Migrancy and African Literature

By: Brenda Cooper

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Migrancy and African Literature

Many writers from parts of the world that have been colonized leave home and migrate to Europe and North America, including a number from Africa. They come from all over the continent. Some went into exile involuntarily, some emigrated by choice. Others move between continents. Few of the well-known and widely published writers remain permanently in Africa, without spending time in Europe or North America. To take just a very few examples, there is Jamal Mahjoub from the Sudan, who lives in Spain, having spent some years in Denmark; there is Leila Aboulela, also from the Sudan, who now lives in Scotland. From Kenya there is the renowned NGUGI WA THIONG’O, who lives in the United States. M. G. Vassanji migrated from Tanzania to Toronto and Abdulrazak Gurnah from Zanzibar to Britain. Buchi Emecheta and Ben Okri, both from Nigeria have for many years lived in Britain, where Okri recently won the coveted Booker Prize for his novel, The Famished Road.

Globalization

These connections across the world are often referred to as the process of globalization. The traffic between worlds is beginning to amount to a jam with borders under seige in all directions. This has enormous consequences for the ways in which writers see and represent themselves and others in their fictions. Globalization challenges boundaries and confronts and transforms the old divide between colonizer and colonized, white and black. European capitals have been transformed culturally, politically, and economically by immigrants from areas of the world it once colonized. Anthony Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity defines globalization as “the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa.” This “brain drain” has affected Africa very radically, given the extent of the migration of its writers and intellectuals, scholars and artists away from the continent. The Nigerian poet Pius Adesanmi, in his paper “Europhonism, Universities, and Other Stories,” says he belongs to “an emergent generation of writers that became very visible in the nineties.” He outlines how, as “everywhere on the continent, bloodthirsty tyrants shot their way into the corridors of power” and as the infrastructure decayed and the universities were increasingly underfunded, there has been “an unprecedented emigration of African intellectuals,” and “European and North American universities played host to an ever expanding army of African intellectual refugees.”

Diaspora

The concept of “diaspora” has been reincarnated in this context. African communities in the West develop ties with other black communities from other once-colonized places, such as India or Latin America. At the same time, they link up in some or other way with host communities and weave these new networks into their roots back home. With each new generation the “woof and weave” of these networks develop and change in texture, color, and style. As new generations grow up and are born in northern climates, so questions of the past, of identity, of roots become more complex. For the first time in her fiction, for example, Buchi Emecheta focuses on The New Tribe, as she titles her novel. These are children of Nigerian background, born and bred in England. This new tribe of black British have different agendas and alliances in their attempts to stake a place in the country in which they were born and yet where racism continues to fissure the land. Paul Gilroy looks at “the syncretic cultures of black Britain” in his book There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. He explains that “black British cultures have been created from diverse and contradictory elements apprehended through discontinuous histories.”

Third Space and Hybridity

While “back home” transforms through the lens of memory and the distortions of nostalgia, new homes are not very easily established. In fact, these travelers from places in Africa, who migrate to places in the United States or the United Kingdom, have been characterized by Homi Bhahba in The Location of Culture as occupying a kind of “third space.” These newcomers to London or Aberdeen from Lagos or Khartoum occupy an ambiguous, hybrid, and changing site, neither fully on one continent or the other. This space is sometimes productive and fertile and at other times lonely and rootless. More than a place, however, the third space is a mental and emotional construct, a way of being in the world, a search for a new identity. Postcolonial migrants rely on the books that they write in order to assist them with a ritual of relocation, one that is a painful, labored struggle for reemergence into sociality. Conceptualizing this third space is made even more challenging by the fact that “here” and “there” are not themselves homogenous places. It makes a big difference whether the writer ends up in London or Aberdeen, Amsterdam or the West Coast of America. Africa, moreover, is a highly heterogeneous continent, and writers coming from West, East, or North Africa have had profoundly different experiences from one another. There are a number of other variables. Are these writers Muslim, Christian, or “traditional” or any combination and mixture of belief? Do their ancestors include migrants to East Africa long ago from the Middle or Far East? The terrible history of persecution of Africans of Asian descent has profoundly affected such writers as Abdulrazak Gurnah and M. G. Vassanji, whose emigration from East Africa was not entirely voluntary and whose stories entwine uneasy citizenship in Africa with all the difficulties of settling in new countries. In other words, their third space is a palimpsest of yet other places and histories, across the centuries. May Joseph, herself an East African Asian migrant from Tanzania to New York, in her Nomadic Identities, outlines her encounters with “dispersed communities of East African Asians in India, the Gulf states, Britain, Canada and the United States.” She describes crossing paths “with these enclaves of displaced East African Asians through the years, in Bangalore, Trivandrum, Doha, London, New York, Los Angeles.”

African Novels in the Third Space

This strange thirdness takes many different forms in different writers, who have come from different African countries and arrived at different European or North American cities. It could be captured by the fantastic, as in B. Kojo Laing’s magical interplays between two fictional towns, Tukwan in Ghana and Levensvale in Scotland in his Woman of the Aeroplanes. It might be that perch in Amsterdam, where Moses Isegawa’s protagonist eventually lands up in Abyssinian Chronicles. This African trickster on Dutch soil will continue to buck the system and live in the cracks, as successfully in Amsterdam as he did in Kampala. It could be the seedy flat in Toronto occupied by the Lalani family in M. G. Vassanji’s No New Land. This family, like many others, fled Dar es Salaam and an East Africa dominated by the anti-Asian sentiments fueled by Idi Amin, only to find life in Toronto hard and hostile. Or it could be prosaically named and identified as Brixton High Street in Biyi Bandele’s The Street. Bandele’s Brixton is a weird and wonderful amalgam of Nigeria and Britain, the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, the dream and the reality. It is a new Britain in which the formerly colonized have come to stay and to transform local and national realities, even while these African men and women are themselves transformed. These are all third spaces.

Gender

Men and women also experience uprooting quite differently. Men have more mobility and opportunities of new jobs and economic empowerment in new places, however difficult these moves are for all postcolonial travelers. Ama Darko’s Beyond the Horizon enacts the particular horror of a naive woman from the village being sold into prostitution by conniving Ghanaian men in Germany. By contrast, however, in Yoruba Girl Dancing, Simi Bedford portrays an equally naive Nigerian girl, who quickly learns the ropes in her English public school and capitalizes on her differences from her female classmates in her determination to stay on top, rather than becoming a victim. Ama Ata Aidoo, the well-known Ghanaian writer, captures some of the particular paradoxes and perplexities of the professional African woman traveler in her story “Some Global News” from her collection suggestively entitled The Girl Who Can and Other Stories. The story focuses on etiquette around dress codes, which carries loaded cultural and gendered meaning.

Language

From stranger to citizen, from foreign alien to new community, from visitor to resident, characters hold onto their possessions, the things, which anchor them in the potential abyss of “in-betweenness.” Pointing, then, in many directions, in both time and space, the objects that these travelers gather, store, pack, and bring speak in tongues and tell new stories. Migrant writers tend to use European languages to tell their stories. However, they explore ways of possessing the language and making it their own, much like the possessions they and their characters bring from home and the new objects they furnish their lives with when they arrive. If English is a forked tongue for the once-colonized, then it is doubly so for migrants arriving in England or Amsterdam, who lose their sense of place in the world, their words, their selves. African writers, who are foreigners, make new languages out of English. This they do as a means of forging new metaphors, meanings, and images. According to Bill Ashcroft, in his Post-Colonial Transformation, they may include some of the indigenous language from where they came, in order to install their difference from colonial culture and language. They change the rhyme, rhythm, and texture of the language. The new English language that is acquired is, of course, also a blended one.

Conclusion

Useful terms and concepts like migration, globalization, diaspora, hybridity, and third space come alive in the plots, themes, devices, humor, conundrums, and everyday occurrences of African fictional tales. African writers use the landscapes and stories of where they were born and where they now live. They borrow from other African places and people, from the cultures of India and Latin America, where they identify with those who have also been colonized, albeit in different ways and at different times. They express themselves in European languages and inherit European traditions. Out of this patchwork they construct visions that are uniquely linked to their own lives, their countries of origin, their generation, the privileged perch from which they view the world, and their individual talents and idiosyncrasies.

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