Reading Migration and Culture

The World of East African Indian Literature

Dan Ojwang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137262967
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

This book uses the uniquely positioned culture of East African Asians to reflect upon the most vexing issues in postcolonial literary studies today. By examining the local histories and discourses that underpin East African Asian literature, it opens up and reflects upon issues of alienation, modernity, migration, diaspora, memory and nationalism.

1

The Pleasures and Tribulations of Migration

The sense of displacement and estrangement that assails migrants and diasporas is one of the most enduring subjects of East African Asian fiction, which presents images of wandering through strange territory, flight from undesirable homes, expulsions from spaces held dear, the scattering of communities and attempts to restore a sense of wholeness amidst the threat of alienation. The figure of an exiled Indian narrator from a Third World country writing out the story of his dislocation in his bleak dwelling in a European or North American city, a figure popularized by V. S. Naipaul in The Mimic Men (1967), appears several times in this body of fiction. So does the figure of the sojourner in a hostile African terrain, or lonely merchants in isolated trading outposts. The three writers under study in this chapter, M. G. Vassanji, Bahadur Tejani and Peter Nazareth, have written about the multiple displacements of African Asians: their migration from India, alienated life within East Africa, and sometimes, eventual departure for Europe or North America where the sense of alienation continues.

In spite of this commonality, the three writers evince very different approaches to displacement, and in the process tell us a lot about changes in East African writing as a whole. The treatment of the theme of displacement in Tejani and Nazareth differs considerably from that of Vassanji, a difference that I account for by considering the intellectual and historical contexts in which their writing was conducted. While the novels of Tejani and Nazareth express the desire for national belonging in East African countries, Vassanji pursues a post-national ideal given the historical experience of Asian migrants under nationalist states. Whereas Tejani and Nazareth wrote during the first two decades of independence—the 1960s and 1970s—a period in which there was a general belief in the value of African nationalism, Vassanji only began to publish his works in the late 1980s, a time when African nationalist discourses had already been delegitimized. If Tejani and Nazareth toyed with the possible assimilation of the Asian diaspora into the melting pot of new national cultures, which were being nurtured in the early years of political independence, Vassanji’s work expresses unease about projects of nation-building in East Africa, while extolling the virtues and depicting the pain of remaining politically on the fence. Nonetheless, there are subtle differences in the approaches by Nazareth and Tejani. While Tejani’s nationalism is of a romantic kind, Nazareth’s is a more skeptical one, given its Marxist sensitivity to power relations within emergent nation-states. The key task in this chapter, in brief, is to account for these different stances on the question of migration, nationhood and alienation. In the process, I shed light on the contributions that Tejani, Nazareth and Vassanji have made to notions of exile and displacement, which remain central in the understanding of post-colonial culture in the twentieth century.

Exile and displacement have regularly cropped up in East African literature, expressing as they do the conditions brought upon the region by colonial modernity: a sense of fragmetation and loss which, in turn, feeds the quest for homes and homeliness. In the fiction of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for instance, black leaders of the colonial period are often cast in the mould of biblical figures such as Moses or the Messiah. Ngugi’s writing of the African experience of colonialism as a kind of exile drew heavily upon the Jewish model of diaspora, a result of his Christian education.¹ The nationalist yearning for a homeland, which Ngugi’s work represents, and the melancholic mood that informs those works indicates that for him, homelessness is indeed a sad fate.

However, alongside the understanding of displacement as a dreadful punishment, a view has developed that the loss of a home might be a positive value. If, as Edward Said has observed, “[i]n premodern times banishment was a particularly dreadful punishment since it not only meant years of aimless wandering away from family and familiar places,” those very qualities of homeliness for which the premoderns felt such a strong affinity have acquired a dubious reputation for many contemporary, especially postmodernist, intellectuals.² The very quality of marginality that had been the source of unhappiness for people of the ancient world has become a positive force in the lives of those that Eva Hoffman has named “the new nomads,” the new cosmopolitans who refuse to sentimentalize the idea of home.³ Within the ambit of much of post-colonial theory, exile and diaspora have become attractive positions from which to view the predicament of the contemporary world, with the nomad seen as offering unique insights into modernity and its aftermath. Exile has come to mean what Edward Said has termed “the state of not being fully adjusted,” and a “dislike [for] the trappings of accommodation and national well-being.”⁴ Meanings of diaspora and exile have become a lot less tied to their origins in violence and oppression. As many critics of post-colonial literary theory have pointed out, exile and diaspora have been emptied of much of their earlier historical meanings to bear the burden of relatively less painful experiences of travel and migration.⁵ In more daring usage, these terms have come to embody the human condition, as is captured in Hoffman’s statement that exile is “a universal experience,” all of us “in some way, on some level [ … ] feel that they are in exile [ … ] We feel ejected from our first homes and landscapes, from childhood, from our first family romance, from our authentic self.”⁶ Alluring and powerful as such kinds of rhetorical gestures may be, they run the real risk of turning histories of expulsion and rejection into objects of word-games rid of much of their analytical value.

There is a sense in which the allure of exile within the culture of modernism and its complex heritage can be attributed to the belief that the centered models of culture and identity advanced by nationalism, and its rhetoric of tradition, imprison human potential. Embracing estrangement is thus viewed as an important step in transgressing the boundaries of national or ethnic culture. The revisionary and innovative quest for an aesthetic and a politics untrammelled by the force of habit, a pursuit that is associated primarily with literary modernism, seems to be the major motive behind the privileging of displacement. For writers, whose basic trade is, after all, the imagination, being thus estranged may have certain benefits. This is especially so in the case of metropolitan writers, as Iain Chambers has implied. Rid of the “single, homogenous point of view, that sense of perspective and critical distance, born in the Renaissance and triumphant in colonialism, imperialism and the rational version of modernity,” the writer who embraces exile is able to develop new ways of looking at the world.⁷

It is clear that the disenchantment with the fictions of belonging, which is a key aspect of modernist and postmodernist criticism, cannot fully account for the salience of the idea of exile and marginality among writers from the former colonies, such as those of East Africa. Granted, the literary modernism of Anglo-American writers has resonated among a number of writers from formerly colonized countries, but this has not been a case of simple repetition. The adoption of the language of modernism by post-colonial writers is more properly attributed to colonialism, whose deracinating effects find a remote counterpart in the alienated nature of life in the modern metropolis, and the consequent attempts to invent tradition. Writers in the colonies have privileged the theme of exile, for it was already prominent within the modernist canon, but this was only possible because they were already witnesses to extreme forms of displacement and fragmentation in their immediate locales. As I argue, East African invocations of the figure of exile, though similar in certain senses to its cousins in metropolitan modernism, did not always follow the same trajectories. If, as Simon Gikandi has pointed out, the European avant-garde adopted “exile and its rhetoric as the gesture that, by individuating and universalizing artistic production, would also liberate the writer from his ‘compromised’ literary traditions,” East African writing often took quite a different approach.⁸ The recognition of exile in the writer’s past and present was merely a prelude to a restoration of the nation; alienation only served as an impetus to corrective action and was rarely ever embraced as a positive end in itself. In his essays in Homecoming, Ngugi wa Thiongo, to cite a major East African example, may have celebrated the exile figure as one “who lives closer to God … and because of his suffering [ … ] has attained [ … ] wisdom,” but he was quick to point out that such wisdom would give the exile “strength to await his deliverance and his return home from exile.”⁹ Like the mythical traveler-hero who travels to unknown worlds, the exile was duty-bound to make a triumphant return home: exile was merely a starting point and not a final destination. The feeling of exile engendered by colonial education was only crucial to the extent that it opened the eyes of the colonized subject to the contradictions of colonialism. This belief is clearly seen in Ngugi’s fiction, in which the more earthy and unalienated figures act as counterpoints and strong alternatives to the positions taken by alienated, intellectual characters.¹⁰

Chris Wanjala’s collection of essays, For Home and Freedom, reflects well the kind of hostility with which the adoption of an exilic subjectivity was met. Though conceding that the writer Taban lo Liyong had indeed attempted to name and thus to master his alienation as a colonial subject, Wanjala felt that the latter’s embrace of cultural displacement was a sign of his “inability to change the status quo.”¹¹ For Wanjala, the deracinating situation in which the writer was caught up was certainly changeable, and the acceptance of the self’s estrangement was therefore a mere failure of will. Whereas other East African writers, such as Okot p’Bitek, made optimistic attempts to forge links with the culture of the popular majorities, Wanjala felt that lo Liyong was seen to be content in “the very alienation in which he [was] enmeshed.”¹² This determined assault on the work of lo Liyong was limited because it assumed that East African writing needed to proceed in only one direction: that of cultural nationalism. To the extent that lo Liyong repudiated the central tenets of cultural nationalism, he was seen as a self-dramatizing purveyor of an imported aesthetic. Indeed, his Nietzschean vision of contradiction as a tool for self-transcending enhancement and freedom seemed strange from a nationalist viewpoint. Faced with the cultural fragmentation in the colonial scene, with its conflicting array of cultures and histories, lo Liyong saw his duty, not as one of marshalling the strength to build a unified whole, but as the courage to accept a shattered cultural image. To refute the quest for wholeness was to reject the genealogical preoccupations of cultural nationalism, a gesture that can be seen in lo Liyong’s famous celebration of his father’s death. By expressing glee at his own orphanhood, he sought to convey that he was now free to pursue his art, without any of the impediments of tradition: “And with his death is removed that ruling against my studying art … English was thenceforth my major.”¹³

Yet, the negative reaction to lo Liyong’s cult of alienation was not entirely misinformed, for African people had not been, in the words of George Lamming, “wholly severed from the cradle of a continuous culture and tradition” like the Caribbeans.¹⁴ The attempt by African writers to proclaim their cultural orphanhood would therefore have seemed like an affectation or, worse, a sign of elitist indulgence. Pitted against the clamour for “commitment” to nation-building that dominated the East African literary scene for close to thirty years after independence, the assumption of cultural orphanhood as a site for creativity seemed wastefully bohemian. The challenge for the “committed” writer was not to expand the imagination merely for art’s sake, but to seek to close the gap between imagination and politics—and reining in the imagination would be the first step in bridging that gap. The poetics of estrangement and defamiliarization were looked at with great suspicion as impediments to the more serious business of grappling with the realities of the nation.¹⁵

Yet, to ignore the power of alienation as an important factor in colonial and post-colonial society is to be blind to an important reality. It might indeed have been, as George Lamming observed, that colonialism had not been devastating to African cultures in the same way that slavery had been in the case of the Caribbean, but he still recognized that “To be colonial is to be in a state of exile. And the exile is always colonial by circumstances.”¹⁶ But, whatever the connections that East African writers still had with “the cradle of a continuous culture,” they could not simply adopt the position of cultural insiders without a wilful blindness to the realities of colonialism. It is indeed a measure of the changes that were taking place in colonial East African societies that some of the first novels in African languages, namely, Okot p’Bitek’s Lak Tar (1953) and Gakaara wa Wanjau’s Uhoro wa Ugurani (1946; the Gikuyu title translates as ‘Marriage Procedures’), both dealt with the difficulties faced by young men in their attempts to raise bridewealth. The cultural vocabulary of these two novels may have seemed comfortably traditional, but a closer look would have shown that the crises the novels thematize took place against the background of migrant labor and an increasingly austere cash economy. These crises led to moral panics, which— according to John Lonsdale—were at the root of anti-colonial agitation and ethnic nationalisms in the post-war years.¹⁷ The point here is that paying attention to displacement and estrangement is perhaps the best way of starting a discussion of modern East African literatures. At a superficial glance, the experiences of East African Asians may seem far removed from those of the Africans of the region. Yet, to concede to such a view is to ignore the realities of modern East Africa as a whole. This point can be illustrated by noting that if the “Asians” were regarded as strangers among “African” peoples, the realities of the modern, polyglot African nation suggested otherwise. In what was one of the twentieth century’s most audacious examples of social engineering, Africans of diverse histories and cultures were brought together under the wing of colonial territories and, later, nation-states. Quite clearly, the modern nation-state in East Africa is made up of strangers, whose multiple solitudes are only disguised through conscious acts of imagining national communities. Putting East African Asians, who have traditionally played the role of African nationalism’s “Other,” at the core of the debate on how the East African nations are narrated is thus a way of laying bare the means of nation-formation. It also calls to attention the uncertain futures of national ideologies, such as those of East Africa, that have had to reconcile the demands of integration with the imperatives of ethnicity. In some important ways, the story of the East African Asians is simply a contraction of the larger East African story—a regional history in small print. The Asians might appear distinct because of the enduring discourse of race, which was given solidity by colonial policies of social engineering, but their story is replicated many times in the history of East African people as a whole. In their strangeness, they act as a reminder of just how distant the rhetoric of nationalism can be from the details of everyday life. The presence of migrants acts as a reminder of the strangeness that the nation would want to subsume within its unisonant message, what Iain Chambers calls “the self-reflexive national idiom and its xenophobic refusal of external referents in its formation.”¹⁸ For Homi Bhabha, the hostility that the nation directs at its “others” is ultimately a declaration of war on its own realities, a maiming of its own image. Jealous of their difference, migrants “can never let the national history look at itself narcissitically in the eye” and their story helps to cast into sharp relief the fact that the nation is but an artifice.¹⁹

The pleasures of xenophilia: “Culture” as exile in Bahadur Tejani

In an act of self-reflexivity in the epilogue to Day After Tomorrow (1971), the Ugandan writer Bahadur Tejani calls attention to his own literary attempt to examine the alienation of East African communities caught up in cultural insularity. That Tejani resorts to direct authorial commentary in the epilogue indicates his frustration with the mutual estrangement of black and Asian East African cultural communities, and his fear that his quest to reverse this trend would end up in failure. This sense of doubt most likely springs from Tejani’s recognition that the daring fictional portrait of romance between an Asian man and an African woman that he draws in the novel is contradicted by the persistence of racial hostilities in East Africa at the time. In decrying what he sees as the indifference of his East African readers, Tejani draws attention to his own feeling of isolation, even as he criticizes those who are isolated by their belief in cultural purity. The epilogue also reflects Tejani’s fear that fashioning new realities through literature may be futile, in a context in which the sedimented prejudices of colonialism carry far more weight than the lone efforts of a novelist. He may want, in his expansive, humanist style, to censure those who choose cultural isolation, but finds himself faced with the reality that his critical stance will mean his estrangement from East African readers. If the Asian communities of Uganda were already isolated from the mainstream flow of Ugandan life, Tejani’s status as a writer seems to have added an extra dimension to his sense of displacement as an Asian— hence his quest for “the educated conscience” that would affirm his positi...