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THE PROBLEM OF HOME AND SPACE IN AFRICAN
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BELONGINGS AND UNBELONGINGS IN THE GLOBAL AGE

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THE PROBLEM OF HOME AND SPACE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE:
RECONCILING MULTIPLE BELONGINGS AND UNBELONGINGS IN THE
GLOBAL AGE

By

Hilary Chala Kowino

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
English

2008

ABSTRACT

THE PROBLEM OF HOME AND SPACE IN AFRICAN LITERATURE:
RECONCILING MULTIPLE BELONGINGS AND UNBELONGINGS IN THE
GLOBAL AGE

By

Hilary Chala Kowino

Current discussions of the idea of home in contemporary African literature
revolve around two opposing positions: the nationalist position (Amilcar Cabral, Ama Ata
Aidoo, Ngugi wa Thion’go) that valorizes the past and the postmodernist position (Gilroy,
Boyce-Davies, Deleuze) that challenges an earlier anti-colonialist evocation of authentic
culture. My dissertation intervenes in this stalemate between nationalists and
postmodernists by challenging the exclusiveness with which the nationalist writers have
championed authenticity, and avoiding the absoluteness with which postmodernism has
argued in favor of migrancy. My project pushes us instead to think of home and space
beyond an either/or binary, and questions the unbridled embrace of indeterminate
change. This new sensibility that the project is pushing towards recognizes that

globalization has changed the parameters and therefore the conception of home.

The nationalist writers’ location of home in a fixed time and space is problematic,
as it illusively wishes away cultural contact, transnational affiliations, and cross-border
belongings. I argue, together with Spivak, that “this staging of origin, too neat and
palliative, was not only medicine but a sort of poison as well, pharmakon. It was the gift
of a European from within a monotheistic culture.” Similarly, the notions of motion
(Gilroy), migration (Boyce-Davies) or nomadism (Deleuze) that inform postmodernist

sensibilities have undertones of elitism and tourism — which undermines the oppressed

movement of slum dwellers, internally displaced people, and the homeless. The
dissertation analyzes the idea of home in three historical moments — home at the dawn
of national independence movements (19503 and 605), the postcolonial home (1970-
19905), and the global home (19905 to present) — to show the impact of each period on

the same.

At its core, my project is interested in showing that the idea of home is much
more complex than current readings allow. To that end: i) it shows that the debate
between roots and routes cannot be addressed outside of the gap between culture and
politics which makes cultural hybrids look back; ii) it complicates valorizations of the past
to show cases of mourning, subversiOn, and progress, and thus moves beyond claims of
atavism; iii) it shifts from reading boundaries and places as fixed to reading them as fluid
in order to account for transnational ties; iv) it reads the constant motion of the homeless
to escape the law against the constant motion of migration and travel to show how
postmodernists’ celebration of motion undermines the case of the homeless; v) it shows
how issues of gender, sexuality, race, and class have defined home, and deconstructs
them to refigure a sense of home without hierarchies. Unless we address these
disparities and misconceptions, we shall continue to feel out of place, even when we

reside in places we consider home.

Copyright by
HILARY CHALA KOWINO
2008 '

‘ For Adeny, Nya Samia, Turumbe, and W.D., who raised me up when I could not

reach.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am deeply indebted to a number of teachers, students, authors, artists, friends,
relatives, and strangers -- too numerous to mention -- who have supported my journey

from the minute I was conceived to the present.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1

UNDERSTANDING HOME THROUGH ORIGINS, ROOTS,

AND SOURCES (HOME AT THE DAWN OF INDEPENDENCE) .................. 41
CHAPTER 2

UNDERSTANDING HOME THROUGH NATIONAL AND
TRANSNATIONAL BORDERS (HOME AFTER INDEPENDENCE

AND DURING POST-INDEPENDENCE DISILLUSIONMENT) ...................... 86
CHAPTER 3
LOCATING HOME BETWEEN THE LOCAL AND THE GLOBAL;
THE HOMELESS, SLUMS, AND MOVEMENT ......................................... 136
The divide between the local and the global .................................... 137
The movement of the slum dwellers and the homeless ...................... 161
CONCLUSION .................................................................................. 181
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................... 185

vii

Hilary Chala Kowino
Dissertation Draft

The Problem of Home and Space in African Literature: Reconciling Multiple

Belongings and Unbelongings in the Global Age

Introduction

People have, for many centuries, constructed their sense of belonging, their notions of
home, of spiritual and bodily power and freedom, along a continuum of sociospatial
attachments. These extend from local valleys and neighborhoods to denser urban sites of
encounter and relative anonymity, from national communities tied to a territory to
affiliations across borders and oceans. In these diverse contact zones, people sustain
critical, non-absolutist strategies for survival and action in a world where space is always
and already invaded. (Clifford 367)

A large component of the identity of that place called home derived precisely from the
fact that it had always in one way or another been open; constructed out of movement,
communication, social relations which always stretched beyond it. In one sense or
another most places have been “meeting places"; even their “original inhabitants” usually
came from somewhere else. This does not mean that the past is irrelevant to the identity
of place. It simply means that there is no internally produced, essential past. (Massey
170-71)

This dissertation is interested in examining how the narratives of home
have been conceptualized in contemporary African literature. Simultaneously
moving in multiple directions, it attempts to find the ground for both the nationalist
sensibility around the need for home and postmodernist sensibility that
challenges the earlier anti-colonialists’ evocation of authentic culture. On the one
hand, the nationalist position feeds on a binary logic to legitimize what it calls
pre-colonial, original, and authentic culture; this project tests the stability of the
said binary. On the other hand, the postmodernist position advocates motion and
debunks the notions of pre-colonial cultures as essentialized; this project offers
more complex readings of the narratives of the past to show why some

communities are obliged to assert an essentialized identity, and thus the perils

uncritically debunking the same. The undying need for home cannot be wished
away by nomadism (in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms); similarly, originality cannot
adequately bear the burden of culture. By engaging the nationalist and
postmodernist positions, this project utilizes the anxieties and insights that both
positions engender. The dissertation’s contribution to scholarship lies in its
interventionist endeavor to challenge the exclusiveness with which the nationalist
writers have championed authenticity, and the absoluteness with which
postmodernism has posited the virtues of migrancy. In other words, the argument
is not about the nationalist sensibility or postmodernist sensibility, but a newer
sensibility that pushes the ways in which we think of identity and home beyond
an either/or system of definition. An either/or logic, for example, cannot
adequately account for the inextricable ties between Africa and African Diaspora.
This newer sensibility involves an understanding of how globalization has
changed the parameters and therefore the conception of home. Additionally, my
study of slum dwellers and internally displaced persons adds afresh dimension
to the problem of home. This dissertation divides the idea of home into three
historical moments — the home at the dawn of independence (1950s and 605),
the postcolonial home (1970-19903), and global home (19903 to present) — to
show how each period impacts the idea of home.

At the dawn of independence, the nationalist writers responded to the
colonial narratives which bastardized pre-colonial Africa by reclaiming a pre-
colonial space. The nationalist writers packaged this space as original, authentic,

and untainted -- and presented it as corrective to the sense of dispossession and

homelessness which characterized the colonial period. The nationalist writers’
location of home in the pre-colonial past cannot be understood without
contextualization, as time plays a critical role on the conceptions of home. While
history offers insights into the nationalist writers’ preoccupation with the recovery
of the past, it does not spare the writers’ positions from contestation. The
nationalist writers” claim to an original space in time and place to which the
colonized can return falls short of being progressive. In other words, in an
attempt to begin anew, African nationalist writers unwittingly locate home “in
static time, thereby removing the dangled nature of lived experience and
promoting the idea of uncontaminated survival” (Glissant 14). To “negate
contact,” to use Glissant’s words in Caribbean Discourse (1989), in the name of
“a single origin” is problematic. But equally problematic is “[p]ostcolonia| theory’s
celebration of hybridity [as] it risks an antiessentialist condescension toward
those communities obliged by circumstances to assert, for their very survival, a
lost and even irretrievable past” (Shohat 110). For example, the displaced
Sudanese refugees may reluctantly embrace hybridity because, as it lulls them
into thinking in terms of a rainbow world in which all Sudanese live together, .the
government in conjunction with rebels displace them because they consider the
refugees as others. There is a gap between the theory and praxis of hybridity,
and this gap involves the difficulty of accepting difference in everyday life. One,
then, has to find a way of locating home that allows for lived experience without

compromising the political valency of displaced people. The first chapter hopes to

come to terms with nationalist claims of originality and a return to pre-colonial
sites, without losing sight of the gaps that seem to compromise it.

The home after independence, on its part, has to deal with unforeseen
transnational identities that cannot be contained in one nation — a sign that
national boundaries are not in tandem with national cultures. This cultural
overflow across borders challenges what Gilroy calls “the unthinking assumption
[by both the colonized and the colonizer] that cultures flow into patterns
congruent with the borders of essentially homogeneous nation states” (5). When
subjects that the nationalist writers considered pure and homogenous, neatly
enclosed within the colonial borders, turn out to be impure or, as Salman
Rushdie puts it in relation to India/South Asia, “a bit of this and a bit of that”
(394), then there is need to re-examine these considerations. The impurity has
implications for the definition of home, compelling us to shift from the nationalist
reading of home as “a comfortingly bounded enclosed space, defining an ‘other’
who is outside” to home, “not as a place but an area, formed out of a particular
set of social relations which happen to intersect at the particular location known
as ‘home”’ (Read 102). In addition, the home after independence is faced with
post-independence disillusionment brought about by corruption. Being inside the
borders does not automatically translate into a sense of belonging, which
reminds one of Said’s argument, in “Reflection on Exile,” that “[bjorders and
barriers which enclose us within the safety of familiar territory can also become
prisons [...]” (185). Whichever way we look at them, borders have considerable

implications for how home is conceived, and, almost always, they mark

extensions rather than endings of home. Here there is a slippage
home/homeland and nation. To that end, “no people has been spared the cross-
cultural process” (Glissant 140). How do we come to terms with these
transnational and cross-border belongings? Chapter Two deploys border theory
to show that an understanding of national home through colonial maps and
boundaries is limited not only because the boundaries are defective but also
because they are more porous than they seem.

The last chapter — the global home - examines how and where to locate
home when global affiliations permeate the boundaries between the local and the
global, as is the case in Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for t_he Rain (1975) and
Oliver Mtukudzi’s _Dzoka Uyamwe (2003) . The narratives of home and origin,
which for a long time found identity in the local place, have become unstable
following the increasing difficulty to draw the line between the local and the
global. Arguing that the idea of home cannot be delinked from the world, the
dissertation attempts to find a way of “being in the world,” a way of embracing our
connectedness here and there. Even as it appreciates the global ties that link us,
the dissertation questions whose global village this is, especially considering
villagers who are kept on the fringes of the village like local Jamaicans in
Stephanie Black’s Life and Debt and Kibera slum dwellers in Nairobi, Kenya. For
these people, who have lost their livelihood to the forces of globalization,
belonging to a global village remains hollow and ambivalent. Specifically, in this
section, the dissertation examines the current problems with the slums and the

question of autochthony as a contribution to the issue of home and

homelessness. It examines the dehumanizing conditions of slums on the one
hand, and, on the other, the demolition of slums by a government indifferent to
the housing needs of the victims. These two trends — the conditions and
demolition -- violate human rights. A case in point is the ongoing (March 29,
2007) demolition of slums in Mombasa, Kenya — with no provision of alternative
housing for the victims. According to The Standard of March 29, 2007,
“Residents of Buxton slums in Mombasa watch helplessly as their houses are
demolished by a Municipal Council bulldozer after they were forcibly evicted to
pave way for the beautification of the city.” We also have an estimated 700,000
Zimbabwean slum dwellers evicted and rendered homeless by their own
government in what has become known as Operation Murambatsvina (Restore
Order) of May 2005. Why would the government invest money on evictions and
demolitions, instead of addressing the socioeconomic circumstances that
produce them and their dwellings? Equally disturbing is the case of Kibera slum
dwellers in Kenya who have been compelled to invent “flying toilets” to address
their lack of, and need for, toilet facilities. The feelings of worthlessness and
nonexistence that stem from such disparities continue to harm these slum
dwellers, even as they fight back by reasserting their right to relieve themselves
of their waste. Their agency lies in their refusal to become waste, which,
arguably, is what their material conditions that deny them toilets presume them to
be. What is the meaning of home for these slum dwellers who live in wretched
conditions without sanitation? Where is home for millions of internally displaced

persons or refugees in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Darfur, Sudan?

What is the relationship between the increasing wave of globalization and the
rapid development of slums and internal displacement? For these slum dwellers
and internally displaced persons, belonging to their nation, much less the global
village, remains problematic as long as the said disjunctions are mainstream.
The described dilemma of belonging prompts one to find out the role that slum
dwellers and internally displaced people might play in one’s thinking about the
location of home. Possibly, Martin Heidegger, in Basic Writings (1977), was right
when he said, “Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world” (219).
This dissertation seeks to negotiate inside and outside, pure and impure; it
rejects the viewing of home boundaries as fixed, straight, and natural — preferring
to view them as transversal; in Mary N. Layoun’s words, in her book Wedded to
the Land? Genger, @undaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (2001 ), it “refuse[s]
singular place of origin and belonging and [chooses] to work through processes
of change” (174); it attempts to re-figure home in the wake of ambivalent
boundaries; it attempts to tell a story that the African nationalist writers have not
told (and to show why the Manichean — Abdul JanMohamed’s term -- conception
of home by nationalist writers often amounts to paralogism). Challenging the
notion of a single, all-inclusive, and stable home valorized by nationalist writers, it
attempts to show that home, to borrow Layoun’s words, is open to contestation,
“‘Home’ and ‘community’ are [...] not self-evident and sustaining categories but
problematic points of contention and possibility” (98). In other words, the idea of
home cannot be explained on the basis of an inside/outside or past/present

binary, largely because these markers are imbricated in each other, making the

whole issue much more complex. A serious study of postcolonialism,
globalization, class, and gender reveal disparities which undercut the traditional
painting of home as singular and concrete. For instance, an attempt to fit
migration, voluntary or involuntary, into these paradigms reveals a feeling of
exile. This dissertation cautiously pushes for plural belongings, even as it shows
a perpetual homelessness. This push is necessitated by the need to account for
the “here and there” allegiances that is our life. Looking at the nationalist concept
of home as a narrative that belies the notions of oneness and origin that it
purports to sell, for example by showing gaps that the narrative of home often
ignores lest they reveal the unrealizability of an authentic home, this dissertation
re-examines the concepts of origin, past, inside, and unity with an aim of giving
them new meanings. Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), particularly his
argument in favor of “the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is
extended through a relationship with the Other” (11), is critical to this re-
examination.

One way of addressing the problem of home is by deconstructing the
hierarchy that makes some allegiances superior to others. These hierarchies
include, but are not limited to, race, ethnicity, class, and gender. Using texts like
Bessie Head’s A Question of Power, this dissertation seeks to study how gender
and race have been used to draw the boundaries of home. How might we create
a space that brings ostensibly separate sides together, especially as it becomes

clear that the wave on which separateness has ridden is itself mixed?

The African nationalist writers have defined home along essentialist lines,
as either the original spaces that Africans occupied prior to colonization or the
indigenous and pure pre-colonial cultures. For African nationalist writers, home
can only be established by discarding the colonial cultures and retrieving the
precolonial cultures, by returning to the originary moment or to the source.
African nationalist writers, Simon Gikandi’s Maps Of Englishness: Writing Identity
in the Culture of Colonialism (1996) observes, “reinvented their [and their
characters’] national identities either as a self-willed return to precolonial
traditions or as a conscious rejection of an imposed European identity” (194). In
fact, they, Gikandi goes on, “insisted on retour as a necessary condition for
alternative identities” (194). This insistence not only valuated home (precolonial
traditions) and provided the political agency that the moment demanded, it also
negated the cultural impact that the empire had on the colonized. In brief, it put a
premium on returning to what it saw as the original and uncontaminated home, at
the expense of the ineluctable cultural changes that had occurred to the same.

Among the scholars who locate home and African identity in the
precolonial space include African nationalist writers like Ayi Kwei Armah, Ama
Ata Aidoo, Amilcar Cabral, and Ngugi Wa Thion’go. In different degrees, these
nationalist writers, following racist colonial ideologies of authenticity, seek to
authenticate African identity by locating it in the nation, the past, the origins.
Amilcar Cabral, in his Return to the Source (1974), for example, calls for a return
to the pre-colonial culture, which he validates as follows, “With certain

exceptions, the period of colonization was not long enough, at least in Africa, for

there to be a significant degree of destruction or damage of the most important
facets of the culture and traditions of the subject people” (60). Of course,
Cabral’s claim is debatable. Cabral may be right if he were to argue that the
cultural disruption in Portuguese Guinea was not as severe as in other African
colonies, but his argument that the period of colonization was not long enough in
Africa to cause serious cultural damage underestimates the reality. It is wishful
thinking on Cabral’s part, as there are so many cases of destruction -- like
identity crisis, the Darfur Massacre, the Rwanda Genocide, and the Ethiopia-
Somali border conflicts — happening so many years after colonization, which
cannot be completely explained outside the same. The negative impacts of
colonial policies like assimilation are evident in all the novels discussed here, and
yet Cabral evaluates these policies as “complete failure” (60). We shall get into
why Cabral makes this debatable point. In a polarized language which had a
great vogue during the struggle for political independence, Cabral gives the
following polemic for a successful liberation struggle, “The greater the differences
between the culture of the dominated people and the culture of their oppressor,
the more possible such a victory becomes” (48). It seems then that the farther
one is from European influence, the closer one is to the source, and vice versa.
One cannot lose sight of the fact that the launch pad for, and, even more,
the development of, colonization was sharp, Manichean differences between the
colonizer and the colonized. The colonizer strategically constructed and inflated
the said differences to justify colonization and its attendant civilizing mission. For

example, the colonized people were labeled as too primitive and barbaric to

10

know what was good for them. A supposedly caring colonizer had to come in and
bear the burden of refining the colonized. Meanwhile, the real purposes of
colonization, which included exploitation of the colony’s resources, were ongoing.
It is this same weapon of difference that Cabral later recommends for the
liberation struggle. As we shall see when we discuss works like Frantz Fanon’s
“On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth (1963), this recommendation,
while useful within the context of the liberation, is subject to contestation.

Cabral also argues that “the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle
both for the preservation and survival of the cultural values of the people and for
the harmonization and development of these values within a nationalist
framework” (48). This is the basis of Ngugi Wa Thion’go’s argument about the
need to write in indigenous languages. In Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of
Language in Africargiterature (1986), Ngugi declares, “This book, Decolonising
the Mind, is my farewell to English as a vehicle for any of my writings. From now
on it is Gikuyu and Kiswahili all the way. However, I hope that through the age
old medium of translation I shall be able to continue dialogue with all” (xiv). Ngugi
disowns English ostensibly to return to what he considers colonialism-free
languages. Are indigenous languages impervious to imperial culture and can
they be constructed outside the same? To say the least, Gikuyu is daily shaped
by inter-ethnic relations between Gikuyu people and their neighbors, not to
mention the culture of colonialism. Cotenninously, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, in
his article, “Nation Language,” eruditely shows how the languages of African

slaves constantly changed and were changed by the languages of their

11

oppressors. The languages of these African slaves, Brathwaite profoundly

reminds us, had

to submerge themselves, because officially the conquering peoples — the
Spaniards, the English, the French, and the Dutch — insisted that the
language of public discourse and conversation, of obedience, command
and conception should be English, French, Spanish or Dutch. They did not
wish to hear people speaking Ashanti or any of the Congolese languages.
80 there was a submergence of this imported language. Its status became
one of inferiority. Similarly, its speakers were slaves. They were conceived
as inferiors - non-human, in fact. But this very submergence served an
interesting interculturative purpose, because although people continued to
speak English as it was spoken in Elizabethan times through the Romantic
and Victorian ages, that English was, nonetheless, still influenced by the
underground language, the submerged language that the slaves had
brought. And that underground language was itself constantly
transforming itself into new forms. It was moving from a purely African
form to a form which was African but which was adapted to the new
environment and adapted the cultural imperative of the European
languages. And it was influencing the way in which the English, French,
Dutch, and Spaniards spoke their own language. (309-10)

Similarly, the languages of the colonized and the colonizer influenced each other.

So, if one chooses to use indigenous language, it should be with a clear

understanding that it is not free of imperial influence, just as imperial languages

12

are not free of the influence of indigenous African languages. Without necessarily
turning the evil of cultural imperialism into an angel, it might help Ngugi and
Cabral to consider, at least more than they do, that sometimes “cultural
contamination may actually be enriching or strengthening” (Gilroy 97). In other
words, nationalist writers’ protection of what they perceive as indigenous culture
may actually cost us a richer culture that is better suited to survive in the new
environment. As we recognize the political capital in Ngugi’s position, we also
need to stretch it so that it can reach what Brathwaite, like Ngugi, calls “national
language,” but, which he, unlike Ngugi, insightfully defines as “English and
African at the same time” (311). The culture that Cabral and Ngugi strive to
preserve here is precolonial/ traditional. Paradoxically, a large portion of that so-
called precolonial past, as Terence Ranger’s “The Invention of Tradition in
Colonial Africa” (1983) has observed, is an invention of colonialism meant to
serve the interests of the colonizer. In other words, what nationalist writers
perceive as precolonial culture is in many ways colonial, and thus does not
amount to the colonized’s way of life prior to colonization.

Gayatri Spivak, in her article “Asked to Talk About Myself...” (1992),
wisely shows that playing the card of origin has its gains and losses, “[T]his
staging of origin, too neat and palliative, was not only medicine but a sort of
poison as well, phannakon. It was the gift of a European from within a
monotheistic culture” (14-15). It is therefore imperative that one weighs the
advantages and disadvantages of staging an origin before doing so. Like Spivak,

Paul Gilroy, in his article “It Ain’t Where You’re From, lt’s Where You’re At...”

13

(1990/91 ), traces the colonized’s obsession with authenticity to Euro-American
policies. In Gilroy’s words, “the problematic intellectual heritage of Euro-American
modernity still determines the manner in which nationality is understood within
black political discourse. In particular, it conditions the continuing aspiration to
acquire a supposedly authentic, natural and stable identity” (4). The
aforementioned invention (Ranger), gift (Spivak), or aspiration (Gilroy) is based
on fixity in order to serve as a marker of difference between the colonizer and the
colonized, particularly to portray the colonized as unchanging and inferior.
Bhabha’s Location of Culture (1994) discusses this “concept of ‘fixity’ in the
ideological construction of otherness” (66-68). To repeat this manufactured and
stagnating otherness in the name of returning to our authentic culture is
problematic; put differently, Cabral’s call for the preservation of African people’s
values is negated by virtue of the colonially manipulated binary logic on which it
is based. In addition, the logic is undercut by the fluidity between the cultures of
the colonized and the colonizer. In fact, this fluidity also undercuts Ranger’s
claim, “the invention of tradition,” as it grants Africans some agency in the
production of the resultant culture, while also acknowledging that the resultant
culture is largely invented. Ranger’s claim, however, does not allow for the
colonized’s contribution in the production of the invented tradition as well as the
colonizer’s culture. The nationalist framework that Cabral recommends is
debatable because it accommodates nationalist texts like Ngugi Wa Thion’go’s
WISE—[I (1987) but it does not account for the kind of transnational identities and

cosmopolitan border crossings we encounter in texts like Nuruddin Farah’s Maps

14

(1999), Bessie Head’s Aguestion of Power (1974), and Kojo Laing’s Woman of
the Aeroplanes (1998). I am using nationalism here to mean “an assertion of
belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. lt affirms the home created by a
community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile,
fights to prevent its ravages” (Said, “Reflections,” 176). In the postcolonial period,
we are faced with the urgent need of simultaneously celebrating and questioning
the origins, hoping that the reconciliation of these two opposites produce a
critical, if paradoxical, space. Towards that end, this dissertation intends to draw
on Edouard Glissant’s Poetjcs of Relation (1997), Spivak’s “Asked to Talk About
Myself ...” (1992), Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness (1996), and Kwame
Antony Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophv of Culture
(1992)

There are two logics of origins at stake here. The first one, the
enlightenment logic, is premised on the notion that it can identify people and that
it can present that identity in language. This logic, in keeping with traditional
epistemology, sets oppositions on the basis of stable, absolute, clearly defined,
and hierarchical meanings. This presupposition by the likes of Hegel that we can
identify as a people and place in time is problematic -- as Bhabha, Derrida,
Glissant, Amselle, Spivak, and Young have shown in the second logic, to which I
turn. According to the second logic, we are only who we are in relation to others,
and places are only places in relation to other places — this logic is also known as
post-structural, deconstructive, or postcolonial. Set on the premise that

oppositions are always already unstable, fluid, and reliant upon one another —

15

(1999), Bessie Head’s fliestjon of Power (1974), and Kojo Laing’s Woman of
the Aeroglanes (1998). I am using nationalism here to mean “an assertion of
belonging in and to a place, a people, a heritage. lt affirms the home created by a
community of language, culture, and customs; and, by so doing, it fends off exile,
fights to prevent its ravages” (Said, “Reflections,” 176). In the postcolonial period,
we are faced with the urgent need of simultaneously celebrating and questioning
the origins, hoping that the reconciliation of these two opposites produce a
critical, if paradoxical, space. Towards that end, this dissertation intends to draw
on Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relatifl (1997), Spivak’s “Asked to Talk About
Myself ...” (1992), Simon Gikandi’s Maps of Englishness (1996), and Kwame
Antony Appiah’s In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of CM
(1992)

There are two logics of origins at stake here. The first one, the
enlightenment logic, is premised on the notion that it can identify people and that
it can present that identity in language. This logic, in keeping with traditional
epistemology, sets oppositions on the basis of stable, absolute, clearly defined,
and hierarchical meanings. This presupposition by the likes of Hegel that we can
identify as a people and place in time is problematic - as Bhabha, Derrida,
Glissant, Amselle, Spivak, and Young have shown in the second logic, to which I
turn. According to the second logic, we are only who we are in relation to others,
and places are only places in relation to other places — this logic is also known as
post-structural, deconstructive, or postcolonial. Set on the premise that

oppositions are always already unstable, fluid, and reliant upon one another —

15

which is the subject of Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1997) — the second logic
recognizes the connectedness of spaces and language, a recognition which has
implications for the idea of home, including the premise of originality which
informs it.

The concept of origin cannot be separated from language, which is
marked by difference and not identity, mutation and not statis. Since meaning is
constituted by the gap, lack, and difference between the present and the past, it
is important to consider Emile Beneviste’s argument, as explicated by Elizabeth
Grosz, that the “l” in the utterance is different from the “I” that produces it.

On the one hand, we cannot presume an identity between the “I” of the

énoncé and the “l” of the énunciation, even in the case of autobiography:

the “I” who speaks cannot be identified with the “l” spoken about. On the
other hand, these two terms cannot be definitively separated, for the
processes of the production of the utterance are always inscribed in the

utterance itself. (Grosz 19)

This dissertation is interested in the second logic of origin, particularly
postcolonial perspective, but it goes beyond it by rereading valorizations of the
originary moment and giving them complex meanings. For example, it argues
that narratives of the past are neither entirely oblivious to the daily
transformations of culture nor are they always keen on retrieving the past. Put
differently, they are not simply atavistic; they are strategically driven by the hope
of a world better than the present and past worlds. In her book Wedded to tJhe

Land? (2001), Layoun gives an account of an old Cypriot woman who glorifies

l6

the past in order to better the future, not to retrieve that past. According to this
Cypriot woman, “We have to think it [the past] was a better time. We have to say
it was a better time. We have to keep telling the younger ones stories about that
better time [...]. And maybe it will be that [better time] for'them in the future” (qtd.
in Layoun 5). This logic is crucial because it departs from the beaten path of
fixity. In addition, as Layoun has observed, “It is an effort to hold a space open
for something whose precise contours and contents are not known, perhaps
cannot be known” (10). So, these narratives are not simply asking us to look for
home in the past, as they know, at least in some cases, that there was no such
home in the past; they are asking us to work towards the possibility of a better
world in the future.

By so doing, the narratives allow us to look at the idea of home as a myth,
which Malinowski neatly defines as “a retrospective pattern of moral values,
sociological order, and magical belief, the function of which is to strengthen
tradition and endow it with a greater value and prestige by tracing it back to a
higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial events” (qtd. in Worsley 5). The
mythologization of home, contrary to obsessing with the good old days, aims at
creative and progressive endeavors. As Stuart Hall has astutely observed, “Far
from being grounded in mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found,
and which when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities
are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position
ourselves within, the narratives of the past” (236). Hall uses identities here to

mean home, and past to mean the source or the originary moment. The point

17

here is that nationalist writers could be using the past and origins for larger
purposes; indeed, as Timothy Brennan, in “The national longing for form,”
articulates, “the evocation of deep, sacred origins — instead of furthering
unquestioning, ritualistic reaffirmations of a people (as in epic) — becomes a
contemporary, practical means of creating a people” (50). Evidently, rereading
the narratives of the past through the above lenses offers new possibilities and
complicates the notion of origins.

While nationalist definitions of home have political currency, hence
Spivak’s phrase “strategic essentializing,” and have worked at particular
moments in Africa’s struggle for national independence, they have not been
sustainable over time. There are affiliations across the borders that undercut the
notion of purity, and there is a series of pre- and post-colonial migrations which
question the originality of original places. There are also political, social and
economic conditions that create a sense of homelessness in the only home one
knows - leading to internal or external displacement.

Women, for example, may not belong to their fathers’ or husbands’ homes
in the same way that the men in their lives do — more than men, women are
forever here and there, sometimes nowhere. Interestingly, this simultaneous
presence and absence of women, patriarchically designed to deny them
complete ownership, inadvertently widens their spaces of operation, and thus
grants them twisted freedom. In this era of globalization, nearly everyone and
every place is connected. Even the language that we use to define the past is

always already mutated, hence Bhabha’s observation (in “DissemiNation”) that

18

the supposed boundaries of language and time are ambivalent, “The language of
culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the
rhetorical figures of a national past” (294). Further ambivalence is evident in the
postmodern age’s celebration of dispersion and fragmentation as a way of life.
However, these postmodern celebrants are often middle and upper class elites
with limited experience of what it actually means to be dispersed or fragmented
in real life. For example, the poor and homeless immigrants who have been
dispersed by socio-economic pressures, like the Sudanese refugees living in
refugee camps away from their homes, do not celebrate dispersion and
fragmentation in the same way that these postmodern elites do, hence the need
to specify what one means by dispersion or fragmentation. Granted, in the wake
of fragmented and dislocated bodies, lives, and cultures, the idea of plurality or
multiple belonging cannot be dismissed, but it is imperative to put it in context
and to show the often neglected problem of unbelonging.

In contrast to the nationalist writers discussed above, Carol Boyce Davies
felicitously observes in Black Women, Writiqu and Identity: Migration of t_he
§u_b_j_e_c_t (1994) that subjectivity “cannot be located and framed in terms of one
specific place, but exist/s in myriad places and times, constantly eluding the
terms of discussion” (36). Like Boyce Davies, Stuart Hall would argue that home
“is not a fixed essence at all, lying unchanged outside history and culture. It is not
some universal and transcendental spirit inside us on which history has made no
fundamental mark. It is not one-and-for-all. It is not a fixed origin to which we can

make some final and absolute return” (237). Hall’s caveat, to the effect that we

19

take note of cultural encounters along the way, is important as we try to locate
home. Boyce Davies’s position is exemplified by Tayeb Salih’s Mustafa Sa’eed in
Season of Migration to the North (1970), and Mongo Beti’s Medza in Mission to
Kai (1958); the two characters’ attempts to singularly identify with specific
places are haunted by the lurking shadows of other places in their lives. For
example, Mustapha’s return to the source does not stop him from owning an
“English fireplace,” “Victorian chairs” (136). As the geographies of Mustapha’s
worlds intersect, the narrator, in a nationalist tone, questions Mustapha’s loyalty
to the source, ‘Was this the action of a man who wanted to turn over a new leaf?
I shall bring the whole place down upon his head; I shall set it on fire” (136).
Similarly, Medza is pampered on the basis of his European aura, which
undercuts his commitment to the source. Paul Gilroy’s The _Black Atlantic:
MgIernitv and Mle Consciousness echoes a more or less similar view in its
major claim of “transnational and intercultural” influences that filter into history as
a result of movement: “The history of the black Atlantic since then, continually
crisscrossed by the movements of black people — not only as commodities but
engaged in various struggles towards emancipation, autonomy, and citizenship —
provides a means to reexamine the problems of nationality, location, identity, and
historical memory” (16). With this statement, Gilroy challenges the notion of
absolute identity, as he maps a platform for “a changing rather than an
unchanging same” (101 ). The changing same here is Gilroy’s idea of Blackness,
so his focus is more about race than space. What Davies, Hall, and Gilroy mean

is that home is not frozen; it is continually being produced. It is on those premises

20

that we need to view characters who not only search for and/or return home, but
also consistently find a changed home or no home at all. Achebe’s Okonkwo
meets this fate in Thinqs Fall Apart, hence the narrator’s theoretical, even
philosophical, underscoring, “Seven years was a long time to be away from one’s
clan. A man’s place was not always there, waiting for him. As soon as he left,
someone else rose and filled it. The clan was like a lizard; if it lost its tail it soon
grew another” (121 ). Okonkwo returns with the hope of finding the glorious, if
ancient, Umuofia, but he is met with indifferent passiveness. The titles that
mattered in Umuofia prior to his exile now have no significance, which preempts
his resolution to acquire more titles. In a paradoxical twist, the time of exile that
Okonkwo regretted as “seven wasted and weary years” (115) turn out to be more
prosperous than the years following his return. He hoped to “return ‘with a flourish
, and regain the seven wasted years” in part “by initiating his sons in the 020
society” and “by taking the highest title” (121); instead, he loses his first son to
Christianity, a loss which accentuates his regret that Enzima was a girl (122).
Worse still, he loses his people, and, eventually, his life, to the colonial
administration. That said, it is important to note that the notions of motion
(Gilroy), migration (Boyce-Davies) or nomadism (Deleuze) featured in this
section, and in postmodernist sensibilities, often have an undertone of touristic
fervor — which is quite opposite from the oppressed movement of refugees, slum
dwellers, and vagabonds. The lives of homeless people, especially in urban
areas, are characterized by movement -- they are forever aboard public trains or

buses, going round and round without alighting, to escape the vagaries of cold

21

nights or to catch some sleep to create a temporary shelter. If they had (heated)
shelter, perhaps they would spend their bus/train fare on a much needed
sandwich. A qualification of movement is thus necessary, lest one mistake the
constant mobility of vagabonds conditioned by their lack of shelter with the
mobility of, say, Gilroy’s sailors/explorers who hold respectable jobs.

In its attempt to rewrite home, this dissertation pays attention to what
Kenneth Harrow, in Thresholds of Change in African Literature: Thefimergence
of a Tramn (1994), and R. Radhakrishnan, in _Diasporic Mediations: Between
Home and Location (1996), have called the problem of the M'o'bius strip.
According to Radhakrishnan, “Part of the postcolonial predicament is its
Moebius-strip-like character, whereby categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are in a
state of interchangeability” (xxiv). I argue that the problem of home in
postcolonial African literature is intricately linked to the increasing difficulty of
negotiating the demarcation between inside and outside. Indeed, as Harrow
articulates, “Outside the strip one world exists, within there is another, and the
line between them is infinitely twisted and decentered” (257). This will become
clear in the first chapter when we read Ahmadou Kourouma’s SL054!
Mependence (1981 ), Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure (1963),
and Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965).

Kourouma’s Suns of Independence, for example, deploys satire to show
the ambivalence around the idea of returning to the source. In the novel, a
Malinke known as Ibrahima Kone is buried in the city as opposed to his ancestral

land. Of course, “traditional” Malinke view this as a misfortune or decline. To

22

keen readers, this city burial, this supposed betrayal of roots, is not a total
surprise because even the name “Ibrahima” reveals a degree of cultural
syncretism. The name is an evidence that Malinke people have been in contact
with and embraced Islam, which does not originate from Malinkeland. As a result,
Fama “first prays in Arabic, the language consecrated by God” (16) then in
Malinke language — this pattern of prayer contradicts the Malinke’s hold on their
origin. More importantly, it shows that the Malinke people have a new sense of
home and history. If they hitherto solely used Malinke as a reference point, they
now have to include Arabic and, of course, their sense of home is also influenced
by their local neighbors, colonization, independence, and the city. However, the
narrator, perhaps in denial of change, does not think highly of city burial. The
narrator says, in reference to the deceased’s burial in the city, “if we weren’t
living in the era of independence (the suns of Independence, the Malinke say),
no one would have dared bury him far away in foreign soil” (3). One immediately
figures out that the nation is simultaneously home and not home, that the city,
though within the nation, is a foreign land compared to the deceased’s ancestral
land. By viewing a section of the nation as a foreign land, the narrator puts
pressure on nationalist writers’ idea of a united nation. One also deduces that the
Malinke live in the city under protest. It is a disgrace, a decline, stemming from
post-independence disillusionment. Despite the Manichean language that marks
the city as foreign soil, and the ancestral land as home proper, the city burial in
itself marks a shift from the tendentious view of the urban home as a temporary

place of residence which does not befit the funeral of a Malinke. One’s burial

23

place is almost always regarded as one’s home, so the city burial pushes one to
look at the city as a new home for people who hitherto regarded it as foreign. In
particular, it suggests that Kone had changed, and in so doing changed homes.
In fact, despite the foreignness of the city soil, we are told that “the burial was
piously performed, and the funeral rite observed with prodigality. Friends,
relatives, even mere passers-by deposited gifts and sacrifices which were then
divided up and shared out among those present and the great Malinke families of
the capital city” (4). The point here is that it is persuasive to consider the city as
Ibrahima Kone’s home because it allowed for the observation of his funeral rites
the same way his ancestral home would have done.

Even as the narrator allows us to witness the foreign soil becoming home
in the above scene, she/he contradictorily privileges the original (ancestral) home
when he says, “the various exceedingly complicated funeral rites for a Malinke
blacksmith caste would have been performed in his native village” (4). First, the
idea of caste implies class discrimination. The blacksmith caste is accorded
preferential treatment, thereby indicating that being a Malinke alone is not
enough to give one a complete sense of belonging. The fact that one’s caste
determines the type of burial one receives shows that home is slippery. Second,
how does one reconcile the narrator’s revelation that the city burial “was piously
performed” and the narrator’s suggestion that the city and its people can neither
fathom nor perform “the various exceedingly complicated funeral rites” for the
deceased? One can either read this as a disclosure of the narrator’s reluctance

to come to terms with change or the narrator’s indication that the city is almost,

24

but not quite home. It might well be a lamentation of sorts — in this case a
lamentation for a space that is no longer within one’s-reach, a space that has
passed on, just like Ibrahima Kone. The ambivalence and illusiveness of this
space, also referred to as “native land,” becomes even more prominent when the
Malinke people return to it only in death, not in life. “As with every Malinke, once
life had fled his remains, his shade rose, spat, dressed and set out on the long
journey to its distant native land, there to impart the sad news” (3). The shadow
here could be read as Kone’s soul/spirit, but it could also be read as an
imaginary Kone, as anything but the real Kone. So, native land becomes a space
for the imaginary.

Whichever reading one adopts, one is still confronted with the questions of
authenticity and originality. We are told that Konate was “a Bambara. Yet all his
features were those of a Fula” (58). This development undercuts arguments for
authenticity. How original is original? What qualifies Togobala (the native village)
and not the capital city as an original home, considering, among other factors,
that the founder of the Dumbuya dynasty, Souleymane, lived in the north before
he settled in Togobala? The text deconstructs the supposed valency of origins by
showing us the impossibility of reaching the actual root of the Dumbuya. In
addition, by locating the supposedly original Togobala between two kingdoms,
the text undercuts its (and by extension Malinke’s) claim of purity and stability.
Therefore, as Harrow has observed, "T he original version of Doumbouya
beginnings [...] insists upon the cusp at the outset, on the failure to be able to opt

for one side, on the mythical emplacement between two opposing forces. All of

25

the history of Doumbouya becomes a history of deferred commitment” (264).
Harrow’s argument that there is a serious difficulty in opting for one side is neatly
exemplified in the novel, “[l]n Togobola, everyone publicly proclaims himself a
devout Muslim, but everyone privately fears the fetish” (72). One, then, is left
wondering how Togobola people reconcile [the divide between adhering to the
Qur’an (Muslims) and Koma (fetish-worshippers).

It is not only the issues of multiplicity and change that have been missing
in the mainstream nationalist writings of home. There is a direct gender
dimension to the question which has been largely ignored in the predominant
critical discussions. The traditional gendering of space has built walls that have to
come down when faced with my argument that home is a space of flux and
contingency that cannot be isolated from the world. The oppressed - women,
slaves, the colonized, and many other -- are oppressed on the implicit premise
that they do not adequately belong to the world. As a result, oppressed people
and mainstream scholars have accepted the tag of outsiders as a tool for
liberation. But this tag is problematic because it affirms the very premise, a
defective one I must add, on which their oppression was based. Liberation has to
be framed on every space’s connectedness to every other space — no space
stands in isolation.

Where does one locate home in cases where global affiliations
problematize the usual location of home within the nation-state alone? Consider,
for example, Charles Mungoshi’s Wamg for the Rain (1975). Mungoshi’s John,

who resides in Bulawayo (a city), visits his rural home with a radio, which he

26

plays to his grandfather. After listening to world news, the grandfather asks,
“Where is this all happening?” to which John responds, “All over the world,
Sekuru. All over the world” (31). Clearly, the radio, a symbol of mass
communication, brings the world (read global culture) to an old man who
apparently has not traveled out of the locality. I use “apparently” here because .
Sekuru’s participation in the World War already questions the supposed purity of
his identity. In any case, the local (the old man) interacts and is linked with the
global (world news on the radio). In addition, Mungoshi’s Garabha, the wanderer,
through his social relation with the several places and people he wanders to,
complicates the subjectivity of his restful/settled relations, whom he visits and
plays drums to from time to time. It is even possible that his popular and famous
drumming borrows from the several cultures and borderlands he visits, and
brings back strands of those cultures to his audience at his birthplace. That way,
his audience travels without traveling; this confirms Doreen Massey’s observation
that “a proportion of the social interrelations will be wider than and go beyond the
area being referred to in any particular context as a place” (169). Indeed, it also
reminds us of Clifford’s reference to traveling cultures, including the band that
had been traveling to different cutltural sites for several years, while still
performing their culture. When culture is so perforrnative, it is difficult to tell what
is real and what is not. In that sense, home is a performance that always
changes, even when the performance of the culture of home by people who are
not residing at home make it appear as fixed. For example, Indians abroad may

only marry Indians and eat Indian food, but the Indians in India may be eating

27

Chinese food and manying Nepalese. This tendency leads us to ask why a
community, say Indians abroad, assert their essentialized identity more than their
counterparts in India. This variance prompts us to query the meaning of home in
this interplay between physical residents of a place called home and those who
are not residing there. In other words, it allows us to consider that the issue of
home is different when regarded from the North as opposed to the South, just as
it is different between the rich and the poor. For Clifford, home cannot be
separated from traveling. What does traveling or performing do to the notion of
home? Through John’s radio, Sekuru’s participation in the World War, and
Garabha’s wandering, then, the text undercuts the supposed cultural singularity
of the locality. That is, the text collapses the boundaries between in and out by
showing that the former is inextricably linked to the latter, and vice versa. This
linkage encourages simultaneous identification with the local and the global or
the country and the city, since the two are strands of the same fabric. Moreover,
it introduces us to the politics of nomadism.

If the boundaries between the city and the country are collapsed, then
what are we to make of Oliver Mtukudzi’s song, Dzoka Uvamwe [Return Home]?
Mtukudzi seems to insinuate that there is an in (home) and out (the world). The
artist appeals to the past and to the rural home as a rejuvenative space for his
protagonist who has failed to find gold in the glitter of the urban space. By
encouraging the protagonist to return home, the artist casts a shadow of doubt
over the supposed progress in the city, thereby nostalgically granting currency

and a new lease on life to the traditional past. Still, nostalgia is not merely a

28

sense of fixity to the past, but also, a revolutionary act that challenges
modernity’s privileging of the present time by allowing a co-existence of the past,
preSent, and future. By leaving the city, which is more commonly associated with
modernity and the present, to return to the rural space linked to tradition,
Mtukudzi’s protagonist disrupts modernity’s sense of time. Here one is reminded
of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostani_a_ (2001), particularly the insightful
argument that “nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of
history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into
private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to
the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xv). This rebellion is
significant because it brings to the fore issues of injustice on whose foundation
modernity rests, but which, paradoxically, modernity endeavors to erase from our
collective memory.

There is, however, another way of reading this urban-rural movement that
Mtukudzi evokes. One could look at it as a reflection of Mtukudzi’s mourning for
the past, as an elusive attempt to hold on to a past that is quickly fading away. In
that sense, Mtukudzi and his protagonist are not ready to embrace a worldwide
wind of change that not only connects the city and the country to each other, but
also to the rest of the world. Of course, the issue is much more complex. That act
of mourning keeps a would-have-been eliminated history of Dande alive, thereby
countering the city’s story. The rural-urban-rural movement of Mtukudzi’s
protagonist also symbolizes the fragmentation and homelessness that have

become our postcolonial condition. Mtukudzi’s protagonist simultaneously

29

belongs everywhere and nowhere. For example, his living condition in the city is
a far cry from the city’s promise of affluence and prosperity. Like the janitor at
Obi’s workplace in Achebe’s No Longer At Ease and the lower class in Achebe’s
Anthills of the Savannah (1987), Mtukudzi’s protagonist is economically
marginalized. It is a question of dispossession.

That said, Mtukudzi’s appeal for his protagonist to return to Dande
questionably implies that one’s belongingness to the home space is always and
already given, that one would fit in as soon as one returns. Nothing could be
further from the truth, largely because the subject returning and the past he/she
is returning to have had several interconnections over time, and these
interconnections defy easy reproduction or repression. Moreover, Mtukudzi’s
appeal fails to recognize that the rural space is not completely removed from the
total mess that is the urban space, that the wall that separates in and out is
porous, that the city is in relation and not opposition to Dande. Viewing Dande
and the city as two separate places, as in and out, to borrow Massey’s words, “is
a view of place as bounded, as in various ways a site of an authenticity, as
singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity. It is a conceptualization of space
which rests in part on the view of space as statis” (5). Yet, places always stand
on contested, fluid, and open grounds. This is the central trope in Harrow’s
Thresholds of Change in African Literature (1994), in which he insightfully argues
that “the Mobius strip of passage must turn in both directions, inward and
outward” (256). In fact, the cover of his book tellingly focuses on the threshold of

the circumcision hut which is where Camara Laye’s’Dark Child (1954) places the

30

key spaces dividing inside and outside, between the boy’s male world and his
mother’s package of food. In brief, places are interconnected.

This collapsing of boundaries between in and out has monumental impact
on our understanding of home. For example, drawing on Amselle, it questions
the location of home within the parameters of the nation by showing the link
between one people and other people. Therefore, the idea of home, like identity,
has to be reformulated in tandem with the ambivalences that characterize the
postcolonial moment. Put differently, the nationalist framework on which the idea
of home has always been predicated does not adequately account for the cultural
overflows, transnational impurities, and ambivalences that characterize the
postcolonial era. We have hope in works like B. Kojo Laing’s Search Sweet
M (1986) and Woman ()Lthe Aeroplanes (1998) which counter the
nationalist paradigm by acknowledging cultural impurities that result from the
characters” interactions with different places and spaces in the world. Instead of
searching for home within the auspices of the national aesthetic as Ngugi Wa
Thion’go’s Matigari (1987) does through Matigari, for example, Laing’s gm
Sweet Country uses Allotey to examine “how to burst through the propriety of
ancient ways, then boldly sew the bits together again in different patterns” (246).
Whereas Matigari is still imprisoned in the past, Allotey envisions “A way of living,
a way of thinking, and a way of fortifying myself so that I shall return and attack
my village with change” (97). In that respect, Allotey moves towards what
Bhabha, in The [.003th of Culture (1994), has called “the possibility of a cultural

hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (4).

31

In brief, the postcolonial moment undercuts the nationalists’ homogeneous and
unified vision of home. But Bhabha’s use of the word “difference” demands
further attention, lest it give the wrong impression of different, separate items.
Bhabha, following Derrida, uses the deconstructive term difference to mean a
refusal of the metaphysics of presence. Harrow’s Thresholds of Chaflge_in
African Literattge (1994) shares that view (12-13, 22, 313). This concept of
difference will play a significant role in my attempt to problematize outside and
inside.

Locating home remains problematic in part because of traditional readings
that are still stuck in the age-old tendency of conceiving home as fixed, past,
singular, and distinct - while there is glaring evidence that such readings do not
address “the multiplicity of the pathways and trajectories of change” (Mbembe
and Nuttall 349). But it is not enough to talk of open spaces without addressing
the economic gap that often places the postcolonial subject in the dilemma of, on
the one hand, identifying with plural home spaces, in keeping with the subject’s
affiliation to several worlds, and, on the other hand, negating or being negated by
some spaces due to his/her miserable socio-economic and political station. In
any case, three points stand out: i) home is multiply inscribed over time, ii)
reproducing the past, while noble, is problematic and iii)socio-economic and
political circumstances can deny one a sense of belonging to a place, even when
one recognizes his/her cultural plurality. Where and how should the postcolonial
subject locate home when the singular, distant past does not fully reflect the said

subject’s subjectivity, and the pluralized present nurtures economic and political

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disparities? What happens to the location of home when both the past and the
present prove foreign? This dissertation examines “the postcolonial subject’s
relation to the spaces it claims, occupies, or even negates” (Gikandi 220).

How are we to read, for instance, situations where characters move from
rural to urban spaces, and vice versa, only to find that none of those spaces is
homely? Globalization has blurred boundaries between what were hitherto
considered separate spaces, making it increasingly difficult to discuss them as
separate entities. It is therefore tempting to deduce that spaces share interactive
relationships, especially in the global age. Indeed, as Bill Ashcroft’s Post-Colonial
Transformatigj (2001) has documented, “The diffusion of global influence makes
the relationship between the local and the global all the more complex, because
when we examine local cultures we find the presence of the global within the
local to an extent that compels us to be very clear about our concept of the local”
(215). In other words, the presence of the global within the local inevitably means
that one cannot draw a straight line between the local and the global, that one
cannot separate home from the world. For that reason, there is a need to
configure a global sense of home, so as to account for the threads of global
culture and relations that interweave the fabric that we call home. This
configuration is exemplified in the music Mungoshi’s Garabha plays; its quality is
attributed to its diversity.

What happens to the meaning of home when the boundaries and maps
we use to define it prove provisional, as is the case in Nurrudin Farah’s M_aLs

(1999)? Farah’s Askar, having imbibed nationalist literatures, is determined to

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recover his lost pre-colonial past, a determination that is already undercut by his
usage of distorted colonial maps and history. The boundaries of Somali, we are
told, vary from map to map. As a way of informing Askar about these distortions,
Uncle Hilaal, who is a university professor, asks him,
And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the 1567
map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our notion of the
world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map, is smaller than
Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the European’s prejudices,
are the maps we used at school when l was young and, I am afraid to say,
are still being reprinted year after year and used in schools in Africa. Arno
Peters’s map, drawn four hundred years later, gives more accurate
proportions of the continents: Europe is smaller, Africa larger. (229)
If the map that Askar carries with him wherever he goes is distorted as we have
seen, and if the nationalist cause he upholds is predicated on that very map, then
Askar has not only to rethink the nation-foml as a structure for configuring home,
but also to consider the places beyond the boundaries that he has inherited.
Such a consideration points to bell hooks’s observation in Yearning: Race.
Gender, andrCultural Politics (1990) - she says, “[H]ome is no longer just one
place. It is locations. Home is that place [...] where one discovers new ways of
seeing reality, frontiers of difference. One confronts and accepts dispersal and
fragmentation as part of the construction of a new world order that reveals more
fully where we are (148). So, even hooks accepts a postmodern sense of

dispersal, fragmentation and homelessness as positive. While hooks’ acceptance

34

can be understood culturally, it adds to the postmodernist celebration of
nomadism at the risk of injuring the cause of poor people who are dispersed by
economic hardships like unemployment. The poor in Africa, or the emigrants who
are forced to leave or who leave because they dream of a good life possible only
with incomes earned abroad have a very different view of fragmentation and
dispersal, not to mention millions of refugees in Africa. How many Sudanese
refugees, with their homes set on fire by militias and scattered to different
directions in search of refuge, would share the rosy postmodernist view of
dispersal? Toward this end, this dissertation seeks to investigate not merely the
possibility of multiple homes but also the promise and alienness in each of these
homes. How might we confront and accept “dispersal and fragmentation” as
hooks suggests, without undermining the cause of dispersed people like the
homeless and refugees?

Even as the dissertation pushes for a consideration of the places beyond
Askar’s boundaries, it is equally interested in finding the places within his
boundaries, as they perform a constitutive role to the places beyond them.
Bhabha’s “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and the margins of the modern nation”
(1990) will be useful here. According to this essay, all subjects, particularly
postcolonials and migrants, do not quite fit into “the Heim of the national culture
and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary
that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation” (315). What, then, does home
mean as something different from away from home? Do slums problematize the

notion of home differently from the rich neighborhoods? Here one has to show

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how affect and class play on the idea of home. Askar fits Bhabha’s card of “a
shifting boundary,” to the extent that he is at once Ethiopian, Somalian, and
many other identities resulting from his imperial history. Chinua Achebe’s Obi
Okonkwo in No Longer at Ease (1960) also fits this card. Obi Okonkwo suffers
homelessness in England because of his cultural and geographical
displacement. He returns to Nigeria (his place of birth) shortly after independence
with the hope of feeling at home, “But the Nigeria he returned to was in many
ways different from the picture he had carried in his mind during those four years.
There were many things he could no longer recognize, and others — like the
slums of Lagos — which he was seeing for the first time” (14; my emphasis). One
could argue that Obi is in the process of losing the struggle against forgetting,
thanks to his education in England. That his inability to recognize the things that
he once recognized stems from his colonial education in England becomes clear
when one reads Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s Amtajgypus Adventqrg (1963). In this
sophisticated novel, Kane’s the Most Royal Lady says, “The school in which I
would place our children will kill in them what today we love and rightly conserve
with care. Perhaps the very memory of us will die in them. When they return from
the school, there may be those who will not recognize us” (46). Notably, failure to
recognize one’s past and people is a common trope in postcolonial narratives.
Granted, Obi’s case, in No Longer at Ease, is not simply a question of
memory lapse. For example, the narrator lists slums of Lagos not as some of the
many things which Obi could no longer recognize, but as the things he was

seeing for the first time. This suggests that the slums developed to the point of

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clear visibility during Obi’s residence in England, and, in that sense, serves as a
commentary on the decline of Nigeria. The juxtaposition of the slums of Lagos
with the national home that Obi has returned to is indicative of the way in which
the development of slums in Africa not only problematize one’s sense of home,
but also cast shadows on the promises of modernity. More importantly, Obi
Okonkwo’s inability to recognize many things he used to recognize before he left
for England shows that he is at once an insider and outsider; he cannot
recognize many things in Nigeria in part because he is looking at them through
the colonizer’s eyes. His conflict echoes what W.E.B. Du Bois has famously
called “double-consciousness.” Obi, largely because of his “mission-house
upbringing and European education” now becomes “a stranger in his country”
(82) - thereby re-enacting T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Journey of the Magi,”
particularly its ambivalence for returning home. Even so, the novel does not deny
the past. In fact, it shows that the past is not dead. This is exemplified in Obi
Okonkwo’s awkward silence when Clara first tells him that she is an outcast,

“I am an osu,” she wept. Silence. She stopped weeping and quietly

disengaged herself from him. Still he said nothing.

“So you see we cannot get married,” she said, quite firmly, almost gaily —

a terrible kind of gaiety. Only the tears showed she had wept.

“Nonsense!” said Obi. He shouted it almost, as if by shouting it now he

could wipe away those seconds of silence, when everything had seemed

to stop, waiting in vain for him to speak. (81)

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Obi’s silence, which serves as a meta-commentary, reveals that our past has a
lot of bearing on our present, and thus cannot be easily dismissed or wished
away. In fact, the past and memory restage themselves through Obi’s telling
“silence” and belated “nonsense.” How does one deal with a past that has not
completely passed, a past that has not completely died?

This study, to use Bruce Robins’s words in his introduction of
Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling_bevond the Nation (1998), is partly
necessitated by “how far we remain from mastering the sorts of allegiance,
ethics, and action that might go with our complex and multiple belonging” and by
Robins’s challenge that “this work has to be done” (3). Negotiating and mediating
all these attachments (whether real or imagined), this study distances itself from
the notion that the past is dead without acknowledging an authentic past. In that
sense, home is partly the past, partly the present, partly the future, never
completely one or all. To be sure, this should not be taken to mean that the past,
present, and future are objects; rather, it should show that they are unstable
referents, and that their instability reflects on what home is supposed to be. Like
freedom and social justice, home is always work in progress. This project
attempts to show, among other things, that the postmodernist sensibility and
nationalist sensibility are two extremes — one denies the past and another denies
the present, yet the past and present are not fixed entities. The past is built on
memory, and constructed like identity. To treat the past as a fixed archive as it is
sometimes treated by both the nationalists and postmodernists raises the

question of who decides what goes into the archive, how it is interpreted, and for

38

what purpose. It is only when we understand who decides what is worth
remembering that we begin to appreciate how the idea of home is constructed.
For that reason, the two sensibilities cannot adequately address the problem of
home in a global age. This is an age in which one has to simultaneously call
global connections and global inequality in one breath, in order to appreciate the
need for, and complexity around, home. The realizability of this work inevitably
depends on the extent to which we question the conventional assumptions of
belonging (that we solely belong to a distant and uncontaminated past, a singular
and local place, a national framework, a husband- or fatherland), as much as we
question postmodernist postures of multiple affiliations which contradictorily and
implicitly silence one of the affiliations — the past. In Jameson’s terms,
postmodernism is a perpetual present. While Jameson’s view may be true of the
West, it does not capture the way postmodernism is experienced in Africa.
Africa’s historical homelessness and dispossession make it difficult for it to jump
on the train of the perpetual present; Africa seems to be in search of a catharsis
that is deep enough to swallow the countless years of programmed
dispossession. It is this search for something that cannot yet be fully defined that
forces the majority of African subjects to approach postmodernism with caution,
to rethink the blanket embrace of world citizenship, and to consider the
cosmopolitan ideal without rejecting the local affiliations. After the fall start of
modernism, Africa seeks to put itself in a better position to come to terms with
globalization and its discontents, even as it recognizes the inevitability of global

connections. Paul Gilroy, in Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), and Kwame

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Anthony Appiah, in Cosmooolitanism: allies in a Worch of Strangers (2006)
discuss this sense of a broader belonging. According to Appiah, this broader
belonging demands that we “take minds and hearts formed over the long
millennia of living in local troops and equip them with ideas and institutions that
will allow us to live together as the global tribe we have become” (xiii). This way,
the gap that seems to stand between the source and the diaspora can be
bridged. To be sure, the cosmopolitanism I invoke here is not synonymous with
universalism; it is a framework that allows for plural belongings without fashioning
any particular belonging as the chosen one, it is what James Clifford would call
“nonuniversalist cosmopolitanism.” The new home has to come to terms with our
fears and desires, our networks and cocoons, our feelings and conditions, our

poverty and wealth.

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Chapter One
Understanding Home Through Origins, Roots, and Sources (Home at the
Dawn of National Independence)

“What are we choosing today when we choose an identity, which is different from an
echoing or a counter-echoing of Western discourse? Is there a difference between the
choice of this counter-echo and the choice of programmed madness. Or are we in the
place where we can choose something ex-orbitant?" (Spivak 18).

“What, then, does de-colonisation of culture actually mean: the recuperation of an
essential culture that existed before the historical moment of colonization, or the idea of
admitting different histories to a complex and syncretic present composed of cross-
cultural transfigurations?” (Chambers 74).

This chapter interrogates the validity of origins, roots, and sources, upon
which African nationalist writers, including Senghor, Laye, Cabral, Armah, Aidoo,
and Ngugi, have premised the idea of home in contemporary African literature.
That is, it questions the nationalist writers’ implication that there is a stable point
out there called our roots, origin, or source, where we can -- and should - return
to in order to retrieve our identity and thus home. This study is necessary in the
wake of multiple experiences and histories that inteniveave our cultural spaces,
and resist easy categorization. As Simon Gikandi has observed, in Maps Of
mishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (1996), African
nationalist writers constructed new national identities based on “a self-willed
return to precolonial traditions or as a conscious rejection of an imposed
European identity” (194). The nationalist writers’ constructions are limited
because the so-called precolonial traditions are always already compromised by,
among others, the acts of transformation and translation. Robin Cohen, in

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Frontiers of Identity (1994), is right in noting that our national identities are
formed on the basis of our “interaction with outsiders, strangers, foreigners and
aliens - ‘the others’. You know who you are, only by knowing who you are not”
(1). In that sense, our identities are compromised. The other limit of the
nationalist writers’ position is that “a conscious rejection of an imposed European
identity” does not necessarily eliminate the same identity in the unconscious.
Moreover, even concerted efforts towards “a conscious rejection of an imposed
European identity” often come to naught. As Gloria Anzaldua has recorded in
Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mesti__z_a_ (1987), cultural experiences do fade
away easily; “[t]he borders and walls that that are supposed to keep the
undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these
habits and patterns are the enemies within” (2213). While I largely agree with
Anzaldua, I would like to point out that, contrary to her view, the habits and
patterns of behavior do not necessarily have to be our enemies; sometimes they
are our friends, especially when they allow us a wider and more critical view of
life. The big question, however, lies in what the nationalist writers call a return to
precolonial traditions, and Lucky Dube, in solidarity with the nationalist writers,
calls “going back to our roots.”

First, as James Clifford astutely reminds us in the epigraph, we live in “a
world where space is always already invaded” (367). Second, the notion of going
back to our roots is not only easier said than done, but also (theoretically)
debilitating. Edouard Glissant has rightly noted in Poetics of Relation (1997) that

belonging does not solely lie in the root, but also in relation. According to

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Glissant, “Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended
to form around an idea of power - the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root —
rather than around a fundamental relationship with the Other” (14). This
tendency to form a sense of home around a unique root and not around a
relationship with the Other stems from the colonized’s desire to cut links with the
colonizer, as a basis for legitimizing the struggle for freedom. But this legitimacy
is anachronistic because it is not any different from the equally problematic
attempt by the colonizer to institutionalize a polarized world between the
colonizer and colonized. Homi Bhabha, in The Location of Culture (1994), also
calls for
the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities
and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the
articulation of cultural differences. These “in-between” spaces provide the
terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood — singular or communal - that
initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and
contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (1-2)
While Bhabha’s call is timely, his formulation wrongly suggests that narratives of
originary and in-between spaces are in opposition. Third, as Spivak’s “Asked to
Talk About Myself ...” has noted, “The question of origin can dis-able as much as
it can en-able” (12). It is a double-edged sword which cuts both sides. For
example, the colonized may share a history of dispossession, but they may not
necessarily share a common identity, as the unity of the latter is fractured by

class, ethnic, religious, gender, and other ideological factors. In this context,

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singular pursuit of origin by the colonized does not only the search for their roots,
but also takes away attention from structures of inequity, thereby dispossessing
them further. It is because of these “enable-disable” characteristics of origin that
one has to theorize and contextualize it.

One could argue that it is in order for dispossessed people to be in search
of their silenced origins, which continue to haunt the present spaces. However,
this search has to be approached differently so as to avoid the promotion of fixity
and homogeneity. This different approach lies in the acknowledgement of an
endless self-creation as a significant step towards what Fanon, in Black Skin,
White Masks (1967), calls “a world of reciprocal recognitions” (218). For
example, the colonized’s resort to past songs for strength and hope in trying
moments of the present keeps the past alive, while also blurring the border
between the past and the present. This blurring, brought about by the coming

together of the past and the present, allows for ongoing cultural self-(re)creation
without undermining the past. In these songs, the past and the present, to borrow
Bhabha’s words, “develop an interstitial intimacy [...] that questions binary
divisions through which such spheres of social experience are often spatially _
opposed” (13). The past has to restage itself through time; it has to find its way in
the mix of the present and the future. If it waits to be excavated, then it might not
be of much use. In addition, it is imperative that one searches for one’s past with
a clear understanding that it would only be a partial reflection of one’s identity. As
Bhabha puts it, “The recognition that tradition bestows is a partial form of

identification. In restaging the past it introduces other, incommensurable cultural

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temporalities into the invention of tradition. This process estranges any
immediate access to an originary identity” (2). In other words, displacement and
enunciative split occurs to the past, causing a ripple on its ostensible stability and
unity. To be sure, this does not make the search for one’s roots irrelevant; it only
opens up space for “enunciative splits” and cultural fluidity. This fluidity, to the
extent that it resists easy refuge in cultural dualism, say, of the civilized versus
the primitive, might be the metamorphosis that the dispossessed need to face the
future. Put differently, the challenges of tomorrow demand that we shift from
viewing the past/root/ origin as unitary to viewing it as ambivalent, and this
caveat applies to both the colonizers’ claims on homogenous, superior spaces as
well as the nationalists’ counter-claims on authentic pasts. We need to recognize
that there is always a bridge that connects the past and the present, and thus
“prevents identities at either end of it from settling into primordial polarities”
(Bhabha 4).

Glissant offers more insight on how to deal with our roots. Following Gilles
Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Glissant argues for a rhizome as opposed to a root,
and for a conception of identity in relation. According to Glissant, the colonizer’s
claim that his root (read language and culture) is the strongest, and thus the
measure of the colonized’s profile, is partly responsible for the colonized’s
attempts to outdo the colonizer by projecting superior roots. “The conquered or
visited peoples are thus forced into a long and painful quest after an identity
whose first task will be opposition to the denaturing process introduced by the

conqueror. A tragic variation of a search for identity” (Glissant 17). Glissant calls

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this search tragic because, as it locates the colonized’s home in an authentic pre-
colonial past, it also limits it by repressing its postcolonial networks. Our sense of
home, as Glissant has observed, would be better off when it surpasses this
limitation, “allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open”
(340).

Still, the political and revolutionary gains of the nationalist writings of
origins, returns, and roots, particularly at the dawn of independence, cannot be
downplayed. These gains, plus the currency that narratives of return continue to
register, suggest that something was and still is amiss in our so-called progress.
If the fruits of modernity had been justly distributed, perhaps there would be less
quest for the source. The ongoing search for home, to borrow Samira Kowash’s
words in “The Homeless Body,” is “a symptom and a symbol of the failed
promises of progress and prosperity” (320). In a similar vein, one cannot, in the
name of recognizing the revolutionary purposes of the nationalist writings, ignore
their denial of cultural engagements between the colonized and the colonizer.
There is no working formula for a complete undoing of our mixture with the
cultures and spaces we daily come in contact with. More importantly, it is not
clear that a community that rejects difference and otherness grows. How might
the idea of home be shaped at the intersection of our multiple experiences; that
is, without denying any of our cultural contacts?

Drawing on Ahmadou Kourouma’s Suns of Independence (1981), Cheikh
Hamidou Kane’s AmMus Adventure (1963), and Ama Ata Aidoo’s _'l_'_h_e_

Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), the chapter argues that the premises of origins,

46

roots, and sources upon which the nationalist writers have located home are at
once relevant and irrelevant. The relevance becomes clear when we view the call
for roots as a performance, as a myth, with political goals. The impertinence
stems from, among other reasons, the daily process of cultural translation which
undercuts the notion of an originary moment by allowing for multiple affiliations.
That these sources which seem irrelevant now were relevant in the 19503 points
to the impact of time and space in culture. The idea of home cannot be fixed to a
distant, single, and pure place in the past — as every place is interconnected and
dynamic. Therefore, as lain Chambers reminds us in _M_igrancv. Culture, Identitv
(1994), there is a need to
conceive of dwelling as a mobile habitat, as a mode of inhabiting time and
space not as though they were fixed and closed structures, but as
providing the critical provocation of an opening whose questioning
presence reverberates in the movement of the languages that constitute
our sense of identity, place and belonging. There is no one place,
language or tradition that claim this role. (4)
Even so, the chapter distances itself from branding all originary narratives as
atavistic, preferring to show ways in which some originary narratives that seem
only to valorize the past instead challenge and go beyond it.
Setting the tone f0r African nationalist writers’ idea of a new home and
nation at the dawn of independence, Cabral, in Return to Jthe Sou_rg§ (1974),
argues for a strategic return to precolonial cultures. According to Cabral, the

colonized stand better chances of freedom when they maintain differences

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between them and the colonizer (48). Cabral’s concern, then, is a political
strategy for freedom. He is arguing more on a political than cultural platform.
Looked at that way, it is easier to understand why Cabral continues the colonial
tune that depicts the colonized and colonizer as cultural opposites, without
adequately acknowledging the impact of many years of contact between the two
parties. Postcolonial writers like Gikandi, however, have shown that the
colonizer and the colonized significantly influenced each other. In contrast,
referring to the difference between human beings, who have a spiritual base, and
material objects, Kane’s Samba Diallo, in Amtliguous Adventtfl, suggests, “If we
do not wake the West to the difference which separates us from the object, we
shall be worth no more than it is, and we shall never master it” (154). Granted,
difference can be, and is here, invented to serve political ends. But at what cost?
The nationalist insistence on returning to the source, however, is not
always strategic. At times it is motivated by fear of “the new world.” Newness is
associated with doom, loss, and misgivings. This becomes evident when the
Chief of the Diallobé, in Kane’s Ambiguous Adventure, imagines Samba Diallo as
his successor, “He [Samba Diallo] would have kept the movement of the Diallobé
within the confines of the narrow track that winds between their past and those
new fields where they want to pasture and gambol and be lost” (121). New fields
here symbolize western culture while loss in this context means derailment from
the path of God, which passes death. But there is more to this quotation than the
linkage of newness with loss. It also spells the challenge of negotiating the line

between the past and the new fields, by suggesting that only Samba Diallo is

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qualified enough for the arduous task of keeping the Diallobé from straying to the
new fields. The irony lies in using Samba Diallo who has pastured in new fields to
prevent the Diallobé from pasturing in new fields. That the task can only be
satisfactorily performed by Samba Diallo, who, tellingly, has already embraced
Western education, shows that the Diallobé have lost the war of resisting
newness. This loss significantly intensifies the Diallobé’s crisis of belonging. The
key word “intensify” is used here to show that the Diallobé’s crisis of belonging
begins long before their contact with the West. For example, there are structures
of slavery and monarchy within the Diallobé which pose questions about the
fundamentals of belonging to the Diallobé nation. While the Chief of the Diallobé
seeks a successor who would uphold the past and consequently save the
Diallobé from doom, Kane’s the Most Royal Lady advocates new leadership. She
is pleased that the young man about to replace the teacher:
He has not, he never will have, that preference of the old man for
traditional values, even those that are condemned and moribund, over the
triumphant values that are assailing us. This young man is bold. He is not
paralysed by the sense of what is sacred. He has no feeling for
background. He will know better than anyone else how to welcome the
new world. (121)
In the above statement the Royal Lady not only displays qualities of the young
man about to replace the teacher, but she also critiques the old order’s fixed hold
on the past cultural values, including outdated and irrelevant ones. For the Royal

lady, the location of home is not in “condemned and moribund” values, but in “the

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new world.” The problem with the Royal Lady’s vision is that it is as uncritically
fixed on the new world as the teacher’s is uncritically fixed on the past. By
occupying two extremes of new and old, the teacher and the Royal Lady fail to
find a suitable location of home for the Diallobé. An accommodative location
might seek to be an intersection of the old and new world, what Anzaldua refers
to as “the juncture of culture” (ix).

A consideration of Cabral’s arguments and the context in which they are
made is necessary. In Return to tthfiource (1973), which I will discuss here in
detail, Cabral is acknowledged by Africa Information Service as one of the
nationalists who “retum[ed] to the source of their own being” and thus “reaffirmed
the right of their people to take their own place in history” (9). This
acknowledgement already spells a need for the restoration of the colonized’s
place and history. Cabral is also remembered by the people of Portuguese
Guinea as “a leader who helped them regain their identity and who was
otherwise instrumental in the initial stages of the long and difficult process of
national liberation” (9). This dissertation is interested in the identity that Cabral
helped the people of Portuguese Guinea regain, as it is pertinent to the idea of
home. This notion of Cabral helping his people regain their identity confirms
Glissant’s argument that the nationalist identities were formed around “a single,
unique root” (14). But the big question is what motivated this drive for a distinct
identity. First, Cabral’s people “were told [by the Portuguese] to disdain
everything African and to revere everything European. However, even if they

adopted these attitudes they were never really accepted by their masters” (10).

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Cabral, therefore, drew a political plan for fighting what he called “the shameful
Portuguese colonial domination” (11). Cabral understood that foreign domination
“can be maintained only by the permanent, organized repression of the cultural
life of the people concerned” (39). So, as early as 1970 when he delivered
“National Liberation and Culture,” Cabral was aware of the critical role that
culture play(ed) not only in foreign domination, but also in national liberation.
According to him, “it is generally within the culture that we find the seed of
opposition, which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation
movement” (43).

The idea of home had to be located in culture because, according to
Cabral, “with a strong indigenous cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure
of its perpetuation” (39-40). To ensure this indigenous cultural life, Cabral called
for “cultural resistance” to “take on new forms (political, economic, armed) in
order fully to contest foreign domination” (40). Cabral and his people “agreed to
make great sacrifices [...] to recover our liberty and human dignity, whatever the
path to be followed” (18). It is instructive that Cabral approved any path “to win
the liberation of their homeland” (31). It is in this approval that we have to
understand the concept of returning to the source, with its shortcomings.
Interestingly, even as Cabral championed a return to the source, he also
understood the dynamism of culture. In his words,

culture is always in the life of a society (open or closed), the more or less

conscious result of the economic and political activities of that society, the

more or less dynamic expression of the kinds of relationships which

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prevail in that society, on the one hand between man (considered

individually or collectively) and nature, and, on the other hand, among

individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes. (41)
He frames this in Marxist terms (man versus nature), which is based on the
notions of the dialectic, contradiction, struggle. In this case, he is not arguing for
a static notion of culture. One, then, has to reconcile the paradox of fixity and
dynamism inherent in Cabral’s arguments. Cabral gives a hint on how to address
the contradiction in his proposal for a culture that at once reflects the society as it
is (following the consequences of economic and political realities of the moment)
and the society as it was (prior to foreign domination). To get out of this
conundrum, Cabral urges us to look at culture as “the ideological or idealist plane
of the physical and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be
dominated” (41 ). It is this political, Marxist, angle that one needs in order to
understand Cabral’s deployment of culture. For Cabral, culture is not simply a
product of our way(s) of life but also a producer of the same. We see the dialectic
at work when he says, “Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people’s history
and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence which it exerts
on the evolution of relationships between man and his environment, among men
or groups of men within a society, as well as among different societies” (41; my
emphasis). Cabral’s call for returning to the source has more to do with culture
as a determinant of history than culture as a fruit of history. His source or national
home thus involves creation and growth. It is not some distant past that is

resistant to change, as Cabral recognizes that “no culture is a perfect, finished

52

whole. Culture, like history, is an expanding and developing phenomenon” (50).
In fact, Cabral uncharacteristically encourages the adoption of positive cultural
values from the oppressor, a move which complicates the source that he wants
his people to return to. As he argues,
A people who free themselves from foreign domination will be free
culturally only if, without complexes and without underestimating the
importance of positive accretions from the oppressor and other cultures,
they return to the upward paths of their own culture, which is nourished by
the living reality of its environment, and which negates both harmful
influences and any kind of subjection to foreign culture. (43; my emphasis)
Again, this is dialectical. Cabral’s source does not only allow for positive aspects
of other cultures. It also allows for a return to “the upward paths of their own
culture,” which means the positive aspects of the indigenous culture. Clearly,
Cabral is aware that there are downward paths within the precolonial culture
which are not worth returning to because they are not progressive. This source or
space that Cabral wants his people to return to has to come to terms with the
challenges of the moment — “nourished by the living reality of its environment”
(43). This source, then, is not frozen in time. It changes in line with the
environment of the time. It might have pre-colonial and colonial elements in it, but
it is neither pre-colonial nor colonial. It is a simultaneous accretion to, and
subtraction from, the pre-colonial past — courtesy of its own life/dynamism and

the other cultures it comes in contact with.

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Cabral’s position that “the national liberation rests in the inalienable right
of every people to have their own history” (43) is persuasive. However, it remains
at the level of ideology because the histories of the colonizer and the colonized
have mixed so much that it is not easy to talk about one without the other. What
are the configurations of Cabral’s people’s own history? How is it different from
the other histories? To address this question, one has to consider that Cabral
uses history and culture almost interchangeably. Advocating the restoration of
African culture, which he views as “the beginning of a new era in the history of
the continent,” (49) Cabral gives the impression that the said culture is easily
attainable, it is simply there. According to him,

African culture survived all the storms [of colonialism], taking refuge in the

villages, in the forests and in the spirit of the generations who were victims

of colonialisms. Like the seed which long awaits conditions favorable to
germination in order to assure the survival of the species and its
development, the culture of African peoples flourishes again today, across

the continent, in struggles for national liberation. (49)

What becomes evident here is that a dialectical reading of Cabral leads to a very
different framing. In the absence of that dialectical reading, one is tempted to
contest Cabral’s claim that African culture survived all the storms of colonization.
The storm of colonization did not spare villages. And Cabral knows this. It is
possible that Cabral deploys hubris here to inspire and assure his people that
their culture is still intact, while knowing very well that that is not the case. In fact,

his analogy of the seed that awaits conditions favorable to germination works

54

against him because such a seed is already affected and shaped by the hostile
climate that delayed its germination. So, even when it finally germinates, it
cannot claim that it survived all the hostility.

Cabral’s argument is further compromised by his attempt to undermine the
influence of colonial culture on the colonized. “[T]he area of cultural influence is
usually restricted to coastal strips and to a few limited parts in the interior.
Outside the boundaries of the capital and other urban centers, the influence of
the colonial power’s culture is almost nil” (Cabral 60). Cabral does not stop
there, “It can thus be seen that the masses in the rural areas, like a large section
of the urban population, say, in all, over 99% of the indigenous population are
untouched or almost untouched by the culture of the colonial power” (60). The
problem with these two positions is that they constitute a view of place and
culture as stable and bounded. Cultural influence cannot be locked within the
place where the colonizer lived, considering that people moved and mixed.
Furthermore, to claim that the indigenous population were “untouched or almost
untouched” is questionable if we consider that the colonial policies seriously
affected the interior regions. A cursory glance at V.Y. Mudimbe’s The |nvent_ion of
Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Ogder of Knowledge (1988), for example,
shows a colonization of Africans’ land and minds to an extent that challenges
Cabral’s assertion. Why, then, does Cabral take such a debatable view. Cabral,
like his fellow nationalist writers, had one primary goal — to authenticate the
precolonial culture, to validate the source. By arguing that “[precolonial] culture

took refuge in the villages, in the forests, and in the spirit of the victims of

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domination,” (61) Cabral apparently provides the rationale for return to the
source. His strategy here is to show that pre-colonial culture is not only existent,
but also unscathed after colonization. It is a position that Cabral himself
contradicts when he argues that culture, space, and time are closely related,
“The coordinates of culture, like those of any developing phenomenon, vary in
space and time, whether they be material (physical) or human (biological and
social)” (51 ).

Cabral also explains the concept, return to the source, in terms of the
indigenous petite bourgeoisie or native elites who turn to the native masses
following increased isolation and marginalization by the bourgeoisie. By so doing,
they “question their marginal status, and [work] to re-discover an identity” (62).
His explanation is worth quoting,

But the “return to the source” is not and cannot in itself be an act of

struggle against foreign domination (colonialist and racist) and it no longer

necessarily means a return to traditions. It is the denial, by the petite
bourgeoisie, of the pretended supremacy of the culture of the dominant
power over that of the dominated people with which it must identify itself.

(63)

This is a new development in Cabral’s thinking. With some difficulty, Cabral shifts
from looking at return to the source as a return to the indigenous cultural values
of the masses to looking at it as a denial of the supposed supremacy the
colonizer’s culture. The denial is a dialectical negative, which leads one to

question whether the “source” is the dialectical thesis, and if he is suggesting a

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process that produces the synthesis. Of course, the fact that the petite
bourgeoisie are partly formed by colonial culture already compromises their
denial. One would even add that if their denial is the definition of a return to the
source then that return is equally compromised. Still, Cabral’s shift brings about a
more complex understanding of return to the source than the previous one. For
example, it recognizes that a return to the source “is a slow process, broken up
and uneven, whose development depends on the degree of acculturation of each
individual, of the material circumstances of his life, on the forming of his ideas
and on his experiences as a social being” (Cabral 63). This is an important
recognition because it departs from the nationalist assumption that the masses
are always one and the same, even as it stresses on cultural identification with
the masses. “So, ‘the return to the source’ is of no historical importance unless it
brings not only real involvement in the struggle for independence, but also
complete and absolute identification with the hopes of the mass of the people,
who contest not only the foreign culture but also the foreign domination as a
whole” (Cabral 63). Arguably, this point is a populist qualification of the idea —
“return to the source.” Nevertheless, Cabral’s canonization of independence here
is premature, considering the despotism and disillusionments that followed
independence. Korouma’s Suns of Independence is a demonstration that the joy
of independence in some African countries was almost immediately replaced with
sorrow. For example, “The president and the single party launched a wave of
repression” (109). It was, therefore, not uncommon to find opposition politicians

strategizing for a second liberation. At this point, it is necessary that we look at

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how characters who return to the source like Ama Ata Aidoo’s Eulalie, in m
Dilemma of a Ghost fit Cabral’s definition.

Aidoo’s play is based on two major characters: Ato, a Ghanaian, and
Eulalie, and African American. Both of them are university students in America.
They meet at the university and develop an intimate relationship which leads to
their marriage. The play starts off with a conflict between the old and new. We
are told, “The action takes place in the courtyard of the newest wing of the
Odumna Clan house. It is enclosed on the right by a wall of the old building and
both at the centre and on the left by the walls of the new wing. At the right-hand
corner a door links the courtyard of the old house” (5). It becomes evident,
therefore, that the play is in part concerned with the relationship between time
(past and present) and home space. The play uses the newest wing of the house
to symbolize new developments in the history of the clan, and how these
developments re-define and extend the home space. In the play it is fashionable
to embrace modernity; as such, the horn blower sings with pride, “We are moving
forward, fonivard, forward...” (8). The new wing of the house is part of this
fonivard movement. But we encounter problems right away. This forward
movement is exclusionary because it leaves out almost all the residents, “[l]t is
expected that they [members of Odumna clan house] should reserve the new
addition to the house for the exclusive use of the One Scholar. Not that they
expect him to make his home there. No...he will certainly have to live and work in
the city when he arrives from the white man’s land” (8; my emphasis). Many

questions arise at this point. Why is the new wing of the house exclusively

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reserved for Ato? One reads a divided home. The rest of the family rejects
newness by not sharing the new house, and Ato rejects his past by not
demanding to share the old wings of the home. But the issue is much more
complex. Even though Ato does not live in the rural area, “they all expect him to
come down, now and then, at the weekend and festive occasions like Christmas.
And certainly, he must come home for blessings when the new yarn has been
harvested and Stools are sprinkled” (8). One is compelled to think that Ato does
not fully identify with the rural home. Home for Ato has become a contested
space. ls home the city where Ato lives everyday, or the rural area where he
comes at least once a year to attend the new yam blessings? That the Odumna
clan house is no longer a home to Ato in the way it was is evident in the fact that
it is a space he visits because he is expected to do so. It does not come naturally
to him as the city does. It is possible, therefore, that the new wing is not new
enough for Ato. What his parents perceived as a half-way home, bridging his
world and theirs, effectively becomes an abandoned home. One of the lessons
one learns from Ato’s location of home in the city is that travel widens one’s
cultural bearings, and thus shifts one’s understanding of home. Little wonder Ato
believes that his love his wife, not his family’s love for her, is “what matters” ( 10).
Ato registers his distance from the rural home when he tells his prospective wife,
Eulalie, about where they would live, “There are no palms where we will
live[...].Unless of course if I take you to see my folks at home. There are real
palm trees there” (9). Ato seems to view the rural home more as his parents’

home than his home, and his going there is a matter of if as opposed to when.

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Ato’s usage of “if” casts doubts on the givenness of his family ties and originality.
Indeed, his stance here deconstructs the idea of return to the source. It as
though his return stops at the outskirts of the source (in the city); it is a journey
that cannot be completed, contrary to the gospel of the retumists.

If we look at home in terms of family and community, then we can see that
home is divided at many levels. First, the forces that plucked Eulalie’s
grandparents from Africa into slavery not only delinked them from their ancestral
home but also destroyed the homes they left behind. Their labor which was
meant to build their ancestral home was now serving the slave master’s interests.
Walter Rodney’s How Europe Uncfldevelggid Africa (1972) is relevant here
because it talks about the relationship between labor exploitation and
underdevelopment. Second, the system of modernity in place during Ato’s time
demands that he goes to the West to acquire Western education so as to be
relevant in the new dispensation. If his departure was not bad enough for the
cohesiveness of the family, his settlement in the city when he returns is. The
alienation that afflicts Aidoo’s characters must be understood as systematic
rather than isolated/individual homelessness.

When we meet Eulalie, we learn that her university degree has not
granted her the happiness she expected (8). We also learn that she is an orphan
when she asks Ato, “Could I even point to you a beggar in the streets as my
father or mother? Ato, can’t your Ma be sort of my Ma too?” (9). Finally, Ato tells
us “her grandfathers and grandmothers were slaves” (18). Eulalie’s return and

her Afro-centrism represent a form of Black Diaspora politics. The three

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instances above provide a subtext for Eulalie’s homelessness. Eulalie pursued
her university degree on the understanding that it would grant her happiness as it
did her fellow Americans. However, upon her graduation, she realizes that her
case is different. What Eulalie is alluding to here is that she has been treated
differently because she is different from most Americans; that is, a university
degree has not worked for her because she is black, poor, and parentless (24).
Her loneliness stems not only from her parents’ death, but also from her society’s
unwillingness (not even a beggar wants to be a parent figure for her) to give her
parental care. And a society that does not care about an orphan, one is tempted
to think, would not care about the conditions that made her/him an orphan. When
viewed from that angle then the fact that Eulalie has no relatives comes across
as a commentary on her society’s calculated destruction of family unit. Eulalie’s
rhetorical question to her mum concurs: “There was no one left was there? And
how can one make a family out of Harlem?” (24). If Harlem is not congenial for
raising a family, then African Americans, to whom Harlem is home far away from
home, are doomed. Eulalie adds, “Ma, I’ve come to the very source. I’ve come to
Africa and I hope that where’er you are, you sort of know and approve” (24). It is
her alienation in America that drives her away, lest she perish prematurely like
her parents. But the issue becomes more complex when we read Eulalie as a
decoy of the Biblical Ruth. Echoing the Biblical Ruth’s plea to Naomi, Eulalie
asks Ato, “Ato, can’t your Ma be sort of my Ma too? And your Pa mine? And your
gods my gods? Shall I die where you will die?” (9). Eulalie’s pledge here draws

on Ruth’s declaration to Naomi, “Thy people shall be my people, Thy god shall

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be my god, Whither thou diest, I will die, and there I will be buried” (Ruth 1:17).
Ironically, as soon as she arrives in Ato’s home, Eulalie falls short of her Ruthian
pledge. For example, she refuses to make Ato’s food her food when she discards
the food that Ato’s mother gives her (31-32). What is food to Ato and Ato’s
people, to Eulalie, only amounts to “horrid creatures” (32). In addition, instead of
embracing the rituals that Ato’s people perform in order to bless the home, she
reduces them to “a blasted mess” (41) of “savage customs and standards” (47),
to a “rotten land” (48). The irony is that Eulalie uses the American culture, which
she strived to escape, to measure other cultures.

Eulalie also drinks coca-cola, saying, “I was only feeling a little homesick
and I drank it for sentimental reasons. I could have had a much cooler, sweeter
and more nourishing substitute in coconuts, couldn’t I?” (26). Here, again, Eulalie
fails to meet her Ruthian declaration. She is homesick not for Ato’s home, but her
home in America. The point here is that Eulalie finds the task of making Ato’s
home her home much more complex than she anticipated. One could
persuasively argue that the Biblical Ruth does a much better job of living up to
the Ruthian pledge than Eulalie — Ruth embraces Naomi’s people while Eulalie
calls Ato’s people “goddam people” who are “[m]ore savage than dinosaurs” (47).

When Ato uses his people’s culture to put pressure on her, she vexingly
asks Ato, “Who married me, you or your goddam people?” (47). Eulalie’s
question departs from her Ruthian pledge, and demonstrates not only that she
never studied the cultural constitution of the source before returning, but that the

ideal of a return to Africa is more difficult than the reality. In that sense, the text

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parodies the Afro-centrism of African Americans. If she had done so, she would
have known that she was not only marrying Ato, but also Ato’s people, as this is
one of the basic articles of Ato’s world. In any case, Ruth and Eulalie make the
new places they move to more tolerant of diversity, as they undergo
transformation in adjustment. Ruth is a Moabite while her mother-in-law, Naomi,
is an Israelite. The two sides (Moabites and Israelites/Bethlehemians) are
enemies.

Eulalie’s problem of belonging becomes clearer when she tells Ato, “To
belong to somewhere again...Sure, this must be bliss” (9). Eulalie implies here
that she does not belong anywhere, certainly not to America. Eulalie’s implied
unbelonging to America requires analysis. The word “again” suggests that Eulalie
once belonged somewhere. She is metaphorically referring to the collective
belongingness of African Americans to Africa, to the fact that African Americans
belonged to Africa before the historic slave trade. Politically, Eulalie’s claim is
strategic. But, culturally and socially, it is difficult to view Eulalie’s belonging to
Africa as wholly synonymous to the belonging (to Africa) of the very ancestors
who were uprooted. Nevertheless, Eulalie decides to return to the source
together with Ato in an attempt to find this elusive happiness, to find a home. But
the fact that she is neither grounded in America nor Africa complicates her
relocation. Born in America, Eulalie does not know Africa, except through
stereotypes (25). And even if she were one of the uprooted slaves from Africa,
her possible return would not necessarily be “bliss” as she assumes. Upon her

return, Eulalie finds out that the source is much more challenging than her

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romanticized view comprising “The palm trees, the azure sea, the sun and the
golden beaches” (9). As soon as she arrives in Africa, she realizes that she has
a lot of adjustments to make. That she is American first, then African second,
becomes clear when warm coca-cola (read America) wins over “a much cooler,
sweeter and more nourishing substitute in coconuts [read Africa]” (24). Eulalie’s
homesickness for America undermines her attempts to abandon it.

Aidoo’s play, one could argue, uses Eulalie to echo Marcus Garvey’s
“Return to Africa” call. Eulalie’s presence in America and her identity as an
African American dates back to the seventeenth through the nineteenth century
when Africans were shipped out of the continent through the Middle Passage into
the New World in the name of slave trade. There have been enormous cultural
transformations both in the Continent and in the Diaspora within that period. It is
on that premise that Paul Gilroy, in The Black Atla_nti_c_ (1993), bases his
argument that the Diasporic Africans share neither a similar history nor
experience with the Continental Africans (23-24). Gilroy’s main concern is that
the similarity claims misleadingly translate to the homogenization of the
differences between the two groups. Indeed, as long as culture is lived and
experienced, one cannot intelligently argue that Eulalie (African Americans) and
Ato (Africans) share a common culture. But even before Gilroy’s book, Aidoo had
documented the cultural differences; for example she exposes a clash of values
to underscore “the differences between [Eulalie’s] people and [Ato’s]” (9). But
some of the Diasporic Africans who seek to return to the source are already

aware that they do not share a common experience with Continental Africans.

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' Homeland and belongingness need not, and should not, be solely linked to
geographical locations. How then can we explain their quest to return to “the
source?”

One way is through a proverb, “a toad does not run in the daytime unless
something is after its life” (Achebe 138). Aidoo’s Eulalie is a university graduate;
we therefore expect her to secure a good job and to lead a good life. But, as she
reveals in a rhetorical question, this is not the case: “Why should I have
supposed that mere graduation is a passport to happiness?” (8). As a result of
slavery and its legacies, Eulalie leads a fragmented life without a family. So,
Eulalie’s return is an attempt to fill a missing link (family), for as John Durham
Peters has so convincingly argued, “The shock, disruption, or loss accompanying
exile together with the distance from the home’s mundane realities, can invite the
project of restoring the ‘original’ — the original home, the original state of being.
Idealization often goes with mourning” (19). The play does not tell us what
exactly happened to Eulalie’s parents — they could have been succumbed to the
very system that Eulalie is trying to run away from. The point is that Eulalie and,
by extension, Diasporic Africans, would not be so determined to return to the
source if American state ideological apparatuses had fully accommodated them.
If African Americans and other minorities are looking back, it is partly because
the state apparatus “feeds at a prissy distance on the wild glamour of minorities
while neither alleviating their hardships nor recognizing their autonomy. People of
color thus have real reasons for suspecting a whiteness that joins — and effaces,

all colors” (Peters 35). Indeed, “[v]ery often it is when we feel deeply dissatisfied

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with marketplace pluralism and its unwillingness to confront and correct the
injustices of dominant racism that we turn our diasporan gaze back to the home
country. Often, the gaze is uncritical and nostalgic [...] half-truths, stereotypes,
so-called traditions, rituals, and so-forth” (Radhakrishman 128). Aidoo’s return,
therefore, can be read as a search for belonging.

It is, admittedly, hopelessness and the thought that slavery is still alive
except in a subtle form, that makes some Diasporic Africans “look back, even at
the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt” (Rushdie 10). Eulalie’s mutation, for
instance, is marked by her frustration in Ghana. Writing on the same issue of
diaspora, but addressing the Caribbean people, Hall makes a long statement that

in my opinion applies to all Diasporic Africans:

Black, brown, mulatto, white - all must look Presence Afn'caine in the faCe,
speak its name. But whether it is, in this sense an origin of our identities,
unchanged by four hundred years of displacement, dismemberment,
transportation, to which we could in any final or literal sense return, is
more open to doubt. The original “Africa” is no longer there. It too has
been transformed. History is, in that sense, irreversible. We must not
collude with the West which, precisely, normalizes and appropriates Africa
by freezing it into some timeless zone of the primitive, unchanging past.
Africa must at last be reckoned with by Caribbean [African American]
people, but it cannot in any simple sense be recovered. (241)

Hall’s argument that Diasporic Africans ought to accept the Afn'canness and

exileness in them is persuasive. A return to pre-slavery Africa would be atavistic.

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But Hall fails to give a better alternative — the fact that Diasporic Africans cannot
return does not mean that they are at home. One needs to go beyond stating
where people cannot go, because the problem of the diaspora is not so much a
place to return to, but a place and space to belong to. Echoing Hall, Caren
Kaplan reminds us that people in the diaspora have “no possibility of staying at
home in the conventional sense - that is, the world has changed to the point that
those domestic, national, or marked spaces no longer exist” (7). Kaplan is right in
observing that “marked spaces no longer exist” but she does not address the
imaginary or the discourse of origins that operates regardless of the changes she
talks about. She also does not give an alternative space in which racial others of
the world like Eulalie can have a sense of belonging. Undoubtedly, cultural
identity and belonging are more problematic than they seem.

Worth noting is the question of hierarchy. By placing a premium on
returning to “the source,” Eulalie unwittingly reinforces the general misconception
that Africa (homeland) is superior to diaspora (America). She says, “Ma, I’ve
come to the very source. I’ve come to Africa and I hope that where’er you are,
you sort of know and approve” (24). Like ThefiDfiilemma of a Ghost, Lorraine
Hansberry’s A Raisin in t_he Sun draws on Garvey’s political clarion, “Back to
Africa.” Beneatha’s relationship with Joseph Asegai, like Eulalie and Ato’s, is
partly motivated by Beneatha’s search for African identity. Asegai is a Nigerian
(African), so Beneatha sees him as a gateway to African heritage. Not even the
knowledge that she is studying to be a medical doctor — a well paying and

respected profession — can appease her. It is this notion that the Diasporic

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Africans’ home is in Africa that makes many of them associate their sense of
belonging with Africa without critically assessing other factors that affect one’s
belonging. Braziel and Mannur rightly view “belonging as a process always in
change and always mediated by issues of class, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality”
(14). For example, TheiDilemma of a Ghost has two classes — the rich/ upper
class which consists of those who “have arrived” and the poor/ lower class which
is made up of those who “have not arrived.” In the words of Esi to Ato: “My knees
are callous with bending before the rich...How my friends must be laughing
behind me now. ‘After all the fuss, she is poorer than ever before’” (35). The
existence of these two classes — the poor and the rich — means that one could
belong or not belong depending on one’s class. The same is true of gender and
race. For instance, “Eulalie is objectified and her identity is gendered, racialized,
and contested as an ‘other’” (Eke 76). In the play the second woman refers to her
as “Black-white woman” (22). Note Esi’s speech to her son when Eulalie throws
away the snails: “Do you not know how to eat them now? What kind of man are
you growing into? Are your wife’s taboos yours? Rather your taboos should be
hers” (33; my emphasis). This could be read as gender inequality or patriarchal
tyranny, affirmed and perpetuated by women, but it could also be read as the
norm or culture of Ato’s people. Still on gender inequality, Ato gives the men
chairs while the women sit on the ground (42). Interestingly, the women have
internalized the inequality so much that when Ato later gives Eulalie his chair and
offers to sit on the ground, the women condemn him (43). That women have

internalized their oppression is also evident in Nana’s utterance when Eulalie

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leaves the gathering of men and women: “I have not heard the like of this before.
Is the woman for whom stalwart men have assembled herself leaving the place
of assembly?” (43; my emphasis). Why, one is tempted to ask, doesn’t Nana
acknowledge the women’s presence in this summit? The issue of belonging, as
we have seen, becomes more problematic when stretched along the lines of

gender, class, and sexuality.

In an attempt to configure a plausible home for characters like Eulalie,
Peters considers nomadism. According to Peters, “Nomadism [...] denies the
dream of a homeland, with the result that home, being portable, is available
everywhere” (31). Nomads laudably don’t subscribe to the notion of a fixed
home, a position that would perhaps solve the diasporic people’s endless desire
to return home. Defying settlement, the proponents of nomadism like Deleuze
readily embrace change. But nomadism does not simply refer to people in
motion. As Braidotti would say, “It is the subversion of set conventions that
defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of traveling” (Peters 33). That said,
nomadism does not adequately address the crisis of diasporic identity, especially
among African Americans. One needs to recognize that there is a world of
difference between being forced into exile and going to exile voluntarily. The
African Americans like Eulalie “did not choose to lose their homes and
homelands; mourning is not their fault but a fate” (Peters 34). Moreover, and
perhaps more importantly, as Bourgeot argues, “[t]hough nomadism may inspire
theorists, actual nomads arouse disdain and disgust from nation-states and their

citizens” (qtd. in Peters 36). Nomads generally live in miserable conditions, and,

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thanks to racism and bigotry, are associated with backwardness. We risk
undermining their political struggles for change when we romanticize nomadism.
Looked at in that context, we ought to declare where we stand before we
celebrate nomadism, even if it is only a metaphor. Even so, one must still recall
that Diasporic peoples and original homelands “are not naturally and organically

connected” (Boyarin and Boyarin 723).

In the words of Karen Chapman, “The American Black has been removed
from Africa for a long time. Contrary to what many romantically inclined
Garveyites would like to believe, to return to the ‘source’ is a much more difficult
task than its fascination may suggest, for it would mean returning to a culture
never experienced” (30). Sharing a similar view, but in a different context,
Kenneth Harrow rightly argues that diasporic return to the source can be
“realized only as a dream, as [...] fantasy, in the spaces outside of harsh reality
and its dilemmas” (172). Paradoxically, it is precisely these dreams and fantasies
that feed the actions of individuals and even the political movements of return. In
other words, it might be delusive to think that Diasporic Africans’ identity is lying
somewhere in Africa, waiting to be embraced; however, that does not stop the
dreams. In brief, even though we can never feel at home anywhere, it is
imperative to negotiate identity and home wherever we are, and to recognize that
they are bound to undergo constant change with time and with new situations
and experiences (given their fluidity). Glissant makes a similar point, as we have

seen in the introduction.

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As Hall so persuasively argues in a different context, homelands are “are subject

to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture, and power” (236).

To understand the complexity of this notion of return to the source, one
has to follow the conversation between the old man, Medouze, and the little boy,
Jose, in Euzhan Palcy’s film, gigar Cane Alley (1983). The film is set in the
Martinique of 19303, and depicts the lives of “former” slaves and their
_ descendants who work on sugar cane plantations. They live in shacks, and live
on “pig tails.” In other words, poverty is their daily bread. When Palcy’s Jose asks
Medouze to take him with him when he returns to Africa, the old man wisely
educates him on what returning to Africa entails. Calling Africa his “dad’s
country,” Medouze explains to Jose thus,

Alas, my child

Medouze will never go to Africa

Medouze has no one left in Africa

When I will be dead...

When my old body is buried...

then I’ll go to Africa

But I can’t take you along.

We’ll all go to Africa one day.

It is important to analyze Medouze’s subtlety here: I’ll never go to Africa, I’ll go to
Africa when I am dead, and we’ll all go to Africa one day. What exactly does
Medouze mean? Medouze tells Jose that he would never return to Africa except

in death, meaning that he would only return to the source in spirit. He realizes

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that his return in life is not practical without dismissing the concept of return. This
education is critical and timely. It is an education that Aidoo’s Eulalie could learn
from. Palcy does not in anyway suggest that Medouze has a happy home in
Martinique. In fact, what Medouze calls home is nothing but a Black Shack, an
equivalent of slums, where black sugarcane plantation workers are forced to live
by the oppressive socio-economic conditions. Even though slavery has formally
ended, Medouze says, “Nothing has changed, son. The whites own all the land.
The law forbids their beating us, but it doesn’t force them to pay us a decent
wage.” This, of course, is well before workers’ unions and labor organizations.
His bed is a hard pile of bamboo. His body reveals penury and hardship. While
his younger life was reduced to slavery, his old age involves servitude. He has to
work the plantations for wages that can only buy alcohol to help him sleep
through the hard-labor and age related aches. He has no family because all his
family were scattered by “The white men [who] hunted us. They caught us with
lassos. Then...They took us to the edge of the big water. One day we were
unloaded here. We were sold to cut cane for the whites.” Why, then, does
Medouze, who has a much closer relationship with Africa, and a vivid memory of
the capture and subsequent enslavement across the Atlantic, reject a physical
return to the source? What are we to make of his position? And what are we to
make of this charcter who actually provides a historical link to Africa for Jose?
Medouze recognizes that Africa is not spared from the oppressive forces that

have subjected him to servitude.

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Kane’s Ambivalent Adventure (1963), like its title, is more ambivalent than
Aidoo’s Thepilemma of a Ghost . It is set in the period of new independence,
and explores the challenges arising from locating the source in the shadow of
empire. It shows that Samba Diallo’s exposure to western culture has cost him
his faith and spirituality, which is why he no longer wants to pray. The novel
seems to echo a common belief towards the end of the nineteenth century that
“western material progress had amounted to spiritual and artistic decadence”
(Snead 236). At the same time, the novel presents the Most Royal Lady’s case
positively, implying that there is another way of locating home - beyond the
source. To that end, the novel is a dialogue about whether to return to the source
or form an alternative community beyond the source. For example, Samba Diallo
completely refuses to pray upon his return, a refusal which leads the fool to kill
him. His refusal to pray and to reach the teacher’s grave, symbolically suggests
that his retum to the source is incomplete. Of course, one could argue that his
death is in keeping with return to the source, that a seed must die in order to
bring new life. But that argument is debatable because if it were the case, then
Samba Diallo’s spiritual death in France would have sufficed. It seems here that
a narrative of return has burst its seams, thus indicating the difficulty, even
impossibility, of a complete return.

Aidoo’s source also ruptures, even if to a lesser degree. At the time of
Ato’s return, the source is a shadow of its past. According to the Second Woman,
“[Tjhose days are over When it was expedient for two deer To walk together,

Since anyone can see and remove The beam in his eye with a mirror” (22). By

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shifting from a community in which people care for one another to an
individualistic arena in which everyone is for herself/himself, the source yields to
the forces that made Eulalie leave America. What, then, is the point of returning?
On a similar note, women without children are not at home (23). That is, to be
barren in this space is a misfortune.

The questions of race weaves through the three major narratives
discussed here. Note, for example, the racial tension in Eulalie’s “conversation”
with her late mum, "

And I had it all, Ma, even graduation. “You’ll be swank enough to look a

white trash in the eye and tell him to go to hell.” Ma, ain’t l telling the whole

of the States to go swing! Congress, Jew and white trash, from Manhattan
to Harlem... “Sugar, don’t let them do you in.” Ma, I didn’t. “Sugar, don’t
sort of curse me and your Pa every morning you look your face in the
mirror and see yourself black. Kill the sort of dreams silly girls that they are
going to wake up one morning and find their skins milk white and their
hairs soft blonde like the Hollywood tarts. Sugar, the dear God made you
just that black and you canna do nothing about it.” Ma, it was hard not to
dream but I tried...only I wish you were not dead...l wish you were right
here, not even in the States, but here in this country where there will be no

washing for you no more and where... (24)

Eulalie makes it clear that she is disappointed with the white American state
apparatus, led by the Congress. She says that her mum’s hands are “chapped

with washing to keep [her] in college” (24). The dreams reveal that blacks are

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under media pressure to conform to white/ Hollywood beauty standards. The
black girls’ daily dreams for white skins and blonde hair remind us of Derek
Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain (1971 ), especially the part where
Walcott’s Moustique says, “And that is what they teach me since I small. To be
black like coal, and dream of milk. To love God, and obey the white man” (290).
Milk, in this play, symbolizes whiteness. So, Moustique, like many blacks growing
up in the colonial system, is trained to yearn for that which he cannot be, right
from his childhood.

Walcott’s Dieam on Monkey Mountain examines the problem of locating
home among Afro-Caribbeans; that is, it plays out a conflict between returning to
Africa and remaining in the West Indies. The ambivalent and multi-layered play
employs both dream and parody to demonstrate the agony of being what Patrick
Colrn Hogan, in Colonialism Cultural Identity (2000), calls a “white in self-
perception and black in self-image” (48). It is predicated on an ambiguous dream,
a dream that simultaneously passes as a vision and as an illusion. Walcott warns
us that the dream is “illogical, derivative, contradictory” (208). And, one may add,
destructive and unattainable. Yet, the characters need these dreams to navigate
a Caribbean world defined by the black and white tropes, a world that constantly
marginalizes them, a world that they perpetuate by internalizing the
dehumanizing labels they are given. As Hogan elaborates, “[Tjhere is
dissociation in virtually all the characters, dissociation that results from the
denigratory identities projected onto Afro-Caribbeans by colonialist racism,

identities partially accepted by those men and women themselves” (46). One

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example of such dissociation is seen in Makak’s self-hatred. He hates his visual
image the same way the colonizer hates it; Lacan would say that he sees himself
as others (the colonizer) see him. Nowhere is this Lacanian self-hatred more
conspicuously seen than in Makak’s confession: “Not a pool of cold water, when I
must drink, / l stir my hands first, to break up my image” (226). While one could
read his action of stirring the water to break his image as a symbol of his
fragmented mind, it especially reveals his determination to avoid coming face to
face with his image (which he perceives as ugly). He is clearly denying himself.
That reading is reinforced by his revelation, “ls thirty years now I have look in no
mirror” (226). Makak avoids the mirror because he has wrongly subscribed to the
notion that he is ugly. He cannot stand what he sees when he looks at the mirror.
There is much more to the image question. Makak apprises Corporal Lestrade,
“Sir, I am sixty years old. I have live all my life/ Like a wild beast in hiding.
Without child, without wife” (226). One’s child is essentially one’s image, and,
since Makak is already ashamed ‘of his image, he does not want a child. Both the
wife and child would act as mirrors (he will see himself in them), which he has
avoided all his life. He hides because he does not fit into the norm. In order to
avoid further humiliation, Makak and his fellow Afro-Caribbeans try to become
white.

Upon realizing that the goal of becoming white is unattainable, they begin
to search for blackness through reactionary nativism/ reverse racism and the
original moment or source. Walcott’s “What the Twilight Says: An Overture” notes

the process: “Once we have lost our wish to be white we develop a longing to

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become black, and those two may be different, but are still careers” (20). Even
the retrieval of the original moment, which the characters in the play, led by
Makak, attempt to do is ultimately futile for several reasons, one of which is the
realization that their ancestry is multi-rooted. If Makak fails in his bid to liberate
his people, it is because, as Cornel West says in a different context, his dream
“remained captive to the supremacy game -— a game mastered by the white
racists he opposed and imitated with his black supremacy doctrine” (142). In a
similar vein, as Fanon would say, “the assertion of pure, essential blackness is a
reaction, still imprisoned within the dualism [Manicheanism] of colonial discourse.
With the destruction of the myth of white superiority, the need for that reaction
disappears as well” (Breslin 130).

Following his dream and experiences, Makak realizes that any meaningful
liberation must recognize that the two races (whites and blacks) are intricately
tied together, they are not Manichean in relationship: “I wanted to leave this
world. But if the moon is earth’s friend, eh, Tigre, how can we leave the earth”
(304). In other words, Walcott is challenging the colonized to acknowledge their
Africanness as well as their Caribbeanness, hence hybridity. He illuminates his

position in his paper, “Necessity of Negritude.”

For us, whose tribal memories have died, and who have begun again in a
New World, Negritude offers an assertion of pride, but not of our complete
identity, since that is mixed and shared by other races, whose writers are
East Indian, white, mixed, whose best painters are Chinese, and in whom the

process of racial assimilation goes on with every other marriage. (23)

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“For Walcott,” argues Paula Burnett, “the task is to demonstrate the incorporation
of multiple traditions in the Caribbean location, mythified as the site of hybridity”
(35). Granted, hybridity is the pragmatic way forward. After all, as Werbner and
Modood put it, “cultures evolve historically through unreflective borrowings,
mimetic appropriations, exchanges and inventions. There is no culture in and of
itself” (4-5). That previously opposing camps (whiteness and blackness) can

question their supposed purity and coexist in the subject is encouraging.

Walcott expects his characters to move from “the expressive, with its rigid
claims and oftentimes unexamined ethnocentric biases” to “the performative, a
self-critical model that conceives identity as open, interculturally negotiable, and
always in the making — a process” (Olaniyan, m 4). Walcott’s objective in this
play, to borrow from West, is to make his characters “affirm themselves as
human beings, no longer viewing their bodies, minds and souls through white
lenses, and believing themselves capable of taking control of their own destinies”
(136). That is why his main character, “Makak (monkey) begins as the exemplary
victim of the colonial hegemonic discourse, living fully his constitution — his
subjection, as ‘black, ugly, poor [and so] worse than nothing’ (237), then
gradually negotiating his way towards self-definition” (Olaniyan, “Corporeal” 156).
Olaniyan’s observation is echoed by Brown, who rightly says that the Makak we
see at the end of the play marks “a new Black self-definition” (20). Like Makak,
the colonized in West Indies ought to accept that they are Afro-Caribbeans, and

that their home is the West Indies. If Walcott’s Makak realizes the need to find

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home in the diaspora, Aidoo’s Eulalie does not. How, then, does Kourouma’s text

configure home?

Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence ironically, even satirically,
valorizes the source, which it refers to as the native village. The irony in part lies
in the text’s location in the city while it emphasizes the need for a Malinke to live
in the native village. Note, for example, Balla’s advice to Fama, “[N]ever stay
away long from your ancestors’ graves; only in Togobola will a Dumbuya, a
descendant of Suleyman, grow, prosper, flower and bear fruit” (102). The text
privileges the native village as a site for burying a Malinke, and provides
consolations/compensations when the burial takes place elsewhere. For
example, after painting Kone’s burial in the city as a setback, it assures us that
his soul would return to the native village. The narrator says, “Then the shade
took its leave forever, and walked back to the Malinke homeland, there to bring
joy to a mother through reincarnation as a Malinke infant” (4). From a spiritual
angle, Kone’s soul is more important than his body. As such, the resting place of
the soul (which is the native village) is more important than the resting place of
the body (in this case the city). The soul’s return to the native village therefore
compensates for the burial of a Malinke in the city. The narrator also uses the
concept of soul and reincarnation to defy death; the forces of death may conquer
Kone, but they cannot conquer his “shade” or soul. Kone’s death is further
compensated when, courtesy of reincarnation, Kone’s soul takes a new life in a
Malinke infant back in the native village. That way, Kone is not only back to life,

but also back to the native village. This double return affirms the resilience of

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one’s past and history, as it reveals the difficulty of retrieving the original. The
text uses this scene to show the givenness of return to the source, even in cases
when one is buried in the city.

How do the Malinke in the city relate to their space? First, the Malinke in
the city are economically marginalized. They trace their penury to independence;
their “trading activities were ruined by Independence (and God alone knows how
many old traders ruined by Independence there are in the capital city!) all ‘work’
the burials and funeral rites” (4). Second, racial segregation policies in place
mean that Malinkes can only live in a poor part of town known as “the African
quarter” while whites live in the city proper, also known as “the white men’s town”
(5). The narrator does not hesitate to remind us of the difference between the two
quarters, “The African quarter dwindled in the distance and was lost amidst dark
clumps of trees; the European quarter, still faint in the distance, shone with
street-lamps” (29). Darkness and light are metaphorically used to show that the
European quarter was affluent while the African quarter was poor. This disparity
makes it difficult for Africans to fully embrace some aspects of the city, including
their neighborhoods. Third, the labor relations undermine attempts to locate
home in the city, thus making Africans look back. Making a case for return to the
source, the narrator says, “The African is in Hell! The buildings, bridges and
roads over there, all built by African hands, were lived in by Europeans and
belonged to them. Independence couldn’t do a thing about it! Everywhere, under
every sun, on every soil, Africans hold the beast’s feet, while the Whites carve it

up and wolf down the meat and fat. Was it not Hell to toll in the shadows for

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others?” (11). The exploitation of Africans’ labor partly explains why Africans
yearn to return home. The novel shows a steady decline in the city, a decline
which threatens the Malinke’s dignity and humanity. Fama is a case in point, “He,
Fama, born to gold, food in plenty, honour and women! Bred to prefer one gold to
another, to choose between many dishes, to bed his favourite of a hundred
wives. What was he now? A scavenger...A hyena in a hurry” (5). Of course, one
reads not only the good old days, but also exploitation of women and resources.
Women are depicted as Fama’s property, who have to outdo each other in order
to win Fama’s favor. One also has to question the cost of what appears to be an
excessive royal life. Whose labor makes it possible for the prince to have excess
gold? What are the working conditions of the miners? Do these miners miss the
old good days as much as the prince does? From a labor relations point of view,
the excess in gold and dishes suggests that there are workers who do the work,
but do not benefit from the same. To understand the connection between what is
amiss in the city and the characters’ homelessness, one has to study the novel
more closely. One example stands out,
Filthy city, sticky with rain, rotten 'with rain! Ah! The longing for Fama’s
native land: its deep distant sky, its soil arid but firm, its ever-dry days. Oh!
Horodugu, you were what this city lacked, and everything that had given
Fama the happy childhood of a prince, that too was lacking (sun, honour
and gold): when at rising the slave grooms brought the horse for the
morning parade, when at second prayer the praise-singers sang the

everlasting power of the Dumbuya, and afterwards the marabouts recited

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the Koran and taught alms-giving and mercy. Who then could have

thought he would come to be hurrying from one ceremony to the next, a

beggar?” (12)

The native land is located in a healthier environment than the city, hence the
allure. But by looking back, the retumists also approve a system that kept slaves
for their own interests. How, then, can one imagine returning to a space that
does not enable everyone to experience a sense of home and belonging? While
we celebrate the notion of home, we need to pay attention to the homelessness
of the slave grooms.

A sense of home escapes Kourouma’s characters partly because of their
obsession with legitimacy, hierarchy, totems, and ethnicity. If one is not othered
on the basis of her/his caste, she/he is othered on the basis of his legitimacy
and/or ethnicity (6). References like “a proper Malinke” (7), “a legitimate son”
(36), “a true Dumbuya” (56), “authentic descendants of great chiefs” (9) abound.
Even praise-singers are ranked, “The real praise-singers, the last of the true
caste of praise singers, were buried with Samory’s great war captains” (9). These
divisions — based on authenticity, legitimacy, hierarchy, totems, and ethnicity —
undermine any attempt to build a collective sense of home.

Kourouma’s characters also find it difficult to feel at home after
independence. Their post-independence disillusionment stems from the
dysfunctions of their independent nation, which in turn undermine the nation’s
progress. The narrator says, “The streets had no gutters, because there again

Independence had played false, they never dug the gutters they promised and

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they never will; water will swamp the streets as always, and colonized or
independent, the Africans will keep on wading through them until such times as
God unpeels the curse struck fast in their black backsides” (16). By failing to
build gutters, the government undermines the social stability of its citizens. If the
city is bad, the native village is worse. Following supposed independence and
socialism, the native village becomes a hub of oppression and exploitation, as
evident in the cases of Jakite, Jakite’s father, and Konate (57-58). It is instructive
that Fama is returning to the native village, while Jakite and Konate are fleeing
from it. It is equally telling Salimata runs away from the native village to the city in
order to escape patriarchal oppression (30). Her oppression and subsequent
flight problematize the depiction of the source as paradise, as a place to return
to, as home. Indeed, the fact that Salimata finds home in the city, and not the
native village, suggests that men and women have different relationships with the
source. Of course, Salimata does not entirely escape from patriarchal domination
in the city. Neither the native village nor the city provides Salimata with a real
home; the city is just a lesser devil. Home is more or less elusive to Fama, as he
cannot easily decide between living in the native village and the city. The fact that
“Fama had not yet decided” (56) shows that the decision is not obvious; none of
the places is completely hospitable. Fama gives the impression that he has more
to lose by living in the city (including Salimata, all his friends, all the ceremonies
and palavers), an impression which strengthens the city’s budding status as a

home. Fama’s natural belonging to his native village is again questioned when

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the customs office at the border refers to Fama as a foreigner, and thus demands
that he produces an identity card before he is allowed to enter (69).

Fama finds his native village quite different from the picture he had in his
mind, “Of the Togobola of his childhood, the Togobolahe bore in his heart, there
was nothing left, not even the whiff of a fart. All the same, in twenty years the
world hadn’t turned upside-down. But this was what remained. Here and there
one or two tumbledown sun-baked huts, isolated like anthills on a plain” (70). As
we see the danger of having a fixed notion of home and origin, we also see a
past that has refused to die. This death-defying past is also evident in a
landmark, “the baobab in the marketplace,” that Fama recognized (70-71).

Following his release from prison, Fama insists on returning to the
source. Bakary’s persuasions, mixed with selfish interests and pragmatism, do
not sway him. One may question Bakary’s motivation, but not his logic when he
asks Bakary, “What will you do in Togobala? The chiefdom is dead. Togobala is
finished, it’s a ruined village” (126). Considering Fama’s inability to meet the
financial demands of his fellow villagers during his last visit, one could argue that
Bakary is largely right when he warns that Fama would “die of poverty” if he
returned to Togobala (127). Bakary’s drawing of the source demands attention,
as it challenges notions of a happy home in the native village. Even so, it would
be inaccurate to reduce Fama’s return to a search for happiness. The power and
pull of the source lie in the very fact that one wants to die there, to end his/her
journey there. Fama is no exception. The narrator says, “As paradoxical as it

may seem, Fama was going to Horodugu in order to die as soon as possible. It

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had been predicted, centuries before the suns of independence, that Fama was
to die near the graves of his ancestors [...]” (128). Fama’s journey is, of course,
interrupted at the border that ushers him into Horodugu, “T he border was shut
until further notice, in both directions; all traffic was suspended for the moment”
(131 ). To exacerbate the situation, Fama does not have his identity card, yet, “No
one could pass without papers” (131). It is telling that Fama has to ask for
permission to enter his native village. As a result of colonialism, borders have
been used to create countries where there were none, and people who took the
belonging to the source for granted are now considered strangers. Out of
frustration Fama asks, “Did a Dumbuya, a real one, father Dumbuya, mother
Dumbuya, need permission from all the bastard sons of dogs and slaves to go to
Togobala? Of course not” (132). In a twist of irony, people who should seek
Fama’s permission to get into Togobala turn out to be the people who demand
Fama’s papers before they can permit him to enter. Indeed, things have fallen
apart. Even the sacred crocodile, that is treated like a god by the Dumbuya, does
not recognize the last Dumbuya; “he had been mortally wounded by the
crocodile” (134). So, after all his effort, Fama can only return to the source as a

cadaver, “Fama had finished, was finished” (136).

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Chapter Two
Understanding Home Through National and Transnational Borders (Home

After Independence and During Post-Independence Disillusionment)

“How does one inscribe oneself between here and there?” (Gikandi 203).
Nationhood — the very definition of citizenship - is constantly being demarcated and
redemarcated in response to exiles, refugees, Gastarbeiter, immigrants, migrations, the
displaced, the fleeing, and the besieged. The anxiety of belonging is entombed within the
central metaphors in the discourse of globalism, transnationalism. nationalism, the break-
up of federations, the rescheduling of alliances, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these
figurations of nationhood and identity are frequently as raced themselves as the

originating racial house that defined them. When they are not raced, they are, as I

mentioned earlier, imaginary landscape, never inscape; Utopia, never home. (Morrison

10-11)

The national maps, borders, and boundaries in Africa cannot be
understood outside of the European Empires that drew them. Following the
partition of Africa at the Berlin Conference in 1885, the colonial enterprise used
maps to construct an epistemology of closed geographies and monolithic
cultures. This colonial ideology of closed spaces was later inherited and used by
African nationalists to perceive a sense of home or national community. Any
serious attempt to locate home in African culture, therefore, has to address the
cultural economy of borders and maps. In particular, it has to challenge the
colonial and nationalist assumption that spaces are isolated from one another,
and attempt to find alternative methods of defining geographical, national, and
gender borders. This chapter seeks to show that the conventional usage of

colonial boundaries by both European colonizers and African nationalists has

legitimated exclusiveness and blurred inextricable intercultural links across

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borders. To borrow Graham Huggan’s words in “Decolonizing the Map” (1995),
the chapter articulates “a resistance to the notion of cartographic enclosure and
to the imposed cultural limits that notion implies” (408). The use of boundaries to
separate imaginary outsiders from insiders has led to conflictive identities and
oppressive power relations, with significant implications on the idea of home.
These repellant cartographic legacies, designed by the empire and retained by
the nationalists, are responsible for the construction of homogenous and
dominant cultures. The traditional readings of geographical and gender
boundaries as fixed engender misleading notions of cultural impermeability,
hence the need for revision. Contrary to the conventional position, the cultures
beyond our boundaries, far from being other, inform and are informed by our own
cultures. Similarly, the colonial borders and maps, rather than designating
endings, designate beginnings of intersections and networks. To the extent that
these borders and maps allow for cultural exchanges and encounters across
them, they challenge colonial attempts to use them as impenetrable dividers,
and, by extension, re-define understandings of home based on such usage. At its
core, this chapter attempts to locate home between here and there.

Drawing on complex identities formed across boundaries, the chapter
challenges the monolithic, nationalist identities based on colonial maps and
boundaries. To that end, it “indicates a shift of emphasis away from the desire of
homogeneity towards acceptance of diversity reflected in the interpretation of the
map, not as a means of spatial containment or systematic organization, but as a

medium of spatial perception which allows for the reformulation of links both

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within and between cultures” (Huggan 408). This shift is critical in the wake of
ethnic clashes, for example the Rwanda genocide, which continue to afflict
Africa. It involves understanding that the conventional epistemology about maps,
now policed by nationalists, is a brainchild of empire designed to suppress
diversity. In other words, the colonial maps stem from the principle of divide and
rule. Empire produces fractures and reinforces ethnic divisions. The new
cartographic discourse has to open space for “flexible cross-cultural patterns
[which] not only counteract the monolithic conventions of the West but revision
the map itself as the expression of a shifting ground between alternative
metaphors rather than as the approximate representation of a “literal truth’”
((Huggan 409). One way of rethinking conventional cartographic epistemology
which stages isolated and unified spaces is by looking at a map as a rhizome
with “multiple entryways” (Deleuze and Guattari 14). This perspective allows for
the argument that spaces are always open, and thus connected to other spaces,
which in turn challenges the notion of isolated spaces and homogenous cultures
passed on by the colonizer. Focusing on Nuruddin Farah’s Maps (1999) and
Bessie Head’s A Question of Power (1 974), this chapter argues, together with
Svetlana Boym, in The Future of Nostalgia (2001, that “Space [read home] is
expandable into many dimensions; one has more and more homes in the span of
one’s life, real and virtual; one criss-crosses more borders” (351 ). It attempts to
negotiate transnational identity within a narrow framework of national identity,
and to address issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality that underline the

texts. Equally important, this chapter uses racism, patriarchal tyranny, and

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internal displacement to show that being inside the border does not necessarily
guarantee belonging.

As Henry A. Giroux, in his article “Pedagogy and the Politics of
Postmodernism” (1991 ), has pointed out, a “border signals in the metaphorical
and literal sense how power is inscribed differently on the body, culture, history,
space, land, and psyche” (51). The key word here is power. The borders are
organized around the idea of power. The colonial enterprise used borders/ maps
to establish the colonial policy of divide and rule, and to declare their domination
of the conquered spaces. Similarly, African nationalists used borders to draw the
parameters of the nation, to fend off outsiders. In both cases, borders were
defined as markers of bounded spaces; culture ended at the borderline. The
critical role border plays in the function and sustenance of power suggests that
the conventional reading of boundaries is strategic, if flawed. Farah’s Maps
deconstructs conventional borders, and thus addresses the political and cultural
chasms they engender. The novel is interested in engaging with the other, in
crossing physical, cultural, and national borders. To the extent that it decolonizes
and denationalizes maps, the novel opens a space for cultural diversity and
heterogeneity. To be sure, Farah destabilizes tradition and cultural absoluteness
upon which borders are grounded, and, by so doing, pushes the nation to allow
for transnational subjectivities.

While nationalism was fashionable in the era of national movements of
liberation, transnationalism is having a great vogue in this era of anti-national

currents. The idea of the nation has proved restrictive, even oppressive, thus

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contradicting the notion of freedom that it was founded on. To be sure, this
limitation is not germane to a particular period; it has always been inherent in the
very idea of national borders. National borders function on the premise of
insiders and outsiders; to be an insider finds value in perceived safety and
protection from the dangerous, often imaginary, outsiders. Interestingly, this very
need for outsiders to give definition to insiders already undercuts the binary logic
of borders. In fact, Farah uses Askar to show that there is really no outside;
Askar has ambivalent allegiances, none of which is totalizing, to both Somalia
and Ethiopia. Such cases of transnational identities, a simultaneous belonging to
this nation and that nation, compel one to consider a more flexible conception of
borders and identities. In some cases, being inside the borders does not
guarantee the promise of nationhood, thereby bringing to the fore the question of
statelessness. It is this sense of homelessness that lead to displacement and
migration across national demarcations, which further complicate one’s bearings
of home. Farah’s Maps puts national borders to task by presenting transnational
characters whose identities belong here and there. When national borders that
hitherto acted as coordinates for national identity fail to accommodate these
multiple identities in the postcolonial moment, they beg us to rethink them.

As Mary N. Layoun has noted in Wedded to the Land?: Gender,
Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis (2001), more attention needs to be paid to
“the gendered construction of the national citizen —- and by extension, of the non-
citizen — and of his or her sexuality” (14). The gender boundaries are

instrumental in the constitution of the nation because they serve the nation’s

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unfailing need for a common enemy, for the other. Indeed, “The very basic
rhetorical and organizational principles of the nation are tropes for and
expressions of gendered power” (Layoun 14). This is evident in Maps when
Hilaal tells Askar what it would take for Misra to acquire Somali citizenship: “What
she might need is a couple of male witnesses to take an oath that they’ve known
her all her life and that she is a Somali, etc., etc.; no more. And all they have to
do is sign an affidavit, that is all” (175; my emphasis). That only males can serve
as witnesses speaks to the larger boundaries of gender that have been
systematized into official policy. Karin, for instance, is a Somali, a senior citizen,
and a wife of a Somali freedom fighter who has known Misra for several years,
but her gender disqualifies her from serving as a witness. Misra’s citizenship
hurdles also speak to the condition of migrants and exiles all over the world.
They are good enough to provide cheap or free labor, as Misra does when she
raises Askar, but they are not good enough for citizenship. Unless these national
boundaries of inside and outside are blurred, (im)migrants like Misra will either
remain suspended in statelessness or be murdered by the so-called insiders.
Paradoxically, while Somali women are not allowed to serve as witnesses for
Somali citizenship applicants, they are required to reproduce the nation, as a
form of labor.

In a similar fashion, the Somali nationalists promote literatures which
equate Somalia with “a beautiful woman” (102) without seeming to reconcile the
gap between the sacred position of the national symbol vis-a-vis the

disempowered position of women on the national space. Of course, women are

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not entirely powerless, as there are subversive moments when they contest
patriarchal tyranny. We see this when Misra resists her foster-father’s violations:
“So, the man the little girl thought of and addressed as ‘Father’ for ten years of
her life, overnight became a man to her, a man who insisted he make love to her
and that she call him ‘husband’. In the end, the conflicting loyalties alienated her,
primarily from her self. And she murdered him during an excessive orgy of
copulation” (72; my emphasis). The insistence amounts to rape under the guise
of marriage, and it is enabled by the patriarchal society that normalizes it. The
man’s insistence assumes that Misra is passive, powerless and helpless, an
assumption which perpetuates gender inequality. By murdering her father-turned-
husband, Misra registers a sense of agency; she shatters the conventional
boundaries that typify women as powerless and men as powerful. However, even
as we note Misra’s heroic act and its renegotiation of gender boundaries, we are
left wondering whether murder/violence is a productive way of addressing
patriarchal oppression. Of course, one could also read Misra’s outrageous act as
an act of desperation, of the helpless.

Following her settlement in the Ogaden, Misra is raped by “a dozen young
men” (194). This particular rape has a larger meaning, as it exploits the image of
a woman as a symbol of the nation. The rapists are zealous Somali nationalists,
actively participating in what they call the Western Somali Liberation. One could
therefore view their act of rape as a foreign invasion of Ethiopia played out on
Misra’s body. In this sense, as Layoun would argue, “purity is sovereignty, rape is

the violation of sovereignty, and consummation is possession of pure and

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sovereign land” (18). It is indicative that the Somali nationalists label Misra as a
traitor before they rape her; this way, they can explain away their violation of
Misra’s dignity and rights, a violation which should have no room in any nation,
as an act of national defense committed by baboons: “The baboons, said the
poet among them (and one of them was a poet), smelt the beast in her and went
for it; the baboons smelt her traitor’s identity underneath the human skin and
went for it again and again. Thank God, we were there to save her body since, as
a traitor, she had ransomed her soul” (195). Misra is essentially reduced to a
beast, no longer a human being; Somali nationalists’ exploitation of Misra makes
it difficult for a reader to tell where colonization ends and national independence
begins. One could also read the Somali nationalists’ sexual violation of Misra as
a twisted violation of Somalia, considering that Misra is in part Somali. Given
such a gendered dimension of power which heavily favors men over women, it is
not surprising to learn that Askar prefers being sick to being a woman (111). The
Ogaden residents are ethnically diverse, neither this nor that, products of
borderlands; however, they fall into an either/or paradigm with its unsettling
implications. These border negotiations express the need for better ways of
coming to terms with our differences.

In an influential reading of Maps entitled Beyond Empire and Nation
(2004), Francis Ngaboh-Smart observes that the novel “draw[s] our attention not
only to the difficulty of positing identity based on primordial values, but also to the
relationship between self and state, individual and collective responsibility, and

the construction of alternative forms of identification” (5). The ambivalent

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relationship between self and state, I argue, is an extension to the problem of
locating home. Set in Somalia, Farah’s Maps challenges the national framework
by creating a major character, Askar, who is tied to several nations and no
nation. That is, Askar’s biological mother, Arla, who is Somali, dies immediately
after his birth, leaving an Ethiopian (Oromo) woman, Misra, to become Askar’s
surrogate mother. In time, Misra, whose name means “Egypt” in Arabic and
Hebrew, and Askar become a part of each other: “Parts of [his] body mingled well
with hers” (62). This mingling of Ethiopia and Somalia is emblematic of Farah’s
attempt to create a space for transnational subjectivities. In Askar’s words, “I
seem to have remained a mere extension of Misra’s body for years — you saw
me when you set your eyes on her. I was part of the shadow she cast — in a
sense, I was her extended self” (78). This metamorphosis undercuts Askar’s
fervent claim for a pure Somali national identity, and, in so doing, evinces the
fluidity of identities and borders. The narrator does not simply say that the two
bodies "mingled,” but that they “mingled well.” If we view these bodies as
symbols of Ethiopia and Somalia, then the fact that they mingled well questions
the rationale for the current conflict in the Oromo and the Ogaden, as much as it
questions the ostensible impermeability of the colonially imposed boundaries that
divide the two nations. The Oromo region has sought independence and the
conflict continues to this day. The narrator’s questioning of the colonial
boundaries that view Ethiopia and Somalia as irredeemably detached in turn

revises the traditional function of borders.

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The mingling of the two bodies reveals something else, and that is the
difficulty of recovering a Somali nation-state that is not contaminated by the
history of empire. Askar is a microcosm of this contamination. For instance,
Askar has a national identity card which indicates that his nationality is Somali.
According to Uncle Hilaal, a Somali is “a man, woman or child whose mother
tongue is Somali. Here, mother tongue is important, very important. Not what one
looks like” (174). It is telling that Uncle Hilaal gives a caveat against the use of
“what one looks like” as a marker of Somali identity. It is telling because it not
only shows that the act of drawing borders on the basis of one’s physical features
is inadequate, but it also implies that the said features have been traditionally, if
problematically, used to draw borders. The narrator’s caveat is persuasive, but
the narrator’s recommendation of a Somali mother tongue as an indicator of
Somali identity is debatable. We shall address this question of national belonging
through language momentarily. Uncle Hilaal also adds, “The Somali are a
homogeneous people; they are homogeneous culturally speaking and speak the
same language wherever they may be found” (174). Uncle Hilaal’s definition
brings forth many questions. According to Uncle Hilaal, Askar is Somali, and
Somalis are homogenous. However, Askar’s cultural and linguistic ties to Somali
and Amharic make him more than Somali, and this excess challenges the notion
that Somalis are homogenous.

Misra, who has served as Askar’s mother and taught him both Amharic
and Somali (179), is not a native speaker of Somali, and her own mother tongue

is Amharic. As a result, Askar’s Somali language is so heavily influenced by

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Amharic that he cannot even pronounce some Somali letters. “For years, he had
had enormous difficulties pronouncing his Somali gutturals correctly, since he
learnt these wrongly from her [Misra]; for years, he mispronounced the first
letters of the words in Somali for ‘sky’ and “earth’” (56). This, then, serves as a
critique of linguistic purity. To be sure, Uncle Hilaal’s use of Somali mother
tongue as a determinant of Somali national identity inadvertently challenges
Askar’s claim to Somali identity. Askar’s speech signifies a crossing of linguistic
borders and undercuts his Somaliness. Paradoxically, the history of Empire that
denies Askar a pure Somali identity is the very history that created the notion of a
distinct Somali. Askar’s suspension in limbo must therefore be understood within
the history of Empire.

One could test Uncle Hilaal’s recommendation of mother tongue further by
looking at Misra’s multiple (un)belongings. “[A] sense of difference or
distinctness,” James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988) reminds us,
“can never be located solely in the continuity of a culture or tradition. Identity is
conjunctural, not essential” (11). Perhaps this explains why Misra “no longer
spoke or understood the language of the area of Ethiopia in which she was born”
(99). This quotation begs multiple readings. On the one hand, it shows
language’s mutability, which in turn indicates the futility and narrowness of using
language to fix borders. On the other hand, it makes one wonder if Misra’s
present has to necessarily come at the expense of her past. Of course, the
notion that Misra no longer speaks or understands her local Ethiopian language

does not negate her allegiance to the same, especially when Askar recalls that

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Misra “would lapse into Amharic, her mother tongue” (23). Why does Farah make
Askar, a product of multiple cultures and nations, the face of Somalia’s
nationalists? This is Farah’s way of parodying the exclusivity of national borders
or enacting Teresa de Lauretis’s call, in Technologies of Gender (1987), for the
consideration of “another perspective — a view from elsewhere” (25). The point
here is that Farah uses multiple belongings to challenge the monolithism of the
national framework, and to show the need for a transnational framework that
accommodates the Ethiopian and Somalian identities of both Askar and Misra.

The idea of the nation as a collective construct becomes clear as one
reads Farah’s contestation of the foundation, including language and race, on
which nationality stands. This is in line with Benedict Anderson’s argument, in
Imagined Communities (1983), to the effect that nations all over the world are
built on imagined communities. As a result of this imagination, “even the smallest
nation never knows most of their fellow members, meets them, or even hears of
them. Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (15). While
Anderson views nationalism as a form of kinship that ties people of different
linguistic, religious, and racial identities together (6), he also recognizes that each
of this imagined communities “has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lies
other nations” (16). In a similar vein, Ernest Renan, in “What is a Nation?” (1990),
argues that nations are built around shared misery and forgetting. In other words,
collective amnesia allows a nation to renew itself in the wake of new realities,
and thus provide a sense of belonging to its emerging members like Farah’s

Riyo. In brief, Renan recognizes that the nation has to come to terms with its

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daily metamorphosis in relation to its future. One could read Misra’s loss of her
local language and Askar’s forgetting in this light. In a similar context, Zygmunt
Bauman, in Postmordemity and Its Discontents (1997), talks of “the world in
which the art of forgetting is an asset no less, if no more, important than the art of
memorizing” (25). Farah attempts to create this world in Maps when it shows
simultaneous forgetting and remembering in the making of the nation. The
difference, however, is that Farah pushes the nation to avoid double-standards;
for example, if the nation is able to forget that Aw-Adan is a Qotto, then it can
also forget that Misra is Ethiopian. Farah’s Askar, a nationalist per excellence,
has faulty memory throughout the novel (65-66;73;160). By presenting Askar’s
memory as unreliable, Farah in essence questions the fixity of national identity in
a primordial past, not so much to suggest that the past is totally irrelevant, but to
show that there is another way of constructing identity that also recognizes the
present and the future. The new Somali identity has to acknowledge the Qotto-
Somali (Aw-Adan), British-Somali (Riyo), and Ethiopian-Somali (Misra) identities
that are inside it.

Here one is reminded of Bhabha’s point in Location of Culture (1994) that
“the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even
the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew”
(37). This is what happens in Maps. For example, we are told that Misra “was
teaching him [Askar] his people’s lore and wisdom, and occasionally some
Amharic when night fell [...]” (134). I argue that the Somali lore that Misra

teaches Askar has already been split by its engagement with and relation to the

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Oromo and Amhara (Ethiopian) lores which in part form Misra’s identity. In fact,
there is an act of translation that occurs when a non-Somali (Misra) teaches a
Somali-Ethiopian (Askar) about Somali culture. As a result, Askar cannot claim
the mantra of nationalism, which is “the coherence, continuity, and the integrity of
(a story of) the nation’s past and of the nation’s relation to a distinct language,
culture, and land. This (story of the) past is cited as legitimation for a demand for
autonomy or independence or at, at least, a change in political status of the
nation” (Layoun 138). The point here is that nationalism has to move away from a
mantra of primordial unity to one that recognizes the ambivalence inherent in
cultural formations. The coordinates of this new mantra might be formed around
justice for all in order to eradicate elements of corruption and poverty that we
see, for example, when Hilaal and Salaado “bribed the technicians at the
mortuary to silence them” (252). This way, we would realize “other kinds of social
organization, other kinds of community, that exceed or at least do not coincide
with the boundaries of the nation and its state” (Layon 138).

lntriguingly, the national ideology whose cause Askar supports includes
Askar but excludes Askar’s first teacher (Misra). It is paradoxical that Misra, who
teaches Askar Somali language, lore and wisdom -- which are in turn used to
grant Askar his Somali national identity -- is not accepted as a Somali while
Askar is. Misra’s abduction, rape, and murder confirms Giroux’s argument, in a
different context, that “dominant culture creates borders saturated in terror,
inequality, and forced exclusions” (62). In another parody of nationalism, Farah

shows that Askar who is a part of Misra cannot, due to the exclusiveness of the

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nationalist framework, follow Misra back to her motherland because, as Misra
tells him, “[l]t’s not safe for you. They will kill you, my people will, without asking
questions, without wanting to know your name or what our relationship is” (99).
Farah uses these cases of national discrimination in both Somalia and Ethiopia
to show that the problem of exclusiveness that plagues the Somali nation is not
unique to Somalis; rather, it is a structural problem at the foundation of every
nafion.

Having imbibed nationalist literatures, Askar is determined to recover his
lost pre-colonial past, a determination that is already undercut by his usage of
colonial maps and history. The boundaries of the Somalia nation state vary from
map to map. This variation parodies nationalists who are already dying for
boundaries that are not even fixed. To exacerbate the situation, these maps are
distorted. Uncle Hilaal, a university professor in Mogadiscio, brings these
distortions to Askar’s attention,

And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the 1567

map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our notion of the

world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map, is smaller than

Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the European’s prejudices,

are the maps we used at school when l was young and, I am afraid to say,

are still being reprinted year after year and used in schools in Africa. Arno

Peters’s map, drawn four hundred years later, gives more accurate

proportions of the continents: Europe is smaller, Africa larger. (229)

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As we have seen, the map that Askar carries with him wherever he goes is
distorted, and the nationalist cause he is fighting for is predicated on that
distorted map. Farah uses these distortions not only to cast doubt on the nation-
form as a structure for configuring home, but also to lend credence to his
epigraph, “Living begins when you start doubting everything that came before
you.” Maps fall in this category of things that we need to doubt because they do
not neatly enclose a homogenous group of subjects as they claim; instead, they
are forever provisional and misrepresentative of the situation on the ground. The
tendency of maps to silence cross-cultural influences beyond their borders
explains the burden they have to bear in order to survive. What is the purpose of
borders and maps? Who draws them? What is it that makes one die or kill in the
name of a map that is after all provisional? Obviously, Askar, like his father who
died “fighting for the Western Somali Liberation Movement, of which he remained
an active member until his last second, brave as the stories narrated about him”
(9), has something to learn from the epigraph’s appreciation of ambivalence.
Farah uses the lesson on cartographic defects and temporariness to show that
“the parameters of place, identity, history, and power” (53) change constantly,
and thus that it is problematic to perceive them as bounded. Looking at Hilaal’s
lesson merely as an anti-colonial attack on Empire is not enough, as it is a
caveat against the nation-state’s obsession with inconsistent colonial borders. It
is Farah’s way of challenging the credibility of maps on which national wars and

identities are located.

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The maps of Somalia have been drawn and redrawn by various imperial
powers. Ngabo-Smart has neatly documented Somalia’s imperial history (2-3).
As a result of the various imperial drawings, Somalia, to use Uncle Hilaal’s
words, is “divided into two British Somalilands (one of them independent and now
forming part of the Republic, the other at present known as Kenyan Somaliland);
French Somaliland; Italian Somaliland (forming part of the present-day Republic
— democratic or not!) and former French Somaliland (now the Republic of
Djebouti)” (156). Maps, then, are neither objective nor innocent; they serve
competing interests of power and domination. As Hilaal reminds Askar, one has
to understand “the political implications as well as the imperialist intentions of the
cartographers” (158). The need for this understanding becomes clear in the
scramble for the Ogaden. Askar, for example, does not conceal his nationalist
desires from his maps: “I began to redraw my map of the Horn of Africa. (In my
map, the Ogaden was always an integral part of Somalia.) [...] I had scribbled not
‘The Ogaden’ but simply ‘Western Somalia’, thereby in a sense, making The
Ogaden lose its specific identity, only to gain one of a generic kind” (227).
Evidently, Askar’s drawings have nationalist interests in favor of Somalia. His
replacement of the Ogaden with Western Somalia has significant implications on
the identity and politics of Ethiopia. In the same context, the colonial divisions of
Somalia register multiple cultural crossings and divergent imperial policies
(Britain, Italy, France). Farah uses these divisions to parody the nationalistic
claims for “a united Somalia” (75), a cause which Armadio pursues at the

expense of his wife, Karin, and children. We are told that “Armadio was

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apparently a member of a cell of the Somali Youth League which was agitating
for the reunification of all the Somali-speaking territories” (75). In other words,
Amardio dies for a Somali-speaking nation, which was not there even in the
precolonial past. But there is much more. These territories have been defined
and redefined with time, clearly suggesting the non-fixity of national boundaries,
on the one hand, and, on the other, the effectiveness of these national
boundaries in policy making.

The narrator gives us a closer observation of the problem of locating home
“by situating the story in a frontier culture, the Ogaden, a disputed territory
between Somalia and Ethiopia” (Ngaboh-Smart 7). This symbolic borderland
location underscores the need to come to terms with being here and there,
sometimes neither here nor there. Frontier cultures are known for their diversity,
for balancing cultures across the borders. One therefore expects a cosmopolitan
approach to the idea of home in such settings. However, as the narrator shows,
Somali nationalists perceive culture as pure, not diverse. “Most people they met
[Misra and Askar] along the way had their bodies tattooed with their identities:
that is name, nationality and address. Some had engraved on their skins the
reason why they had become who they were when living and other had printed
on their foreheads or backs their national flags or insignia” (43). Significantly,
Farah shows that even the national flags that these nationalists print on their
foreheads or backs are subject to change over time, “It [Somali flag] has, right in
its middle, a five-pointed star and, for each point, a Somali-speaking territory.

The former British Somaliland and the former Italian Somali have been recently

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joined by the Ogaden” (131). Farah uses the provisionality of maps here to
parody the nationalist agenda of closed and fixed identities.

Rhonda Cobham is therefore right when she notes that Farah’s novel
focuses on “the uncertainties about the integrity of the boundaries that define the
nation state, Somalia” (83). By demonstrating these uncertainties, Farah
counteracts the nationalist attitude, projected by Uncle Hilaal, that Somalia is
“specific,” and thus that “you are either a Somali or you aren’t” (155). Uncle Hilaal
elaborates this specificity in the following terms: “Somalia is unique. It is named
after Somalis, who share a common ancestor and who speak the same language
— Somali” (155). This definition is obviously exclusive. For example, Misra has
lived in Somali for so many years and speaks Somali language. Nonetheless,
she is still discriminated against and mapped out by Somali nationalists. “To
many members of the community, she [Misra] was but that ‘maiden-servant who
came from somewhere else, up north’ and they treated her despicably, looking
down upon her and calling her all sorts of things” (11). While one could use
Misra’s case to argue that women are victims of cartographic discourse, the
novel does not seem interested in portraying Misra solely as a victim. Farah uses
Misra to show the role of women in redrawing maps and extending boundaries;
“women can be seen in this sense both as mapbreakers engaged in the
dismantling of a patriarchal system of representation and as mapmakers involved
in the plotting of new coordinates for the articulation of female knowledge and
experience” (Huggan, Territorial 13). Of course, there are risks regarding the

idealization of women. Still, Misra’s presence, in keeping with the quotation,

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serves to wrestle the patriarchal control associated with the map. The question
remains, however, regarding what the newly reconfigured map might look like. If
women’s maps are simply interested in “the articulation of female knowledge and
experience” as Huggan implies, then they cannot be the maps of the future
because they are still enclosed, this time in favor of women.

Hilaal’s traditional definition of a Somali also excludes Askar. Askar is not
a perfect fit into the map of Somalia mainly because of his uncertain ancestry
and Ethiopian heritage — thanks to Misra. Misra and Askar are more or less
cultural and national doubles, so it makes sense to deny or grant both of them
Somali citizenship. Misra’s treatment like an outsider emphasizes the illusion of
citizenship; it is not enough to epitomize the essentials of good citizenship, to
speak Somali, to live in Somalia, and to “mother” Somalia (Askar). Farah
destabilizes these narrow, Manichean boundaries by constantly revealing
“impurities” that the nationalist writers seek to repress. For example, the fluidity of
identity is symbolically captured by Aw-Adan’s statement to Misra, “You smell of
his [Askar’s] urine and at times I too smell of it and it upsets me gravely” (12).
Aw-Adan has an intimate affair with Misra. He has no body contact with Askar at
this stage except through Misra, and yet he smells of Askar’s urine. This, then,
validates Clifford’s argument, in The Predicament of Culture (1988), that “one is
always, to varying degrees, ‘inauthentic’: caught between cultures, implicated in
others” (1 1).

As Cobham has rightly argued, Farah’s novel “challenges us to resist the

reflexive urge to pin down a single version of the African reality as ’true’ without

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first attempting to take seriously the conflicts, tensions and absences inherent in
any narrative of the past and present” (96). It is for this reason that Farah gives
Askar “various selves” (63). As Askar puts it in his conversation with Hilaal, “I
have a strange feeling that there is another in me, one older than I — a woman. I
have the conscious feeling of being spoken through, if you know what I mean. I
feel as if I have allowed a woman older than I to live inside of me, and I speak not
my words, my ideas, but hers. And during the time I’m spoken through, as it
were, I am she - not I” (158). This woman, Askar tells us, “has a striking similarity
to the half-profiled photograph of the woman you say was my [biological] mother”
(158). Askar’s case is complicated by the fact that there was never a proper
separation between him and his biological mother, so he remains forever
attached to her and thus to her unknown subjectivity — this in itself compromises
his unbridled claim to pure Somali identity. In any case, Askar’s “varioussselves”
allow him to occupy multiple spaces (even though in denial), either
simultaneously or successively. By so doing, he embodies and lives out Kenneth
W. Harrow’s Less Than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African

Women ’3 Writing, particularly its argument about multiple subjectivity: “One can
occupy multiple subject positions from which an ‘I’ can address others, and the
specific time and place will dictate how those subject positions are produced,
how they speak themselves” (6). Farah deploys Askar’s multiple selves (63; 70)
to direct both his and the reader’s attention to'the ambivalence that nationalists
do not often account for, ambivalence which calls for a revision of the nation as it

were. Askar’s multiple selves also undercut and ridicule his vow never to

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“befriend any Adenese” simply because one of them was caught copulating with
a hen. This blanket condemnation is a commentary on the nationalist wars that
are fought on the basis of a blanket reading of a whole nation state as an enemy.
It is this either/or ideology of the nation that makes Askar train as a guerrilla
fighter against Ethiopia, even though it constitutes his identity. His reference to
Somalia as “his mother country” (96) is counterintuitive to the extent that his
mother is at once Somali and Ethiopian. It is significant that Askar can hardly
understand all his multiple selves; his limited knowledge sheds doubt on his
claim to understand the entirety of Somalia.

Like Askar, Misra has multiple identities which disrupt the unified identity
of the nation. This destabilizing nature of Misra’s culture does not work well for
any nation, as it were, so the nation marginalizes her. Farah complicates Misra’s
history by giving her a parentage that cannot be easily categorized. Her mother is
Oromo, her father is Amhara, and her cultural heritage is at the intersection of
Oromo, Amhara, and the Ogaden. Her problem of belonging begins when her
father abandons her at birth simply because she is a girl. By showing the plurality
of every individual, Farah succeeds in depicting the danger of homogenizing any
person, let alone nation. Misra’s history, which is made up of several cultures and
languages, is so complex that Misra is described as “real as the border” (133).
There is something else that Farah is doing here. That is, the novelist creates
characters who negotiate boundaries of gender and nation to show that there is
another way of doing things, different from the dominant position. Interestingly,

even as the nationalists police boundaries, we see ordinary people criss-crossing

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these borders. Aw-Adan, for example, is not a Somali; nevertheless, he has
blended with Somalis in the Ogaden so well that people mistake him for a
Somali. When the Ogaden war begins, he fights on the side of Somalis. That a
Qotto is ready to die and/or kill for a Somali cause is an indication that there is
another way of organizing community other than along a homogenous line. If the
Somali nation is determined by Somali ethnicity, then what are we to make of
Aw-Adan’s celebrated participation in a Somali national war, despite the fact that
he is not a Somali? This moment not only reveals the contentious space that a
nation occupies, but also the silences and fissures behind the facade of
homogeneity. Upon Aw-Adan’s return from the Ogaden war, he becomes a
Somali hero: “He is a legendary figure in the town’s history. Bare-handed, he
took on three of them [Ethiopians] and killed them. Just like that. As easily as a
strong-armed man might behead a hen. They say his faith in the destiny of his
people — he wasn’t Somali, he was a Qotto, you knew that? — they say that was
his strength, gave him confidence” (183). What are we to make of this? What is
clear is that Aw-Adan now views Somalis as his people, and this development
revises conventional Somali nationality. In other words, Farah is pointing to the
gap between the official national policy of Somali homogeneity and the ordinary
transnational lives on the ground.

It is not only Aw-Adan who regards Somalis as his people. We see a
similar shift in Misra when she says,

For me, my people are Askar’s people; my people are my former

husband’s people, the people I am most attached to. Those who were

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looking for a traitor and found one in me, rationalize that because I wasn’t
born one of them, I must be the one who betrayed. Besides, it is easier to
suspect the foreigner amongst a community than one’s own cousin or
brother. But I swear upon Askar’s life that I did not inform on the freedom
fighters’ movements or on their camp of sojourn. (193)
One may contest the gender inequality behind Misra’s reference to her
husband’s people as her people, especially considering that her husband does
not view her people in Ethiopia as his people. Our focus’ however, is on Misra’s
ability to cross nationalist boundaries, and thus contest their ostensible fixity. Her
Somaliness challenges the nationalists’ assumption that a nation cannot be
wrong (196) because she becomes a Somali in her own right without meeting the
conventional requirements set by Hilaal. The two cases of Misra and Aw-Adan
reinforce Robin Cohen’s argument, in Migration and its Enemies (2006), that the
nationalists’ obsession with tight border controls is a desperate attempt to
frustrate the connections across borders. In his words, “Nationalists have always
needed strong frontier controls and stony-faced sentinels because identities are
much more fragmented and overlapping than their fantasies or historical
reconstructions allow” (Cohen 4). Somali nationalists are averse to boundaries
because they feel that they deny Somalis an opportunity to form one nation. For
them, “borders deny the Somali people who live on either side of it, yes, such
borders deny these people their very existence as a nation” (126). This quotation
is open to different readings. First, it shows that the Somali nationalists are still

imprisoned to the nationalist obsession with boundaries of inside (Somalis) and

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outside (non-Somalis). Second, it shows that the Somali nationalists are against
(some) borders; particularly borders that prevent Somalis in Kenya, Ethiopia,
Djibouti, and the Ogaden from living together in one space. Obviously, these
spaces cannot be reduced to one space; the unity of space is a national myth.
One is left wondering how this political ambition is different from the imperialist
motivations of cartographers. Even so, the Somali nationalists” call for a space
for all Somalis, narrowly defined as it were, is already undermined by the cultural
ambivalence that defines nearly all characters. In this postcolonial moment,
Farah’s characters epitomize overlapping spaces and gaps to an extent that
compels a rethinking of the parameters around which the conventional Somali
nation has been mapped. One of these characters is Riyo, Askar’s girlfriend, who
“spoke [English] almost like a native. She had been born in Britain, where her
father had done his higher education” (222). Clearly, Riyo's overlapping
subjectivity resists easy classification along fixed boundaries of ethnicity and
nation. To borrow’s Layoun’s words in a different context, Riyo’s subjectivity is “a
reminder of the difficulty of fixing and maintaining ethnic boundaries, a curious
yet crucial marker of what was and is. It is equally, if more implicitly, a suggestion
of what might be” (42). Indeed, Riyo is a significant part of a what Somalia’s
future might look like. In an attempt to challenge this perception of boundaries as
fixed, Farah makes Misra and Aw-Adan negotiate Qotto/Somali and
Ethiopia/Somali borders, and thus suggest alternative possibilities of belonging to
the Somali nation-state. Farah also challenges the notion that one unified space

for all Somalis would translate into a problem-free nation by showing class

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inequalities. As Salaado puts it, “There’s a difference between the rich and the
poor, even when dead” (254). What this shows is that the oneness of Somalis
has more demanding internal threats to deal with, including “hunger, corruption
and poverty” (168). As such, it is important for the nation to attend to these cases
of post-independence disillusionment largely brought about by a poverty of
national leadership, even as it reels from the legacies of empire and rethinks its
frames of definition.

Askar’s resolve to join the Western Liberation Front in order to liberate the
Ogaden is guided by one principle, “If killed when defending his country, he
would die a young man at peace with his soul — and therefore a martyr” (57). And
“[d]ying for one’s country,” Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Commynities (1991)
reminds us, “is felt to be something fundamentally pure” (144). The Ogaden
region was a site of war between Somalia and Ethiopia - with external powers
like Russia, Cuba, USA, and Egypt taking sides -- in 1977 and 1978. It remains a
contested space to date, with Somalia determined to annex the Somali-speaking
part of the Ogaden in order to form a Greater Somalia. In the novel, even the fact
that the Ogaden is split between Ethiopia and Somalia, and thus culturally gray,
does not stop the nationalist fighters like Askar from viewing it as solely Somalia.
Uncle Hilaal, in approval, tells Askar, “Somalis went to war in order that the
ethnic origin of the people of the Ogaden would match their national identity.
That’s what gives the Somalis their psychical energy, a type no other African
people have, only Somalis” (126). The reader, however, knows that the Ogaden

already defies nationalist categorization because it is split, and exists within both

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Somalia and Ethiopia. Besides, as Ian Chambers has noted in Border Dialgoues:
Journeys in Postmodemity (1990), it is important “to recognize that the ‘nation’ as
a heterogenous cultural and linguistic unit is not a closed history, something that
has already been achieved, but is an open framework, continually in the making.
In starker terms, it means to move out of the mythological tempo of ‘tradition’ into
the more fragmented and open discontinuities of histories” (47). It is for this very
reason of continual making of culture that Somalis, contrary to Hilaal’s advice,
have to find their psychical energy in moments of contingency, and in the
transnational landscape that defines their subjectivity, not outside them. By
critiquing nationalist assumptions -- for example Askar is involved in the
mysterious death of Misra, whom he is a part of, and, by so doing, has murdered
a part of himself — Farah opens spaces for cultural diversity. These spaces are
compounded by the overflow of refugees from the Ogaden war, whose presence
points to a life in exile. The persistent homelessness in the novel -- exemplified
by the refugees and Misra’s depiction as “a miserable woman, with no child and
friends” (7) — enact postcolonial condition of simultaneous home and exile. The
co-existence of home and exile in this case is not entirely negative, as it
highlights the case for a transnational space like the Ogaden and allows for the
conceptualization of home beyond an either/or category.

Farah's attempts to conceive a world whose loyalties transcend the nation,
a world in which various nations of humankind and animals can co-exist and be

at home becomes clear when he uses Askar to project an open space,

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On the other side of the bank, I could see all sorts of animals and even a
child or two and these were living together in total harmony. I couldn’t, for
the life of me, see how a lion could rub manes with horses without being
tempted to tear them savagely apart with his teeth; could not imagine how
a group of elderly men were in attentive reverence, listening to a speech
being delivered by a young boy of eight; couldn’t remember ever seeing
(either before or after) how the men of the community paid respectful
gallantry to the women upon whose demands and orders they waited. I
was visibly delighted. (136)
This is a Sufi Muslim image in Birago Diop’s Tales of Amadou Koumba (1988) by
Birago Diop. It is also a Judaeo-Christian image; the above scene alludes to, or,
rather, draws on the futuristic and harmonious reign of Messiah, documented in
the Bible, “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.
Cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together and the lion will eat
straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young
child put his hand in the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy” (Isaiah
11:6). It is important to note that Farah collapses boundaries and spaces by
bringing together subjects that traditionally stay apart. The message here is that
if “a lion could rub manes with horses,” then there is no reason why a Somali
could not live in peace with an Ethiopian, no reason why men and women cannot
cultivate mutual respect, no reason why adults cannot learn from children. It

essentially deconstructs hierarchies based on one’s gender, nation, age, or

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power. It also destabilizes the symbolic order. The prospect of the harmonious
co-existence reflected in the quotation brings joy to the narrator. Farah’s
connection of spaces here serves other purposes as well. It is a symbolic
resistance to colonial compartmentalization of space, and to the assumption that
identities are closed; in other words, it is Farah’s way of celebrating contingency.
In a broader sense, Farah shows, as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri have
done in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), that maps are open to transformation; they
put it thus, “The map is open and connectable in all its dimensions; it is
detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification” (12). It is because of
Farah’s commitment to the openness of space that he collapses age and gender
boundaries, creating in Askar a subject of multiple subjectivities, “l was once a
young man — but I lost my identity. I metamorphosed into an old man in his
seventies, then a young woman. I am a septuagenarian wearing the face, and
thinking with the brain, of a young woman, although the rest of my body [...]

, partly belongs to yet a third person, namely a seventeen-year-old youth” (63).
The message here is that Farah is determined to fight not only boundaries, but
also the hierarchies and misconceptions that accompany them.

While Farah’s Maps disavows the notion of natural and pure national
identity as a way of locating home, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s Matigari valorizes the
nationalist framework that locates home in the pre-colonial past. Ngugi has
(in)famously advocated the nationalist position in both his critical works and
narratives, even now when it is apparent that such a position is roped in a crisis

of sorts. In Moving the Center, Ngugi says, “I wrote Matigari, novel of return in

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the Gikuyu language, and I felt a sense of belonging such as I had felt when in
1978 at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison in Cell No. 16, I had written Caitaani
Mutharabaini (Devil on the Cross) as an attempt to reconnect myself to the
community from which I had been so brutally cut by the neo-colonial regime in
Kenya” (106). Arguably, then, like his character Matigari, Ngugi is determined to
return to a pre-colonial community as a site of identity. It is paradoxical that
Matigari, and by extension, Ngugi, locates his freedom struggle on the platform of
the nation-form, which is in itself repressive. The novel narrates the predicament
of Matigari who successfully fights against the colonial power of the day and lives
to see the dawn of political independence. He emerges from the forest with the
hope of finding his place in the new nation, but, instead, he finds a condition of
homelessness brought about by neocolonial cultural economy. Matigari’s
displacement allegorizes the formerly colonized people’s attempt to return to
estranged spaces, strange lands, which disallow belonging. Matigari cannot even
find his people in this new nation, ‘When he had come out of the forest, he had
thought that the task of bringing his family together was going to be an easy one.
But now? It was already afternoon, and he had not yet made contact with his
own; he did not even know where or how he would begin his search” (26).

Matigari, I argue, cannot find his people because they have undergone
transformation. His search is still formulated within the paradigm of national
culture that is oblivious of the impact of empire on the local cultures. In a
defeatist and desperate rhetoric, but with the optimism that characterize

nationalist discourse, Matigari accentuates the plausibility of finding the lost

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nation, “My house is my house. I am only after what I have built with my own
hands. Tomorrow belongs to me. I invite you [his fellow prisoners] all to my
house the day after tomorrow. Come to a feast and celebrate our homecoming!”
(64). Of course, we, the readers, know that tomorrow and even the day after
tomorrow will belong to neocolonialists and not Matigari; the empire has simply
undergone hibernation and modification. The empire is not about to quit the
game, and that explains Matigari’s homelessness. Before Matigari can think of
celebrating a homecoming, he has to modify his resistance to reflect the wisdom
of Achebe’s Obierika in Things Fall Apart, who says, “Our own men and our sons
have joined the ranks of the stranger. They have joined his religion and they help
to uphold his government. If we should try to drive out the white men in Umuofia
we should find it easy. There are only two of them. But what of our own people
who are following their way and have been given power?” (124). This
modification is partly necessitated by Matigari’s persistent and protracted, yet
fruitless, nationalist struggle: “I did not begin yesterday. I have seen many things
over the years. Just consider, I was there at the time of the Portuguese, at the
time of the Arabs, and at the time of the British —” (45).

Eventually Matigari considers an open space; that is, he seeks to advance
a nationalist discourse without ignoring issues like race and tribe that undermine
its validity. He does this by resigning to God: “He [God] will return on the day
when His followers will be able to stand up without worrying about tribe, race or
colour, and say in one voice: Our labour produced all the wealth in this land. So

from today onwards we refuse to sleep out in the land cold, to walk about in rags,

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to go to bed on empty bellies. Let the earth return to those to whom it belongs”
(156). But this struggle demands much more than preaching. As Gikandi’s “The
Politics and Poetics of National Formation: Recent African Writing” in From
Commonwealth to Post-Colonial (1992), posits, “Writers who still seem to believe
that the post-colonial situation is simply the continuation of colonization under the
guise of independence, or that the narratives of decolonization can be projected
into the post-colonial world, seem to be entrapped in an ideological and narrative
cul-de—sac” (379). Ngugi’s Matigari falls in the above category because it does
not account for the ambivalences that inhabit the postcolonial moment. Matigari
is important as a critique of neocolonialism, as it typifies the colonized people
who remain without land, houses, and family (metaphors for home) long after
independence. However, it falls short of envisioning the way forward, unless one
takes the characters’ participation in the burning of the rich people’s cars and
houses, which would only send the burners to jail without addressing their
landlessness, as a revolutionary vision. But this determination for a pre-colonial
community, while noble, is, ultimately, futile. Matigari has to accommodate both
his past and present; as Caren Kaplan, in Questions of Travel (1996) rightly
reminds us, “There is not necessarily a preoriginary space in which to stay after
modern imperialist expansion” (7). What Kaplan and Gikandi mean here is that
the national spaces we inhabit are products of empire, a view that is also shared
by Etienne Balibar in We, the People of Europe ?: Reflections on Transnational
Citizenship (2003). It is for this reason that our longings for home have to

recognize and work with the history of colonization. That said, Kaplan’s point that

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there is no precolonial space after empire seems to simplify the nationalist
appeal to the past. It is fair to register that some nationalists constantly invent the
notion and content of a common past as a strategy for solidarity around the
present and future challenges, not because they believe in finding a literal past.
Of course, a question still remains on why the nationalist project or rather the
new community cannot be built on the complex challenges of the present and
future, and on the brighter days ahead.

Maps is a borderland of various subjectivities and cultures; it is a call for a
more tolerant community in which borders serve as horizontal intersections of
identity. As such, the novel serves a larger emancipatory project than
nationalism. For example, it collapses age and gender boundaries to create a
subject of multiple subjectivities: “l [Askar] was once a young man - but I lost my
identity. I metamorphosed into an old man in his seventies, then a young woman.
I am a septuagenarian wearing the face, and thinking with the brain, of a young
woman, although the rest of my body [...] partly belongs to yet a third person,
namely a seventeen-year—old youth” (63). What is noteworthy here is that Askar
makes it difficult for anyone to pigeon-hole his identity by being three characters
simultaneously: a septuagenarian, a young woman, and a youth. This instance
also reminds one of Bhabha’s argument, in Location of Culture, that “it is by living
on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that
we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of
solidarity” (170). In other words, a mutual crossing of boundaries and sharing of

knowledge is necessary in the process of locating home. Farah creates several

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situations that promote a crossing of boundaries in one way or the other. In terms
of gender, for example, Farah reverses the gender roles between Hilaal and
Salaado (150; 151; 196; 238) in order to deconstruct gender boundaries. In
particular, Hilaal and Salaado allow us to see the difficulty, even fallacy, of
drawing a line between male and female when Hilaal fails to start the family car
and goes back home in a taxi to seek his wife’s help. Everything related to a car,
from driving to repairing it, is a man’s domain in the text; yet, it is Salaado who
acts the man as she takes the same taxi to go and get the family car: “‘The
carburetor is flooded, can you imagine?’ she was saying to the taxi driver, “and
they just lock it up and walk away. Useless men’” (238). Instead of looking at this
as a moment of emasculation, one could read it as an attempt to unfix gender
roles, to show that the gender boundary is a construct that can be overcome.

In order to bridge this gap, Farah seems to suggest, women would have to
rethink their complicity in the perpetuation of gender boundaries. The said
complicity is evident in Misra’s shock when she visits Hilaal and Salaado: “Misra
felt disoriented when she learnt that Hilaal cooked most meals [...] disoriented
because she had never been in a home where the man did the woman’s job and
the woman more or less the man’s” (196). Misra’s disorientation shows that
gender roles are quite entrenched, but it also suggests that the negotiation of
boundaries that we see between Hilaal and Salaado is an aberration. While
Farah’s point of change is clear, especially when he makes Hilaal play “the
contradictory roles of ‘Mother’ to [Askar] and Salaado” (156), his reversal of

gender roles is partly subject to debate. One could argue that it simply swaps

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men’s duties to women and women’s duties to men; that is, a serious revision of
gender boundaries would require Farah to delink roles “from gender, and project a
space in which roles are not tied to a particular gender. Not just that - the values
associated with gender must be neutralized. That said, Farah creates many
scenes that point towards a fluidity of boundaries. One of these scenes shows a
female dog named “Bruder,” which is a German word for brother (188). We see
“Salaado in Hilaal’s jellaba, he in her caftan” (256). Askar says, “I feel as if I have
allowed a woman older than I to live inside of me, and I speak not my words, my
ideas, but hers. And during the time I’m spoken through, as it were, I am she -
not I” (158). It is in keeping with its goal of breaking gender barriers that the novel
proudly mentions the Wolof language’s interchangeable use of he and she,
showing that it has “no indicator of gender” (169). Why is it important for Farah to
deconstruct these boundaries?

Farah is interested in addressing the hierarchies and inequalities that
traditional boundaries engender. The novel is set in a patriarchal society in which
men are superior to women. Uncle Qorrax, for example, is notorious for beating
his wives and children. Askar, on the other hand, condescendingly asks Misra if
she would return to Ethiopia together with the Ethiopian women and children who
are fleeing the Ogaden. In response, “She [Misra] smiled rather mischievously,
reminding herself that Askar was not yet eight and that here he was behaving as
though he were a man and she a creature of his own invention” (112). Gender
inequality has been so normalized in Askar’s world that he learns about the

power he has as a man over Misra at a very young age and without a father-

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figure to learn from. Farah makes him learn that his manliness is dependent on
Misra when he is severed from Misra. A few minutes after boarding the lorry to
Mogadiscio, he tells Karin that his separation from Misra “feels as though I have
no heart which beats, no lungs which breathe and no head which can think
Iucidly” (127). Farah also introduces Askar to “a girl without a name, without a
country" (135) whom he admires. On the one hand, the fact that this girl’s lack of
national identity does not prevent Askar from liking her promotes alternative ways
of self-definition. On the other hand, a celebration of this girl’s status
romanticizes her condition as a refugee. I

Farah’s novel contests the institutionalization of authentic and unified
tradition by constantly inserting contingent subjectivities. For example, to
destabilize the supposed stability of Karin’s linguistic tradition, Farah exposes her
to other languages: “Then she [Misra] began speaking words belonging to a
language group neither Karin nor Askar had ever heard of before and she
repeated and repeated the mantras of her invocation” (118). One could look at
this as a moment of contingency, a moment of translation, which instantly
complicates the listeners’ traditions. It may also be an indicator that Misra is
unknowable, as her use of a language that is neither Somali nor Amharic
complicates her identity further. The same can be said of the identity of the
Ogaden children like Askar who enroll in Aw-Adan’s Koranic School only to learn
much later that “he wasn’t Somali, he was a Qotto” (183). It is tempting to argue
that Aw-Adan’s Qotto identity spills on his students’ identity, making it difficult for

them to claim a pure Somali identity. For Askar, this has far reaching implications

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because it means that both his first teacher, Misra and his second teacher, Aw-
Adan are both non-Somalis. These students are also taught Arabic, which further
complicates their identity. Additionally, in an attempt to contest the notions of
authenticity and tradition, Farah creates in Misra a character who cannot be
traced to a single self. This is evident when she is kidnapped from the hospital,
and her immediate family consisting of Askar, Hilaal, and Salaado do not even
know her real name, let alone her father’s name:

[S]he had entered the country in disguise, under another name. What

name was that? The one I knew her by, spelt as Misra or variations of it?

Or the one Karin gave me? Even if we wanted, we had no name to report

to the police as a “Missing Person”, nor did we have one to release to the

press. Misra? Massar? Masrat? Massarat? What name can we find you

under and where? (242)

Misra takes a different identity from time to time and from place to place; for
example, while everyone in Kallafo knew her as Misra, the Ethiopian officer from
the same village as Misra called her “Misrat” (185). Askar who has known Misra
since his birth does not know a name to report to the police,- suggesting that a
subject is simultaneously knowable and unknowable.

In Askar’s conversation with Karin, we gather the following: “Misra is the
Arabic name for ‘Egypt’ and Somalis prefer it to their own corrupted form
‘Massar’, which also gives you the Somali word for ‘headscarf’. And when I asked
Misra what her name meant in her language, I remember her saying that it meant

‘foundation’, I think ‘the foundation of the earth’ or something” (185). First, the

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quotation shows that Arabic has a significant influence on Somali language,
causing Somalis who are otherwise determined to preserve their linguistic purity
to adopt some Arabic words; linguistic “corruption” is already taking place,
compromising Somali homogeneity. Second, if we take Misra as a foundation of
the earth, then the message we get is that the earth cannot be framed on a
single tradition as there are always many other, known and unknown,
overlapping, even incomplete, traditions. Third, the multiple variations of Misra,
which seem to increase with time, show that identity is never over and is never
complete at any given time. This corresponds with Chambers’ observation, in
Border Dialogue_s, about tradition:
No single tradition can function as a guarantee of the present, can save
us. There are many, constituted by gender, ethnicity, sexuality, race,
class, that criss-cross the patterns of our lives. By bringing them into
history, into recognition and representation, we appreciate the complexity
that can challenge the tyranny on the present of a single, official heritage:
that of “being British [Somali].” (46)
Chambers is concerned that a narrowly defined mainstream identity is likely to
oppress marginal identities, and to undermine the kind of complexity we see in
Farah’s characters. Karin, for example, is female; however, when she falls sick,
she “give[s] as her name the name of a man” which, according to Askar, is
equivalent to “giving as her own an identity which didn’t match her real identity”
(107). Askar assumes here that there is an authentic and real Karin, an

assumption which the text questions by doubling her gender. The point here is

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that identity, tradition, and history are always almost but not quite; either
something is missing or cropping up in the frame to deny an authentic image. For
example, an attempt to frame the priest-doctor/witch-doctor who treats Waliima
Sheikh has to deal with the contingency of his being a practicing Muslim as well,
and with “the religious and philosophical contradictions surrounding his activities”
(212). Similarly, an attempt to frame his patient has to come to terms with both
“the woman-as-human” and "the spirit in the woman” (214). Even though the
human part of her is a woman, the spiritual part of her is unknown, prompting the
priest-doctor to ask her: “Just tell the congregation your name, address and, if
possible, your profession. Are you a man, are you a woman or are you a child?
Are you human or jinn?” (214). The woman’s response, “I am Deeqo Amin”
(214), serves as an example of a contingent subjectivity, and contests the notion
of a distinct and authentic identity. The same applies to Bessie Head’s Elizabeth
when she says that she feels “as though I am living with a strange ‘other self’ I
don’t know so well” (58).

Bessie Head, like Farah, explores the questions of boundaries, how they
are normalized, and how they can be subverted to bring about change. In her
autobiographical novel, A Question of Power, she uses the tropes of madness
and gardening to cross a different set of borders - nationality, race, gender,
sexuality, and class. To that end, it reminds us of Gloria Anzaldtra’s suggestion,
in Borderfands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), that we have to be ready to
live without borders (195). It is a novel about Elizabeth’s search for home in an

otherwise hostile world of marginality. To borrow Rob Nixon’s words in "Border

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Country: Bessie Head’s Frontline States,” the novel “offers radical insight into the
contingencies underlying efforts to secure membership or exclusion from society
on grounds of nature or ancestry” (108). Head questions the rationale on which
the boundaries of inclusion/exclusion are constructed, and their implications on
women. We see a similar questioning of the supposed impermeability of
boundaries in Jacques Derrida’s “Living On” (1979). Here Derrida recommends
“doing away with all boundaries, all framework, all sharp edges” (70). Here, then,
is a case for porosity across borders. What seems to be an end is also a
beginning, and what seems to be a distinction is also a connection, “No border is
guaranteed, inside or out” (Derrida 64). Derrida goes further to contest the
assumption of unity in spaces or subjects within conventional boundaries; as he
postulates, “the unity of one version can be encroached upon by an essential
unflnishedness that cannot be reduced to an incompleteness or an inadequacy”
(84-85). I push Derrida’s point further by replacing “can be” with “is always.”
Head’s novel meets the challenge of Susan Stanford Friedman’s call, in
Mappings: Feminisms and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter (1 998), for a
movement towards “new ways of thinking that negotiate beyond the conventional
boundaries between us and them, white and other, First World and Third World,
men and women, oppressor and oppressed, fixity and fluidity” (4). As a result of
“the symbiotic, syncretist, interactive formations in the borderlands,” Friedman
argues that “[t]he future of feminism and other progressive movements lies [...] in
a turning outward, an embrace of contradiction, dislocation, and change” (4). The

mentioned boundaries are fluid, but they are kept impermeable in the interest of

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social power; the fixity of these borders plays a significant role in maintaining the
status quo whereby power is in, not out. It is because of this relationship between
power and boundaries, because power relations and social order feed on and are
enabled by conventional boundaries, that Bessie Head insists on the
transgression of borders as a gateway to a meaningful change. Her novel not
only questions the boundaries of race, gender, sexuality, and class, but also
demonstrates a direct relationship between these boundaries and women’s
marginality.

The novel anticipates “an idealized community in which the bigotries of
racism and ethnic nationalism are simultaneously transcended” (Nixon 114).
Nixon’s use of transcendence here is similar to Bhabha’s suggestion, in The
Location of Culture, that we move beyond the identities we have received;
Bhabha’s beyond “is neither a new horizon, nor a leaving behind of the past,” but
a recognition of a point “where space and time cross to produce complex figures
of difference and identity, past and present, inside and outside, inclusion and
exclusion” (1). On the basis of this anticipation, the novel contests the notion of
hegemony as a way of configuring home. The major character, Elizabeth, has no
place in Apartheid South Africa because of her mixed race (her mother is white
and father black): “In South Africa she had been rigidly classified Coloured.
There was no escape from it to the simple joy of being a human being with a
personality. There wasn’t any escape like that for anyone in South Africa. They
were races, not people” (44). This categorization privileges race over gender. In

Elizabeth’s world, one is either white or black; colored/biracial characters like

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Elizabeth are rejected by both whites and blacks. Dan, who is black, calls her
inauthentic upon seeing a supposedly proper African with traditional African hair,
“I like girls like this with that kind of hair. Your hair is not properly African” (127).
Dan fails to register that Elizabeth has a double racial identity that makes it
difficult for her to easily fit into a monolithic racial pattern. In a similar context,
Medusa, a xenophobic masquerading as a nationalist, warns her to keep off
Africa: “Africa is troubled waters, you know. I’m a powerful swimmer in troubled
waters. You’ll only drown here. You’re not linked up to the people. You don’t
know any African languages” (44). Elizabeth who has been rejected by her white
family for being too African is now rejected in Botswana for not being African
enough. Of course, one could look at Dan and Medusa as products of Elizabeth’s
psychosis, but they are also reflections of Elizabeth’s society. What happens to
the binary of oppressor and oppressed when the oppressed (Dan and Medusa)
become oppressors? Suspended in limbo, Elizabeth becomes a victim of two
competing worlds of white men and black men. It is in this limbo where she
attempts to negotiate a home beyond the paradigms of authenticity and/or
inauthenticity. Elizabeth’s experience shows the need for a space which can
handle multiple cultural intersections.

Like Farah’s Askar in Maps, Elizabeth is brought up by a surrogate
mother: “They had kept the story of her real mother shrouded in secrecy until she
was thirteen. She had loved another woman as her mother, who was also part
African, part English, like Elizabeth. She had been paid to care for Elizabeth, but

on the death of her husband she resorted to selling beer as a means of

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livelihood” (15). Considering that her surrogate mother is also colored, it is not
surprising that Elizabeth grows up without suspecting that she is not her mother.
When Elizabeth finally joins a mission school, where she becomes a beneficiary
and victim of the civilizing mission, the white principal is quick to remind her, “We
have a full docket on you. You must be very careful. Your mother was insane. If
you’re not careful you’ll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white
woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a child by the stable boy,
who was a native” (16). The principal uses the colonial notion of madness to
draw boundaries within which to confine Elizabeth. In apartheid South Africa,
sexual relationships between white women and black men are not only prohibited
by a controversial Immorality Act but considered abnormal. The society denies
the plausibility of such relationships because allowing them would (in their view)
grant the black men a sense of humanity and normality, which would undermine
apartheid. The trope of madness is deployed here to explain away Elizabeth’s
mother’s transgression of racial boundaries (sleeping with a native); in order to
maintain the apartheid system’s impermeable boundaries, Elizabeth’s mother’s
action has to be labeled as madness. If her act was accepted as a normal activity
between two human beings, the very racist structure on which the apartheid
system was founded would collapse. The underlying message is that Elizabeth’s
mother could not have been sexually involved with a native if she was in her right
mind, and since rape was not reported it follows that Elizabeth’s mother was
mad. Elizabeth’s mother commits at least two crimes - class (sleeping with a

stable boy) and race (sleeping with a native). The other crime might be that she

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undercuts the colonial efficacy of calling black men boys; a boy is an
emasculating boundary created to show that the colonized men are forever boys
as opposed to men, but this boundary becomes difficult to sustain when the
stable boy proves himself a man by impregnating Elizabeth’s mother. The
native’s crime is that he forgets his place (Fanon, Black Skin 52). This black and
white binary is responsible for the rejection of both Elizabeth and her mother by
their families and societies; it serves to institutionalize the fear of rejection in
potential border transgressors. Of course, for change to be realized, Elizabeth’s
mother has to transgress the racial boundary between blacks and whites; her
transgression is at once a protest against and a negotiation of this racial divide
that does not account for Elizabeth’s hybridity. Head could also be using the
tropes of madness and rejection to show the price one has to be prepared to pay
for crossing boundaries, for going against the norm, for becoming a social critic.

Out of fear that Elizabeth might infect other children with her madness, the
principal “lived on the alert for Elizabeth’s insanity” (16). A small fight between
her and fellow pupils, for example, is enough to invite the principal’s order that
she be isolated “from the other children for a week” (16). This extraordinary
penalty against Elizabeth only helps ostracize her further from the community,
“The other children soon noticed something unusual about Elizabeth’s isolation
periods. They could fight and scratch and bite each other, but if she did likewise
she was locked up. They took to kicking at her with deliberate malice as she sat
in a corner reading a book. None of the prefects would listen to her side of the

story. ‘Come on,’ they said. ‘The principal said you must be locked up’” (16-17).

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This endless abuse based on her link to a mother she has never known compels
Elizabeth to investigate her origins from her foster mother, from whom she learns
that she was rejected by her own family and society because she “did not look
white” (17). Her maternal uncle, clearly more preoccupied by a racecourse in
Durban and brainwashed by the apartheid system, is eager to dump little
Elizabeth to whoever would accept her. His speech to the foster parents is telling:
“We want to wash our hands of this business. We want to forget, but the old lady
insists on seeing the child. We had to please her. We are going to leave her here
and pick her up later” (17).

Paradoxically, the apartheid system’s determination to conceal any
evidence of white-black relationships, which in large measure informs its decision
to have a colored woman raise Elizabeth, also reveals that very evidence. Put
differently, the surrogate mother is a product of a white-black relationship. As
such, even though locking up Elizabeth’s white mother so that she is not seen
with a mixed child serves to fix the sexual boundaries between blacks and
whites, both Elizabeth and her surrogate mother attest to the porosity of those
boundaries, thereby making the whole process of denial counterintuitive.

According to Helen Kapstein, in “‘A Peculiar Shuttling Movement’:
Madness, Passing, and Trespassing in Bessie Head’s A Question of Power”
(2003), the novel “opens a range of transgressive border-crossings, and allows
[the protagonist] to shuttle between various identities, genders, sexualities, and
nation-states” (71 ). For example, Elizabeth has an ambivalent gender that resists

categorization. Dan tells her, “You haven’t got a vagina” (13), and she does not

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find it “maddening to be told she hadn’t a vagina” (44). Similarly, Dan’s sexuality
is ambiguous; if he was not going for women, Dan “went for men like mad” (116).
Both Dan and Elizabeth have shifting gender and sexual identities throughout the
text. The ambivalence deconstructs the boundaries of gender and sexuality, and
the power relations they produce. In an attempt to connect with other
geographical locations, Elizabeth interacted with people from different national
backgrounds: “She spent some time living with Asian families, where she learnt
about India and its philosophies, and some time with a German woman from
whom she learned about Hitler and the Jews and the Second World War” (18).
This worldly exposure grants Elizabeth an international subjectivity beyond South
Africa and Botswana, and makes her more receptive to difference than the
people in her environment. It appears that Head is commenting on the possibility
of world citizenship, which is the subject of Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the
Worgz Cosmopolitanism (1997) and Masao Miyoshi’s “A Borderless World?:
From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State”
(1993). By allowing Elizabeth to build a community outside of the boundaries of
South Africa, Head suggests the possibility of life after statelessness. Obviously,
her subjectivity becomes more complex as her world expands, which shows that
identity is an “ongoing process, politically contested and historically unfinished”
(Clifford 9).

It is important that we do not let the 'need for these connections eclipse the
burden of blackness as presented in the novel. According to the narrator,

“[Elizabeth] had also lived the back-breaking life of all black people in South

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Africa. It was like living with permanent nervous tension, because you did not
know why white people there had to go out of their way to hate you or loathe you.
They were just born that way, hating people, and a black man or woman was just
born to be hated” (19). Frantz Fanon speaks to this nervous tension in _Bfllg
Skin, White MaLsks. Everyday occurrences are underlined by race. For example,
Elizabeth is sacked from her teaching job on the ground of her insanity (66), but
also because her fellow teachers “really disliked her and preferred to have
nothing to do with her” (67). As if that were not enough, she is rejected by the
English farm manager (71). On her part, Camilla was “a hysterical white woman
who never saw black people as people but as objects of permanent idiocy” (76).
Although the society is patriarchal, Camilla’s race grants her the power to
mistreat the male Botswana students at the farm. Race comes first. “She
[Camilla] flung information at her [Elizabeth] in such a way as to make it totally
incomprehensible and meaningless, subtly demonstrating that to reach her level
of education Elizabeth had to be able to grasp the incoherent... It was really
hatred at first sight, but the blue-eyed chattering woman seemed entirely
unaware of it” (76). In her assessment of Camilla, Elizabeth tells Birgette, “She
takes the inferiority of the black man so much for granted that she thinks nothing
of telling us straight to our faces we are stupid and don’t know anything. There’s
so many like her. They don’t see the shades and shadows of life on black
people’s faces” (82).

Bessie Head depicts Elizabeth’s husband as abusive and unfaithful (19).

When she cannot endure him anymore, she takes an exit permit to Botswana

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where she becomes “a stateless person” (18). Interestingly, when Elizabeth
takes the seat of power, she still remains imprisoned by patriarchy and binary
logic, “She could hurl a thunderbolt like nothing ever seen before and shatter a
victim into a thousand fragments: ‘Who’s running the show around here? I am.
Who knows everything around here? I do. Who’s wearing the pants in this
house? I am.’ She seemed to fill all requirements” (43). The pants here is a
metaphor for man — which means that she cannot imagine power outside of
masculinity.

Without a home in South Africa and Botswana, Elizabeth literally and
figuratively enacts bell hooks’s words, “at times home is nowhere” (148). In a
nationalist tone, Medusa rejects Elizabeth because she is not a citizen of
Botswana, “We don’t want you here. This is my land. These are my people. We
keep our things to ourselves” (38). In “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” a
chapter in The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon spells out the dangers of
nationalism, emphasizing that it was necessary for the birth of post-colonial
culture but also cautioning that it would breed exclusive and “othering”
tendencies among the members of the new nation once the colonizers were out
of the picture. That is to say, the nation was a momentary tool, based on the
notion of using the enemy’s weapon to fight him/her, which had to be
reconfigured once independence was attained to prevent the nation from
disintegrating (183). Granted, meaningful progress cannot be established within
the framework of the nation because it is inherently divisive. In a similar vein, the

novel’s narrator says, “The wild-eyed Medusa was expressing the surface reality

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of African society. It was shut in and exclusive. It had a strong theme of power-
worship running through it, and power people needed small, narrow, shut-in
worlds. They never felt secure in the big, wide flexible universe where there were
too many cross-currents of opposing thought” (38). This is commentary on the
limitations of Africa’s nationalism; it invokes cosmopolitanism as an alternative
space.

Elizabeth, in keeping with her cosmopolitanism, says, “‘l’ve got my
concentration elsewhere,’ she said. ‘lt’s on mankind in general, and black people
fit in there, not as special freaks and oddities outside the scheme of things, with
labels like Black Power or any other rubbish of that kind” (133). In the farm where
she works, “There were a thousand such stories to tell of life in Motaben’g, of
tentative efforts people of totally foreign backgrounds made to work together and
understand each other’s humanity; that needed analyzing — intangible, unpraised
efforts to establish the brotherhood of man” (158).

Borders are always already fragmented and “ambivalent. Instead of
maintaining inherited borders, we need to cross them so as to attain what bell
hooks calls "a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing
for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering
that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (147). In other words, our
reference to the past has more do with illuminating and transforming our idea of
home today than reproducing the once-upon-a-time home with its flaws. We
cannot feel at home if we remain imprisoned to a supposedly flawless past that is

full of flaws; our way forward is to refer to the past with an aim of learning what

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worked and what did not work in our construction of home. Without such a

reference, we stand the risk of marching backwards.

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Chapter Three

Locating Home Between the Local and the Global; The Homeless, Slums,
and Movement

The last chapter examines how and where to locate home when global
affiliations permeate the boundaries between the local and the global, as is the
case in Charles Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain (1975), and Oliver Mtukudzi’s
Dzoka Uyamwe (2003). The narratives of home and origin, which for a long time
found identity in the local place, have become unstable following the increasing
difficulty to draw the line between the local and the global. Arguing that the idea
of home cannot be delinked from the world, the dissertation attempts to find a
way of “being in the world,” a way of embracing our connectedness to both the
local and the global. Even as it appreciates the global ties that link us, the
dissertation questions whose global village this is, especially considering
villagers who are kept on the fringes of the globe. As Homi K. Bhabha cautions
us in The Location of Culture, when “we talk of the ever expanding boundaries
and territories of the global world , we must not fail to see how our own intimate,
indigenous landscapes should be remapped to include those who are its new
citizens; or those whose citizenly presence has been annihilated or marginalized”
(xxii). He further warns that while celebrating “diasporic communities” we should
not neglect “regional movements of people within nation-states” (xxii), and for
him these movements have created a vast constituency of people that includes
millions of “internally displaced peoples as a result of famines and civil wars”

(xxi). In my case, this marginalized group includes local Jamaicans in Stephanie

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Black’s Life and Debt (2001), slum dwellers who suffer constant evictions in
Kenya and Zimbabwe, internally displaced persons in the Democratic Republic of
Congo and in Darfur, Sudan, and the homeless/street people, all of whom “keep
moving” -- a different movement from the one celebrated by many
postmodernists - because they do not have a place to call home. For these
people, who have lost their livelihood to the economic forces of the local and the
global, a belonging to either the latter or the former remains hollow and
ambivalent. This chapter intends to do the following: i) to contest the divide
between the local and the global in order to show that the two are connected; ii)
to read the movement of slum dwellers and the homeless against the motion
celebrated by postmodernists in order to show that an unqualified celebration of

movement undermines the condition of slum dwellers and the homeless.

i) The divide between the local and the global

Conventionally, the local and the global are understood to be distinct
cultural spaces. While the local is considered as a unitary site, and thus the
location of home, the global is regarded as the other. However, in this era of
globalization, it has become very difficult to maintain this distinction. There is a
sense of the global in the local, and vice versa. Moreover, contrary to
conventional assumptions, both the local and the global are actively transforming
and being transformed by each other. It is therefore inaccurate to view the local
as a passive player, either removed from global influence or waiting to be

influenced by the global. Stuart Hall, in “The Local and the Global: Globalization

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and Ethnicity” (1997), demonstrates the danger of viewing identities and places
as “stable points of reference that were like that in the past, are now and ever
shall be, still points in a turning world” (175). In his view, the locality turns with the
rest of the world, and “goes through the eye of the needle of the other before it
can construct itself” (174). In other words, every place is connected to another
place. Hall has also noted globalization’s role in “the erosion of the nation-state
and the national identities that are associated with it” (177). Indeed, according to
him, “different subject-positions are being transformed or produced in the course
of the unfolding of the new dialectics of global culture” (173). It is not only Hall
who sees a link between the local and the global.

Bill Ashcroft, author of Post-Colonial Transformation (2001), has made a
similar observation: “The diffusion of global influence makes the relationship
between the local and the global all the more complex, because when we
examine local cultures we find the presence of the global within the local to an
extent that compels us to be very clear about our concept of the local” (215).
Ashcroft’s view that we can no longer look at the local in isolation from the global
is persuasive; however, it is compromised by its “top down” approach. That is, it
wrongly suggests that the contest between the global and the local is one-way,
and that it is only the local on the receiving end. In any case, the presence of the
global in the local has implications for our perception of home, one of which is the
difficulty of separating home from the world. There is a need to configure a global
sense of home, so as to account for the threads of global culture and relations

that interweave the fabric that we call home.

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In their introduction to Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and
Closure (1999), Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere call for “an understanding of
globalization that not only takes into account the rapid increase in mobility of
people, goods, and images, but also the fact that, in many places, flow goes
hand in hand with a closure of identities which often used to be much more fuzzy
and permeable” (2). In other words, while some people seem open to
globalization, others resist it by affirrning what they consider as their endangered
local identities. This resistance is based on the fear that globalization is cultural
imperialism by any other name, and that in time it would consume the local
cultures. While this fear is in some ways justified, it does not change the fact that
“there are no absolute boundaries unaffected by global flows” (Meyer and
Geschiere 5). Nevertheless, the local space is too complex and active to be
erased by the global flows. As Henry Lefebvre, in The Production of Space
(1991), puts it, “We are confronted not by one social space but by many —
indeed, by an unlimited multiplicity or uncountable set of social spaces which we
refer to generically as ‘social space’. No space disappears in the course of
growth and development: the worldwide does not abolish the local” (86).
Nevertheless, globalization has an impact on the local, an impact that affects our
understanding of home.

In a similar vein, Arif Dirlik, in “The Global in the Local” (1996), shows the
relationship between the local and the global by arguing that the boundaries of

the local are open. For him:

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The local [...] is a product of the conjuncture of structures located in the
same temporality but with different spatialities, which is what gives rise to
the problem of spatiality and, therefore, of the local, in the first place. The
conjunctural situation also defines the culture of the local, which is
stripped of its reification by daily confrontation between different cultures

and appears instead in the nakedness of its everyday practice. (39)

In other words, the local undergoes daily constructions and tensions as it finds its
place in a sea of cultures, which in turn makes it difficult to separate it from those
other cultures. Dirlik also warns against unbridled idealization of the local
because it is “a site both of promise and predicament.” Put differently, the local is
capable of liberation as much as it is capable of oppression: “In its promise of
liberation, localism may also serve to disguise oppression and parochialism” (22).
In a similar context, Mike Featherstone, in “Localism, Globalism, and Cultural
Identity” (1996), argUes that “it is not helpful to regard the global and local as
dichotomies separated in space or time; rather, it would seem that the processes
of globalization and localization areinextricably bound together in the current
phase” (47).

Talking specifically about Latin American presence in the US, Richard T.
Rodn'guez argues that when we look at Latino/a studies “what we see are not
mutually exclusive Chicano/a and Peurto Rican cultural histories,” instead we
have a complex social history that grasps “the glocal”- that is, the intertwine
function of the global and the local-whose key coordinates are provided by a

critical regionalist practice” (183). Rodrl'guez’s argument resonates with

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Mungoshi’s Garabha, a character who resists categorization as either local or
global. He is equated with wind, which is a strategic way of indicating his
openness.

Mungoshi’s Waiting for the Rain explores the relationship between the
country and the city, between the local and the global, or the glocal, and between
Zimbabwe and the Western world - showing that the boundary that divides them
is permeable. Set in Zimbabwe, it uses lack of rain literally and figuratively to
explain penury in the worlds of his characters. As a result of drought, a society
that chiefly relies on agriculture as an economic activity is faced with famine. The
narrator defines “home” as a locality “where the rain comes late, if it does come
at all, and the animals simply drop dead and the old folk are abandoned to await
the black messiah with a curse on their twisted lips. Home? No, no, no, no” (163).
Indeed, there is drought throughout the novel. A conflict between the local and
the global first surfaces when the main character, Lucifer, travels from the capital
city where he has been residing to his rural home where his parents live. The
purpose of his visit is to get his parents’ blessings before he travels overseas for
higher education. The bus he has boarded stops at Chambara township before it
proceeds to his village, and it is here that his embodiment of the conflict becomes
evident: “He recognizes familiar faces but they seem much older. He can’t fit any
names to the faces, they remain just familiar anonymous faces. He is ashamed.
He is supposed to know their names but he doesn’t. An uneasiness — a feeling of
not belonging - assails him” (40). One could read his inability to fit any names as

a sense of detachment between the city/the global and the country/the local,

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considering the weight of names in relation to identity. However, this detachment
is undermined by his recognition of faces. We shall expand on that sense of
(dis)connection that allows Lucifer to recognize his villagers.

At the next bus stop, Lucifer encounters another family, and there is
something about them that he cannot remember: “[lt] makes him uneasy. It sits
uncomfortably in him together with other things that he can’t name - things that
have always haunted him in his home country — making him feel an unwelcome
stranger here where he was born and grew up” (41). He finally arrives at his
destination and meets his father at the bus stop: “He looks round at the old stony
country and wishes he were elsewhere” (42). Lucifer feels homeless in his home
country, which is in contrast to the general trend in which people feel homeless in
the city or overseas. He promises not to return when he leaves: “Must I live with
what I no longer believe in?” (162). Lucifer suggests here that he once believed
in his rural home, making us wonder when he shifted and what caused that shift.
To understand why Lucifer no longer believes in his rural home, one has to look
at his home as a diseased or sick space.

The local space that is Lucifer’s village stands out as a site of disease and
death, a site burdened with the negative effects of globalization. Nearly all
characters are suffering from a range of ailments and facing imminent death.
They look emaciated, wasted, doomed, and dying. For example, Tongoona
suffers from swollen feet and backache which affect his work and sleep; Old Japi
is “half-deaf and half-blind” (6); Old Mandisa feels dead (11); “Lucifer looks sick”

(169); Lucifer’s mother, Raina, has “a terrible headache” (21); and Kutsvaka’s

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wife and children have “pains in the chest” (22). When one begins to think deeply
about these characters, their diseases, and general fatigue, one begins to see
what being at the receiving end of globalization really means. In other words,
Lucifer’s rural home is an example of the cost the local has to pay in its
relationship with the global.

One could read this local space’s poverty and death as a commentary on
its relationship with the global. Lucifer describes it as “a cluster of termite—eaten
huts clinging on the stony slope of a sun-baked hill” (162). This description
evokes decline and abandonment. More importantly, it evokes a negative and
cancerous consumption. There is always something eating up something in both
spaces. The huts are eaten by termites. The characters are eaten by disease.
The dead bodies are eaten by vultures. Everyone and everything, including an
ant (164), is death-bound. In fact, Lucifer says, “At home, the worms set to work
on you on the very day you are conceived” (163). This could be read as taking
away protest, but it could also be read as an urgent call for protest because it
suggests that both the mother and the unborn baby are endangered. Ordinarily,
worms begin to eat one after one’s burial, meaning after one’s death. However,
in this case, the worms do not wait for a subject to be born, to live, and to die; the
death-bound-subject, if I can borrow Abdul R. JanMohamed’s term, begins to
encounter the threat of death on the day it is conceived. This makes more sense
when we consider that the fetus of the hunger-stricken characters in the novel
would begin to face malnutrition in the womb. This prompts us to join

JanMohamed’s The Death-Bound-Subject (2005), in asking: “What happens to

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the ‘life’ of a subject who is faced with the ubiquitous threat of death, a threat that
is constant yet unpredictable? How does that threat permeate the subject’s life?
(2). In terms of the novel, the movement of both the subjects who stay at home
and those who leave home inevitably ends at “The Plain of Skulls” (164) and
Lucifer’s family have “the feeling that someone is being buried” (166). While a
form of agency is lacking among the villagers who seem to passively await their
fates, is fair to say that the ‘ agency lies in the resilience and survival. Tongoona,
for example, goes to cultivate his farms even when he is in pain; the fact that he
is still there shows a persistent struggle against the threat of death. Still, in the
novel, it seems that movement always leads to death, and in the era of
globalization, one does not need to leave home in order to move - as the cases
of the Old Man and Garabha show. Lucifer’s flight from his village could be a
manifestation of his feeling that people in his village are death-bound.

One could push that cloud of death that is hanging over the local further
by arguing that it is a part of the game. In other words, it is a manifestation of the
tension between the local and the global. Even when we argue about open
boundaries, we are clearly reminded that the power relations between the local
and global are in favor of the global, that the global is largely in control. Once the
local subject is death-bound as is the case in Lucifer’s village, the global forces
use that occasion to explain away any abuse against them. Paul Gilroy neatly
captures this tension between the global and the local in Postcolonial

Melancholia (2005) through a memo written by the former Chief Economist at the

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World Bank, Lawrence Summers. In this memo, Summers makes the following
case:
I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the
lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that... I’ve
always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly
UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low
compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.... The concern over an agent
that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate cancer is
obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to
get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is about 200
per thousand. (qtd. in Gilroy 10)
Summers bases his logic for depositing toxic wastes from the developed world in
Africa on the fact that Africans are already death-bound. One would think that
people who are dying belong to the intensive care unit, but Summers believes
that they belong to the morgue. It is difficult to separate Summers’ logic from the
logic of globalization, especially considering how, in the name of free trade, the
global’s subsidized agricultural produce has pushed local production out of the
market. It is therefore tempting to look at the local subject’s condition as death-
bound as a design of global capital, emblematic of broader power relations
between the local and the global.
The above examples of consumption relate to Baudrillard’s argument
about consumer society. The local, according to Lucifer, is a forgotten space

where people only return for burial. But not everyone shares Lucifer’s reason for

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abandoning the local: “He had thought that something would change, something
would happen to restore the meaning into the word: Home. When, in the city,
people talk of home, he feels his lack and he wants to hide. For them, home is
[...] the place to go when they are tired of the city — the city, an alien place that
only jingles to the tune of coins. Home is where Father, Mother, Brother and
Sister are” (162). What we see here is that the people Lucifer is referring to have
a better negotiation of home, which involves the city and the country, the local
and the global. Lucifer wants to hide from them because his definition of home is
based on either the country or the city, while the other city dwellers view the city
and the country as complimentary to each other. Lucifer views space as
bounded, not open; this view at once informs and undermines his desire for a
“more dynamic, home far away across the seas” (166). Despite Lucifer’s rejection
of his home, he is not able to sever himself from his past; “he can never seem to
completely dig up and cut the roots that plant him in the earth of this dark arid
country. In spite of the books. In spite of his knowledge of modern psychology
which he has taken to reading so avidly these days. In spite of...in spite of...”
(52).

Mungoshi’s text does not make mobility an easier option; in fact, it
contests mobility. For example, Old Mandisa depicts Garabha’s wandering in
negative light: “The way he roams the country as if he has no home — who knows
what they [the enemies of the family] might have done to him?” (13). Wandering
signifies homelessness or haunting, according to Old Mandisa. The car that

comes to collect Lucifer has “Engine trouble” (170) which figuratively mars its

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mobility. Old Mandisa also quotes a local saying that associates movement with
death: “He who dares a long journey is asking death to a fight. We who remain
have no power over what may befall him. He is gone, good as dead” (174). As
Lucifer prepares to leave his village, he dreams of mobility and its discontents. In
other words, the allure of global capital as a site of opportunity might seem
promising, and the global may seem to be winning over the local, but both are
doomed to death sooner (for the local) or later (for the global). Lucifer’s travel
takes him through “a dark road with tall cypresses” which “are casting such a
shadow that he can hardly see the road” (153). These tall trees symbolize the
trappings of globalization that make it difficult to see the end of the tunnel. In this
postmodern journey, one is “almost there” but never “there” (153). In the second
part of his dream he sees people he recognizes, “They are all faces he has seen
before but he cannot give any of them names. He just feels he has seen them
before but he wouldn’t know what to say if someone asked him where he had
seen them. They are all wearing the same expression: stern reproach” (154). It
turns out that “these faces belong to his fathers from the beginning of time” (154).
The exclusion of Lucifer’s mothers in this team is telling, and it raises the
question of the women’s place among ancestors. Equally telling is the fact that
Lucifer’s ancestors are stern because they feel that Lucifer’s global movement is
futile.

The novel allegorically deploys dream to critique movement. We see a
positive movement when the ancestors cross the boundaries between the living

dead and the living to save Lucifer from peril. However, most movements are

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destructive. Kuruku, for example, goes to work in town because globalization has
made it difficult for him to find meaningful work in his rural area. But his
movement to town disrupts Tradition which says that the he, as the eldest son,
should take care of his parents and family (158). In his last dream before he
leaves his rural country to go overseas, Lucifer sees a figure who looks like
Matandangoma with many alternating faces. This figure tells him about a hunter,
Magaba, who was called out by a bird when he was sleeping. The bird sang:

Come away, Magaba,

with me, come with me.

Come with me, Magaba,

And I will show you

show you the Big Plain.

The Big Plain, Magaba —

the Big Plain of Game.

Don’t delay, Magaba,

Don’t delay. Rise

and follow me, follow me

to the Big Plain, Magaba,

the Big Plain of Game. (155-56)
This song performs the underlying reason for global movement — an opportunity
to accumulate wealth or what Baudrillard describes as the limitlessness of our
needs and desires vis-a-vis the perpetual flights of the objects of our desires.

Magaba is a hunter who only needs one game, but he falls to the trappings of

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large consumption in the form of “the Big Plain of Game,” meaning an opportunity
for him to hunt more game. This marks the beginning of consumerism in the
novel. One assumes that with more game comes more left over, more garbage.
In this sense, the bird and the Big Plain of Game represent the all-knowing global
while the hunter is the local. Magaba resists this bird’s persistent call for a long
time, but eventually he gives in because, “For many days he had gone out
without bringing home any meat. He was hungry, his dogs were hungry” (156).
This is a typical situation in many African local spaces, a situation that the
imperial powers, now including China, exploit for their own benefit. Magaba’s
hunger compromises his better judgment, “So he followed the voice of the
strange bird that promised him game. He couldn’t see the bird itself. He could
only hear it, hear it way ahead of him” (156). That he could not see the bird
uncannily reminds us of the blurred image of globalization; we can neither see
nor define globalization, but we still follow it. More specifically, this scene reminds
us of the overseas journey that Lucifer is about to embark on, a journey which
has promised him “big game” in the form of better living conditions and the ability
to take care of his poor family. It is as though the system that has kept his family
in poverty is rewarding him so as to keep the family from rebellion. The word
reward is used here sarcastically because the Lucifer we see in the text is
already too alienated to help his family, and one could argue that this outcome is
a part of the play to keep his family poor.

Magaba’s movement goes on and on: “He followed the voice of the

strange bird for days and days across many rivers and several mountains,

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through thick jungles and dangerous swamps. [...] Then he began to grow weak.
The voice went on and on, farther and farther away from him, sweeter than ever
before but fading and fading and fading till he couldn’t hear it any more” (156).
The voice is gone, his dogs are nowhere to be seen, and he is alone. “All alone
in the middle of a vast treeless plain. He couldn’t tell which way he had come”
(156). He lies down, and the vultures are ready to eat his body: “[B]efore his eyes
closed forever, he saw that the plain was covered with human skulls and bones.
The bird gave one shrill piercing note and he died with that laugh in his head. By
the end of the same day ants and vultures and other carnivores had cleaned his
bones of its flesh till he was just another heap of bones among others” (156). So,
“the Big Plain of Game” that Magaba expected at the beginning of his journey
becomes a Big Plain of Death. This is the price of unbridled motion, hence the
narrator’s caveat, “Beware of the voice of the Strange Bird...” (156). In other
words, beware of movement and its promises of big game, beware of
globalization. As this terrifying dream ends, Lucifer sees the ancestors he had
seen earlier. Strikingly, Lucifer’s description of his village is very similar to the
vast treeless plain where the strange bird leads him to: “You go for mile after mile
in this swelter and not here, not there, not anywhere is there a tree big enough to
sit under. And when you look everywhere all you see is the naked white earth
criss-crossed by the eternal shadow of the restless vulture” (162). This uncanny
similarity suggests that both the local and global are endangered, even death-
bound, and that something has to be done to save both of them. In this sense,

the text parodies Lucifer’s attempt to solve his location in his village, what he

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calls “a biological and geographical error” (162), by moving to a different
geographical location. Mungoshi is telling us here that moving to a new place can
only work temporarily; ultimately, all the spaces are connected, and thus tied to a
more or less similar fate. One is reminded here of global warming that every
space suffers from, regardless of which space is most responsible for the same.
The discontents of globalization include deforestation. Lucifer laments his
village’s environmental decline: “When I was a little boy, the bush was a little
thicker than it is now, and there were bigger trees than this scrub that remains
now. The people have cut down most of the trees for firewood and building
material” (161). One of the characteristics of modernity and globalization is
massive lumbering, often resulting in climate change. It is not strange to find
international lumber companies logging in remote African forests, places that
would otherwise not have international interest. Many times people tell the
intensity of the global in these areas by how fast a forest is reduced to a scrub.
Ironically, while the nation-state allows these agents of globalization to profit from
logging in the local forests, it arrests local peasants for cutting down one or two
trees. Lucifer observes that the cutting of trees is such that “in five more years
this land will be useless, too tired to support any form of life [...] soon people will
have to go and find somewhere else to live. Already some of them, those less
attached to roots and family and “our ancestors’ are moving out” (162). In other
words, the land, like the subjects, faces the threat of death. In the quotation,
moving out is not painted positively; moving is associated with over consumption

and destruction of resources. The attitude here is that once one destroys the

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forest in the Amazon, one can move on to destroy the Congo, without
understanding that these spaces are connected. Meanwhile, the destruction and
resultant displacement produces Environmental Refugees.

The climax of the conflict between the local and the global comes when
Lucifer’s parents give him medicine to protect him overseas. They expect him to
carry the herbs, but he refuses: “Father, surely you don’t expect me to carry
those — those things all over the world, do you?” (169). Lucifer’s father who has
never gone overseas says, “I know what happens out there. You need to be
protected” (171-72). For the father, out there is a dangerous zone. The tension
between the local and the global is also evident in Lucifer’s rejection of the
peanut butter locally made by his grandmother, Old Mandisa (179). The text
seems to point towards a negotiation of the local and the global when we see
Raina, Lucifer’s mother, seek the protection of both the ancestors and the God of
the Bible: “She makes the sign of the cross and throws some more roots on to
the fire” (176). Meanwhile, Lucifer is alienated from both worlds. The local has
already failed him, and the global, which he is embarking on is gloomy: “Lucifer
looks round. There is nothing at the end of the road. The road just stops at the
brink of nowhere, on the edge of darkness” (153). The destination of Lucifer’s
road is overseas, which is supposed to have better opportunities than the local
place; however, we are told that there is nothing at the end of the road. What this
means is that home is not waiting for Lucifer overseas; home, locally or globally,

is a dream deferred -- a dream that has to be worked on constantly. This moment

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of darkness shows the elusiveness of home, as it leaves Lucifer with nowhere to
call home.

Mungoshi’s John, who resides in Bulawayo (a city), visits his rural home
with a radio, which he plays to his grandfather. What the old man listens to is a
commentary on the dangers of movement: “...search parties have combed the
whole area but they haven’t been able to trace the bodies of the missing air-
crash victims” (30). This air-crash reveals the other side of movement. After
listening to world news, the grandfather asks, “Where is this all happening?” to
which John responds, “All over the world, Sekuru. All over the world” (31).
Clearly, the radio, a symbol of mass communication, brings the world (read
global culture) to an old man who apparently has not traveled out of the locality. I
use “apparently” here because Sekuru’s participation in the liberation struggle
against “the first white men who came in our country” (31) already questions the
supposed purity of his identity. In any case, the local (the old man) interacts and
is linked with the global (world news on the radio). In his book, The Postmodern
Omition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), Jean-Francois Lyotard sets the stage
for the complexity and ambivalence that is our cultural identity when he says

no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more

complex and mobile than ever before. Young or old, man or woman, rich

or poor, a person is always located at a post through which various kinds

of messages pass. No one, not even the least privileged among us, is

ever entirely powerless over the messages that traverse and position him

at the post of sender, addressee, or referent. (15)

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This means that every subjectivity traverses and is traversed by other
subjectivities. Similarly, there is no place that can claim a pure identity. The local
is no longer innocent when it is playing global music. Of course, the novel also
uses this scene of the radio to show that there are cases when the local resists
the global: “He [the old man] doesn’t like it - just as he doesn’t like most of the
things the boy brings from town — useless things to the best of his knowledge —
but the boy behaves as if he invented them and as if without them life would
immediately stop” (29). He also mocks John’s assumption that the tobacco is
“best quality” simply because it is from the city as opposed to the country: “Of
course everything made in the towns is best quality with you [John]” (28). The
Old Man allows us to see how the local and global play out in ordinary lives. He
subtly resists the notion that the global is better than the local, without hurting
John’s feelings.

Mungoshi also uses the Old Man’s complexity to critique anthropologists’
tendency to view place as bounded. Typically, anthropologists who travel from
the city to the country, from the global to the local, to do research, with the
assumption that the data they get from the local place is uncontaminated. In a
similar fashion, John’s friends from the city are interested in interviewing the Old
Man. John presents his friends’ intention to the Old Man: “They would like you to
tell them how you fought the white men” (31). The binary logic in this question
negates cultural intersections. John’s friends’ visit and their interest in
interviewing the Old Man remind us of the logic of the anthropological visitations

that James Clifford records in Routes and Translation in the Twentieth Century

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(1997): “Villages, inhabited by natives, are bounded sites particularly suitable for
intensive visiting by anthropologists. They have long served as habitable,
mappable centers for the community and, by extension, the culture” (21). After
criticizing both the colonialist characterization of natives as local or confined to a
locality, and examining its relationship to anthropology’s obsession with outlying
villages or the fieldwork, Clifford writes: “Localizations of the anthropologist’s
objects of study in terms of a ‘field’ tend to marginalize or erase several blurred
boundary areas, historical realities that slip out of the ethnographic frame” (22-
23). Clifford views culture and travel through the same lens, but he is quick to
give a warning:
In my current problematic, the goal is not to replace the cultural figure
“native” with the intercultural figure “traveler.” Rather, the task is to focus
on concrete mediations of the two, in specific cases of historical tension
and relationship... I am recommending not that we make the margin a
new center (“we” are all travelers) but that specific dynamics of
dwelling/traveling be understood comparatively. (24)
It is this kind of mediation that the Old Man evokes when he believes that not
everything Western has the best quality, but still partakes of the Western things
that John brings him.
Garabha, the wanderer, through his social relation with the several places
and people he wanders to, complicates the subjectivity of his restful/settled
relations, whom he visits and plays drums to from time to time. It is even possible

that his popular and famous drumming borrows from the several cultures and

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borderlands he visits, and brings back strands of those cultures to his audience
at his birthplace. That way, his audience travels without traveling; this confirms
Doreen Massey’s observation that “a proportion of the social interrelations will be
wider than and go beyond the area being referred to in any particular context as
a place” (169). Through John’s radio, Sekuru’s participation in the World War,
and Garabha’s wandering, then, the text undercuts the supposed cultural
singularity of the locality. That is, the text collapses the boundaries between in
and out by showing that the former is inextricably linked to the latter, and vice
versa. This linkage encourages simultaneous identification with the local and the
global or the country and the city, since the two are strands of the same fabric.
These connections, even tensions, between the local and global are also
captured in Oliver Mtukudzi’s song, Dzoka Uyamwe (2003). Set in Zimbabwe, the
song negotiates the conflict between the country and the city, the local and the
global. The protagonist sings: “Mandiona kusviba mati kuora [You see my dark
skin and think I’m decayed].”
He could be talking to a prospective employer who is judging him by the color of
his skin, assuring her/him that he is not decomposing. The impression we get
here is that he suffers racial discrimination because of his dark skin. However
there is another way of reading this piece. He says: “Ndoenda kwangu vakomana
ndavirigwa ini [I am going home, friends, the sun has set on me].” At this point we
begin to imagine a subject who has lost his youth in the city due to exhaustion
and frustration. As a result, he feels the need to assure himself and others that

he still has something left in him; he has not decayed. It is important that he does

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not decay because that would reduce him to trash, which would have to be
cleaned-up the way the homeless are. It is this fear of being declared homeless
or human rubbish and subsequently trashed that makes him emphasize that he
has a home to return to if the city does not live up its promise: “Dzoka dande
vakomana ndavirigwa ini [Going back to my birthplace, the sun has set on me].”
It becomes clear that the protagonist has had a trying time in the city when his
mother, acting as the local place, calls him to return to his village for
rejuvenation: “Huya zvako gotwe ranguwe dzoka [Come back my youngest child
and breastfeed].” One could read this as an uncritical celebration of nature, but it
also suggests the importance of a community and family that can intervene and
offer support in an increasingly hostile world economy. The country, then,
becomes a safe haven from the hostilities of the city. The mother assures him not
to be discouraged by people who link his dark skin to decomposition and even
death: “Kuora kwemunhu kuri mumoyo, Kusviba kwemunhu kuri mupfungwa
[The decay of a person is in the heart, The darkness of a person is in the mind].”
In short, the protagonist travels to the city with the hope of negotiating the two
spaces. However, his hopes are shattered by a cruel city, which renders his
belonging impossible. At that point, the postmodernist notions of motion,
dispersal, and belonging nowhere prove inadequate as alternative ways of
conceiving home. This validates Aljaz Ahmad’s argument, in In Theory: Nations,
Classes, Literature (1994), to the effect that postmodernism has fallen short of
addressing the impasse of belonging; “what postmodernism has done is to

validate precisely the pleasures of such unbelonging, which is rehearsed now as

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a utopia, so that belonging nowhere is nevertheless construed as the perennial
pleasure of belonging everywhere” (157). Mtukudzi’s protagonist’s context shows
that unbelonging translates not into belonging everywhere, but isolation and
nihilism. That said, Mtukudzi’s call for his protagonist to return home is equally
problematic, as it misleadingly assumes that the country is bounded, and thus
safe from the homelessness in the city: “Kukurumura kwandakaita gore riya,
Pawakasiyira ndipapo dzoka uyamwe [Since I weaned you, that year, My breasts
have been waiting].” Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth; the
country is implicated, as will become clear momentarily. However, this call could
also be read not through the lens of truth, but through the lens of resistance to
the forces of globalization. Here one is reminded of Raymond Williams’s The
Country and the City (1973), particularly its claims that there is more to the rural
area than we admit: “Rural England is said to be a thing of the past, and of
course the changes are evident. But if we look up from the idea and back at the
country we see how much is still present, even in this exceptionally industrialized
and urbanized nation” (301 ). The point here is that the local has to revolt against
attempts to erase it from the map of existence.

Mtukudzi seems to insinuate that there is an in (home) and out (the world):
“Kwangu vakomana, ndavirigwa ini [My home, friends, the sun has set on me].” It
is as though the home he is referring to is not connected to the city. The artist
appeals to the past and to the rural home as a rejuvenative space for his
protagonist who has failed to find gold in the glitter of the urban space. By

encouraging the protagonist to return home, the artist casts a shadow of doubt

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over the supposed progress in the city, thereby nostalgically granting currency
and a new lease on life to the traditional past. Still, nostalgia conveys not merely
a sense of fixity to the past, but also functions as a revolutionary act that
challenges modernity’s privileging of the present time by allowing a co-existence
of the past, present, and future. By leaving the city, which is more commonly
associated with modernity and the present, to return to the rural space linked to
tradition, Mtukudzi’s protagonist disrupts modernity’s sense of time. Here one is
reminded of Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia (2001), particularly the
insightful argument that “nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time,
the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and
turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to
surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (xv). This
rebellion is significant because it brings to the fore issues of injustice on whose
foundation modernity rests, but which, paradoxically, modernity endeavors to
erase from our collective memory.

There is, however, another way of reading this urban-rural movement that
Mtukudzi evokes. One could look at it as a reflection of Mtukudzi’s mourning for
the past, as an elusive attempt to hold on to a past that is quickly fading away:
“Ndasuwa dande [I miss my birthplace].” In that sense, Mtukudzi and his
protagonist are not ready to embrace a worldwide wind of change that not only
connects the city and the country to each other, but also to the rest of the world.
Of course, the issue is much more complex. That act of mourning keeps a would-

have-been eliminated history of Dande alive, thereby countering the city’s story.

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The rural-urban-rural movement of Mtukudzi’s protagonist also symbolizes the
fragmentation and homelessness that have become our postcolonial condition.
Mtukudzi’s protagonist simultaneously belongs everywhere and nowhere. For
example, his living condition in the city is a far cry from the city’s promise of
affluence and prosperity. Like the janitor at Obi’s workplace in Achebe’s No
Longer At Ease and the lower class in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987),
Mtukudzi’s protagonist is economically marginalized. It is a question of
dispossession.

That said, Mtukudzi’s appeal for his protagonist to return to Dande
questionably implies that one’s belongingness to the home space is always and
already given, that one would fit in as soon as one returns: “Zamu rakamirira iwe
dzoka uyamwe [My breasts are waiting for you to come back and begin from
where you left].” Nothing could be further from the truth, largely because the
subject returning and the past he/she is returning to have had several
interconnections over time, and these interconnections defy easy reproduction or
repression. Moreover, Mtukudzi’s appeal fails to recognize that the rural space is
not completely removed from the total mess that is the urban space, that the wall
that separates in and out is porous, that the city is in relation and not opposition
to Dande. Viewing Dande and the city as two separate places, as in and out, to
borrow Massey’s words, “is a view of place as bounded, as in various ways a site
of an authenticity, as singular, fixed and unproblematic in its identity. It is a
conceptualization of space which rests in part on the view of space as statis” (5).

Yet, places always stand on contested, fluid, and open grounds. This is the

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central trope in Harrow’s Thresholds of Change in African Literature (1994), in
which he insightfully argues that “the Mdbius strip of passage must turn in both
directions, inward and outward” (256). In fact, the cover of his book tellingly
focuses on the threshold of the circumcision hut which is where Camara Laye’s
Dark Child (1954) places the key spaces dividing inside and outside, between the
boy’s male world and his mother’s package of food. In brief, places are
interconnected.

Beyond the facade of “we are living in a small world, with connections
everywhere,” lies a huge wealth gap between the global and the local. There is a
pattern of “global wealth and local poverty [which] articulate a growing
contradiction” (Appudarai 630). A sense of global connection is compromised by

global inequality, as we see in Mtukudzi’s song and in Mungoshi’s novel.

ii) The movement of the slum dwellers and the homeless

It is common among postmodernists to celebrate the fact that we now live
in what Stuart Hall, in “Political Belonging in a World of Multiple Identities” (2002),
has called “a world of constant movement” (25). For instance, in The Consumer
Society: Myth and Reality (1998), Baudrillard celebrates motion and mobility in
terms of the insatiability of our needs and desires and the perpetual flights of the
objects of our desire. The postmodern condition or this consumer society is for
him the state of “evanescence” and “continual mobility” in which it is increasingly
“impossible to define an objective specificity of the need,” as if it were a “flight

from one signifier to another” (77). Elsewhere, in Simulacra and Simulation

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(1995), Baudrillard puts this celebration of blind motion in the context of the
dissolution of cartographies of Empire. The concepts of empire and imperialism
are fast disappearing in mere simulation and abstraction as simulation is “no
longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance” (1). This abstract
world of Simulacra, territory or space that once defined empires and its colonies
is gradually rotting across the map. Paradoxically, the legacies of empire
continue to haunt its subjects, as we see in cases of the homeless, the internally
displaced persons, and slum dwellers.

The postmodernist celebration of movement is based on notions of
freedom from cultural attachments, sophistication, and cosmopolitanism. When
we romanticize movement, we undermine the plight of the homeless/street
people and slum dwellers, who daily undergo an agonized movement. The
majority of the movers envisioned by postmodernists can vacation in the
Caribbean, attend a business meeting in Tokyo, visit friends in London, organize
a conference in Sydney, and then return home in New York - all in ten days.
They often have a place that they can come back to when they are tired of travel
and hotel. As a result, they move with a fall back plan. However, the other
movers, especially the homeless/street people, do not have the luxury of homes
to return to when they are tired of moving. They have no menus and world
cuisines; instead, they eat what they find in garbage cans. They do not have
basic things like clean drinking water, let alone water for shower and laundry.
Their movement does not fit into the romanticized motion of postmodernists, and

it is on this basis that I show the limits of movement.

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999)
calls this figure of the displaced and homeless “Native lnforrnant,” whom she
describes as the “moving base” and argues that this base is increasingly facing
“annihilation” as it is disappearing both from Eurocentric discourses and what has
come to be known as postcolonial discourse. Her aim, she remarks, is to “track
the figure of the Native lnfonnant” whose position has been recorded and
appropriated by what is traditionally known as the postcolonial subject who either
resides in the metropolis of the former empires or among the elites of the former
colonies (ix). The other figure of the native informant, whom she also calls the
“autochthone and/or subaltem” (xi), either does not move at all [if movement
means movement of people from colonies to the metropole as in the case of
postcolonial subjects, or vice versa, as in the case of the cosmopolitan tourists
and corporate businessmen trekking globe], or is displaced from land, home, and
social and economic mobility as to render her completely mobile. That is the
reason why Spivak characterizes this constituency as a “moving base,” and her
own attempt to track this base as the “history of vanishing present.” To this end,
Spivak and Clifford have some common ground. Whereas her term “Native
Informant” is incased in anthropological research in which the native informant is
speaking literally to the anthropologist, the homeless that I am invoking is not a
typical anthropological subject precisely because he/she does not live in villages
or in places that are traditionally considered local. Anthropologists would rather

go to the villages, not the cities.

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In Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993), Spivak critiques both
Eurocentric discourses as well as postcolonial complicity:

As a result of a decade of colonial discourse studies percolating into

disciplinary pedagogy and its powerful adjuncts, and of the imbrication of

techniques of knowledge with strategies of power, who claims marginality
in the larger postcolonial field? What might this have to do with the old
scenario of empowering a privileged group or a group susceptible to

upward mobility as the authentic inhabitants of the margin? (59)

That is to say that when postcoloniality is defined in relation to mobility, what
happens is that that margin gets claimed by people who move, say from the
colonies to the metropole, leaving behind those who cannot move, forever locked
in the margin without the claim of a margin. To that end, Spivak is critiquing post-
colonialism as globalization that forecloses the study of margin, which is literally
endless. One could apply Spivak’s logic here to the unquestioned celebration of
movement by some postmodernists to an extent that makes it difficult for the
homeless to identify with it.

This section examines the current problems with the slums and the
question of autochthony as a contribution to the issue of home and
homelessness. These problems include, but are not limited to, the eviction of
slum dwellers in Harare and Mombasa, the constant movement of the slum
dwellers and the homeless in order to escape charges of vagrancy, and the living
standard of slum dwellers. It reads the movement of slum dwellers and the

homeless against the motion celebrated by postmodernists in order to show that

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an unqualified celebration of movement undermines the condition of slum
dwellers and the homeless. The dehumanizing conditions of slums on the one
hand, and, on the other, the demolition of slums in the name of better housing
which never benefits the evictees, require urgent attention. These conditions and
demolitions do not provide for the housing needs of the evictees, and for that
reason they violate human rights. A case in point is the ongoing (March 29, 2007)
demolition of slums in Mombasa, Kenya — with no provision of alternative
housing for the victims. According to The Standard of March 29, 2007,
“Residents of Buxton slums in Mombasa watch helplessly as their houses are
demolished by a Municipal Council bulldozer after they were forcibly evicted to
pave way for the beautification of the city.” The question that comes to mind is to
whom the city is being beautified, and whose interests are targeted by this
beautification. As one begins to think about this question, one sees the hand of
globalization in it. The local governments are more interested in becoming a
tourists’ destination, and thus in attracting capital.

In a related case, on May 19, 2005 and the days after, an estimated
700,000 Zimbabwean slum dwellers were forcefully evicted and rendered
homeless by their own government in what has become known as Operation
Murambatsvina, which translates into Operation Clean-Up Trash or Operation
Restore Order. The trash here refers both to the slum dwellers and the shacks
they lived in. The government claimed that these slum spaces were breeding
grounds for crime, illegal housing, and AIDS so as to appear as though it was in

public interest for these spaces to be cleared. Of course, the timing of this

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“Operation Clean-Up Trash,” coming just before presidential elections, suggested
that the government did not expect “the trash” to vote in their favor. After all, the
parliamentary elections had just been held, and “the trash” voted heavily in favor
of the opposition. In other words, this was the government’s ploy to scuttle
opposition strongholds as a way of manipulating future elections. But there was
more to it. These slum areas became alternative markets for foreign currency
exchange, which wrested away monopoly from the government. In an era of
globalization where the flow of money and communication is much faster and
difficult to control, the government found it even more difficult to control foreign
currency agents who lived in nameless streets. The people that the government
had all along negated were now negating the government by running parallel
markets which controlled more foreign currency than the government-owned
reserve bank. Let us put the Operation Clean-Up Trash in context.

According to Anna Kajumulo Tibaijuka, the UN Special Envoy on Human
Settlements Issues in Zimbabwe, in “Report of the Fact-Finding Mission to
Zimbabwe to assess the Scope and Impact of Operation Murambatsvina” (2005),
the government used Operation Murambatsvina as a tool to “clean-up” its cities.
The phrase “clean-up” suggests trash, and leads me to argue that the
government “cleaned up” (demolished and evicted) the slums and the slum
dwellers because they considered them as trash. According to the report, “It [the
Operation] started in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, and rapidly evolved into a
nationwide demolition and eviction campaign carried out by the police and the

army” (7). As a result of these demolitions and evictions, approximately 700,000

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lost their homes and economic activities, and subsequently became poorer than
they were before the Operation. The report’s findings fault the government:
“Operation Restore Order, while purporting to target illegal dwellings and
structures and to clamp down on alleged illicit activities was carried out in an
indiscriminate and unjustified manner, with indifference to human suffering, and,
in repeated cases, with disregard to several provisions of national and
international legal frameworks” (7). In an environment of government-sanctioned
“segregation and social exclusion” it becomes difficult for one to feel at home.
This report gives an in-depth account of this Operation, including its historical,
social, political, and economic contexts.

The Zimbabwean president, Robert Mugabe, however, saw the
operation’s goal as a campaign to “restore sanity,” which is a re-appropriation of
the colonial usage of the tropes of sanity and insanity to justify oppression.
Zimbabwe’s Commissioner of Police viewed this operation as an opportunity “to
clean the country of the crawling mass of maggots bent on destroying the
economy.” We shall momentarily discuss these references to Zimbabwean
people by their own government as trash, maggots, garbage. The 2007 Amnesty
International Report provides a useful background on Zimbabwe. According to
the report, “The situation of thousands of people whose homes were destroyed
as part of Operation Murambatsvina (Restore Order) in 2005 continued to
worsen, with no effective solution planned by the authorities.” To exacerbate the
situation, “The government continued to obstruct humanitarian efforts by the UN

and by the local and international non-governmental organizations.” In other

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words, the government did not only fail to provide basic needs like food, water,
and medicine to the evictees, but they also prevented organizations that offered
to help from doing so. In a BBC article dated May 23, 2007, Amnesty
International contests the Zimbabwean government’s claim that it had replaced
the demolished houses: “By May (2006) one year after the programmes launch,
only 3,325 houses have been built, compared to 92,460 housing structures
destroyed in Operation Murambatsvina.” In a similar context, the Center on
Housing Rights and Evictions described Operation Murambatsvina as a state-
sanctioned abuse of ordinary citizens whose perpetrators should be tried in the
International Court. In light of all these reports, why would the government invest
money on evictions and demolitions, instead of addressing the socioeconomic
circumstances that produce them and their dwellings? Notably, Amnesty
International and BBC reports on this tragedy are also moments of globalization,
and they are partly responsible for making those beyond the border aware of the
tragedy, which means that we may have to resort to weapons of globalization to
fight globalization’s excesses.

The demolition to allow “for the beautification of the city” rests on
presumptions that slums are garbage. Considering that slums are also sites of
globalization, it is in order to theorize the discourse of garbage in relation to
globalization. In “Beyond Third Cinema: The Aesthetics of Hybridity” (2003),
Robert Starn shows how, “[i]n cinema, an ‘aesthetics of garbage’ performs a kind
of jujitsu by recuperating cinematic waste materials” (35). He also discusses the

“ways that dispossessed New World blacks have managed to transmogrify waste

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products into art” (35). In other words, something that is not wanted like trash or
excess materials can be strategically salvaged for other purposes. The slum
dwellers’ use of waste materials like iron sheet left over, tin containers, plastic
bags, and boxes to build shelter comes to mind. These are people who have
been denied opportunities to own houses, but they still survive by building a
house out of the waste materials that come with our consumer culture. This
practice is at once a mark of agency, resistance and environmental conservation
through the recycling of waste materials. In fact, as Stam shows in a case of a
person who built his house using garbage, building “‘from the city’s leftovers,’
represents the “power of poverty.’ Garbage thus becomes an ideal medium for
those who themselves have been cast off, broken down, who have been ‘down in
the dumps,’ who feel as the blues line had it, ‘Iike a tin can on that old dumping
ground’” (42). Well, not an ideal medium, just a medium. What is important here
is the idea of the shapeless stone that the builders refused becoming the
cornerstone, the idea of what the dominant culture calls useless becoming
useful. Equally important is “a strategy of resourcefulness in a situation of
scarcity” (42). For example, in Ttsitsi Dangarembga’s film, Everyone’s Child, we
see Tamari making table mats out of garbage in an attempt to support her
siblings, following her parents’ death. While we recognize the slum dwellers’
ability to resist homelessness, we must not lose sight of the fact that their use of
garbage as a dwelling place has a debilitating effect on their dignity. In fact, we
should not push the concept of agency too far, as it can easily distract attention

from the conditions that made these slum dwellers homeless in the first place.

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Stam goes further to link “the motif of garbage” with mixed culture in
Brazil. As he puts it, “Garbage is hybrid, first of all, as the diasporized,
heterotopic site of the promiscuous mingling of rich and poor, center and
periphery, the industrial and the artisanal, the domestic and the public, the
durable and the transient, the organic and the inorganic, the national and the
international, the local and the global” (40). In other words, garbage is a
community of strangers, in terms of items from different spaces that would
otherwise not mix. While it is possible to read the garbage as a site of syncretism
by virtue of bringing different worlds together, it is also possible that dominance
and incompatibility may continue in the garbage. If there was always syncretism,
as Stam suggests, then the street kids would not rummage through the garbage
in search of valuables because everything would be a valuable. The fact they do
shows that there is some inequality in garbage. In addition, this notion of
syncretism is also undercut by the class of people who search for food in the
garbage; instead of a mixture of the rich and the poor congregating near a
garbage dump, it is often the latter who do so. In this sense, they bear the burden
“of marginality, of being condemned to survive within scarcity, of being the
dumping ground for transnational capitalism, of being obliged to recycle the
materials of the dominant culture” (42). This one-way recycling has come to
define the age of globalization. The garbage is therefore a living testimony of
power relations; to know the marginalized in any society, one only needs to look

at the garbage dump.

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In a related context, Kibera slum dwellers in Kenya have been compelled
to invent “flying toilets” to address their lack of, and need for, toilet facilities. The
feelings of worthlessness and nonexistence that stem from such disparities
continue to harm these slum dwellers, even as they fight back by reasserting
their right to relieve themselves of their waste. Their agency lies in their refusal to
become waste, which, arguably, is what their material conditions that deny them
toilets presume them to be. Of course, that refusal is constantly tested as flying
toilets from other places land on their doors. For slum dwellers who live in
wretched conditions without sanitation the meaning of home continues to be
elusive, just as it is for millions of internally displaced persons or refugees in the
Democratic Republic of Congo and in Darfur, Sudan. Equally elusive is the
relationship between the increasing wave of globalization and the rapid
development of slums and internal displacement. These slum dwellers and
internally displaced persons find that belonging to their nation, much less the
global village, remains problematic as long as the said disjunctions are
mainstream. In the wake of their oppressed belonging, it is tempting to ask what
role slum dwellers and internally displaced people might play in one’s thinking
about the location of home.

Slums are reflections of inequality, poverty, and global market forces, so
the question we should ask is how inequality and poverty affect our conception of
home. Inequality and poverty create ambivalence and reservation about a place’s
status as home: “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world — in

slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes

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are not paid and where public services are not provided” (UN-Habitat 6). In the
absence of legal backing, the slum dwellers cannot even claim the tiny spaces
they sleep in: “As illegal or unrecognized residents, many of these slum dwellers
have no property rights, nor security of tenure, but instead make whatever
arrangements they can in an informal, unregulated and in, some respects,
expensive parallel market” (UN Habitat 6). It is partly because of this instability
that slum dwellers move from one place to another, but their movement, unlike
the postmodernist movement, is oppressed. For example, according to the BBC
News published on September 3, 2007, Soweto (South Africa) slum dwellers
were in motion, protesting against “what they see as the government’s failure to
improve living conditions.” They had “no water, no electricity, and no sewage
provision.” Even as they were arrested, they demanded homes and water. In
Kisumu (Kenya) the slum dwellers move up and down searching for water; their
movement is hampered by poor infrastructure. Kibera (Kenya), one of the largest
slums in Africa, lacks sanitation, clean drinking water, and space. According to
UN-Habitat, “The major challenges facing cities are urbanization and poverty”
(2).lt is therefore necessary to include urbanization -- particularly unemployment,
rural-urban and international migrations, and urban poverty -- in our discussion of
the problem of slum dwellers.

The living conditions of slum dwellers vary from case to case, but it is
generally agreed that all slum areas are products of poverty. Many slum dwellers
do not have access to basic needs like water and sanitation. The trend is not

going to get better unless serious action is taken. United Nations Human

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Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat), in The Challenge of Slums: Global Report
on Human Settlementsfi2003 (2003), has warned that “Without serious and
concerted action on the part of municipal authorities, national governments, civil
society actors and the international community the number of slum dwellers is
likely to increase in most developing countries” (xxv). This book is a global study
of the challenge of slums, especially in the developing world. According to their
finding: “In 2001, 924 million people, or 31.6 per cent of the world’s urban
population, lived in slum. The majority of them were in the developing regions,
accounting for 43 per cent of the urban population, in contrast to 6 per cent in
more developed regions” (UN-Habitat xxv).

More recently, the UN-Habitat Executive Director, Anna Tibaijuka,
estimated that the world population of slum dwellers has reached one billion.
Instead of a serious intervention to improve Kibera, for example, business people
are making money out of it. That is, travel agencies who used to take tourists to
game parks are now taking them to tour Kibera slum. The question that Western
tourists are now asked when they return from visiting Kenya is not whether they
saw elephants or climbed Mount Kenya, but whether they saw the largest slum in
Africa. The idea of slum tours is popular in South Africa, Zambia, Namibia, and
Lesotho, making one wonder what tourists find so fascinating about slums and
poverty. These tourists’ movement to see slums in Africa is worth further studies.

The preparations for the 35th IAAF World Cross Country Championships
scheduled for March 24, 2007, saw local authorities ffrom Operation Clean Up

Mombasa embark on forced eviction, even though, as UN-Habitat reminds us,

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“National approaches to slums, and to informal settlements in particular, have
generally shifted from negative policies such as forced eviction, benign neglect
and involuntary resettlement, to more positive policies such as self-help and in
situ upgrading, enabling and rights-based policies” (xxvi). Of course, forced
evictions remain an active tool that many governments use when it suits their
interests, which is the case in Zimbabwe’s rounding up and eviction of more slum
dwellers in the second anniversary of the 2005 Operation Drive Out Filth. The
main task of the Operation Clean Up Mombasa was to prepare the city for World
Cross Country by making Mombasa beautiful; making Mombasa beautiful meant
getting rid of “beggars, street children, street families, commercial sex workers
and hawkers.” Neither the government nor the organization it formed to help
clean-up the city considered the input of these beggars they sought to evict, yet:
“It has long been recognized that the poor play a key role in the improvement of
their own living conditions and that their participation in decision-making is not
only a right, thus an end in itself, but it is also instrumental in achieving greater
effectiveness in the implementation of public policies” (UN Habitat xxvii). These
are very mobile people; they move from one part of the city to another, searching
for their daily bread. By arresting them, the authorities show that the often
celebrated notion of movement has its limits, especially for the homeless and
lower class.

The “cleaning up” of beggars is not unique to Kenya. According to a report
by Anita Powell in Mail and Guardian of August 29, 2007, Ethiopia moved

thousands of homeless people from the capital city to the countryside in order to

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prepare the city for the September 2008 millennium celebrations. “Homelessness
is a huge problem in Addis Ababa, a city of five million where an estimated
90,000 live on the streets. Beggars are a common sight, with everyone from
young children to the elderly seeking money or scarps of food.” It is ironical that a
nation that can afford a US$16 million celebration in one day cannot provide
basic shelter for its homeless. In fact, as the homeless in Ethiopia were sent to
reservation camps, marking the resurrection of colonialism, non-Ethiopians,
including tourists, received red-carpet treatment. In this situation, political,
economic, and social station is used to legitimize humanity and citizenship, which
not only put the humanity and citizenship of the homeless on trial, but also deny
them the temerity to complain about human rights violation. While Ethiopia
celebrated the millennium by disowning their homeless, Libya celebrated its 38th
anniversary of the September 1 Libyan Revolution by “distributing 100,000 title
deeds” to the homeless. Of course, Libya’s move has some degree of political
propaganda and public relations, but it still shows two countries with two different
priorities at this point in time.

I end this chapter by focusing on Sembene Ousmane’s film, Xala (1974),
adapted from his novel with a similar title. The film satirically maps the
misappropriation and mismanagement of public resources by the political
leadership of an African nation, most likely Senegal, its former colonizers, and
“the business world,” and how that corruption breeds the homeless, particularly
beggars. When the film begins, the French colonizers are handing over power to

“the founding fathers” of this African nation who are now in charge of the

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Chamber of Commerce and Industry, an allegory for the new nation. Consisting
of the president, ministers, and deputy ministers, the Chamber declares
independence from France: “We can’t turn back. Our struggle for true
independence is finished. We must take what is ours...what is our right. We must
control our industry ...our commerce. . .our culture...Take in hand our destiny.”
However, their resolve to control their destiny is undermined by their immediate
shift from the local apparel they dressed in as they took over the Chamber to
European suits that their predecessors wore. The President who is leading this
new nation to their own destiny is advised by one of the recently dethroned
French colonizers, thereby questioning his independence of thought. It becomes
clear, then, that the social and economic structure has not changed.

The film closely monitors one of the ministers, El Hadji Abdou Kadar Beye,
through whom we evaluate the new political leadership. El Hadji is vexed by the
constant presence of beggars outside his office, so he asks the president to
clean them up: “For hygiene’s sake can’t we get rid of these human rubbish?”
Human rubbish is a term used to refer to beggars and street children. The
president responds by ordering that a patrol car [the army and the police] be sent
quickly to round up the beggars and to dump them far away from the city: “Send
a patrol car quickly. To get rid of this human rubbish. The beggars! It’s bad for
tourism.” Here the film parodies the president’s declaration for independence by
having him care about tourists at the expense of the homeless citizens. Of
course, it becomes clear as we watch the film that the political elite have more

reasons to clean-up these beggars. El Hadji and by extension the political elite

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do not want to see these beggars because they act us evidence of the unequal
distribution of resources. Like slums, the homeless “are a physical manifestation
of urban poverty and intra-city inequality” (UN-Habitat xxvi). By keeping them out
of sight, the government ministers can continue to accumulate wealth without
guilt. To understand why there are so many beggars in the streets, one has to
listen to El Hadji’s speech to the cabinet:
Each one of us is a dirty dog! I repeat, a dirty dog! Probably worse than I.
Been in on rice trafficking. As for the drought, we’ve all diverted goods
destined for the needy. The Army, Even the security agents are on our
payroll. Democracy. . .Equality. . .Justice. . .are words that we are too low,
too greedy to know. And here before us, these very people who listen to
me...who know nothing about business...dare shout from the
rooftops...about an injustice which we all practice.
The government ministers are involved in economic scandals that institutionalize
inequity, and drive ordinary citizens deep into poverty. This confirms the UN-
Habitat’s observation that the homeless are “the products of failed policies, bad
governance, corruption, inappropriate regulation, dysfunctional land markets,
unresponsive financial systems and a fundamental lack of political will” (UN-
Habitat xxxii). Sembene is reminding us here that the government ministers have
produced these beggars that they now seek to clean-up.
When they are not diverting goods meant for the needy, the ministers are
importing expensive goods at the expense of the tax-payers. They are so

obsessed with Euorope that they have to drink mineral water imported from

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there; El Hadji tells his daughter: “It’s the drink I prefer.” The extravagance of the
government is captured in the scene where El Hadji’s car is washed with
imported water known as Evian, while the beggars have no drinking water as a
result of drought and penury. The same bottle of imported water is used as
coolant in the minister’s car. In fact, El Hadji wants to be French so desperately
that he is offended when his daughter talks to him in Wolof: “Rama, Why do you
answer in Wolof when I speak to you in French?” Interestingly, El Hadji himself,
either because he is undergoing cultural transformation or because he wants to
exclude the French advisor from his speech, later requests to address the
cabinet in Wolof, a request that the president denies: “[everyone] has to observe
the purest Francophone tradition.” The satire lies in the fact that these are the
very national leaders who undertook to control their precolonial African culture.

It is paradoxical that the physically disabled people who need more
convenient means of transport trek from place to place on the scorching sun,
while the ministers are driven in luxury cars. Their great trek from the reservation
camp where they were dumped by their government to the city is the most painful
scene to watch, especially because the film juxtaposes their oppressed
movement with the fast moving cars of ministers and tourists. Indeed, this scene
demonstrates the difference between the movement of the homeless and the
movement celebrated by some postmodernists. One group, the homeless, is
moving for survival; another group, the business and political elite are moving for
pleasure. Worse still, the ministers have become globetrotters, moving from one

overseas country to another. For example, one of them is asked, “Did you

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vacation in Spain or Switzerland?” His response that he does not want to see
Negroes, though he is a Negro, is indicative of both satire and racial self-hatred:
“I can’t go to Spain anymore. Everywhere you look there are Negroes.” The
national leaders who claim that they “kicked out the colonizers and freed the
country” now want to see the very colonizers they kicked out, not their fellow
Africans. While they travel the world, the taxpayers to whom they promised jobs
and better opportunities gradually become homeless.

Consumerism and wealth accumulation become the measure of status,
and the banner of socialism that was popular at the dawn of independence gives
way to capitalism, making the ministers outdo each other in corruption. El Hadji,
for example, uses the proceeds from rice which was meant for the poor, to
finance his third wedding and the treatment of his “xala” — the curse of his sexual
impotency. The celebration of national independence, like the celebration of El
Hadji’s wedding, leads to disillusionment because of impotence and
incompetence. When the president of the Chamber of Commerce summons an
emergency meeting to find out why the members’ checks are bouncing, we learn
that the economy is not in the new government’s control, which is contrary to the
promise they made at the beginning of the film: “We are businessmen. We must
take over all the businesses...even the banks.” El Hadji becomes the scapegoat
and he is expelled. Of interest here is what El Hadji tells the Chamber: “We only
redistribute leftovers. We are the dirt grubbers of the. business world.” That is, the

developed world, through globalization, has a bigger control of the new nation’s

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economy. It is, therefore, not surprising that multinational companies like CATA,
the truck which ferries the wedding car, are present.

As the end comes closer, it becomes clear that there are imbrications
between the local and the global, the city and the country, the rich and the poor,
the sheltered and the unsheltered. The local space collapses into the global
space, and vice versa, as El Hadji’s episode shows. The poverty in the local
place is tied to the wealth that allows the businessmen in the Chamber to wash
their cars with imported water. More importantly, globalization, like colonization,
rewards a few people in positions of power in order to thrive in the local space. It
is therefore difficult to find a space in which to isolate the global from the local or

poverty from globalization.

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Conclusion

I would like to conclude by looking at the relationship between HIV/AIDS
and the idea of home in Tsitsi Dangarembga’s film, Everyone ’s Child. Produced
in 1996, the film tells the tale of four children who struggle to survive following
their parents’ death. The first two children, Tamari and Itai, assume the
responsibility of parenting themselves and their younger siblings. The film
exposes the community’s abdication of responsibility by showing how these
orphans, who are supposed to be everyone’s children, as the title suggests, are
instead no one’s children. In this sense, the film shows the children’s
homelessness from various angles: their parents’ death, their uncle’s distance,
their community’s indifference, and their poverty.

In an attempt to support himself and his siblings, ltai leaves the country for
the city. Here he is met with great hostility, as he has no roof over his head and
he becomes a target of pedophiles who see him as a cheap sex object. Indeed,
as the Internal Displaced Unit has observed, “Being forced to leave one’s home
creates a particular kind of vulnerability, both physical and psychological. I
Displaced people are separated from their usual means of livelihood and their
traditional means of coping with adversity” (1). Even becoming a street child does
not come easy for ltai because the senior street children demand that he earn his
way into their club, where earning one’s way includes bullying and extortion.
When Itai eventually finds a place as a street child, he begins to hustle, under the
guidance of a veteran street child. We see him exploited by the older street kids,

but he remains resilient in the face of adversity. ltai’s life in the slums is

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constantly threatened by the threat of imprisonment and death, especially
considering that the city authorities associate street children with crime. ltai’s life
in the urban space is devoid of dignity, and thus is characterized by a sense of
homelessness.

ltai’s sister, Tamari, who remained in the rural area to take care of her
younger siblings, is also a survivor of sexual abuse by a shopkeeper who is
much older than she. This shopkeeper takes advantage of her desperation,
especially her need to support her siblings. If we look at this shopkeeper as an
extension of the community, then.we begin to understand how the community
has not only abandoned the orphans, but has also chosen to abuse them. Tamari
weaves mats out of the trash she collects from a garbage yard, and tries to sell
them so that she can keep her siblings alive. Instead of buying the mats, the
community just admires them and sometimes takes them for free. Left with no
choice, she succumbs to the pressures of a pedophile who promises her items
like clothes which she cannot afford on her own.

The cost of Tamari’s exploitation by this shopkeeper becomes clear when
the house she shares with her siblings catches fire at night. At the time of this
incident Tamari is away, attending to the lust of the shopkeeper. This fire claims
the life of Tamari’s youngest sibling, and in effect acts as a turning point in the
community. It is at this point that it dawns on the community that the little boy
would not have died if he were indeed everyone’s child. The movie ends with the
hope that the community has learned their lesson, and that they would be more

responsible in the future.

182

 

The idea of home in Africa is therefore threatened by multiple forces. If
HIV/AIDS patients feel homeless because of the pain from, and the stigma
associated with, the disease, their children suffer homelessness brought about
by their parents’ demise and lack of moral and material support from the
community. As the case of Itai, Tamari, and their siblinds show, it is not enough
to have a physical home. It is very easy in this age of slums and street children to
forget that not everyone who has a physical home is at home.

The premise and promise of this project was to show that we can no
longer understand home in a conventional way, as what constitutes home at any
given time is never complete, is always in tension and problematic. In addition,
conventional conception of home is challenged by the fact that the idea of home
in the age of globalization has undergone significant metamorphosis. An
examination of any specific location or space called home reveals what Edward
Soja, in Postmodern Goeographies (1989), has called “a limitless space of
simultaneity and paradox, impossible to describe in less than extraordinary
language” (2). In a similar tone, Michel Foucault, in “Of Other Spaces” (1986),
makes the following observation:

The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are

in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of space. We are in the

epoch of near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a

moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long

life developing through time than that of a network that connects points

and intersects with its own skein. (22)

183

 

 

The dispersion that Foucault alludes to is evident in the formation of (African)
diaspora, which, in Brent Hayes Edwards’ terms in The Practice of Diaspora:
Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Intemationalism (2003),
“necessarily involves a process of linking or connecting across gaps — a practice
we might term articulation”(11). The sense of connection that Foucault and
Edwards comments on is implicitly positive at its core. However, as we have
seen with, “the epoch of near and far” produces more mixed results than
Foucault envisaged. In addition to yielding the positive attributes of global
connections, this epoch also witnesses the burden of these networks, for

example, when the importation of sugar in Kenya renders local sugarcane

 

farmers jobless. This way, the quest for better markets on the global stage, while
netting huge profits for the global powers, also threatens the local persons at
another point with extinction.

The said threat places the locals in a survival mode, and thus underscores
the need for what Abdul R. JanMohamed, in The Death-Bound-Subject (2005),
calls “the will to survive, the will to live in the midst of a culture predicated on the
successful production of death-bound-subjects. . .” (34). A tomato farmer who
sees his sugarcane counterpart out of business begins to feel homeless, a
feeling which is exacerbated when imported tomatoes, despite transport costs,
are cheaper than the locally produced tomatoes. In this sense, instead of viewing
this epoch as an opportunity for international network, the said locals view it as a
gateway to their own extinction. One has to struggle on a daily basis to have a

home and to feel at home.

184

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