The Poetics and Politics of Diaspora

Transatlantic Musings

Jerome C. Branche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317627692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su tematiche africane

This book studies the creative discourse of the modern African diaspora by analyzing poems, novels, essays, hip-hop and dub poetry in the Caribbean, England, Spain, and Colombia, and capturing diasporan movement through mutually intersecting axes of dislocation and relocation, and efforts at political group affirmation and settlement, or "location." Branche's study connects London's multimillion-dollar riots of 2011, and its antecedents associated with the West Indian settler community, to the discontent and harrowing conditions facing black immigrants to contemporary Spain as gateway to Fortress Europe. It links the brutal massacres that target Colombia's dispossessed and displaced poor - and mainly black - "throwaway" citizens, victims of the drug trade and neoliberal expansionism, to older Caribbean stories that tell of the original spurts of capitalist greed, and the colonial cauldron it created, at the center of which lay the slave trade. In revisiting the question of what really has awaited Afro-descendants at the end of the Middle Passage, this volume brings transatlantic slavery, the making of weak postcolonial states that bleed people, and the needle's eye of racial identification together through a close reading of rappers, black radicals, dub poetry, and novelists from Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Branche at once demonstrates the existence of an archive of Afro-modern diasporan, discursive production, and just as importantly, points toward a historically-rooted theoretical framework that would contain its liberatory trajectory.

1
Dislocation and Re/membering

Ndongo and D’Aguiar Write the Middle Passage

The new countries offer a vast field for individual, violent activities which, in the metropolitan countries, would run up against certain prejudices, against a sober and orderly conception of life, and which, in the colonies, have greater freedom to develop, and consequently, to affirm their worth. Thus to a certain extent the colonies can serve as a safety valve for modern society. Even if this were their only value, it would be immense.

Carl Siger, Essai sur la colonisation (1907)

In a book whose purpose is to consider the transatlantic musings of Afrodiasporan creative writers and poets, there is an unavoidable logic to beginning with the physical and symbolic historical markers, on both sides of the ocean, that frame these musings and serve as a prelude to studying its initial texts, set in the Middle Passage itself. They include touchstones evocative of some of the earliest modern contacts between sub-Saharan communities and expansionist Europe. Among them would be the 1472 “discovery” and claim by the Portuguese of the island of Fernando Po, today’s Bioko, in Equatorial Guinea, which is the homeland of Donato Ndongo, the author of our first story, “La travesía” (“The Crossing,” 1977), and the construction of the first permanent European stone structure on the West African coast, by Diego Azambuja in 1482. This Portuguese outpost, then called São Jorge da Mina, subsequently known as Elmina, followed an agreement with King Kwamena of the Fetu people.¹ It was situated at the fishing village of Edina, part of an extended littoral destined to be the source of the highest concentration of captives bound for slavery in the New World, across the infamous Middle Passage, the location of our second narrative, Feeding the Ghosts (1997), by Guyanese-British writer Fred D’Aguiar.

When Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison gave the Tanner Lecture on Human Values at the University of Michigan in 1988, much of her discussion critiqued the absence of the figure of the enslaved in the larger American literary canon, as well as the contrived banishment of the topic of race from what she called “genuinely intellectual exchange” in America (1989, 3). Morrison’s broader function as literary creator and commentator, before as well as after the lecture, has been to render, as she said, the “unspeakable” in America’s past “speakable,” and to thereby catalyze a process of both emancipation and healing, a re/membering, as it were, of the shattered episteme of African-American-ness, through the narrative arts of memory. In 2008, twenty years later, Morrison inaugurated the “Bench by the Road” project, an initiative begun at Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina, the point of entry for some 40 percent of the forced African migrants into America, to recall their enslavement and the raced odyssey of their descendants in the nation’s history. The bench, the first of a projected ten to be located at similarly symbolic sites around the country, would, in all its modesty, constitute for Morrison a “suitable memorial” to the aforementioned subjects,² and serve simultaneously as a material complement to her own desire as a writer for them to be rescued from the “willful oblivion” of America’s dominant literary culture (1989, 12). To be sure, this process of literary rescue had begun at least two decades before, during the heyday of the civil rights movement, with the publication in 1966 of Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, which was followed by a plethora of works of neoabolitionist orientation that revisited and reshaped the slave novels of the nineteenth century, particularly in regard to the controlling element of the white editorial presence.³

If America’s “benches by the road,” like Haiti’s famous monument to the Marron inconnu, Jamaica’s statue of Nanny, the rebel maroon leader and national hero, Barbados’ Bussa statue, and other sculptures on this side of the Atlantic, purport to re/member an imaginary African body through tributes to its survivalism and rebellion, the numerous forts, castles, and trading posts scattered along the West African shore from which it originated evoke a different reality, that of the dismemberment of this imaginary African body. According to conventional reports, there is little reverence reserved on the African shore for those who suffered the uprooting and trauma of slavery. The five hundred kilometers between Keta and Half Assini on Ghana’s Atlantic coast, for example, are littered with some eighty of the stated trading centers, silent testimonials to European imperial greed and competition and to the complicity and acquisitiveness of the local elites with whom they conducted business (Opoku-Agyemang 1996, Anquandah 1999). Among them, the most notorious and imposing are Cape Coast Castle and the aforementioned Elmina Castle, where between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries Portuguese, Dutch, English, Swedish, Danish, and Brandenburgers (Germans) traded their European wares for gold, spices, and human captives, and where the hapless victims bound for the Americas were housed in conditions that banish all thoughts of humaneness.⁴

Notwithstanding their stellar role in the imagery and materiality of the current Ghanaian tourist industry, the castles and the history they denote and connote mark a profound ambivalence for the Ghanaian people as a whole on the question of slavery, for according to anthropologist Bayo Holsey, “neither a desire to commemorate the slave trade nor connections to the African diaspora were the driving forces behind [their] conservation” (2008, 162). The castles, massive stone structures each covering about a hundred thousand square feet, were designated World Heritage Sites in 1979 and recuperated through USAID funding and developmentalist expertise, as a fillip for Ghana’s nascent tourist industry. The initiative behind their preservation subsequently included the biennial regionalist cultural celebration, PANAFEST, which started in 1992, to which was added an annual Emancipation Day celebration on the first of August, following a state visit to Jamaica of former president Jerry Rawlings in 1997, during which he witnessed that country’s yearly observance of Emancipation.⁵ This conjuncture would bring the slave trade back into public discourse in Ghana and make visible in the pan-Africanist projection implied by these celebrations fissures that are at once regional, national, and transatlantic.

As it turns out, the Anglo-Ashante war of 1873–1874 drove the final nail in the coffin of whatever traditional form contemporary local autonomy had taken over the preceding centuries of Euro-African commercial intercourse, most graphically seen in the British and Dutch rivalry between 1647, when the latter took over from the Portuguese and made Elmina their headquarters on the coast, and 1872, when they ceded the castle to the English to pursue opportunities in the East Indies. Up until this time, Cape Coast Castle, provisioned mainly by the Ashante, had, after initial Portuguese tenancy, been under the control of the British, who finally seized it in 1664 in the contest that ensued after the castle’s construction by the Swedes in 1653.⁶ Elmina, similarly, received its goods, human and otherwise, from Fante-controlled networks of trade. Indeed, the city states, that is, the respective castles and the nearby towns, grew to be known, on account of their prolonged commercial engagement with their European interlocutors, as “Little Europe” (Elmina) and the “Athens of the Gold Coast” (Holsey 2008, 27). With the final military conquest of the Gold Coast on the part of the British, and the formal imposition of colonial structures of dominance, whatever fleeting cosmopolitanism and influence obtained among the coastal elites in these former slaving centers dissipated as the nineteenth-century colonial economy shifted toward cacao, palm oil, and gold, and the British deployed local traditional rulers as intermediaries in their control of the broader populace. What remained indelibly imprinted in the mentalities of all concerned, however, after four centuries and the enforced exodus of the uncountable many, was the degraded status of the enslaved and the apparently pressing need to distance the social and national self from the stigma of both slaves and enslavement, particularly considering nationalist sensibility to the all-pervasive colonial discourse linking Africa to savagery and slavery.

Observers have stressed the degree to which traditional practices of servitude in Gold Coast life, and the region’s role in provisioning the European capitalist project overseas with slave labor, is a taboo topic in the nationalist discourse of politicians of the independence era, in high school textbooks, and in everyday conversation in the domestic sphere (Holsey 2008). Even the pan-Africanism of independent Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, which brought several icons of black internationalism to Ghana and scores of diasporan “returnees,” mainly African-American, to reside in Ghana, a topic to which we return in Chapter 2, did not create the purchase sufficient to dispel suspicion and coolness toward these revenants or dua ho mmire (rootless ones), as Saidiya Hartman painfully recalls in her recent travel narrative (2007). That Ghanaian independence should be constructed as a teleological product of the struggle against colonialism, in which the chiefs, benevolent rulers, had to cede their traditional roles of respect, leaves undisturbed thorny ethical issues relating to the precolonial distribution of power locally, and the condition of the odonkor (slaves) not only at home, but also trapped in the genocidal trajectory of transatlantic slavery. What one finds, as a result, is an apparent agreement to forget, not unlike the one Morrison mentions in relation to the United States. Speaking of the absence, in Africa, of literary explorations of the topic of transatlantic slavery, Achille Mbembe refers to “the silence of guilt and the refusal of Africans to face up to the troubling aspect of the crime that directly engages their own responsibility” (2002, 260). The purported complicity of creative writers in erasing the question, however, is not complete. Kwadwo Opoku-Agyemang’s volume of poetry, set precisely in the shadow of the castle at Cape Coast (Cape Coast Castle: A Collection of Poems, 1996), and Donato Ndongo’s 1977 short story “La travesía,” contradict this general assumption. Written by a Ghanaian, Opoku-Agyemang’s work is particularly noteworthy not only for the grief, frustration, and anger at the loss, betrayal, greed, and cruelty implied in the slave trade, but also for vindicating the humanity of the unfortunate and forgotten class of the precolonial natives condemned to servitude and their accompanying social marginalization. Just as important is his highlighting of the pain experienced by the relatives left behind by those who were shipped overseas or otherwise sacrificed in the transatlantic enterprise. Although an in-depth examination is beyond our present purpose, his work merits attention for confronting anti-odonkor prejudice in Ghana, for its pan-African solidarian ethic, and for its critique of both the local seller elites and the buyer capitalists from overseas. In embracing both unnamed and canonical captives like the aforementioned Equiano, and Sengbe Pieh of the famous Amistad rebellion, his work marks an important point of departure, discursively speaking, from the other shore. It represents an important clearing out of the weeds of memory—to paraphrase one of his lines in his poem “The Watch”—for healing and re/membering (1996, 14).

If it does not come as a surprise to find a diasporan sensibility and a lyrical critique of the Atlantic slave trade at the end of the twentieth century by a Ghanaian poet who, besides, has lived and studied in the West,⁷ a similar sense of black internationalism might equally be expected in Donato Ndongo, an Equatoguinean, given the circumstances of his life in 1970s Spain. Ndongo, an ethnic Fang from Neifang in Rio Muni, came to Valencia to finish his secondary education at a Catholic religious college in 1965. With the postindependence military coup carried out in 1969 by Francisco Macías Nguema, and the human rights scandal associated with it, to which we come back in Chapter 4, he found that his initial role of “native informant” in satisfying the curiosity of his classmates concerning his African homeland was expanded and elevated to the level of reporter when the Spanish news agency ABC commissioned him to write a series of articles on conditions in Equatorial Guinea: “Guinea, vista por un guineano,” or “Guinea, from the point of view of a Guinean.” A student of contemporary African history and journalism, Ndongo would go on, apart from being a journalist, to also be a historian, novelist, poet, professor, and cultural ambassador for his country from his many nomadic bases in exile. It is noteworthy that his metropolitan location in the latter 1960s and early 1970s afforded him exposure to the currents of Black Power in the United States, the anticolonial movement, and black internationalism, and more important, for the first time in his life, to black literary stalwarts of the likes of Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Amiri Baraka. The aggressive antiracist posture of the Afro-American writers, according to Obatela and Onomo-Abena, and these writers’ concern with the past, is seen as a factor in his short story, “La travesía,” written under the pseudonym of Francisco Abeso Nguema (2000, 41).

In “La travesía,” Ndongo does not have, as in Opoku-Agyemang’s case, a nearby slave trading post as a constant reminder of history. Equatorial Guinea’s role in the Atlantic slave trade was negligible. Although it was placed on the Iberian colonial map as early as 1471, the main island, Fernando Po, turned out to be a “developmental failure,” according to Ibrahim Sundiata (1996, 4), and the continental enclave of Rio Muni was not fully explored and occupied by the Spanish until 1935, when the country’s continental borders were established. Native Bubi resistance, on Fernando Po, in fact, helped preserve that island’s relative integrity, as its role in the regional trade was in providing yams and other provisions to slavers during the 1700s and 1800s as the British and Spanish sought to establish preeminence over the putative colony. The fortress, then, from which Ndongo’s anonymous first-person narrator starts to tell his story is a generic one, and the temporal setting of the narrative is imprecise, although the names of some of his fellow captives, killed early in the account in a failed onboard uprising, suggest Fang ethnic origin and place the story in the Gulf of Benin. Ndongo’s primary achievement in “La travesía,” perhaps, is highlighting what the disaster of captivity and removal from the home and family meant for the individual in the context of the larger historical transformation experienced by West African coastal communities drawn increasingly into the orbit of commodity exchange with the European incursionists. As with the chief Mbatua, who has artificially incorporated him into a class of saleable criminals by exaggerating the gravity of his insult to an elder, the protagonist has no idea of the extent of the geography involved in this commercial network, nor, consequently, of his likely destination now that he has been sold to the foreigners. Indeed, when we meet him, in an account that starts in medias res, he is located in one of the European coastal fortresses. As he looks out to the vessel anchored offshore, his fear and his anxiety at captivity are intensified, particularly because no one among the hundreds of captives gathered could say where their impending departure would take them.

In a process that would eventually objectify Africa’s exported millions as chattel through the “legal fiction” of slavery (Patterson, 1982, 31.), Ndongo recreates for his readers what its victims experience in the initial moments of this process of “thingification.” They are seen here in the assembly in the village square of the young men who Chief Mbatua is making into offerings for trade as they undergo physical examination by the dealers. The chief himself is smiling nervously at them as he caresses the firearms and other articles for which they have been exchanged (Ndongo-Bidyogo, 2000, 195), in a scene that points as much to the African elite’s increasing immersion in the Atlantic orbit of capitalism in an unequal relationship that would have tragic long-term consequences (Rodney, 1982), as it does to the seduction of consumerism. Stephanie Smallwood has commented on the regular use by the mid-1600s of imported guns among West African communities, stressing their importance in the consolidation and territorial aggrandizement, for example, of the Ashante under the legendary Osei Tutu at the turn of the seventeenth century (2007, 29). “La travesía” is not a case of such large statist confirmation. Its story seems to fit the profile of one of the much smaller units that might have sought to protect itself from the trade by participating in it.

What is more important on this point, however, is the conversion of the protagonist into the equivalent of whatever objects would have been accepted for his acquisition. This was part of a larger mercantile calculus that would have originated in Europe, which would continue, subsequent to his “sale,” in his being stacked on board and resold as a pieza in the colonial marketplace. While his commodification contributes to preindustrial capitalist accumulation in Europe, it at the same time plays a role in the depopulation of the African continent and the destabilization of traditional processes of material and cultural produ...