with the word ‘asylum’ were in themselves rare; rarer still was any notion that it might be coupled with world-class art. 25 26 27 28 29

Hale, “Bushara and his Indelible Art,” 10. Personal interview, 25 January 2004. Hale, “Mohamed Omer Bushara (portfolio).” Personal interview, 25 January 2004. Janine Charles, personal email, 23 December 2005.

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At the round-table discussion Charles organized after the exhibition closed, both Bushara and El-Salahi said that there were two reasons why they had agreed to show their work. Not only were they prepared to act as catalysts for a debate about asylum issues, but it also felt as though they were being offered the chance to have a small solo show each, the layout of the galleries being such that each had their own separate space to themselves. However, the lack of congruence between the title of the exhibition and the works shown in it raises several interesting issues, particularly relating to the expectations viewers bring with them when they come to see an exhibition and the impact these expectations have on the way they then view it. At an exhibition entitled Asylum Years, viewers might be forgiven for arriving with their preconceptions about asylum seekers at the forefront of their minds, at the very least expecting to see issues related to asylum being addressed, as indeed they were at a number of other exhibitions shown during this period in the U K .30 But in this particular instance, this was not to be the case at all. The title alone, however, established an immediate connection between the artists’ biographies and the fact that they had sought asylum, and their work. Such a connection inevitably brings problems with it, and Charles’s decision to host a discussion at the close of the exhibition demonstrated her own keen awareness of this fact. That there is a relationship between the artist and his or her work may be taken as a ‘given’, but exactly how this relationship works is far from straightforward. Showing artists’ work with reference to their biography rather than within a more critical or thematic context clearly underlines this relationship and raises problematic essentialist and reductionist issues. The Romantic argument that art is self-expression,31 despite being discredited by later commentators who see art as inseparable from broader social and historical issues,32 still has some hold on both the public and academic imagination. The high-profile personal presence of artists such as Tracey Emin, Damien 30

For example, at Leave to Remain, an exhibition of work by ‘refugee artists’ in London, June 2003, in which curator/artist Margareta Kern deliberately set out to raise issues about the so-called ‘refugee community’ in the U K ; Sanctuary, an exhibition at the prestigious Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, from April through September 2003, with curators Sean McGlashan and Susan Pacitti exploring and responding to issues of human rights and the expanding community of refugees and asylum seekers in the city, and Strangers to Ourselves, a complex and ambitious project held at various venues in south east England and then London during 2003–2004, that explored issues to do with where both people and also art-works, belong. 31 As expressed, for example, in Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Concept of Art,” first published in 1835, excerpt reprinted in Art in Theory: 1815–1900, ed. Charles Harrison, Paul Wood & Jason Gaiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). 32 For example, T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985).

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Hirst, and Chris Ofili suggests that while artists and viewers may well be liberated in terms of seeing artworks as sites of multiple discourses rather than fixed meaning, nonetheless one of those discourses still persists in highlighting the person of the artist. This discourse suggests that the ‘self’ that created the artworks is worthy of foregrounding and reflects the belief that an artwork in some way represents the artist who created it. Thus, the art historian Donald Preziosi describes post-Enlightenment art as continuing into the contemporary moment in the form of a powerful instrument for legitimising the belief that what you see in what you make is what in some deep, essential way you truly are. The form of your work is the physiognomy of your truth.33

According to this reasoning, to which I shall return again in a moment, the work of those exhibiting as, let us call them for the moment ‘refugee artists’, will be of particular and special interest regarding the insights it offers into what it has meant to the artists to be a refugee – the now well-explored and familiar fate met by ‘black artists’, ‘African artists’, ‘Indian artists’, and ‘women artists’ (and so on) before them. Significantly, funding practices in the U K under the all-powerful Arts Council are skewed very much in favour of any artist or project identifiable as ‘culturally diverse’, a policy that implies a certain endorsement of the Preziosi hypothesis. ‘Culturally diverse’ artists supposedly produce ‘culturally diverse art’, each strand of ‘difference’ potentially reflecting and representing the broader group to which each artist ‘belongs’ and from which new audiences can be drawn. Broadening the base of the art-viewing public was, and remains, high on Arts Council agendas, with ‘refugees’ becoming a new quasi-ethnic category of cultural difference that by 2006 had started to be favourably included within their funding policies. Foregrounding artists’ identities as refugees, however, raises its own problems, just as foregrounding artists’ identities in terms of their ethnicity or gender has done in the past. These occur partly through the very act of defining artists on the basis of their supposed Otherness and thereby placing them in opposition to the mainstream from which they are now excluded. As the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek demonstrates, respecting the Other’s specificity, whether under the guise of multiculturalism or cultural diversity, is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority. In such an unequal power relationship, it is only those in the privileged, universal ‘centre’ who are able to appreciate, depreciate (and tolerate or not tolerate) other more particular cultural group33

Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U P ,

1998): 516.

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ings. Agency thus remains the prerogative of the centre and the “patronising European distance” they maintain towards those they define and treat as their Others, he argues, becomes a disavowed, self-referential form of racism.34 But problematic, too, is the very process of fixing the viewer’s gaze through the narrow lens defined by whatever biographical details are foregrounded. Viewers of Asylum Years, then, would have inevitably arrived on the alert for issues to do with asylum. While there are undoubtedly interesting and exciting ways exhibitions can open up debate on these issues, they nonetheless put some constraints on the ways viewers can engage with the work on show. El-Salahi’s personal statement in the exhibition notes to Asylum Years, however, is a plea for freedom, not restraint: I see the picture in its finished form as a young person coming of age, able to speak for itself. I see it as a platform that represents a common ground of mutual interest to be shared equally between me as its past maker and the eye of the beholder, whose limitless capacity to observe and to absorb I trust and respect.

Exhibitions, though, that are constructed around aspects of one, or several, artists’ biographies make such a dream of an unprejudiced, respectful, and dynamic relationship between artist and viewer, via the work itself, almost impossible. They have a more fixed (albeit important) agenda to which the work remains tethered. Viewers may be encouraged to contemplate aspects of being a refugee (or black, or African, or a woman, etc.) in interesting and significant ways, but the ability of work displayed in this way to fly free and to stimulate unexpected new avenues of thought is constrained. Preziosi’s notion that we live in a world in which “we are our stuff” implies that work shown in biographically delimited exhibitions inevitably represents the artists who made it.35 His controversial suggestion: just as the world is imagined by many to be the artefact of a divine creator, there remains a “lingering theological desire” that, either individually or as groups, people’s characters are somehow homologous with their products and possessions. “Individuals are thereby taken as inextricably linked to the forms, materials and affordances of their object-worlds,” he asserts.36 Preziosi sees the relationship between ‘subjects and objects’ as a key issue in the art-world. He argues that this relationship has been naturalized in academic 34 Slavoj Žižek, “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 44. 35 Preziosi, “Grasping the World: Conceptualising Ethics After Aesthetics,” keynote paper presented at the G L A A D H conference “Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History: Debating Approaches to Curriculum Change in the U K ” (London: 19 September 2003): 7. 36 Preziosi, “Grasping the World,” 7.

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art-historical discourse. The “knots and conundrums” that tie them in place, he asserts, are then denied, with the link between the two becoming apparently seamless. We are left, he reflects, with what he refers to as “the problem of representation” – specifically, of representational ‘adequacy’. Artefacts come to represent the essence or ‘truth’ of an individual, community, class, gender, race, nation, place, or even period, though quite how this happens is not something that preoccupies him.37 Hence, he maintains, viewers inevitably make important connections between the art works they see and the nature (the character, state of mind, identity, culture, economic status and so on) of the artist who has made them. Not only will viewers to Asylum Years be making connections between the work and the artists, if Preziosi’s hypothesis is correct, but they will also be looking at the work through the dense prism of preconceptions they entertain around the word ‘asylum’ itself. The high level of media attention refugees and asylum seekers have, over the last decade, received in the U K has meant that most British people hold a pretty strong image in their minds of who a refugee or asylum seeker is, irrespective of whether they have ever met either (in fact, this often seems to be particularly the case if they have not).38 Far from having an open mind, then, preconceptions at best linked to key notions of suffering, alienation, dislocation, persecution (hence possibly imprisonment and torture), Third-World-ness, and poverty will be foremost in viewers’ minds. (At worst, they will be linked to fraud, cheating, scrounging, crime, and terrorism.) In fact, the curator Janine Charles remarked to me how much she enjoyed seeing the disbelief on people’s faces when she told them the prices of El-Salahi’s work; these thousands of pounds did not gell with the notions of professional and economic impoverishment associated with asylum seekers and refugees. As Kobena Mercer has observed, artists described as ‘black artists’ (in the present case, replaceable by ‘asylum artists’ or ‘refugee artists’) have “the burden of representation” foisted upon them39 – the burden of representing the key characteristics associated with being a refugee and the limitation of representing these characteristics only (or risking their authenticity as genuine ‘refugee artists’). Just as Roland Barthes famously argued that “Italianicity is not Italy; it is the condensation of everything Italian from spaghetti to painting,”40 it is possible to postulate now an emerging refugeeicity which is the condensation of 37

Preziosi, “Grasping the World,” 7. Terence Wright, “Refugees on Screen,” R S C Working Paper No. 5 (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, U of Oxford: 2000): 1. 39 Kobena Mercer, “Ethnicity and Internationality,” 51–63. 40 Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977): 48. 38

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everything to do with refugees, from barbed wire to detention centres to clothes handouts and food tokens. As far as art exhibitions are concerned, so long as the work operates in an overtly social and political context, there will be congruence between the artists’ conscious decision to challenge viewers’ notions about the nature of the asylum-seeking experience and the fact that viewers will be arriving with the baggage of these preconceptions. All players’s cards are on the table. The artists at Asylum Years, however, did not show work that drew attention to – or even signalled – their political status. Indeed, El-Salahi describes his work as an “invitation to meditation.”41 For the past fifteen years, all his work has developed from a single motif of a tree, and his paintings draw the viewer into a centre from which the eye is encouraged to wander and explore in a contemplative rather than purposeful manner. His belief that living in the present moment is the source of “ultimate and eternal happiness”42 is reflected in work that is not ‘about’ political or social issues – which is, of course, not to say that it is not informed by the various cultural influences on his long career. Bright linear patches of different colours worked in between the black, mainly vertical and horizontal, lines suggest north African rugs or flag motifs, for example, and shapes within The Tree [Figure 6] are strongly evocative of Sudanese men’s flowing robes, with the black ink marks suggestive of the Arab calligraphic forms that were once the focus of El-Salahi’s attention. The notion of not transmitting any specific ideas but, rather, of suggesting “a state of being which is at once repose and inner rhythm” also draws on Islamic traditions.43 Tom Freshwater observes, however, that El-Salahi’s work “sits strongly within the style of ‘international modernism’.” It evokes the increasing abstraction of Mondrian’s Tree series, for example, which later evolved into his famous geometric grids with their play of colour balanced within horizontal and vertical lines, or the colourful squares and geometric forms harmoniously juxtaposed in the compositions of Paul Klee.44 The artist /curator/ writer Rasheed Araeen, moreover, has sounded the alert about the difficulty of positioning work such as El-Salahi’s in Western artworlds. He describes the dilemma of postcolonial artists who are paradoxically forced to enter the metropolitan West (the centre, that is, of the West’s colonial empire) in order to seek an arts education, thanks to a colonial legacy that

41 42 43 44

Asylum Years exhibition notes. Asylum Years exhibition notes. Titus Burckhardt, Moorish Culture in Spain (Louisville K Y : Fons Vitae, 2001): 206. Tom Freshwater, review of Asylum Years, 2004, unpublished.

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prohibited the development of arts institutions in their own countries.45 Araeen maintains that looking for cultural difference in such artists’ work was crucial “for the eurocentric West and its art institutions which had been built on differentiating between the ruler and the ruled.”46 When artists such as El-Salahi and Bushara produce work that has arguably rather less to do with cultural difference than with modernist influences of the twentieth century, they present a problem. Faced with the possibility of accepting these artists as part of a modernist tradition and thereby as peers of and equals to their European counterparts, Araeen argues that the Western art-world could see no other option than to ignore them: recognizing them would “disrupt the white genealogy of modern art.”47 El-Salahi’s work raises some of these issues now. Not only does his work not touch on asylum issues, even though he agreed to contribute to an exhibition entitled Asylum Years but, despite his stature as a distinguished international artist whose work is both popular and expensive in the U S A and Germany, both work and artist are largely ignored by the art-world mainstream in the U K . The major Brunei Gallery retrospective of his work mentioned earlier was an initiative that would have left the mainstream unchallenged.48 In either context, however, as Araeen predicts, his cultural difference becomes foregrounded in his positioning as an ‘African artist’. His work is thereby contrasted with – hence excluded from – a non-culturally specific mainstream. Hence the Asylum Years title carries associations that frustrate the unconstrained interaction between the work on show and its viewers that El-Salahi himself advocates. Borrowing from Marsha Meskimmon’s analysis of women artists, it is clear that ‘refugee’ and ‘artists’ are not terms that sit easily with each other: like the terms ‘woman’ and ‘artists’, “they require representational strategies which make their connections meaningful.”49 It is all too easy for simplistic anecdotal details. on the one hand, or notions of ethnic or experiential essentialism. on the other, to be offered as ‘explanations’ for artists’ work. Of course, certain aspects of artists’ lives may be significant when looking at 45

Rasheed Araeen, “The Artist as Post-Colonial Subject and This Individual’s Journey Towards ‘The Centre’,” in Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, ed. Catherine King, (New Haven C T : Yale U P in association with the Open University, 1999): 231. 46 Araeen, “The Artist as Post-Colonial Subject,” 231. 47 “The Artist as Post-Colonial Subject,” 231. 48 inIVA has been accused of having a minority and separatist agenda, promoting “a kind of alternative avant-garde,” Gen Doy, Black Visual Culture, 85–86; see also Mercer, “Ethnicity and Internationality,” 54. 49 Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (London: Scarlett Press, 1996): 11.

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their work, but more, as Meskimmon argues, in the sense of situated knowledges; it is important to resist fixed and simple identifications.50 It is hard for a picture to ‘come of age’, as El-Salahi proposes, if the viewer has already decided what its interests are. Thus Olu Oguibe, in the catalogue of an exhibition of El-Salahi’s work in London in 1992, argues that, Some have tried to construct theories of alienation around Salahi’s work, drawing attention to his status as an exile. But nothing could be farther from the reality which these works enunciate. The mingling of figures and forms, the unfurling of shapes, none of these call to mind a state of rupture or estrangement. There is unity, coherence, a dynamism which defies the circumscription and definition which are the prerequisites of alienation […] If Salahi lives in estrangement, which he does not confess to, he equally does not betray it in his work.51

Bushara’s work, like El-Salahi’s, also draws on a modernist tradition and equally defies categorization in terms of the artist’s ethnicity or political status. It is “neither wholly abstract, nor entirely figurative”52 and its elusiveness demands time from the viewer and allows for a very personal engagement, precluding easy interpretation. Nonetheless (or perhaps because of this), at the Private View of another exhibition of his work on the café walls at Modern Art Oxford, at least two visitors could be heard discussing their conviction that they could ‘see’ that he was in exile from his paintings. Predominantly abstract work such as Bushara’s is perhaps particularly generous in permitting the viewer to see whatever he or she is looking for in it. Hence, while the dense black ink surrounding and encroaching on the rough figures in Figure 7, for example, could be interpreted as evidence of Bushara’s sense of entrapment in a life lived in exile, this is but one of many possible readings. Oguibe, for his part, looking at earlier work of Bushara’s, sees in his figures the “faceless destitutes [… of London] shuffling down cold sidewalks in an insensitive city, wrapped up in their own worlds, surrounded yet irretrievably alone.”53 Bushara himself won’t be pinned down, and rejects any form of “pigeonholing,” as he refers to it; he has exhibited in exhibitions of ‘black art’, ‘African art’, ‘Arab art’, ‘Middle Eastern art’, and now ‘asylum art’, but while he is happy to talk about his relationship to his materials and media, he refuses to be 50

Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection, 199. Olu Oguibe, “El-Salahi” in Ibrahim El-Salahi: Images in Black and White (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1992). 52 Miria Swain, exhibition notes to A Woman Offering her Child to Silence, Mohamed Omer Bushara, Modern Art Oxford, café exhibition, 28 September – 28 November, 2004. 53 Olu Oguibe, “Mohamed Omer Bushara,” in Bushara: Recent Works (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993): 7. 51

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drawn regarding the impact, if any, of his politics, his nationality or his cultural background on his work. The Asylum Years exhibition, then, demonstrated how the new discourse associated with the category of ‘asylum art’ or ‘refugee art’ acts to diminish what is seen and to impose limits on how it is absorbed, just as such categories as ‘African art,’ ‘black art’ or ‘women’s art’ have done before it. Such a discourse will also have an impact on arguments about the particular affective quality of visual art. These arguments focus on the way in which art is primarily appreciated via the senses, with cognition an interrelated but secondary response: it is through art’s affective nature that new – and often unexpected – lines of critical inquiry can be opened up.54 Thinking in terms of a particular work of art being ‘about’ issues to do with asylum clearly reduces the viewer’s capacity to allow his or her thoughts to float freely, wherever and howsoever they will, in response to an affective encounter with the work. Cognition is already engaged prior to the affective experience, rather than triggered by it. By extension, ‘asylum artists’ become those limited to representing issues around their flight and search for safety, past or present, the label itself becoming the factor that now defines their authenticity as artists in the public eye. Artists find themselves pushed into a corner, knowing that viewers will come to view their work with less than open minds; with a veil of preconceptions clouding what it is they are going to see.

WORKS CITED Adams, Sarah. “‘In My Garment There is Nothing But God’: Bodies, Trees and Prayer in Ibrahim el Salahi’s Work,” African Arts 39.2 (2006): 26–35. Araeen, Rasheed. “The Art of Benevolent Racism,” Third Text 51.4 (2000): 57–64. ——. “The Artist as Post-Colonial Subject and This Individual’s Journey Towards ‘The Centre’,” in Views of Difference: Different Views of Art, ed. Catherine King (New Haven C T : Yale U P in association with the Open University, 1999): 229–55. ——. “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” in The Third Text Reader on Art, Culture and Theory, ed. Rasheed Araeen, Sean Cubitt & Ziauddin Sardar (London & New York: Continuum, 2002): 333–46. Auden, W.H. The Sea and the Mirror (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1944) Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (London: Collins / Fontana, 1977). ——. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, 32–51. Beier, Ulli, & Ibrahim El-Salahi. Identity and Exile (Bayreuth: Iwalewa, 1990). Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2005). 54

Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2005): 8.

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Burckhardt, Titus. Moorish Culture in Spain (Louisville K Y : Fons Vitae, 2001). Clark, T.J. The Painting of Modern Life (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985). Coubagy, W Leroi. Bushara: Recent Works (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993). Doy, Gen. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Freshwater, Tom. “Asylum Years,” unpublished review (for Oxford Brookes University, 2004). Hale, Sondra. “Bushara and his Indelible Art,” in Savannah: an Exhibition of Contemporary African Artists, ed. Leroi W Coubagy (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993): 9–13. ——. “Imagery and Invention: Sudanese at Home and in the World; ‘Conversations with Mohamed Omer Bushara and Musa Khalifa’,” in Images of Enchantment: Visual and Performing Arts of the Middle East, ed. Sherifa Zuhur (Cairo: American U in Cairo P , 2000): 187–203. ——. “Mohamed Omer Bushara Emerges from Artistic Exile,” Aljadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts 28 (1999): 1–3. ——. “Mohamed Omer Bushara (portfolio),” African Arts 27.1 (U C L A , 1994): 66–71. Harrison, Charles, Paul Wood & Jason Gaiger. Art in Theory: 1815–1900 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Hassan, Salah. “El Salahi,” N K A Journal of Contemporary African Art 9 (1998): 28–33. ——. “Khartoum Art School: Intellectual and Cultural Origins,” in Seven Stories of Africa, ed. Jane Havell (exhibition catalogue; London: Whitechapel Art Gallery / Flammarion, 1995): 113–18. Kasfir, Sidney. “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,” in Reading the Contemporary, ed. Okwui Enwezor & Olu Oguibe (London: inIVA, 1999): 88–113. Lillington, David. “Golden Birds in Thousands,” in Bushara: Recent Works, ed. Leroi W Coubagy (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993): 14–18. Mercer, Kobena. “Ethnicity and Internationality: New British Art and Diaspora-Based Blackness,” Third Text 49 (1999–2000): 51–62. Meskimmon, Marsha. The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (London: Scarlett Press, 1996). Oguibe, Olu. “El-Salahi,” in Ibrahim El-Salahi: Images in Black and White (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1992). ——. “Mohamed Omer Bushara,” in Bushara: Recent Works, ed. Leroi W Coubagy (exhibition catalogue; London: Savannah Gallery, 1993): 6–8. Preziosi, Donald. The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998). ——. “Grasping the World: Conceptualising Ethics After Aesthetics,” keynote paper presented at the G L A A D H conference on “Globalising Art, Architecture and Design History: Debating Approaches to Curriculum Change in the U K ” (London, 19 September 2003). Rotas, Alex. “In Conversation with Mohamed Omer Bushara” (2005): http://www.sudan-forall.org/sections/plastiic_arts/pages/essays-recherch/plasticart_m-bushara01.html Swain, Miria. “Mohamed Omer Bushara: A Woman Offering Her Child to Silence,” exhibition notes for exhibition of the same name, Modern Art Oxford (28 September–28 November 2004). Tuitt, Patricia. The Law’s Construction of the Refugee (London: Pluto, 1996). Visona, Monica Blackmun, Robin Poynor, Herbert M. Cole, Michael D. Harris, Rowland Abiodun & Suzanne Preston Blier, ed. A History of Art in Africa (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000).

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Wright, Terence. “Refugees on Screen,” R S C Working Paper No. 5 (Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford: 2000). Žižek, Slavoj. “Multiculturalism, or the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” New Left Review 225 (September–October 1997): 28–51.

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F I G U R E 2: Ibrahim El-Salahi, Funeral and a Crescent (1963). Oil on hardboard, 93x97 cm. Gift of Mariska Marker, courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

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F I G U R E 3: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Inevitable (1984–85). India ink on paper, 9 panels total 530x604 cm, courtesy of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University; image courtesy of the artist.

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F I G U R E 4: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Untitled (2000). Collage, 30x21 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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F I G U R E 5: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Untitled (2003). Collagraph, 18x18 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

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F I G U R E 6: Ibrahim El-Salahi, The Tree (2001). Coloured ink and watercolour on paper, 35x26 cm. Courtesy of the British Museum; image courtesy of the artist:

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F I G U R E 7: Mohamed Omer Bushara, Painting 37 (2003) Ink drawing on paper, found material, 20.3x29.3 cm. Asylum Years exhibition, Oxford, 2004; image courtesy of the artist.

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M ARIE –C HRISTINE P RESS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

North African Modernities — Myth Stripped Bare

ABSTRACT: This article examines how ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ in the postcolonial condition are negotiated in the famous travelling exhibition Africa Remix. The author focuses on what she calls the ‘myth-making’ display that operates in the works of the video artists Zineb Sedira and Zoulika Bouabdellah included in the exhibition. The artists, both of Algerian origin, utilize the technique of subverting cultural objects and icons – such as voiles, flags, and the concept of the freedom fighter – which, by way of appropriation and mimicry, returns the gaze of Europe and at the same time questions ethnic and family linkages.

I

of an increasingly globalized art market, the status of artistic production is the object of a debate around the perceived dominance of Western values. In particular, the question is posed of the negotiation between tradition and modernity arising from the encounter between different cultural systems of thought and belief. The exhibition Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, which travelled for two years (July 2004– August 2006) across Europe and to the Far East, from Düsseldorf to London, then Paris and lastly Tokyo, raised such issues. Narrating Africa in terms of “identity and history,” “body and soul,” “city and land” – the titles of each of the three parts of the exhibition – beyond geographical or political borders, was a central aim of the curatorial team. According to its chief curator, Simon Njami, Africa Remix endeavoured to avoid historical or thematic overgeneralN THE CONTEXT

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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izations while at the same time exploring “the possible unity of a contemporary African creativity” by bringing together a range of artists who all have personal connections with the realities and the experience of colonialism, and whose quest is concerned with politics, ethics, and aesthetics.1 Linked with this concern, there was a desire, expressed by the Tunisian poet, writer, and essayist Abdelwahab Meddeb in an interview published in the exhibition catalogue, to show how a shared space is being created in the postcolonial world, a space for different stories to be told, to circulate, and to be heard.2 Thus the selected artists were each invited to show facets of the African experience through highly individual works to be viewed as reflecting on the personal and the political, the individual and the collective. The work of Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, two women visual artists of Algerian background selected for the show, seems exemplary in this respect, and will be the focus of this essay. Both artists use and transform personal experience in order to address crucial historical moments that have reverberated down the generations for the Algerian people as well as for the French. Their work tells stories that may not have been heard before, and presents facets of history as seen and interpreted through the eyes and in the words and images of Europe’s ‘Other’, thus correcting and amending conventional wisdom or authorized versions of history, as echoed in Meddeb’s words: This is the modern nomadism, dissemination and displacement, and the end of a one-dimensional, self-referential world. […] Movement is created by what I call the aesthetics of passing through and betweenness. These French North Africans are the children of the new nomadism and post-colonial relocation. (46)

The role and power of art in referencing and articulating the experience of displacement, exile, and diaspora is currently attracting great interest among scholars and theorists, among whom one must note the decisive influence of Mieke Bal in helping to define and theorize what she terms a “Migratory Aesthetics”: i.e. the aesthetic dimension of the social experience of migration, or Abdelwahab Meddeb’s “aesthetics of passing through and betweenness,” as quoted above. Bal herself has explored this concept through her own artistic production – for example, the video installation Nothing Is Missing, in which the mothers of exiled children talk to a close member of their family, recount-

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Simon Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Afrika Remix: Zeitgenössische Kunst eines Kontinents; Düsseldorf: Museum Kunst Palast, 2004; abridged tr. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005): 20. 2 Abdelwahab Meddeb, “Africa Begins in the North,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, 40–46.

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ing their stories of grief.3 The video artist states that she was careful to give the mothers free rein by leaving the room in which the camera was set up, thus enhancing the intimacy of the interaction and – crucially – its performative value for all participants, which includes the viewing public. It is worth signalling at this point that a video installation by Zineb Sedira, one of the artists under consideration in the present essay, works with very similar concerns, as will be analysed presently. Bal emphasizes how the concept of performance is central to our understanding of cultural objects and argues that its narrativity is intrinsic to its affective power and to the aliveness of culture. One finds here a striking parallel with Paul Ricoeur’s commentary on Lévi–Strauss’s structural analysis of myth.4 According to Ricoeur, speech and performance are essential to reactivating the power of a myth in a particular situation; similarly, Bal asserts that performance involving a public response is necessary for the written text of a play to become an actual play, just as the viewing public is necessary for a work of art to come alive. Interestingly, these aspects of narration and performance are specifically relevant to a strategy of myth-making that appears to be shared by a number of artists whose lives are intimately bound up with the experience of migration, the realities and aftermath of colonialism. This article explores how a kind of myth-making, or mythophoric artistic production – to translate a French neologism used by Mireille Rosello5 – may be seen as a common strategy for the creation of new identities in the postcolonial era, as suggested by the work of Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah. Indeed, the two artists appear to share concerns that are also present in the work of several contemporary writers and intellectuals of the Maghreb writing in French. One can see the recourse to myth-making as a common dynamic that unites those artists and writers. Rosello usefully reminds us that the series of short articles that appear in Barthes’ Mythologies was written between 1954 and 1956 during the Algerian War, at a time when the French empire was dis3

Mieke Bal, Nothing Is Missing, ed. Gary Ward (Cinema Suitcase/Mieke Bal, 2006). Video stills and the artist’s statement are available on www.miekebal.org/index.php?id=21. I have based the above remarks on Bal’s Keynote Presentation, “Inter-Facing,” delivered on 1 June 2006 at the International Conference “Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe,” University of Frankfurt, Germany, 1–3 June 2006. 4 See Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, tr. Kathleen Blamey & John B. Thompson (Du texte à l’action : Essais d’herméneutique II, Paris: Seuil, 1986; tr. Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1991): esp. 114–16; Claude Lévi–Strauss, Structural Anthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Anthropologie structurale, 1958; tr. New York: Basic Books, 1963): esp. “The Structural Study of Myth,” 202–12. 5 Mireille Rosello, “Lectures mythophores des récits de l’origine dans Nzid de Malika Mokkedem,” Présence Francophone 62 (2004): 22–38; Malika Mokkedem, N’zid (Paris: Grasset, 2001).

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integrating.6 Barthes was keen to debunk, among other things, the myths which still pervaded the French view of the world at the time, presented as a set of self-evident truths. One of his examples concerns a young African soldier in French military uniform saluting the tricolour as pictured on the cover of the popular magazine Paris–Match: the image, says Barthes, was transparently meant to signify to its readers the undying patriotism of France’s colonial subjects. This self-evident ‘truth’ of the image is exposed by Barthes as a myth: i.e. a mystification, a lie. In her discussion, Rosello then raises the possibility of a postcolonial mythology based on a pantheon of Algerian liberation heroes – mujahidin or, more rarely, mujahidate, their female counterparts – as celebrated in Assia Djebar’s films and novels. Indeed, this form of myth-making has been seen by many intellectuals and political figures as a crucial building-block in the construction of an original African modernity. Rosello trenchantly argues, however, that in the last analysis such an anticolonial mythology functions in exactly the same way as the colonial mystification: In spite of its anticolonial stance, this new type of narrative would function in exactly the same way as the petit-bourgeois myths: it would enjoin us to believe in the heroism of heroes, in the revolutionary character of the revolution.7

And yet, Rosello believes, myths are intrinsic to culture. What we should be looking for, then, is a form of postcolonial myth that would create the possibility of a demystified reading. To this effect, she advocates an analysis which carefully distinguishes between mystification and a form of myth-making in which a quasi-myth is staged in such a way that one is forced to distance oneself from it through a mise en abyme, a myth within the myth, thus creating an ironic tension, a critical distantiation. I suggest that such a staging of myth can be illustrated by two pieces from the work of Zineb Sedira and Zoulikha Bouabdellah, shown in the “Identity and History” section of Africa Remix. Here, myth is envisaged as a marker of cultural identity, to be variously contested, debunked, re-written and re-appropriated by the artists for their own creative ends. Their myth-making display operates a cultural re-framing or re-staging which invites an affective response from the viewers, and their positioning within the performance necessarily inflects its ontological value.

6 Roland Barthes, Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies, 1957; tr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). 7 “Pour en être anticolonial, le nouveau récit fonctionnerait comme les mythes coloniaux petits-bourgeois: il nous signifierait que nous devons croire à l’héroïsme des héros, à l’aspect révolutionnaire de la révolution” (Rosello, “Lectures mythophores des récits de l’origine dans Nzid de Malika Mokkedem,” 26; my tr.).

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Sedira’s triptych Mother, Father and I [Figure 8 below] is a 20-minute video installation in which the artist’s parents recount aspects of their lives during the Algerian War of Independence, and subsequently in France where they emigrated in the early 1960s. On first viewing, this piece might appear to be a straight documentary. However, the manner of its presentation invites several readings. As Simon Njami stressed on the occasion of Sedira’s English retrospective Telling Stories with Differences, her work should not be reduced to anthropological or sociological dimensions.8 Two large screens show her father and mother simultaneously and separately recounting, in their Algerian Arabic vernacular, the harrowing memories of those years: stories of their suffering under French occupation from 1954, acts of resistance by the mujahidin and their supporters, instances of torture, rape, and murder of relatives or close friends, and other horrific events both during the war and after, when in France, such as the massacre of over one hundred Algerians peacefully demonstrating in the streets of Paris on October 17, 1961. Facing them on the opposite wall, Sedira is shown listening to them. The artist’s dedication reads: “To my parents who for the first time told me their stories....” At issue here are the transmission and public dissemination of family history, intimate and public memory, language and storytelling. For instance, the subtitles provided in English (or in French when shown in France) make viewers acutely aware of the linguistic and cultural silence to which the people now speaking had previously been relegated. It is also worth noting that the artist’s father actually speaks in strongly accented French some of the time, a poignant reminder of the unresolved conflicts and crises that have reverberated throughout their lives. For example, when explaining why he left for France after several years of fighting alongside the mujahidin (glossed in the subtitles as “freedom fighters”), Sedira’s father exclaims in French: “Je ne voulais pas mourir!” [I didn’t want to die!] and a little later: “A ce moment, je suis jeune, très jeune. Je veux aller en France ...” [I am young at the time, very young. I want to go to France]. The father’s departure signals the beginning of very different experiences for him as a labourer in France, while the mother’s separate narrative highlights an often hidden and forgotten part played by Algerian women in the War of Independence. One telling aspect of this conflictual situation is exposed when Sedira’s mother narrates a story, rarely told, about the harkis (glossed as “collaborators”), those Algerians who fought for the French army against their own people. In a sequence entitled “Harkis in the family?” she recounts how, in order to avert a likely massacre of the local population, the village elders would 8

Njami, “An Assumed Autobiography,” in Zineb Sedira: Telling Stories with Differences (catalogue / D V D ; Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2004): P D F file, 3.

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at times “offer up” a few men from each district to “get dressed with the French” – a euphemistic phrase meaning “to become collaborators.” This, she finally admits with visible pain, may have happened with some of her own people. The phrase “get dressed with the French” reverberates throughout the video, contrasting with the traditional white garments worn here by the protagonists, but also underscoring their own adoption of European dress when they emigrated to France. By recording and giving her mother and father a space in which to be heard, Sedira confronts the parallel but different realities of their lives and interprets the former silences of both her parents and official history. Furthermore, she exposes the ambivalence at the core of her migrant parents’ experience, at once victims and actors in the mystification of France’s colonial and postcolonial history. Their stories are made up of parallel fragments, so that the viewer cannot actually hear a unified narrative; nor can the artist who subsequently filmed herself listening to them. The installation creates a space within which stories are narrated and a drama unfolds, each time differently according to where, when, and how the piece is presented. Sedira’s triptych evokes today’s geographical, linguistic, and cultural migrations, displacements and transfers and the deterritorializing strategies of nomad thought and representation. By opening up the possibility of a shared space where different stories can circulate and be heard, this work partakes in Meddeb’s “aesthetics of passing through,” which he sees as characteristic of the aesthetic approach of this and other French North African artists. As noted earlier, such artistic engagement with, and foregrounding of, individual memories of often traumatic personal and historical events has been articulated as a “migratory aesthetics” by Bal, who considers it a crucial dimension of today’s understanding of migrant experience. One could ‘read’ Sedira’s piece as a documentary narrative of an individual’s family history, but its staging and the viewer’s complicated viewing experience clearly belie the apparent simplicity of documentary evidence. Barthes’ insistence on examining how myth “functions,” not what it purports to “say,” encourages a further reading which may yield an insight into how postcolonial myth-making might function. The triptych, a recurring form of presentation in Sedira’s work, appears to function here as a metaphoric space, supplementing language by dramatizing the narration and offering the possibility of understanding differently, both for the artist and for the viewer. The triptych can be seen as a material object that enables the artist to undertake a journey towards an understanding of the self – what Mildred Mortimer calls, in her introduction to a collection of essays on North African literature of French expression, “the identity quest, [a theme]

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that still dominates francophone Maghrebian literature.”9 In Sedira’s video piece, the formal arrangement of the triptych functions as a familial lieu de mémoire, a memorial site in both time – evoking three generations – and geographical space – Algeria, France, and England where Sedira lives.10 Furthermore, it operates on a poetic level as a material object of transfer, each time assembled, dismantled, and reassembled for different exhibition spaces, performances, and interpretations as it travels across countries and continents. The form of the narrative accords it a mythic quality with echoes of the founding myths of origins (mother, father, and I). In Sedira’s scenario, however, the myth is not straightforward: the “I” (the artist? the daughter?) is not immediately visible, as the viewer cannot watch the narrators and their silent listener at the same time, since they face one another on opposite walls. “I” faces “Mother” and “Father” from a distance, a physical space within which countless others (the viewers) intervene and complicate meanings. Through the formal device of the video triptych, the daughter (the artist) presents herself as a silent witness. “I” is a silent eye, a distanced gaze with no story of self to tell, and yet at the same time creating a new story for herself. In this story, the laws of origin and ethnic or national identity are called into question, as is the very genre of autobiography, destabilized as it is by the ambivalent presentation of the self. Rosello’s “mythophoric reading” of Mokkedem’s Nzid is pertinent to Sedira’s video piece: Here, the myth is not the established narrative which enjoins me to identify with a heroic character in the story. Rather, it is that which enables me to write the story that one tells oneself about the relationship between the self and one’s origins.11

The formal arrangement which enables Sedira’s distancing strategy is what facilitates the advent of a new narrative that implicates the viewers in its unfolding. Commenting on Abdelkébir Khatibi’s novel Triptyque de Rabat (Rabat Triptych),12 Lucy Stone McNeece points to the author’s interest in the “third dimension” in a tale whose narrator is endowed “with the vertiginous 9 Mildred Mortimer, Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition, ed. Mortimer (Boulder C O & London: Lynne Rienner, 2001): 5. 10 Pierre Nora’s seminal Realms of Memory, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, intro. Pierre Nora (Les lieux de mémoire, 1992; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1997), has been criticized for being flawed by a kind of French colonial amnesia when it comes to commemorating the events surrounding the Algerian War of Independence. 11 “Ici le mythe n’est pas ce récit préexistant qui me somme de m’identifier à certains personnages héroïques. Il est ce qui me permet d’écrire le récit que l’on se fait du rapport entre le ‘je’ et sa propre origine” (Rosello, “Lectures mythophores des récits de l’origine dans Nzid de Malika Mokkedem,” 35; my tr.). 12 Abdelkébir Khatibi, Triptyque de Rabat (Paris: Noël Blandin, 1993).

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perception of himself as a character within another’s vision.” “The real insight of the novel concerns a ‘third eye’ that is outside and inside at once but is identified with neither.”13 This literary device, McNeece states, is characteristic of a mise en abyme that functions as a critique of the illusory nature of origins, and enables the reader or the viewer to become involved in the construction of meaning. One can argue that this enabling function of the “third eye/ I” extends to its creator in making him or her an actor in the construction of their own complex history. In this sense, the third eye thus participates in the mythmaking quality of such a creation. A similar myth-making strategy appears to be at work in Sedira’s earlier large-scale photo triptych, Self Portrait or the Virgin Mary [Figure 9 below]. Here, the artist stands partly turned away from the camera, shrouded in a flowing white garment, at once challenging and inviting the viewers to hold in their minds the image of an Algerian woman wearing the traditional haik together with a possible representation of the Virgin Mary. Not only does the artist suggest a visual parallel between Christianity and Islam in the use of the veil but, more controversially, she appropriates a religious iconography which happens to be redolent with colonial undertones and creates an insistent triple selfportrait that is particularly resonant in the context of the French debate around ‘le foulard islamique’, the wearing of a veil or scarf by Muslim women. In images that stage both a ghostly self-effacement and a daring but ambiguous self-identification (Self-Portrait or the Virgin Mary), Sedira translates in visually striking terms the possibility of a different imaginary, both personal and collective. Her work repeatedly brings to the fore a sense of ambivalence and difference, two notions which Homi Bhabha has articulated as crucial to the performative power of mimicry.14 By a subversive appropriation and mimicry of cultural objects and icons, Sedira’s hybrid images translate the complex intersections of colonial and postcolonial spaces, and open up the possibility of new mythologies for new cultural identities in a future yet to be imagined. Critics have noted this subversive strategy in the works of contemporary francophone Arab artists and writers. For example, Anne Donadey develops this point about Assia Djebar – with whom Sedira particularly identifies.15 13 Lucy Stone McNeece, “Rescripting Modernity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Archaeology of Signs,” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition, ed. Mildred Mortimer (Boulder C O & London: Lynne Rienner, 2001): 81–98. 14 See Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), esp. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” 84–92. 15 Zineb Sedira, personal interview, December 2004. Sedira referred in particular to Assia Djebar’s Algerian White (Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995) when discussing the importance of the colour white in her own work.

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“Mimicry becomes a critical strategy for her, as she repeats a Western Orientalist discourse with a difference.”16 In her work, mimicry can be viewed as an ironic form of translation, or again as so many mirrors held up to the former colonial power and gently but decisively returning its gaze – with a difference. This strategy is also at play in a piece by the second artist I will now turn to. Zoulikha Bouabdellah’s Dansons [Let’s Dance] [Figure 10], a five-minute video also shown in the “Identity and History” section of Africa Remix, is perhaps more directly explicit in its debunking of myth through the distancing strategy of irony, while suggesting the possible transformation of a mystifying colonial narrative into a new, mythic postcolonial reality. In this video, against the backdrop of a vast French flag adorned with glittering fringes, appears the bare midriff of a young woman – the artist herself – apparently wearing only a low-slung sarouel, the loose trousers that are historically characteristic of the Algerian rural population but also associated in European minds with nineteenth-century Orientalist representations of Arab women. She slowly drapes and ties three fine cloths round her waist, one blue, one white, and one red. Suddenly the brisk sounds of the French national anthem burst out, as she starts to move and shake in an enticing but comical belly-dance to the military strains of the Marseillaise. No singing, no rousing voices are to be heard here, and yet the violent words of the anthem inevitably rise silently in the minds of French viewers. In an ironic contrapuntal note, the title’s gentle invitation to dance echoes the anthem’s bloody call to arms: “March on, march on! And drench our fields with their tainted blood.”17 In this piece, Bouabdellah tackles head-on not just one, but two of the sacred symbols of the French republican ideal – the flag and the national anthem, which, incidentally, focused the resentment of many young Beurs in France not long ago.18 She does so by divesting these public emblems of their pomp and circumstance and subverting their use and their significance, thereby distancing herself ironically while at the same time literally reappropriating them for her personal purpose – and the viewers’ enjoyment (or, for some, discomfort). Through her short and humorous perfor-

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Anne Donadey, Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing Between Worlds (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 2001): 103. 17 “Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons.” The history and a translation of the Marseillaise are available on the official French presidential website under the rubric “The Symbols of the Republic”: www.elysee.fr [accessed 28 December 2006]. 18 Indeed, the artist states that this piece was inspired by a football match between France and Algeria in 2002 during which the Marseillaise was hissed and booed by Beur supporters, thus causing the game to be abandoned. See www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENSAfricaRemix/ENS-AfricaRemix.htm#bouabdellah [accessed 28 December 2006].

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mance, Bouabdellah captures, in fact, a whole segment of the (North) African experience of colonization. As Mortimer explains, throughout the colonial era, Algeria’s contact with the French colonizer was longer, more complex, and more violent [than was the case with other colonial territories]. If we view the process of colonization as a wound – which many Maghrebian writers do – we must conclude that Algeria’s wound was deeper and more painful than that of its North African neighbors.19

Meddeb, too, believes that Algeria is more deeply marked by the trauma of colonialism and the loss [of the indigenous culture] was more destructive here. This is the trauma caused by what I have called genealogical interruption, which leads to a […] fantasy of regaining identity. There is a deeper narcissistic wound.20

Bouabdellah is effectively referencing a vital aspect of the complex history of colonized subjects by manifesting the imprint left on their minds by major symbols of colonial power. The power of those symbols is also the very power that can be derived from subverting them, as was demonstrated by the furore following Serge Gainsbourg’s (in)famous reggae version of the Marseillaise in 1979.21 In his autobiographical novel La Mémoire tatouée [Tattooed Memory] Abdelkébir Khatibi explores and dissects the wound inflicted on the colonial subject by the crushing power of the Western world. Turning his anger against a France personified as a vulgar sex-object to be subjugated in her turn, his narrator’s diatribe includes an iconoclastic catachresis: “and your buttocks in a tricolour.”22 Bouabdellah’s video piece stages a similar image but delivers a very different meaning: here, it is the artist’s own body that is symbolically clothed by her own hands with the demystified emblem of the former colonial power, no longer a threat but a symbol of freedom to be owned, identified with, and enjoyed as an adornment of choice. Indeed Bouabdellah states that the tricolour in this video connotes Delacroix’s famous 1830 allegorical painting Liberty Leading the People, and her own bare midriff may be seen as a discreet and humorous reference to the bare-breasted figure of Delacroix’s Liberty.23 It 19

Mortimer, Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition, 1. Meddeb, “Africa Begins in the North,” 44. 21 Serge Gainsbourg, Aux armes, et caetera (album, Philips / Polygram, 1979). This song earned him death threats from right-wing veterans of the Algerian War of Independence. 22 “Et tes fesses en drapeau tricolore”; Abdelkébir Khatibi, La Mémoire tatouée: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Paris: Denoël, 1971): 172 (my tr.). 23 http://www.centrepompidou.fr/education/ressources/ENS-AfricaRemix/ENS-AfricaRemix .htm#bouabdellah [accessed 28 December 2006]. 20

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must be noted here that this figure of Liberty was gradually enlisted to personify the French Republic and ultimately, the authority of the French State. Similarly, the Marseillaise originally adopted as a marching song during the French Revolution lost much of its revolutionary significance when it was established as the official anthem as late as 1879. Bouabdellah’s postcolonial performance therefore serves as a salutary corrective to the appropriation by the French State of original symbols of revolutionary fervour. Like Sedira, she also re-inscribes women into the mythic narratives of European and African histories. Dansons stands as a modest and light-hearted statement of the artist’s belief that myth is crucial to humanity and myth-making both a necessary and a redemptive act. Thus, myth-making has the potential to contest received meanings and values. With reference to postcolonial authors who occupy an interstitial space between languages and cultures – Khatibi, Djebar, Mokkedem, and others – one can observe that old myths can generate new visions. The legacy of the deep wound inflicted by colonialism, and efforts to deal with it in a creative way, have given rise to autobiographical forms of literary and visual narratives indexing shared histories. In this sense, it could be argued that, in the postcolonial context of globalization, myth-making is a privileged creative strategy for survival and a most powerful and necessary process in the creation of new modernities.

WORKS CITED Bal, Mieke. Nothing Is Missing, ed. Gary Ward, multiple screen video installation, 35 minutes. Cinema Suitcase / Mieke Bal (2006). Barthes, Roland. Mythologies, tr. Annette Lavers (Mythologies, 1957; tr. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bouabdellah, Zoulikha. Dansons [Let’s Dance], video installation, 5 minute D V D (2003) © The artist. Donadey, Anne. Recasting Postcolonialism: Women Writing between Worlds (Portsmouth N H : Heinemann, 2001). Gainsbourg, Serge. Aux armes, et caetera (album, Philips / Polygram, 1979). Khatibi, Abdelkébir. La Mémoire tatouée: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Paris: Denoël, 1971). ——. Triptyque de Rabat (Paris: Noël Blandin, 1993). Lévi–Strauss, Claude. Structural Anthropology, tr. Claire Jacobson & Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Anthropologie structurale, 1958; tr. New York: Basic Books, 1963). Meddeb, Abdelwahab. “Africa Begins in the North,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Afrika Remix: Zeitgenössische Kunst eines Kontinents; Düsseldorf: Museum Kunst Palast, 2004; abridged tr. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005): 40–46. Mortimer, Mildred, ed. Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition (Boulder C O & London: Lynne Rienner, 2001).

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Njami, Simon. “An assumed autobiography,” in Zineb Sedira, Telling Stories with Differences: Catalogue/ D V D (Manchester: Cornerhouse, 2004): P D F file, 3. ——. “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (Afrika Remix: Zeitgenössische Kunst eines Kontinents; Düsseldorf: Museum Kunst Palast, 2004; abridged tr. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005): 13–23. Nora, Pierre. Realms of Memory, tr. Arthur Goldhammer, intro. Pierre Nora (Les Lieux de Mémoire, 1992; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1997). Ricoeur, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, tr. Kathleen Blamey & John B. Thompson (Du texte à l’action: Essais d’herméneutique II, 1986; tr. Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1991). Rosello, Mireille. “Lectures mythophores des récits de l’origine dans Nzid de Malika Mokkedem,” Présence Francophone 62 (2004): 22–38. Stone McNeece, Lucy. “Rescripting Modernity: Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Archaeology of Signs,” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition, ed. Mortimer, 81–98.

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F I G U R E 8: Zineb Sedira, Mother, Father and I (2003). Video triptych projected onto two walls, (‘mother’ and ‘father’ on one wall, with sound; ‘I’ on opposite wall, silent). Duration: 20 minutes each video. (Commissioned by the St. Louis Museum of Art, St. Louis, Missouri, U S A . Private collection: Galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris. Collections: Cité Nationale de l’Histoire et de l’Immigration, Paris; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris). Extracts from the performance can be viewed on www.sonicgenes.co.uk/zineb/MothFath_v.html; stills are available on the artist’s website www.zinebsedira.com

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F I G U R E 9: Zineb Sedira, Self Portrait or the Virgin Mary (2000). C-Prints triptych (Collections: Arts Council of England; Musée Réattu, Arles, France).

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F I G U R E 10: Zoulikha Bouabdellah, Dansons [Let’s Dance]. Video installation, 5 minute D V D (2003) © the artist.

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Spies in the Sixteenth Arrondissement — Myriam Mihindou Exhibits 1 at the Musée Dapper in Paris

ABSTRACT: This essay explores the art of the Gabonese-born Mihindou against the artist’s family background. Highlighting hybridity as an energy-filled cultural and creative space, Papper stresses the conceptual importance of Homi Bhabha’s concept of the third space for a critical engagement with Euro-West African art.

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the contemporary art space of the Musée Dapper, a private museum of African and Caribbean Art in Paris, the visitor cannot ignore the large and glossy pictures of tied black women’s hands against red-lit backgrounds. The opposite wall shows photographs of what looks to be the same hands, manipulating clay in various poses, this time as intimate as a postage stamp. Small organically shaped soap objects hanging from elastic bands are on display in transparent boxes. One wall is filled with fetish-like collages: ‘beds’ of brown felt support capricious white shapes of cotton, hemp, threads, needles, and paraffin. Turning to yet another corner, the visitor is confronted with a video installation, a diptych in black and white. Two black women dressed in white execute different movements, each on a stone column, at the Place des Invalides in Paris. Myriam Mihindou HEN ENTERING

1 Olfert Dapper (1635–89, Amsterdam) was a doctor, a writer, and an Africa specialist, although he never visited the continent.

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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(Gabon, b.1964) is the creator of these sensitive artistic expressions.2 How to read these artworks against the background of the present postcolonial or, rather, decolonizing era is the main question to be answered in this essay. A biographical feature serves as the point of departure for this enquiry: Mihindou, daughter of a Gabonese father and a French mother, as a “mixed blessing’.3 Mihindou’s life is strongly influenced by a colonial legacy which is evoked in many of her biographical statements: The child of what was called ‘a domino couple’ (black and white) was considered ‘a monstrosity of history’ because neither of the two cultural groups understood this birth of the third entity, the mulatta. A mulatta is a kind of hybrid, ‘a traitoress’ of history that has broken free of two actors. I am, like all children, the result of a mix, the subject of a conflict and at the same time the object of increasing attention, for I am a foot-bridge that allows both of these cultures to express themselves and to open that other realm of relationships that is the language of universality. It is this third dimension that has been decisive for my life as an artist. It is this that has led me to undertake all these trips ‘abroad’. We are all hybrids.4

Trained as an artist in Bordeaux in the late 1980s, Mihindou discovered some connections between herself and Western art movements, one of them being feminist art5. She also relates to Land Art6 and Arte Povera,7 melding diverse 2

Gabon, Présence des Esprits, Musée Dapper, Paris, September 2006 – July 2007. Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessing: New Art in Multi-Cultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 4 “L’enfant de ce qu’on appelait à l’époque ‘un couple domino’ (noir plus blanc) était perçu comme ‘une monstruosité de l’histoire’, dans la mesure où ni l’un ni l’autre groupe culturel ne comprenait cette naissance de la troisième entité, métisse. Un métisse, c’est une sorte d’hybride, ‘une traitrise’ de l’histoire qui échappe aux deux acteurs. Je suis comme tout enfant issu d’un mélange, le sujet d’un conflit et en même temps l’objet d’une attention accrue car je suis une passerelle qui permet à ces deux cultures de s’exprimer et d’ouvrir cet autre champs de relation qu’est le langage de l’universalité. C’est cette troisième dimension qui a été décisive pour ma vie d’artiste. C’est elle qui m’a conduit vers tous ces voyages à ‘l’étranger’. Nous sommes tous des hybrides.” Personal written interview with Myriam Mihindou, August 2005, my tr. 5 Important representatives of this movement are Jenny Holzer, Shirin Neshat, Marina Abramovic, Rebecca Horn, Cindy Sherman. From the late 1960s onwards contemporary art has increasingly become indebted to feminism. This development has also stressed the importance of race, age, class and sexuality on art production and reception. See note by the editors Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan, Art and Feminism (2001; London & New York: Phaidon, 2002). 6 Land art or earth art uses materials from the natural environment, such as rocks, sticks, soil, and plants. Particularly large works are sometimes known as earthworks. These works frequently exist in the open and are left to change and natural decay. Consequently, many artefacts were ephemeral in nature and thus exist only as photographic documents. The group 3

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elements into her pictorial language. “Initially, works by female artists were useful reference-points for grasping the mechanism of the work. What I saw in them was a wound.”8 Women artists of that emancipatory phase came up with revolutionary themes in their art that concerned them personally: the body, the relation to men/ the father, love, animality, instinct, self-mutilation, to name but a few, themes that at that time were missing from artistic represention. Mihindou felt strongly attracted to artists such as Louise Bourgeois, Ana Mendieta, and Frida Kahlo9 whose performances cleaved close to the body and nature. She left her studio for outdoor (trance-dance) performances, mostly in natural surroundings, which she captured in photographs or films. In recent years she has exhibited throughout the world, wherever she has lived and worked. Her work has been displayed at international exhibitions such as Marokko: Kunst en Design 2005,10 Africa Remix,11 the Rencontres Africaines de la Photographie,12 and the Dak’Art Biennial.13 Her solo show in Paris serves as an outstanding example of how Mihindou’s oeuvre functions in the present postcolonial or decolonizing era – the museum connects two universes, that of the colo-

exhibition “Earthworks,” mounted at the Dwan Gallery in New York in 1968, was the ‘birth’ of this art movement. Important representatives of this movement are Richard Long, Robert Morris, Walter de Maria, and Richard Serra. 7 Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Piero Manzoni, and Michelangelo Pistoletto are important representatives of the Arte Povera (poor art) movement, centred on open-ended experimentation and a disregard for formal limitations for the sake of complete openness towards material and process. 8 “Au départ les oeuvres féminines étaient une référence constructive pour saisir le mécanisme de l’oeuvre. J’y percevais une blessure.” Personal written interview with Myriam Mihindou, August 2005, my tr. 9 Louise Bourgeois (b. 1911, Paris) is an artist and sculptor whose work is strongly influenced by the Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism. Her work, deeply involved in investigating her past, foregrounds nostalgia and torture. Ana Mendieta (1948–85) was a Cuban exile who became famous for her performance art and video works, which often depict abused and violated female bodies. Frida Kahlo (1907–54) was a Mexican painter who depicted the indigenous culture of her country and later her physical pain and suffering in a style combining Realism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. 10 Myriam Mihindou, Folle (2000). Video installation, 100x100 cm: exhibited in Wereldmuseum Rotterdam (2005). 11 Myriam Mihindou, Folle (2000). Video installation, 100x100 cm: exhibited in Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf (2004), Hayward Gallery, London (2005), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2005), Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2006). 12 Myriam Mihindou, Relique d’un corps domestique (2000). Series of full-colour photographs, 60x90 cm each: exhibited in Bamako, Mali (2005). 13 Myriam Mihindou, Déchoucage (2004–2006). Series of digital (black and white, negative) photographs: exhibited in Dakar, Senegal (2006).

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nial past (African and Caribbean folklore) and that of a globalized present (contemporary art). In order to position Mihindou as an artist in the universe of contemporary art, a comparison with Zineb Sedira (Algeria, b.1963) may be useful. This artist spent her youth in France and now lives in London. In a recent article on Sedira’s work, Marie–Christine Press14 explores “the power of her work to contest established systems of representation […], and imagine new modes of being in the world by ‘telling stories with differences’.”15 Press develops the notion of translation as an important aspect of Sedira’s oeuvre, quoting, among others, Michel de Certeau: Immigrants, he says, are “the inventors of solutions” which they create by means of “systems of translation” that enable them continually to invent their existence and to legitimize their status as agents and subjects of their own histories.16

Both Zineb Sedira (immigrant) and Myriam Mihindou (mulatta) could be seen as “inventors of solutions” in this sense. They thus belong to a category of artists who are translators possessing the power to become liberators, as Press interprets Walter Benjamin.17 Comparable to Sedira’s past, Mihindou’s experience with racism and ethnicity urges her (“pushed me”) to undertake a journey of self-discovery by means of her art. As for Sedira, this journey is “necessary to find or redefine, her identity” and it provokes the image of the “bridge that allows both of those cultures to express themselves and to open that other realm of relations, the language of universality.”18 This metaphor is productive in visualizingthe capacity of the artwork to reduce the distance between cultures, between ‘Other’ and ‘Self’, ‘them’ and ‘us’. One could think of a triangle in which the message of the métisse or the immigrant comes from the ‘third dimension’. It links the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’ by nourishing the ‘Self’ with information about the ‘Other’ and simultaneously about the ‘Self’. The model visualizes that these images refer to the collective consciousness of both cultural spaces. Information flows from the ‘them’ position to the ‘us’ position via the métisse artist, who acts as a liberator. The freedom of both artists from the burden of old hierarchies is partly due to their generational status. Moreover, Sedira and Mihin14 Marie–Christine Press, “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Translation Towards New Identities,” in Betwixt and Between: Place and Cultural Translation, ed. Stephen Kelly & David Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007): 242–54. 15 Press, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 245. 16 “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 244. 17 “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 243. 18 “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 248.

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dou share another decisive experience: both left their countries of birth to become nomads, on the move and far from home. Introducing the term ‘third space’, Homi Bhabha has claimed that “the bearers of a hybrid identity” are “free to negotiate and translate their cultural identities in a discontinuous intertextual temporality of cultural difference.”19 Press takes over this quotation and makes nomads the subject of this freedom.20 Now, if we agree that Sedira and Mihindou freely negotiate their identies, then their images, as a consequence, would reflect this freedom. Turning from the production of art to its reception, it would be interesting to explore the effect of these images on the beholder. Mutually conditioned opinions and views, still affected by the colonial past, do not allow for total freedom of reception, at least not yet. Julia Kristeva, herself a Bulgarian immigrant in Paris, helps us to see why and provides us with another dimension to the model of the triangle. In Strangers to Ourselves21 she reconstructs the destiny of foreigners in European civilization, from the Greeks to the present. Kristeva views issues such as the foreigner, the barbarian, the ‘Other’ and ‘difference’ from an historical perspective. Turning to the individual scale, she states that “Hegel’s Negativity,” as a counterpoint to the moral universalism of the Enlightenment, prepared the way for Freud’s notion of the ‘unconscious’.22 Drawing on Freud’s essay Das Unheimliche [The Uncanny], Kristeva declares that “the other is my (own) unconsciousness.”23 Freud, she explains, began his research into angst and the dynamics of the unconscious with a semantic study of the word ‘heimlich’ and its antonym ‘unheimlich’. The first, meaning both ‘familiar’ and ‘secret’, is already suggestive of its semantic opposite. As Freud explained, “the uncanny is that particular variety of the frightening that goes back to the long-known, the long-familiar.”24 Drawing on these ideas, Kristeva argues that that which is uncanny now, was once familiar. She also elaborates on Freud’s analysis of the narcissistic Self. The 19

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 38. Press, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 244. 21 Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). All translations from this work are mine. 22 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 249. This Hegelian negativity is said to be part of a countermovement to the moral universalism of the Enlightenment, along with its romantic inversion, the emergence of German nationalism, in particular the Volksgeist notion of Herder, “that all at once rehabilitates and systematizes, unchains and shackles the power of the Other, against and within consciousness of the Self” (“qui à la fois réhabilite et systématise, déchaîne et enchaîne la puissance de l’Autre, contre et dans la conscience du Même”). 23 “L’autre, c’est mon (propre) inconscient” (Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 271). 24 “L’inquiétante étrangeté est cette variété particulière de l’effrayant qui remonte au depuis longtemps connu, depuis longtemps familier” (Kristeva, paraphrasing Freud, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 270). 20

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latter projects what he finds dangerous and unpleasant in himself beyond himself, turning his double into a disturbing stranger. As Kristeva points out, we understand that linguistic use causes the shift of ‘heimlich’ into its contrary, ‘unheimlich’ […], because this ‘unheimlich’ is in fact nothing new or strange but something that is always familiar to the life of the psyche and has become strange to it only through the process of repression.25

To the frightening conditions that trigger the uncanny, according to Freud, Kristeva adds xenophobia (in Freud’s text, the stranger is absent). No matter how different, these phenomena share one basic characteristic: the value of signs and logic crumbles away for the benefit of imagination: “Facing the stranger whom I refuse and with whom I simultaneously identify, I lose my limits […].” The uncanny always intensifies, Kristeva continues, “the difficulty I have of placing myself in relation to the other, and […] the trajectory of identification-projection that underlies my access to autonomy,”26 evoking the process of repression of the once-familiar by the narcissistic Self. This leads to the hypothesis that the ‘Other’ reflects the hidden corners of the ‘Self’ and is therefore part of the ‘Self’. Kristeva’s historical perspective may be objective, but it is too immense and too complex to grasp, keeping the object (the ‘Other’) at an anonymous distance. The individual perspective, however, is more accessible, though at the risk of being too subjective. It allows an individual to identify with the stranger in himself, hence with the stranger exterior to himself. Returning to the triangle mentioned earlier: the position defined as ‘them’ assumes another dimension, with the historical perspective representing the faraway, anonymous ‘Other’ or ‘them’. The ‘Self’ or ‘us’ positions could be viewed as metaphors for the individual level. So both dimensions appear useful in releasing the “Other–Self” opposition. To take up another aspect of Kristeva’s analysis of Freud’s thoughts: he distinguished the uncanny caused by an aesthetic experience from that caused by a real experience. Being fictional, the aesthetic experience or, rather, its artificiality, neutralizes the uncanny.27 The aesthetic experience offers the viewer a free mental space where real life’s laws 25 “Nous comprenons que l’usage linguistique fasse passer le heimlich en son contraire l’unheimlich […], puisque cet unheimlich n’est en réalité rien de nouveau ou d’étranger [sic], mais quelque chose qui est pour la vie psychique familier de tout temps, et qui ne lui est devenu étranger que par le processus du refoulement” (Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, 272). 26 “Face à l’étranger que je refuse et auquel je m’identifie à la fois, je perds mes limites”; “ma difficulté à me placer par rapport à l’autre, et […] le trajet de l’identification-projection qui gît au fondement de mon accession à l’autonomie” (Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes, 276). 27 Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, 277.

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and logic are abolished. Works of art, highly individual expressions or comments on the world, transcending the individual scale, can be activated by the willing beholder as links between the two positions. This seems particularly true of works of art created by transcultural artists, because of their intermediary status. Thus, a ‘transcultural’ method for reading the artwork that shifts between the perspectives may allow the beholder to overcome the potentially frightening ‘us–them’ opposition and create a more productive ‘I–you’ relationship. Let us take a closer look at the exhibition in Paris to see if the artworks really act as links and whether we can speak of freedom of reception in this case. The Musée Dapper in the posh arrondissement of Passy hosts collections of fine African and Caribbean artifacts. In 2005, its director, Christiane Falgayrettes–Leveau, started a pioneering programme of contemporary art shows linked to the museum’s folklore collections. Myriam Mihindou was the second artist in this series. As traditional cultural objects and contemporary artworks are mixed in this format, the artwork of the métisse could be viewed as a connection between transcultural and diachronic dimensions, integrating the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’ as well as past and present. The small Musée Dapper had taken on a brave task which had been neglected by its prestigious new counterpart, the Musée du Quai Branly: the latter museum had decided to maintain the ‘Otherness’ of the historical objects displayed, stressing this by effects such as exoticizing interior décor. The contemporary interventions could have been read as efforts to connect past and present if they had been not so marginal that the average visitor was probably not even aware of them. Now, at the Musée Dapper, the mysterious, old, hence distant, Africa could shed some of its ‘Otherness’ through being drawn into the present by the contemporary art, in order to come closer to the ‘here’ (Paris, Europe, the ‘West’, ‘Self’, ‘us’) and ‘now’. Mihindou’s works could prove to be genuine links in the confrontation between the creations of her paternal ancestors (the ‘Other’) and the average museum visitor (the ‘Self’). However, the contemporary art space, a traditional white cube, appeared to be a transitional zone through which the visitor reaches the main exhibition space. What could have been a daring and rich dialogue appeared to be a mere juxtaposition, the transcultural and diachronic dimensions producing a minimal effect. Integrating these perspectives in one installation would be an excellent opportunity for an educational institution such as the Dapper: to offer fundamentally new views to its audience, allowing it to look beyond imposed, conditioned methods of thinking. Instead of reducing the distance between contemporary Europe and ‘good old Africa’, the contemporary works, thanks to their mode of installation, appear as secret intruders, as if they were spies in disguise, exploring this new environment but aware that some-

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thing is not yet in place. Apparently the exhibition context exerts a strong influence on freedom of reception: the identity and curatorial choices of the Musée Dapper are factors to be renegotiated in order to create an open environment for a transcultural reading of the artworks. Rather than reject the Dapper initiative as a failure, one may qualify it as one of many efforts to contribute to the process of decolonization in the context of the art-world. As stated previously, mutually conditioned opinions and views still dominate that discourse. However, a growing number of exhibitions, publications, and conferences are proposing a renewed union between ‘Other’ and ‘Self’ from a transcultural perspective. These are often the same initiatives as those that concretize the tension between old and new views. The following examples may shed light on the present postcolonial relationship between the African and European art-worlds. First, the contemporary art review Third Text was launched in 1987 as the new voice of the ‘Other’ in the art-world. However, in 2000, according to its chief editor, Rasheed Araeen, independent art theory in the realm of postcolonial studies is underdeveloped. Although he values highly thinkers of the postcolonial canon, he expresses some concerns: What I am critical of is the ambivalent and uncritical attitude of these post-colonial intellectuals towards art institutions and their multicultural projects. [...] What bothers me is the fact that these intellectuals have allowed themselves to be used by these institutions, […]. These institutions have been able to lure Said, Spivak, and Hall to participate in their activities because these activities appear to be new or critically significant, but which are in fact a façade. Their inability to penetrate this façade is largely due to their ignorance not only of the structures of these institutions and their relationship to art, but also their ignorance of the specificity of art practice and its historical and theoretical underpinnings.28

Unfortunately, Araeen’s radical vocabulary confirms the reality and /or illusion of separate worlds, placing his discourse within the old paradigm based on oppositions. The second illustration of my argument is the recent, important international group exhibition of African artists, Africa Remix (shown outside of Africa, as usual).29 This demonstrates that even in 2005 this large and prestigiously presented exhibition of African art in the West was overly concerned with postcolonial issues instead of with ‘merely’ artistic ones. As the chief curator, Simon Njami, pointed out in the catalogue’s opening essay, “African 28

Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 50 (“Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture”; Spring 2000): 3–20. 29 On the same exhibition, see Marie–Christine Press’s “North African Modernities: Myth Stripped Bare” in this volume.

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artists themselves have long been silent. Whatever Western critics may write, they do not care about labels pinned on them, as long as their work is shown.”30 The “labels pinned on them” refer to the gaze of the Western art-world that never really got much further than labelling these art practices as ‘primitive’, ‘native’, ‘exotic’, ‘different’; more recently, the Musée du Quai Branly has applied the more respectful-sounding but equally doubtful term ‘Arts Premiers’. In other words, artistic practices of formerly colonized peoples are either ‘othered’ (exoticized) or ‘appropriated’ (taken over) by formerly colonizing peoples. Africa Remix contained many works by artists who, like Mihindou and Sedira, are living in the diaspora and operating in the “third dimension” of the triangle. It therefore made a significant contribution to the ‘decolonization’ of the artistic image of the ‘Other’ (although such an isolation of the continent can, in the last analysis, hardly be seen as a constructive paradigm for reducing the distance). The next initiative, academic this time, was an undertaking designed to investigate the issue of the decolonization of the image. Nevertheless, the conference on “Shared History / Decolonising the Image” (Amsterdam, 2006), contrary to what the title suggests, invited only a few experts on the visual arts. Simultaneously with the conference, a contemporary visual arts exhibition under the same title was held, but the delegates, primarily specialists in the fields of literature, film, architecture, and music, hardly commented on the decolonization of the image; but the lacuna was at least acknowledged in the concluding forum. Although the contributions were interesting, apparently the issue of decolonizing the image still has to be defined by art historians and theorists. The last and most recent effort to contribute to the decolonization process is a publication entitled Is Art History Global? edited by James Elkins,31 who asked over thirty art historians from all continents to reflect on this question. One of them was Kitty Zijlmans, whose contribution offers a basis for a new theory, ready for experimentation. Her close-reading technique32 could bridge the gap between an image made by an artist from outside the ‘Euramerican region’ (i.e. old Europe and colonized North America) and historically defined reading codes and criteria, from the Italian Renaissance to Baudelaire. Zijlmans introduced World Art Studies (W A S ) at Leiden University as a Master’s programme. Building a framework around the concept of “art as a pan30

Simon Njami, “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (abridged tr. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005): 17. 31 Is Art History Global?, ed. James Elkins (NewYork & Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2007). 32 Kitty Zijlmans, “An Intercultural Perspective in Art History: Beyond Othering and Appropriation,” in Is Art History Global? ed. James Elkins (New York & Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2007): 289–98.

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human phenomenon,” World Art Studies demonstrates that the attitude of reading images created by artists from all over the world as links between the ‘Other’ and the ‘Self’ makes possible a vision beyond the old (colonial) paradigms. In the triangle model, the message of the métisse or immigrant offers familiar reading keys, on the one hand, and unknown blanks, on the other (depending on the beholder, the white or the black side), to be melded in the mental space of the beholder. Before we pass on to the analysis of four artworks by Myriam Mihindou, an introductory issue calls for attention. One way for the researcher to avoid imposing certain terms on artworks (such as attributing the transcultural in this case) is to keep in mind an important observation by the art historian Richard Meyer on matters of identity. He wrote about the tension between the scholar’s mission and the reconstruction of the artist’s intentions: In writing the history of art, let us allow artists not only to embody the terms of gender, race, religion and sexuality but also to exceed or elude them. Let us recognize the individual’s need not only to inhabit the space of identity but also, and even simultaneously, to get the hell out of there.33

Bearing this in mind will prove to be useful during the analysis of Mihindou’s creations. Nomads have to (rather than ‘are free to’) negotiate their cultural identities.34 Leading a nomadic life, Myriam Mihindou constantly shifts between the realities (or illusions?) of ‘Other’ and ‘Self’. To the world around her, she is always the ‘Other’ because she lives in exile, far from her native country of Gabon. Her frequent encounters with unknown lands, languages, and peoples have made a deep impact on her works. She adjusts to new sociocultural, political, and religious circumstances by repeatedly finding new modes of expression. The profound transformations that take place in her result in works of considerable density. However diverse the final results may look, most of Mihindou’s works come into being as ritualistic actions. These may be interpreted as releases from the mental adjustments the artist has to make in each episode of her life, as she explains: “Visualising certain things means liberating them. Taking the decision to show these images is to recognize this liberating role.”35 Physical acts such as sculpting or performing may result in series of objects such as Fleurs de peau [flowers of skin] and Angel and Dark 33 Richard Meyer, “Identity,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson & Richard Shiff (1996; Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2nd ed. 2003): 345–57. 34 Press, “A Pilgrim’s Progress,” 244. 35 “On libère certaines choses en les visualisant. Prendre la décision de montrer ces images, c’est leur reconnaître ce role libérateur”; Dominique Blanc, “Myriam Mihindou: du matériau à l’immatériel,” in Gabon, Présence des esprits (Paris: Éditions Dapper, 2006): 174, my tr.

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Swan or (audio)visual recordings such as La Colonne Vide [the empty column] and Division plastique [plastic division]. More recently, she tends to keep the objects in the private sphere, only sharing photographs of them with the outside world, but: “I think that if I did not mould, if I did not sculpt, I could not take pictures. It is the contact and my relationship to sculpture at some point that inspires me to photograph.”36 This artist has developed a rich pictorial language of ‘releasing strategies’, a process that starts close to the body, gradually moving away from it, and ending up with a (moving) picture(s). She invents ways to expel and transform disturbing emotions such as fear and pain, her own but also that of others, which she absorbs. Her cathartic images construct a personal yet universal mythology. This analysis can be said to reflect Mihindou’s heritage as a “domino child,” which, she says, “led me to undertake all these trips ‘abroad’.” Both her ‘Otherness’ (rituals as therapy, the relation between the body and the material) and her ‘Selfness’ (taking pictures, showing the images) offer familiar as well as new perspectives on what art or, by extension, humanity can be. For La Colonne Vide [Figure 11 below], Mihindou selected an urban landscape. This black-and-white video features a double-screened stone column on the Place des Invalides in Paris. The beholder sees two black women (the same person), dressed in white clothes, one on each column, performing nine different movements in windy weather. While doing so, they walk in circles, backwards and forwards. Finally, one of them disappears, and the other one fades away. Some of these movements appear to be in dialogue with the traditional wooden funerary statues on display in the adjacent main exhibition space at the Musée Dapper, such as bent arms and knees. The audio part of the work is the sound of cow bells. A free use of cultural symbols marks this work; a series of movements related to traditional Gabonese funerary rituals takes place in the historical centre of Paris, performed by a black woman in white cotton clothes. The beholder becomes aware of different narratives: emptiness, disappearance of a beloved, geographical dislocation, the cycle of life and death, etc. Mihindou appropriates a symbolic spot in Parisian public space in order to work out the loss of a beloved ‘Other’. The revelation of the distinct aspects of the work demonstrates a cosmopolitan amalgam of the European and African collective consciousness. This exemplifies the third dimension in which she was born and in which she acts out her artistic expression. Her nomadic way of life exempts her from being bound to either centre or periphery. 36 “Il me semble que si je ne manipule pas, si je ne sculpte pas, je ne peux pas photographier. C’est le contact et ma relation avec la sculpture qui, à un moment donné, me donnent envie de photographier” (Blanc, “Myriam Mihindou,” 174; my tr.).

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Physicality and materiality are central to the analysis of the fetish-like collection Fleurs de peau [Figure 12], more than fifty organically shaped soap objects, and Angel and Dark Swan [Figure 13], fifteen textile collages. In the model of the triangle, the position of the ‘Other’ is articulated here. Both collections offer the beholder (representing the ‘Self’) an opportunity to explore unfamiliar features such as the combination of materials used. They resemble traditional African ‘collages’, called nkisi: Nkisi is the name of things we use to help a man when he is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicines combined together. […] an nkisi is also something that hunts down illness and chases it away from the body. Many people therefore compose an nkisi […] It is a hiding place for people’s souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life.37

These traditional sub-Saharan spiritual artifacts are often anthropomorphic. Although the poetic title Fleurs de peau suggests that the objects are flowers, à fleur de peau literally means ‘close to the skin’. Thus, the image of an organism is conjured up. Their fragmented shape could be seen as a ‘pars pro toto,’ a part of a body. Another ‘nkisi’ story is accounted for by the Czech academic Zdenka Volavkova, who discusses their healing powers, in which materiality and immateriality go hand in hand: An Nkisi figure comes into existence only after a ceremony in which the force or “respect” (nkinda) is put into the image and the paraphernalia added to it. This second part of the work on the sculpture is performed by the nganga, the diviner. He places the magic substance not only in a receptacle in the body, but often in the head also. He shapes the headdress, sometimes paints the figure’s face, and adds various materials and small objects to the statuette, sometimes covering most of its parts.38

Independent of the question of whether or not Mihindou went to see a nganga to ritualize her homemade nkisi, the Fleurs de peau seem to be healing objects. The traditional nkisi figures may be made of wood; however, the material used here is soap, suggesting a purifying function. The Fleurs de peau collection was created at the French Île de La Réunion, a multicultural space, where “a recognition of her identity became envisageable.”39 Another important issue is 37

Nsemi, Cahier 391, “Nsemi on Minkisi,” National Museums Liverpool: www .liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/wml/humanworld/worldcultures/africa/minkisi.asp [accessed 18 April 2007]. 38 Zdenka Volavkova, “Nkisi Figures of the Lower Congo,” African Arts 5.2 (1972): 57. 39 “Une reconnaissance identitaire devient envisageable.” Youna Ouali, “Terre d’exil,” in Organic Flower: Catalogue Solo Exhibition Myriam Mihindou (exhibition catalogue, Galerie Trafic; Ivry-sur-Seine: Éditions Trafic: 2004): [31], my tr.

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the opposition between cultural diversity and syncretism. Elsewhere in Volavkova’s essay, nails and knives stabbed into these objects are stated to be an effect of christianization in Africa, “the nail symbolizing Christ’s suffering.” This cultural syncretism was at its peak in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, what was and may have been referred to as barbaric or frightening by Europeans may well have originated in their own cultural background, but transformed, hence unrecognizable. As a result, the Western gaze exoticizes its own religious past. Rephrasing another argument Araeen made in the already quoted Third Text essay: as modernity travelled from Paris to other European countries but also to the French colonies, one cannot speak of different cultures after all.40 Every culture is a part of the same whole, interconnected. To close the circle, Mihindou inserts needles into objects such as the Fleurs de peau but also into her own hands (Sculptures de chair; see below). Appropriation and othering finally include each other. Made in Egypt in 2001, the second collection of individual works, Angel and Dark Swan, could also be considered a manifestation of the union of materiality and immateriality. This time the fetish is composed of different fabrics. ‘Beds’ of brown felt (c.31x25 cm) support collages of white, woolly, and sometimes animalistic shapes of cotton, kaolin, hemp, threads, needles, and paraffin. The cotton ‘balls’ are knotted and shaped by threads, while other materials are added, resulting in all kinds of capricious ‘creatures’. Familiar with the cultural universe of the original artifacts, Myriam Mihindou draws on the stories behind them in order to create her own artistic universe. Finally, let us consider a series of works in which the artist has combined matter, body, performance, and modern technology. Division plastique [Figure 14] is a complex narrative of (tied) hands modelling clay and other materials, executed photographically. Like Fleurs de peau, it was also created at Île de La Réunion, in 1999 and 2000, during a recuperation period by the artist, according to remarks made in the catalogue (“salvatory moult,” footnote 38). As we saw earlier, sculpture is fundamental to Myriam Mihindou. In Division plastique, she demonstrates the process of her physical contact with matter in an astoundingly intimate way: against a red-lit background we see (one of) her hand(s) in the spotlight, holding clay, moulding it, squeezing it, leaving her fingermarks in and on it, sometimes tied to the material by a rubber band. It is so intimate that it is hardly possible to see where the body ends and where matter starts: the artist and her material are inseparable. Whereas the face is quasi-absent in Mihindou’s work, contrary to the omnipresent ancestor masks 40

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Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,”

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in her father’s culture, she attributes a key role to the hand. To quote the artist in relation to Sculptures de chair [Sculptures of Flesh] [Figure 15], the large number of glossy pictures of (one of) her hand(s) evoked in the first sentence of this essay: To me a hand is a body, like a human being. […] You must be one with the pain in order to expel it. Then transformation can take place; the hand becomes a ‘power object’. This is a mental model, mastering the borders between the physical and the mental, in order for the body to cease being a victim but to become a subject with its own right and say.41

While the hands in Sculptures de chair still seem to be fighting against pain and thus are represented as victims, in Division plastique the hands more firmly become agents. Some positions are quite tensed and forced, others seem more relaxed and liberated. Although the artist chose to go public with this holy matrimony between her body and the clay, she printed the representations of these intimate moments on the scale of a postage stamp: 24x36 mm. While the images of the painful positions in Sculptures de chair measured 90x60 cm or even 120x80 cm, this time the viewer has to come very close to get a glimpse of the pictured action, almost like a voyeur. The miniature size creates an extra distance. The photographic registration offers an indirect encounter with highly intimate physical performances, in Sculptures de chair as well as in Division plastique. In both cases, the artist starts the process close to the body, but the catharsis cannot be complete until she moves away from it. As Mihindou states, “The photographic act is a crystallization of states of mind – my photographic ‘sculptures’ visualize the sensory and mental limits of those states of mind.”42 The purpose of this essay has been to present the reader with a model that will enable an understanding of Myriam Mihindou’s work as it functions in the postcolonial era. The reading context, in this case an exhibition, appeared to be in tension with the work’s vulnerability. Its power to be a personification of transcultural identity, on the other hand, appears to question mutually conditioned views and opinions. The artwork, viewed at the centre of the triangle, incorporates features of both extremes. Conventional oppositions in art history as well as beyond the discipline (e.g. ‘us’ and ‘them’, individual and anonymous, centre and periphery, cultural diversity and syncretism, materiality and 41 Daphne Pappers, “Vrijheid is kunnen kiezen voor een nomadenbestaan: De wereldkunst van Myriam Mihindou,” Lover: Tijdschrift over feminisme, cultuur en wetenschap 33 (Amsterdam, I I A V : March 2006): 22, my tr. 42 Personal written interview with Myriam Mihindou, August 2005; tr. by DP. “L’acte photographique est une cristallisation de ces états – mes ‘sculptures’ photographiques seraient l’image des limites sensorielles et mentales de ces états de conscience.”

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immateriality) – all these extremes or polarities are present in the images, but not as oppositions. Art history may not yet be global as a discipline, but the more art is produced that triggers that question, the more art history will have to follow, as always. Art that renegotiates the cultural identity of the artist invites the beholder to do the same for him/ herself. The works of art discussed appear to be recipients of a complex of meanings. These reveal themselves in a close reading of the material and semantic layers, which go beyond notions of feminist art, Land Art, and Arte Povera. Mihindou’s images embody the question “How do we live with the other?” in such a way that the beholder cannot but raise the same question with regard to the Self. The fictional, artificial, hence neutral aesthetic experience offers the viewer a free mental space where real life’s laws and logic are suspended. The uncanny thus being undone, the message of the artwork can operate on a fully receptive level within the beholder’s imagination.43 — All pictures (below) courtesy of Galerie Trafic, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

WORKS CITED Araeen, Rasheed. “A New Beginning. Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 50 (“Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art & Culture”; Spring 2000): 3–20. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Blanc, Dominique. “Myriam Mihindou: du matériau à l’immatériel”, in Gabon, Présence des esprits (Paris: Éditions Dapper, 2006): 173–87. Elkins, James, ed. Is Art History Global? (NewYork & Abingdon: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2007). Kristeva, Julia. Étrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988). Lippard, Lucy. Mixed Blessing: New Art in Multi-Cultural America (New York: Pantheon, 1990). Meyer, Richard. “Identity”, in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert S. Nelson & Richard Shiff (1996; Chicago & London: U of Chicago P , 2nd ed. 2003): 345–57. Njami, Simon. “Chaos and Metamorphosis,” in Africa Remix, Contemporary Art of a Continent (abridged tr. London: Hayward Gallery, 2005): 13–23. Nsemi, Cahier 391, “Nsemi on Minkisi,” National Museums Liverpool, www.liverpool museums.org.uk/wml/humanworld/worldcultures/africa/minkisi.asp [accessed 18 April 2007]. Ouali, Youna. “Terre d’exil”, in Organic Flower: Catalogue Solo Exhibition Myriam Mihindou, Galerie Trafic (Ivry-sur-Seine: Éditions Trafic: 2004): np. Pappers, Daphne. “Vrijheid is kunnen kiezen voor een nomadenbestaan: De wereldkunst van Myriam Mihindou,” in Lover: Tijdschrift over feminisme, cultuur en wetenschap (Amsterdam, I I A V ) 33.1 (March 2006): 22–24. 43

Julia Kristeva, Etrangers à nous-mêmes (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 277.

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Press, Marie–Christine. “A Pilgrim’s Progress: Translation Towards New Identities,” in Betwixt and Between: Place and Cultural Translation, ed. Stephen Kelly & David Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2007): 242–54. Reckitt, Helena, & Peggy Phelan. Art and Feminism (2001; London & New York: Phaidon, 2002). Volavkova, Zdenka. “Nkisi Figures of the Lower Congo,” African Arts 5.2 (1972): 52–59. Zijlmans, Kitty. “An Intercultural Perspective: Art History: Beyond Othering and Appropriation,” in Is Art History Global?, ed. Elkins, 289–98.

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F I G U R E 11: Myriam Mihindou, La Colonne Vide (2004, Paris, Place des Invalides). Video diptych projected onto the wall. Duration: 6 hours 20 min.

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F I G U R E 12: Myriam Mihindou, Fleurs de peau (1999, Île de La Réunion). Series of sculptures of soap, needles, hemp, paraffin. Between 6 and 10 cm high (soap parts).

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F I G U R E 13: Myriam Mihindou, L’Ange et le cygne noir / Angel and Dark Swan (2001, Alexandria). Series of sculptures of cotton, felt, kaolin, hemp, thread, needles, paraffin. c. 31x25 cm high.

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F I G U R E 14: Myriam Mihindou, Division plastique (1999–2000, Île de La Réunion). Series of colour photographs, 24x36 mm.

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F I G U R E 15: Myriam Mihindou, Sculptures de chair (1999–2000, Île de La Réunion). Series of colour photographs, 120x80/90x60 cm.

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J ACOBIA D AHM ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Emigrants and Immigrants of Burkina Faso, Senegal, and France — Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de… and S. Pierre Yameogo’s Moi et mon blanc

ABSTRACT: This analysis of the representation of migrancy in two West African films reveals how the parallel geographical movement of the protagonists – the original migration to France and the ultimate return to Africa – leads to opposed discourses in the two films. While division and incommunicability reign in the classic La Noire de… by the recently deceased pioneer of African film Ousmane Sembène, S. Pierre Yameogo’s twenty-first-century film Moi et mon blanc reveals correspondences, and even suggests new utopian connections, between Europe and Africa. W O W E S T A F R I C A N F I L M S , the 1966 classic La Noire de… [Black Girl]1 and the more recent Moi et mon blanc [Me and My White Pal]2 from 2003, made almost forty years apart, both narrate journeys from West Africa to France, and back again. Together they provide an ample lens with which to examine changing attitudes regarding relations between cultures and continents, and also between generations in the postcolonial era as depicted in film history.

T 1 2

Ousmane Sembène, dir. La Noire de… (France / Senegal, 1966). Pierre Yameogo, dir. Moi et mon blanc (Burkina Faso / France, 2003).

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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La Noire de…, released in 1966 and directed by Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (b. 1923), is one of the first films to be directed by a subSaharan African filmmaker. Although the title suggests an outsider’s perspective, the voice-over narration of the film is, in fact, the interior monologue of the African protagonist. Sembène’s feature film tells the story of Diouana, a young woman who leaves Senegal in order to join her French employers in Antibes on the Côte d’Azure in France. Once she arrives, she quickly realizes that the couple can no longer afford a big staff and that she is no longer the nanny to the couple’s children, but, rather, the full-time cook and cleaning lady. Her employers think she should be grateful. Flashbacks reveal how Diouana was picked by her employers at the market in Dakar, and how in her dreams about France, which are mocked by her boyfriend, she imagined the beautiful clothes she would buy and how her family would envy her. However, Diouana quickly wakes up to a harsher life, and her daily chores and her employer’s treatment grind her down until, in quiet despair, she finally commits suicide. After Diouana’s death, her employer takes a wooden mask that Diouana once presented to them as a gift, and returns it to her family. In Diouana’s street in Dakar, her employer returns the mask to a boy who formerly played with it. In a symbolically charged last scene the boy puts on the mask and angrily chases the Frenchman through the streets. With the Frenchman fleeing, the boy stays behind, weeping. Moi et mon blanc, released in 2003, is the sixth feature film of the Burkinabé director and producer S. Pierre Yameogo (b. 1955). The film, a dramatic comedy, gained prominence at film festivals in Europe, the U S A , and Africa, and won the audience prize at F E S P A C O , Africa’s largest film festival. Also narrated from the perspective of the African protagonist, Moi et mon blanc tells the story of Mamadi, a doctoral student from Burkina Faso (although his country of origin remains unclear until he returns home) who studies political science at the Sorbonne with the help of a stipend from his home government. Although we are not told why, the governments of several West African countries discontinue the stipends. As a result, Mamadi can no longer pay his rent in time and is thrown out of the boarding house where he lives, but with the help of an older cousin, he finds himself a job at a parking garage. One day Mamadi finds a bag full of money and cocaine left behind by a pair of drug dealers, who were chased out of the garage during a false alarm. After they return and threaten Mamadi, our protagonist turns to his French colleague, Franck, and the ensuing hunt leaves the two no choice but to flee France and escape to Ouagadougou, where they want to start a new life with the loot. In a final twist, they are mugged just after they buy a spot for a nightclub they have planned to open; now penniless, they open a street cinema instead.

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Intercultural Relations Past and Present The story of La Noire de… is set just after Senegalese independence in the early 1960s and is based on Ousmane Sembène’s short story of the same name. In the film, there is no genuine exchange and communication between Diouana, who is part of the Senegalese working class, and the French ex-colonizers, her employers. It is likely that the French couple previously occupied administrative positions in Senegal’s colonial government, and, facing an uncertain future in the newly independent country, were prompted to return to France. However, had we not been told during a dinner conversation that Senegal is now independent, it would have been difficult to tell from the events alone that Senegal is in fact no longer formally ruled by France. The actual relationship between the Senegalese and the French, as depicted here, is still unambiguously that of master and servant. Diouana is treated like a slave: she is paid irregularly, she is made to work from dusk till dawn and not granted free time, and she is kissed without her consent by a male friend of her employers. Throughout the film, only her employer’s demanding voices are synchronous, whereas Diouana is silent, and all her interior thoughts are communicated through voice-over. As a later dinner scene reveals, there is, among the French hosts and their guests, much talk about ‘Africa’ as an entity, but little dialogue with its representative, Diouana. And in the final scene, when Diouana’s employer returns the mask to her family in Dakar, he wears dark sunglasses in order to avoid any direct exchange of looks. Moi et mon blanc suggests a radical departure from previous depictions of group identity in sub-Saharan African film. Images of white Westerners and black Africans have, with rare exceptions, worked along a rigid colour line. The process is described by the sociologist Rogers Brubaker as ‘groupism’ – the tendency to treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed […] to represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocs.3

This groupism is something that both African and Western films commonly depend on in depicting intercultural encounters in African locales. Throughout film history and indeed until very recently, the ‘division of labour’ in both Western and sub-Saharan African films has been somewhat formulaic, albeit for different reasons: Westerners have explored, owned, or colonized African 3 Rogers Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens & Ann Shola Orloff (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2005): 471.

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territory, whereas Africans have either served or resisted the ruling or propertyowning foreigners.4 Not surprisingly, this division is to a large extent the direct consequence of colonial conflicts whose history allows little confusion about the identity of the victims and the perpetrators, or the masters and the servants, depending on what period of history is depicted. The new direction taken in Moi et mon blanc can be seen in the strikingly different degrees of emancipation and freedom of expression accorded to the two protagonists of La Noire de… and Moi et mon blanc. Whereas Mamadi, as a self-confident young man on a government stipend, is free to roam the city and seek and choose employment as he likes (while his girlfriend stays at home), Diouana’s work – as has traditionally been the case for women around the globe – confines her to the interior and enclosed sphere of a private household in a large apartment. As a result, the rules and regulations of Diouana’s employment are far more arbitrary than those under which Mamadi works. For example, at one point, in order to render Diouana – stunning in her polka-dot dress – more visibly a servant, her female employer buys Diouana an apron, and there is little Diouana can do to renegotiate the terms of her employment. In comparison to La Noire de…, Moi et mon blanc does not focus on cultural separation but, rather, defies traditional divisions of group identity by suggesting new, ethnically heterogeneous alliances between Africans and Europeans of a younger generation. Moi et mon blanc questions the idea of a collective national identity5 by having Burkinabé Mamadi and French Franck turn best friends and business partners, and by foregrounding the comedy of stereotypes on both sides of the ex-colonizer/ ex-colonized divide. That said, emancipation might, as is suggested in the film, come at a price: for Franck it means the cutting of family ties, and for Mamadi it means losing access to the political networks that are used to distribute patronage in Burkina Faso.  4 Examples of such films are, among many, Compton Bennett & Andrew Marton, dir., King Solomon’s Mines (U K , 1950), John Ford, dir., Mogambo (U S A , 1953), Cy Endfield, dir., Zulu (U K , 1964), Jean–Jacques Annaud, dir., Noirs et blancs en couleur ([Black and White in Colour], France, 1976), and Sydney Pollack, dir., Out of Africa (U S A , 1985), Med Hondo, dir., Sarraounia (Burkina Faso / Mauritania/France, 1986), Ousmane Sembène, dir., Camp de Thiaroye (Senegal, 1987). 5 Concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘nationhood’ have become core problems in cultural studies, as it has become increasingly clear that works of art participate, explicitly and implicitly, in people’s individual and group sense of belonging and nationhood. For a useful review of the debate, see Cinema & Nation, ed. Mette Hjort & Scott MacKenzie (London & New York: Routledge 2000), and Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat & Robert Stam (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2003).

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Strategies of Comparison The complicity of cultural ignorance and covert xenophobia in Moi et mon blanc manifests itself in the clever contrasting of two pairs of gossips, one in France and one in Burkina Faso, who are inserted into the film’s narrative like two painfully ignorant versions of the Greek chorus: two elderly women on their Parisian balconies, and two elderly gentlemen resting in the shade of trees in Ouagadougou comment with reckless authority on the events and the unfamiliar cultural background of the strangers in their neighbourhoods. When the two women in Paris comment on the fact that Franck has brought “a black” home for dinner, they hope that Franck’s friend is a student of medicine, since everyone seems to be dying of A I D S in Africa. Similarly, the two Burkinabé men gossip about Mamadi having brought “a white” home for dinner, and that this guy is now dating a black woman. On a balcony in Paris N E I G H B O R A : Tenez-vous bien, Il paraît que leur fils, le Frank là, il a ramené chez

NEIGHBOR NEIGHBOR

NEIGHBOR

eux, un Africain – un noir! – à dîner à la maison. [Listen carefully, it looks like their son, Frank, has brought an African – a black! – home for dinner.]6 B : Un noir à dîner, quelle drôle d’idée! [A black for dinner, what a funny idea!] A : Mais il paraît que ce n’est pas n’importe quel noir; d’après Monique, il fait des études. [But it looks like it’s not just any black; according to Monique, he’s a student.] B : Ah oui, des études de médecine j’espère! Parce que d’après la télé la semaine dernière là-bas chez eux ils meurent tous de S I D A . Eh. [Ah yes, I hope he’s studying medicine! Because according to T V last week they’re all dying of A I D S out there.]

Under the trees in Ouagadougou N E I G H B O R A : Tu connais la nouvelle? [Did you hear the news?] N E I G H B O R B : Quelles nouvelles? [What news?] N E I G H B O R A : Mamadi est retourné avec un blanc! [Mamadi has come back with a

white guy!] N E I G H B O R B : Avec un blanc? [With a white guy?]

[…] N E I G H B O R A : Il paraît qu’il tourne avec une fille noire. [It seems he [the white guy] is

going out with a black girl.] N E I G H B O R B : Avec une femme noire? C’est honteux! Le père doit être vraiment

malheureux. Si une de mes filles me fait ça, je la chasse! […] [With a

6

All translations are my own.

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black woman? That’s shameful. The father must be really unhappy about that. If one of my daughters did that to me I would chase her out.]

Racism and cultural ignorance still exist in Moi et mon blanc; the key difference, however, is that victim and perpetrator are no longer ‘ethnically fixed’ – xenophobia is no longer exclusively the property of just one culture. The streets of Ouagadougou are, in that respect, similar to the balconies of Paris. Such echoing is part of the narrative strategy of Moi et mon blanc. By restaging many scenes that happened in the first half of the film – a visa problem, a family dinner, the two gossiping neighbours, an encounter with the criminal sphere of society – Yameogo creates a mirror world in Ouagadougou. The scenes that stand out as the heart of the comparison of cultural values are a dinner at Mamadi’s parents’ place to which Franck is invited, and an earlier family dinner at Franck’s to which Mamadi was invited. When in Ouagadougou, the men sit down at the table and the wives and children take their seats under a tree; cultural curiosity provokes the same questions that Mamadi was subjected to before: “Is it true that where you come from the women have the say? And is it true that where you come from men can marry men? And if so, who then gets to be the woman? And how come you’re an only child?” The two scenes differ not just in what is valued, but in how these values are discussed. Unexpected answers are not, as is the case when Franck’s father questions Mamadi, greeted in Burkina Faso with self-righteous shock but, rather, with friendly giggles and laughter. The listeners empathize with the hardship of a fellow human being, even if what constitutes hardship is very different in different places. Yameogo uses montage to show how clichéd Western ideas of Africa fail to measure up to the reality: when Franck explains that his mother did not want more children, because she found life hard enough with just one, Mamadi’s family sympathizes, even as the film contrasts the words with the image of the large group of Mamadi’s siblings happily eating and sharing their food. The same method of offsetting image and text is also used in the final scene of Moi et mon blanc, in which Franck’s mother, in voice-over, addresses a letter to Franck, warning him about the dangers of African genocide, cholera, and malaria. The images accompanying the mother’s worried voiceover is a yard full of teenagers noisily enjoying the screening of an old Western movie and debating the wisdom of the cowboys. Comparison of the two films, however, suggests that although some things have changed, Western thinking about Africa has remained remarkably constant over the nearly forty years that separate these works. In both cases, ‘L’Afrique’ – the entire African continent – rather than a more specific question, problem, or region – is negotiated, discussed, and judged exclusively by the French. In Sembène’s La Noire de… the French discuss Africa after inde-

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pendence but without engaging in dialogue with Diouana. Moreover, they even talk about Diouana in her presence, as if she were not there. In Moi et mon blanc, many people seem more interested and ask Mamadi (whom they most commonly call ‘Mamadou’) where he is from. Possibly out of a sense of not wanting to overstretch the questioner’s geographical and geopolitical horizon, Mamadi often simply responds “Africa.” And indeed, no-one ever comes back to inquire which of the many African countries he calls his home. His coworker Raoul greets Mamadi with the words: “Salut, Afrique!”, which can be seen as symptomatic of European notions of the African continent as a single country – a certain Western pan-Africanism in itself.

Generational Shifts La Noire de… focuses mainly on the divide that separates the French and the Senegalese, even though even within Senegal there seems to be a divide between those who believe in a radically independent Senegal and those that (as shown in Diouana’s conversation with her boyfriend) try to ‘remain friends’ with the former oppressor.7 Moi et mon blanc, however, focuses more squarely on these intra-cultural divisions, questioning traditional affiliations such as family and party lines. These themes first arise when Mamadi visits his much older cousin Dr Zongo Souleymane (Souleymane himself insists on his title when being addressed). Inside Souleymane’s apartment, the camera pans along the impressive catalogue of Souleymane’s academic accomplishments and doctoral degrees, all framed and put up on the wall, alongside a poster of Kwame Nkrumah, the charismatic post-independence leader of Ghana (Mamadi’s room is decorated with a poster of Malcolm X). When Mamadi confronts Souleymane about his plans to return, since “his place” is not here in France, his suggestion is met with rejection. Souleymane argues he won’t go back, claiming that the regime hates intellectuals. Mamadi’s response: “But what should happen to us when you [the generation of older intellectuals] give up?” In the following scene the generational obligations of the young are reaffirmed when Mamadi receives a letter from his father, reminding him not to forget his parents, as life is hard back home. These scenes – and others which take place after Mamadi’s return to Burkina Faso, where we see him taking care of the medical bill for an uncle – suggest that Mamadi’s life is structured by strong horizontal and vertical generational family ties, even when in a foreign country. In stark contrast, another scene in Moi et mon blanc, a family dinner at Franck’s, suggests a very different generational conflict among the men, one in 7

Yet many of Sembène’s later films take up the problem of intergenerational tensions.

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which the role of the older generation is distinctively not based on guardianship and social responsibility, as articulated in Mamadi’s communications with his family, but on a hierarchical and mono-perspectival view of the world, in which many images and assumptions live on that would have been common currency during colonization. When Franck and Mamadi arrive for dinner at Franck’s parents’ place the night before Mamadi defends his thesis, Franck’s father, a man in his sixties, bombards Mamadi with one negative stereotype of Africa after another. He starts off by asking whether it is true that everyone is starving in Africa, as he has heard on T V . And he reacts with shock when he hears that Mamadi has ten siblings, upon which Franck’s father exclaims: “Your poor mother!” Mamadi’s clarification that his father has, in fact, three wives does little to appease the father, but evokes further sexual banter. The mind is clearly far from having been decolonized, and, in a reversal of traditional patriarchal authority, both his wife and his son Franck tell the father off. The dinner conversation ends with Franck apologizing to Mamadi in front of his parents for the older generation’s remarks.

New Alliances Even though life in France brings disillusionment to both Diouana and Mamadi, Moi et mon blanc suggests, in utopian fashion, the possibility of new alliances whereas La Noire de… breaks off the conversation. While Sembène focuses on the division between the different cultures, Yameogo sees commonalities. However, the world of Burkina Faso is by no means idealized. It starts off with the bribe that Franck has to pay for not having an entry visa, and continues with a mugging that robs Franck and Mamadi of the financial foundations for their future plans to open a nightclub. Unlike Yameogo’s Paris, though, his Burkina Faso does not have first- and second-class citizens and, despite the fact he has lost all and is without the protection of family ties, Franck seems to be able to get by and arrange a life for himself. The only racism Ouagadougou has to offer is hidden in the shade of a tree where, in parallel with the two old women lingering on a Paris balcony, two old men are seen gossiping. As I noted at the outset, the protagonists in the two films enact a similar geographical movement. An African (the young woman of La Noire de…, and the young man of Moi et mon blanc) quit his / her their country and family in Dakar and Ouagadougou to live and work in France. Both films depict the tribulations of living on the terrain of the former colonizing power – among people who know little but volunteer a tremendous amount of opinion about the state of affairs in Africa – and both films problematize the ultimate return to Africa.

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Yet Moi et mon blanc offers a twist on the narrative of the traditional migration from an economically disadvantaged South to a prosperous North: Franck, Mamadi’s French friend in Moi et mon blanc, ends up travelling ‘against the current’, leaving Paris for Ouagadougou, a place, as he comes to see it, where happiness does not depend exclusively on material possessions. Diouana chooses suicide as her escape from a restricting life in France. After her death, the African mask is returned to her family, and this seems to suggest a spiritual separation between France and Senegal. Mamadi and Franck in Moi et mon blanc also have to leave France, and it thus seems that, either way, neither Diouana nor Mamadi has a place in France, or in Western societies, for that matter – at least not on an equal footing. However, all is not lost, according to Yameogo, and new paths can be found by striking out in a different direction: the return to Burkina Faso is a homecoming for Mamadi, and the beginning of a new life for Franck. That said, the price of the new life for Franck is dissociation from the traditional, patriarchal French family with its imperial value system and oppressive petit-bourgeois moral codex, and the liberation but also pain (they are, after all, his parents) that comes with this decision. This film’s strong utopian vision proposes that a younger generation of Europeans, who refuse to accept their parents’ closed and eurocentric vision of Africa, could indeed find a new home with new possibilities further south on the map. New directions are also possible for Mamadi in Burkina Faso. Refusing to join the party as a sign of his gratefulness to the government, he instead starts a new life together with the impoverished Franck and Franck’s new girlfriend, a callgirl and savvy business partner. New alliances – in love and in business – should, according to Yameogo’s film, avoid following the old lines separation determined by ethnicity, class, and gender, but are best formed by heterogeneous social groups.

WORKS CITED Films Camp de Thiaroye. Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow, dir. (Senegal, 1987, 157 min.). Cast: Ibrahim Sane, Sidiki Bakaba, Pierre Orma, Jean–Daniel Simon, Mohamed Dansogo, Pierre Londiche, Marthe Mercadier. Cinematography: Ismail Lakhdar Hamina. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembène & Thierno Faty Sow. Music: Ismail Lo. Production: Enaproc / Films Domireew / Films Kajoor / Satpec / Société Nouvelle Pathé Cinéma. King Solomon’s Mines. Compton Bennett & Andrew Marton, dir. (U K , 1950, 103 min.). Cast: Stewart Granger, Deborah Kerr, Richard Carlson. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Screenplay: Helen Deutsch (based on a novel by H. Rider Haggard). Production: Sam Zimbalist / Loew’s / M G M . La Noire de…. Ousmane Sembène, dir. (France / Senegal, 1966, 65 min., black-and-white). Cast: Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Anne–Marie Jelinek, Robert Fontaine. Cinematography: Chris-

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tian Lacoste. Editing: Andre Gaudier. Screenplay: Ousmane Sembène. Production: Filmi Domireew & D A K A R Sénégal, and Les Actualités Françaises. Mogambo. John Ford, dir. (U S A , 1953, 115 min.). Cast: Clark Gable, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly, Donald Sinden, Donald Nordley, Philip Stainton, John Brown–Pryce, Eric Pohlmann. Cinematography: Robert Surtees. Screenplay: John Lee Mahin (adapted from a play by Wilson Collison). Production: Sam Zimbalist / M G M . Moi et mon blanc. Pierre Yameogo, dir. (Burkina Faso / France, 2003, 90 min.). Cast: Serge Bayala, Pierre–Loup Rajot, Anne Roussel, Bruno Predebon, Samuel Poirier. Cinematography: Jürg Hassler. Editing: Manuel Pinto. Music: Ansi Ray Lema. Production design: Chef Joseph Kpobly. Costume design: François Yameogo. Production: Dunia Productions / Les Films de l’Espoir / Thelma Film. Noirs et blancs en couleur. Jean–Jacques Annaud, dir. (France / Côte d’Ivoire , 1976, 88 min.). Cast: Jean Carmet, Jacques Dufilho, Catherine Rouvel, Jacques Spiesser, Maurice Barrier, Benjamin Memel Atchory, Peter Berling, Marius Beugre Boignan, Claude Legros, Dora Doll. Cinematography: Claude Augostini. Screenplay: Jean–Jacques Annaud & George Conchon. Music: Pierre Bachelet. Production: France 3 Cinéma / Reggane Films / Smart Film Produktion / Société Française de Production (S F P ) / Société Ivoirienne de Cinema. Out of Africa. Sydney Pollack, dir. (U S A , 1985, 150 min.); . Cast: Meryl Streep, Robert Redford, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Kitchen, Malick Bowens, Joseph Thiaka. Cinematography: David Watkin. Music: John Barry. Screenplay. Judith Thurman, Errol Trzebinski & Kurt Luedtke (based on a novel by Karen Blixen = Isak Dinesen). Production: Sydney Pollack, Anna Cataldi & Judith Thurman / Mirage Entertainment / Universal Pictures. Sarraounia. Med Hondo, dir. (Burkina Faso / Mauritania / France, 1986, 120 min.); . Cast: Aï Keïta, Hean–Roger Milo, Féodor Atkine, Didier Sauvegrain, Roger Mirmont. Cinematography: Guy Famechon. Screenplay: Med Hondo, Abdoulaye Mamani & Abdoul War (based on a novel by Abdoulaye Mamani). Music: Pierre Akendengue, Abdoulaye Cissé & Issouf Compaore. Production: Med Hondo & Films Soleil O. Zulu. Cy Endfield, dir. (U K , 1964, 122 min.). Cast: Stanley Baker, Michael Caine, Jack Hawkins, Ulla Jacobson, James Booth, Nigel Green. Cinematography: Stephen Dade. Screenplay: John Prebble & Cy Endfield. Music: John Barry. Production: Cy Endfield & Stanley Baker / Diamond Films.

Secondary Sources Brubaker, Rogers. “Ethnicity Without Groups,” in Remaking Modernity: Politics, History, and Sociology, ed. Julia Adams, Elisabeth S. Clemens & Ann Shola Orloff (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2005): 470–92. Hjort, Mette, & Scott MacKenzie, ed. Cinema & Nation (London & New York: Routledge, 2000). Shohat, Ella, & Robert Stam, ed. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media (New Brunswick N J : Rutgers U P , 2003).

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M ARIE –H ÉLÈNE G UTBERLET ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Towards an Aesthetic of the Migrant Self — The Film Le Clandestin by José Zeka Laplaine

ABSTRACT: The representation of migrant arrivals in Europe is at the centre of this investigation of Zeka Laplaine’s short film Le Clandestin (1996). Placing the short film in the context of the African cinematographic traditions of earlier, more conventional, migrant narratives, the essay shows that the associative structure and the postmodern use of irony and magical realism in this short film question both our sense of familiarity and the promise of effortless transcultural communication.

1

M

(cinema and television productions) dealing with African migration, especially migration to Europe, are produced and realized by European film and broadcasting companies. They reflect a specific attitude towards individuals and their situation and towards the issue of foreign presence on European soil. The portrayal and production of the African migrant in European media represents a complex field of politically, socially, racially, and aesthetically relevant influences that would need to be analysed specifically. Awareness of these issues has spread beyond the academic field: everybody is more or less familiar with the images of African migrants, with the unease, the exaggerations, humiliations, and transformations taking place in the production of these images, and has learned to view against the grain and sometimes see behind the obvious. Another concern underlies the present essay: are there other ways of expressing and showing the arrival of OST FILMS

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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African migrants in Europe? Who is showing us the migrant? How is s /he being shown? What does this tell us? What does this type of framing do to him/ her, and to us, the audience? Is there another way of approaching this situation apart from talking about the migrant other or as the migrant other? The film Le Clandestin by José Zeka Laplaine (1996)1 does not give a solution to the problem of representation but focuses on the hidden ‘how’ of the representational performance.

2 There are various films made by African filmmakers about Africans arriving and living in Europe. The very first, Afrique sur Seine, is a documentary shot in Paris; the fiction film La Noire de … is set in Senegal and France; Les Bicots nègres vos voisins and Lumière noire, both by Abid Med Hondo, focus on black labour in France in the 1970s and 1990s respectively; Back Home Again turns out to be a rare comedy on this topic; the docudrama Waalo Fendo is set in Switzerland; Clando takes place in Cameroon and Germany; one of the most famous Senegalese productions, Touki Bouki by Djibril Diop Mambety, addresses migration; so do all films by Abderrahmane Sissako, especially Rostov Luanda and Octobre, to name but a few.2 Narrating migration to Europe can be regarded as a topos in African filmmaking. The above-mentioned films present a variety of styles and modes; they refer to different cinematic movements and historical periods. This is also true of the often stereotypical images of Africa presented in colonial films produced between 1900 and 1930. The latter aimed at presenting the many facets and faces of humankind, and played a crucial role in representing Europe in Africa and Africans to a Western audience in the colonial period. People were filmed in the colonies, and the films got transported to Europe to be shown; African people made the journey (whether by force or in the hope 1

José Zéka Laplaine, dir. Le Clandestin (Bakia Films/Prole Films, 1996, 35mm, 15 min.). Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Jacques Mélo Kane, Mamadou Sarr & Robert Caristan, dir. Afrique sur Seine (Groupe Africain de cinéma France, 1955, 16mm, 21 min.). Ousmane Sembène, dir. La Noire de… (Filmi Doomireew, 1960, 16mm, 60 min.). Abid Med Hondo, dir. Les Bicots nègres vos voisins (Les Films Soleil O, 1972, 35mm, 150 min.). Abid Med Hondo, dir. Lumière noire (M H Films, 1994, 35mm, 104 min.). Kwame Johnson & Coffe Zokko Narty, dir. Back Home Again (Bob J. Productions, 1994, 35mm, 110 min.). Mohammed Soudani, dir. Waalo Fendo (Amka Films, 1997, 35mm, 65 min.). Jean–Marie Téno, dir. Clando (Les Films du Raphia, 1996, 35mm, 98 min.). Djibril Diop Mambety, dir. Touki Bouki (Cinegrit, 1973, 35mm, 89 min.). Abderrahmane Sissako, dir. Rostov Luanda (Movimento / Z D F / R T B F / Morgane Films, 1997, 35mm, 60 min.). Abderrahmane Sissako, dir. Octobre (Ejva / La Sept–A R T E , 1993, 35mm, 37 min.). 2

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of earning easy money) to arrive on European soil, where they took part in international fairs and zoos and museums. Africans exhibited as vivid objects were again filmed. Sometimes the background indicates where that timelesslooking person stays: a wall in nineteenth-century style, a Renaissance façade, vegetation that does not look very tropical.… The ‘Savage Other’ depicted in exhibitions in Europe as living under bushes or in tents, as photos and films from that period make us believe, is not necessarily a Massai, Baule, Toutouleur. Apart from the way s /he is dressed, there is a striking similarity to today’s African migrant sitting under a sun-baked shelter, waiting. One might assume that films by African filmmakers have been made as alternatives to the majority of migration media narratives since 1900, showing the truth from within migration, from the migrant’s insider perspective. But there is no single, irrefutable truth or reality about migration. Even the migrant looking for words and images that can lend expression to his /her experience can only communicate fragments of that experience in images that have to be universal enough to be understood. Where there is no sole truth and no sole reality, there is instead narration, the surface of the image, the word that the African migrant takes and occupies and the space s/he fills with his/her presence. In other words, the migrant African is part of a performance. To use the term ‘performance’ in this context might appear cynically reductive. But my point is that there is no image and no document without performance; migration needs to be shaped into narrative in order to be communicated. This connection is a stimulating one, because it touches on two fundamental experiences: migration as the process involved in a complete change of life, place, friendship, language, identity documents etc., and performance as the process of foraging for bits and pieces of narratives and meanings that might be able to convey that experience. Both processes have their potentialities and their limitations; both deal with the impact of reality on the images we see, the image we have in mind, and the constant adjustment taking place. Indeed, narration, image, and sound are, as Siegfried Kracauer has proposed,3 documents of a specific physical reality recorded on celluloid and soundtrack; on the other hand, they are signs of a specific constellation of watching and being watched, and are thus the product of a certain idea or narrative structure. When we see an image – a photograph, say – we are confronted with the reality this image conveys, and the way that same reality is presented. These two layers are inextricably linked. Joining the political or ideological to the aesthetic layer, it seems obvious that European migration narratives are 3

Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford U P , 1960).

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more about presenting the African migrant as the object of their mise-enscène,4 whereas African films are more about conveying experienced reality: they are films with subjects. While European cinema and its colonial and postcolonial history may certainly be discussed as representing one position, and African cinematic productions as representing a kind of counter-position to the omnipresence of the European production of the migrant African, this particular viewpoint does not take into account the film as such (let alone photography, literature or any other aesthetic form). It does not take into consideration – the production situation, which, due to the subject matter, is always international and transcontinental, – the individual choices and beliefs of the filmmaker, his technicians etc., who, irrespective of their skin colour or nationality, can have all sorts of political, social, and racial attitudes, – the context of perception: we, the recipients, decide what we want to see, the reality as mise-en-scène, mise-en-scène as reality, and many individual ways of confronting our own experiences with the impact the picture has on us. – that film is a reality of its own. The crucial problem with the reception of African cinema in most cases is indeed that image and sound tend to be taken for granted, so that there is little awareness of the formal setting, style, colour-design and framing, the staging, narrative rhythm, montage, etc.

3 I will examine these issues by taking a closer look at the film Le Clandestin [The Stowaway] made in 1996. The author and director, José Zéka Laplaine, grew up in Kinshasa, the capital of today’s Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire. Laplaine was 18 years old when he went to France to study theatre. He was disappointed by the lack of scope for black characters in French literature and

4

Ethnographic and anthropological filmmakers throughout history have tried to objectify the lives and cultures of ‘the Other’ and make him / her an object of observation; the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène has criticized this attitude towards the African as “looking at us, as if we were insects”; see Ousmane Sembène and Jean Rouch, interviewed by Albert Cervoni, “Tu nous regardes comme des insectes,” Cinémaction 17 (“Rouch: Un griot gaulois,” ed. René Pédral; 1982): 77–78. Specific aesthetic forms through which ‘the Other’ is presented have been in use since 1900: the collection of specific scenes (workmanship, for example) and anthropomorphic types were meant to help compare individuals of different peoples and their customs. The term ‘scene’ iin cinematic language is, interestingly, a synonym for ‘location’ or ‘shot’; ‘Mise-en-scène’ means, indeed, the act of arranging people or things in front of the camera in order to achieve a composition according to a comparable setting and significance.

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started to write his own plays and screenplays, in order to give himself the opportunity to play an interesting role. He then decided to make his own films. Le Clandestin is his first short film, followed by Macadam Tribu,5 a featurelength fiction located in Kinshasa, but, for political reasons (the impending collapse of the Mobutu Sese Seko regime), filmed in Bamako. Laplaine’s most recent feature, Le Jardin de Papa,6 is about a French couple’s honeymoon trip to Dakar. The author’s biography, much more than in the sense of a cinéma d’auteur, is relevant to the production of a film like Le Clandestin. Laplaine takes the possibilities cinema offers, and tries to find out what he can do with them to position himself as director, writer, and actor (he plays the role of the policeman in charge of the container dock). The establishing shot shows a large container ship arriving at Belem, the harbour of Lisbon, not too far from town. A young African jumps out of a container and tries to get out of the closed port area to visit his cousin in town. He never manages to meet him but is instead pursued across town by a policeman. Finally, he decides to return to Africa and wait for another try. Belem and Lisbon have been chosen for several reasons to juxtapose the main story-line of the migrant arriving in Portugal with the historical impact of the location. Belem was the port of departure for Prince Henry the Navigator and the first overseas expedition to conquer Ceuta in Morocco, for Bartholomeu Dias to round the Cape of Good Hope, for the first voyages of Ferdinand Magellan, for Vasco da Gama to discover the sea route to India; and Christopher Columbus stopped here on his way back to Europe after ‘discovering’ the New World. As mentioned above, certain biographical details play an interesting role in the making of Le Clandestin; Laplaine, the son of a Portuguese father and a Congolese mother, knows Lisbon well. His actors are all friends and family: his mother, for example, plays the old woman standing in front of a shack on the outskirts of town. Like many filmmakers from the south and migrant Africans, Laplaine arrives in Europe, as he says, driven by the urge to get to a place where everything seems better. In his film, it is not the desire for a better life but the ‘Northern Paradise’ that Laplaine calls into question. Desire itself seems crucial to understanding not only migration but also the aesthetic impact of images of the imagined Europe. Richard Dyer, in his essay “Entertainment and Utopia,”7 opens an illuminative analysis by arguing that entertainment films offer a straight path out of the confused situation in which we live; they even offer desire accomplished, utopia: 5

José Zéka Laplaine, dir. Macadam Tribu (Flamingo / Bakia Films, 1996, 35mm, 90 min.). José Zéka Laplaine, dir. Le Jardin de Papa (Les histoires Weba, 2003, 35mm, 75 min.). 7 Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Movies and Methods, vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: U of California P , 1985): 220–32. 6

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Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that one day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes – these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and maybe realised. Entertainment does not, however present models of the utopian world [...]. It presents, head-on as it were, what utopia would feel like rather than how it would be organised.8

I remember very well the action movies young people told me about in Ouagadougou some years ago, starring Claude van Damme, Bruce Lee, Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, and directed by John Woo and others. They were particularly fans of pictures about the Far West, India, or the snow-capped Swiss mountains, about the pure anger the action heroes showed, or the love stories in heartbreaking romances ...; beneath these emotions one could sense their frustration at being stuck in the bush of a banana republic. As Dyer puts it, “stars are nicer than we are, characters more straight forward than people we know, situations more soluble than those we encounter,” when governed by the “representational codes”9 of filmmaking. Taking into consideration the fact that African cinemas and television programmes mainly show European and SouthAmerican productions, including German series like Der Alte and Derrick,10 it is easy to imagine their effect on the imagination of an African audience: things definitely could be better somewhere else. Fifty years of Euro-American film productions had been shown on African screens before African filmmakers started to make their own films in the 1950s. They had seen westerns and romances, as Djibril Diop Mambety recalls: Bollywood, action, worn-out copies of mainstream movies, and exquisite international programming in the centres culturels français. These films, and the idea that not everything had yet been told, inspired film enthusiasts to become filmmakers themselves, as Felix Samba N’Diaye points out.11 N’Diaye talks about cinema in terms of perception and from a non-Western point of view, about American, Italian, French, Brazilian films screened in Dakar in the 8

Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” 222. “Entertainment and Utopia,” 222. 10 Der Alte and Derrick are two famous German criminal inverstigation television series; Derrick was produced by Z D F , O R F and S F D R S between 1974 and 1998, in total 281 episodes of 60 min. each. The main character Derrick, played by Horst Tappert, solves murder cases following Georges Simenon’s “Maigret” model but in typically German surroundings. Derrick is the most sold and most successful German series ever. Like Der Alte (produced since 1977 with various main actors), it is known all over the world, Africa, Asia, and South America. 11 Samba Félix N’Diaye, “Die Zeit der großen Brüder ...,” in Afrikanisches Kino, ed. Marie–Hélène Gutberlet & Hans Peter Metzler (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1997): 33–39. 9

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1960s. These cinematic experiences have long been seen through the narrow

lens of colonial propaganda, seduction, escapism, and alienation. But N’Diaye and others have since shown that by examining the formal structure of these films or their “non-representational signs – colour, texture, movement, rhythm, melody, camera work,”12 the possibility is established of looking against the grain or, in the words of bell hooks, of developing an “oppositional gaze.”13 In other words, they discovered that these same cinematic tools could be used for other purposes, for cultural redefinition and transformation. Throughout the continent, African filmmakers have tried to break the monopoly of Western film distributors, but to little success. Their work remains largely unknown in their own countries. Laplaine’s film, however, shows another effect of the Western influence on African filmmaking. Le Clandestin, a French production, set in a Portuguese location, has been made by a Congolese/ Portuguese filmmaker living partly in France, partly in Congo. What does that mean, if anything at all? Instead of putting Laplaine in the context of any specific national, linguistic, racial or cinematic school or other distinct identity, or even a combination of these, his existence shows us the necessity to think differently: to see how much he temporarily identifies with a certain nationality, language, colour, profession, attitude, and to see that these modes of identification can change. For Laplaine, filmmaking means questioning the certainty of his origin and actual position. Of course, he does not have a monolithic identity related to Congo, Portugal or France, to theatre, film, or menial jobs, but somewhere in between the Centre and the South, on the borderline. Le Clandestin contains these experiences, but has the eloquence to spare us the personal adventures of the filmmaker. The in-betweenness is put in a narrative form that allows us to stay in the middle of the filmic action, between the characters on the borderline: at the duty-free dockside. This tension is a way for Laplaine and his protagonist to make himself a subject of filmmaking, a subject of the story and of history; constituting a ‘self’ with whom the spectator can identify in different, changing places.

4 Le Clandestin can be described as a potpourri of scenes in different styles taken throughout film history: an eclectic associative structure. In theory – as a reflex of postmodern irony – the magical and the hybrid or creolized have made their 12

Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” 223. bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996): 197–213. 13

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appearances in fields of cultural and cinematic studies. I would be inclined, however, to understand the formal disparity as the reflection of the disparity of Africans’ experience of Europe and the West up to this day. Le Clandestin is clearly rooted in such experiences, in world cinema and history as a whole, and within the specific, even idiosyncratic, preferences of the filmmaker. The film starts with a written text, a letter. Subtitles interrupt and structure the flow of images. The slapstick performance, combined with piano music reminiscent of the Marx Brothers or Charlie Chaplin, appears as way of using humour and expressive body language to convey the harsh realities of life. All this reminds us of silent movies. We can discern scenes in a documentary style of the 1960s in the dynamic narrative of the young man running. He does not run alone but has Shaft, Sweetback, and other running characters of 1970s blaxploitation14 with him. This narrative connection between the African stowaway and the African American is stunning: both run through white societies without any place to rest; the public sphere does not belong to them, they are only passing through. All this is blended in a sort of post-industrial black-andwhite style that one might have seen in clips of the 1990s; and the soundtrack (e.g., a House track) underlines this impression. black and white means also segregation. The film clearly plays with contrasts and all the shades of grey. The rich sound editing replaces the spoken word and dialogue in Le Clandestin. One could say that this sound is a sort of basic global language before the Babylon experience and / or very much later. Muteness and subtitles are obvious elements of an old utopian idea from the silent-film era before World War I: i.e. a universal film language based on the image. The same filmic elements can be understood as hinting at a completely different field of investigation: the protagonist’s muteness both physically and symbolically mirrors the political and social situations of all the Africans arriving in the West, their lack of rights. Le Clandestin’s eclecticism is in itself some kind of a run through film history and through the possibilities of understanding. Even the characters remind us of figures seen somewhere else. Laplaine plays with them in order to dissolve our sense of familiarity. Everything has been done in cinema, we 14 Gordon Parks, dir. Shaft (Shaft Productions Ltd., 1971, 35mm, 100 min.). Melvin van Peebles, dir./main character, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Yeah, 1971, 35mm, 97 min.). The U S film genre blaxploitation [black exploitation] emerged in the late 1960s as a creative response to the growing importance of the African-American civil rights movement. During that time the film industry started to focus on the expanding ‘black’ market by introducing ‘black’ themes and characters. In addition to the prominent directors Melvin van Peebles and Gordon Parks, actors like Pam Greer and Richard Roundtree became role models for a whole generation. For a detailed discussion, see, for example, Darius James’s That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995).

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know all the tricks, the codes, styles, and tools; but they can be used to tell another story and show the context they have been taken from in another light.

WORKS CITED Films Afrique sur Seine. Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Jacques Kane Mélo & Robert Caristan, dir. (Groupe africain de cinéma France, 1955, 16mm, 21 min.). Der Alte. various dir. (Z D F , O R F , S F D R S , T V -series, 20.10.1974 – 16.10.1998, 281 episodes, 60 min. each). Back Home Again. Kwame Johnson & Coffe Zokko Narty, dir. (Bob J. Productions, 1994, 35mm, 110 min.). Les Bicots nègres vos voisins. Abid Med Hondo, dir. (Les Films Soleil O, 1972, 35mm, 150 min.). Le Clandestin. José Zéka Laplaine, dir. (Bakia Films / Prole Films, 1996, 35mm, 15 min.). Clando. Jean-Marie Teno, dir. (Les Films du Raphia, 1996, 35mm, 98 min.). Derrick. various dir. (Z D F , 1977 –, T V -series, more than 300 episodes, 90 min. each). Le Jardin de Papa. José Zéka Laplaine, dir. (Les histoires de Weba, 2003, 35mm, 75 min.). Lumière noire. Abid Med Hondo, dir. (M H Films, 1994, 35mm, 104 min.). Macadam Tribu. José Zéka Laplaine, dir. (Flamingo Films / Bakia Films, 1996, 35mm, 90 min.). La Noire de …. Ousmane Sembène, dir. (Filmi Doomireew, 1960, 16mm, 60 min.). Octobre. Abderrahmane Sissako, dir. (Ejva / La SeptLa Sept–A R T E , 1993, 35mm, 37 min.). Rostov Luanda. Abderrahmane Sissako, dir. (Movimento / Z D F / R T B F / Morgane Films, 1997, 35mm, 60 min.). Shaft. Gordon Parks, dir. (Shaft Productions Ltd, 1971, 35mm, 100 min.) Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Melvin van Peebles, dir. (Yeah, 1971, 35mm, 97 min.). Touki Bouki. Djibril Diop Mambety, dir. (Cinegrit, 1973, 35mm, 89 min.). Waalo Fendo. Mohammed Soudani, dir. (Amka Films, 1997, 35mm, 65 min.).

Secondary Sources Dyer, Richard. “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Movies and Methods Vol. II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: U of California P , 1985): 220–232. hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze. Black Female Spectators,” in hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (London: Routledge, 1996): 197–213. James, Darius. That’s Blaxploitation: Roots of the Baadasssss (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1995). Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (New York: Oxford U P , 1960). N’Diaye, Félix Samba. “Die Zeit der großen Brüder...,” in Afrikanisches Kino, ed. Marie– Hélène Gutberlet & Hans Peter Metzler (Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1997): 33–39. Sembène, Ousmane, & Jean Rouch. “Tu nous regardes comme des insectes,” interview by Albert Cervoni, Cinémaction 17 (“Rouch un griot gaulois,” ed. René Pédral, 1982): 77–78.

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N WACHUKWU F RANK U KADIKE ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Critical Dialogues — Transcultural Modernities and Modes of Narrating Africa in Documentary Films

ABSTRACT: This essay challenges the idea that the colonial experience is buried in the past. Focusing on the works of the Cameroonian Jean–Marie Teno, the author shows that African directors compel the viewer to acknowledge the pervasive influence of the colonial experience on the lives of Africans today. Films such as Teno’s documentaries Colonial Misunderstanding and Afrique, je te plumerai operate a careful ‘dissemination’ of knowledge and demystify “the so-called civilized European” who is – particularly in the missionary–colonial alliance – “the savage in civilized custom.”

F

O R M O S T O F A F R I C A , political independence brought utopian dreams that soon crumbled under the subsequent requisites of nationbuilding. As these fledgling democracies ‘failed’, compromised by ineffectual leadership or dislodged by military dictatorships, the ideals of panAfricanism, Negritude, or even pan-Arabism lost much of their lustre. Currently, the legacies of colonialism and Africa’s own political ineptitude, coupled with dubious agenda for ‘development,’ I M F policies, the privatization vogue, and ‘globalization’ have inaugurated new discourses on culture, postcoloniality and ‘modernity’. Not surprisingly, contemporary African cultural production (especially films) reflects these fluxes. The foregoing inevitably raises questions, such as: What are the conditions that encourage the ebul-

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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lience of transcultural modernity? Do contemporary films throw ‘homefashioned’ modernities or hegemonic Euro-Western modernism into relief? Herein, the idea of African films as meta-cinema is advanced and, with a focus on documentary films, especially Jean–Marie Teno’s Colonial Misunderstanding (Cameroon, 2004), an examination is made of how certain alternative paradigms of narrating Africa work to highlight the North /South, centre/periphery binary structures of Euro-Western hegemony. The colonial experience of Africans still pervades the context of life for both those residing within the continent and those who have relocated through the diaspora. In reviewing the history of cinema and documentary film practice – indeed, even media images in general – one finds a deliberate mockery by Western film producers of Africans and their historical traditions and cultures. This distortion of the image seeks to disinform, or simply to ridicule, African cultures. In fact, critics have observed that most documentary and fiction films (specifically ethnographic and anthropological films), are mere spectacles constructed to titillate Western viewers; or, at best, they serve as fragments of reality, depending on the nature of the real or what one conceives of as the real.1 In this examination of contexts and categories of representational patterns, the films discussed are considered in relation to their theoretical contexts so as to redefine the relationship between dominant (Western) and oppositional (panAfricanist) cinematic representations of Africa. A critical issue at stake is whether new African documentaries can be wholly understood without grasping the radically divergent ways in which pan-Africanist imagery positions the subject, the viewer, and the filmmaker to promote spectator participation, while also serving as an authentic exposé of African reality. In addition to stressing the documentaries’ manifestations as social art, it is necessary to consider their inventive approaches to issues of formal structure and modes of address – the significations of a meta-cinema. In this context, the African documentary seeks to interrogate the African experience; the documentary frame presents what may be seen as a window on history, culture, and other parameters of resistance. The social issues, cultural values, and politics of the African world are depicted with both sensitivity and realism. It is this connection between documentary and the real circumstances depicted, between the filmmaker and the subject /audience, that is the most distinctive characteristic of the African documentary tradition. This essay argues that the passion for truth stems from the urge to historical accuracy and communicability, hence the impact of “the belief that what is seen (and heard) is the 1

Joan R. Rayfield, “The Use of Film in Teaching About Africa,” Film Library Quarterly

17.2–4 (1984): 34–52.

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essence of what is, and of what is knowable about what is,”2 this forming the basis for African historical truth.

Towards the History: Towards the Criticism Bill Nichols’s observation regarding the dichotomous relationship between fiction and documentary film is germane to our discourse: If narratives invite our engagement with the construction of a story, set in an imaginary world, documentary invites our engagement with the construction of an argument, directed toward the historical world.3

The hegemony of the colonizer relative to the colonized peoples has, in conjunction with the history of oppression, institutionalized social differentiation and inequality. Further, this imbalance promoted the assumption that colonial histories offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze both worlds. Countering this assumption requires the demystification of colonial histories, exposing their methods of reification, objectification, and representation of the ‘Other’. Hence, the quest for African cinematic reality (the image) in film has produced a genre of provocative documentary meant to combat the unbalanced image presented by traditional Western cinema and other media. In attempting to confront this distortion, the perspectives of ‘alternative’ cinema highlight an ideological mission that functions as a specific mandate for reexamining hegemonic power-relations. Stating that “narrativity emerges as a fundamental condition that binds together all three representational practices – history, documentary, and the fiction film,” Philip Rosen argues that “meaning arises through a process of sequestration which is constitutive of historical discourse.”4 This latter concern, as Rosen rightly points out, has been an integral component of documentary theory and practice ever since the time of John Grierson, father of British and Canadian documentary film. But the truth is that Western documentary films and media images about Africa have also given preference to fiction at the expense of authentic history in exactly the same way that the history and theory of

2 Julianne Burton, The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburg P A : U of Pittsburgh P , 1990): 77. 3 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1991): 118. 4 Michael Renov, “Toward the Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993): 2, 58.

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the genre most often ignore the willful destruction of the relationship which non-Western subjects enjoyed in early documentary experiments.5

Amplitude of Silence The development of cinema in Africa is directly connected to both historical circumstances and movements in film practices. There is a relationship between history/ politics in society and history /politics in the text, which may culminate in the decolonization of the screen and the repositioning of the cinema as the site for maximizing interactions in the midst of divergence and difference. A concerted effort to crystallize national struggles and identities may be an indication of a society in flux, always struggling to regain its belief in itself. This belief, however, has been – and still is being – shattered by the “[un] humanitarian uses of the cinema,”6 a paradigm of representation epitomizing the disdain and lack of respect that usually characterize European dealings with African affairs. Needless to say, centuries of slavery, colonialism, and neocolonialism have left a gaping hole in the heart of the continent, leading to what Chinua Achebe aptly described as the “cruel malignity that often characterizes Africa’s experience with Europe.”7 It is not surprising, therefore, that the Africa which gains access to prime-time Euro-American television and other news media headlines is a miserable Africa steeped in the Conradian heart of darkness and abject poverty. Westerners are hardly offered any glimpses of positive developments, the various ways the continent has managed to mediate its interand intrastate conflicts – a recent example being the signing of an agreement in Nigeria involving warring Sudanese factions that will bring peace to the country and the battered Darfur region; famine; A I D S ; or, as Niyi Osundare puts it, the “processes of building and rebuilding,” the unprecedented hourly and daily 5 The French pathologist turned anthropologist, Félix–Louis Regnault (the first practicioner of ethnographic filmmaking), had good intentions for the use of cinema for cross-cultural study of movement. His earlier experiments, dating back to 1895, the same year the moving image was first projected to paying audiences, involved studies of Africans which he contrasted with the images of peoples from other great civilizations such as Egypt, India, and Greece. Shortly after, subsequent foreign filmmakers turned Africa into exotic décor. See Émilie de Brigard, “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975): 13–43. 6 This statement originates in Paul Rotha’s contention that “Hollywood did little to further the humanitarian uses of cinema” (Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, 108). 7 Chinua Achebe, “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South” (1977), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1988): 1–20. Cited in Niyi Osundare, “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe: Impediments and Possibilities,” unpublished keynote address, Prague Book Fair, 24 April 24 2003.

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efforts of Africans to “make something out of a predominantly arduous existence, to throw off their Sisyphean burden.”8 This dialogue of unequal exchange, an exchange in which Europe “has not always wanted for Africa what it wants so zealously for itself,” underscores “the manner the amplitude of its voice is a function, an imperative condition, for Africa’s silence.”9 Niyi Osundare effectively illustrates the double-standard that is the hallmark of the EuroAmerican politics of selective memory: A clear instance of that silence(ing) occurred on C N N ’s coverage of February 5, 2003 presentation at the United Nations General Assembly by Colin Powell the United State’s Secretary of State. After Mr Powell had made his case calling for a U N action against Iraq, different members of the Security Council began their responses. The first three respondents, China, Russia, and the United Kingdom, presented their positions in an atmosphere of respectful quiet as C N N gave viewers the opportunity to see them in full and listen to their every word. Then came the turn of Cameroon, the first African country on the list, and without any qualms, without any consideration, C N N muted out the African delegate’s voice, tossed his picture to a tiny top right corner of the screen in order to create room for commentators and comments on the first three respondents. For quite a while, the screen was loud with the “ands” and “buts” of television pundits: we saw the Cameroonian delegate gesticulating and moving his lips in that tiny corner, but we were never allowed to hear one word of what he said. After Cameroon had completed her inaudible five minutes, it was the turn of France. The C N N quickly banished its pundits and restored full screen, sound, and sight to what it called an important European country.10

While no one is surprised about the disrespectful treatment of Africa as some sort of blank page in the history of humanity, the muted voice of the Cameroonian delegate not only “brings to the fore the pains of the unequal exchange that has always characterized the dialogue between Europe and Africa” but also the denial of humanity, and “the consequence of such a hasty dismissal of the views and opinions of another continent.”11 It is likely that there are many Europeans who are concerned about the disrespectful treatment of Africa by Western powers; however, many are not enlightened about how this type of obstinacy impacts upon international relations. It is also necessary to add that such an imbalance perpetuates the type of intransigence and arrogance that lead to the American military fiasco in Somalia, and the Euro-American-led coalition in the annihilation of Iraq of which Germany refused to be part, at least for 8

Osundare, “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe.” “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe.” 10 “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe.” 11 “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe.” 9

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now. We can see why such a distortion of reality would be tantamount to disinformation, and why disinformation is a human-rights abuse. These flaws result from an inability to comprehend the complex relationship between history and culture that Africa’s cultural producers have always heralded as the tool and help-mate in cinema’s humanizing mission, the transformative power of which resonates in its ability to unveil new possibilities. It is from this perspective that we locate the mission of African cinema, specifically the documentary tradition. How do tradition and modernity actually interact in contemporary African life, and by what means does the film image postulate afresh the notion of modernities, the acceptance or rejection of the ideals of modernity as fashioned by the colonial and postcolonial European agenda or ‘Pax Americana’? Western methods applied to the construction of African film images constitute what might be termed spurious art, antithetical to the longing for a genial art which indigenous cultural productions predicate. Colonial Misunderstanding and Afrique je te plumerai (Cameroon, 2004 and 1998 respectively) by Jean–Marie Teno, and other films such as Sankofa (Ethiopia, 1998), Le Grand Blanc de Lamberéné (Cameroon, 1995), and Pièces d’Identité (Congo, 1997) contrast sharply with many films, both documentary and fiction, that have made Africa their point of focus. When released, these films were denied distribution or the filmmakers were brutally attacked for the ways alternative cinema works against the myth of European superiority. This also implies stressing ideological subjectivity in preparation for the curious observer to think about cinematic truth and how methodology influences what is presented on the screen (the cinematic sign) and what was out there in the open (the referent). From the very beginning of filmmaking, some of the above distinctions began to emerge to address the visual polarities and characteristics: Auguste and Louis Lumière’s La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving The Factory, 1895) and George Méliès’s Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon, 1902). While Lumière’s film was believed to have captured an unmediated event, Méliès extended the potential of the cinematic apparatus beyond the capture of “physical reality” (Kracauer) to encompass a rearrangement of filmed events. This counter-hegemonic impulse has greatly influenced filmmaking ever since. On this level, filmmaking/ filmwatching becomes synonymous with history lessons, instilled with culturally specific codes and awareness, rendering this tradition unabashedly political and incisive. 

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Historical Specificity and Documentary Practice Many African films, especially Colonial Misunderstanding, have used their structures to transform the above-mentioned filmic attributes to further the cinematic scrutiny of the African experience, which, in turn, forcefully informs and moves the audience both at home and abroad. In their respective ways, each film uses creative modes of address with conventions of traditional documentary / fictional cinema, but each is recontextualized to offer a means of challenging the nature of representation. This can be seen, for example, when footage originally broadcast to promote colonialist or neocolonialist propaganda is given a new meaning. The films are reconfigured as turnaround images, refurbished as veritable critiques of colonialist /repressive ideologies. In other words, they offer insight into how, from the colonial period, Africans have responded to the terms of modernity; and, in the postcolonial period, convoluted by the conditions of predatory globalization (now a buzzword for imperialism), how social reality is constituted at the intersection of I M F and economic structural adjustments programs. In oppositional structures, experimentation with technique conforms to the search for new organizing principles in the construction of a new image. When the filmic criterion is effective it strengthens the rapport between the filmmaker and the spectator (read: Africa and Europe) – a rapport, as cultural producers and critics in the developing world have argued, that could not be realized with the cinematic codes originating from formal structures. (Here reference is made to how dominant paradigms obfuscate African details in order to expedite their own goals.) Thus, Colonial Misunderstanding pointedly presents itself as a prototype of African investigation-in-progress (in Julianne Burton’s term). It also points up the significance of Africa’s blossoming of historical filmmaking.

Of Powers and Subjectivities: The Colonial Misunderstanding Teno stands out as one who not only has advanced and popularized the African documentary tradition, but has made the medium an ideal communicative and educational tool for scrutinizing African developmental, social, and political issues. His feature-length documentary Afrique je te plumerai [Africa I Will Fleece You], whose structure deliberately mixes modes of address, remains a powerful example of unconventional narrative patterns. The film’s construction makes it a perfect instance of a political manifesto. Its mode of interrogation stems from the juxtaposition of documentary with fictional images and from narrative discontinuity as well as oral tradition. Remarkable in this mix of cinematic and indigenous narrative codes is the manner in which what would seem

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on the surface to be a mélange of film styles (documentary, experimental, and narrative; montage editing, lighting, alternation of silence and sound) coheres to powerfully express significant, deep-rooted issues.12 Similarly, Teno has stated that Colonial Misunderstanding is a lesson in history. Its emphasis on history and historical references illustrates the fundamental role history and culture can play in understanding postcolonial African situations. The film explores Germany’s African past (with special focus on how Namibia was colonized and the role that missionaries played in laying the groundwork for colonialism), functioning as an indictment of Africa’s own ineptness and complicity in the colonizing process. More specifically, Colonial Misunderstanding successfully reveals how colonialism and early Christian missionaries in Africa destroyed African beliefs and social systems, replacing them with European ones in the name of modernity, civilization, and evangelism. In theory, missionary involvement with Christianity and the work of God may seem diametrically opposed to imperial governments and their fostering of colonialism and exploitation. In practice, however, Christianity in Africa became allied with European colonialism, involving two aspects of the same process: the destruction or deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, and colonial subjugation of the continent.13 Colonial Misunderstanding, a highly reflexive film, was shot in the style of the first-person narrative; arguably, this shooting technique removes the director from the ‘eye of the storm’, making him, as it were, non-judgmental by letting the story unfold in front of an unobtrusive camera. Teno attributes this style to the fact that he was addressing complex issues, and he wanted to make films that Europeans could view in order to reach their own conclusions about what Africans went through.14 The film juxtaposes testimonies and cross-interviews of several professionals – missionaries, the clergy, professors, historians, and activists – both Africans and Germans – to narrate the gravity and intensity of the inevitable violence, inhuman treatment, and brutality that missionaries and colonialists subjected Africans to. These interviews played significant roles in clarifying the contradictions and hypocrisies that were exhibited by the colonial authorities. In an expert and illuminating analysis, Professor Paulin Oloukpona Yinnon of the University of Lome explains one of the major reasons for the colonial 12 See Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, “Interview with Jean–Marie Teno,” Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2002): 302. 13 For fuller discussion of missionaries’ involvement with cinema in Africa, see Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P , 1994). 14 Horst Rutsch, “Interview with Jean-Marie Teno”: http://www.africanfilmny.org/network /news/Iteno.html [2005].

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misunderstanding of Namibian culture. He stated that land–grabbing in Namibia by Europeans was based essentially on the misunderstanding of Western ideals of property ownership and traditional African beliefs that land belonged to the ancestors and the gods. Simply put, Africans did not understand the concept of private property ownership. Deeds and documentation were foreign to them; based on conventional wisdom, the traditional ruler or paramount chief is the only one who can grant the right to the temporary use of any land (by Europeans or anyone else), after which the land is returned to the community. But the Germans sought permanent acquisition of land, and it was this misunderstanding (the link to the film’s title), together with resisting the settlers’ imposition of an alien culture (including their laws and system of governance), that led to the African uprising. In 1904, the Herero people of Namibia rose against the Germans. There are other reasons land acquisition is contentious here: the Herero plains contained some of Namibia’s best pasture. As noted by the Commissioner for Settlement, Paul Rohrbach, “whoever will live in South West Africa [Namibia] must live essentially by stock farming.”15 This statement echoes Governor Leutwein’s articulated racial disposition strategy or land-grabbing policy, which stipulated that “the whole future of the colony lies in the gradual transfer of the land from the hands of the work-shy natives into white hands.”16 When the Herero took up arms to fight for what was rightfully theirs, they were brutally massacred. The war, lasting over three years, left thousands of the Hereros murdered, with others starved to death in the middle of the desert or locked up in concentration camps. Their military defeat and subsequent demise arose in no small part from their betrayal by the missionaries working with them, who revealed their positions to the German forces. One of the roles of Colonial Misunderstanding was to highlight the missed cross-cultural opportunity between Africa and Europe. This is well articulated in another African film that addresses colonial encounter – Le Grand Blanc de Lambaréné by Bassek ba Kobhio. In this film, where the myth of Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Prize laureate, philanthropist, doctor, missionary, and musician is demystified, we are shown that Dr Schweitzer knew several European languages yet made no effort to learn any local African languages over the 15

Paul Rohrbach, Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, vol. 1 (Berlin & Schöneberg: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1907): 223, 282, also cited in Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (June 2004): 182. 16 Gerhardus Poole, Samuel Maherero (Windhoek: Gamsberg / Macmillan, 1990): 117. Also available online: http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial; Benjamin Madley, “Patterns of Frontier Genocide.”

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many years he lived and worked in Africa. This secular saint of the colonial era, as his critics call him, even despised African music! In the same vein, the activities of the missionaries in Colonial Misunderstanding exposed the Europeans’ arrogance and master-race narcissism, and their obsession with imposing hegemonic values to promote Western norms. Some people may wonder why Teno choose to make Colonial Misunderstanding at this time, since the history of colonization in Africa and the influence that the missionaries had (and still have) on the continent is relatively well known. Why retell the continent’s sordid history? In the first place, Teno believes that everything that happened in the past has some sort of relevance today. Secondly, he uses the medium of film as a platform to correct the lies of pro-slavery propaganda that depicted the immorality and savagery of Africans. Europeans used derogatory images and false literature to defend slavery and imperialism. They also made it seem as though Africans were actually enlightened by being enslaved. As a result, Africans throughout the world were left searching for their identity, trying to fit into societies by being that which they were not (or are not, in view of the current globalization malady). In this regard, Christianity was the most powerful tool that the oppressor used to justify imperialism – a view strongly articulated in such a film as Sankofa by Haile Gerima of Ethiopia. Sankofa is a moving exploration of personal and cultural memory that allows the audience to travel back in time to see the harsh realities of colonialism. It is a powerful film that challenges the accuracy of the documentation of slavery, imperialism, cultural encounters, and the role of the church. Like Gerima, Teno is not interested in the past because it is exotic but, rather, because it is significant to the present. Hence Colonial Misunderstanding is a story that is wrapped in other stories. It is told from the perspective of letting the blame be apportioned to the culprit rather than seeing the current predicament as exclusively Africa’s ‘postcolonial delinquency’ – in Osundare’s terms. Western dialogue on Africa most often avoids mentioning, as Chinua Achebe would have put it, where the rain began to beat us;17 these films, however, compel us to really reflect on history, reminding us that that history has many tributaries and bearings on today’s situations. Some of those indelible attributes and confluences of events reverberate in the following questions posed by Niyi Osundare: How, for instance, can we apprehend and fully appreciate the frightening malaise of the Congo today without a flash-back to the 17 Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine 81 (1964); repr. in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1973): 157–60.

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brutal assassination of Patrice Lumumba, its first democratically elected leader, and the consequent and persistent destabilization and waste of one of the continent’s largest and richest countries? How can we honestly comprehend the recurrent problems of nationality and nationhood on the continent without a candid memory (and remembrance!) of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85? How did the so-called ‘nation-states’ of Africa come to be? Whose colonial interests and designs were they created to serve? Why are these old scars multiplying in myriad forms in the so-called age of globalization?18 Colonial Misunderstanding serves as an eye-opener to, and reminder of, what the continent had suffered, proclaiming that Africans should not be too quick to embrace the ways of our former oppressors (who, by the way, still have a firm grip on the continent through various means – political, economic, social, and cultural.) The African predicament started with the agreement reached at the Berlin Conference of 1884, at which the European powers carved up all of Africa for themselves. Some scenes in the film were even shot inside the red town hall (known as ‘Rote Rathaus’ in German) where the conference took place, highlighting the conference because it forms such a vital component of African colonialism and had such a profound impact on the future of Africa, yet at which no African was in attendance. This conference marks what critics have called “the defining moment for present-day Africa.”19 Colonial Misunderstanding makes it clear that, as far as Europe was concerned, there was no Africa that belonged to Africans, only a French Africa, a British Africa, a German Africa, a Belgian Africa, a Portuguese Africa – or, in today’s ridiculous expressions, francophone Africa, anglophone Africa, and lusophone Africa. In the present geopolitical language, the continent might even be called the Euro– American Africa. As we know, Britain, France and Belgium controlled the majority of Africa’s territory, while Germany gained access to South-West Africa, where most of Colonial Misunderstanding was shot. The importance of cinema as a medium for speaking to people, especially when the majority of these people are either illiterate (as in Africa) or simply ignorant of African affairs (as in Europe), has been recognized by African filmmakers. In turn, these artists have employed film as a pedagogical tool for not only dispelling the fallacies about Africa but also for exposing the contradictions in the North / South dialogue. In this sense, therefore, Teno’s film brings to attention the idea of a cohesive, well-calculated, and premeditated assault on Africa by the colonial powers. 18

Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation”; Osundare, “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe.” 19 Rutsch, “Interview with Jean–Marie Teno.”

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When the opportunity arose, the Europeans helped themselves to African’s natural resources, needed for industrialization. They did not care what happened to the residents of the territories they pillaged so long as they themselves benefitted from the resources of the land. Following this pattern of operation, consider in the present period the ongoing ecological disasters in African countries where extensive explorations are carried out to the detriment of the inhabitants: the delta region of Nigeria, which is still witnessing local opposition to the Shell and Exxon /Mobile oil corporations; Equatorial Guinea and its exploration /exploitation by American oil companies. The case of Equatorial Guinea, dubbed the Kuwait of Africa, is an especially sad one. Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the country’s President since 1979, was called by Condoleeza Rice, the United States Secretary of State, a “good friend [despite his regime’s notoriety] for macabre brutality”: he survives in part because his tiny country pumps 350,000 barrels of oil a day and has reserves of 1.2 billion barrels along with 36 billion cubic meters of natural gas. As a result companies and governments are willing to support a regime that has since silenced the press, driven almost a third of its population of 540,000 into exile and crushed any hint of dissent.20

The oil business is so lucrative that the “oil workers come in droves, and there are so many that there is now a weekly flight direct from Texas to Equatorial Guinea called the Houston Express.”21 Plundering and imperialism now assume a new name – globalization – and the people hovering at the periphery of the comfort zone of the so-called global village are the marginalized natives. Interestingly, when rebels attacked the capital N’Djamena in April 2006, Chad’s President Idris Deby “did what comes naturally: he telephoned French President Jacques Chirac.”22 French Presidents have long supported unpopular African despots and corrupt Presidents-for-Life. The benefits from this are both economic (Chad exports 160,000 barrels a day), and diplomatic (Paris receives African support at the United Nations). In return, African leaders enjoy French military support to keep them in power, as well economic and technical assistance. Since Chad gained independence from France in 1960, the French mili20 As published in the Sunday Independent (30 April 2006). See also Anon., “With Friends Like These ... Condoleezza Rice’s inglorious moment,” Washington Post (18 April 2006). 21 “Kuwait of Africa?” C B S News (18 July 2004). Available online: http://www.cbsnews .com/stories/2003/11/14/60minutes/printable583700.shtml 22 Jamey Keaton, “France’s Ties with African Leaders Fading,” Associated Press (21 April 2006). Available online: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21 /AR2006042101108.html

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tary has intervened four times; the most recent intervention, code-named ‘Épervier’ or ‘Sparrowhawk’, included 1,200 troops, three Puma helicopters, and six Mirage fighter jets.23 Although France routinely advocates greater democracy in Africa, it is ironic that she has one of the longest track record of preventing real democracy. “For the French the issue is about geopolitical positioning, Mohamed Tetemadi Bangoura says [… but] you cannot rule out the colonial mentality.”24 There is the European attitude (especially in France, which eschews colonial discourse from an African perspective), but Teno has stated that it was actually the German missionaries he met at Wuppertal in Germany (the headquarters of the Rhenish Missionaries), who encouraged him to make the film. “I was very impressed by their attitude towards history” he noted, “and their critical attitude towards what happened in Africa and what their predecessors did there. That really encouraged me to go and look in the archives and use the missionaries as a thread to try to tell this story from an African perspective.” Besides this, he also sees the Germans as special in Europe, as their “country was the only one that can commemorate the 100th year of a genocide that they committed in Africa,”25 a far cry from the American and British atrocities in Iraq today, which both countries refuse to acknowledge. The film does not simply ask Africans to wake up to the challenges ahead, it indicts tyranny through a critique of colonial decadence made comprehensible from colonial and neocolonial histories. Thus it also compels Europeans – at whom the film is aimed – to witness firsthand the facts of that history, no matter how uncomfortable they may be. From this perspective, the film serves as political commentary for the contemporary period. The film’s captivating power derives from Teno’s methodology. Teno appropriates traditional representational codes, blending them with the ‘dominant’ conventions in unique and critical ways to address current trends in postcolonialism and /or modernism. The many kinds of representation within the film – such as dramatic narrative, allegorical monologue, and film within film – diversify the authoritative voice. These forms are also evocative of the multiple voices of Africa’s oral tradition, which draws on many forms of representation in its abundant use of culturally established iconographic codes of explication. 23

The information on the French military intervention in Africa is from Jamey Keaton, “France’s Ties with African Leaders Fading,” Associated Press (21 April 2006). 24 Marie Zarka (contributor), France’s Ties With African Leaders Fading, C B S News (3 July 2007): http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/ap/world/mainD8H4I4501.shtml. Mohamed Tetemadi Bangoura of the ‘Political and Strategic Observatory on Africa’ in Paris is also the author of a book and other articles about Chad. 25 Rutsch, “Interview with Jean–Marie Teno.”

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Since the inception of African cinema, oral tradition has formed the basis of its cultural and aesthetic grounding. It is interesting that the structure of Colonial Misunderstanding is indebted to this traditional technique of disseminating knowledge. In returning to the actual impact of oral tradition, we find that oral art can bear upon the method of narration, including repetition of dialogue and images, satire and dramatization; the primary result is to externalize the text, validating the voices of authority by neutralizing their hierarchy. The film is carefully researched, emanating as it does from the filmmaker’s understanding of colonial histories before his birth and extending into his present life, and made more incisive from his hybrid stance – his status as an exile living in Paris. As in Afrique je te plumerai, Teno creates a meta-cinema that utilizes archival newsreel images from the propaganda of colonial media. This cinema, constituting an inadvertent critique of its own history, is spun out of powerful images that compel the viewer to understand the impact of colonialism and modernity upon the African consciousness; it shows how that consciousness was eroded over the years (the film shows some of the symptoms of underdevelopment, pointing to failures of independence – poverty, dilapidated buildings, unpaved roads, etc., still abound); but, more importantly, it forces the viewer to reflect on the effects of multiple modernities rather than the debilitating Western and “all-conquering singular modernities.” Modernity, therefore, “can be understood as an immanent phenomenon that can be, and indeed is, shaped differently in specific contexts. In a way, then, what is important about modernity is not what it looks like, or should look like, but rather how it is differently experienced and the implication thereof….”26

Conclusion Like Afrique, je te plumerai, Colonial Misunderstanding positions the African filmmaker and his audience in a world dominated by injustice, and offers a vehement and sardonic critique of the oppressive mechanisms of power. The brutal images in the film and all its negative connotations do, in fact, provoke awareness and response – in a recent classroom discussion, when it prompted the following questions: What makes the Jewish holocaust any different from the African Maafa? What makes one tragedy more important than another? And why is one group of people considered more valuable than another? It makes one realize that the tight clutch of imperialism has not loosened its grip. Reminiscent of Aimé Césaire’s critique of colonialism in his book Discourse 26

Elísio Macamo, Negotiating Modernity: Africa’s Ambivalent Experience, ed. Macamo (Pretoria: U of South Africa P , 2005): 5.

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on Colonialism,27 in which he advanced the idea that colonialism actually worked to decivilize the colonizer, and that the ‘civilized’ European is actually the savage in civilized custom, Teno makes a great point of equating the missionary–colonial alliance with the ‘detribalization’ and dehumanization of Africans. It is indeed thought-provoking and taxing when in the film we hear Professor Fabien Kangué Ewané declare, “I can forgive Westerners for taking away my land … but not for taking away my mind and soul.” That is a positively conclusive statement directed toward achieving a specific awareness. In essence, Colonial Misunderstanding, as one critic put it, is a journey through history; it illustrates the relevance of looking at the past as the current socio-political quagmire in Africa resonates with the experiences of the past. If it is argued that Africa’s relationship with the West today recalls that of the Berlin-Conference era, it is because the situation has not drastically changed to Africa’s advantage. This unequal relationship can be seen in terms of daily exchanges between Europe and Africa (or the West and Africa). In fact, as in other Teno’s films, this issue is made vivid in the film through camera pyrotechnics. We see it through the clever juxtaposition of fragments of contrasting, sometimes contradictory, texts refurbished as a collage of turnaround images – newsreels and interviews – as they lay bare colonial brutality, effects of colonization, and Africa’s predicament. As an historical document, the film might well be considered a pragmatic project of the African community for the defence of tradition, family, and property or, more specifically, resistance to cultural dominance and coercion, and all the appurtenances and techniques of supplanting indigenous cultures and traditions with hegemonic Euro-Western modernisms and their attendant Euro-American norms and values.

WORKS CITED Films ba Kobhio, Bassek, dir. Le Grand Blanc de Lamberéné (Gabon / Cameroon / France, 1995; 93 min.). Gerima, Haile, dir. Sankofa (U S A / Ghana 1993; 124 min.). Lumière, Louis, dir. La Sortie des usines Lumière (first version; France, 1895; 46 sec.). Méliès, Georges, dir. Voyage dans la Lune (France, 1902; 845 feet, 8/20 min.). Teno, Jean–Marie, dir. Afrique je te plumerai (Cameroon, 1992; 88 min.). ——. Colonial Misunderstanding (Cameroon, 2004; 73 min.).

27

Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1953).

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Secondary Sources Achebe, Chinua. “Impediments to Dialogue Between North and South” (1977), in Achebe, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 (Garden City N Y : Doubleday Anchor, 1988): 1–20. ——. “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine 81 (June 1964): 158–79; repr. in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G.D. Killam (Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1973): 157–60. Burton, Julianne. The Social Documentary in Latin America (Pittsburgh P A : U of Pittsburgh P , 1990). Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (Discours sur le colonialisme, 1953; tr. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). de Brigard, Emilie. “The History of Ethnographic Film,” in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings (The Hague: Mouton, 1975): 13–43. Keaton, Jamey. “France’s Ties with African Leaders Fading,” Associated Press (21 April 2006): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/21/AR2006042101108 .html “Kuwait of Africa?,” C B S News (18 July 2004): http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003 /11/14/ 60minutes/printable583700.shtml Macamo, Elísio, ed. Negotiating Modernity: Africa’s Ambivalent Experience (Pretoria: U of South Africa P , 2005). Madley, Benjamin. “Patterns of Frontier Genocide, 1803–1910: The Aboriginal Tasmanians, the Yuki of California and the Herero of Namibia,” Journal of Genocide Research 6.2 (June 2004): 167–92. Mweze, Nagangura, dir. Pièces d’identité (République démocratique du Congo, 1997; 97 min.). Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1991). Osundare, Niyi. “Dialogue Between Africa and Europe: Impediments and Possibilities” (unpublished keynote address, Prague Book Fair, April 24, 2003). Poole, Gerhardus. Samuel Maherero (Windhoek: Gamsberg, Macmillan, 1990), http://www .yale.edu/gsp/colonial. Rayfield, Joan R. “The Use of Film in Teaching About Africa,” Film Library Quarterly 17.2– 4 (1984): 34–52. Renov, Michael. “Towards a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993): 12–36, 198–204. Rohrbach, Paul. Deutsche Kolonialwirtschaft, vol. 1 (Berlin & Schöneberg: Buchverlag der Hilfe, 1907). Rutsch, Horst. “Interview with Jean-Marie Teno,” , 2005. Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank. Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2002). ——. Black African Cinema (Berkeley: U of California P, 1994). “With Friends Like These ... Condoleezza Rice’s inglorious moment,” Washington Post (18 April 2006). Zarka, Marie (contributor). “France’s Ties With African Leaders Fading,” C B S News (3 July 2007): http:// www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/21/ap/world/mainD8H4I4501.shtml

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I MAGINING L IFE – N ARRATING S TORIES ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

G RAHAM H UGGAN ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Imagining Disaster in the African Postcolony ABSTRACT: This essay discusses the theoretical implications and consequences of the topical use of ‘disaster’ in public discourse on, and in literary and cinematic representations of, Africa. The author introduces the “genre of contemporary disaster writing” as a site where ‘disaster’ is often treated as a ‘natural’ condition of modernity. The images and motifs that are mediated by such disaster writings, it is further argued, easily become the object of touristic curiosity.

Introduction

M

Y M A I N I N T E R E S T I N T H I S E S S A Y is to seek representational alternatives to stereotypical European conceptions of Africa as the Dark Continent, conceptions which refer back to or revivify a longstanding tradition in which Africa has served either as a counterpoint to or, more often, an alibi for the institutional excesses of the West.1 Taking my cue from the work of Achille Mbembe, my secondary aim is to restore a more complex vision of an enormously diverse continent, one still too often seen through the twin distorting mirrors of the catastrophic (Africa as undifferentiated disaster zone) and the savage (Africa as what Mbembe calls a “meta-text about the 1

See Dorothy Hammond & Alta Jablow, The Myth of Africa (New York: Library of Social Sciences, 1977); Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, tr. A.M. Berrett, M. Last, S. Rendall & J. Roitman, (“Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie,” 1990; Studies on the History of Society and Culture 41; Berkeley: U of California P , 2001), and V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988). © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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animal,” in which African otherness is accounted for much in the same manner as we might account for the irrationality and incomprehensibility of the beast).2 Probably more than enough has been said about these tropes, both of which obviously block understanding of the social, cultural, and political complexities of the African continent past and present. However, like Mbembe – though without laying claim to either his authority or his range – I am as much concerned with exploring the disarticulated anatomy of contemporary ‘Afro-pessimism’ as with seeking viable alternatives to it; all the more so because I believe, as does Mbembe, that Afro-pessimism’s self-replicating vocabulary – the vocabulary, for instance, of political collapse and seemingly uncontrollable warfare – may yet contain within it the seeds of a continent’s regeneration, conveying the layered sense of an identitary multiplicity and conviviality – terms typical of Mbembe’s double-edged vocabulary – that have never been fully overshadowed by, and may even have been inspired by, a continuing (post)colonial history of confrontational excess. The particular term I want to unpack here is ‘disaster’ – a term now so prevalent across a wide body of ostensibly liberal-humanist Western media representations that it seems to have become indelibly inscribed in the West’s consciousness of Africa, conveying neo-imperialist views of an entire continent no longer able – if it ever had been – to look after or control itself. My interest here is not to dismiss the applicability of terms such as ‘disaster’ to what Mbembe calls the African ‘postcolony’, but. rather. to gauge the rhetorical effectiveness of their usage in two recent African-based texts. These texts are the American journalist Philip Gourevitch’s harrowing account of the mid-1990s genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With All Our Families (1998), and the late Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty’s satirical film about the devastating impact of Western-style consumer capitalism an ‘traditional’ African social structures, Hyenas (1992). Both are engagements with what might be described, loosely adopting the key terms of this volume, as African transcultural modernities; and both are also, as I will be seeking to argue, postcolonial cultural works. As might be expected, then, I will be making a pitch here for the continuing viability of postcolonial approaches to modern Africa, largely text-based approaches which, allied with rather than opposed to – still worse, superseded by – sociological / anthropological analyses of contemporary African modernities, emphasize the need for a multi-conceptual understanding of African societies and cultures and their changing place in the modern globalized world. 2

Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 2. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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Let me proceed by unpacking my two key terms, ‘postcolony’ and ‘disaster’. The first of these terms is usually associated first and foremost with the work of the aforementioned Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe. Indepth research on Africa, for Mbembe, has all too often been replaced by peremptory observations that characterize an entire continent as incomprehensible and pathological, as a “great, soft, fantastic body [which is] engaged in rampant self-destruction,” and inscribed upon which human action, invariably perceived as foolish, proceeds from “anything but rational calculation” (8). Over and against this crude reductionism, Mbembe proposes a view of African realities characterized by complex, discontinuous entanglements. One term for these entanglements is the ‘postcolony’, by which Mbembe seems to understand a combination of different temporalities, inevitably but not exclusively determined by colonialism, that convey the often extreme instability of African societies, cultures, and polities in the modern, global age. The postcolony is best understood not as a constellation of existing socio-political entities but, rather, as an historical trajectory of “societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves” (102). Often to be found in such societies are a particular “style of political improvisation, [...] a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, [...] and a political machinery that, once in place, constitutes a distinctive regime of violence” (102). Taken together, these characteristics produce a plurality of identities, not always fashioned in the crucible of anticolonial struggle, nor exclusively gauged in the durably oppositional terms of Marxist-inflected postcolonial critique. In fact, Mbembe’s postcolony owes much more to the free-floating French poststructuralisms of Foucault and, especially, Deleuze and Guattari than it does to historically situated anticolonial thinkers, although – as is often the case with this particular kind of postcolonial critical practice – poststructuralism and anticolonialism converge in Mbembe’s seemingly mandatory homage to the wideranging work of the Martinican psychiatrist–activist Frantz Fanon. Much more could obviously be said on Mbembe’s eclectic methodology, but for my purposes here I shall restrict myself to making two main points. First – and I will need to come back to this in more detail later – Mbembe’s work provides a good example of the possibilities offered by combining broadly synchronic, transcultural, and broadly diachronic, postcolonial approaches to modern Africa. Second, the link-term between these approaches, although not always acknowledged within them, is violence – not just the constitutive violence of colonialism, but the originary, what Walter Benjamin would probably

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have called the ‘lawmaking’ rather than ‘lawbreaking’ violence of the state.3 Yet if state violence and its effects are probably the main theme of Mbembe’s work, he is equally interested in what happens when violence exceeds state boundaries; when, for example, “war is no longer waged between armies of two sovereign states” but rather between stateless militias, having as their principal targets civilian populations, and which seek to control entire regions for their own profit while acting “behind the mask of the state.”4 Such contexts, Mbembe suggests, are not well served by the oppositional vocabulary of postcolonialism, nor yet by the unevenly reciprocal terms of a transculturalism arguably ill-equipped to account for the ‘new’, often seemingly limitless forms of violence that have accompanied the fragmentation of earlier, Western-rationalist models of the nation-state. These ‘new’ forms of violence, says Mbembe, are the effects of technologies of destruction that have become “more tactile, more anatomical and sensorial, in a context in which the choice is between life and death [and] the generalization of insecurity has deepened the societal distinction between those who bear weapons and those who do not” (34). One word for this ‘new’ regime of violence is terror, and its reach is obviously global. Its primary aim, according to Mbembe, is not so much to “inscribe bodies within disciplinary apparatuses,” e.g., through such prior mechanisms as colonial policing; rather, it is to inscribe them “within the order of the maximal economy [...] represented by the massacre” – an economy in which bodies are reduced to the sum of their scattered parts, systematically disassembled until they become “meaningless corporealities” (Mbembe’s resonant phrase), with no distinctive identity or cohesive form of their own.5 A still more general word for massacres like these is the composite term ‘disaster’: a term as likely to conceal as to reveal and to obscure, more specifically, the historical conditions that originally give rise to massacres and in which these repeatedly take place. In fact, disasters, routinely treated as random, fundamentally incomprehensible occurrences, occlude the social and historical conditions that produce them. This also goes for ‘natural’ disasters which, while more likely to be experienced as ‘acts of God’ or ‘caprices of nature’, are at least in part of human manufacture, calling various readily identifiable human agents to account.6 3

See Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence” (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” 1921), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978): 277–301. 4 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 35. 5 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 35 (my emphasis). 6 Kai Erikson, “A New Species of Trouble,” in Communities at Risk: Collective Responses to Technological Hazards, ed. Stephen Robert Couch & J. Stephen Kroll–Smith (New York:

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Two theses on disasters are of particular relevance to this essay, which I will call, for short, the ‘primordial-exceptional’ and the ‘modern-normative’. According to the first thesis, the tendency toward a biologization of disaster effectively naturalizes a social order predicated on the notion of civilizational hierarchy: one particular version of this thesis would claim that certain, ‘less developed’ societies / cultures are predisposed to produce the disasters they seem congenitally powerless to prevent. According to the second thesis, disasters are a by-product of what Ulrich Beck calls the global ‘risk society’;7 intrinsic to modernity, they are normalized to the point of becoming commodities for exchange in a global communications market in which mediated images of mass suffering and death, however deplorable or repugnant, become compellingly attractive as spectator experiences and (post)modern tourist forms.8 These two theses are brought together, I would argue, in the prolific genre of contemporary disaster writing, itself a product of the relentless commodification, and attendant trivialization, of death under the conditions of the late-modern / late-capitalist world. This brings me, via a series of hopefully not too lengthy detours, to the first of my African examples, Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, which is in part an examination of what happens when one of the greatest unnatural causes of human death – war – becomes a further object of touristic curiosity; and when war is transformed, through the self-privileging tropes of Western disaster writing, into that most dangerous of postmodern delusions – a self-invigorating game.

War Games In the American journalist Philip Gourevitch’s chilling account of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (1998), one of his informants, the survivor Theodore Nyilinkwaya, matter-of-factly describes the coercive methods used by the state to ritualize the practice of mass murder: Everyone was called to hunt the enemy [...] But let’s say someone was reluctant [... and] runs the rest, but he doesn’t kill. [The others] say, “Hey, he might denounce us Peter Lang, 1991): 13–14. 7 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, tr. Mark Ritter (Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, 1986; London: Sage, 1992). 8 John Lennon & Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Thomson Learning, 2000); see also Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (Aldershot: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).

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later. He must kill. Everyone must help to kill at least one person.” So this person who is not a killer is made to do it. And the next day it’s become a game for him. You don’t need to keep pushing him.9

The idea of killing as a game recurs later in the text when the makeshift Hutu militia responsible for committing many of the murders, the interahamwe, is described as promoting genocide as little more than a joyous ‘carnival romp’: Hutu Power youth leaders, jetting around an motorbikes and sporting pop hairstyles, dark glasses, and flamboyantly colored pyjama suits and robes, preached ethnic solidarity and civil defense to increasingly packed rallies, where alcohol usually flowed freely, giant banners splashed with hagiographic portraits of [Hutu President] Habyarimana flapped in the breeze, and paramilitary drills were conducted like the latest hot dance moves. (93)

Much of Gourevitch’s text concerns itself with unpacking the conventional argument that scarcely imaginable atrocities such as genocidal murder are implicitly derealizing, taking on the trappings of carnivalesque ritual or macabre spectacle even as the wider context behind the carnage becomes increasingly mystified and unclear. Thus, while Gourevitch grudgingly acknowledges the perverse excitement that comes from perpetrating or, later, witnessing the consequences of mass murder, he remains resolutely opposed to sensationalist views of genocide that either confirm a fashionable postmodern relativism – as in the mass-mediated notion that “all massacres are created equal: the dead are innocent, the killers monstrous, the surrounding politics insane or nonexistent” (186) – or that collapse extreme violence into routine apocalyptic visions of the absurd (259). Instead, he insists on a view of the genocide in Rwanda as the politically motivated consequence of a series of interlinked, historically verifiable factors: precolonial inequalities exacerbated by self-serving European colonial regimes; heightened fear and insecurity in the postcolonial era as a result of political extremism, ethnic absolutism, and near-total economic collapse; the toxic combination of arms and alcohol in the hands of a compliant, desperately impoverished rural populace; manufactured consent for war as a desirable, quasi-permanent civil state; and the indifference of an outside world all too ready to see Africa as an undifferentiated hotbed of primordial tribal violence, in which repeated evidence of mass slaughter merely reconfirms the unavoidable, perhaps fundamentally irremediable chaos that is the ‘natural’ accompaniment of Africa’s sad array of collapsed postcolonial states (95, 180).

9

Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998): 24. Further page references are in the main text.

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Such a view of Africa, as is well known, has been propagated by several generations of Western travel writers, many of whom have actively contributed toward (re)installing the pernicious myth of an irredeemably tainted continent, repeatedly sucked back into the self-consuming Heart of Darkness it seems driven to re-create.10 Gourevitch is well aware of the historical variables that underlie this durable, and durably racist, vision of African ‘barbarity’, seeing it reproduced even in well-meaning modern accounts that seek to rescue Africa from itself by conscripting its accumulated history of human /ecological disasters into the service of a universal humanitarian cause. Part of the problem, for Gourevitch, consists precisely in what can be called the Western ‘biologization’ of African social history: the continuing process by which specific social and political conflicts are likely to be reinterpreted in the West as typecast, essentially incomprehensible humanitarian crises – as variations of the periodic natural disasters which, taking particularly heavy toll on the world’s developing countries, serve to confirm the misbegotten thesis that “Africans generate humanitarian catastrophes but don’t really make meaningful politics” (226); or, in the more specific case of the genocide in Rwanda, to ‘prove’ the trumped-up case that “Hutus and Tutsis [were] simply doing what their natures dictated, and killing each other” (168; also 154). As Gourevitch shows, “there was nothing inevitable about the horror” in Rwanda; nor could the mass murders of 1994 and after be simply attributed to some primordial ‘natural cause’ (94). Genocide, after all, is not by any stretch of the imagination a ‘natural disaster.’ Yet it is often treated as if it were, and not only by the so-called ‘international community’, who take it upon themselves – often belatedly – to offer assistance in the context of such evolving global crises, but also by the local perpetrators themselves, who are keen to minimize their responsibility for the catastrophic chain of events they have set in motion, the wholesale human destruction they have either indirectly encouraged or immediately caused. (The governing idea behind genocide, argues Gourevitch, is the ‘naturalization’ of the enemy; its main excuse the ‘uncontrollability’ of the appalling violence it brings in its wake. Both ideas, turning the victim rhetoric of the natural disaster to their own advantage, belie the premeditated nature of genocide as a systematic programme of planned destruction.) For Gourevitch, attempts to see genocide in terms of (natural) disaster often amount to little more than an ideological smokescreen, designed to obscure human agency while distracting attention away from the violence’s predomi10

V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988); see also Patrick Holland & Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998).

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nantly political root cause. Gourevitch is equally critical of the role of the international media in capturing public sympathy for the humanitarian plight of the post-conflict Rwandan refugees, many of whom had previously perpetrated the murders, or in recasting the disease-ridden condition of the refugee camps as a form of “divine retribution” through which the “horror had been equalized,” and the guilty punished for their crimes (164). International relief organizations are similarly taken to task for their failure to address the underlying causes of the events whose devastating consequences they later sought to alleviate, and for their apparent readiness to shelter, along with the innocent, a number of known criminals who, given time to regroup, then went on to commit further crimes. The world’s (super)powers, finally, are held to account for their reluctance to intervene in the struggle, for offering to help the clean-up – “in the interests of public health” – but not to halt the killing (149, 154). In exposing the genocide in Rwanda as a scandalous “case-study in international negligence” (326), Gourevitch makes the larger point that the West’s obsession with the reified figure of the suffering disaster victim reveals the blandishments of ‘international concern’ to be, at worst, a form of sanctioned, perhaps politically strategic ignorance and, at best, a reprehensible decontextualization of the historical and political circumstances that make events such as genocide possible, irrespective of the increasingly empty post-Holocaust credo that it must never be allowed to happen again. (This last point is reinforced by the phenomenon of selective commemoration, well brought out in the powerful scene when Gourevitch, waiting in line to visit the immensely popular United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, tellingly juxtaposes his reading of a newspaper featuring graphic images of the recent carnage in Rwanda with the arrival of museum staffers wearing lapel buttons with the slogans ‘Remember’ and ‘Never Again’ (152). As Gourevitch is moved to conclude a few pages later, The West’s post-Holocaust pledge that genocide would never again be tolerated proved to be hollow, and for all the fine sentiments inspired by the memory of Auschwitz, the problem remains that denouncing evil is a far cry from doing good. (170)

Another problem that obtains is how to imagine a slaughter of genocidal intent and proportion, and how to do so after it actually happened – how to perform the necessary memory work of “[re]imagining what is, in fact, real” (7). Visiting the killing fields of Rwanda for the first time – his research for the book will involve further field trips over a three-year period between 1995 and 1998 – Gourevitch freely admits to finding it difficult to imagine the horrific violence that had happened there just over a year before. At one of the killing sites

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in Nyarubuye, where cadavers have been allowed to remain where they lie in a kind of open memorial, Gourevitch confesses to looking without really seeing, and to being disturbed by the aestheticizing impulses of his own response: The dead at Nyarubuye were, I’m afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there – these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn’t settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely. (19)

Gourevitch is torn, here as elsewhere, between the ‘natural’ touristic curiosity which drives him not just to look at, but also to fetishize, the dead bodies of Rwandan genocide victims, and his investigative journalist’s duty to inquire further into the possible reasons behind the carnage, to attempt to convert sight into understanding and fleeting images into a (semi-)coherent picture of past events. A threefold project – to describe what he sees, to imagine what has happened, and to try to understand why it happened – thus lies at the core of a text that combines the sensory alertness and surface inquisitiveness of the conventional travel book with the greater critical acuity and moral indignation of the war correspondent’s investigative report. Gourevitch’s task is complicated by the removal of much of the prima facie evidence. Most of the corpses have long since been taken away, and many, though by no means all, of the killers have either fled or gone into temporary hiding. In some cases, such has been the efficiency of the killing that entire Tutsi-dominated villages have been wiped out, and all traces of the people who once lived there have effectively disappeared (19). Under such circumstances, stories must compensate for the enforced lack of visual evidence, as Gourevitch energetically scours the country, “collecting accounts of the killing” (23). The traveller/ reporter emerges both as listener and as secondary raconteur, compiling survivors’, and in a few cases perpetrators’, accounts as a way of imagining what must have happened to the dead. These stories provide the raw material from which conflicting versions of the historical past are created; they also form a sequence of imaginative relays linking personal, emotionally resonant memories of the killings to ‘official’, highly ideological accounts of recorded events. The stories operate, in other words, as a series of individual case histories, issuing a reminder of the metonymic function of ex post facto war reportage, which often seeks to move from the evidence provided by a number of specific witnesses, many of them previous victims of the violence, to a broader

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understanding of the enormity of the violence itself. Retold against the backdrop of an aestheticized Rwandan landscape, the stories create a deliberate dissonance between the beauty of nature and its function as both temporary refuge for the killers and illusory resting-place for the dead (20, 178). Meanwhile, between stories, and sometimes by means of them, Gourevitch fills in snippets of historical detail, creating, in the best tradition of politically informed travel journalism, a kind of historico-political whistle-stop tour, a deliberately inconsistent, back-and-forth narrativization of epoch-making events. Many of these details are provided in an ostensibly ‘historical’ chapter which, again as in the tradition of travel journalism, is informed but unashamedly imprecise, moving freely between history, legend, and myth. Repetition – in some respects, a structural property of travel writing11 – operates here as the guiding principle, as in the view of Rwanda’s misguided Hutu revolutionaries as Naipaulian ‘mimic men’, reproducing “the abuses against which they [had previously] rebelled” (61).12 Gourevitch’s insistence on the historical specificity of the Rwandan and, to some extent, the larger contemporary African crisis is thus undermined by his tendency to see recurring patterns in the violence that link it back to previous, even ‘originary’, events. This leads, as so often in writing of this kind, to the loose deployment of European analogy, as when Gourevitch compares modern-day Africa (straight out of the pages of a Naipaul, or Kaplan, or Kapuscinski) to medieval Europe, plagued by feudal corruption, racked by war, and serially afflicted by epidemic bouts of population-threatening disease (325). To see We Wish to Inform You as a politically-oriented travel book, rather than an extended piece of morally concerned investigative journalism or retrospective war reportage, is no doubt to stretch the point a little; even so, Gourevitch uses many of the standard tropes and imaginative resources of travel writing, even if travel itself emerges as an incidental necessity, rather than a narrative focus or sustained object of reflexive inquiry, in the main body of his report. The question remains as to whether We Wish to Inform You can be seen as a piece of disaster writing. Clearly, as suggested above, Gourevitch is wary of attributing the dialectical (coincidental /eschatological) properties of natural disasters to the genocide in Rwanda, even as he shows how both of these mystified aspects have been manipulated to create a self-exonerating version of ‘unavoidable’ (in the first case) or ‘preordained’ (in the second) events. Gourevitch’s primary concern, indeed, is to give the lie to genocide as a particularly extreme form of pathological human behaviour, ideologically linked to either 11 12

See Holland & Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, and here, for example, ch. 2. See also V.S. Naipaul, The Mimic Men (London: André Deutsch, 1967).

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‘innate’ human aggressiveness or the ‘primordial’ origins of ethnic violence. To write about an African genocide, at the same time, is to challenge those emptied-out, hypermediated visions of Third-World disasters which, in creating the paradoxically reassuring impression of a “distant sense of random menace” (313), run the risk of anaesthetizing their complacent First-World consumer public. (As Gourevitch remarks despairingly at one point, “perhaps even extinction has lost its shock,” 201.) Within this context, Gourevitch’s text is written in defiance of two perhaps equally distasteful notions: that mass murder might become a game to those who perpetrate it; or that it might become a bore to those who, vicariously witnessing it from a distance, content themselves with assimilating it to quotidian media-disaster routines. Nonetheless, the text, for all its undoubted moral force and critical intelligence, arguably betrays some of the characteristics of much less considered forms of travel writing: the sentimental concentration on victims rather than perpetrators; the aestheticization of the dead; and, perhaps above all, the persistent tendency to insert violence into ‘natural’ cycles of destruction which, long after being acknowledged as politically motivated, are still paradoxically treated either as biological phenomena (viz. the ‘extinction’ metaphor), or as functions of an originary violence, revisited on reconstituted ‘natural’ enemies, that is made to seem simultaneously unforeseen and strangely preordained.

Necropolitics and the Cinema A very different kind of (re)imagining of disaster is the late Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambéty’s brilliant adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s satirical play Der Besuch der alten Dame (The Visit), which, translated into the context of debt-ridden modern Africa, turns into the multiple prize-winning film Hyenas (original French / Wolof title Hyènes). The plot can be briefly recounted here for those unfamiliar with the movie. The life of Draman Drameh, a respected shopkeeper in the tiny village of Colobane (somewhere in the Sahel region of West Africa, although the film sports a wide range of geographical and cultural references), is irreversibly altered when the young girl he had previously impregnated and abandoned returns to the village, bent on revenge. The girl, Linguère Ramatou, has since become a fabulously wealthy but emotionally crippled woman, desensitized to the world around her and fixated on settling scores with the man she still sees as having ruined her life. Returning to Colobane, Linguère Ramatou transforms into a kind of exterminating angel, promising the impoverished villagers salvation through her riches, but only if they will conspire in her vengeful wishes by putting Draman Drameh to death.

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The film is usually read as a biting satire on global consumer culture and its destructive impact on an African continent it has severely if unevenly affected, from the earliest incursions of the European colonial powers to the global neoliberalism of the present day.13 The contemporary, neocolonial underpinnings of foreign aid (with a further, meta-cinematic nod to continuing French financial control of the Senegalese film industry) are clearly alluded to here, as is the conspicuously uneven development of sub-Saharan Africa in the modern globalized age. These financial disparities, symbolized in the grotesque figure of Linguère Ramatou, undercut the transcultural dimensions of the movie, which suggest that cultural boundaries are as much transcended as traversed in certain kinds of ‘transcultural cinema’ (David MacDougall’s term), and that these kinds of cinema serve to remind us “that cultural difference is at best a fragile concept, often undone by perceptions that create sudden affinities between ourselves and others so apparently different to us.”14 One of the movie’s central paradoxes is that hybridity – long since a mantra of postcolonial and now, more recently, transcultural studies – is not only effectively disabling but also conceals, and is even tacitly dependent on, an economistic binary logic that its cultural idealism can only temporarily repress. Linguère Ramatou is the spectral embodiment of this paradox: half overdetermined victim, half psychotic avenger, she is the film’s über-hyena, feeding ravenously off the human carrion that her twisted necro-philosophy creates and manipulates to excess. ‘Excess’ is probably the operative word here, bringing us back again to the work of Mbembe, for whom excess is one of the perversely normative categories of understanding around which contemporary African realities – particularly urban realities – are structured: “overloading of language, overloading of public transport, overloading of living accommodations ... everything [here] leads to excess.”15 The lived experience of excess, which goes side by side with the experience of extreme scarcity, helps create the conditions for what Mbembe calls an African postcolonial ‘necropolitics’ centering on deathly images of tyranny, madness, and revenge. There is no time to go into detail here on the different connotations of necropolitics, which Mbembe defines in his memorable 2003 essay of the same name in terms of the connections between the contemporary exercise of sovereignty and the “power and [...] capacity to dictate who may live [in any given polity] and who must die” (11). Suffice to say that some of the necropolitical principles Mbembe sketches out in his essay – 13

See, for example, Elizabeth Mermin, “A Window on Whose Reality? The Emerging Industry of Senegalese Cinema,” in African Cinema: Post-Colonial and Feminist Readings, ed. Kenneth Harrow (Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 1999): 201–21. 14 David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1998): 245. 15 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 247.

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sovereignty as the right to kill, killing as an extension of play, the colony as the “location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended” (24), the connection between new forms of tyrannical autocracy and the deterritorialization of the modern postcolonial state – are highly relevant to any reading of Hyenas, while allowing us to reflect more generally on the different ways in which the contemporary realities of Africa are presented as media spectacle on the global stage. Before closing, a few thoughts on disaster in Hyenas. According to the primary logic of the film, the predatory regime unleashed on Colobane by the return of Linguère Ramatou is unequivocally disastrous: it sets in train a sequence of events that leads not only to the inevitable death of Draman Drameh, the ritual scapegoat, but to the self-implosion of the village itself. However, another reading of the film is possible that might provide an alternative commentary on African modernity /modernities. Just as the body of Draman Drameh ‘disappears’, so the village of Colobane, in the final sequence of the movie, is swallowed up by the city, which then becomes the all-engulfing locus of a modernity from which the village had already been effectively marginalized (the train that brings Linguère Ramatou to Colobane does not actually stop there; only she can make it stop). According to this reading, Linguère Ramatou provides the catalyst not so much for Colobane’s destruction as for the completion of a previously unfinished process by which Colobane’s hopelessly provincial citizens are absorbed – for better or for worse – into the rhythms of modern urban life. The film implicitly resists this part-triumphalist, part-defeatist reading of the relentless spread of an urban-centred global capitalism; but it also suggests that this process is not necessarily as calamitous as it appears. Instead, the film implies, there might be other ways of negotiating modernity – there might be other modernities – that are not beholden to the developmental logic of the West. This is perhaps what Mbembe means when he suggests that a modern African ‘aesthetics of vulgarity’ has as much to do with the staging of multiple, often improvised subaltern identities as well as with the obscene trappings and vainglorious performances of state power. Certainly, both forms of theatre are much in evidence in Hyenas: its elaborate burlesques, with their deliberately ironic restagings of the primitive, display not only a transculturated version of European modernist aesthetics, but also represent an equally deliberate intervention in the global project of modernity itself. What ensues is perhaps less disastrous than preposterous, demonstrating what Mbembe calls the postcolonial ‘intimacy of tyranny’ but also its reverse-face, the ridiculing

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exposure of the vulgarity and pomposity, contained within a search for prestige and glory, that the official order tries to hide from itself.16 It is perhaps significant in this respect that the film’s most obviously modernizing figure, Linguère Ramatou, reveals the corruption at the heart of the system: both outsider and insider, both innovator and destroyer, she is simultaneously a symbol of the new global-capitalist order and a relic of the archaic, ‘primitive’ order that global capitalism seeks, never quite successfully, to suppress. Mambéty’s film supports neither dispensation; rather, it implies, through the twisted figure of Ramatou, that the two orders are destructively enmeshed. ‘Disaster’ functions here as the sign under which this entanglement is converted into spectacle, simultaneously dehistoricized and reduced to a naturalized battle between opposing ideologies (Western individualism vs African communalism, global neo-liberalism vs local state socialism, etc.). ‘Disaster’ is also a universalizing term for what happens when human greed is left unchecked in conditions of widespread poverty – an allegory conveniently mapped back onto Africa as the signature site of violent excess and breathtaking scarcity, the world’s preeminent disaster zone. The film’s transcultural / postcolonial dynamic work against these easy ideological assimilations of disaster by making a series of deterritorializing (transcultural) and rehistoricizing (postcolonial) moves. Thus, while the film remains to some degree both temporally and spatially ambiguous, it is identifiably located within a global, neocolonial economic order in which post-independence Africa is inextricably enmeshed. Hyenas, as its title suggests, performs a violent allegory of necolonial predation in which the West, in dictating the terms for a selectively modernizing Africa, feeds both literally and metaphorically on the bodies of the dead. However, this twisted dialectic of development and regression is by no means the film’s only reading of modernity. Indeed, modernity emerges precisely not as a trumpedup, self-celebratory narrative of Western progress but, rather, as a self-conscious, locally re-negotiated relationship between the present and the past. This negotiating process – to repeat – is transcultural and postcolonial: transcultural with respect to the shifting mutualities of the local and the global, and postcolonial in regard to colonial power-relations of both the present and the past. Transculturalism and postcolonialism, in turn, are not the mutually excluding methodologies they are all too often taken for, and their productive though not always amicable relationship forms the basis of any serious consideration of local modernities in Africa, and of global modernity at large.17 16

Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 109. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). 17

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WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, tr. Mark Ritter (Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, 1986; London: Sage, 1992). Benjamin, Walter. “Critique of Violence” (“Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” 1921), in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken, 1978): 277–301. Dürrenmatt, Friedrich. The Visit: a tragi-comedy, tr. Patrick Bowles (Der Besuch der alten Dame, 1956; tr. 1958; London: Jonathan Cape, 1973). Erikson, Kai. “A New Species of Trouble,” in Communities at Risk: Collective Responses to Technological Hazards, ed. Stephen Robert Couch & J. Stephen Kroll–Smith (New York: Peter Lang, 1991): 11–29. Gourevitch, Philip. We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador, 1998). Hammond, Dorothy, & Alta Jablow. The Myth of Africa (New York: Library of Social Sciences, 1977). Holland, Patrick, & Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998). Lennon, John, & Malcolm Foley. Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Thomson Learning, 2000). MacDougall, David. Transcultural Cinema (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1998). Mambéty, Djibril Diop. Hyenas (Hyènes; A D R Productions / Thelma Film; Senegal / Germany, 1992, 110 min.). Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony, tr. A.M. Berrett, M. Last, S. Rendall & J. Roitman, (“Notes provisoires sur la postcolonie,” 1990; Studies on the History of Society and Culture 41; Berkeley: U of California P , 2001). Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. Mermin, Elizabeth. “A Window on Whose Reality? The Emerging Industry of Senegalese Cinema,” in African Cinema: Post-Colonial and Feminist Readings, ed. Kenneth Harrow (Trenton N J : Africa World, 1999): 201–21. Mudimbe, V.Y. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1988). Naipaul, V.S. The Mimic Men (London: André Deutsch, 1967). Rojek, Chris. Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (Aldershot: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993).

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S ISSY H ELFF ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Refugee Life Narratives — The Disturbing Potential of a Genre and the Case of Mende Nazer

ABSTRACT: This article offers a close reading of Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and her Fight for Survival (2004), a recently published testimony about the life of the Sudanese refugee woman Mende Nazer who became an unpaid maid in the home of a Sudanese diplomat in London. After her escape from abusive treatment there, the launching of her book stirred huge public pressure, eventually saving her from being sent back to Sudan. In this respect, the story of Nazer’s book shows how literature sometimes reaches beyond its usual sphere to interact directly with politics. Taking the text and the extratextual facts into consideration, this essay raises questions about the currency of refugee narratives, the need to perform refugee identities, and the risk involved of essentializing ‘refugeehood’. Nazer’s testimony as a ‘refugee life narrative’ prompts us to see literature, with its intertwined historico-political and cultural-aesthetic dimensions, as both a distinct layer within, and agent of, modernity.

Introduction

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have always been intriguingly creative grounds for artists. It is within these life writings that performers, artists, and writers courageously invest in various forms of

UTOBIOGRAPHICAL PROJECTS

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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self-invention and self-formation.1 In their efforts to narrate their lives, authors recover unrecorded pasts and almost forgotten stories while becoming aware that factual and fictional realms are so neatly intertwined in the representation of memory and history that it is at times hard to distinguish between them. Accordingly, one major challenge for all autobiographical projects can be seen in their endeavours to make sense of historical facts, partial memorization and imagination. Narration together with re-memorization thus is understood as a means to sketch reality. Another word for this process is fabrication2 that views unreliable narration3 as a constitutive narrative device of all (auto)biographical works. This exciting venture becomes a complex, political act when authors invest in the bestowal of agency.4 My illustrative reading echoes these issues, especially as Mende Nazer’s award-winning book Slave: True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (2004) tells, or so the cover claims, “the true story of a girl’s 1

In this article, I follow Mary Besemeres and Maureen Perkins’ notion of life writing when I use ‘life writing’ as an umbrella term for autobiographical and biographical texts, see their editorial comments in the launching issue of the journal LifeWriting 1.1 (2004): vii–xii. 2 Wolfgang Iser uses the term ‘Fingieren’ (fabrication) to denote and analyse the connection between the imaginary and the real. For a detailed discussion of the relationship between anthropology and imagination from a hermeneutical, poststructuralist perspective, see the chapter “Die Funktionale Differenzierung der Akte: Selektion – Kombination – Selbstanzeige,” in Iser, Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (1991; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993): 24–51. 3 The study of unreliable narration has a long tradition in English and American literary studies, gaining particular importance as a narratological approach through Wayne C. Booth’s groundbreaking structuralist study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago U P , 1961). While Booth’s classic understanding of unreliable narration has become increasingly disputed, more and more critics argue for a cognitive approach to unreliable narration; see Tamar Yacobi, “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” Poetics Today 8 (1987): 335– 72, and Kathleen Wall, “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 18–42. Interestingly enough, James Phelan and Mary Martin’s taxonomy of unreliability aims to reinforce Booth’s definition: see, for example, “The Lesson of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethnics, and The Remains of the Day,” in Narratologies, ed. David Herman (Colombus: Ohio State U P , 1999): 88–109. Departing from the ‘classic’ understanding of unreliable narration, this article suggests reading unreliable narration as a cultural practice and as an important aesthetic dimension of transcultural literature in times of globalized modernity. For a detailed discussion of the theory of transcultural unreliable narration, see Sissy Helff’s “Orchestrating Transcultural Aesthetics through Narrative Unreliability,” in Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English 29 (Trier: W V T , 2007): 277–87. 4 In The Use of Autobiography, the editor Julia Swindells points out that it is imperative to note that autobiographical projects present means of gaining agency for artists by turning their voices from the ‘subjects of discourse’ into the ‘subjects in discourse’ (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995): 4–5.

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lost childhood and her fight for survival.” Mende Nazer was abducted from her Nuba village in Sudan and sold by slave traders at the age of twelve. She finally became an unpaid maid in the home of a Sudanese diplomat in London. After her escape from torment and her initial request for asylum in Britain (which was rejected), the launching of her book stirred masive public pressure, which saved Nazer from being sent back to Sudan. In this respect, the story of Nazer’s book shows how literature can sometimes reach beyond its usual sphere and interact directly with politics. This assumption is reinforced by the book’s puzzling publishing history; we have to keep in mind that Slave first appeared in German translation (2002) before its publication, a year later, in English. The text’s extraordinary journey might be explained by the forceful German human-rights campaigns which supported Nazer’s asylum case. This evocative mind-mapping explains why autobiographical studies feature prominently in the entire field of minority literatures.5 It is, in fact, in minority literatures that new subject positions are formulated in order to generate alternative (his)stories. And it is in these literatures, too, that authors often find the freedom to engage on an equal footing with traditions that have determined their past and still influence their present. Thanks to the increasing popularity of such life writings, critics within the field of minority literatures have endeavoured to distinguish various sub-genres of autobiographical writing, such as Gillian Whitlock’s approach to postcolonial life narratives, Susanna Egan’s take on genres of crises, and Miriam Fuchs’s study of life narratives and catastrophes.6 We have recently witnessed an exponential growth of life stories by refugees.7 As far as studies of life writing are concerned, the present essay proposes labelling these works ‘refugee life narratives’. Interestingly enough, many refugee life stories, especially these that recount the fate of refugees from ‘Third-World’ countries, challenge the genre of autobiography, because they 5

In this article, the term ‘minority literatures’ is used rather broadly to cover not only literature by ethnic minorities and immigrant writing but also women’s literature, slave narratives, and refugee life narrative. 6 See Gillian Whitlock’s fine study The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000), Susanna Egan’s Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1999), and Miriam Fuchs’s The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 2004). 7 In addition to Mende Nazer’s story, a great number of refugee life writings has been published recently, including Senait G. Mehari’s Feuerherz [Heart of Fire] (Munich: Droemer, 2004), Nura Abdi’s Tränen im Sand [Tears in the Sand] (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe 2003), Henriette Akofa’s Keine Zeit für Tränen [No Time for Tears] (Munich: Ullstein, 2002), Francis Bok’s Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003), and Waris Dirie’s Desert Flower (New York: Virago, 1998).

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are often produced by two authors. They are mostly told orally, and commonly need to be recorded and translated into English before they can be written down and finally worked into a narrative.8 Such tales, however, are particularly interesting, since they often combine, in a highly effective way, different traditions of life narration. Certainly, second authorship implies a further difficulty in the process of working life into literature, since not only language and narrative patterns have to be translated in an appropriate manner but the refugee’s experience of pain and loss, too, needs to be confronted and worked through before it can be put into perspective for a mainstream readership. Obviously, it takes great will and enormous courage to go through these painful experiences and memories over and over again until a story is completed. Not to forget that this procedure sometimes even involves the risk on the part of the narrator–protagonist (the refugee) of becoming visible, not only to the eyes of the common reader but also to the eyes of authorities. These considerations demonstrate that each text resonates with different trajectories, needs, and motivations. Whereas some stories are told by people who found a new home before they actually set out to narrate their story, other accounts are produced while people are in the process of applying for asylum. Such scenarios are particularly interesting, because they illustrate how texts and their publishing histories, on the one hand, directly reflect the political and social climate of countries people try to escape from and, on the other hand, depict the socio-political topography of host countries. With regard to Slave, it can be argued that Nazer’s testimony generates an alternative his/story representative of all Nuba refugees, in which contemporary, autobiographical, historical, and biographical realms are merged. Referring to different qualities of autobiographical writing, Tobias Döring comes to a similar conclusion: autobiographies […] are primarily performative texts: they are not just descriptive, but productive; in other words, they do things with words. What they are doing can 8

In the “Afterword” to Mende Nazer’s story, Damien Lewis, the co-author of Nazer’s life writing Slave, confirms this observation: “I had thought long and hard about how we get the best of the writing ahead of us [here referring to himself and Nazer]. Mende still only spoke basic English after a year living as a free person in London [‘living free’ refers to her escape from the Sudanese diplomat’s house]. I spoke almost no Arabic, and my Nuba was non-existent. At first, I considered working with an English–Arabic translator, but I knew that so much of Mende’s story was going to be deeply personal, difficult material to talk about. I knew that the key to her being able to tell me about her story from the heart lay in the closeness that would develop between the two of us. She would need to trust me with her most difficult, painful memories and fears.” Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis, Slave: True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and her Fight for Survival (London: Virago, 2004): 319–20. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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be characterised as self-formation by self-formulation (cf. Haselstein). Through telling his or her own life, the autobiographer therefore turns into the author of his or her self.9

The Importance of Ethnicity and Race in Refugee Life Narratives Refugee life narratives often invest a great deal in representing ethnicity and race as their predominant tropes, allowing readers to contextualize a refugee’s life story within a concrete moment in history and a specific political cartography. Indeed, it can be stated that ethnic biographical writing has become a fashionable mode for representing the fractured subjectivities of refugees in a globalized publishing market where books are often brought out in many languages without great delay. Nazer’s bestselling book is a case in point, where the extra-textual world has strong repercussions on the text, as indicated by the paratexts that it includes: “Afterword,” “Acknowledgements,” and “Helpful Addresses.” By introducing such paratextual elements the text translates a societal topography (including institutions, N G O s, and discourse) into narration. With the added list of political campaigns and important institutions, the narrative even takes the shape of a guidebook that provides useful information for those who find themselves at some point in their lives in a situation similar to that of Nazer. The way in which Slave presents its extra-literary sources is representative of many other published refugee stories.10 Thus it becomes clear that paratextual elements are intrinsic to the genre of refugee life narratives, where they provide the narrative space in which recent human-rights discourse might involuntarily act as a ‘narrative profiler’ generating new textual formulae and structural outlines for future refugee stories. These narrative devices, finally, might be effectively employed in asylum seekers’ ‘bids for asylum’. Without doubt, these are provocative assumptions, given the often equivocal nature of the testimonial situations narrated. Yet I would underscore the societal and ethical importance of the human-rights discourse implemented in the public sphere and the influence it can exert on recollective refugee discourse, and would accordingly align myself with Bhikhu Parekh: The idea of human rights represents a great historical achievement. For the first time in history it provides a universally accessible moral and political language in which to articulate our shared concerns and differences. In doing so it builds moral

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Tobias Döring, “Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography,” Wasafri 21.2 (2006): 71. See, for example, Mehari’s Feuerherz [Heart of Fire], Abdi’s Tränen im Sand [Tears in the Sand], Akofa’s Keine Zeit für Tränen [No Time for Tears] and Dirie’s Desert Flower. 10

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bonds between human beings in different parts of the world and helps create an awareness of our shared humanity.11

Claims for a shared humanity and universal human values are also central to Nazer’s story, since her life writing presents an ostensibly authentic black refugee voice that negotiates global human-rights issues against the backdrop of a moving personal testimony. When we attempt to understand the full range of connotation in this work, we are recounting the events of the narrator–protagonist’s life or, to be more precise, her psychological development, her quest for recognition, and her journey from innocence to experience. Nazer’s representation of her experiences of becoming and being a slave propels the plot in such a way that it skilfully combines all these elements in one highly effective, fabricated narrative universe. And this, in a nutshell, describes the making of an extraordinary, powerful message.12 The text’s message is further intensified by a narrative perspective that tells Nazer’s entire story through the discursive lenses of race and ethnicity. It goes without saying that in order to read such an intense testimony a critical sensibility is indispensable that pays particular attention to the refugee’s personal story while being aware that such victim discourses, as Achille Mbembe points out, has become an important trope within postcolonial discourse in the African context13 and might sometimes even be utilized for implementing further discrimination. In this respect, the connections between the narrators’ external narrative motivation and the strategy of fictionalizing experiences and memories (as shown in a deliberate use of specific motifs) should be considered central to the study of Nazer’s text and the genre of refugee life narratives. Accordingly, this article seeks to offer a ‘balanced reading’ of the ethnic and racial markers represented. These markers become a topos within the narrative 11

Bhikhu Parekh, “Finding a Proper Place for Human Rights,” in Displacement, Asylum, Migration, ed. Kate E. Tunstall (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 17. 12 Obviously, there are many prominent examples underlining the complex connection between socio-political worlds and imaginary realms. Salman Rushie’s The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1998), for example, stirred massive protest in the Islamic world, where the Ayatollah in Iran pronounced a fatwa against Rushie on charges of blasphemy, threatening his life and his freedom of expression. 13 In his lucid article “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Achille Mbembe reflects on the postcolonial paradigm of victimization in the African context: “The possibility of a properly philosophical reflection on the African condition having been set aside, only the question of raw power remained: Who could capture it? How was its enjoyment legitimated? In justifying the right to sovereignty and self-determination and in struggling to wrest power from the colonial regime, two central categories were mobilized: on the one hand, the figure of the African as a victimized and wounded subject, and on the other, the assertion of the African’s cultural uniqueness”; Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 251.

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development of a genre, as well as being decisive indicators in asylum issues. Taking my cue from the work of Julia Swindells, I will also discuss to what extent, and at what cost, refugee life narratives install agency for artists by turning their voices from being the ‘subjects of discourse’ into being the ‘subjects in discourse’.14

Uses and Abuses of Authorized Narrative Positions Like all (auto)biographical texts, refugee life stories claim to represent the social world and the true trajectories of their narrator–protagonists, thus essentially seeking to pursue the outlines of the ‘autobiographic pact’.15 These texts thus claim that they always and only represent individual behaviour patterns and signifiers such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class in an ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ way. At the same time, refugee life writings often serve specific individual political agendas: namely, as in Mende Nazer’s case, to narrate a life story in order to get political asylum granted. Nazer’s biography Slave, in fact, is a prime example of a refugee life narrative that resonates with all these dilemmas when it seeks to construct reliable refugee experiences based mainly on racial persecution. The narrative’s powerful message, then, is generated by a unique narrative formula that astutely coordinates form, content, and style in order to maximize an emotional reading experience. In this way, the text creates the greatest effect out of both discursive positions. Consequently, Nazer, on the one hand, works with the ‘subject of discourse’ in order to make her own hard-luck story known to a wider audience; on the other, she uses the ‘subject in discourse’ to advocate rights for women and refugees. Nazer and her co-author Damien Lewis are fully aware of the gaps and discrepancies that emerge in the book through the combination of both discursive positions. The question, however, remains whether Slave can be seen as a selfrighteous attempt at instrumentalizing public discourse for individual purposes only. Nazer’s book exemplifies the complexity and ambiguity of the very genre of refugee life narratives, especially in the text’s extra-literary performance. It goes without saying that these extra-literary motivations, trying to combine an authentic story with individual needs and political motivations, impinge deeply 14

Swindells, The Use of Autobiography, 4–5. The ‘autobiographical pact’ describes a literary convention which suggests that the sujet d’énonciation: i.e. the novelist whose name surfaces on the cover of the novel, and the sujet d’énoncé, the narrator who is part of the novel itself, should be identical. For a more detailed discussion of the ‘autobiographical pact’ see, for instance, Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 15

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on the story-line. One could even argue that refugee life narratives tell us more about the political laws of asylum and the corresponding activities of humanrights organizations than about the actual life of a refugee. Such assumptions, however thought-provoking they might be, remain matters which cannot be scrutinized to the critic’s full satisfaction. Nevertheless, to be able to approach the political performance of a refugee life narrative, it is vital to provide a solid terminological starting-point. So, whom do we actually call a refugee? Drawing on extensive discussions on asylum in the social science, the term ‘refugee’ is often used in relation to the 1951 U N Convention (extended in the 1967 Protocol).16 In this document, three central features serve to determine the status of refugees: first, a refugee is a displaced person outside his/her country of nationality. Accordingly, people who remain within the national borders of their country do not fall under the ambit of those requiring protection and assistance. Secondly, a refugee cannot return home, because s /he faces the reality or the risk of persecution. And thirdly, the persecution a refugee faces is due to political opinions held, race, religion, nationality or membership in a particular social group. While the definition according to the these criteria can be related to the Convention’s origin in the early Cold-War period, more recently the adequacy of defining a refugee in terms of these three markers has come under fire. As a consequence, critics have started to refer to refugees within their own country as “internally displaced persons.”17 Andrew Shacknove argues that the crossing of international boundaries does not necessarily generate refugees, so that in this respect refugeehood must be considered as “conceptually […] unrelated to migration.”18 Instead, refugees are individuals “whose basic needs are unprotected by their country of origin, who have no remaining recourse other than to seek international restitution of their needs, and who are so situated that international assistance is possible.”19 Following Matthew J. Gibney’s definition of refugees (being much broader than the U N ’s, in that it includes victims of generalized states of violence and disastrous events disturbing public life, such as natural disasters, along with individual persecution), the present essay refers to people as refugees if they are “in need of a new state of residence, either temporarily or permanently, because if forced to return home or

16 For a detailed guide to the Convention’s history and to international law pertaining to refugees, see Gay S. Goodwin–Gill, The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1996). 17 See Roberta Cohen & Francis M. Deng, Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of International Displacement (Washington D C : Brookings Institution, 1998). 18 Andrew Shacknove, “Who Is a Refugee?” Ethics 95.2 (1985): 283. 19 Quoted from Sacknove, “Who Is a Refugee?” 277.

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remain where they are, they would […] be persecuted or seriously jeopardize their physical security or vital subsistence needs.”20

Constructing Truth As already suggested in my introduction, Slave presents a slick combination of well-known strands of life writing – prominent narrative patterns of ethnographic fiction, distinctively stylistic devices of life writings dealing with crises and catastrophes, and the characteristically generic modes of slave narratives.21 While ethnographic patterns highlight the authenticity and reliability of the content, the storytelling devices of the slave narratives remain the most powerful in the overall composition of the text.22 This might well explain why modern slave narratives have recently been gaining more and more importance within the field of life writing; in this connection, Nazer’s descriptions of her life as a slave can be read either as a narrative reconstruction of personal recollections or as a palimpsestic fusion of individual and collective memory. Like many slave narratives, Nazer’s story also works within the narrative framework of traditional slave testimonies written before the American Civil War.23 In her notable study Witnessing Slavery, Frances Smith Foster describes and analyses four main narrative phases in such slave texts: First comes the loss of innocence, which is objectified through the development of an awareness of what it means to be a slave. This can be compared to the descent from perfection or mortification. The mortification process includes purgation, for 20 Matthew J. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004): 7. 21 Another example of a slave narrative of the twenty-first century is Francis Bok’s Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America (London: St Martin’s, 2004); early examples are Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written By Himself (1794; Norton Critical Edition; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001), Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (1845; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1967), and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Written by Herself (1861; Miami F L : Mnemosyne, 1969). 22 It is interesting to note that in the recent study Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1999), Kevin Bales states that there are more people enslaved worldwide today than during the ‘golden age’ of the transatlantic slave trade. 23 I am very grateful to my student Robyn Handel, whose critical remarks and suggestions enhanced this article.

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as the slave learns the meaning of slavery, he also tries to purge himself of those elements that would facilitate enslavement. Second is the realization of alternatives to bondage and the formulation of a resolve to be free. This decision begins the ascent to the ideal, or invigoration. The resolution to quit slavery is, in effect, a climax to a conversion experience. The third phase is the escape. Whether it occurs between two sentences or forms the largest portion of the narrative. It is part of the struggle to overcome evil. The interest at this point is in the details, the pitfalls and obstacles, the sufferings and moments of bravery encountered in the process of achieving freedom. Although the first attempt sometimes ends in capture, the outcome is never in doubt. The narrative, after all, was written by a freeman [freewoman]. The fourth phase is that of freedom obtained. It is the arrival at the City of God or the New Jerusalem and it corresponds to the jubilation period of ancient ritual.24

Nazer’s text is also structured and organized in four phases. In accordance with this structure, Nazer strategically memorizes, in the opening passage of her life writing, her idyllic childhood in the Nuba Mountains: When I was born, my father chose to call me Mende. In our Nuba language, a Mende is the name of a gazelle – the most beautiful and graceful animal in the Nuba Mountains. (9)

It seems as if the loss of innocence and her conversion experience are dramatized and are deliberately set into perspective for an uninformed readership. Nazer’s encounter with the disturbing and inhuman system of slavery and its profound psychological impact on individuals are reflected in repetitive motifs in various incidents, such as Mende’s being deprived of her name by her so-called master, Rahab, who simply calls her “yebit”, a “girl worthy of no name” (133). By employing personal story elements in the description of widely known demoralizing practices, Slave establishes its authenticity as an autobiographical eyewitness account of slavery. However, besides these writing techniques, which are ingrained in the genre of the slave narrative,25 Slave vividly stirs up the catastrophic dimensions26 of the narrator–protagonist’s life and thus points to moments of deep personal crises.27 Yet I am particularly apprehensive of using ‘crisis’ as a broad term in extrapolation from specific situations of catastrophic dimensions. The term ‘catastrophe’ will be thus used for situations that 24 Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1994): 85. 25 Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery, 4. 26 See, for instance, Fuchs, The Text is Myself. 27 See Egan’s Mirror Talk.

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occur rapidly, with life-threatening effects on the narrator, such as indicated in the prologue of Slave, in which Nazer recollects the violent raid on her village in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan (1–5). “Mujahidin!” my father yelled. “Arab raiders! The Mujahidin are in the village!” I still didn’t understand what was happening and I was frozen with fear […] I saw the raiders cutting people’s throats, their curved daggers glinting in the firelight. I cannot describe to you all the scenes I saw as we ran through the village. No one should ever have to witness the things I saw that night. (2–3)

In recollecting this violent, terrifying situation, ethnic markers are used conspicuously to illustrate Nazer’s story. Accordingly, her main narrative concentrates throughout the book on establishing difference between Arab Sudanese and her own cultural, religious and tribal heritage. They [the Arab raiders] had wild, staring eyes, long scraggy beards and they wore ripped, dirty clothes. They brandished their swords at us. They looked completely different from the men in our tribe. They had blocked the only obvious escape route. I could see terrified villagers running ahead of us towards their trap. As they caught sight of the ambush, they started screaming and turned back, trying to find some other way to escape. There was complete chaos and terror and the sound of gunfire. (3)

In this forthright comparison between different ethnic groups, the text introduces a fierce anti-Arab rhetoric that culminates in the xenophobic (islamophobic) stereotype of the evil and aggressive Arab. There is more, however; for Nazer establishes her individual story and highlights her rightful claim to asylum by playing a cultural-essentialist card. She depicts herself as being oppressed as a woman and a black Muslim. Accordingly, Nazer reflects on her initial victim position as a Muslim Nuba woman in Sudan. The text suggests that her disastrous situation emerges from, and reflects, incompatible cultural and ethnic behaviour patterns, which are again based mainly on the racist ideologies of Arab Sudanese Muslim society: I am a Muslim and she [Rahab, for whom Mende worked in Sudan] is a Muslim, I used to think to myself. We are both of the same God […] the more I thought about it, the more I realised that all my oppressors had been Muslims. The raiders had all shouted “Allahu Akhbar” when they had attacked our village. The slave trader Abdul Azzim had been a Muslim. And now Rahab and her family. All these people believed themselves to be good Muslims. Yet they had killed and raped and tortured and enslaved the Nuba people from my tribe, who were all Muslims too. (164)

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Nazer’s emotionally dense exploration of a Sudanese cultural and political landscape, serves, in its obviousl address to Western readers, as a quasi-anthropological introduction to life in Sudan. Echoing Homi Bhabha’s ideas on how racialized perceptions affect the ways in which individuals see themselves and are publicly perceived, the text suggests that the stereotyped representations of Nazer’s family and her tribe, which stand in sharp contrast to the images she provides of the Sudanese Arabs, form the basis of her self-identification as a slave and later a refugee. In The Location of Culture, Bhabha convincingly argues, by drawing on the work of the Martinican critic–psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, that skin as the key signifier of cultural and racial difference in the stereotype, is the most visible of fetishes, recognised as ‘common knowledge’ in a range of cultural, political, historical discourses, and plays a public part in the racial drama that is enacted every day in colonial societies.28

Transferring this idea to the difficult situations Sudanese society faces at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one might feel inclined to argue that Nazer’s book generates a refugee identity that draws heavily on an essentialized combination of a tribal heritage, skin-colour, and religion. This becomes narrative reality when characters like Rabha state “Islam isn’t for black people like you [Mende]” (164). The ostensibly ill-fitting connecting between Nazer’s skin-colour and her religion triggers and further propels Nazer’s conflict in the book. While introducing this complex Sudanese reality where cultural difference emerges as a main source of conflict, the book suggests a clash between Arab civilization and the ‘rest’ of the world in which the unifying concept of a Moslem brotherhood, the Umma, has lost its significance. Nazer’s recollection of the catastrophic dimensions of the protagonist–narrator’s life suggests that we need to perceive her literary project as a performative response to the refugee experiences that are deeply ingrained in her psyche. Accordingly, the text intimates that Nazer is galvanized into telling her story because she was exposed to life-threatening racial persecution, expulsion from her homeland, and severe, gender-specific exploitation: I chose to speak out, and to write this book because I know that there are so many other women, girls and boys still enslaved in Sudan. A few of them I know – Asha, Katuna, Nanu – remain friends. How could I not speak out if, by doing so, there is at least a chance that the scourge of slavery would be removed from my longsuffering country? (310)

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Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 78.

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Through this book, the ‘I’ of the protagonist–narrator refers to various unheard refugee voices, not just to Mende Nazer’s but also to those of her enslaved companions. Nazer sums up her experiences about telling her life story: Each time I told my story it became clearer to me that people around the world find the existence of modern-day slavery shocking and appalling. Most can hardly believe that slavery truly exists today, in the 21st century. But then they hear my story. (333)

Reading Nazer’s slave narrative as a true account, written in freedom and from memory, we can see how it seeks to promote its intention of moving the reader to abolitionist action. The didactic tone of Nazer’s voice is obviously addressing an uninformed audience29 when the author depicts her struggle for asylum in the U K . Throughout this plot-line, the dimensions of asylum policies are represented in an intriguingly objective way: Under the European-wide asylum laws, I would have to stay and fight my case here in the U K . If I tried to go to Germany, the government there would be duty bound to return me to the U K , the country where I first claimed asylum. (307)

The ‘instructional’ dimension of the book is designed to inform readers, in addition to facts of slavery, cultural issues, and racial discrimination, about the consequences asylum seekers might face when running into trouble with politics and international laws. Reading this passage in the light of Swindell’s arguments, it becomes clear that Nazer’s voice quite consciously generates both the subject in discourse and the subject of discourse. In this respect, Nazer’s text suggests, as argued earlier, that the genre of refugee life writing unfolds its full narrative potential only when both discourses go hand in hand, thus fuelling each other. Nazer’s text even reflexively mentions this issue in its “Afterword” when Mende Nazer recollects the words of her asylum lawyer Alison Stanley in the following way: I’m confident they will change their mind, Mende. They’ve clearly made a very big, very stupid mistake. And with your book being published and all the media coverage over your asylum refusal, they’ll realise that. (309)

And yet, if one compares the German and the English editions of Nazer’s book, one striking difference can be found in the publisher’s representation of the fictional and factual quality of the text. While the German edition opens with the remark that in Mende Nazer’s testimony, names and places have been changed for her protection, this paragraph is inserted into the main narrative in the English edition. Nevertheless, the English text includes (again in direct 29

Foster, Witnessing Slavery, xxx.

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comparison to the German edition) an extended passage on how the British journalist Damien Lewis fashioned Nazer’s life into ‘fiction’: Of course, no story is ever complete: Mende’s has been through a creative process of selection, condensation and story writing, such that it may be read in an accessible, compelling form. Names have been changed and locations altered, for obvious security reasons. Some scenes and parts of the narrative have been partfictionalised in order to protect identities, and to aid the narrative flow of the story […] The final product – Slave – remains an incredibly detailed account of Mende’s life story. In it I hope I have captured the voice of a young Nuba child and then woman in a way that is authentic, compelling and real. (322)

To see refugee life narratives as fiction does not solve the problems emerging from ostensibly authentic life stories which invest a great deal in extensive stereotyping as we find it in Nazer’s harsh representations of the Arab Sudanese people. And critics might find themselves in even greater difficulties if it is on the basis of such stereotyping that the respective claims to asylum are negotiated. Even these few sketchy remarks on the genre of refugee life narratives should have made it clear that as long as asylum laws and the approval of requests for asylum are based on specific notions of ‘authenticity’, new versions of a previously told ‘refugee success-story’ will be narrated. A refugee story thus combines fractured individual realities with performative responses to global and local human-rights campaigns and asylum laws, all of which are creatively embroidered with fictionalized story elements. It goes without saying that such a compelling ‘staged authenticity’30 of persecuted people necessarily represents the refugee and his / her life story in an intriguingly unreliable mode. This is why I call refugee life narratives a disturbingly powerful genre, because their generic patterns tell us more about the ‘closed system’ of asylum in host countries than about the actual ‘subjects in discourse’.

WORKS CITED Abdi, Nura. Tränen im Sand (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe 2003). Akofa, Henriette. Keine Zeit für Tränen (Munich: Ullstein, 2002). Bales, Kevin. Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: U of California P , 1999) Besemeres, Mary, & Maureen Perkins. “Editorial,” LifeWriting 1.1 (2004): vii–xii. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Bloch, Alice. “A New Era or More of the Same? Asylum Policy in the U K ,” Journal of Refugee Studies 13.1 (2000): 29–42. 30

See Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989).

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Bok, Francis. Escape from Slavery: The True Story of My Ten Years in Captivity and My Journey to Freedom in America (London: St Martin’s, 2004). Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1961). Chimni, B.S. “Globalization, Humanitarianism and the Erosion of Refugee Protection,” Journal of Refugee Studies 13.3 (2000): 243–64. Cohen, Roberta, & Francis M. Deng. Masses in Flight: The Global Crisis of International Displacement (Washington D C : Brookings Institution, 1998). Dirie, Waris. Desert Flower (New York: Virago, 1998). Döring, Tobias. “Edward Said and the Fiction of Autobiography,” Wasafiri 21.2 (2006): 71–78. Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Benjamin Quarles (1845; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1967). Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P , 1999). Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written By Himself (1794; Norton Critical Edition; New York & London: W.W. Norton, 2001). Fuchs, Miriam. The Text is Myself: Women’s Life Writing and Catastrophe (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 2004). Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1994). Gibney, Matthew J. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2004). Goodwin–Gill, Gay S. The Refugee in International Law (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1996). Helff, Sissy. “Afrika – Europa: Kulturlandschaften in Bewegung,” Eins – Entwicklungspolitik (18 October 2007): 36–42. ——. “Mende Nazers Roman Sklavin: Eine Leseprobe,” Epd-Entwicklungspolitik (7 April 2003): K6–K7. ——. “Orchestrating Transcultural Aesthetics Through Narrative Unreliability,” in Proceedings of the Conference of the German Association of University Teachers of English 29 (Trier: W V T , 2007): 277–87. ——, & Julie Woletz. “Chapter 10: Narrating Euro-African Life in Digital Space,” in Story Circle: Digital Storytelling Around the World, ed. John Hartley & Kelly McWilliam (Oxford & New York: Wiley–Blackwell, 2008, forthcoming). Herman, David, ed. Narratologies (Colombus: Ohio State U P , 1999). Iser, Wolfgang. Das Fiktive und das Imaginäre (1991; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993). Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – Written by Herself (Boston, 1861; Miami F L : Mnemosyne, 1969). Kumar Rajaram, Prem. “Humanitarianism and Representations of the Refugee,” Journal of Refugee Studies 15.3 (2002): 247–64. Lal, Victor. “From Reporter to Refugee: The Politics of Asylum in Great Britain,” Journal of Refugee Studies 10.1 (1997): 79–90. Lejeune, Philippe. Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975). MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1989). Mbembe, Achille. “African Modes of Self-Writing,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 239–73. Mehari, Senait G. Feuerherz (Munich: Droemer, 2004). Nazer, Mende, & Damien Lewis. Slave: The True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and her Fight for Survival (London: Virago, 2004).

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——. Sklavin, tr. Karin Dufner (Munich: Schneekluth, 2002). Parekh, Bhikhu. “Finding a Proper Place for Human Rights,” in Displacement, Asylum, Migration, ed. Kate E. Tunstall (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 17–43. Phelan James, & Mary Martin. “The Lesson of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethnics, and The Remains of the Day,” in Narratologies, ed. David Herman (Colombus: Ohio State U P , 1999): 88–109. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1998). Shacknove, Andrew. “Who Is a Refugee?” Ethics 95.2 (1985): 274–84. Swindells, Julia, ed. The Use of Autobiography (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995). Tunstall, Kate E., ed. Displacement, Asylum, Migration (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004) Wall, Kathleen. “The Remains of the Day and Its Challenges to Theories of Unreliable Narration,” Journal of Narrative Technique 24 (1994): 18–42. Whitlock, Gillian. The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (London: Cassell, 2000). Yacobi, Tamar. “Fictional Reliability as a Communicative Problem,” Poetics Today 8 (1987): 335–72.

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Shared Paradoxes in Namibian and German History — Lucia Engombe’s Kind Nr. 95

ABSTRACT: In the wake of colonial conquest, postcolonial movements, and contemporary transcultural discourses, the tales of refugees and migrants with divided identitary loyalties have gained increasing prominence. Against this background, this essay discusses a memoir by Lucia Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, as a valuable historical source that provides personalized views on historical developments to illustrate how political decisions affect the lives of people who are neither involved in making these decisions nor in a position to change them. Raised in both Namibia and the German Democratic Republic, Engombe must reconcile her Namibian origin with her German upbringing, but she also has to emancipate herself from the dogmatic manichaeism of socialist ideology. Her story serves as a parable of the impact of totalitarian ideology, registering sensitively the G D R ’s deviations from its own standards and moral codes.

I

the life of Lucia Pandulenikalunga Engombe presents an extraordinary story. Born in 1972 at the Old Farm in Lusaka, Zambia,1 her first recollections relate to the Nyango refugee camp in the north west of Zambia, where her family moved when Lucia was two. In 1979, a group of eighty Namibian children was brought to the G D R , the German 1

N MANY RESPECTS,

Constance Kenna, Homecoming (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1999): 74.

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Democratic Republic, where they were to be raised by Namibian and German caregivers and teachers to become the new Namibian elite. Lucia, aged seven, was one of them. The decision to send Namibian children to the G D R followed an agreement between the East German government and S W A P O , the South West African People’s Organization, who fought against the South African occupation and for an independent Namibia. Upon her arrival in Germany, Lucia Engombe had no idea that she would be spending the rest of her childhood and most of her teenage years in Germany. When she returned to Namibia after German reunification, she was confronted with a mother tongue she could not speak properly; with a family she had never met before; with a strange country that was supposed to be her home; and with a culture whose codes of conduct and values Lucia found unintelligible. In surroundings whose inhabitants made derisive comments about her such as “the one from Germany,” Lucia slowly learned to come to terms with her upbringing. She set off to find out more about her family, only to discover that her personal story was tightly interwoven with the political history of Namibia. Engombe’s book Kind Nr. 95 [Child No. 95] (2005) is an autobiographical account of her life in Germany, and of her return to Namibia. In other respects, Lucia’s life shares a number of features and experiences with those stories of migrancy that seem to have become characteristic of the globalizing world of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. In the wake of colonial conquest, postcolonial movements, and the contemporary transcultural discourses of both the public realm and academia, the tales of refugees and migrants whose identity is made up of loyalties toward different places and cultural heritages, have gained more prominent recognition. Fiction writers like Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Peter Carey, Hanif Kureishi, and Michael Ondaatje both embrace and problematize the pluralism of negotiable identities and cultural loyalties. In the present public discourse of ‘the West’, a cosmopolitan understanding of our world is being celebrated, whereas a migrant’s deep-rooted belief in the superiority of his/her original culture or religion is perceived as a delusory and dangerous notion, yet also as a – sometimes, to some degree – understandable result of cultural estrangement and failed integration. However, the mother countries of the refugees and migrants are normally to be found in places which are derogatorily termed the ‘Third World’, while the countries to which they immigrate claim to represent the ‘First World’. The hierarchy is clear: epistemological power lies in the hands of those who benevolently allow the migrants to take refuge. This notion also shaped the attitude of the G D R (which technically belonged to the ‘Second World’) towards the Namibian children. The the story of Lucia Engombe is thus informed by a number of features frequently resulting from migration,

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exile, and estrangement, such as: multilingualism; a problematic sense of cultural belonging; the notion of being (seen as) an ‘Other’; depression; and an acute sensitivity towards the host society’s deviations from its own standards and moral codes. Lucia Engombe was forced to reconcile two highly different ways of life – twice. She also had to emancipate herself from the manichaeism of the socialist ideology in whose world-view she was raised. Therefore, Kind Nr. 95 is not only relevant because it narrates a specific individual fate; it is important because it offers an autobiographical parable illustrating the ideologies behind the positions adopted by the G D R government and the S W A P O leaders with regard to potentially ‘disloyal’ subjects. In postmodern historiographical and literary research, (auto)biographical narratives and memoirs have come to be regarded as valuable historical sources that provide personalized views on historical developments. Kind Nr. 95 is one of these memoirs that offers a subjective account of how political decisions affect the lives of people who are neither involved in making these decisions nor in a position to change them. But Lucia Engombe’s story is not only a story of suffering. As a true descendant of the slave narratives published in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Kind Nr. 95 is first and foremost an account of identity-formation. It outlines the author’s personal development, and delineates the intellectual and emotional processes by which Lucia Engombe achieved maturity. Since the era of the slave trade, autobiographies have been a prevalent narrative mode of the African diaspora in Europe and North America. Autobiographical works by writers of African descent often served to pave the way for social, political, and legal developments. Whether these are the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, and Harriet Jacobs, the memoirs of W.E.B. Du Bois and Joseph Casely–Hayford, or the fictionalized accounts of the lives of Richard Wright and Malcom X, (auto)biographical texts have always accompanied, and often promoted, social transformations. Moreover, they offer unique depictions both of the writers’ mother countries and, if the authors had experienced some form of emigration or abduction, critical delineations of their places of exile. As a consequence, Britain and the U S A have treated these black autobiographies as part of their literary and cultural heritage, and have integrated them into their university curricula. Life-writing by African-German writers, however, still leads a somewhat neglected existence in Germany. As an attempt at overcoming this marginalization, my essay will look at Lucia Engombe’s book, which was written in collaboration with the German author Peter Hilliges. Engombe’s story fits in with other (auto)biographies of both Africans who migrated to Germany and Germans with African ancestors.

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In the past decade, a number of these African-German voices – among them Hans–Jürgen Massaquoi’s Destined to Witness (1999), Senait Mehari’s Feuerherz (2004), and Harald Gerunde’s Eine von uns (2000)2 – have contributed to the debate on Germany’s national identity, and have demonstrated that transcultural and postcolonial issues are becoming increasingly relevant in this country. Each of these (auto)biographies gives a different impression of what it means to be a German with African ancestors. Engombe’s account is singular because it is the only biography set in East Germany, as the German Democratic Republic (G D R ) was informally called. Public discussions that deal with the relations between Germany and African countries in the second half of the twentieth century usually tend to focus on the policy of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Academic research has acknowledged that different ideologies informed the Africa-related policies of the two Germanies in the era of the Cold War, and research on the particular aspects of the relations between African countries and the G D R has been conducted.3 However, Engombe’s autobiography is the first book to offer a transcultural delineation of what it means to grow up in the G D R as a Namibian girl. Also, it is intended to attract a general audience, as it was brought out by a non-academic publishing house. Before I proceed to discuss some of the transcultural and politico-ideological subject-matter of the book, I would like to sum up Lucia Engombe’s life as depicted in her autobiography. Engombe was brought to the G D R in 1979, and stayed there for eleven years. From 1979 to 1985, Lucia lived in a S W A P O children’s home in Bellin, a small village in Mecklenburg (a region in the north of East Germany which is now part of the federal state of Mecklenburg–West Pomerania). She belonged to the group of the first eighty, pre-primary Namibian children to be granted refuge in East Germany. In the course of the 1980s, about three hundred and forty other Namibian children were sent to the G D R .4 The children’s home in Bellin was a spacious manor house known as Bellin Castle, which had been built by a trading family from Hamburg in 1909. Before it became a home for the Namibian children, the S E D (Socialist Unity 2 Hans–Jürgen Massaquoi, Destined to Witness (New York: William Morrow, 1999); Senait Mehari, Feuerherz (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 2004); Harald Gerunde, Eine von uns (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2000). 3 See Ernst Hillebrand, Das Afrika-Engagement der D D R (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987); Ulrich Post & Frank Sandvoss, Die Afrikapolitik der D D R (Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Afrikakunde 43; Hamburg: Institut für Afrikakunde, 1982); Hans–Joachim Döring, “Es geht um unsere Existenz”: Die Politik der D D R gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Mosambik und Äthiopien (Berlin: Links, 1999); Ulf Engel & Robert Kappel, Germany’s Africa Policy Revisited: Interests, Images and Incrementalism (Münster: L I T , 2006). 4 Kenna, Homecoming, 9.

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Party of Germany) used it as a schooling facility for its leaders.5 The house was completely surrounded by a fence, and was further protected by a gatekeeper who controlled the entrance around the clock. In Bellin, the children were taken care of by both German and Namibian caregivers. While the German Kindergärtnerinnen were “responsible for teaching the children the German language and customs [... in order to] prepare them for the German school system,”6 the Namibian caregivers were to “keep the children in touch with their own culture and mother tongue. They spoke Oshiwambo with the children and practised the Namibian Kampflieder [songs for the struggle] with them.”7 In 1981, Lucia, along with the other six- and sevenyear-old children, started attending the P O S (Polytechnische Oberschule – the standard G D R school consisting of ten grades) in Zehna, a village not far from Bellin. Although German children attended the same school, the Namibians were taught in separate classes. Their (German) teachers used a slightly altered G D R curriculum, which was enhanced with S W A P O -approved information on Namibia and S W A P O ’s struggle for independence. The tightly organized daily activities of the Namibians included the cleaning of their rooms and work in the grounds and in the kitchen, as well as paramilitary training, political lessons, manoeuvres, and regular roll-calls on the parade ground, during which they were to be prepared for the struggle for independence. They were raised to be disciplined, well-behaved, and industrious, and were encouraged to strive for academic achievement. Their political lessons and their military training in particular served to indoctrinate the children, who were meant to become loyal S W A P O supporters. In August 1985, Lucia was one of nearly sixty Namibian children to be moved from Bellin to Staßfurt, a small industrial city in what was to become the federal state of Saxony–Anhalt. The children had completed either grade 4 or grade 3 at the P O S in Zehna and were now housed in the Schule der Freundschaft (School of Friendship) in Staßfurt, which was originally built for Mozambican students. The daily programme did not differ much from what the children had been used to in Bellin, although acquaintances with Mozambican teenagers made their spare time much more interesting. But couples had to form in secret, since relationships between Namibian girls and Mozambican boys were disapproved of. When one of Lucia’s fellow students got pregnant,

5 6 7

Kenna, Homecoming, 11. Homecoming, 19. Homecoming, 19.

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she was forced to abort her child,8 an event which considerably weakened Lucia’s belief in the infallible righteousness of S W A P O and its policy. Before this incident, Lucia had already been confronted with several ridiculous contradictions and injustices which did not seem to comply with the image that S W A P O had created of itself. Like all fundamentalist ideologies, the socialist concept as propagated by both the G D R and S W A P O divided the world into good and evil. S W A P O , of course, was good, hence always right. Critique of the policy of the organization was considered high treason, undermining the struggle for liberation. When the representative of S W A P O in Bellin, a man called Teacher Jonas, raped one of the girls in his custody, his victim and her friends, including Lucia, were too afraid to report this assault. Torn between the respect they were taught to feel for their teachers and the knowledge that he had committed a crime, they decided to remain silent, and admitted only that the girl had been beaten.9 It was part of S W A P O ideology to influence and control political education as well as clearly private matters. Both the Namibian and the German caregivers and teachers expected the children to follow orders unquestioningly. The children’s upbringing was generally characterized by a lack of empathy and a well-meaning but condescending ignorance of their individual needs. Some of the teachers and Kindergärtnerinnen, however, tried to give the children the love and emotional support they needed. Some caregivers invited children to their homes, and some Namibians visited members of their Patenbrigade.10 The S W A P O representative had to approve of all of these visits. Individually established contacts with other Germans were subject to the strictest supervision, and were usually prevented. Only in what was to become the Namibians’ last year in the G D R did their educators slacken the reins. When the teenagers eventually received permission to stroll through the city on their own, and to visit youth clubs, they were confronted with the rising xenophobia in the ‘new states’. In 1989, the world outside of the Schule der Freundschaft had begun to change, yet the Namibian children hardly noticed the political developments, since they still lived their lives more or less in isolation from the rest of the East German population. What they did learn, however, was that S W A P O had won 8

Lucia Engombe, Kind Nr. 95 (Berlin: Ullstein, 2005): 203. All translations from the German are my own.. 9 Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 146–47. 10 Literally ‘godparents’ brigade’, a Patenbrigade was a group of industrial or agricultural workers who visited the children at school in order to introduce them to patterns of production. In the G D R , every school class had its own Patenbrigade. The children also visited their Patenbrigade at its place of work – for example, in order to celebrate Labour Day with them.

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the thirty-year struggle for independence. The first free and democratic elections in Namibia were scheduled for November 1989, and in March 1990, the S W A P O leader Sam Nujoma became the first president of an independent Namibia. Because of the end of the struggle, and because neither the last G D R government nor the administration of the reunited Germany was willing to take further charge of the Namibian children and teenagers, their repatriation to their mother country was organized in only a few months. The ‘G D R children’ (as the Namibians had begun to call themselves) had even less time to prepare their resettlement – they were given notice that they were to return to Namibia only a few weeks ahead of their departure. In August 1990, more than four hundred ‘G D R children’ were flown to Namibia; many of them had never set foot in their country of ethnic origin before. Back in Namibia, Lucia managed to re-establish contact with her sisters and her brother, but failed to build up a relationship with her parents. Since she was also unable to get used to life in the rural area, she started attending the D O S W (Deutsche Oberschule Windhoek – German Public High School in Windhoek) where she completed her A-levels in 1994. She returned to Germany twice: after finishing her schooling, she worked as an au pair in Ravensburg, and, in 1996, she began an apprenticeship at an advertising company in Fürth, Bavaria, but did not complete her training.11 She returned to Namibia in 1997 and studied to become a journalist. Only after the death of her mother in 1998 did she begin to conduct research into her life and the fate of her family. The autobiography resulting from her research shows in an exemplary way how political and ideological forces form, and inform, aspects of private life, such as one’s relationship with one’s parents and the development of moral awareness during childhood. It further illustrates the impact of totalitarian ideology on the individual. Against this background, my essay focuses on the means by which S W A P O tried to raise the children to become loyal S W A P O supporters, and it examines how the kids responded to being ideologically manipulated. These points of discussion not only serve to examine an individual story of identity-formation within the context of a shared episode of Namibian and German history. In a more general respect, Lucia Engombe’s life illustrates in a highly vivid and emphatic way that one of the basic dilemmas of every totalitarian ideology is the gap between propaganda and social reality. Characteristic of dictatorships is the breach that separates theoretical ideological claims from the multi-dimensionality and complexity of daily life, and which informs both S W A P O ’s mode of response to criticism from among its own supporters and the (educational) policy of the G D R . The sensitive and ob11

Kenna, Homecoming, 74.

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jective approach to the fact that different people respond in different ways to obvious contradictions between theoretical socialist ambition and its often faulty translation into action is one of the strengths of the book. Lucia Engombe does not condemn the policy that caused her to spend her childhood in a children’s home in a foreign country, separated from her parents and the rest of her family. She acknowledges that, because of the G D R , she was materially provided for, received medical treatment and formal education, and did not have to grow up in a refugee camp while her country was being devastated by a bloody war of independence. Her assessment of her childhood years hesitates between rejection and acceptance of what happened to her, as it is also a detailed and admittedly subjective account of an almost forgotten chapter of Namibian–German history. Lucia Engombe’s account begins with the story of her mother’s imprisonment. Tuahafifua Kaviva Engombe, a mother who is solely responsible for the survival of her four children, is sentenced to forced labour after being caught reading a banned newspaper. The reader does not learn how long she has to remain in the work-camp. Nor does the author reveal what newspaper was involved, whether somebody betrayed her mother, why Tuahafifua Engombe was reading this paper, and whether she was politically engaged. Lucia Engombe also alludes only briefly to the fact that her father had by then already left the family, although when and why is not disclosed.12 This mode of presentation shapes the whole book: although the adult Lucia, who looks back upon her life, sometimes clarifies certain aspects and also reflects on her own feelings and notions, the reader usually encounters the episodes in her life at the same time as the author experiences them. He sees through Lucia’s eyes, and empathizes with Lucia’s emotions. A disadvantage of this narrative mode is that when Lucia refers to events in her life which are directly linked to, or were caused by, decisions on the part of S W A P O , for example, the reader often lacks the information that would allow him to put these events into a larger context. In her chronologically narrated story, Engombe does explain both what happened to her father and the precise circumstances of her mother’s imprisonment, but only when she herself has learned the truth. A clear advantage of Lucia Engombe’s mode of recollection, however, is that the immediacy of her experiences is directly conveyed to the reader. At the (momentary) expense of the bigger picture, her story highlights the perceptions and fears of the young girl 12 Lucia’s father, Immanuel Engombe, worked as a school headmaster in Oshakati. He was first sent to the “Health and Education Camp” in Nyango with his family, and then to prison because he criticized the embezzlement of donations by the S W A P O leaders. The donations were made by foreign countries and organizations to support the struggle of S W A P O , and to improve the living conditions of the Namibian refugees. See Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 357–59.

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she was. Engombe’s autobiography thus succeeds in depicting her life in a subjective mode which contributes to a more balanced presentation of the political forces involved. Her book gains larger relevance and meaning not despite its individual character, but because of the validity of her personalized memory. To correlate my essay with the mode of narration of Lucia Engombe’s book, I am applying a somewhat holistic approach. At the heart of my discussion will be Lucia’s account of the propagandistic education of the Namibians in the G D R , including her description of the means of ideological manipulation, and of the children’s responses to their training. Aspects such as Lucia’s attitude towards the G D R and its population, and her difficulties after returning to Namibia, are also examined and serve to further illustrate the central subject-matter of my discussion. I mentioned earlier that a fundamentalist ideology always begets contradictions, as it is characterized by an obvious gap between theoretical claims and practical action. And like many of the subjects of totalitarian states, Lucia struggles to bring these discrepancies into accord with the simple manichaeism she is raised to believe in, a task that proves to be the work of a lifetime. Lucia first encounters a downright lie that is justified in the name of the S W A P O struggle (which is claimed to be essentially just and thus needs to be defended at all costs) when she is still an infant. Because her father criticized S W A P O leaders for embezzling foreign donations, the organization sent him to prison. He even spent some time in the death-cell before being released, after several years. As a child, Lucia was first told that her father was a traitor who spied for the racist South African government – a deception which, in the twodimensional world-view of S W A P O ideology, was not even a lie, since anybody who questioned the methods of the organization was also questioning the legitimacy of its mission. Later, she was informed that her father had been killed during a demonstration.13 In the world-view of S W A P O , it was logical to associate a former supporter who had turned disloyal with the actual enemy, the South African apartheid system. In the manichaeistic ideology of the organization, both were the same. Lucia, however, was forced to spend her whole childhood with the knowledge that her father was a traitor. She learned to despise the word ‘traitor’. During their time in the children’s home in Bellin, Lucia and her friends often imitated scenes from popular films, playing Cowboys and Indians in the Wild West, for example. Their games blended the film plots with the stories the soldiers of the P L A N (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia – the military wing of S W A P O ) told them whenever they were in Bellin. These visits were part of the children’s education: they were taught to revere the heroic deeds of the P L A N soldiers, 13

Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 138.

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and were encouraged to develop a deep sense of loyalty towards S W A P O and the liberation struggle. For Lucia, it was natural to support the struggle for independence, and she also admired the P L A N soldiers and the S W A P O leaders, and learned to see white South Africans as her enemy. But she also missed her father, whom she remembered as a good person. The clear distinction between ‘good’ (S W A P O ) and ‘evil’ (the South African government whose army has occupied Namibia) was too rigid to leave room for a former S W A P O supporter and anti-apartheid fighter who criticized the corrupt methods of S W A P O . It is this lack of space, the impossibility of weighing moral convictions against officially propagated ideology, that characterizes Lucia’s upbringing. Her response to S W A P O ’s fundamentalism resembles a mode of resistance that many East Germans followed in their daily lives: they avoided confrontation with the official ideology and its representatives whenever possible, and tried to find gaps, loopholes, and niches which would allow them to live as undisturbed as possible. This attitude has been labelled ‘Rückzug ins Private’ (retreat into private life), and Lucia highlights the fact that it also worked for her very well: “Not S W A P O or the G D R , but the world of the children’s home in Bellin, which was both familiar and manageable, had become my true home.”14 Years later, when Lucia was living in the Schule der Freundschaft, she discoverd that some of her female classmates slipped through a hole in the fence surrounding their home to visit their Mozambican boyfriends. This hole becomes a symbol for different kinds of breakouts: “And this was actually the reason for the hole in the fence. People wanted to escape their fate.”15 Things did not become any easier for Lucia when her mother, during her only visit in the children’s home, confirmed the rumour that Lucia’s father was a traitor. She entreated Lucia to stop asking about him.16 Although Lucia found out several years later that her mother had no choice but to deceive her because she wanted to protect her children,17 their relationship was damaged beyond repair. Moreover, in the course of Lucia’s childhood it became apparent that neither the S W A P O representatives nor the German caregivers saw any need to strengthen the bond between the children and their families abroad. Only by chance did Lucia learn that her mother was studying in Moscow, and when she was eventually given permission to write to her, she had to do so in Russian,18 14 “Nicht die S W A P O und auch nicht die D D R , aber die überschaubare Welt des Kinderheims Bellin war mein wahres Zuhause geworden” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 141). 15 “Aber deshalb gab es das Loch im Zaun. Menschen wollten ihrem Schicksal entkommen” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 189). 16 See Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 87. 17 See Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 371–72. 18 See Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 79.

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because if she were to write in Oshiwambo, the secret service would not be able to check her letters. Therefore, she had to ask a German caregiver to translate her letters into Russian. Lucia herself imagined her letters in Oshivambo before she translated them into German. It is not surprising that a correspondence that had to cross two linguistic borders failed to maintain a close bond between mother and daughter. Their letters became increasingly confined to the exchange of meaningless information. The tendency to control personal conversations between members of a family reveals a paranoia which also permeated the socialist regime’s attitude to religion. When Lucia is caught praying to Kalunga (the god of the Owambo)19 during a night manoeuvre, she is reported by a German caregiver and scolded and slapped in the face by Teacher Jonas, the S W A P O representative at the children’s home. He shouts at her: “God doesn’t exist, don’t forget that! I don’t want to hear such rubbish!” And, addressing the rest of the group, he declares: “You are the elite of the new Namibia! You don’t need a god, your leader is Sam Nujoma!”20 It is an irony of fate that Teacher Jonas’ proclamation of the S W A P O leader as a secular substitute for the Christian God seems to recall the first commandment ‘You shall have no other gods before me’. Obviously, S W A P O was as jealous about competition as monotheistic religion. In the children’s home, Lucia becomes fascinated by German fairytales. Before long, she knows all of the stories by heart and so becomes a storyteller for the younger children. She interprets the tales in a creative way, rewriting the ones she finds in books or inventing new fables for her listeners. She enjoys her new-found talent to imagine her own fairytale world; it allows her to escape to a fictional realm, and to repress her loneliness. Her delight is soon dampened, however, when she is scolded for her enthusiasm by the German caregiver Edda, who embarrasses her in front of the group: We were expected to practise speaking off the cuff. Edda looked at me with narrowed eyes and an ironic smile: “Lucia, are you going to tell us one of your made-

19

Lucia’s people, the Owambo, believe in the existence of a creator god who, as the highest being, is almighty and commands lower gods and spirits. In the Owambo religion, however, people usually pray to spirits and ancestors, since they believe that Kalunga is not interested in becoming involved in the daily lives of human beings. Lucia’s prayer to Kalunga, therefore, alludes to the fact that Christian missionaries in Namibia adapted local religious concepts and integrated them into their creed. They created a hybrid element common to many African and African-American confessions. For further details, see Johan S. Malan, Die Völker Namibias (Göttingen: Klaus Hess, 1998): 34. 20 “Gott gibt es nicht, merk dir das! Ich will diesen Quatsch nicht mehr hören!”; “Ihr seid die Elite des neuen Namibia! Ihr braucht keinen Gott, eurer Führer heißt Sam Nujoma!” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 106).

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up fairytales again?” Because of her spitefulness, I was so ashamed that I wished the ground would open up and swallow me. [...] Edda’s remark ridiculed something that meant a lot to me. [...] From then on, I kept my fairytales to myself.21

This scene is an excellent example of how social ostracism and ridicule enforce forms of behaviour that are claimed to be ‘normal’. Phenomena such as personal fantasies; whole new versions of, or new endings for, old stories; and an individualized and self-conscious approach to the imagination and its escapist possibilities – all this betrays subversive potential in a fundamentalist order. The strict, manichaeistic dichotomy of both East German and S W A P O ideology depends on their subjects’ conformist, collective, and conventional submission to socialist codes of conduct. This strictness, however, also creates the essential paradox of totalitarian systems, which become particularly susceptible to the ridicule and subversion they fear above all else. The essential structural defect of totalitarianism comes from a refusal to acknowledge that reality is usually more complex, and often more refined, than fundamentalist constructs. At the beginning of her stay in the G D R , Lucia is still too young to see through the shallow slogans of S W A P O , but in the course of time, the Namibian children cease to take the S W A P O propaganda seriously. At the regular roll-call, they make fun of the slogans. They are also increasingly bored with the repeated training sessions: “‘Oh, Meme, can’t we watch T V instead?’ somebody grumbled. ‘No, we have to (do the training),’ said Paula, ‘otherwise we will get into trouble with S W A P O ’.”22 Although the children are taught to be ready to die for their country, their enthusiasm decreases considerably in the course of their stay in the G D R . One of their teachers remembers one of the children, upon hearing that he was always to be ‘prepared for the struggle’, answering: “But I don’t plan to be shot dead.”23 These episodes illustrate the gradual distancing of the G D R children from S W A P O propaganda. Over the years, more and more children begin to see the G D R as their home, and the struggle for Namibian independence, which has always been a long way off, fades out of sight. Lucia develops ambivalent feelings towards her mother country. She hopes to be able to complete her school 21

“Wir sollten üben frei zu sprechen. Edda fixierte mich mit schmalen Augen und einem ironische Lächeln: ‘Na, Lucia, bekommen wir von dir mal eins deiner selbst erdichteten Märchen zu hören?’ So, wie sie das sagte, wäre ich am liebsten im Boden versunken [...] Eddas Bemerkung stellte mich bloß [...] Fortan behielt ich meine Märchen für mich” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 109). 22 “ ‘ Ach, Meme, können wir nicht lieber Fernsehen gucken?,’ nörgelte jemand. ‘Nein, wir müssen,’ sagte Paula, ‘sonst kriegen wir Ärger mit der S W A P O ’ ” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 151). 23 “Ich lasse mich doch nicht totschießen” (Kenna, Homecoming, 23).

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education in Germany. When she and her friends learn that they have to return to Namibia, they are at a loss about how they should feel about this: Me and my friends walked through the spacious grounds of the School of Friendship. We tried to imagine what Namibia would really look like. “It’s so hot there,” said little Lilli. “They have palm-trees and stuff.” It was as if we had never learned anything about our distant homeland in our geography lessons. Our dreams and fears repressed all of the knowledge about deserts and thornbush savannah that [our teacher] had taught us in the fifth grade.24

As with her falsified image of her mother country, Lucia has to bring her political education into line with the much more complex reality of S W A P O ’s liberation struggle. After returning to Namibia, she learns that her father is not only not dead but also still active in the political opposition to the S W A P O government. No longer together with Lucia’s mother, he has found himself a new and much younger partner. Her mother, meanwhile, has become a farm manager and, much to Lucia’s dismay, is conducting an affair with President Sam Nujoma. All of this news disturbs and unsettles Lucia. Still in her late teens, she not only has to deal with the abrupt end of her childhood world but must also adapt to a culture that is supposed to be her own but is entirely foreign to her, and must digest the realization that although S W A P O fought for the Namibian people’s liberation from the South African apartheid system, its means and methods were highly questionable. At her high school in Windhoek, Lucia, who had already been confronted with ‘Ausländer raus’ (‘Foreigners out’) slogans during her last year in the G D R , encounters a form of institutionalized racism that differs from the skirmishes the Namibian G D R kids had with ‘D D R lern’ (East German youngsters). Another legacy from the apartheid era is the urban slums resulting from the illiteracy and impoverishment of the black majority. But Lucia also seees the relief and the joy brought about by the end of the racist regime that distinguishes the rural areas from the desolation in the slums of Windhoek.25 Although Lucia, towards the end of her autobiography, still labels her people ‘the Owambo’ (in contrast to her own felt identity, which is ‘Namibian G D R child’),26 she takes Namibia to her heart. It also be-

24 “Gemeinsam mit meinen Freundinnen lief ich über das große Areal der Schule der Freundschaft. Wir versuchten uns vorzustellen, wie Namibia wirklich aussehen mochte. ‘Es ist da doch so heiß,’ sagte die kleine Lilli. ‘Da gibt es Palmen und so.’ Es war, als ob wir in Geographie nichts über die fremde Heimat gelernt hätten. Unsere Wunschvorstellungen und Ängste verdrängten sämtliches Wissen über Wüsten und Dornenlandschaften, das [unsere Lehrerin] uns in der fünften Klasse beigebracht hatte” (Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 267). 25 Engombe, Kind Nr. 95, 352. 26 Kind Nr. 95, 353.

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comes clear, however, that her codes of conduct are European: she is shocked to learn about her father’s relationship with a young girl, and puts it down to an affair between a sugar daddy and a minor. Even when an aunt explains that, in Owambo culture, a father does not have to justify his behaviour to his daughter, Lucia’s sympathy and understanding for her father are limited. Nor does her mother’s affair with Nujoma, the man whose orders eventually led to the disintegration of the Engombe family, make any sense to her. Lucia’s isolated childhood had confronted her with political hypocrisy and shallow slogans, but failed to prepare her for a world in which the divine distinction between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is blurred by such mundane forces in people’s lives as political opportunism, weakness, and fear, but also the wish to save one’s family and simple pragmatism. Lucia has had to challenge a number of conflicting notions that echo contradictions and antagonisms felt by many East Germans in the course of the 1990s. Her attitude towards her upbringing, S W A P O ideology, and her parents becomes eventually characterized by the same ambivalence that defines the assessment of the G D R of even those former citizens who had always had a critical view of the socialist regime. Lucia’s struggle to come to terms with the obvious contradictions of S W A P O ideology, both in the course of her childhood and after her return to Namibia, makes it clear that her ‘ambivalence’ towards S W A P O and its policies results from her refusal to adapt to the excluding, totalitarian mode of perception this organization had always propagated. Her repatriation had torn her away from the secluded private space in which she had grown up. Although the confrontation with the true character and heritage of both S W A P O and her family frightens her, Lucia feels that reconciliation with her past experiences ought not to come at the price of submission to another fundamentalist view of life. She accepts the challenge to establish a life built on two cultural heritages – a shattered manichaeism, and the realization that the place she had once called home – the children’s home in Bellin – no longer exists. Her story serves, once more, as an exemplary parable of the impact of totalitarian ideology, and shows a way in which to cope constructively with its political and ethical legacy.

WORKS CITED Dierks, Klaus. Chronology of Namibian History: From Pre-Historical Times to Independent Namibia (Windhoek: Namibia Scientific Society, 1999). Döring, Hans–Joachim. “Es geht um unsere Existenz”: Die Politik der D D R gegenüber der Dritten Welt am Beispiel von Mosambik und Äthiopien (Berlin: Links, 1999).

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Engel, Ulf, & Robert Kappel. Germany’s Africa Policy Revisited: Interests, Images and Incrementalism (Münster: L I T , 2006). Engombe, Lucia. Kind Nr. 95 (2004; Berlin: Ullstein, 2005). Gerunde, Harald. Eine von uns (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2000). Hillebrand, Ernst. Das Afrika-Engagement der D D R (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987). Kenna, Constance, ed. Homecoming: The G D R Kids of Namibia (Windhoek: New Namibia Books, 1999). Malan, Johan S. Die Völker Namibias (Göttingen: Klaus Hess, 1998). Massaquoi, Hans–Jürgen. Destined to Witness (New York: William Morrow, 1999). ——. Neger, Neger, Schornsteinfeger (Bern: Fretz & Wasmuth, 1999). Mehari, Senait G.. Feuerherz (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 2004). Oji, Chima. Unter die Deutschen gefallen (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1993). Post, Ulrich, & Frank Sandvoss. Die Afrikapolitik der D D R (Arbeiten aus dem Institut für Afrikakunde 43; Hamburg: Institut für Afrikakunde, 1982). Rüchel, Uta. “... Auf deutsch sozialistisch zu denken ...”: Mosambikaner in der Schule der Freundschaft (Magdeburg: Die Landesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen D D R in Sachsen–Anhalt, 2001). Rüchel, Uta. “Wir hatten noch nie einen Schwarzen gesehen,” in Das Zusammenleben von Deutschen und Namibiern rund um das S W A P O -Kinderheim Bellin 1979–1990 (Schwerin: Der Landesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen D D R in Mecklenburg–Vorpommern, 2001). Scheunpflug, Annette, & Jürgen Krause. Die Schule der Freundschaft: Ein Bildungsexperiment in der D D R (Hamburg: Beiträge aus dem Fachbereich Pädagogik der Universität der Bundeswehr, 2000).

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A NNIKA M C P HERSON ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

From Utopia to Atopia to Diaspora? — Narratives of Social (Re-)Organization in a German Refugee Home

ABSTRACT: This case study presents fieldwork on the Sierra Leonean residents of a refugee home in Northern Germany, and demonstrates how the harsh living conditions and the uncertainties the asylum seekers experience during the application process shatter any utopian notions of a ‘European paradise’.

T

conducted in a refugee home in Northern Germany in 2000, and focuses on the everyday lives and concerns of several young Muslim men from Sierra Leone whose native language was Fula or Mandingo.1 Our conversations with these young men between the ages of 13 and 29 often took place in or just outside Mahmud’s kitchen.2 Hamed, Ismail, and Amadou occasionally invited us to sit in their rooms, where we sipped tea and talked, usually accompanied by T V sounds and images which gave us ample topics for our multi-lingual conversations, ranging from music, sports, and the B B C World News to daily soaps. Towards the final phase of our regular visits, marked by a thank-you party we HIS ESSAY DRAWS ON FIELDWORK

1

Annika Lieby–McPherson & Bettina Horn–Udeze, “‘Just Floating in the Air’ – Identitäten in der Schwebe: Eine ethnographische Forschung mit westafrikanischen Flüchtlingen in Bremen” (M.A. thesis, University of Bremen, Germany, 2001). 2 All names have been changed. © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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hosted at the refugee home, several young men agreed to record semi-structured interviews, in which we tried to summarize the main topics of concern regarding their lives in Germany as asylum seekers. During these interviews, the young men’s images of Europe and Germany, their hopes, dreams, and incentives for migration, and the challenges they encountered upon arrival were recurrent themes. What binds the different narratives together is a gradual disillusionment with a utopian image of Europe. In this essay I aim to relate the young men’s personal narratives to Marc Augé’s concept of the ‘non-place’ of the refugee home. Individual and shared experiences resulting from the assigned status of ‘refugee’ or ‘asylum seeker’ are at the centre of the narratives. In addition, the social structures that are (re-)created at the refugee home will be discussed as possible moments of diaspora formation.

“This is Paradise”: Utopian Images of Europe and Germany In order to avoid conflating individual biographies into an overly generalized image, it is important to point out that my broad use of the term ‘refugee’ makes no distinction between ‘political asylum seekers’ and ‘labour migrants’ as regards the young men with whom we talked. Refugees are here seen as people on the move – for various and different reasons and driven by manifold motivations. Persecution, oppression or economic disaster have always been some of main causes for the decision to leave a country in search of protection, better opportunities or self-development. Such motivations party determine the destination envisioned, or at least the direction of the move. Every person on the move has his/her own reasons and, at the same time, is usually part of larger migratory chains or systems with a distinct history and context. As is well known, transatlantic migration from Europe to North America was caused not only by persecution and/ or economic hardship, but was often also an attempt to escape social norms, and was aided by the myth of unlimited possibilities to such an extent that, towards the end of the nineteenth century, many European regions witnessed something like a ‘cult’ of emigration. After the end of formal colonialism, many crisis-ridden West African regions witnessed their own complex and multi-faceted versions of such migratory chains. Each new crisis seems to set more people in motion, and in many cases something like a ‘culture of migration’ can be assumed to play an important role in the decisionmaking process. Individual social actors experience and assess their circumstances very differently. The details of one’s flight are a taboo topic at the refugee home,

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especially in conversations with outsiders. Yussuf, for example, kept insisting that we would not get any ‘information’ out of him. Only when it became clear that we were not interested in migratory routes or biographical data relating to the pending applications for asylum did our communication become more open. In our subsequent conversations, the young men’s images of Germany and /or Europe prior to departure appeared mostly in the context of narratives of disillusionment from unrealistic expectations. Hamed described his image of Europe as something like an economic safe haven where one could learn the language, go to school, get a job, and send money back home in order to support one’s parents. “I thought it was easier,” he said, reflecting upon the descriptions of others who had returned and told stories about how it was possible to study and make good money in Europe. His parents expected him to support them financially and were disappointed whenever he did not send money, thinking that he was just “fooling around with women,” keeping his money to himself or spending it on alcohol and parties. The expectations of Hamed and his parents were based on a fairly common utopian image of Europe. Upon arrival, however, reality soon kicked in, and dreams of self-fulfilment and economic stability turned into the nightmare of having to seek political asylum and being prevented from entering the labour force. Yet, like many others, Hamed’s parents were either uninformed or refused to acknowledge this frustrating reality. Achmed provided a similar example. His “best friend” wanted to come to Europe in spite of Achmed’s warnings. He simply could not believe that Europe is not the ‘paradise’ he imagined: “You can tell him a thousand times,” said Achmed, “but he won’t believe you.” Rather, his friend claimed that “this is paradise.” Achmed fought with him over the phone because of this disbelief and the insinuation that Achmed merely wanted to keep his material achievements to himself. This discrepancy between idealized images and high hopes on the one side and a disillusioning reality on the other was voiced by everybody we talked to. Ismail did not heed anybody’s warning, either, and similarly left against his own friends’ advice. I S M A I L : It’s hard for them to believe. When I explain my situation to them – for most of them it’s very difficult for them to... like when I was there, when somebody is here, to tell me something about here. I will always say: “Ah [bares his teeth]. This man is talking rubbish. He is in Europe, Europe, Europe, the big name Europe” – you know. So, them, too, they find it hard to believe that life is not like we Africans expect it to be, expect it to be.... Most of the Africans expect Europe to be paradise... paradise on earth, so – experience is different.... [subdued] It’s not so good....

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Hamed was literally talked into applying for asylum and was encouraged to go and find a woman to marry and in this way to exploit the loopholes of the exclusionary system for his own benefit. The pressure of having to support his family led him to buy into the myth of Europe as well. In his account, stories of strong young men being picked by employers immediately upon arrival at the airport resound with disturbing historical images. Alternative story-lines were “being picked by a beautiful woman” who wants to marry a good-looking youngster and will help him find a job. A friend of Hamed’s apparently expected just that to happen, and when he found himself freezing in front of Schipol Airport in his summer suit and tie, he kept telling himself that no woman would walk up to him like that. Hamed enacted the situation during our conversation and imitated how his friend tried to look relaxed in order to attract female attention. As this plan did not work out, he had to beg a taxi driver to take him downtown, where, after hours of walking around helplessly, he finally encountered a fellow Sierra Leonean who fed him and advised him on what to do. This imaginary ‘Europe’ is marked by high expectations and hopes regarding work and economic stability.3 Disillusionment sets in either immediately or later, when applying for asylum becomes the only option aside from illegality. Those who have gone through the process of disillusionment function as a support group for the new arrivals. Even in the face of a more realistic view, there is often the hope of ‘making it’ against all odds. Images and myths of other places and one’s personal network influence the decision-making process, but the main motives for migration that were mentioned were flight from political instability, the search for economic opportunities, and the desire to escape oppressive family structures and responsibilities. As in most processes of migration, many of the routes towards utopia are determined by different networks of families, friends, and even casual acquaintances. In Hamed’s words, “wherever you have a friend, that’s where you go.” If he had had a friend in the Netherlands, he claims, he would have been better off, as “most asylum seekers end up with a United Nations passport there, can study and work. That’s what I wanted. Not work illegally. It’s better.” Elsewhere it is better – it has to be better. Nothing, it seems, can keep Hamed from pursuing his goal, and one imaginary place replaces another, as a result of which the paradisiacal image of Europe retains some of its power, all disillusioning experiences notwith-

3

“Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés.” Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; tr. London & New York: Verso 1995): 95.

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standing. Literally re-placing utopia thus becomes a survival strategy for confronting everyday hardships.

“You Are Putting Me in Prison”: The Refugee Home as Non-Place Hamed utilizes his knowledge about other countries as a basis for criticizing his situation in Germany. Whether this is factual knowledge or not, it constitutes his coping strategy. From his real and imaginary knowledge Hamed derives the hope and strength to evaluate his situation and, if need be, to move on. “In order to stay here I have to find a good woman. It’s not easy, but all I can do is try,” he says. “Then I can really try and do something for the foreigners in this city, talk to the government and the mayor, help them find work so that they will have some money to send to Africa.” Given the bleak prospects for such a development, the Netherlands and Italy remain further utopian destinations supposedly offering work, legality, and thus self-sufficiency. Prior to his migration, Hamed had no idea what applying for asylum meant, let alone that pursuing this path would be his only chance of staying in Germany legally. The situation of dependence is frustrating for him, as he left home specifically in search of independence. Marc Augé has called this limbo between utopia and reality a typical expression of the ‘non-place’ and has argued that ‘supermodernity’ brings forth increasing numbers of non-places. Whereas a place “can be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity,” non-places “are listed, classified, promoted to the status of ‘places of memory’, and assigned to a circumscribed and specific position.” Examples of such “transit points and temporary abodes” are “hotel chains and squats, holiday clubs and refugee camps, shantytowns threatened with demolition or doomed to festering longevity.”4 Non-places are functional spaces determined by “solitary contractuality.”5 The pull-factor of the utopian, imaginary place called Europe plays an important role in the decision of many refugees to migrate. Upon arrival, this utopia evaporates into disillusionment for those on the move, but not necessarily for those left behind – both because they do not (want to) believe and because the topic becomes taboo in order not to disappoint one’s relatives and friends. The “big name Europe,” as Ismail phrased it, is far from its reality. Achmed, too, had no idea about the procedures and implications of having to seek political asylum. As a minor, he was sent to a German vocational train4 5

Marc Augé, Non-Places, 77–78. Non-Places, 94.

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ing school, where he felt he was wasting his time because, as one teacher kept emphasizing, upon finishing school he would not be allowed to pursue further training. Hence, like many others, he stopped attending this school, but the resulting inactivity was extremely frustrating as well. “This is a big problem,” he pointed out, “because we run away from the problems in our country and we are the young generation. In the future we will have to do something for our country, but here, we cannot learn anything.” Not being able to be meaningfully employed or to learn useful skills, he began to feel more and more lethargic. The situation back home, the vicissitudes of refugee life in Europe, and the fear of deportation and returning empty-handed place these young men under enormous psychological stress. In addition, the procedures for applying for political asylum generally fail to acknowledge their subjectivity and individuality but contribute instead to categorizations and generalizations. According to Augé, people in non-places are confronted mainly with texts issued by legal entities, in this case interrogation reports, sufferance notes, deportation notices or – extremely rarely – recognition as political refugees. Identities in non-places are thus provisional and marked by relative anonymity.6 In the eyes of the civil servants at the welfare office, these refugees are just names or, worse, stereotypes rather than individuals. Their identity need neither be explained nor narrated in the application process. Ismail noted that his caseworker was “a good woman” because she even called him by his name. Amadou, conversely, disliked his caseworker, who would send him away again if he showed up a couple of minutes late. He interpreted this as not being recognized as a person. In addition, at the non-place one constantly has to prove one’s innocence, as Augé relates with regards to the passport check for travellers: “No individuation (no right for anonymity) without identity check.”7 Random identification checks by police abound at the refugee home and are often clear cases of discrimination. We were told that the police, who know where the young men gather on Sunday afternoons to watch T V , walk into the room and ask for everybody’s identification, usually hoping to find a refugee from another city who has travelled without a permit. The non-place of the refugee home is located in a society that does not share its rhetoric. Its language is based on specific circumstances and shared experiences that are largely unknown to its surroundings. Listening to personal narratives thus becomes an act of multiple translation. Gaining the young men’s trust depended on the ability to communicate in a shared language, of which body 6 7

Marc Augé, Non-Places, 101. Non-Places, 102.

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language and emotional responses became an important part. Understanding each other’s lives necessitated a certain transparency on both sides. Yet certain topics, such as migratory routes or the details of the application process, remained taboo. One’s past largely remained a non-topic, silenced by the strictures of the legal procedures. The future, in turn, remained unknowable, as sufferance notes were commonly issued on a three- or four-month basis, only sometimes extended to six months. The legal framework did not allow for the development of personal perspectives or the acquisition of useful skills. The lack of perspective had negative effects on the organization of everyday life and – as refugees at the time were largely excluded from socio-political debates on ‘integration’– on their perception by mainstream society. Motivation for language learning was low, given the general uncertainty. Daoud complained: I can’t go to school, because I never get more than two months or three months [i.e. an extension of the legal permission to stay]. They don’t want us here. Maybe I’ll be here for ten years and still not know German.

Even Amadou, who speaks five languages and never before had problems learning another one, claims: “I cannot learn German because I don’t know if I can stay. It’s too difficult. When I know I can stay, I will learn.” The situation of ‘permanent transience’ complicates a meaningful structuring of everyday life and inhibits language acquisition as well. At the non-place, one is constantly confronted with a strange perspective on one’s self and lives in the present, without history or future. In Augé’s words, “encounter, identification, image” characterize the passenger in non-places.8 At the refugee home, this relates to the encounter with the lost self and the foreign surroundings, the confrontation with the image of “asylum fraud, economic refugee, petty criminal,” as one social worker phrased it, and, in due course, some degree of identification with the constructed category of ‘asylum seeker’. Ismail, however, always tried to develop a more balanced picture. Just as he resented being labelled an ‘asylum seeker’, he wanted to know more about student life in Germany, because of his personal background and interests. Like the others, he emphasized the importance of work in developing meaningful and useful perspectives and for countering the sense of being useless. I S M A I L : Most of us – maybe we don’t have skilful experience in certain jobs – but there are certain jobs that some people can do. If you give these people a chance to work. That would reduce the burden on the government – of every month giving every individual 350 Marks. Then it will also reduce the rate of criminal activity 8

Marc Augé, Non-Places, 105.

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going on in the streets – done by the Ausländers, I mean. You know, because most of the people here, some of them were occupied in work before they came here. After they leave their jobs and come here, you know... after they run away, they come here. When they are here now, try to make them, you know, use their time. But you keep somebody in the room, you don’t even want him to prepare his future. What is that? If that man is to stay here for ten years, what do you think will happen to him after ten years, if he is to be sent, you are not – your Asyl is finished – you are not accepted in this country, you have to go back to your country. What they did? Just brainwashing somebody, that’s how you treated him. You put him in civilized prison. But you think you are feeding him, you are giving him everything – you are not doing nothing for that individual! […] That is a prison. You are putting me in prison. […] Allow me to do certain things in society, like letting me work! I am at my useful age. Allow me to use my power! To survive on that rather than forcing me to go and engage myself in criminal activities.... yeah. If you don’t have anything to do, you might think of doing so many other things. There are so many things you can do, bad things. But if you are engaged in some good things, doing work [...], you forget about some of these problems. But that is what is lacking here. They block all the chances for you – no chance. You don’t have a chance to work. You don’t even have a chance to see Germany as Germany. […] Yeah? You are in Germany but you are not allowed to know Germany – […] to see Germany. What is that? Eh? Because I’m here, Hamburg is right near here. But I’m not allowed to go there. Not even Hamburg is too far, even... [...] If you accept … I’m not a criminal, I have not done any criminality. I don’t see why should I always tell somebody I want to go somewhere. Why? […] I don’t understand. In the same country. I don’t do anything wrong. I’m not a criminal.

Ismail calls the refugee home a “civilized prison” and criticizes the restriction on free movement during the application for asylum, the de-facto prohibition against work, and the resulting lure of criminal activity, especially when families at home have to be supported. Ismail describes this as a survival strategy which he does not want to pursue but which appears to be a logical conclusion for many others in his situation.

“We Are Doing It Like Our Parents”: Social Reorganization In spite of the ‘permanent transience’ that characterizes the refugee home as a non-place, its inhabitants create their own social structures. Owing to the duration of their stay, the refugee home becomes a provisional home of sorts, a social reference system from which interaction with the wider society takes place. Augé, quoting Vincent Descombes, describes home not as a geographical location but as a “rhetorical country”: people are at home when they are

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familiar with the rhetoric of those around them, when they can communicate without difficulties and can enter into the thoughts of those around them without tedious explanations. The rhetorical country of a person ends where the other persons no longer understand the reasons for one’s actions or complaints.9 The concept of home fades into memory and home becomes the social place where one can communicate and is understood. The shared experience of applying for asylum creates a new shared language, a link between the inhabitants of the refugee home that separates them from the outside world, which has little knowledge of what the threat of deportation and work prohibition mean for the individual. Only when we began to understand those meanings did the nonplace emerge as a place with its own rules and language. Augé describes anthropological space as the existential space “where a being whose mode of existence is mainly determined ‘in relation to a surrounding’ experiences his or her relationship to the world.” A shared world depends largely on the shared language for describing this world, as certain codes are intimated by consent and complicit intimacy. The communication that was enabled by our attempt at mutual emotional understanding and a respect for taboo topics in our research slowly allowed us to move from confusion and miscommunication to a new rhetorical country of transcultural communication marked by a slow process of mutual comprehension, be it the language of asylum or the language of academia. Hamed often functioned as an interpreter and mediator, describing our project as a mutual explanation of ‘Africa’ and ‘Europe’ and as a ‘cultural exchange’. The more familiar we became with each other as individuals, the more we were able to understand the social character of what we had previously perceived as a nonplace. Every inhabitant had his own hopes and goals. Some went to school, against all odds, others cooked or took on other tasks in order to structure their everyday life, which was furthered by group activities and socio-cultural events ranging from soccer to theatre performances. The reconstruction of communal social patterns enabled survival as a group. One example was the ‘Fula Union’, a self-help organization which offered a framework for reflecting on the developments back home, for exchanging information and experiences, and for discussing problems of everyday concern in the refugee home. Achmed called their gatherings a form of kutim (meeting) based on their parents’ social formations. Organizing the group according to these familiar structures greatly helped in reducing conflict. The parties to a conflict had to meet and discuss 9

Marc Augé, Non-Places, 108.

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their issues before the whole group, and the perpetrator, once determined, had to pay a fine. This form of social control considerably reduced tensions between the young men, who did not live together voluntarily but were forced by circumstances to share the little space the refugee home offered. Isah described this association as an opportunity to “free one’s mind” and saw his role as the head of the union as motivating the people and mediating between the young men and the social workers. The social formation of this association alleviated the permanent transience by re-creating familiar patterns of communication. It also opened the refugee home to a wider social formation, as it included inhabitants of other refugee homes as well as former inhabitants. It was thus not only a problem-solving body but also a diasporic formation ensuring sociocultural survival.

“Where You Have a Friend, That’s Where You Go”: Diasporic Routes The concept of diaspora has many different aspects and by now is often applied metaphorically. Robin Cohen’s definition lists expulsion, labour migration, memories and myths of an idealized home, as well as the aim of contributing to that home’s preservation, development, security, and prosperity. Additional factors are return migration, group consciousness, shared history, and the belief in a shared fate plus an often problematic relationship to the host society. Finally, Cohen considers solidarity with group members in other countries and the possibility of a beneficial life in the host country if this tolerates diversity as constitutive of diasporas, and distinguishes five different types: refugee, labour, trade, imperial, and cultural.10 The refugees’ association points towards the practical and emotional functions of a diaspora organization, with West-African origin and the shared experience of the process of applying for political asylum as the distinguishing features. Another cultural marker is the above-mentioned social reorganization according to familiar patterns of communication. In this situation, diasporic identity is based not only on shared background and experiences, however, but also on the social ascriptions that come with the status of an ‘asylum seeker’. Telecommunication with other refugees and with relatives or friends at home and elsewhere offers some continuity in the face of an overwhelming 10

Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997): 180. Such a typology is, of course, an analytical one. Similarly, categorizing a group of people as a diaspora can become problematic when the emphasis on their ‘difference’ becomes a device for exclusionary social practices.

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sense of rupture. Social networks, mediated political events and developments, cultural celebrations, and, most importantly, emotional ties maintain the connection with the regions of origin. Hamed, for example, was in regular contact with his mother and his brothers, although the pressure of having to take care of them was often overwhelming. In the beginning, they did not believe his tales of hardship, and only after much debate accepted his explanation that he would have to marry in order to be able to stay and work under the condition that he continue to take care of them. Their families’ inability to understand their plight or refusal to believe it posed a serious challenge to many of the young men. Because return was often impossible for both humanitarian and psychological reasons, many ended up lying to their families, thus further distancing themselves from a source of potential emotional support. Their current lives were too different, their rhetorical countries incompatible, so that communication seemed impossible and the myth of ‘Europe’ perpetuated itself. As the receiving society’s largely undifferentiated image of ‘Africa’ contributes to placing the two continents on opposing poles, over time and with increasing disillusionment the situation reverses: ‘home’ becomes idealized, a mythical and imaginary place. The possibility of return – although indefinitely postponed – remained an important stabilizing anchor for Hamed. When he “discovered” Europe, as he phrased it, he decided that he should stay and try to study. A diploma might get him the desired job and allow him to transfer his newly acquired skills. Before having to leave, he wanted to go “somewhere else” in Europe, preferably a French-speaking country. Rather than returning empty-handed, he wanted to try again, start over, all hardship notwithstanding. Returning without having ‘made it’ simply was not an option when the possibility of a European education and / or work experience equals ‘fame’ and social recognition back home. Like many others, Hamed had a long-term vision for his return, while his shortto mid-term agenda was the pursuit of useful skills to prepare for this eventual return, the timing of which depended not only on political and economic developments in the region, but also on the fulfilment of his personal goals and his family’s expectations. The active pursuit of these goals often led to multiple migrations within the wider diasporic network. I S M A I L : Yeah, eh... in my own... me, for me particularly... I don’t like the situation I’m in. And every day I look for an opportunity to leave this country. [...] Maybe I might get... a better situation. Because where there’s no future... it’s useless. And that’s what is here. You’re parked there, don’t plan anything for yourself. You can’t plan nothing for yourself. Just parked there. What for? ... I mean, if... it’s... war that takes you out of your country... and then... you’re in somewhere... but you still need to leave after twenty years... you see? [...] Because I find

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myself so useless here. So, all the time, all the time, every time, trying to find a way to really get out of this place, get to another place. I hope – […] maybe there I’ll be allowed to plan some future. This situation is horrible.... […] You might one day come [here] and ask for me and I’m there any more [laughs]. “Where is this guy?” – “Ah, he’s gone, he’s no longer here. We don’t know where he is.” Yeah. […] Yeah, if I can – get to England, today, I’ll be there. […] Yeah. Because I think I have some friends there. […] We are in touch with each other, talk to each other: I mean, conditions there are quite different from here. There, if you’re interested in education, all avenues are open to you. If you’re interested in work, then you’ll find a place to work. You know [...]. If you have the qualifications, they’ll take you like any other person. But unlike here, even education – there’s a barrier, a barrier. You, you know, you people know that. [...] So… maybe if I find my way to England or some other time, I’ll be able to engage in something that could... through which I can plan my future. Not just sitting here in this Heim... doing nothing.

Exclusion from society weighs heavily on Ismail, so that yet another migration within Europe and within one’s transnational social network seems to be the only way out. Convinced that it will be better elsewhere, many young refugees continue their journey, regardless of whether they can reach their goal or just another imaginary place. Moving on within diasporic networks thus takes on the quality of an act of resistance to exclusionary mechanisms.

Conclusion Many of the young men who participated in our study had come to Europe, and Germany in particular, because they expected to be able to develop perspectives for themselves. Their expectation of ‘paradise’ was utopian: instead of being able to find work and to become useful members of society, the identity assigned to them as asylum seekers led to social marginalization, and legal constraints often contributed to the lure of illegality. Permanent transience and the lack of perspective during the application process often amounted to a stripping-away of subjectivity and individuality. These refugees were literally just “floating in the air,” as they themselves described their situation to us. Despite this suffocating situation, many developed their own coping strategies, often connected with re-creating communal social structures. Reflecting on their experiences as a group, they were able to develop and communicate new aspects of their identities – which, however, often distanced them further from their families at home. Actively prevented from pursuing meaningful and useful occupations, many refugees had to move on to another place within the emerging West-African refugee diaspora, although most certainly only to find themselves in yet another

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imaginary place. The legal and social constraints in Europe, especially in Germany, contributed to this migratory pattern. Whereas both sending and receiving regions might benefit from the young men’s acquisition of useful and transferable skills, their ‘floating in the air’ constitutes a devastating political and social farce. Many of the young refugees quoted here seemed to use the opportunity to articulate their experiences in order to counter the stereotypes they were constantly confronted with. Their narratives provide an important counter-balance to theoretical discussions of legal paragraphs and to overly generalized discourses on labour migration. To bring these voices and subjective narratives to the fore remains an urgent task for the social and cultural sciences.11

WORKS CITED Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, tr. John Howe (Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, 1992; tr. London & New York: Verso, 1995). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle: U of Washington P , 1997). Lieby–McPherson, Annika, & Bettina Horn–Udeze. “‘Just Floating in the Air’: Identitäten in der Schwebe: Eine ethnographische Forschung mit westafrikanischen Flüchtlingen in Bremen” (M.A. thesis, University of Bremen, Germany, 2001).

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11 For another account of a personal narrative by a Nigerian migrant, see Bettina Horn– Udeze’s “Here in Europe it’s Like a Secret Cult”: Initiation into the System of Migration. A Nigerian in Tenerife” in this volume.

B ETTINA H ORN –U DEZE ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

“Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult” — A Nigerian Migrant’s Narration of Initiation 1 into the System of Migration

ABSTRACT: This case study reconstructs the geographical and psychological movement of the young economic migrant Nduka and his interpretation of migration as a form of initiation that destabilizes and re-establishes his family relationships and social position in new forms. Migrancy, stereotypical imagery, and racism, the essay argues, impinge powerfully on creative processes and storytelling. I N C E T H E E N D O F T H E 1 9 9 0 S the Canary Islands, on the periphery of the European Union, has attracted many people from different parts of the world with jobs in the tourist industry and in the agricultural sector.2 Among them there many Nigerians who migrated to Tenerife during the past eight years, seeking work and residence permits that are available in Spain, in contrast to many other European countries.

S 1

This essay draws on ethnographic fieldwork in various public and private places of a Nigerian community in Tenerife in 2003 and 2004 funded by the D A A D and the University of Bremen. 2 From being a country of emigration, Spain has since the 1990s developed into a country of immigration; see Axel Kreienbrink, Einwanderungsland Spanien: Migrationspolitik zwischen Europäisierung und nationalen Interessen (Frankfurt: I K O , 2004). © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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According to recent media reports, African migration to the Canaries is mainly being associated with refugee boats and camps. These dominant public narratives of the ‘flood’ of immigrants, the ‘invasion’ of the poor to ‘Fortress Europe’ and E U policies designed to fence off entry have resulted in negative and stereotyped perceptions of the migrants. This poses a challenge to academics and calls for more subject-oriented perspectives on African migration.3 In order to meet this demand, I regard Lila Abu–Lughod’s4 approach for “narrative ethnographies of the particular” as an appropriate mode of writing against dominant generalizing discourses. As a complement to other types of representation, she suggests the telling of “stories about particular individuals in time and place.”5 These reconstructions of “people’s arguments about, justifications for, and interpretations of what they and others are doing would explain how social life proceeds.”6 By applying this writing strategy in the context of African migration to Europe, I address the following issues: How do individuals perceive, reflect upon and cope with their migration experiences? How do they interpret their migration project, and what significance do they attach to it? How do they narrate their experiences in Europe? What kind of common narratives and images on the topic circulate within their narratives? In this essay I approach these questions by focusing on sequences of the migration story of Nduka,7 a thirty-five-year-old Nigerian migrant in Tenerife. In addition to several informal meetings and discussions with Nduka during my fieldwork, I conducted an extensive narrative interview with him about his migration experiences. In the course of this interview, he developed an interpretation of his own concerning his migration project. Reflecting on his experience, he compared life in Europe to a ‘secret cult’, describing migration accordingly as an ‘initiation’ process. By picking out these central motifs from his narrative of the various locations of his stay in Europe, this essay examines the different stages of initiation (separation, liminality, and incorporation)8 and 3 See also Bettina Horn–Udeze & Annika Lieby–McPherson, “‘Just floating in the air’ – Identitäten in der Schwebe: Eine ethnographische Forschung mit westafrikanischen Flüchtlingen in Bremen” (M.A. thesis. University of Bremen, 2001). 4 Lila Abu–Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe N M : School of American Research Press, 1992). Abu–Lughod is an anthropologist and New York University professor working on topics of gender, class, and modernity in Middle Eastern studies. 5 Abu–Lughod, “Writing Against Culture,” 153. 6 “Writing Against Culture,” 154. 7 In order to maintain confidentiality, the names of all informants have been changed. 8 Initiations – birth, childhood, adulthood – mark transitions in human lives. Transitions from one stage to the next are often performed by rites of passage. Anthropologists distinguish among three phases in such rites: separation from the society / the family; intermediate

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describes the transformations of relationships, identification, and belonging that are involved in the life of a transnational community. The actual changes take place in the liminal period. This process generated Nduka’s intensive reflections on the system as an initial start-up for the narrative he offered me. That is why, in a second step, after presenting and analysing the ‘initiation’, I focus on the act of narrating, at the same time exploring the correlation between the state of liminality and the narrative representation within the context of Nduka’s migration.

Leaving Nigeria: “I Want to Have My Own Fucking Freedom” Nduka is an Igbo from Abia State in Nigeria. He graduated in computer science and worked in a construction company in Lagos before quitting his home country more than two years prior to my fieldwork. In Tenerife he was jobless, living in a Red Cross home for immigrants. He had the status of an intellectual outsider in the diasporic community – not shy about expressing his critical or often opposing opinions. From his current lowly position in Tenerife, Nduka reflects on his past life in Nigeria in a positive way. He was married, had a good job, a car, and a house. Describing his family situation, he points out that his sister holds a ministerial post and that several of his brothers are living in Europe and America. Presenting his direct connections with influential circles within the country and referring to his transnational family relations, he stresses important factors for potential personal success and prestige in Nigeria. Through his transnational ties he acquired information about ‘life in Europe’. At the same time, he registered the respect accorded those who are living abroad: Everybody wants to be here [in Europe] […] when they [migrants abroad] come down there [to Nigeria] they get the maximum of respect. Like somebody that has seen the white men we worship because – down there in my country we worship white men. I can’t really say we, but – people do.9

liminal period where knowledge is acquired; and incorporation / re-entry into society after initiation, with a different status and new rights and obligations. See Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom (Les Rites de passage: étude systématique, 1909; tr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). 9 Interview with Nduka, lines 41–46. This quotation, as well as those that are following in this essay, is taken from a narrative interview I conducted with Nduka in April 2004 in Tenerife. Legend of transliteration: […] = abbreviations; … = pause; [in Nigeria] = supplementary information provided by the author; italics = emphasis.

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Although, from his current position in Spain, Nduka distances himself from other Nigerians who admire ‘white men’, he seems to have shared the respect for those who were living abroad at the time when he was still living in Nigeria. Respect and social status are thus important factors attached to migration for Nduka as well as for many other Nigerians I met during my fieldwork. In many cases, the desire for social acknowledgement is part of the motivation to migrate. Contrary to the implication of generalizing public narratives on African migration, Nduka’s decision to come to Europe is not rooted in economic hardship; rather, he associates his motivation to leave the country with his personal position in the family. In addition to his regular job in Nigeria he ran the import businesses for his brothers, who were living abroad. After a while he regarded this as a burden and therefore told his sister, the minister: “I am tired of staying here. ... Being commanded and being under somebody’s control. I want to have my own fucking freedom.”10 Nduka’s urge for independence and emancipation from constraining family ties remains a central topic throughout his narration. Self-development and individualization as motives for migration in the African context have been largely ignored in academic research in the past. As Rainer Tetzlaff11 points out, there has been little discussion of the fact that African migrants take flight not only from war, poverty, and unemployment but also from life-styles, social structures, and hierarchies that are no longer valid or binding for them. In a study on contemporary Igbo migration to Europe, Eloka Okanga mentions that it is an increased sense of individualism and an urge to independence, especially among young men, that drives them to migrate.12 On the basis of my own research, I can only confirm Tetzlaffs’s and Okanga’s observations. I met many young Nigerians like Nduka who left their country in order to liberate themselves from different family responsibilities. They wanted to embark on an independent and mature life, gain respect, and increase their status in their home society. Among these emancipatory factors, material success also play an important role, but with different nuances from those obtaining in the ‘discourse of poverty’. Although many of Nduka’s friends and family members had been abroad before, they only partly imparted their knowledge to him: 10

Interview with Nduka, lines 74–76. Rainer Tetzlaff, “Fluchtbewegungen in Schwarzafrika,” in Menschen auf der Flucht, ed. Franz–Joseph Hutter, Anja Mihr & Carsten Tessmer (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999): 152. 12 Eloka C.P. Nwolisa Okanga, Njepu Amaka – Migration is Rewarding: A Sociocultural Anthropological Study of Global Economic Migration: White Man’s Magic, Women Trafficking: Business and Ethnicity among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003): 212–13. 11

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I never knew anything about asylum. But when I was about to leave my uncle told me something about aduro.13 And I asked him: “what’s that aduro, aduro all about?” He said I will know when I get there; I will see it.14

In his uncle’s case there was a secret about ‘aduro’ that was not meant to be revealed before Nduka’s journey. Thus, he was sent out to discover the ‘secrets of migration’ through experience. In the context of Nduka’s narrative, this notion of secrecy on the social level and his individual desire for a mature position within the family can be regarded as two indications of the coming initiation into the ‘secret cult’ as a transnational process.

Entering Europe: “I Never Experienced Such Cold in My Life” At the end of 2001, Nduka entered Germany on a business visa valid for three months. He went to his elder brother, who had already been living there for several years. His brother welcomed Nduka and helped him find a job. In snowy conditions he had to load containers in the port: “Never since I was born did I experienced such cold. I never experienced such hard work in my whole life.”15 Feeling diminished as a graduate by the hard physical work under poor conditions, he began to doubt the positive image of Europe he had brought with him. But as long as he was protected by his visa it was still a period of grace for Nduka, living sheltered but financially independent in his brother’s house – but keeping the opportunity to return to Nigeria at the back of his mind. The physical experience of cold recurs several times in the interview – also in the context of his sojourn in Spain. It seems to reflect the emotional coldness Nduka is experiencing in his migration process. His brother’s hospitality lasted only until the visa expired, after which he introduced him to the ‘usual path’ to legalize his stay. He should apply for asylum, live in ‘aduro-house’, and find a German woman to get married to. Nduka was outraged: “Over my dead body. I can’t take asylum. I can’t – get married to any – old German woman here. I am a married man. I can’t do that.”16 His annoyance was accompanied by the disappointment he felt about his brother, who was sending him out of his house to live in a house for asylum seekers. By dismissing the procedure adopted by his elder brother and by rejecting his advice, Nduka failed to show due respect. 13 14 15 16

‘Aduro’ is an expression for asylum especially among Nigerian and Ghanean migrants. Interview with Nduka, lines 65–68. Interview with Nduka, lines 92–94. Interview with Nduka, lines 114–15.

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Moreover, he denied the complicity offered to him. He thus created a conflict between himself and his brother that lasted for almost two years, so that he was left to his own devices and had to discover Europe’s secrets gradually by himself. If migration is to be regarded as an initiation process, as Nduka suggested, it was at this point that the phase of separation from the family was completed and the precondition for initiation fulfilled. Leaving safe ground, Nduka here entered the uncertain but promising space of liminality. While looking for alternatives for where to go to when his visa expired, he received a call from a friend living in Spain who told him about the liberal immigration policies and possibilities for foreigners to gain work and residence permits there. This led Nduka to Galicia, where he was introduced to the ‘system’ of how to get work and papers by his friend. In Galicia he met another Nigerian, who told him about his prosperous life in Tenerife and paid for Nduka’s flight. Thus, having travelled through Europe for several months Nduka, arrived at one of its southernmost borders. The myth that life is better elsewhere led to Nduka’s transmigration from Nigeria to Tenerife via Germany and the Spanish mainland. In each of the three places, he faced the same experience with family members and friends in the diaspora: He will tell you welcome the first week. The second week he will tell you: “Oh, boy, you have to find your way. Go to Red Cross or go to aduro-house and stay.” […] even your brother cannot help you here. Because he has not helped himself.17

This feeling of a lonely struggle is shared by most of the Nigerians I met. The structures of subordination as well as the pressure to succeed connected with the migration project in many cases create an atmosphere of competition and distrust. I often found that it was regarded as a betrayal to say anything against the image of a solidly united community of Nigerians or Igbos; but many people were prepared to tell me, in strict confidence, about distrust and lack of solidarity in the diaspora.

Reflections on the ‘System’: “Europe is Like a Secret Cult” After only three days of Nduka’s stay in Tenerife, the friend who brought him there went back to Galicia because of a ‘problem with the police’. Left alone again, failing to find a job, and refusing to engage in illegal activities, Nduka ended up in a Red Cross house for immigrants. He was now under the control of a Spanish institution. Thus, having sought personal freedom, his migration 17

Interview with Nduka, lines 373–81.

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led him into another dependency. Moreover, his higher educational background, which had gained him some respect in the diasporic community is not acknowledged at all in the Spanish context. This low regard led to Nduka’s strong desire to return to Nigeria: “I am tired of staying in Europe. I prefer suffering down in my country than here. Where I have regard... At least if you are there [in Nigeria] people see you are there.”18 Nduka further describes how the myth of Europe and the positive image of a successful migration project are cultivated by the migrants when they travel to Nigeria, in the form of incomplete or misrepresented stories about their personal achievements in the diaspora. At the same time, the myth is also maintained by people in Nigeria, who believe and enjoy the stories or do not ask any further questions. By accepting and concealing the degradation and marginalization experienced in Europe, respect and a higher status in the home society are maintained. Thus, the secrets of migration are left untouched. Although these days everybody somehow knows about them, thanks to movies and the internet, they are not explicitly or only partly articulated in face-to-face contact. This kind of avoidance or concealment of ‘public secrets’ represents a social taboo based on reciprocal consent within the transnational community. The taboo is cultivated through collective images and shared narratives about the positive myth of Europe.19 Reflecting on his stay in Europe, Nduka concludes: Here in Europe it’s like a secret cult. If you don’t belong you won’t know what is inside. Immediately you are initiated into the system, to go back is another problem. But to me going back is not a problem to me.20

Nduka describes the disclosure of the secrets as an initiation. By using the metaphor of a secret cult for migrants’ life in Europe he refers to a widely known concept in Nigeria. Igbo secret cults, for example, are politico-religious societies. In order to become a member, a long and complicated initiation process must be gone through, in which the initiant’s courage, discipline, and endurance are tested. It often marks the passage from childhood to adulthood through the acquisition of knowledge that is inaccessible to the uninitiated. While the initiants are absent from their homes, the secrets are revealed to them

18

Interview with Nduka, lines 612–14. Taboos are based on the fear of alienating everybody against oneself by talking against internalized common ideals; see Paul Parin, “Wer richtet ein Tabu ein und zu welchem Zweck? Tabuisierung, ein Werkzeug der Politik: Legitimationsorgan, Geschichtsverfälschung und Sündenbocktaktik,” in Ethnopsychoanalyse 6: Forschen, Erzählen, Reflektieren, ed. Jutta Sippel–Süsse & Roland Apsel (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2001): 9–18. 20 Interview with Nduka, lines 358–61. 19

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only step-by-step. Afterwards, their childhood behind them, they rejoin their families with new personalities.21 This initiation into a secret cult has many parallels with Nduka’s migratory progress, which he planned in the first place in order to gain a new and mature position within his family. Starting in Nigeria and proceeding to Germany and Spain, Nduka was gradually initiated into the secrets of migrant life in Europe. The concept of the secret cult can also be related to university campus secret cults, which are very popular in contemporary Nigeria. Student members are required to keep the cult’s secrets and conceal certain activities. To those who are willing to preserve the secrets, observe the taboos connected with them, and identify themselves with it, the cult offers a strong sense of belonging but at the same time separates the participants from the rest of society. Disclosure of the secret is punished with exclusion or even more severe sanctions.22 These characteristics of secret cults are reflected in Nduka’s description of his life in the transnational community. The notion of secrecy in this context is attached mainly to negative migration experiences such as degradation, exploitation, illegal activities, lack of solidarity among migrants, and the aspect of the lonely struggle. Secrecy become a dimension separating Nigerians in the diaspora from those in the home country. Nduka thus identifies the intention of a permanent return to Nigeria as a problem for those living in the diaspora.23 His reflexive distance, his lack of identification with the diasporic community and its rules, poses a potential danger to the system. Consequently, he is in an outsider position abroad as well as in Nigeria. Throughout his years in Europe, Nduka has remained in contact with his family members in Nigeria. However, idealized images about life in Europe have made it difficult for him to communicate his suffering in Europe to those at home. In preparing for return to Nigeria, he has tried to convey his bad situation to his family, who fail to understand him or to show any empathy. The idea that he might return from Europe without any economic success to show is utterly incomprehensible to them, so that Nduka’s attempt to be open with them has led to a clash and the gap between the two life-worlds has only grown wider. 21 See Victoria Oluomachukwu Ibewuike, African Women and Religious Change: A Study of the Western Igbo of Nigeria. With Special Focus on Asaba Town (Uppsala, 2006): 40–47, 104–109: http://www.diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_uu_diva-6200-2_fulltext .pdf [24 January 2007]. 22 See Adewale Rotimi, “Violence in the Citadel: The Menace of Secret Cult in the Nigerian Universities,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 14.1 (2005): 79–98. 23 Over the years, the idea of returning develops in many cases into a myth; see Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: U C L Press, 1997).

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Bridging the Gap Through Mobile and Internet Communication: “My Experience in this Europe is Never a Thing of Regret to Me” Ever since Nduka came to Europe, his wife has been his invisible tie to Nigeria. He presents her as the only one who really knows about and understands his situation. By means of regular communication via phone and internet, Nduka shares every detail of his experience with her. Being jobless, he was usually hanging around, looking for work or visiting people. At times, I would meet Nduka on the street rushing to the internet café because he had an online appointment with his wife, something that seemed to be the highlight of his day and had an empowering effect on him. Thus, it became an important strategy for him to bridge the growing gap between the two life-worlds. Generally, the internet, as a speedy and cost-effective mode of communication, plays a great role in Nduka’s life in the diaspora. Apart from enabling contact with his wife, the translocal space of the worldwide chatrooms has also made him new virtual friends: I have friends in Argentina, I have friends in Columbia, I have friends in South Africa, I have friends in Nigeria.24 Whom I have not met before. But only through the net we exchange experiences. My experience in this Europe is never a thing of regret to me or whatever. I like it. Because if I never come here I wouldn’t have known what is going on. Now that I have come and I have known the secret […]. It’s now left for me to regulate my life.25

The anonymity of the internet enables him to communicate his migration experiences which he can neither share with most of his family members in Nigeria nor critically discuss with most of the Nigerians he has met in Europe. Therefore, the computer mediated communication serves him as an important means of voicing his experiences. While lacking other identifications in the diaspora, Nduka has developed a sense of belonging to the virtual community of the chatrooms as a “community of sentiment.”26 Online, it is possible for him to share the secrets of migration and discuss his experience critically without fear of exclusion. In the context of internet communication, his earlier regret at coming to Europe takes a back seat in Nduka’s narrative.27 He now 24

Here he is referring mainly to people of the Nigerian diaspora. Whenever I met Nduka in the internet café, he especially liked to join one of the numerous Nigerian chatrooms. 25 Interview with Nduka, lines 453–60. 26 Following Arjun Appadurai, I hereby refer to “a group that begins to imagine and feel things together” in a transnational space due to the exchange of shared experience and its criticism. Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003): 8. 27 Interview with Nduka, lines 453–60.

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identifies knowledge about ‘the secret’ as the actual gain of his migratory project, thus recognizing that he has reached a new stage of independence and responsibility in his self-development. Considering Nduka’s perception of migration as an initiation process, this gain in knowledge can be compared to the initate’s learning of secrets by the end of his / her rite of passage.

Reconciliation and Partial Incorporation: “I Was Talking to Him as a Guy” Having worked out the dynamics and mechanisms of a transnational migrant’s life, including the discovery of the secrets, Nduka felt able to contact his elder brother in Germany, whom he had not talked to since he left him two years earlier: What he knows about Europe I have now come to know. You know, that respect will not be there again. […] I mean, now I am kind of different from African life. I thought about it, and there is nothing inside it. I have to call him and talk to him as somebody that has seen things. I was not even talking to him as a senior brother. I was talking to him as a guy. And he was responding to me as a guy, too.28

In this section, Nduka expresses openly his growing distance from his life and family in Africa. As a consequence of his migration experience and the disenchantment with Europe associated with it, the former hierarchical relationship to his elder brother has changed. He neither admires him as a senior nor as somebody who is staying abroad, as he used to do when he was still in Nigeria. Rather, for the first time in his life, he looks upon his elder sibling as an equal, due to their shared experience and knowledge. During the same telephone conversation with his brother, Nduka told him self-confidently about his condition: “Things are okay. Things are very cool. No problem. Even said I am going back to Nigeria by the end of this year. He [the brother] said: Wow!”29 This conversation indicates that Nduka has adapted to the appropriate code of conduct; by concealing his present poor living conditions he has elevated his own status. When he told his brother about his decision to return, his senior even seemed to admire him. Going back did not remain a myth for Nduka – in 2005 he finally returned to Nigeria. 

28 29

Interview with Nduka, lines 943–44, 957–62. Interview with Nduka, lines 969–71.

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Narrating in Transitional Social Spaces Nduka interprets his migration story as an initiation into a secret cult. This essay has shown how this explanatory model is reflected in the different stages of his migration. For Nduka, the transition implied does not take place between the home and the host society – as it used to be conceptualized by ethnological and psychoanalytical migration studies.30 Rather, he describes his initiation within the border-crossing Nigerian community – which reflects the assumptions of transnational perspectives on migration.31 Concerning the transformation involved, he refers to two partly overlapping frameworks: 1) he is gradually becoming an insider to the system of the Nigerian diaspora; 2) he gains the position of a grown-up in his transnational family. These two transformations of status are reflected in the changing relationship to his elder brother in Germany, whom he could meet on an equal level after two years of his stay in Europe. But these transformations cannot be regarded as fixed identifications or belongings. Rather, Nduka also experiences differences on diverse levels. First of all, he is wholly excluded from European society due to working conditions, residence restrictions, and the negative public image of African migrants. Moreover, he can identify neither with the diasporic community he is facing nor with his former life in Africa. Instead, the knowledge and experience he has acquired in different contexts enable him to switch between different identifications. This characterizes his in-between or liminal position. It is this state of liminality that has been pointed out in postmodern theories and studies on migration.32 In order to cope with the inconsistencies of the liminal state and the processes of cultural symbolization and re-organization involved, the anthropologist and psychoanalyst Maya Nadig argues, migrants need a ‘transitional space’ (Übergangsraum). She uses the term to define a 30

For the conceptualization of migration as a transition with a reference to anthropological ritual theories, see Heidi Schär Sall, “Überlebenskunst in Übergangswelten,” in Überlebenskunst in Übergangswelten: Ethnopsychologische Betreuung von Asylsuchenden, ed. Asyl– Organisation für den Kanton Zürich (Berlin: Reimer, 1999): 77–107, and Leon & Rebecca Grinberg, Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile, tr. Nancy Festinger (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1989). 31 See, for example, Nina Glick–Schiller, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorising Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly 68.1 (1996): 48–63. 32 Owing to its emphasis on liminality, Doris Bachmann–Medick, for example, connects Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ as an ongoing state of experience and existence to Victor W. Turner’s theory of ritual. Accordingly, during the state of transformation the initiant is unsettled concerning cultural traditions and behavioural patterns. See Bachmann– Medick, “Dritter Raum:. Annäherung an ein Medium kultureller Übersetzung und Kartierung,” in Figuren der / des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume, ed. Claudia Breger & Tobias Döring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998): 19–36.

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social space that endorses socially experienced difference and inconsistencies on an emotional, physical, and cultural level. Here it is possible to negotiate different perceptions and meanings. As a result, processes of re-symbolizations and self-development are encouraged.33 In the case of Nduka, I regard some of his social relationships as potentially transitional spaces. Here he can articulate the knowledge and experience he has gained during the migratory process and enlist these in negotiating critical stances. In this regard, the relation to his wife in Nigeria plays an important role. As an empathic listener, she offers him an emotional backing that bridges the growing gap between his two life-worlds. A second important transitional space for Nduka is the communication in the worldwide chatrooms. Chatting with migrants from different parts of the world enables him to negotiate different migration experiences and perceptions. For Nduka, the chatrooms thus became an organ with transformative potential. Presumably, internet discussion also encouraged Nduka to reflect further on his own process of migration. Moreover, the ethnographic encounter between Nduka and myself represents another potentially transitional space. In the course of the interview, Nduka constructed the story of his migration; he articulated his experiences and perceptions and offered me his own interpretation of them. His narrative should therefore not only be regarded as a story of pure facts but also as the self-representation of a transnational agent. Nduka converted the social relegation and personal suffering he experienced into knowledge about the secrets of migration, thereby reinterpreting his experiences and profiting from them. More than this, he created a meaningful link between his past and the present, lending coherence to a period in his life that was marked by inconsistencies. Thus, in Nduka’s case narrating his migration experience in transitional spaces can be regarded as an important coping strategy. Emancipation and self-development are central motifs of his narration and represent important motives for migration in the Nigerian context. These motifs are also integral to the literary genre of the Entwicklungsroman or coming-ofage story. By relating the different stages of his migration, Nduka presents his inner and outer development and shows how his migration experiences have contributed to his personal development. This growth through migration, however, has been rarely discussed in public discourse. Although Nduka’s account and his deconstruction of the myth of Europe could provide a basis for countering the general victimization of migrants in European debates on poverty, it 33

Maya Nadig, “Interkulturalität im Prozess. Ethnopsychoanalyse und Feldforschung als methodischer und theoretischer Übergangsraum,” in Identität und Differenz: Zur Psychoanalyse des Geschlechterverhältnisses in der Spätmoderne, ed. Hildegard Lahme–Gronostaj & Marianne Leuzinger–Bohleber (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000): 87–88.

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also shows how massive familial, social, and cultural pressures hamper the creative and transformative potential of initiation. As such, Nduka’s narrative offers an explanation for the question of why the myth of Europe as a collective transnational narrative persists.

WORKS CITED Abu–Lughod, Lila. “Writing against Culture,” in Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present, ed. Richard Fox (Santa Fe N M : School of American Research P , 1992): 137–62. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996; Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2003). Bachmann–Medick, Doris. “Dritter Raum: Annäherung an ein Medium kultureller Übersetzung und Kartierung,” in Figuren der/des Dritten: Erkundungen kultureller Zwischenräume, ed. Claudia Breger & Tobias Döring (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998): 19–36. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: U C L Press, 1997). Glick–Schiller, Nina. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant. Theorising Transnational Migration,” Anthropological Quarterly 68.1 (1996): 48–63. Grinberg, Leon, & Rebecca Grinberg. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile, tr. Nancy Festinger (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1989). Horn–Udeze, Bettina, & Annika Lieby–McPherson. “ ‘ Just floating in the Air’ – Identitäten in der Schwebe: Eine ethnographische Forschung mit westafrikanischen Flüchtlingen in Bremen” (M.A. thesis, University of Bremen, 2001). Ibewuike, Victoria Oluomachukwu. African Women and Religious Change: A Study of the Western Igbo of Nigeria: With Special Focus on Asaba Town (Uppsala, 2006). http://www .diva-portal.org/diva/getDocument?urn_nbn_se_uu_diva-6200-2__fulltext.pdf [accessed 24 January 2007]. Kreienbrink, Axel. Einwanderungsland Spanien: Migrationspolitik zwischen Europäisierung und nationalen Interessen (Frankfurt am Main: I K O , 2004). Nadig, Maya. “Interkulturalität im Prozess: Ethnopsychoanalyse und Feldforschung als methodischer und theoretischer Übergangsraum,” in Identität und Differenz: Zur Psychoanalyse des Geschlechterverhältnisses in der Spätmoderne, ed. Hildegard Lahme–Gronostaj & Marianne Leuzinger–Bohleber (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000): 87–101. Okanga, Eloka C.P. Nwolisa: Njepu Amaka – Migration is Rewarding: A Sociocultural Anthropological Study of Global Economic Migration: White Man’s Magic, Women Trafficking: Business and Ethnicity among the Igbo of Eastern Nigeria (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2003). Parin, Paul. “Wer richtet ein Tabu ein und zu welchem Zweck? Tabuisierung, ein Werkzeug der Politik: Legitimationsorgan, Geschichtsverfälschung und Sündenbocktaktik,” in Ethnopsychoanalyse 6: Forschen, Erzählen, Reflektieren, ed. Jutta Sippel–Süsse & Roland Apsel (Frankfurt am Main: Brandes & Apsel, 2001): 9–18. Rotimi, Adewale. “Violence in the Citadel: The Menace of Secret Cult in the Nigerian Universities,” Nordic Journal of African Studies 14.1 (2005): 79–98. Schär Sall, Heidi. “Überlebenskunst in Übergangswelten,” in Überlebenskunst in Übergangswelten: Ethnopsychologische Betreuung von Asylsuchenden, ed. Asyl-Organisation für den Kanton Zürich (Berlin: Reimer, 1999): 77–107.

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Schweigle, Günther, & Irmgard. Metzler Literatur Lexikon: Begriffe und Definitionen (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2nd rev. ed., 1990). Tetzlaff, Rainer. “Fluchtbewegungen in Schwarzafrika,” in Menschen auf der Flucht, ed. Franz–Joseph Hutter, Anja Mihr & Carsten Tessmer (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1999): 141–56. Turner, Victor W. The Ritual Process: Structure und Anti-Structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969). Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom (Les Rites de passage: Étude systématique, 1909, tr. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960).

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C HRISTINE M ATZKE ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

“Performing ‘Africa’” in Germany — Members of abok Theatre Company in Conversation

ABSTRACT: This conversation with members of abok, the first German-speaking theatre company devoted to the production of African and AfricanEuropean theatre texts, gives an insight into the complex realities of ‘performing “Africa” ’ and negotiating Black professional theatre identities in Germany.

W

‘ N A R R A T I N G ’ or ‘performing “Africa”’ in post-reunification Germany, theatre has played a rather marginal role. While internationally renowned African playwrights, performers, and directors may occasionally tour their productions or collaborate with national theatre houses, and while a number of locally based African theatre artists enjoy various degrees of success on the fringe theatre scene, few attempts have been made at producing African plays for a German-language audience. In 2004, Philippa Ebéné, an African-German director, author, actress, and cultural activist, put an end to this by founding abok, the first German-speaking theatre company devoted to the production of African and African-European theatre texts. So far, the group has had eight shows to their credit: Die Sterne dort unten/Flammen der Hölle (Ken Saro–Wiwa), Kinjeketile (Ebrahim Hussein), Die Insel (John Kani, Winston Nsthona, Athol Fugard), Die Lobpreisung eines Grashüpfers (Femi Osofisan), Sterne auf Deiner Haut (An Evening of Love Poetry), Der fürsorgliche Ehemann (Ken Saro–Wiwa), HEN IT COMES TO

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Brixton Stories (Biyi Bandele), and a commemorative reading in honour of the Afro-German author and activist, May Ayim. Abok invites audiences into theatrical contexts little known and even less performed on stages in Germany, and it does so beyond prevalent eurocentric perceptions. All the members of the company are black theatre professionals from backgrounds as varied as the black community in Germany itself.1 And as diverse as the company are their individual experiences with African theatre. The following conversation with three members of the company – Elizabeth Blonzen, Philippa Ebéné, and Edsel Scott – was recorded on 5 December 2006, in Berlin, and gives an insight into the complex realities of “performing ‘Africa’” and negotiating black professional theatre identities in Germany.2 Elizabeth Blonzen (E B ), Edsel Scott (E S ), Philippa Ebéné (P E ), Christine Matzke (C M ) C M : I would like to start with some professional background. E B : I am Elizabeth Blonzen. I was born near Cologne and later trained at the

Otto Falckenberg-Schule in Munich. After that I worked at different theatres in Germany; at the Kammerspiele in Munich, for example, and at the Residenztheater, at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, at the Nationaltheater in Mann1

Unlike other African-European communities, black people in Germany have no collective history of migration or displacement, but mostly trace their histories “to a number of individual journeys of blacks over two centuries from different nations”; Tina M. Campt, “Reading the Black German Experience: An Introduction,” Callaloo 26.2 (2003): 290; see also May Ayim, “Die afro-deutsche Minderheit,” in AfrikaBilder: Studien zu Rassismus in Deutschland, ed. Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2001): 71–86. The designation ‘AfroGerman’ was first developed in the 1980s by Afro-German women scholars, authors, and activists in collaboration with the African-American writer Audre Lorde; Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, ed. Katharina Oguntoye, May Opitz & Dagmar Schultz (1986; Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992): 10. ‘Black Germans’ (Schwarze Deutsche) also emerged around that time, when the “New Black Movement” engendered the emergence of various black associations in their attempt at self-definition and greater public visibility in German society (Eleonore Wiedenroth–Coulibaly & Sascha Zinflou, “Geschichte der I S D ”, http://www.isdonline.de [accessed 28 May 2007]. Today, the term ‘black Germans’ has been replaced by the more comprehensive ‘black people in Germany’ (Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland) to include persons of more diverse cultural backgrounds and to emphasize the “constructedness of blackness in German society and the fact that public perception of blackness in Germany is not restricted to the attribute of skin color”; Campt, “Reading the Black German Experience,” 288. There also exist a number of other, more specific, self-designations: e.g., Eritreo-Germans, African-German, Afro-Berliner or African-American–German. 2 For further information on abok, including individual biographies and shows, see: http.//www.abok.info [accessed 2 April 2007].

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heim, and at the Schauspiel in Bonn. I also made series and films for television; and two films for the cinema. I played a Bavarian secretary in a T V series with Uschi Glas [a well-known German actress who debuted in the mid-1960s]. I played the role with a Bavarian accent. It was very popular with the audience. Now I live in Berlin and work on a freelance basis. I have a five-year-old son. E S : My name is Edsel Scott. I am English, born in London. I came to Germany in the 1980s. Like Elizabeth, I am a freelancer, but my background is in dance. I trained at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London. After graduation I started to dance in various ballet companies. Moving on from the ballet companies in England, I eventually came to Koblenz in Germany, where I started in a Tanztheater [dance theatre] company. After three years in Koblenz, I moved to Berlin, where I began to work as a freelance dancer. Then I moved on to acting. I’ve had various experiences going back and forwards between engagements at Staatstheater [national theatres] and the open scene, doing freelance work with various choreographers in Germany, Holland, and Spain. I’ve come eventually to a crossroads where, in the last few years, I have been working with both actors and dancers. P E : My name is Philippa Ebéné. I went to drama school in Freiburg, where I partly grew up. I started working at the theatre while I was still at school. I realized pretty fast that I would probably have to play roles that I wouldn’t like to do, so shortly after I finished drama school I decided that it wasn’t the job for me and moved into something else, P R and marketing. I returned to acting because in 1999 I was asked to take part in a play, Am Ort: Frauengestalten von Goethe. It was a theatre I really liked, the Schaubühne in Berlin. I also like the director, Edith Clever, so I sort of came back. I then thought that I would like to go more into training and opened up a studio for professional actors, forum für filmschauspiel e.V. I am not teaching myself, but I invite teachers and tutors who then work with actors; for two weeks or six weeks or weekends or once a week, depending on the programme. During one of the workshops in 2004 one of the actors, a Nigerian, worked on a Soyinka play. I realized that none of the other twenty-odd actors and actresses, who came from Denmark, Spain, Portugal, England, and Germany, had ever heard of Wole Soyinka. I was shocked! So I thought I have to do something about this and decided to start a company, which is abok. Abok means ‘celebration’ in the Beti language. C M : So that was in 2004 … P E : I had the idea of introducing African authors to a German audience, but

also to an African, African-German audience. We started off by reading in my kitchen. Some of us would meet and we would read, but some people would be late – you know what it’s like. You have to work towards a certain goal. It’s a bit difficult to meet once or twice a week if there’s nothing ahead of you apart

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from getting to know these authors. Then I said to myself, let’s stop right here and let me find someone to support us financially; then we will start anew. I think I had the idea in late 2004. I really thought it would be easy – one would go and knock at doors, ask for money, and people would be thrilled: “What a fabulous idea! Here you are; 1,000 Euro here and another 2,000 there.” But unfortunately it didn’t happen that way. I tried for about six months. Then I realized that we need a strong partner. I thought I could apply for money for theatre or the arts. Then I realized I have to shift the whole thing to people who work with ‘Africa’, so to speak. C M : That’s interesting. P E : I had to ask people who are into ‘political work’. That really surprised me.

I thought this was art! So I approached groups that worked on a political level. I found a very reliable partner in AfricaVenir. They are a Foundation for Development, International Cooperation, and Peace, with headquarters in Duala, Yaoundé, and an office in Berlin.3 They really support us. But it’s not always AfricaVenir [who support us]. We have put on shows without them. But we started off with, I think, four rehearsed readings financed by AfricaVenir. They found the money for us. C M : I really do find that interesting. Talking of Wole Soyinka, there are certain similarities to his own experience in the early 1970s when he was invited to give a lecture series on literature and society at Cambridge. The English Department was supposed to participate, but in the end the lectures took place at the Department of Social Anthropology.4 They obviously did not associate Soyinka with ‘theatre’ or ‘the arts’, but with ‘politics’ and ‘the study of mankind’. Your case seems similar, in that you do not get support from the arts world, but have to approach organizations that work with ‘migrants’ or ‘Africa’, and the like. P E : Yes, this is how it started off. We were invited to the Africa Festival in Potsdam, for instance, so the focus has always been on Africa, and not on drama, at least not so far. Of course, I am working towards being invited to theatre festivals. I think it is going to happen next year, in 2007, in North Rhein–Westphalia, but it is still important to note that we were more interesting for people who work on a political level, rather than the arts world. C M : When you had the idea of getting people together to work on African plays – how did you go about it? How did you, Elizabeth, for example, join the 3

For further information, see: http://www.africavenir.com [accessed 2 April 2007]. Soyinka’s lecture series was published in 1976 as Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P ). 4

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group? After all, abok is not a permanent company. Both of you, Elizabeth and Edsel, work as freelancers; all of you are engaged in different projects. P E : The point is, we are not a permanent company, because I can’t keep people! If I could, I would! If I had the kind of money I need to pay people properly, I would certainly try to form a company, have contracts, and have people work on productions on a daily basis. But it is very difficult to find that kind of money, especially here in Berlin. C M : So you basically went round asking your friends and colleagues if they were interested in working on African drama? P E : They were all actors. And I know that most [black] actors in Germany have to accept roles they would not necessarily choose to play. I had the impression that people were pretty interested when I told them we are going to work on African plays. Which, of course, means that the whole cast will be of African descent. And this means that you will not be the sole black character in the show. It makes a big difference, at least for me. E B : I came to the group at Philippa’s invitation. I think most of us did. I saw her in the 1999 production at the Schaubühne in Berlin as Goethe’s Iphigenie [in the earlier-mentioned play Am Ort: Frauengestalten von Goethe]. All actors were white, except for Philippa. I know the part very well, so I was very critical, but I liked her performance very much. So I basically knew her as an actress. A few years later we met again at the birthday party of a mutual friend. She told me about abok, and I said I would like to join the group. She invited me to work on Kinjeketile, and later I also did Love Poems and Brixton Stories. I find it very, very relaxing to be on stage with other black actors. I was so happy, almost on the verge of tears, because this experience was so new. There were also so many black spectators in the audience. I’d never seen anything like that in Germany. When I play ‘mainstream’ theatre, there are no black spectators. Sometimes one or two, because they have heard that there is a black woman in the play. What was also new for me was that that not all members of the audience were African, but many were African-Germans, like me. They also wanted to know about African drama and history. I have been to Africa twice, to Zimbabwe and South Africa, but I know little about my black heritage. I don’t know my father, but I know he was African-American. I’ve always hated this idea of ‘Africa’. I am not ‘Africa’, but I always had to represent the whole continent. It is really difficult. I can’t play ‘Europe’ or ‘Asia’, I’m always the ‘African’ character on stage. So I found it very relaxing and inspiring to be part of this, well, call it ‘African’ company, and to do research myself. It’s not assumed that I know about these things. I can ask Philippa, who is very knowledgeable, and other company members, too. At first I was a bit ashamed about my lack of knowledge. They all knew so much about the con-

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tinent, or were from Africa. I just thought, “Oh no, I am wrong again!” But then I started as an actress in the group, and not as someone who is black, but not from Africa. So the work began, and it was great. C M : Edsel, would you like to share with us how you came to join abok? E S : I think I am the lucky one, because I was the last to join the group. So

when I came to the group it was already formed. It’s not a permanent company in that people are always together, but I had watched the group twice, on two different nights. During the last showing – it basically blew me away. It was really nice to watch black actors on stage. I’d always assumed that here in Berlin you can’t get a group of black people together. Sorry if I sound offensive, but you cannot get a group of black people together. It’s totally impossible. P E : That’s not true! [All laugh] E S : Well, before abok. That was my experience. I’d been working on other pieces before. I met Philippa just by chance at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. I didn’t know what she was doing when we actually met. There was a fair or a meeting going on and we just got talking. We were not talking about the arts at all, but about our children, but we decided to stay in contact. A few months later I got a phone call from Philippa, inviting me to watch a film with a group of friends. P E : Spike Lee! The last one! E B : Ah, Inside Man! [All laugh] E S : Yes, Spike Lee. At first I hadn’t thought anything of it, but then I went and met this group of people. And then, slowly but surely, it dawned on me what Philippa was doing. She started to explain to me about her group, where she was going and why she wanted to do it. I found it fascinating. You meet a person who has drive and motivation. A lot of the time you sit back and can see things coming and happening, but how do you react? You have to do something. And Philippa is a person who says, “I am going to do it!” This is something that stuck with me. Afterwards you get this awareness. She invited me to watch a show or sent out emails about the group. I went to the Werkstatt der Kulturen, where I had worked before on different pieces, and wanted to see what they were doing. I found it extremely interesting. And then Philippa comes along and says that she’d like me to do something in the next piece! I just went: “Are you sure about this?” There were all trained actors and my field is pure dance, even though I have done Tanztheater [dance theatre] and musical. I was terrified the first day I went in to do a reading. I just thought they will all have to help me over my words. But I went in and enjoyed it. That’s what I can say. It’s been a brilliant voyage of discovery. Through this and another friend of mine, an anthropologist, I am now more aware of Africa. In England we were brought up to be ashamed, really. We were Caribbean, so we have a

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different history. Especially in the media, Africans are always portrayed as helpless. It’s projected so much. So we grew up rejecting people and looking down on them. That’s why it was such a voyage of discovery for me. C M : One of things that you mentioned before are the roles on offer to black actors and actresses in Germany. This might be another aspect of abok’s work, where you are trying to set something positive against your experience with German ‘mainstream’ theatre. Perhaps you can briefly comment on what it means to work as a black actor in Germany. I found one article written by your colleague and co-member of abok, Nisma Cherrat,5 which really takes to task the racism and discrimination black actresses suffer; and we also briefly spoke about your own difficulties before taping this conversation. Maybe you can relate it to your work with abok. Elizabeth and Edsel, you have both spoken about how relevant – and revelatory – the work with abok has been for you on a personal and professional level, but we only touched on your experience with other theatres, such as Elizabeth having to represent ‘Africa’ all the time. E B : Exactly. E S : Yes! P E : May I say something? I don’t want to be the spoilsport. But to be very honest, I don’t like to talk about racism. In the end, it just weakens me. I could go on and on about how I am not getting this role or that role, and that people are always portrayed stereotypically, but I would really prefer to use this time and talk about things that are more constructive. I would rather talk about what we want to do. The reasons why every one of us decided to get involved with abok – in a way it is clear, don’t you think? Personally, I find it more interesting to explore African writers and how to get them on stage. It’s not easy, for the simple reason that they are not very well known. Africa has musicians, and Africa has dance, Africa is now en vogue with André Heller’s variety show, but people always think there are no writers on the continent. It’s just not true! Especially when it comes to storytelling, Africa is extremely rich! My interest lies in telling those stories. And as I said, we don’t work for a white audience. I am not trying to say: “Listen, folks, we also have stories!” We usually have a big black audience. Just recently we had a memorial reading for the Afro-German author May Ayim. Around 130 people came. More than half of the audience was of African descent. For me, that’s one of the most important things, to draw people to the theatre who normally wouldn’t come. When I 5

Nisma Cherrat, “Mätresse – Wahnsinnige – Hure: Schwarze SchauspielerInnen am deutschsprachigen Theater,” in Mythen, Masken und Subjekte: Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland, ed. Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche & Susan Arndt (Münster: Unrast, 2006): 206–20.

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go to the theatre, I rarely see a black character on stage or a black person in the audience. And if you have a black character, well, you can already guess what he or she is supposed to do now. E S : We don’t have to go into the matter, but I do think that unfortunately the two things are related. It’s like a taboo. You go through society and you can’t really talk about it [racism and the arts]. Maybe this is a new taboo. You don’t talk about prejudices, because now we are moving on to the ‘socially acceptable’. The thing about audiences and black actors and actresses – it was the same in London when I was growing up. My parents didn’t go to the theatre. I only found out about theatre by chance through a friend of mine whose father was a writer and whose mother was a dancer. That’s how I got interested in dance. I liked their life-styles and the way they thought and the things they did. I think it is very, very important to have a black audience. Every time I go back to London, you become aware of it. You go into a bookshop and see a whole section on black literature. That tells you how far society has come and the speed at which society is moving. I hope this development will also come to mainland Europe. There is a greater awareness if it happens to you later in life. I find it such a shame. Even when I am on stage, I can’t influence other people to follow me and choose dance as a career. Unfortunately, black people in England – I can’t say much about Germany – but in England they make themselves publicly known mostly through sport or music entertainment, not the other arts. P E : It’s not that different here. E S : At the time I decided to dance, I really thought hard about it. Do you do this because this is really where you want to go? After school, I had trained as an electrician for three years, and then I went back into dance. Until then it had been a hobby for me. My mother warned me: “If you are going to dance, how much money are you going to make?” But it was my choice. I looked around and found a group of black people who were dancing, so I said I’d try. I was also trying to make a point. We can do ballet, we can do modern, we can do jazz – even though, at the time, when you were black, you did jazz. I just wanted to make a point and to break something down. There is no need to be afraid. We can do it as well. So my point is, we black artists have so much to share with black audiences. If you deny this, you are denying the future. E B : I would like to add something about abok. I knew some of the other actresses from castings and auditions. But now it was a new situation for me. I joined abok because of my interest in African drama. I am interested in the themes. It is also fascinating to see where the authors live and how it influences their writing. For example, we did Biyi Bandele’s Brixton Stories, which is set in London, not in Nigeria, his country of origin. I found Brixton Stories closer to my own experience, though I am more interested in writers whose focus is

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Africa and who also live there. Often they have a very different outlook on, for example, women and gender. Some are very conservative. I want to find out how they write, what kind of language they use – Swahili, Yoruba, English, French; you name it. I also like themes connected with Germany. For example, we read Ebrahim Hussein’s play Kinjeketile, on the Maji Maji uprising in Tanzania during the German colonization. It’s not a good play where the representation of Africans is concerned. They are really portrayed as ‘savages’. And I thought, “Oh no, we can’t show this to a German audience. That’s what I never wanted to play: a ‘wild’ black woman or man!” But then I began to understand the context, and in the end I liked the play very much. We had an excellent actor who played Kinjeketile. It was very powerful. C M : You probably performed the play as part of the 2005 Maji Maji com-

memoration here in Berlin. P E : Yes, it was easy to get money for that. E B : It was also unusual for me to come into the group and to work with the

other actresses. I knew all of them. Normally when you go to a casting, you go in for the same part. We are always in competition. Now, I find it normal to work with them as colleagues, but initially I thought, “Oh dear, that’s so and so, and so and so, oh my God, how is this going to work?” We’d always been in competition. Once she got the part, and the other time I was the lucky one. Now the situation has become much more normal. We are all colleagues and we work together. Some of them I like better than others, some are late, others are on time; some are full of life, others are depressed – it’s like any other company. That’s what I like about it. And when we are working, the issue is not who is representing ‘Africa’. That’s not the issue of the group. The issue is the theme of the play, or who is late, who knows their lines or who has forgotten their pages. It’s just a very typical rehearsal situation. It’s normal working life for an actor. And you don’t see the other actors as ‘black’ or in competition. That was my shocked reaction initially. I could see that Philippa was very happy about it, because she is so political. She really supports you. Also, the work with abok gives me a lot of encouragement. Normally you are on your own. You stand there in front of mostly white people who have a certain picture of ‘blackness’. I also have a certain image. That’s what I noticed when I started working with abok; I have a certain picture of ‘Africa’ and of ‘blackness’. But I realized that I can’t continue like that if I want to continue my work with abok. It’s not okay. I didn’t know any other black people before I met Philippa. She was the first black woman I talked to. Well, I had talked to Ice Cube at the Berlinale and to Jamie Foxx, who’d played Ray Charles in Ray. These were the only black people I had spoken to before, plus a few black musicians in Munich. She was also the first one I spoke German to – excluding, of course,

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the colleagues I had met at auditions and castings. And Philippa had similar opinions. It suddenly felt so good to have someone you can call and talk to, and she understands and gives you support. That is very important for me. She is an actress, but it does not mean that she is just a body. For some actresses it is. They like to be reduced to their bodies, constantly worrying about their looks, going on diets and so on. And what I also appreciate is that we are being paid for the readings. It’s not a lot, but it makes the whole thing professional. Philippa really puts an effort into it, and she’s good at getting funding. It gives your work as an actor a certain respect and dignity. You are not just a black person on stage who can read, but you are a professional actress. I like that very much. E S : I’d also like to add something. When I came to the group, I really liked the different skills people brought into the group. Philippa uses the experiences of the actors, and their opinions count. There is no hierarchy in the group as such. E B : Yes. E S : Everybody contributes what they can. Not many directors are happy to share the creative process. C M : I’d like to take you up on that and ask how you operate as a company. You seem to be working pretty democratically. P E : Things are actually pretty simple. I read plays and then say that one needs to be done. I will particularly look at the number of characters. There is a big difference if I need to raise the money for six people or three. C M : This is an aspect that people really need to know about. If you like a play with a cast of twenty, you won’t be able to put it on, simply because it will be difficult to find sufficient funding. P E : Exactly. Instead, we do plays like The Oriki of a Grasshopper by Femi Osofisan. I liked the play, plus it is written for only three characters – easy do deal with. The policy is to put on African plays in the German language. Or, let’s say, predominately in German. Sometimes it is a mixture of both the original language, mostly English and French, and German. So The Oriki of a Grasshopper had to be translated into German. Usually I first try to find money to make sure that people are going to be paid. Then I translate the play and send it out to those actors I think might be interested. And then we do it. The process is really: looking for material, deciding on a play, trying to get money for it, and finding out whether people are available. When Edsel and Elisabeth were referring to the work, they meant the moment we start rehearsing. There’s other work that’s done prior to that. C M : Perhaps I should also mention that as far as I know you have done play

readings rather than mounting full-fledged shows.

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P E : Yes, they are rehearsed readings, but they are more rehearsed than read. What do you think? E B : Absolutely. E S : Yes, the interaction on stage matters a lot. P E : That’s what I mean, it is more directed than just read. And we have lighting and all that. E B : Yes. P E : Of course, if it was a real play, people would have to learn it by heart and not read from the manuscript. It would be more work for them and the money just wouldn’t add up. We want to present African plays, but we are not so desperate that we would do it for nothing. C M : I actually like the idea of seeing people with the playscript on stage. It’s a kind of Verfremdungseffekt that can give a different edge to a play. E B : Yes, but it also shows the kind of distance and difficulties between me as a black German actress and the African play I am reading. It’s not my cultural history. You see, classical plays from the Ancient Greek and Roman period are much closer to me. Elektra, and the like – I’ve known them since I started getting interested in theatre. But I don’t know African plays. And holding these pages shows the distance between me as a German and the African text. It really helps me. I don’t have to go through the experience I normally have. I am black, so I am ‘African’. But with abok, I read the play as a professional actress, but I am not ‘African’. So I don’t ‘lie’, if you know what I mean. That’s what I normally do. Really! I don’t think actors have to lie or negate themselves when they are acting. So when I read the play I feel both serious and honest. I feel more honest than if I had to play it, I think. For me, reading from the script really helps. C M : Any comments on that from the others? E S : When I watched the group perform, even with a piece of paper in front of

them, people reading from the script, there was an enormous intensity in their performance. They could still bring their characters across. And because the audience is so close, you can get immediate feedback from the people. And therefore you get this conversation going. It starts on the stage with the reading and it carries on afterwards. There is something else going on apart from the performance. Afterwards you meet people, and the conversation continues. C M : Normally, when you go to the theatre here in Berlin, you leave immediately after the show. Some people might move on to the restaurant, but usually there is no possibility of meeting the actors or the director. Sometimes you

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have a discussion scheduled afterwards, but they are pre-arranged. It doesn’t happen spontaneously. In your case it seems to be different. E B and E S : Yes. C M : Where do you perform? P E : We’ve performed at the Werkstatt der Kulturen several times, but we’ve

also performed at the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Berlin. They have a huge space. It’s not a theatrical space, but it’s fabulous because it has these high ceilings. It’s really exceptional. And we also performed at the Volksbühne Prater and at the Africa Festival in Postdam. I really like working at the Werkstatt der Kulturen, because the technicians are very nice, everybody is friendly, and also, people know where to go because we’ve been there several times, especially when you want to meet afterwards. People come to the show and then we all meet in the restaurant downstairs. That’s what you were referring to, Edsel. It’s very communal. Well, we only started last year. C M : Yes, I remember when Femi Osofisan was in Berlin last year I did a quick internet research because I had to introduce one of his lectures. And the first thing that came up was your reading of one of his plays! I was very surprised, because I hadn’t come across abok before. And I had no knowledge of a previous performance of The Oriki or Grasshopper in German. P E : That’s another problem: there are too few African play scripts available in translation. There is nothing, actually, apart from a few texts published in the G D R .6 There is also a play by Marie N’Diaye. She is Senegalese-French. Her work has been translated,7 but she basically doesn’t write for black characters. African playwrights you just do not find.

6

See, for example, Wole Soyinka, Stücke, ed. & tr. Joachim Fiebach (Berlin: Henschel,

1987), and Stücke Afrikas, ed. Joachim Fiebach (Berlin: Henschel, 1974). The latter contains

plays by Ebrahim Hussein, Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, Assia Djebar / Walid Garn, John Ramadhani, Aimé Césaire, Guillaume Oyono–Mbia, Kuldip Sondhi, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. To my knowledge, the only published African playwright writing in German is the Cameroonian Kum’a Ndumbe I I I , founder of AfricaVenir, with four German-language plays to his credit to date. To my knowledge, none of them has been performed yet. For further information, see Sara Lennox, “Das afrikanische Gesicht, das in deinem Raum spricht: Postkoloniale Autoren in Deutschland: Kum’a Ndumbe I I I und Uche Nduka,” Text + Kritik: Zeitschrift für Literatur (“Literatur und Migration,” ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold, special issue 2006): 167–76. 7 Marie NDiaye, “Papa muss essen/Papa doit manger,” in Scène 6: Vier französische Theaterstücke, ed. Barbara Engelhardt (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 2003): 75– 127.

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C M : There is very little available. I think the last theatre person to be involved in translations was Joachim Fiebach, a theatre professor at Humboldt [University, Berlin], now retired, but still very active. P E : Yes, I’ve actually met him. He came to the Volksbühne Prater when we did the reading of Kinjeketile. I was happy because he liked it. He’s the one who translated Kinjeketile from the Swahili into German.8 E B : Oh, really? C M : Yes. And Ebrahim Hussein, the author of the play, also did his PhD with Fiebach. P E : Anyway, I imagined these rehearsed readings to be a kind of ‘teaser’. We’ve done rehearsed readings for a year and put out as many plays as possible. I tried to do a new play once a month, and I wouldn’t use the same actors. I do hope that as a result we will have two ‘proper’ plays paid for next year. I hope we can have several shows. It looks as if it is going to happen. That was my goal. I would also like to see people do a full play and be paid decently. And I want some continuity. C M : So far you have only performed in and around Berlin. Do you have any

plans to tour other places? I am sure there is a great need for the kind of work you are doing, especially here in Germany. P E : What to say? – we’d go anywhere we were invited. C M : How long does it take to put on a play? P E : Brixton Stories, for example, took … I tried to rehearse more with the

main actors, of course. But I think we had five rehearsals with the complete cast, six people altogether. But I worked with Araba Walton and Errol Harewood for three weeks. C M : I should also mention that sometimes you have other shows that are not play-readings, such as the memorial evening for May Ayim, when you read from her work. P E : Yes, once we also did love poems. Not that I am great expert on love poems, but there is a collection of African love poetry available in German and I liked it.9 We were six or seven actors, one child and one musician. It was nice, wasn’t it? E B : Yes, very nice!

8

Ebrahim N. Hussein, “Kinjeketile”, tr. Joachim Fiebach, Stücke Afrikas, [5]–53. Antilopenmond: Liebesgedichte aus Africa, ed. Peter Ripken & Véronique Tadjo (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 2002). 9

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C M : Have you ever thought of working with African dramatists and theatre practitioners – someone like Femi Osofisan, for example? P E : I’d love to have him direct one of his plays, but of course it’s all about money. If we had money, and if we had a real company, I would happily invite all kinds of writers and directors to come and work with us. It would be fabulous [to have Osofisan] – even though he doesn’t speak German and the work is all in German. I don’t know how that would work out. C M : From my experience, such barriers can be bridged. It’s not always easy, but it certainly can be done. Well, is there anything else you would like to add? A final comment, perhaps? E B : I hope the work will continue, and I hope that our work will get wider coverage than it does at the moment. We haven’t seen each other for months since the last performance of Brixton Stories in June 2006. It would be great to continue soon. E S : I think it’s important to have something [a theatre company] here in Berlin that ‘talks’ to different audiences. Not just our own audience, but to reach out to others and demonstrate our professionalism. For me, it has been an immense learning process. I’ve learned so much about our history and about African drama; it really opens up people’s minds. C M : Thank you so much for the interview, Elizabeth, Philippa, and Edsel.

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F OUAD L AROUI ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Misunderstandings 1

— Working Euro-African Life into Fiction

ABSTRACT: In this (transcribed) lecture, Laroui talkes about his own experiences as a Moroccan writer-cum-academic who has decided to spend part of his life in Europe. He offers a refreshing approach to transculturality as a transdisciplinary dialogue by highlighting common ‘misunderstandings’ and ‘cross-cultural expectations’ pertaining to Euro-African writers and their creative work.

I

NSTEAD OF GIVING A THEORETICAL POINT OF VIEW,

I’ll just raise some questions I cannot answer. I’m quite sure that someone will have the theory of my practice, if I may say so. Usually, you have to give titles to lectures, so I hereby give it the title “Misunderstandings.” I started being a writer in 1996, and the first year or two I got very cross most of the time because of misunderstandings. Now I kind of enjoy them. I have learned to relish misunderstandings; they can lead you to fruitful discussions. 

1

This text is a transcription of the keynote lecture (entitled “Misunderstandings”) that Fouad Laroui held at the “Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe” conference, Frankfurt University, Germany, 1–3 June 2006 (transcription by Carla Müller–Schulzke). The oral form of the original communication has been maintained, with minor adaptations to the written style. [Editors’ note] © Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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Digressions I really like ‘digressions’. In writing and also in real life, I can never end a story, because I start another story in the middle, and so on. Well, this is the first misunderstanding! Because I tend to write a story in a story in a story, some people say: “Ah ah, it’s because he is from an Arabic country; it is The Arabian Nights all over again,2 this guy is some kind of a male Sheherazade.” Don’t expect me to suddenly break into belly-dancing on this table (in case you are wondering). I cannot and I am not going to do that. The funny thing – the first misunderstanding – is that my first exposure to digressions has nothing to do with The Arabian Nights, but with what still remains one of my favourite books, Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste. Its opening sentences are: “How did they meet? By chance, as everyone does. What were they called? Does that matter to you? Where did they come from? From the next-best place. Where were they going? Does anybody know where he’s going? What did they say to each other? The master said nothing,” etc. 3 When you are fourteen or fifteen years old, such a book catches your interest. Until that time, I had read books which started somewhere, went somewhere, ended somewhere, and then there was this book that started nowhere and just went on, without justification, like life. And this is the whole point of Jacques le fataliste. The master and Jacques are just travelling. Later, when I got acquainted with English literature, I recognized the influence on Diderot of Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy4 – but at that time I did not know this. For me, it was Diderot, it was Jacques le fataliste. At the beginning, Jacques tells his master that he will tell the story of his love adventures to entertain him, but something happens every time he starts telling his love adventures: they got shot, a dog attacks them, they have to rescue a damsel in distress, etc. It goes on like that for four hundred pages. At the end, you know nothing about Jacques’s love life. When I was a teenager, I read it twice, hoping to find something sexy, but to no avail. It has become a livre de chevet to me, the kind of book you have by your bed, and from time to time you re-read a page or two. Misunder-

2

First translation from Arabic published in French (c.1704). Many translations from Arabic are presently available; see, for example, The Thousand and One Nights, tr. Husain Haddawy, in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces (New York: W.W. Norton, 7th ed. 1999), vol. 1: 1566–95. 3 “Comment s’étaient-ils rencontrés? Par hasard, comme tout le monde. Comment s’appelaient-ils? Que vous importe? D’où venaient-ils? Du lieu le plus prochain. Où allaient-ils? Est-ce que l’on sait où l’on va? Que disaient-ils? Le maître ne disait rien”; Denis Diderot, Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1773–96). [Tr. Gordon Collier.] 4 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67).

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standings! When my first novel, Les Dents du ‘topographe’,5 was published, in 1996, my model was more or less Diderot’s Jacques, but people said: Ah, yes, The Arabian Nights. I had never read The Arabian Nights, I went to a French school, where you are not supposed to read The Arabian Nights.

Bach und Raï Second misunderstanding: Bach und Raï. Every time I am invited onto a Dutch radio programme, sometimes also on T V , they always select some Raï music for the background. My favourite music is Bach. I do not like Raï. When it started to become famous in Algeria, with Chab this and Chab that, I was vaguely aware of it. I heard it, did not like it, and that was that. But every time I’m on the radio, they play Raï. You may have a theory about that, I did not, and got cross. What I do now when I am invited for a radio programme is this: I take my own music with me, I take my C D s and say, Please, this is my ‘background’ music. ‘Background’ would have here at least two meanings.

Cultures We are talking about transcultural issues, and I am just getting into that field. I am learning all the time, since I’m going to switch faculties: I have been working for the last fifteen years in economics, and then earth science, but I will start in September 2006 at the Faculty of Arts in Amsterdam. Therefore, this whole transcultural issue, for me, means being somewhere between ‘humanities’ and ‘hard science’, not between Morocco and Europe. It has to do with the two-cultures discussion that started in 1959 with an article by C.P. Snow.6 He said that one of the most fundamental problems of our times was that these two cultures had grown apart and did not communicate with each other. In recent years, I have tried to defend mathematics and even economics, the “dismal science,”7 as they say, because I agree that the real problem is that there is not so much communication between the ‘hard sciences’ and the humanities. I’ll give you a couple of examples. People usually hate mathematics and see mathematicians as ‘nerds’. Actually, there is a lot of fantasy and poetry in mathematics; it’s fascinating. To take but one example, there is something 5

Fouad Laroui, Les Dents du ‘topographe’ (Paris: J’ai lu, 1996). “The Two Cultures” was the title of C.P. Snow’s Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959. An augmented version was published as The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1965). 7 Derogatory term introduced by Thomas Carlyle in the nineteenth century. 6

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called ‘non-standard analysis’. As the name says, you are not going to learn it at university except if you are working with some crazy professor, saying (whispers): “I know something, come on, come on, I’ll teach you non-standard.” In the regular curriculum at university, it’s frowned upon. Why? Because […] the whole point of non-standard analysis is: take a number, like 2 or 2.56, but let’s say that the number is not exactly where it is. Let’s suppose that the number has a ‘halo’. Now, when you say that, most mathematicians stop listening, because ‘halo’ is for the humanities, for dreamers, magicians and the like. They don’t believe in it. The funny thing is that non-standard analysis says that we are going to define the number 2, like two minus something infinitely small, plus something infinitely small, which actually makes sense. Some mathematicians do not like it, but if you accept this strange point of departure, then non-standard analysis is actually easier than mathematics as we know it. For instance, all the things that have to do with derivation and integration – things that turned so many people off mathematics when they were teenagers – become very easy. Only, you have to start with something poetical, admitting that numbers have a ‘halo’ about them. If you tell things like that to poets, they may start liking mathematics…. The reverse is true. Some hard scientists should read more literature… What happened before the Big Bang? Some physicists think that time did not exist before the Big Bang. Obviously, it is kind of mind-blowing, but the funny thing is, if you open St. Augustine, he clearly wrote, sixteen centuries ago, that time did not exist before the creation of the world. Some clever physicists seem never to have heard of Augustine, or think he is an old fool. Reading Augustine and modern physics would be nice, wouldn’t it? But we have only twenty-four hours and we cannot do everything, but it would be wonderful if we started bridging these two ‘cultures’ before bridging our different cultures.

Cruelty My fourth point is cruelty. One day I found a wonderful book called Manuscript Found in Zaragoza written by Jan Potocki.8 Potocki was the first tourist to arrive in Morocco, in 1791. He was, indeed, the first to actually go to Morocco with no plan, no idea – he was not a spy, he was not going to buy anything – he just went for fun and he wrote a book about it, a book called Voyage dans

8

Jean Potocki, Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, ed. & intro. Roger Caillois (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1847; Paris: Gallimard, 1958).

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l’empire du Maroc.9 There is an anecdote in it that I find fascinating. Potocki was a count, and travelled accompanied by ten or twenty people. They disembark in Larache, and the king, who is somewhere in the hinterland, hears that some foreigners have entered his kingdom. He thus goes to meet them, and since they are both very polite people, they sit down and a Jewish translator translates what the king says to Potocki, who had brought some presents. The king is talking to Potocki and, since he has a job to do, the king is at the same time conducting the kingdom’s current affairs. At a given moment, his servants bring in a man, who is in chains, and must have done something horrible. Someone, a vizier probably, comes up to the king and says something in his ear, and the king says: “I don’t like this.” Then the executioner comes with a big sword and he cuts off the head of the poor man just in front of this Mister Tourist Number One. That very same moment, the king says to Potocki, “Would you have more of these fruits?” in a very sweet manner, exactly when the head of the man is cut off. Well, Potocki reflects on this scene and says: “This melange of cruelty and utter politeness is probably a sign of the culture of these people.” Remember, this took place in 1791, and in France you will soon have the Terror, with Robespierre, when they will chop off heads every day. The guillotine will be working non-stop. But Potocki did not realize that cruelty was at that time much more common in France than in Morocco. (Some say that the guillotine was invented by Dr Guillotin because he wanted to suppress the cruelty of quartering and hanging. In fact, he just wanted equality for all those condemned, whether noble or not.) Potocki nonetheless wrote that cruelty defined the national character of the Moroccan people, when Europeans were at least as cruel as they were. So this is again one of the misunderstandings. Cruelty is always what the others do.

Language This could take us very far, but I want to say only one thing about language. People assume that, if you are from Morocco, then you have a choice to write in French. Some people are uneasy about that. I was in Marrakesh a couple of weeks ago, where I gave a lecture, and the first person who asked a question was a Frenchman, who had just migrated to Marrakesh and bought a house. He stood up and said: “You speak very good French, you write in French, but it is not your language – come on, shouldn’t you speak and write in another language?” I said I could not answer in one sentence. If we had one hour, or if we 9

Jean Potocki, Voyage dans l’empire de Maroc: Fait en l’année 1791 (Clichy: Éditions du Jasmin, 1999).

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had a whole day, I could have answered. In Morocco we have classical Arabic. It is a language that nobody speaks, but this is the language that you learn at school; you are taught everything, including physics, including chemistry, in classical Arabic. Funny thing, though, nobody speaks this language at home. Berbers speak their own language, they have, like, three or four different dialects, and you have Arabs, or Berbers who have become arabized, and they speak a language called Darija, which is a dialect of classical Arabic. In my case, I went to school and learned French. I did not have a choice, that’s what I wanted to explain to that person. I really cannot write in classical Arabic; I can read it, but it would be completely artificial for me to write a novel in it, exactly as if you started to write a novel about things happening in Frankfurt in 2006 in… Latin. Exactly. What can you do? This is the problem. Berber may be a beautiful language, but I do not speak it and there is no written Berber. They started in Morocco only a couple of years ago – the king appointed a commission, which has now decided on how to write Berber, with which alphabet.10 I don’t speak Berber; I could not write in it. As for Darija, it is the same problem, it is a dialect and it is not easy to write, for technical reasons, and also because it is a language that is evolving all the time. It is changing from being French and Spanish-influenced to being Arabic-influenced because of Al Jazeera and the other Arab satellite T V channels. One example: when I was a boy, to say ‘the car’ in Darija, you said ‘tomobil’ and now you say ‘siarra’, so we went from French ‘tomobil’ to Arabic ‘siarra’. And it’s happening all the time, so that, when you write in Darija, you can be sure that whatever you are writing will be completely obsolete in a couple of years. So, for all these reasons, what remains for me is French. Writing in French is not a choice of some spoiled brat who speaks many languages and decides, “Oh, you know what, I’ll write in French.” I cannot write novels in any other language than French. This is one of our misunderstandings. We do not have a choice.

At Home and Abroad Another misunderstanding. My novel Méfiez-vous des parachutistes11 is the story of a man who is walking in the street, and then a parachutist lands on him. 10

Berber is the second language of North Africa and is spoken in several areas (and relatively local variations) of Morocco, Algeria, Lybia, Mali, and Niger. There have been written forms of Chleuh Berber (southern Morocco) in Arabic transcription since the sixteenth century, and of Kabyle Berber (northern Algeria) in the Latin alphabet since the nineteenth century. The oldest written form is Tifinagh, a geometrical alphabet used by the Tuaregs in the Sahara region. [Editors’ note] 11 Fouad Laroui, Méfiez-vous des parachutistes (Paris: Julliard, 1999).

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He takes the parachutist home to give him some refreshment and, from that moment on, the parachutist never leaves his house; he stays there forever. It is a kind of parable. When the book was published, a Tunisian critic wrote something really nice about my book. She was very enthusiastic because, she said, “this writer has re-invented the old Arabian theme of ‘ad-dayf at-taqil’” – which means ‘the heavy guest’. It seems that there is a whole tradition in the Arabic literature which is based on this theme of the guest who would not go away. And she was very happy that I was again giving some life to that tradition – misunderstanding! – of which I knew nothing. Teach me what this means. If you read Lévi–Strauss’s Tristes tropiques,12 one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century, the first sentence is beautiful: “Je hais les voyages et les explorateurs.” And then he proceeds to travel to the other side of the world…. Anyway, there is Lévi–Strauss, who hates travelling, who hates explorers, going all the way to Brazil, to the Mato Grosso, where he comes into contact with a Brazilian tribe that has probably never seen a white man. Lévi–Strauss is a very cultured and refined Frenchman, the kind who eats a pear with a fork and knife. Suddenly, in the Mato Grosso, one of the tribal men takes him to a rotted tree, puts his hand in it, takes a handful of maggots, and gives it as a present to Lévi–Strauss. It is a defining moment. Lévi–Strauss could say “Non, merci,” this would be the end of the whole story, and he would go back home. But no: he eats the maggots, and in so doing he gains access to the tribe. This happened to me last week in Marrakesh. I was in Marrakesh, minding my own business, just walking in Jamaâ al-Fna, the big marketplace. A young man came up to me and offered me a pot of snails. I hate snails. I cannot eat them, I cannot even look at a pot of boiled snails. It was a present; he wanted to start a friendship with me. But I was not as courageous as Lévi–Strauss was. So that was the end of a long friendship that never even started. I walked back to my hotel in Marrakesh, really laughing, thinking about Lévi–Strauss. Ironically, it happened to me in my own country, which means that inside the country we have many different cultures, which intersect and interact. There are people in Morocco who eat boiled snails, people who do not eat boiled snails, and it’s not the same thing. Another misunderstanding. Right, I want to say something positive. I was reading Bernard Lewis, who is no friend of the Arabs. But he is a scholar, he knows their history, their language, etc. I was reading his book called The Arabs in History,13 in which he writes that “Arabic is the most concrete language in the world.” I realized that 12 13

Claude Lévi–Strauss, Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1950).

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he was right. I give you two examples: the words ‘theory’ and ‘diaspora’. The Arabic word for ‘theory’ is nazaria, from the verb ‘to see’. As you know, ‘theory’ comes from the Greek word ‘to see’. The Arabic word for ‘diaspora’ is shatat, dispersion or scattering. And ‘diaspora’ does mean ‘scattering’. But when you use this word in German, French, English, whatever, you are not exactly aware of its etymology. But in Arabic the meaning is immediately there, because nazaria means ‘(way of) looking at something’. And shatat, which means ‘diaspora’, is when you take a grain and scatter it. And I went on to check all the words, all the theoretical words, and in Arabic they have exactly the same concrete sense that the Greek and Latin words have, but which is lost in our European languages. I realized that I would like to write in Arabic, because when I write in French or in Dutch, or English, I am always tired of using words in a sense that does not clash with the concrete etymological sense. So I have to know what the word means etymologically to be able to use it, which is a lot of work. It means that every time you write a text, you have to go through the dictionaries, looking for what the word means in Latin. Now I have a language that is completely in contact with the concrete word. The only problem, again, is that it is difficult for me to write in classical Arabic, because it is not connected with the modern world, because we don’t use it all the time. Now, there are the famous new Moroccans, Dutch-Moroccans…. I will tell you something about them, and again under the same heading of misunderstandings. Abdelakader Benali’s first book, for instance, Bruiloft aan zee.14 I started reading it, and there was something there that is impossible. This whole book is based on a character called Lamarat, who goes back to Morocco for the marriage of his sister to their uncle: that is, the bridegroom would marry the daughter of his brother. But this is impossible in Morocco. It’s impossible. It’s incest. You cannot marry the daughter of your own brother! But Benali writes a whole book based on that premise. And nobody realizes this, he does not know, the Dutch publisher does not know, the critics do not know, nobody knows. What makes him a Moroccan, a Dutch-Moroccan? I do not know. He even bikes every day (as the Dutch do)! And Hafid Bouazza.… He is a very interesting case in point. A couple of years ago he did something incredible. He invited the whole press of Holland to the Moses-and-Aron church in the centre of Amsterdam to announce that a) he was not a Moslem and b) that he was not a Moroccan. And they still put him in the Moroccan corner, and call him an enlightened Moslem – whereas he gave a conference stating that he was neither of the two.

14

Abdelkader Benali, Bruiloft aan zee (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1996).

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Authenticity If you are a Moroccan, and you write in French, what is your authenticity? Now, you have to understand someone like me, who was a student in Paris when Jean–Paul Sartre was still alive. And I was very pleased when one day I saw him get into a taxi – so I do have a connection with Jean–Paul Sartre. For us, the biggest insult is not to be authentic, because for Sartre the one big virtue was authenticity. The only justification you can give when people question your authenticity is the concept of ‘trajectory’. It means that you should not look at the identity of cross-cultures, but at individual trajectories. I was born somewhere, and then my father took the decision to send me to the French school when I was four years old. This is my trajectory. Forget identity, culture. And then I went from there, I discovered La Fontaine, and – as I said – Diderot, and this is my trajectory. It explains and gives authenticity. If I would now start pretending to write literary books in English, then you could question my authenticity; I would be the first one to question it. But if you look at my trajectory, it is completely ‘authentic’ that I write in French.

Legitimacy If you speak French, live in Holland, or France for that matter, what legitimacy do you have to write about Moroccans’ problems, about their country, about Morocco? So I put this, too, under the heading of misunderstandings, because I could elaborate on that; but I have to stop…

WORKS CITED Benali, Abdelkader. Bruiloft aan zee (Amsterdam: Vassallucci, 1996). Diderot, Denis. Jacques le fataliste et son maître (1773–96). Laroui, Fouad. Les Dents du ‘topographe’ (Paris: J’ai lu, 1996). ——. Méfiez-vous des Parachutistes (Paris: Julliard, 1999). Lévi–Strauss, Claude. Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). Lewis, Bernard. The Arabs in History (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1950). Potocki, Jean. Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse, ed. & intro. Roger Caillois (Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie, 1847; Paris: Gallimard, 1958). ——. Voyage dans l’empire de Maroc: Fait en l’année 1791 (Clichy: Éditions du Jasmin, 1999). Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1965). Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67). The Thousand and One Nights, tr. Husain Haddawy, in The Norton Anthology: World Masterpieces (New York: W.W. Norton, 7th ed. 1999), vol. 1: 1566–95.

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C REATIVE W RITING ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

F OUAD L AROUI ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

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c’est la fin de l’après-midi, le week-end de la Pentecôte commence. Le lycée français de Casablanca va fermer ses portes pendant trois jours. Mehdi, onze ans, attend dans la loge du concierge. Les internes ne sont pas autorisés à quitter seuls le lycée, ils attendent que leurs parents viennent les emmener chez eux. De temps en temps, la porte s’ouvre, des adultes s’engouffrent dans la loge, les uns rieurs et bavards, les autres pressés. Un à un, les garçons s’en vont. Ceux qui restent regardent, par la fenêtre de la loge, les voitures qui glissent sur l’avenue et parfois s’arrêtent devant le lycée. Ils s’agitent ou poussent une exclamation quand ils reconnaissent la Simca ou la Taunus de leur père. Mehdi est le seul qui ne regarde pas par la fenêtre. Tous les internes sont maintenant partis. Mehdi n’ose pas lever les yeux sur le concierge. Celui-ci ne sourit pas. Il regarde sa montre de temps en temps. Et il pose sur le jeune garçon un regard sans aménité. Mehdi sait qu’on ne va pas venir le chercher. La veille, le surveillant général l’a convoqué dans son bureau et lui a demandé d’appeler ses parents pour leur rappeler qu’ils doivent venir le chercher pour la Pentecôte. Depuis le début de l’année, il a passé tous ses week-ends à l’internat. Mais ce week-end est particulier: l’internat ferme pour de bon. Ni surveillant, ni cuisinier, ni concierge. Mehdi ne pourra pas rester au lycée.

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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— Alors, tu as appelé tes parents? Le surveillant général avait surgi devant lui, le matin. Pris de court, Mehdi avait fait « oui » de la tête. L’homme était parti, satisfait. Mehdi n’a appelé personne. Sa mère n’a pas le téléphone et elle ne sort jamais de chez elle, depuis que son mari est mort. Depuis qu’il est entré comme interne au lycée, Mehdi n’a aucune nouvelle d’elle. Mais comment expliquer cela au surveillant général? Mehdi attend un miracle. À défaut de miracle, il espère qu’un avion s’écrase sur le collège et qu’ils meurent tous, lui, le concierge et le surveillant général. Ou bien un tremblement de terre pourrait détruire toute la ville, ou un raz-de-marée l’engloutir. La nuit commence à tomber. Le concierge, excédé, est allé chercher le surveillant général, qui est encore dans son bureau. Monsieur Bernard arrive, les sourcil froncés, le concierge dans son sillage. Les deux hommes se penchent sur le garçon, qui fixe le sol. A force de le questionner, ils finissent par comprendre la situation. La situation est la suivante: on est vendredi soir et ils ont un gamin sur les bras, un gamin que nul ne viendra chercher. Que faire? Ils le fixent des yeux, espérant qu’il va s’évaporer dans l’air. Mais rien ne se passe et Mehdi est toujours là. Soudain, le concierge a une inspiration. — Qui est ton meilleur ami? Monsieur Bernard, qui a compris de quoi il s’agit, hoche la tête. — Oui, oui, qui est ton meilleur ami? Mehdi n’a pas d’amis. Il fait semblant de réfléchir. Il voit une sarabande de visages, Bernard, Juan, Hamid et d’autres, qui se moquent de lui, lui tirent la langue ou lui donnent des coups de pied. Les deux hommes semblent perdre patience. — Alors? On t’a posé une question! La peur lui tord les tripes. Un nom fuse de sa bouche: — Denis Berger. Il n’a jamais parlé à Denis mais il a toujours été fasciné par ses cheveux blonds paille, soyeux et raides. Le surveillant général s’empare du téléphone, réclame le numéro de la famille Berger au concierge et appelle. Il est bientôt en grande conversation avec monsieur Berger. En fin de compte, un grand sourire éclaire son visage et il se répand en remerciements. L’affaire est réglée. Mehdi va passer la Pentecôte avec des Chrétiens qu’il ne connaît ni d’Ève ni d’Adam.

2 Monsieur Bernard a confié sa voiture au concierge et lui a demandé d’emmener Mehdi chez les Berger. Mohammed semble pressé et de mauvaise humeur. Il

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dépose le jeune garçon au pied d’une colline et lui explique quelle direction il doit prendre. Mehdi comprend à peine ce qu’on lui dit, mais il hoche la tête, effrayé à l’idée de devoir grimper seul la colline, mais encore plus effrayé à celle d’attirer sur lui la colère de cet homme si désagréable. Tout ce qu’il a compris, c’elle qu’il doit aller au 21, rue de la Dordogne. Le problème, c’est que toutes les rues ont été débaptisées. La rue de la Dordogne porte un autre nom. Il ne sait pas lequel. Il déchiffre des rues Lahsen M’hidi ou Ferhat Hachad ou Abbas el Fassi, mais quel rapport avec la Dordogne? Il cherchait une région de France, le voici au milieu de syndicalistes morts ou de résistants oubliés. Il fait de plus en plus noir. Adossé à un arbre, il tremble de peur, au bord des larmes. Un homme engoncé dans une djellaba marron s’approche. Il se penche sur l’enfant et lui adresse quelques mots. Mehdi ne comprend pas. Il ne peut que gémir: — Rue de la Dordogne, rue de la Dordogne… L’homme lui prend la main et l’entraîne vers une petite ruelle sombre. Tétanisé par la peur, Mehdi le suit en refoulant ses pleurs. La ruelle débouche sur une rue plus large, un peu mieux éclairée. — Nimiro? Nimiro? — Vingt-et-un, répond l’enfant. L’homme a l’air perplexe. Il avise un petit tas de sable et y farfouille de son doigt. Il écrit un, deux, trois… puis s’arrête. Mehdi trace à son tour un 21 tremblotant dans le sable. La djellaba l’emmène vers un portail et le plante devant, après avoir énergiquement sonné. L’ange gardien disparaît dans la nuit.

3 Le portail s’ouvre. Monsieur Berger est là, un large sourire éclaire son visage. A côté de lui, Denis se tient tout droit, les sourcils un peu froncés. Derrière eux, sur les marches qui mènent à la porte de la maison, madame Berger regarde silencieusement la scène. Monsieur Berger tend la main à Mehdi qui la serre mollement. Il serre aussi celle de Denis. Madame Berger s’efface pour les laisser entrer. Denis, sous l’œil attentif de son père, demande à Mehdi s’il veut le suivre dans sa chambre. Là, il lui montre ses bandes dessinées. Les deux garçons sont bientôt absorbés dans la lecture. Une heure plus tard, il faut descendre pour le dîner. Mehdi est heureux d’avoir trouvé la maison. Il y fait chaud, on y est bien. Il respire l’odeur caractéristique des Français, un mélange d’odeur d’encaustique et de cire, loin des odeurs d’épices des maisons des Marocains. Petit à petit, il se sent pénétré par un malaise. Il a l’habitude que les adultes lui posent des questions, or la mère

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de Denis ne lui demande rien. Ses yeux bleus se posent parfois sur lui. Denis, lui, joue à écraser ses pommes de terre, il y creuse des rigoles pour la sauce, il découpe la viande en petits morceaux. Seul monsieur Berger essaie de tenir une conversation. Il raconte des histoires qui se sont passées dans l’entreprise qu’il dirige, il parle du gardien qui est si naïf, de la secrétaire.... Le dîner est fini. Mehdi tombe de sommeil. Il se retrouve, il ne sait comment, dans la chambre de Denis. Il s’aperçoit qu’il a oublié de mettre son pyjama dans sa petite valise. Gêné, il explique la situation à Denis qui hausse les épaules, ouvre un tiroir et lui tend un pyjama tout bleu, avec un petit logo jaune. Il ne l’avait pas remarqué tout à l’heure mais il y a deux lits superposés dans la chambre de Denis. En attendant que Denis revienne – il est allé se brosser les dents – Mehdi se tient devant les deux lits. Quel est le sien? Soudain il entend une espèce de petit cri derrière lui. Il se retourne. La mère de Denis est debout dans l’embrasure de la porte, la main contre la bouche. Elle disparaît. Mehdi l’entend parler avec Denis dans la salle de bain. Denis revient. Sans mot dire, il ouvre un tiroir et tend à Mehdi un autre pyjama. — Tu changes de pyjama, lui dit-il. Mehdi trouve enfin la force de dire quelque chose. Il murmure: — Mais pourquoi? — Parce que c’est comme ça, répond Denis, l’air buté. Mehdi est maintenant couché dans le lit du haut. — Tu dors en haut, moi je prends toujours celui du bas, lui a dit Denis. Mehdi porte maintenant un pyjama jaune, avec des rayures blanches. Il déteste la mère de Denis.

4 Lorsqu’il se réveille, le soleil luit derrière les rideaux fins. Le lit du bas est vide. Par la fenêtre, Mehdi peut voir Denis et sa mère assis dans le jardin. Il descend au rez-de-chaussée et erre dans la salle à manger. Au bout d’un bon moment, madame Berger entre, venant du jardin. Elle s’arrête net et rebrousse chemin. Quelques instants plus tard, Denis arrive et l’entraîne vers la cuisine. Un grand bol de café au lait l’attend, avec des croissants. Mehdi adore les croissants mais l’attitude de la mère de Denis l’attriste. Pourquoi est-elle si méchante? Elle a pourtant de jolis yeux et ses cheveux sont comme ceux de Denis, blonds et lisses.

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Monsieur Berger revient avec des sacs, des boîtes, des paquets. Derrière lui trottine une petite bonne. Madame Berger s’empare des sacs et disparaît dans la cuisine. L’après-midi se passe mollement pour Mehdi. Il lit, sort dans le jardin, regarde les bibelots dont la maison est pleine. Sur l’insistance de monsieur Berger, il essaie de jouer au ping-pong avec Denis mais ce dernier est trop fort pour lui. À un certain moment, alors qu’il joue au ping-pong, dans le jardin, il lui semble surprendre une conversation entre monsieur et madame Berger, qui sont dans la cuisine. A la mère, qui dit « ce n’est pas possible », le père répond: — Mais c’est ce que je t’ai dit hier, ses parents ne sont pas venus le chercher. Mehdi tape très fort sur la balle. Le soir est venu. La table est servie. C’est ce que Mehdi avait espéré, un vrai repas français, comme dans les livres. Du poulet rôti, de la purée un peu rougeâtre, des jus de fruit et du vin pour monsieur Berger. Mehdi goûte un peu de purée. Tiens, c’est sucré. Il pousse Denis du coude et lui montre son plat. Denis murmure: — On a toujours des patates douces avec la dinde. À cause de Pascal. Mehdi fronce le sourcil mais ne dit rien. Le dîner se poursuit en silence. De temps en temps, le père essaie de détendre l’atmosphère. Il se sert du vin, son verre n’est jamais vide. Il pose quelques questions à Mehdi, qui répond par brèves onomatopées. Le père lui demande quelle est la matière qu’il préfère le plus — L’Histoire. Le père se tourne vers la mère. Ils se regardent. La nuit est tombée. Les deux garçons sont de nouveau dans la chambre de Denis. Madame Berger entre et vient border Denis. Elle l’embrasse sur la joue. Puis elle se penche sur Mehdi, qui fait semblant de dormir. Dans le noir, il respire son parfum délicat. Elle passe doucement ses doigts dans ses cheveux. Elle n’est donc pas méchante? Soudain, il sent que quelque chose de mouillé sur son front. N’osant pas s’essuyer, il attend qu’elle s’en aille. Mehdi est trop énervé maintenant. Il ne peut plus dormir. Après un moment, il sort du lit. Il erre dans la maison. Il pousse au hasard une porte. Sur un bureau, il voit quelques photos. Il les regarde longtemps puis retourne se coucher.

5 Le lendemain, pendant le petit déjeuner, miracle, Madame Berger sourit à Mehdi, lui caresse encore les cheveux, lui tend des croissants. Elle lui parle, lui pose des questions. Puis, se baissant, elle lui lace ses souliers. A un moment, elle

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sort quelques instants, puis revient avec un petit paquet qu’elle fourre dans la valise de Mehdi. Elle murmure dans son oreille: — Un cadeau pour toi. Mehdi profite d’un instant ou personne ne fait attention à lui pour ouvrir discrètement sa valise et jeter un coup d’œil au paquet. Il n’en croit pas ses yeux: c’est le pyjama bleu avec le logo jaune. Monsieur Berger a sorti la voiture pour emmener les deux garçons au lycée. Au moment de monter dans la voiture, Mehdi prétend avoir oublié quelque chose, il remonte en courant à l’étage, mais au lieu d’aller vers la chambre de Denis, il va vers le bureau de monsieur Berger. Quelque chose l’y attire. Une photo, qu’il a vue la veille, pendant son excursion nocturne. Il la retrouve tout de suite, sur le bureau. Elle est sans doute prise dans un chalet: tout est en bois. Deux garçons posent ensemble devant une grande baie vitrée. Au dehors, un paysage de montagne. Ils ont chacun un bras passé autour du cou de l’autre. Mehdi regarde avec un peu plus d’attention. L’un des garçons est Denis. Mais l’autre? Eh bien, l’autre, c’est encore Denis! Du moins, il lui ressemble comme deux gouttes d’eau. Mehdi n’y comprend plus rien. Il retourne la photo. Il lit deux mots, deux noms, tracés au feutre: Denis et Pascal, vacances d’hiver. Puis une date. C’est l’an dernier. Mehdi regarde la photo intensément. Maintenant, il voit une différence, presque imperceptible. À gauche, c’est Denis. A droite, ce n’est pas lui. Les deux garçons viennent sans doute de se réveiller, puisqu’ils sont encore en pyjama. Ils portent le même pyjama. Enfin presque. C’est drôle, les couleurs sont inversées. L’un est jaune avec un logo bleu, l’autre est bleu avec un logo jaune. Pascal porte le pyjama bleu avec un logo jaune. 

C HIKA U NIGWE ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Cotton Candy

A

NTWERP IS LIKE TWO AGING GRANDMOTHERS.

One grandmother is aging gracefully; serene and beautiful. With minimal make-up. Make-up that accentuates rather than distracts. Like Maya Angelou. And like my grandmother, Mama Lokpanta, a quiet, dignified woman who never developed a stoop even when she became too old to venture more than a few steps outside her home. The other grandmother is aging against her choice and is fighting that process with misguided ferocity. That part of Antwerp reminds me always of the very old women I see during the summer, exposing antiquated legs in flimsy mini-skirts. Old women, my grandmother’s age, who paint their eyes and lips in bright blues and fluorescent oranges, colours so loud that they can induce a migraine. Women my friend and I refer to as Mmonwu Christmas, because they remind us of the masquerades that frightened and chased us during the Christmas festivities in our village, Osumenyi, when we were both younger. I live in both parts of Antwerp simultaneously. What did you say? I have confused you? How can I live in both parts at the same time? Patience, my friend, is a virtue. Please, do not rush me. I will get to that in my own time.... The most important thing about me is that I lie. I have always lied. I lie even when I do not need to. I have told a total stranger that I was suffering from a rare form of cancer and had been given only a few months to live by the doctors. He cried and I cried with him. I have told a man I barely know that my father was a big chief in Nigeria. I have told another that I am an adopted child of a murderer who raped me when I was ten and threatened to kill me if I

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breathed a word of it to anybody. The man held me in his arms and told me solemnly that I should never let my past haunt me. I lie; it’s a compulsion. I am good at what I do. I am the mistress of lies. I have never lived in the two-room house where my parents still live in Enugu. A house, boxed in between two other houses with a gutter smelling of death and urine running alongside it. I have never slept on a cement floor with my six siblings, fighting mosquitoes and sweat in the night. I have never shared a bathroom (a zinc construction) with three other families. I do not know what it is like to have a communal kitchen, the walls black with smoke from kerosene stoves. I do not know what it is like to go without food because there is not enough to go round. I do not have a father who is gaunt and who works as a supermarket security guard. My mother is not a fat-faced woman who sings as she fries akara balls to sell to passing school children every morning. I have never hated my life so much that I wanted to escape it. My lies are exquisite, and as I unwrap them, I handle them like freshly-laid eggs; gently and conscientiously. The lies are well-woven quilts and they keep me warm on cold winter nights. They are rooms I can escape to and be the person I want to be. So, I live in both parts of Antwerp at the same time. Most times, I live in a room with a broken window and garishly painted walls. The walls remind me of somebody who, not wishing to be seen without make-up, has hurriedly applied her mascara, lipstick, and eye-shadow in the dark. Alone. As every woman knows, there are three essentials to that delicate art of putting on cosmetics: 1. Good lighting. Not just any lighting but a bright glare of sunshine or fluores-

cent light. 2. A clear mirror. 3. A friend to assure you that you did a good job. Or not.

When all of these essentials are missing, the result is often a gruesome dab of colours. My walls are urgent splashes of uncoordinated colours. A bit of red. A bit of yellow, more of purple. Much as I hate them, I am unwilling to change them. I am sorry, but even I do not know the reason why this is so. It just is; take my word for it. When I need to escape, I walk out the door and take the bus to the elegant grandmother part of Antwerp with stiff-lipped middle-class houses and treelined streets, imposing houses with white garages and well-fed children being pushed in luxury strollers with huge wheels.

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Someone once told me the story of Antwerp. How it got the name. Before then, I have to admit, it never occurred to me that care was taken to name cities, as is done when children are being named in my village. When babies are born, the parents take a good look at it, take a good look around them, and think hard about their wishes and hopes for this new person. They take their time, and it is only after the eighth day of birth that the father (who may have discussed with his wife) announces to the rest of the family the name they have decided upon. Antwerp. According to my source, so many years ago, like, five hundred years ago or so, an unruly giant terrorized the inhabitants of that area. Then a brave young man came from who-knows-where and killed the giant and threw his hand into the River Scheldt, which runs through the city. The overjoyed inhabitants watched him throw the hand away (hand and werpen in their local Flemish) and named the city Handwerpen, but along the years, the name became corrupted and transformed itself into Antwerpen. Or Antwerp. I have never had this story confirmed. So, I do not know if it is true or not, so do not go quoting me. For a skilled liar, I am bad at detecting people’s lies. It is my one great weakness, and what landed me in Antwerp. I had never heard of Antwerp until a few months before I found myself at Brussels International Airport. The man who sold me Antwerp was a salesman, a seller of lies. He followed me home on a sweaty afternoon and, like a mosquito in the rainy season, buzzed praises of my beauty in my ears: You are the most beautiful girl I have ever laid eyes on Your beauty sways me Makes me dizzy It is glaring. I need sunglasses to protect my eyes You should be a model Our own Kate Moss And Claudia Schiffer And Naomi Campbell A body like yours should be worshipped Your face is the face of Helen, the instigator of the Trojan war I laughed at him and my laughter bounced like a ping-pong ball onto his face and made him smile. He said I had a laugh that could shatter crystal into such fine pieces you could sniff it. “Ha,” he told me, “if they sell the powder of your laughter in Amsterdam cafes, people will rush it. They’ll scamper for it, I swear!”

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I let him tell me stories of where he had been and what he had done. I let him hold me around my eighteen-year-old waist and, a few days later, I allowed him do a lot more than that as I fed greedily on the dreams of a future he lavishly dished out to me. A future which included school in Antwerp. “Where is Antwerp?” I asked. “Belgium. Europe.” Mekus continued, “You will go to school in Europe. You can be anything you want to be. Anthropologist. Sociologist. Pharmacist. Lawyer. The university in Antwerp will give it to you.” My heart did an atilogwu dance. Then I remembered, “But I did not pass my G C E ’s,” I protested, settling my head against his broad chest, hoping that the failed G C E ’s would not be too much of a problem. “Never mind that. The V C of the university and I are tight like this,” he

locked his two index fingers together to show how tight. “He is like my brother. Honestly, like a blood brother, akpuobi!” he hit his left palm hard on his chest. “We always go out to drink together. Ha, that man, he likes his beer. Always his Stella Artois. Me, I like Guinness. Good stuff. Black Guinness for black man,” he roared and then burst into raucous laughter that caused him to clutch his stomach like a child protecting his favourite toy from a bully. I wondered what was funny but did not ask. I was already dreaming of Antwerp. And a university. And being an anthropologist. Or a sociologist. Or a pharmacist. Or a lawyer. A liver-in-Antwerp. The day I arrived in Belgium, the clouds were pregnant with rain. Rain they delivered in short, angry spurts. Mekus picked me up at the airport in an impressive Opel Zafira and drove me to Antwerp. To a street full of old brick houses with brightly coloured doors. “Tomorrow, I will take you to see the V C of the University of Antwerp. He is like my brother. We are tight, tight like this,” he announced as he took his hands off the steering wheel to show me how tight with his index fingers. He stopped in front of one the houses, the one with a door as red as tomapep, and gave me a full-toothed smile. “Welcome to Antwerp.” Antwerp depressed me that first night. The city dressed me up in grief. Grief that would, with time, grow mildew and go stale and make it easy for me to chuck it in the bin. That first night, the bed hurt my back, the room smelt of

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damp rag and dog hair, and Mekus tried to drown me in bitter Belgian beer. That night, I missed the bare floor of a room in Enugu. Mekus let me have a few days of grace and then he told me he would take me to see the V C for an interview. The V C was a dark man built like the trunk of some tree. He had three long marks etched deeply on each cheek. His Adam’s apple was shaped like a tennis ball. It bobbed up and down when he spoke and held me captive throughout the interview. That was why it took me a while to realize what type of questions I was being asked. What is your favourite colour? Red Good. Good. Very good. Whish do you prefer? Cotton or silk? I don’t know. I have never owned silk. Ha! Ha! Ha! Smart girl. Smart girl. Ha! Ha! Whish is your favourite position? That question made me snap out of my hypnosis. Ringlets of cigarette smoke found their way into my eyes and tickled my nostrils. “Favourite position?” my voice came out hesitant and small. “Yes. Yes. We need someone who knows that the customer decides whish position she should take. “Customer? Position? I am sorry. I do not understand.” My voice was polite. My eyes darted to Mekus’ and held his in a wrestling combat. They demanded an explanation. V C looked at Mekus, too, threw his hands up in the air like a baby throwing a tantrum, and queried, “A a? Whish one? What’s going on? You no brief am? I dey waste my time here?” No. No.” Mekus hurried to reassure him, his sweaty palms rubbing against each other. “Not at all, V C . Not at all.” Mekus looked at me. “This is it,” he casually told me, “welcome to Antwerp. Na back for ground or back to Enugu.” I went home with V C that night. He had to test the ware before buying, he leered at me, as he helped me into his leather-cushioned car. I refused to think of anything but the luxurious newness of the feel of a leather cushion against my buttocks. I let the boom bang bang blaring from his stereo drown the voice in my head that said I should never have left home, and I told myself that this was better than slapping mosquitoes at night. I told myself that it was too late for should haves and could haves. I was here now. What else could I possibly do?

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V C with the breath that stank of raw fish inducted me into his university. He got me this room with the broken window and the mismatched colours and took me to buy my first set of silk G-strings.

There I stand. In front of the window like a cake on display. I am wearing a pair of lacy, lemon strings. My stomach is ironing-board flat, Étienne once told me. My breasts are shielded by a lemon push-up brassiere, with a sprinkling of silver studs. I am waiting for young men in their thirties with chins as soft as a baby’s buttocks, and pictures of their pretty wives in their leather wallets, looking for adventure between the thighs of een jonge afrikaanse. They stroll by and you can tell those who have stumbled on the Schipperskwartier by mistake. Japanese tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, tourists who do not know Antwerp, seduced by the antiquity of the city, and deceived by the huge Cathedral, they wander off and then suddenly they come face to face with a line-up of half-dressed women, different colours and different shades of those colours. They look and, disbelieving, take another look. Quickly. And then they walk away with embarrassed steps. Not wishing to be tainted by the lives behind the glass windows. Those that know where they are and why they are there walk with an arrogant swagger and critical twinkle in their eyes. They move from one window to another and, having made up their minds, go in to close a sale. He comes into my room now. He gives me a garlic-scented smile. I give him what I call my sexy smile in return. His hair is slicked back, wet with gel. I wonder now, as I often do, how many jars of gel he must go through. Hallo, mijn schat, he purrs through cracked lips Hallo, sweetie, I lend him another of my sexy smiles: something between a pout and a grin à la Angelina Jolie. It is our customary greeting. Has been since the first day he discovered me. He tells me that I am his schat, his darling, his treasure. “Etienne’s Nubian Princess” he calls me as he kisses me three times on my cheeks. He is one of the good customers. Étienne is a generous tipper, but you would not tell just by looking at him. He is proof that looks do not always tell the real story about people. Étienne is small and always wears trousers which are too tight for him. Trousers that look like he has worn them since he was fourteen. And he always smells like he has just eaten three cloves of garlic. Not what you would expect from a man who doles out money left, right and centre like he was scattering rice grains to his

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pet chickens. Whenever he comes, I give him my widest smile, the smile I reserve for those that drop me enough money to pay V C and have still have enough left over for my favourite pastime, shopping. And I do not just mean the kind of shopping I do twice a week to replenish my stock of yam and egusi. The Belgians can live on their fries and mayonnaise but I need something more substantial. As anyone who knows Antwerp well knows, close to Schipperskwartier is a conglomeration of one-room stores monopolized by young ambitious men who have taken it upon themselves to bring Nigeria into Antwerp. They sell everything from key soap to bottled palm wine. Ikechukwu is my favourite. He lets me choose the best yams and saves the freshest egusi for me. I love shopping there. But, better than that, I love shopping on De Meir. Imagine, a long street lined with stores upon stores. A street lined with dreams. I pick up a heap of racy lingerie at Hunkemöller. The saleswoman smiles at me with stained teeth. I am a big spender here. I walk over to Ken’s. The bored saleswoman looks at me and glances away, pretending not to watch me out of the corners of her eyes. Ready to pounce if I try to pilfer anything. It does not matter that all the shoes on display are not paired. One can never be too sure with these foreigners, especially the Afrikanen. Maybe where they come from, you can walk around in only one half of a pair of shoes. I can actually see the words whirling through her mind. I ignore her and I try on the mate of an expensive pair of knee-high suede boots. She walks over to me, all smiles, peroxide blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders like a child on her father’s thighs. “Mevrouw, kan ik U helpen?” I like being a respected “U” rather than the more informal “jij” reserved for juniors, for familiar people (and we all know familiarity breeds contempt) and for riff-raff. “Yes.” I flash her a toothpaste smile. “I would like the mate of this shoe, please. As well as those of these other two.” I watch respect creep into her eyes as I casually pick out two more expensive shoes. Apart from Étienne and two of my regulars, the rest of the men I sleep with are downright weird or mean or both. They cry, they whine, they lash, they spit, they abuse. This is my revenge on them. I spend their money and have their wives or possibly sisters or cousins fawn over me. Peroxide Blonde waltzes back with my shoes and asks if I would like to try them on. I let her help me put them on, kneeling on the floor, kowtowing to my temporary wealth. I walk out of the store with my purchases and her cheery “nog een prettige weekend, mevrouw” chasing me into the busy street, like a child running out to welcome his favourite aunt, the one who always comes with a bag full of sweeties.

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I am in the city centre. Today, I am a tourist. I am even dressed for the role. A cap on my head, a bum bag around my waist, and a camera hanging like heavy sin around my neck. I have a Dutch phrase book in my hand and I enjoy the camaraderie I share with my fellow tourists and with Antwerpenaars of good will. I walk up to a woman who is walking a black dog and smile. I open my phrase book and say in halting Dutch, “Em, kunt U... em, kunt U ma... me....” She cuts me short and asks in impeccable French first, “Parlez vous français?” Then in flawless English, “Do you speak English? I do too.” I give her a rehearsed laugh of relief and ask her if she could take a picture of me opposite the police station. She irritates me. I know if I had not laughed to show I understood one of the languages she spoke, she would have gone on to ask me the same question in every other European language but German. (Étienne tells me that no Belgian will ever admit to speaking German. Something about the two world wars. Too long to go into detail here.) She may have even thrown in a sprinkling of Swahili, picked up on holiday to garnish her stock of languages. She takes a picture of me and I am the perfect tourist, posing and smiling with my hands in my pocket, phrase book at my feet. I tell her I am a first-time visitor from the United States. She tells me I must eat french fries with mussels before I leave. “You cannot leave Belgium without trying that. And our chocolates, of course!” She laughs as she waves at me. I enter the lace shops and ooh and aah over the beautiful Flemish laces. I buy a dainty Japanese fan made of beige lace and smile as the rushed shopkeeper places it in a transparent bag. The fan will find its way into my huge trunk, to make the acquaintance of all the other souvenirs I have picked up on my days out as a tourist: a teaspoon with Manneke Pis (the statue of the little boy passing water that has ridiculously become a crowd-puller) engraved on it, which I picked up in Brussels; a drink coaster with the heads of the entire royal family on it; a place mat with the Atomium drawn coldly in its middle and a pair of lace baby booties (I had told the woman who sold them to me that I was visiting from Trinidad and Tobago and had just found out I was pregnant. The booties would be for my unborn child’s christening. She had wrapped up the shoes in utter silence and reverence, stopping only to dab at her glistening eyes with a flower-embroidered handkerchief.) Finally, I pay a visit to the annual city fair. I make straight for my favourite stand. I buy white cotton candy from a man with an exposed tattooed forearm. He smiles as he gives me the fluffy tower of sugar. I go back to my room and throw myself on the bed and cry. Last week, Vanya from Russia was murdered in her room. Stabbed to death by a jealous patron. Okay. It’s not exactly true. She was not murdered, but she swears that she might have been. Dieter (that is the man’s name) claimed she

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stinted on her services and scared her to death when he pulled out a sharp knife (okay, it was a Swiss knife) and began to scrape his nails with it, all the while hissing and threatening to kill her if he felt short-changed next time. She had to promise to make up for it. I have paid off what I owe V C . I shall graduate myself, summa cum laude, from this particular University of Antwerp. Or maybe not. Perhaps, I enjoy the life. Or perhaps, I do not even live this life. Maybe all I have told you are lies, cotton-candy spun on a stick to sweeten a bland existence. 

N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS AND E DITORS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

S U S A N A R N D T is a Research Fellow at the University of Frankfurt. She has been Senior Fellow at various academic institutions, including Oxford University and Humboldt University, Berlin. She has published on literatures and oratures in West Africa, women’s literature and feminism in Africa, gender and literature, intertextuality, racism, and Critical Whiteness Studies. She has written two monographs, African’s Women Literature, Orality and Intertextuality (1998) and The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African Feminist Literatures (2002; German ed. 2000), and (co-)edited several books, including Words and Worlds: African Writing, Theatre and Society (2007, German ed. 2005), Exophonie: Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (2007), and Theatre, Performance and New Media in Africa (2007). E L I S A B E T H B E K E R S is Lecturer in British and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Brussels (V U B ) and also teaches Literatures in English at the University of Antwerp. Her research focuses on African literatures from the continent and the diaspora (including the U S A ). She has written various articles on literary explorations of female genital excision and on the fiction of Nawal El Saadawi and Alice Walker, and is co-founder of the Postcolonial Literatures Research Group (University of Antwerp) and co-director of the Platform for Postcolonial Readings for junior researchers in the field (a joint venture with Leiden University). Her book Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 is forthcoming (2010) from the University of Wisconsin Press. K A T R I N B E R N D T studied English philology and ethnology at the University of Leipzig. She completed her doctorate at the University of Bayreuth in 2004, and has worked as a freelance lecturer in Berlin, Hamburg, and Leipzig. She has taught undergraduate courses in the Department for English Studies at the University of Leipzig, and in the English Department at the University of Saarland. At present, she is working in the Department for English Studies at the University of Bremen,

© Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York N Y : Editions Rodopi, 2009).

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where she is also embarking on a postdoctoral project on the moral implications of friendship in British writing of the long eighteenth century. S A B R I N A B R A N C A T O studied Modern Languages and Literatures at the Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli (1995) and earned a doctorate in English from the Universidad de Barcelona (2001), specializing in literature and cultural pluralism. She has taught courses on women’s literary history, postcolonial and migration literatures, contemporary poetry, Caribbean and Black British fiction and poetry. She is currently a research fellow in the Department of New Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Frankfurt. Her main research interests and publications are focused on black studies, migration, and gender perspectives. Her current project, on African migration, is supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the Sixth European Community Framework Programme and involves a comparative study of Afro-European narratives. N A D I A B U T T is a doctoral student at the University of Frankfurt. The working title of her doctoral thesis is “Literature as Cultural Memory: Negotiating the Imperative of Transcultural Remembering in Contemporary Indo-English Novels.” Butt holds an MPhil in English from the University of the Punjab and worked as a freelance journalist from 2001 to 2004. During this period, she contributed articles to a number of nation-wide daily newspapers in Pakistan, including The News, Daily Times, and The Friday Times. Her main focus has been on culture, education, women issues, and politics. Currently, she is teaching English language at the Centre of Foreign Languages (Zentrum für Weiterbildung: Arbeitsfeld Sprachen), University of Frankfurt. She is a fellow of the Friedrich Neumann Foundation. J A C O B I A D A H M is a doctoral candidate in film studies at the University of Mainz in Germany. She holds an MA in comparative literature, film studies, and English literature, also from the University of Mainz. She was a visiting scholar at the Center for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. In her dissertation research, titled “Projecting Nationhood: Intercultural Encounters in Africa in American, European, and African Film,” she is studying cross-cultural representation in film, in particular how nations and nationhood are represented in African, European, and American films in the colonial and postcolonial periods. Dahm has been a reviewer for the annual Human Rights Watch Film Festival in New York, and has contributed various essays to the recently published Routledge Encyclopedia of Documentary Film. E L I S A D I A L L O is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, Leiden University. She holds a BA in History (Paris) and an MA in Dutch Studies (Leiden). Since 2003 she has taught Dutch language and literature in the Department of Dutch Studies at Leiden. Her doctoral dissertation investigates the narrative strategies of the Guinean writer Tierno Monénembo and discusses his work within the framework of the contradictory conceptualizations of exile / diaspora / migrant literatures in French, English, and Dutch literary studies. Her article “Écrivains africains et monde global: Une lecture de Tierno Monénembo” will ap-

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pear in Du Bambara au Négropolitain: Créations transculturelles dans les littératures africaines post-coloniales, ed. K. Wa Kabwe–Segatti (forthcoming 2008). S U S A N N E G E H R M A N N is a senior lecturer in African literatures and cultures at Humboldt University, Berlin. Her book publications include Kongo–Greuel: Zur literarischen Konfiguration eines kolonialkritischen Diskurses (1890–1910) (2003), Le Blanc du Noir: Représentations de l’Europe et des Européens dans les littératures africaines (edited with János Riesz, 2004), and Les enJEux de l’autobiographique dans les littératures de langue française: Du genre à l’espace – l’autobiographie postcoloniale – l’hybridité (edited with Claudia Gronemann, 2006). Her research interests include autobiographical writing in Africa, gender and other critical differences, and literatures of migration. She is coordinator of the African section of the project “La France: Espace d’accueil pour les ‘littératures migrantes’: Dictionnaire d’auteurs vivant et publiant en France: 1981–2006” (main editors: Ursula Moser and Birgit Mertz–Baumgartner). M A R I E – H É L È N E G U T B E R L E T holds a degree in art history, philosophy, and film studies from the University of Frankfurt. Her dissertation Auf Reisen: Afrikanisches Kino (2004) focuses on aspects of reception in African cinema. She has published widely on African film, black cinema, and experimental and documentary film, and has organized conferences and screenings in this field. Since 2003 she has been curator of the experimental film programme “reel to real” at the arthouse Mousonturm in Frankfurt am Main. She is currently teaching in the Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies at the University of Frankfurt and is doing postdoctoral research on migration and its visibility. S I S S Y H E L F F is a senior lecturer in English literary and cultural studies in the Department for the New Literatures in English at the University of Frankfurt. Her main fields of interest are postcolonial and transcultural literature and theory, narratology, media, and gender studies. She is currently working on a postdoctoral project focusing on the representation of refugees in the media and literature. Her publications include Die Erfahrung der Migration in der Black British Frauenliteratur (1999) and Unreliable Truths: Indian Homeworlds in Transcultural Women’s Literature (forthcoming), and (with Frank Schulze–Engler) the co-edited volume Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities (2008). She is currently a visiting researcher in the interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies Centre of the University of Leeds. B E T T I N A H O R N – U D E Z E studied cultural studies, anthropology, and German language and literature and wrote her MA thesis on African refugees in Germany. In 2001 she participated in a women’s project in Nigeria on a scholarship from the A S A / Carl Duisberg Gesellschaft (InW E nt). From 2001 to 2005 she was a teaching and research assistant in the Department of Cultural Studies of the University of Bremen. She is currently working on her doctoral project, which focuses on the coping strategies of Nigerian migrants.

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G R A H A M H U G G A N is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures and Director of the interdisciplinary Postcolonial Studies Centre at the University of Leeds. His research areas include postcolonial studies, contemporary travel writing, ecocriticism and, more recently postcolonial Europe (particularly current issues of ‘race’ and racism, migration, and multiculturalism). He is the author of Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction (1994), Peter Carey (1996), and The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (2001), co-author of Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (1998), and co-editor of Critical Perspectives on J.M. Coetzee (1996). F O U A D L A R O U I is a Moroccan-Dutch mathematician, engineer, economist, and writer of novels, short stories, poetry, and essays, who divides his time between Casablanca, Amsterdam, and Paris. An acclaimed writer in France, where his debut novel Les dents du ‘topographe’ [The Mapmaker’s Teeth] won the 1996 Albert Camus Prize, he has recently begun to publish also in Dutch. In addition to articles in various Dutch newspapers, he has written the humorous essay Vreemdeling: Aangenaam [Stranger: Pleased to Meet You] (2001) and two poetry collections, Verbannen woorden [Forbidden Words] (2002) and Hollandse woorden [Dutch words] (2004). In 2002 he received the Dutch Eddy du Perron Prize for his literary work so far, and in 2005 he was made Chevalier des Arts et Lettres de la République Française. In his most recent book, De l’islamisme [About Islam] (2006, published simultaneously in French and in Dutch), he gives his personal view on Islam, while vigorously refuting and denouncing Islamism and ‘political Islam’. He is currently Professor of Migrant Literature at the University of Amsterdam and also teaches Arabic culture at the same university. C H R I S T I N E M A T Z K E currently teaches African literature and theatre in the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University, Berlin. A graduate of the Workshop Theatre, University of Leeds, she specializes in Eritrean performing arts and has an interest in African crime fiction. She is co-editor (with Susanne Mühleisen) of Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective (2006) and (with Aderemi–Raji Oyelade and Geoffrey V. Davis) Of Minstrelsy and Masks: The Legacy of Ezenwa–Ohaeto in Nigerian Writing (2006). A N N I K A M C P H E R S O N studied Kulturwissenschaft and English and American studies at the University of Bremen, where she is currently completing her doctoral dissertation “White – Female – Postcolonial? Towards a Transcultural Reading of Marina Warner’s Indigo and Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.” Her main research areas are comparative cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and contemporary literature in English. She has taught at the University of Bremen, the Maastricht Centre for Transatlantic Studies, the University of Stellenbosch, and the University of Oldenburg. D A N I E L A M E R O L L A is a senior lecturer in African literatures in the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, Leiden University. Her specialization in African oral and written literatures has allowed her to publish and teach courses in

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anthropological and literary approaches to gender, ethnicity, narrativity, and new media in African and African diasporic literatures. Her most recent books are De l’art de la narration Tamazight (berbère): 200 ans d’études: État des lieux et perspectives (2006) and, co-edited with Sandra Ponzanesi, Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (2005). O B O D O D I M M A O H A is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Ibadan, where he currently teaches stylistics, semiotics, and creative writing. He is also a Fellow and Postgraduate Coordinator at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Ibadan. He has published articles in Mosaic, Mattoid, Matatu, Cahiers d’Études Africaines, Interventions, Africa, African Anthropology, American Drama, Mots Pluriels, and African Study Monographs. D A P H N E P A P P E R S , after almost ten years’ employment in the contemporary visual art world, is currently an external researcher in the Art History Department at Leiden University under the supervision of Professor Kitty Zijlmans. Returning in her doctorate to the issue of “engaged art expressing and questioning identities” that she explored in her final paper for her degree on European studies (University of Amsterdam, 1994), Pappers intends to develop a contemporary method for reading images made by artists with transcultural biographies, and has so far focused on African women artists. P E T E R N . P E D R O N I is Professor of Italian at Miami University and the Director of the Miami University Summer Language Institute in Italy. His publications include several articles, interviews, and translations of twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Italian writers, including immigrant writing in Italian. He is the author of Existence as Theme in Carlo Cassola’s Fiction (1985) and The Anti-Naturalist Experience: Federigo Tozzi (1989). He is the translator of Paolo Volponi’s Il sipario ducale, as Last Act in Urbino (1995), and of Kossi Komla–Ebri’s Neyla, as Neyla: A Novel by Kossi Komla–Ebri (2004). M A R I E – C H R I S T I N E P R E S S is a senior lecturer in French and Francophone Literature and Culture at the University of Westminster, London. She has published articles on language teaching methodology, modern languages and applied linguistics and, more recently, the visual arts and the creative process. She now shares her time between academic teaching and research, and her own art practice. Current research focuses on aspects of language and identity in the works of contemporary writers and visual artists of North African descent. Recent publications include articles and an essay on the work of the visual artist Zineb Sedira in the light of writings by Abdelkhébir Khatibi and others, foregrounding the place of translation when dealing with issues of conflict and memory. E I L A R A N T O N E N is a researcher and teacher in the Department of Arts and Literature at the University of Tampere. She has published several articles on postcolonial criticism, postcolonial feminism, racism, ethnic minority literatures, and migrant writing in Europe, and co-edited a Finnish review of literary studies, Avain.

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Rantonen has taught courses in African-American fiction and world literatures. She is currently engaged in a research project on literary representations of migrants in the Nordic literatures. A L E X R O T A S lectures in Visual Culture at the University of the West of England and is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Cardiff (School of Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies). In 2004/5 she was a Visiting Fellow at Centre C A T H (the Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History), at Leeds University. She has recently completed a research project on the artwork of visual artists who have arrived in Europe as asylum seekers and / or refugees and is co-editing a book (with Murat Aydemir) called Migrant Settings, to be published in Thamyris in 2008. F R A N K S C H U L Z E – E N G L E R is Professor of English Literatures at the Institute for English and American Studies at the University of Frankfurt, where he also heads the Department for New Literatures in English. His publications include his doctoral dissertation, Intellektuelle wider Willen: Schriftsteller, Literatur und Gesellschaft in Ostafrika, 1960–1980 (1992), and the co-edited volumes African Literatures in the Eighties (with Dieter Riemenschneider, 1993), Postcolonial Theory and the Emergence of a Global Society (with Gordon Collier and Dieter Riemenschneider, 1998), and Crab Tracks: Progress and Process in Teaching the New Literatures in English (with Gordon Collier, 2002), as well as numerous essays on African literature, comparative perspectives on the New Literatures in English, postcolonial theory, transnational culture, and the cultural dimensions of globalization. D A R I A T U N C A has an MA in English studies and works as an assistant in the English Department at the University of Liège. Her research interests include postcolonial literature (especially African fiction) and stylistics. She is currently completing a doctoral dissertation on language in recent Nigerian fiction, and she has published articles and reviews in journals such as the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Wasafiri. She edits an online bibliography of works by and about Ben Okri (http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/okri) and maintains a website on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/adichie). N W A C H U K W U F R A N K U K A D I K E is Associate Professor of film and of African and African diaspora studies at Tulane University. His areas of interest include film and T V historians, theorists, and critics. He has published Black African Cinema (1994), in which he explores the development of black African cinema and examines the impact of culture, history, and technology on filmmaking throughout Africa. He has edited a special issue on African cinema for Iris: Journal of Theory on Image and Sound (Spring 1995) and, more recently, Questioning African Cinema: Conversations with Filmmakers (2002). C H I K A U N I G W E is a writer of fiction and poetry, whose first novel, De Feniks [The Phoenix], appeared in September 2005. Born in 1974 in Enugu (Nigeria), Unigwe studied in Nsukka (BA), Leuven (MA), and Leiden (PhD) and moved to

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Flanders, Belgium in 1995 with her Flemish husband. She is the author of two E F L books published by Macmillan and has published various short stories and poems in anthologies and literary journals, both online and in print. In 2004, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for African Writing award, a.k.a. the ‘African Booker Prize’. Her other writing awards include a B B C Short Story Award, a Commonwealth Short Story Award, and two Million Writers’ Awards for best online fiction. De Feniks is the first novel by an African woman writer to appear in Flanders.

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N OTES FOR C ONTRIBUTORS ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

G ORDON C OLLIER , Department of English, FB 05 Sprache, Literatur, Kultur, Justus Liebig University, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, 35394 Giessen, G ERMANY Email: [email protected]

G EOFFREY V. D AVIS , Institut für Anglistik, RW T H Aachen, Kármánstr. 17–19, 52062 Aachen, G ERMANY Email: [email protected]

C HRISTINE M ATZKE , Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften, Seminar für Afrikawissenschaften, Afrikanische Literaturen und Kulturen, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, G ERMANY Email: [email protected]

A DEREMI R AJI –O YELADE [pen-name R EMI R AJI ], Department of English, Faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, N IGERIA Email: [email protected]

F RANK S CHULZE –E NGLER , de Ridder Weg 2, 65929 Frankfurt, G ERMANY Email: [email protected]

C HANTAL Z ABUS , Université de Paris, F R A N C E Email: [email protected]

S UBMISSIONS . All prospective contributions primarily as EMAIL ATTACH MENTS sent to G ORDON C OLLIER . Preference is for Word for Windows; Rich Text Format is recommended; IMPORTANT – remove all automatic formatting). Contributions in HARD COPY should be sent to G EOFFREY D AVIS ; two print copies, double-spaced, must be submitted. B ASIC GUIDELINES FOR INITIAL SUBMISSIONS . In general, follow M L A presentation. Use underlining, not italics. All texts cited or quoted from must be footnoted – include all relevant data (full first and last name of author or editor,

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title and subtitle, place of publication and publisher; date of first publication and date of edition used). With essays in periodicals and books, include full page-span; with periodicals, include volume and issue number; with translations, include name of translator, the title in the original language, and the date of publication of the original.

S TYLESHEET . Should manuscripts, after being accepted for publication, need to be re-submitted on grounds of presentation or layout, the Editors will send contributors a detailed stylesheet.

B OOK R EVIEWS . Send all copies of books to be considered for review to G ORDON C OLLIER , Technical Editor, Matatu, Department of English, Justus Liebig University, Otto-Behaghel-Str. 10, 35394 Giessen, Germany.

C REATIVE WRITING . Poetry, fiction and playscripts will, as in the past, be sought out by the Editors of Matatu and the Advisory Board, but African writers are, of course, encouraged to submit material for consideration on their own account.

T HEMES AND TOPICS . Essays on all aspects of African and Afro-Caribbean literature and culture are welcome, as well as reports and interviews on topics of pressing and current concern (many of which can find a place in the occasional “Marketplace” section of Matatu).