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‘Poor’ African Writers Travelling:
Home and Exile in Younger Nigerian Diasporic
writing
Memories of Stone: Chuma Nwokolo, Jnr. Villagerhouse, Lagos, 2006.
The Bridge Selection: Poems for the Road. Nnorom Azuonye. Eastern Light EPM International, London, 2005.
Why I Don’t Like Philip Larkin & Other Poems: Esiaba Irobi. Nsibidi Library of Nsukka Poets, Nsibidi Africana Publishers, Owerri, Cambridge, 2005.
Heart’s Field: Uche Nduka. Yeti Press, Bremen, 2005.
The experience of a traveller from the world’s poor places is very
different, whether he is travelling as a tourist or struggling to settle
down as an exile in a wealthy country. One could give a whole lot of
time to that subject but I am not going to. Let me just say of such a
traveller that he will not be able to claim a double citizenship like
Gertrude Stein when she said: “I am an American and Paris is my
hometown” (92-93).
(Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile, 2000).
Achebe’s focus on identity and location is continued in the closing paragraph of his book of essays. A magazine opinion by Salman Rushdie that “Literature has little to do with a writer’s home address,”1 elicits the following comment from the African novelist:
I just wonder if in seeking to free the writer from all ties we might
not end up constraining literature’s long reach into every nook and
corner of every writer’s experience and imagining including his
encounter with the extraordinary invention called the passport (105).
Achebe’s responses in Home and Exile interest because some of the certainties informing them are being tested in the experience and work of the younger Nigerian writers under review. Chuma Nwokolo, Nnorom Azuonye, Esiaba Irobi and Uche Nduka, who live and work in Europe and America – Oxford (London); Athens (Ohio) and Bremen (Germany) respectively – are among a dramatically increased and increasing number of new Nigerian poets and other writers writing from abroad. For illustrative purposes in this review, I will also consider the ruptures in the diasporic experience of some of these other Nigerian writers abroad.
I intend to complicate the subject further with a passing interest in the represented memory of those new ‘Nigerian’ writers abroad, who have lived outside Nigeria most of their signifying life, having limited contact with the country, its ways and people. This later group of writers still uses Nigerian or related African material in the work they do, but they also belong to the national literature of their location of residence (place of birth, in some cases) by choice, and are primarily engaged with that other national experience. For this later group, the connection with their African ancestral homeland was tenuous from the beginning and has remained so for much of their lives. The question is how do they relate to that unknown African place which would offer itself as the creative homeland of their art? Being part of an African national diaspora but not having any substantial experience of Africa like the first group of writers abroad, is their own experience of alienation any different from the experience of the earlier group? UK-based ‘Nigerian’ writers in the later category would usually identify themselves as Black British writers, and are categorised and celebrated as such, but they also share the Nigerian ancestry and memory of the other new writers abroad with a more extensive Nigerian experience.
I am interested in how, if at all, the marginal or fringe (or, in Achebe’s words, “poor”) experience of all these new Nigerian poets and other writers abroad is indicated in their creative choices and the identity of their writing. Writing from their metropolitan settings, what is the present evidence of their creative sensitivity to being of black, African, ‘poor’ origins? Poor may also be translated as postcolonial for the purpose of this review. After the theoretical gains of hybridity and related universalisms, is Achebe’s ancient wisdom still relevant to our reading of these young Nigerian writers abroad? How indeed does long-term residency in a location of aspiration sit with the longing for that other location, the location of origin, from which presumably these writers are still drawing inspiration? And there is the awful question to be considered: Is the creative home of this new and exiled writing still properly Africa? What Africa? There is potentially then not only an aspirational location but also an inspirational location determining this new Nigerian writing abroad. All the writers still imagine a home in their ancestral past, or in its contemporary Nigerian realities, which they continue to represent (celebrate or criticise) in their works. But it is not actually as clear-cut, this issue. These new writers are more conflicted over origins and identity, over the imagining of home, than has been previously evident in Nigerian writing, or known to its earlier discourse generations, including that of Achebe. Perhaps, the real difference between now and then, in the case of Nigeria, and much of Africa, is in the sheer weight of numbers involved in these departures, and the seeming permanence of their exit. That has to be culturally significant, sufficient reason for this invitation to discourse.
I have assumed a Nigerian diaspora in this review. That is based on the large numbers of people involved, their continuing behaviour as a nation abroad, and common imaginings of Nigeria as the home to which they might return. I should also state from the onset that the focus here is not on the condition of ‘internal exile,’ by which, in the case of Africa, we might mean such intra-continental exilic and diasporic movements that have also increased for the same reasons and at the same time that the vertical movements out of Africa have increased. Harry Garuba and Sanya Osha, both in South Africa, are among the younger Nigerian writers involved in these horizontal relocations within Africa. Kole Omotosho, of an older generation and now also a South African, is another of the Nigerian writers who may be considered internal African exiles.
As this review is informed by postcolonial commentary from Chinua Achebe, it might have been assisted by a corpus of imaginative exile writings from the novelist with which to draw some comparative conclusions: that is, comparing what Achebe has urged on ‘poor’ diasporic writing in his essays, in terms of nation-consciousness, and how he has actually represented this imaginatively now that he is in long-term residency abroad, and then comparing these new differently informed, and, possibly, generationally specific, representations of Achebe with the exile work and thoughts of the younger writers under consideration. We are not assisted in this regard by Achebe’s recently published book of poems. Obi Iwuanyanwu notes in a Sentinel journal essay, ‘Achebe’s Poetic Drive,’ that Collected Poems (2004), is “the same collection of poems that has been reborn or, like an Igbo ancestor, reincarnated at least four times through different publishers, in different forms, versions, titles, and incremental number of poems over twenty-three years across three continents…”(25) Most of these newly published poems are not new and can collectively make no definitive statement to us on the exile imagination of Chinua Achebe.
Not finding comparative joy with Achebe’s imaginative oeuvre, we might seek analytic comfort in Samarkand and Other Markets I Have Known, the most recent collection of poems from Wole Soyinka, one of the other outstanding Nigerian writers of Achebe’s generation. But the value of this for our purpose is also limited. Samarkand, registers the international presence of Soyinka, who lives part of his time abroad, but not really his international experience. In the period of its writing and publication Soyinka was never far from home, and was in fact engaged with home politics, which is what features in most of the poems. But the usual elements of internationalism (rather than universalism) in Soyinka’s writings – the references to Greek mythology and to the important literary and political figures, or struggles, of other travelled lands – are also reflected in Samarkand. What Soyinka shares with Achebe, and with all Nigerian-African people of a sentient nature, including writers, whether they live abroad or at home, is that emotional separation occasioned by frustration from the observed poverty of vision and lack of progress in their African places of origin. Achebe was moved by this to write his political treatise, The Trouble with Nigeria. In Samarkand, Soyinka also deals with that estrangement in the opening stanza of a poem, ‘Elegy for a Nation,’ dedicated to Chinua Achebe, at seventy:
Ah, Chinua, are you grapevine wired?
It sings: our nation is not dead, not clinically
Yet. Now this may come as a surprise to you,
It was to me. I thought the form I spied
Beneath the frosted glass of a fifty-carat catafalque
Was the face of our own dear land – ‘own’, ’dear’,
Voluntary patriotese, you’ll note – we try to please.
An anthem’s sentiment upholds the myth. (68)
Among earlier Nigerian writers, it is, perhaps, in the later work of Tess Onwueme (Shakara Dance-Hall Queen, 2000) and Isidore Okpewho’s novel, Call Me by My Rightful Name, 2004, that diasporic experiences from the recent mass literary departures from Africa are becoming influential in plot-making, characterization and other creative choices, including the choice of subjects and locations. I am interested here in determining possible differences in the recent thinking and imaginative work from exile of older Nigerian writers in comparison with that of their younger compatriots who are the subject of this review. In noting here the changed global circumstances of forced removals and cross-border relocations by refugees, exiles, émigrés, expatriates and other migrants, I am struck by how the elements which determine the exilic contexts of an earlier Nigerian writing by Buchi Emecheta (Second Class Citizen), Naiwu Osahon (Sex is a Nigger) and Wole Soyinka (in the early play, Childe Internationale, or the poem, ‘Telephone Conversation’) remain relevant to the immediate world of this review and the experience of the younger Nigerian writers it is reviewing.
On the Nature of Diasporic Consciousness
Achebe’s thoughts on the poor writer abroad resonate in these later days of literary practice in Africa, with its many forced and ‘voluntary’ exiles, including internal exiles, its increasing body of writings from younger Africans abroad, among them the Nigerian writers under consideration. There are more of the writers relocating abroad, making a life outside the homeland, and increasingly representing that conflicted subjectivity of life-away-from-home in their work and utterances. The memory of home these more recent Nigerian writers abroad have is seen to recede the longer they reside abroad so that this exiled imagination begins to represent home in terms of absence, in words of unfulfilled longing for presence. For all the evidence of political sophistication in some of these younger Nigerian writers abroad, dislocation and its ambiguities remain primary constants in many, conditioning, if not determining, their creative choices and the changeable interests they allow to inform those choices. Their uprootedness and frayed sense of certainty and communal loyalty, feature in idealized or compensatory imaginings of home, and a suspicion of the moments and fixtures of their locations abroad. This conflicted sense of belonging continues to provide a dominant subtext for much of the work – the loss of home, the yearning for it, and, especially for those in long disconnecting residency abroad, the progressively increased perception of home as a place less known, not where they live, only an imaginary or imprecise construct of where they are from.
A cautionary word on how we may fruitfully approach the subject of exile may be found in ‘Reflections on Exile, ’the seminal essay by Edward W. Said. Said urges an appreciation of exile that is distanced from any valorisation of the experience, and the attempt to centre and define it as a peculiarly Western experience, such as may be found in George Steiner’s aesthetic justifications of the experience.2 Said replaces Steiner’s aestheticism with a political construction of the exile experience:
it is apparent that to concentrate on exile as a contemporary political
punishment, you must therefore map territories of experience beyond
those mapped by the literature of exile itself. You must first set aside
Joyce and Nabokov and think instead of the uncountable masses for
whom UN agencies have been created. You must think of the refugee
peasants with no prospect of ever returning home, armed only with a
ration card and an agency number. Paris may be a capital famous for
cosmopolitan exiles, but it is also a city where unknown men and women
have spent years of miserable loneliness: Vietnamese, Algerians,
Cambodians, Senegalese, Peruvians… As you move further from the
Atlantic world, the awful forlorn waste increases: the hopelessly large
numbers, the compounded misery of “undocumented” people suddenly
lost, without a tellable history. (175-176)
For all his sensitivity to the identity and suffering of other nationals outside the Western world, Said, a great internationalist, criticises Wole Soyinka, and by implication Achebe, in Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays, for investing too much in otherness, and in the nation project. In this way, then, he can be classed with the cosmopolitan Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Homi K. Bhabha,3 in opposition to the nationalist criticism by which culture (including literature in Africa) is usually interpreted. Said’s main concerns in a later work, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, are subject specific, but in that collection of public lectures, he also offers justification for his difficulties with nationalists and nation-projects:
Because the world has become far more integrated and demographically
mixed than ever before, the whole concept of national identity has to be
revised and, in most places that I know, is in the process of being revised.
Muslims from North Africa, Kurds, Turks and Arabs from the Middle East,
West and East Indians, as well as men and women from several African
countries have changed forever the collective face of Britain, Sweden,
France, Germany, Italy and Spain, among other countries in Europe.
Extraordinary mixtures of nationalities, races and religions form the different
histories of Latin America, and when we look at India, Malaysia… and
several more Asian countries, we will note, as we would in the case of
many African countries, an enormous variety of languages and cultures…
The point is that of all the baggage inherited from nineteenth century
political thought, it is the notion of a unified, coherent, homogenous
national identity that is now undergoing the most rethinking, and this
change is being felt in every sphere of society and politics.
It is possible for the exiled African writer in difficulty over identity and related cultural decisions to find an easy resolution of such conflicts in these words of Said, for they reflect accurately the realities which they choose to represent. But there are the contradictions to be found in what is not stated. First, the idea of a collective of people united under governance, located in geography and history, with an evolved system of social mores and lore and is not a discovery of nineteenth century political thought, though it may have gained prominence in discourse from that time. A country or state is sometimes commonly referred to as a nation, but a nation is really a more involving political construct than the mere presence of flags and anthems may indicate. It can be any political formation of people with shared, extensive and lasting ethnic, linguistic and historical loyalties and experiences attached to them. It is in this sense that Africa was organised in national formations long before the colonialism and discourse of Nineteenth Century Europe, and it is also by this definition that the idea of nation seems likely to outlive the contemporary discourses aiming to rest it.
It is the case that refuge seekers, intellectuals, agitators, artists, thinkers, and other sentients and official undesirables usually inhabit a life across borders, or at the borderline, as may be determined by birth, residence, marriage, sexual orientation, religious experience, or as a consequence of emotional journeys, work histories and intellectual enquiries. A life lived across borders or at the borderline tends to find great attraction for universalisms, explanations of life and recommendations for living, which necessitate an erasure of borders. For those who belong here and elsewhere, who may be ruled out as belonging elsewhere rather than here, or simply seen as nowhere people, like refugees (or exiles and internationalists like Said, Rushdie, Homi Bhabha and Appiah) borders and boundaries can assume peculiar relevance as insidious locations or moments of antagonism, presences providing justification for the exclusivities which bar some and exalt others, which separate and oppose subjectivities in perpetuation of conflict. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza indicates this as the continuing challenge of Said’s vision:
Said embodied and exuded a humanistic sensibility, a yearning for a
more humane world subject to universal standards of justice, a world
we could all call home, without the suffocating and terrorizing binaries
of “us against them.”4 (Zeleza on Exile, 2)
Will the idea of nation, and the wars and other hated conflicts associated with it, be concluded in Europe or Africa by globalisation and its system of mixed perspectives and relationships, and supposedly shared lives and aspirations? Or, will it, perhaps, happen that instead of the death which opponents of the nation-project imagine they see, what actually happens is that nations re-model themselves, sometimes even change their make-up, in their peculiar history of re-births and make-overs. It is not that nations do not have their historical reversals. No, they have sometimes been conquered, or their people wiped out by plagues or environmental factors, even by invaders, or through internecine conflicts. It is also true, however, that nations have a remarkable capacity for survival, and those who would theorise or hustle them out of existence will have to deal with that. The continuing survival of the Jewish nation is a remarkable story but it is not the only evidence of longevity and survival in the world of national identities. There are the Armenians and Said’s own Palestinians. After the break-up of empires and the emergence of its modern countries, the European ‘tribe’ (or nation) was supposed to be ‘a thing of history’ – until its recent re-configurations in the Common Market, monetary union and the parliament at Brussels. It might be imagined that after the shame of apartheid, the Afrikaner national identity would be in retreat, not wanting to assert itself in independent South Africa. Not so. There is much pride in the use of the language and projection of the culture even from the more liberal of Afrikaner writers. When Said tries to offer America as an example of multiculturalism in triumph, he encounters what he seems to think is a passing inconvenience, what some others might, however, identify as an abiding feature of nations making or re-making themselves:
The actual composition of America is not much different [from what
exists elsewhere] in terms of diversity and multiplicity of cultures,
although one unfortunate consequence has been the felt need to try
to homogenize all this into an assertive, not to say bellicose and
positive American identitarian unanimity. The invention of tradition
has become far too thriving a business.5
Since both the ‘home-sickness’ of the African writer in exile, and the ‘home-consciousness’ of Achebe, imagine the homeland as a place of value, from which ‘national’ writers abroad inherit a uniquely shared history and common identity, authenticated by the name African - and there are cultural perspectives and models, which dispute this, or define it differently- it is useful to evaluate some of these alternative visions of the Africa project to which the younger African writers abroad might be turning for comfort, direction or inspiration. Oyekan Owomoyela attempts a reading of some of these perspectives on Africa in his essay, “The Mata Kharibu Model and its Oppositions: Conflicts and Transformations in Cultural Valuation.” He identifies two broad visions in the discourse on the African past and evaluates their contemporary importance as guides to the definition and development of the African identity. Owomoyela’s models are represented on the critical side by Wole Soyinka (in the independence play, ‘A dance of the Forests’), Ayi Kwei Armah (in the novel, Two Thousand Seasons) and Yambo Ouloguem (in the novel, Bound to Violence). Against the differently damning readings of the African past modelled by these three African writers is the promotional model provided, in Owomoyela’s view, by Chinua Achebe (in the novel, Things Fall Apart) and by the poetry of negritude:
While the Soyinkas, the Ouloguems and the Armahs looked at the African
past and saw perdition, other Africans looked and saw a heritage that
inspired pride, and cultures that were, in human and spiritual terms, if not
in material terms, far superior to the Western impositions. (488-489)
Owomoyela does atttempt to bridge his perceived divide in these opposed interpretations of the African past, providing a suggestion that in Anthills of the Savannah and The Trouble with Nigeria, Achebe makes up for his earlier position in Things Fall Apart by at last turning his critical searchlight on the enemy within rather than just the strangers. But the readings of the authors he offers still seem rather simplifying and calculated to indicate a division, which is not evident, or not quite so pronounced and crucial. What is evident is that, taking the discourse further, beyond Africa, differences do exist in the recognition and interpretation of the African experience, even in the acceptance of the validity and viability of Africanness, and this lends accuracy to Owomoyela’s specific consideration of such commentators as Ato Quayson and Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah’s In My Father’s House (1992), seeks, in part, to delegitimize Africanness as a viable identity option, going further, in some ways, than Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, in which the Africanness of the black presence in the diasporic Americas, is simply de-emphasized, or deliberately ignored.
Chinua Achebe and Ayi Kwei Armah assume it and have written novels to prove it; but beyond the geography and history (its time and space significations), and the practical economic, political and social structures and signs of an African cosmopolitan or hybrid modernity (largely traceable to colonial contact with Europe and Arabia and to globalisation), is there an African “essence” or “way,” or “truth,” habits of mind, system of relationships, a unique and separable African identity, which the exiled writer from the continent might correctly imagine as home and feel committed to defend, promote or return to? Or is this imagined ‘essential’ Africa – and its attendant claim of an African diasporic consciousness – mere fiction? In the face of such uncertainties about origins, especially in the diaspora, can (how can) the African identity and sense of belonging for those long settled outside the continent be differently interpreted? This is the many-headed question Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, Ali Mazrui and other scholars in African and Diasporic Studies consider in their published volume of conference papers, The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities. Okpewho provides It is not out of character with the Africa discourse that in The African Diaspora, Michael J. C. Echeruo’s qualified afrocentric perspective (in ‘An African Diaspora: The Ontological Project’) should seem at odds with Ali Mazrui’s multiculturalism (in ‘Islam and the Black Diaspora: The Impact of Islamigration’), or with Jean Rahier’s atlanticism (in ‘Blackness as a Process of Creolisation: The Afro-Esmeraldian Decimas’).
Okpewho guides the discourse of these many perspectives on Africa in diaspora with an introductory essay, which also speaks to this review, especially regarding attitudes that too hastily dismiss any foregrounding of African elements in diasporic studies as essentialist and particularist. He attempts to contrast the Atlantic revisionism of Henry Louis Gates and others, which recognises and engages links with African origins or centres…
In the work of these scholars, there is at any rate, a civil concession
to an African past which suggest that the quest for self-definition
need not entail a total disavowal of vestigial history. This, in fact, is
the significance of scholars like Houston Baker and Henry Louis
Gates – in the ideas of “vernacular theory” and “signifying,”
respectively – as well as artists like Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat,
and Grace Nichols, and the trope of “re-memory” or “re-membering”
underlying their work. (xx-xxi)
and the disavowals or denials of revisionists like Clarence Walker and Paul Gilroy, who, as in the case of Walker’s Deromanticizing Black History, unleash “a no-holds-barred attack not only on those who look backward to Africa, but even on those who employ the concept of “community”… to construe Afro-America as one unified racial family.” (xxi) Okpewho revisits this tendency towards a denial of the African connection, and its attendant denunciations of those in the diaspora who would consider Africa ‘home’:
“Essentialism” has emerged in… diaspora discourse as an ugly label
for any tendency to see the imprint of the homeland or ancestral culture
- in this case, Africa – in any aspect of the lifestyles or outlook of
African-descended peoples in the western Atlantic world. But we can
hardly deny that Africa has had much to do with the ways that New World
blacks have chosen to address the realities before them from the moment
they emerged from the ships… Deracination must have seemed a little
easier to bear the moment the Africans discovered that the environment
[of the Southern plantations] looked amazingly similar to home. In time,
this familiarity not only encouraged them to resume skills (e.g., herbal arts)
they had practiced in Africa but even to seek sanctuary, as maroons fleeing
an inhuman regimen, in the protective cover of the surrounding woods.
Memory of Africa, a sense of roots, therefore served these exiles well,
especially when conditions became simply intolerable… (xv)
This sense of an ancestral connection with Africa was what led to the resettlement initiatives by which some African Americans returned to Africa. Indicating that this connection with Africa is resonant even now in African American culture. Okpewho says regarding the contradictions of Gilroy’s position, that “nothing could be more essentialist or particularist than recognizing a geocultural site (however unstable) as peculiar to a certain set of cultural integers; an isle (even a floating one) of self-elected deracines is nonetheless a “home,” something Gilroy has been looking for ever since lamenting ”There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack.” “ (xxii-xxiii) Gilroy is of a British and Caribbean background.
Toyin Falola and Matt D. Childs offer an ethnographic perspective in The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. In this way of seeing, the representative diasporic home of Africans abroad is defined in a more anthropologically specific manner. Differently from afrocentrism, for which is Africa is one conceptual (pan-cultural) unit, ethnographic and other sectional readings offer instead a basket of African national identities. Falola and Childs privilege the Yoruba, in their own search for diasporic roots, for an African homeland. But Falola and Childs are not unique in this kind of sectional reading of Africa in diaspora, and offer additional possibilities for what is an immeasurably complex discourse, in much the same manner as Ali Mazrui’s privileging of religion, especially Islam. In his contribution to a 2003 CODESRIA conference in Dakar,6 Mazrui, habitually a provocative taxonomist, goes on to identify two kinds of genealogical American diasporeans from Africa:
The distinction between the diaspora of enslavement and the diaspora of
colonialism gets more complicated with the distinction between (a) African
Americans (Americans is the noun and African the adjective) and (b) American
Africans (Africans is the noun). The great majority of African Americans
are a product of the diaspora of enslavement. The term ‘African Americans’ can
either be hemispheric (meaning all descendants of enslavement in the Americas)
or national (meaning all descendants of enslavement in the United States).
American Africans (or Americo-Africans), on the other hand, are products of the
diaspora of colonization. They are usually first- or second- generation immigrants
from Africa to the Americas. They may be citizens or permanent residents of
Western-hemisphere countries. What is distinctive about American Africans is that
their mother-tongue is still an African language. (In the case of Americo-Liberians,
they may still speak Liberian English.) Second, American Africans usually still
have immediate blood relatives in Africa. Third, they are likely still to be attached to
the food culture of their African ancestry. Fourth, American Africans are still likely to
bear African family names, although this is by no means universal, especially
among Lusophone Africans, Liberians and Sierra Leoneans….
W hen does an American African family evolve into an African American family?
When it loses its ancestral language. The umbilical chord is language… But when
American Africans become African Americans it does not mean that other ties with
Africa are cut. Relatives in Africa still abound. Concern for Africa is often still intact.
And the Internet is now providing a new network of Afro-Atlanticism, a new
language. (68-69)
About previous centuries so little information has been available
as almost to justify the unlikely assumption that a past did not
exist – were it not for two large improbabilities: that English
should have been used in Wales for so long without giving rise
to literary expression, and that the vigorous Anglo-Welsh
Literature of the twentieth century should have sprung into
existence fully formed.(6)
Garlick then proceeds in his essay to unearth some of these lost Welsh voices in English. Over the years, this nationalist response of Garlick has flowered all over Wales, and become even more deeply rooted, so that now there are funded graduate courses and structures set up for the study of Welsh (language) Literature, which, as the subject-name indicates, is different from Anglo-Welsh Literature (or Welsh Literature in English). This political balancing of national representations and influences also informs the historical readings of literary relations in Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Literature, and the reading of British and American Poetic Relations since 1925 provided by Steve Clark and Mark Ford.
National particularities in cultural response and experience survive even after long connecting encounters with others. But merely surviving is not the same thing as bountifully thriving. Without the kind of counter (or protectionist) measures taken over time especially by the literatures of America, Wales and Scotland in containment of English Literature, the functional space by which a peripheral literature can be represented diminishes. If such a marginalized literature is indifferently managed, and not centred even its own locality, it may increasingly be poorly represented, become more devalued, perhaps ultimately lose even its right to a name or identity in its encounter with a globalised literary tradition or tendency. This happened with the African colonial experience so that there had to be a process of cultural retrieval and much affirmative writing around the independence period. Migratory shifts and cultural displacements in a time of global cultural activity from the metropolitan centres can again result in indigenous African perspectives becoming just as internationally and nationally insignificant as was the case in colonised Africa. Centrality never totally disappears, nor does it ever stop wanting to determine and dominate discourse, including the judgement of value and the interpretation of form. It will not yield the controlling values and structures of understanding, by which its core essences and authority base are established, to the migrant multiculturalism which some point to as evidence of an equalisation of cultures. No. It will continue its gate-keeping practices, othering aside or mapping out, and marginalizing such compound or hybrid migrant cultural formations as may be developing within its own locality. It will reserve its ‘rights’ and protect its ‘interests,’ achieving the desired separations, exclusions, and selective inclusions through the processes of naming and definition, and by retaining the powers of provision and judgement.
Centrality (including a centrist paradigm like globalisation) may enthusiastically export itself but it is a hesitant importer of otherness. From the metropolitan driving seats and engine rooms of globalisation, traditionally or locally developed standards, which may be culture specific, are offered and sometimes enforced as universally applicable in a canonical process. Selecting and authenticating cultural work even in this time of the Internet, supposedly a time of the blurring of borders, is still based primarily on nationalist agenda and curriculum setting mechanisms. Pius Adesanmi, one of several critics to have taken the calculated risk of introducing the new poetry from Africa to academic peers and readers abroad has narrated his experience in a Sentinel Poetry Quarterly essay, ‘Nigeria’s Third Generation Poetry, Canonization and the North American Academy: Random Reflections.’ Some of the Nigerian poets, whom he considers, though well known in their home country, struggle abroad at the fringes of recognition and patronage. Their Nigerian-known work is not easily available to international readers, and their struggles in exile, including difficulties with the publishing regime, and with canon-specific or policy-determined critical and curriculum preferences, ultimately affect the progress of their writing abroad. Some of these new Nigerian poets abroad considered by Adesanmi include Maik Nwosu, Lola Shoneyin, Unomah Azuah, Ogaga Ifowodo, Amatoritsero Ede, Sanya Osha, Nduka Otiono, Victor Ehikhamenor, Obi Nwakanma and Olu Oguibe. He aligns his own experience in attempting to recommend and teach some of these new poets with the similar difficulties of another Nigerian poet in Canada, the film scholar Onookome Okome. The fact that the fiction from emergent Nigerian novelists, especially those abroad, has had so much international publishing success, critical acclaim and media attention is, for Adesanmi, evidence of the growing importance of this national corpus of new writing, and invitation to a greater publishing and critical interest in its poets and poetry. In a sense, this ‘success’ abroad of the new fiction from Nigeria, but not the poetry, can easily be explained by the fact that poetry anywhere, from any place, is often the poor sibling of narrative fiction. But upon closer inspection of the mechanisms, purposes and influences involved, it also exposes, as indicated earlier, the possibility of cultural engineering and political manipulation in the reception, ordering and determination of what gets honoured abroad, something which Achebe’s poor writer abroad often has to deal with.
Younger Nigerian writers abroad are fiercely independent individuals who, however, also long to belong somewhere and experience the certainty and comfort of home. This accounts for the growth of the literary listserv and other online gatherings by which these writers communicate, share work and remain in touch with the home country. The evidence is that this diasporic ambiguity of catering for two locations is processed through several stages of engagement and/or disengagement. Most exiles, including those whose lives were really physically endangered in their homelands, and who had to flee, are almost never the comforted cosmopolitans Kwame Appiah might applaud, though they may become increasingly internationalist in their outlook, utterances and work. Some do become home-obsessives, operating a rather more conflicted subjectivity than may be evident, full of contradictory resolutions and representations.8 This position of the ‘poor’ writer abroad is, for the most part, governed by a distanced, sensitively managed and changeable commitment to home.
But a word of caution is in order here. The exilic life is a condition in flux, changeable by individual circumstance and location, in other words most accurately judged by its intractably emotive, individual human evidence, and only imperfectly as the generally applicable result of any cultural study. Home for the more separated of these writers increasingly becomes a location elsewhere, an unsettling memory or notion rather than a settled place. I suggest that among the ‘poor writers’ of Achebe’s discourse – those writers long resident abroad from whom the certainty of home has been taken – the need to settle somewhere is sometimes resolved by making a home of their art, the only ‘place’ they frequently go to and live in, which cannot be taken away from them by dislocating distances, political and other cultural alienations. Ben Okri, a Nigerian writer long resident in the UK provides a perfect foil for this kind of study. He is perhaps the model or pathfinder for the current wave of Nigerian diasporic migrations. There was of course Buchi Emecheta and others before him, but the current literary relocations in younger Nigerian writing can be traced to the success of Ben Okri (at the Booker), the globalising effect of the Internet, and the economic and other difficulties of intellectual labour in the home country. Since Okri there have also been the recent high profile successes of Chimamanda Adichie, Helen Oyeyemi, Segun Afolabi, Helon Habila and Uzodinma Iweala, who are all part of this newly attractive canvas of Nigerian literature abroad.
Okri’s long-term exiled creative work show degrees of separation or disconnects from his inspirational origins. There is evidence of conflict in the creative exploitation of a lost or disappearing memory, a difficulty seemingly resolved in locating and representing it differently as an aesthetic imaginary. In this sense by which the inspirational home has become an aesthetic imaginary for a dislocated poor writer, any fictive response to, or representation of, the lost geographical space is possible – idealized characterizations, alienation-fuelled fantasies, scientific fictions and futurisms, fabulist caricatures, cultural anachronisms, and magic realism of the sort some interpreters of The Famished Road attribute to the novel. By this thinking, it is logical that the creative experience of Famished Road (and its spin-off novels)9 would lead eventually to the imagining and construction of an aesthetic-intellectual space, location or home in Okri’s other difference-marking novel, the more recent In Arcadia.10 What is the present mind of this most influential of the younger Nigerian writers abroad regarding exile? There are important words from his book of essays, A Way of Being Free:
Exile is a fleeing from one dream to another one. In the process
we change, we metamorphose, and our new shapes are never
settled. (54)
Living is a continual metamorphosis. Everything is change;
everything is relative. (54)
Obsessions about purity of blood have wiped out empires. We are
all of us mixtures, and our roots are fed from diverse and forgotten
places. (100)
Okri, especially in his work with the Caine Prize for Literature from Africa, and recent contributions to the 2005 memorial for the slain Nigerian writer, Ken Saro Wiwa,11 has tried to continue engaging that elusive home of his primal creative impulse. But it is also true that since the Booker-Prize success of The Famished Road, he has become much honoured as a ‘British writer,’ and is now fairly established as one, finding permanent space in UK bookshops and in certain, politically defined curriculum lists receiving an OBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2001. For the younger Nigerian writer abroad, this kind of success can seem to offer more attractive value than any continuing engagement with a distant homeland as the place of primary source and security for the postcolonial writer. ‘Forget Africa’ might seem like a winning formula, but what really is on offer outside Africa? Even for Okri the seeming security of institutional recognition as a British writer still serves only as an uncertain access into the heart of ‘English Literature,’ into English cultural (or national) history. Indeed the evidence of many anthologies, academic curricular, critical essays and literary histories indicate that there is not much of that invitation from the national literature of England to Okri or any British other. There are still the English Novel, English Poetry and the English Literature of Shakespeare, and Okri is still not read, taught or anthologised as belonging to that national literary tradition. In canonization, beyond matters of ethnic or linguistic identity, there are also the exclusively aesthetic concerns with form and subject. Okri’s canvas largely reflects the troubled memory of some lost ancestry and its alienating contemporary realities – his creative enquiry into possibilities for an aesthetic recovery from, or representation of, that loss. He is located in the British literary present as an establishment figure but still identified in terms of his creative struggle with a past that has not gone away. His life may no longer be dominated by that past but his work and literary identity are still being coloured by it.
Pius Adesanmi, in ‘Redefining Paris: Trans-Modernity and Francophone African Migritude Fiction,’ reflects this Okrian experience in the ‘settled’ Parisian residency, marginalisation and alienation of the younger Francophone African writers:
In France, this new international and intercultural space of
representation has been occupied since the mid-1980s by two
sets of novelists with different trajectories but whose idea of Paris
and politics of self-imagining are best captured in the scopic
regime of the songs, “nous pas bouger” and “le bruit et l’odeur.”
First are the novelists of Maghrebian origin, children of the first
generation Maghrebian immigrants, mostly born in France but
who are still rejected and placed under stereotypical signs of
Otherness: Arab, Islam, terrorism. The corpus of novels produced
by hese writers comes under the critical tag, litterateur beur, beur
being the sound derived in French when Arab is inverted. (966)
And this is happening more than a half-century after Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, negritude and the French colonial policy of assimilation, all of which, taking different routes, should have made France and the literature of France more accustomed to and more fully accepting and involving of otherness than any other literary nation.
The exile condition comes with its differences in filial, genealogical, marital and other human and political attachments, commitments and affiliations, even for writers who might regard Nigeria or Africa as their ancestral homeland, so it would seem illogical for criticism to deny these diasporic writers the right or choice they have to make a home of their locations of residence, whenever they wish, and to whatever extent or however long they may wish to do so. I do not read Achebe as assuming that legislative power. What is being identified in Adesanmi’s study and Achebe’s comments is that such a decision to belong elsewhere (not merely settle there) when it means a turning away from, or abandonment of, the African ancestral homeland, is itself a choice of limited and tainted value, not a choice without consequences. Adesanmi has more to say on the younger writers of the diasporic African literary presence in France:
Second are novelists from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa who
are also children of first-generation immigrants or who moved
independently to Paris as teenagers and now have very vague
memories of Africa. These writers… have thematized identity and
otherness… Of the critical taxonomies that have evolved around
these writers – the critic, Bernard Magnier has called them “black
beurs,” “negro-gallic” or “negropolitan” writers in an essay12 – their
recent characterization by critic, Jacques Chevrier, as “migritude” 13
writers is particularly pertinent… Migritude – a contraction of migration
and negritude – evokes two mutually reinforcing ideologies as well as
a negation. Migration of course implies the location of these new
writers in the diasporic space of Paris while Negritude evokes the
deconstructive black politics vis-à-vis the dominant narratives of
their context. But migritude negates the return to source philosophy
of negritude. For the migritude writer, Paris is home and it is the
context in which s/he seeks to articulate a resisitant black identity
that refuses to construct Africa as a site of salutary return. (967)
Okri’s experience is instructive on the conflicted memory and aesthetic of the Nigerian-African writer long resident abroad but this review is not centred on him so let us consider others whose work and utterances also provide substantial evidence of similar responses to the problem of dislocation – similar responses in the sense that they seek to cover or bridge the information or knowledge gap in their constructs of home, and their lingering awareness of an absent home, by representing their estrangement from that absent home as an aesthetic imaginary, going into magic realism, deploying lampoons, diverse superstitions and fantasy, in the representation of language, form, plot, conflict, situation, and even characterisation. Home, represented or characterised as the unknown (perhaps unknowable) alien place of strange (and so fearful) experience. The opposite of this, in which home is promotionally idealised and idolized, is also indicated, as, for instance, in the poetry of negritude and some of the imaginings from the literature of African America. Nnedimma Okoroafor-Mbachu, Uzodinma Iweala, Helen Oyeyemi and Chris Abani are among recent Nigerian writers to have found such creative comfort in these mythic constructs and mystical or stylised representations of a home from which they have been significantly distanced. Uzodinma Iweala even constructs a fabulist linguistic space in representation of that imagined home, which by experience he can most comfortably relate with aesthetically. In his acclaimed novel, Beasts of No Nation, the haunting memory of a bad news-homeland he has had little personal experience of is unsurprisingly imagined as some dark, fearful badland. Beasts is a novel of contemporary realities from a contemporary imagination, not some fairy tale, but it similarly reflects the involved imagination’s insecurities and distanced representation of the unknown, all that unremitting violence of its plot determined by a sense of being violated by so much bad news from home.
Iweala’s success with Beasts, his first novel, enabled him to return in triumph and experience more of home, listen to home-based criticism, and empathise with the bones and blood realities of his location of inspiration. What will ‘home’ look and sound like in the novels of his future writing? In Chris Abani, home is imagined in poetic and increasingly stylised portrayals of experience, especially with the new novel, Becoming Abigail. Myth and mystery, portrayals of the uncanny, the fearful unknown, also offer aesthetic succour to Helen Oyeyemi, Diana Evans and Bernadine Evaristo in their creative encounters with that elusive, memorial past they identify as home. In the novelist Diran Adebayo , and poets Patience Agbabi and Jackie Kay, representations of home offer the reader more realism. But they remain poignantly estranged, as they focus, like tourists, on what is strange, what is different, what might elicit laughter, disgust or some other strong interest or response from outsiders about that distant location or memory they interpret as home. Is it possible that the actual creative choices made by these writers can be explained differently as determined simply by aesthetic considerations? Yes. But I am interested in the unconscious subjectivities informing those choices – the patterned thoughts and responses, which become readable over time, considered comparatively with what is observed in other writers of a similar experience. A literary style, or the form and features of any kind of writing, is the result of many unconscious writerly choices traceable not only to training but also to other non-literary human experiences. I am factoring the diasporic personal experiences of these ‘African’ writers as being influential in how they write, what they write.
In the case of Biyi Bandele, the following magazine report for The Guardian newspaper (Lagos, Nigeria) by Molara Wood is revealing. She informs that Bandele’s
upcoming novel, Burma Boy, is set in Burma. “It is about my
father’s generation during World War 11 (WW11).” It will focus on
Nigerians but will not dwell much on Nigeria itself. “I don’t write
much about the Nigerian government anymore because I don’t live
there; it would be hypocritical.”
Set in 1943, Burma Boy features two flashbacks, one to 1936 and
the other to 1896. “I find I keep going back to the past to make
sense of the present.”
This Nigerian writer abroad is not rejecting his homeland or abandoning his past. On the contrary, he is still fascinated and inspired by both. Indeed, he seems to say that even if he wanted to he can’t totally prise his present from the grip of his past. There is so much hidden treasure for a writer in that past, he thinks. His problem, as is the problem of all the writers under consideration here, is what to do when that past, which has its spatial-cultural references, has receded in memory but retains a strong emotional resonance in the creative unconscious. Do you totally silence that echo from a home you no longer quite know or do you subsume all that uncertainty, that dislocated knowing, in the art which now serves as the location of all your living spaces? Can you? How effectively so? I believe that in support of the claims made in this review, the Bandele statement above, “I don’t write much about the Nigerian government anymore because I no longer live there…” is better understood as, I don’t write much about Nigeria anymore because I don’t live there… I’ll illustrate this with another Bandele statement on his art, from the Guardian online service (Guardian Unlimited), which offers further insight on the choices he has had to make as a writer abroad:
Great theatre is the telling of a truthful lie, defined by the degree
to which the facts of the mind are made manifest in a fiction of
matter… In the universe of imagination to which we all belong,
we may not always know where we are going, but we require
no visas to go there and we need not worry about packing.
The name of the place is home.
Here, home is located in the imagination, and then further identified as a future place. So we have from the words of this writer, perhaps not intended but nonetheless revealing, a presentation of home as an imagined future place. But isn’t home supposed to be where this writer has come from, where he still nurses in memory, and continues to creatively plunder, but with increasing uncerta