New Routes for Diaspora Studies

Sukanya Banerjee, Aims McGuinness, Steven C. McKay, Sukanya Banerjee, Aims McGuinness, Steven McKay

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780253002174
• eBook ISBN: 9780253006011
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Offers a welcome addition to the literature on migration by using the springboard of 'diaspora' to address the cross-border movements of people." —Rhacel Parreñas, Brown University Study of diasporas provides a useful frame for reimagining locations, movements, identities, and social formations. This volume explores diaspora as historical experience and as a category of analysis. Using case studies drawn from African and Asian diasporas and immigration in the United States, the contributors interrogate ideas of displacement, return, and place of origin as they relate to diasporic identity. They also consider how practices of commensality become grounds for examining identity and difference and how narrative and aesthetic forms emerge through the context of diaspora. Contributions by Crispin Bates, Martin A. Berger, Rachel Ida Buff, Marina Carter, Betty Joseph, Parama Roy, Jenny Sharpe, Todd Shepard, and Lok Siu

PART 1

INTERROGATING TERMS

CHAPTER ONE

The Middle Passages of Black Migration

JENNY SHARPE

The middle passage is a particularly charged signifier within a black literary imagination. Carl Pedersen calls it “arguably the defining moment of the African-American experience.”¹ He identifies a literary geography that extends the signification of the middle passage beyond the historical moment of the African slave trade, when the term narrowly referred to the second or “middle” portion of the triangular trade route between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. In response to a Eurocentric perspective that considered the middle passage as a rupture with African culture, there developed an Afro-centric one that sought to establish continuity with Africa. Pedersen, however, is interested in those writers who charted a third path. For Afro-Caribbean intellectuals such as C. L. R. James, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, George Lamming, Wilson Harris, Edouard Glissant, and Derek Walcott, the transatlantic passage of enslaved Africans did not signify the absence of black creativity, as it did for European colonizers. Rather, it signaled the beginning of a new creolized and hybridized culture.² To the Afro-Caribbean writers that Pedersen identifies, one can add black British writers such as Caryl Phillips and Fred D’Aguiar, who have fictionalized the lives of slaves who journey back and forth along the transatlantic trade route, and artists such as Keith Piper and Lubaina Himid, whose seascapes memorialize the death and suffering of slaves who experienced the middle passage. These black British writers and artists not only resurrect middle passage images in order to let the dead bear witness to the past, they also transform those images so that they can speak to the more recent migration of people from Africa and the Caribbean. If, during an era of black power and nation building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term has more recently been deployed to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of diaspora into a vital and ongoing process.³ The routes traveled by black migrants do not necessarily retrace the same paths of the slave ships: they cross continental Europe, the English Channel, and the Caribbean Sea. The theoretical “routing” of a transatlantic black diaspora thus involves not making the multiple crossings cohere into a single narrative but rather maintaining their temporal and spatial disjunctures and discontinuities.

This new imaginative geography is present in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), which invokes the ship as a chronotope for charting the temporal and spatial axes of a transatlantic culture.⁴ The ship, for Gilroy, represents the crisscrossing of travelers and cultures along the triangular slave trade route, which is a movement that complicates a simple, linear narrative of a black diaspora originating in Africa. Instead of denoting a foundational connection with Africa, the middle passage in Gilroy’s black Atlantic model represents a “catastrophic rupture” that hurtled diasporic space into a linear temporal order.⁵ Alluding to Gilroy’s explanation, James Clifford suggests that the middle passage does not simply exist as a past moment in time because its trauma continues to be repeated. “For black Atlantic diaspora consciousness,” he observes, “the recurring break where time stops and restarts is the Middle Passage. Enslavement and its aftermaths—displaced, repeated structures of racialization and exploitation—constitute a pattern of black experiences inextricably woven in the fabric of hegemonic modernity.”⁶ Time, for a transatlantic black diaspora, is broken; the past can, and does, coexist with the present.

The simultaneity of past and present is incorporated into the narrative structure of two literary works that metaphorically extend the middle passage to contemporary conditions of black migration. Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore (2003) tells the story of an African refugee who is smuggled into post-9/11 Europe as a traumatic journey that mirrors the middle passage and ends in death.⁷ Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Children of the Sea” (1993) allegorizes the middle passage for conveying the present hardships and future uncertainties experienced by Haitian boat people fleeing the political instability of their nation.⁸ Both works suggest that although the waters modern migrants cross may not be as vast as the Atlantic Ocean, their voyages are no less perilous than the ones made by slaves. They transform received images from the past in order to critique the present treatment of black refugees. They also, however, harness the symbolic value of the middle passage as the beginning of a transatlantic black diaspora for rethinking its meaning. Both works expose the limitations of a diaspora model that suggests a unified history and destiny of all peoples of African descent. A Distant Shore revives a middle passage memory to show the isolation of the black man living in the diaspora, while “Children of the Sea” frames that memory with a Haitian worldview that offers a counternarrative to the middle passage’s broken temporality.

Phillips often deploys the middle passage as a metaphor for the psychological state of homelessness associated with migrancy.⁹ In A Distant Shore, two intersecting narratives about an African refugee and a divorced English woman show how the term “stranger” does not apply to immigrants alone. “England has changed,” observes Dorothy, a retired schoolteacher, about the former mining town where she grew up and to which she has now returned. “These days it’s difficult to tell who’s from around here and who’s not. Who belongs and who’s a stranger. It’s disturbing. It doesn’t feel right” (3). Here the sense of homelessness applies to a middle-aged English woman who is estranged from a hometown that offers her no asylum, equal to its treatment of the lone black inhabitant, Solomon Bartholomew. Their shared state of mind makes them shipmates in the turbulent national waters. The white woman is also connected to the black man as the potential recipient of his story. “This is a woman to whom I might tell my story,” he thinks. “If I do not share my story, then I have only this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps. I am a man burdened with hidden history” (266). Since Solomon is beaten to death before he has the opportunity to share his story with Dorothy, the moment for bridging the colonial divide through an unburdening of history is lost. The English nation remains broken and disjointed, like the novel’s narrative. Only in the second half does the reader learn that Gabriel, an African refugee, and Solomon, the night watchman at the housing development in which Dorothy lives, are one and the same person.

Solomon, whose real name is Gabriel, comes from a war-ravaged African country that is not explicitly identified. He claims to have belonged to a smaller tribe that was disliked for controlling most of the businesses in the capital city and their tribal land in the south. After a member of his tribe becomes president, there is a military coup and soldiers begin killing his people. His father sends him to join rebel troops in the south, where he trains in the bush for guerilla warfare. Although Gabriel refuses to kill the villagers his captain denounces as traitors, government troops destroy his entire family in revenge anyway. After witnessing the massacre of his family from the concealed space of a cupboard, he pays his uncle to smuggle him out of the country.

Phillips places Gabriel’s journey out of Africa within the memory of the middle passage. The discomfort Gabriel experiences evokes images of the hardships slaves were made to endure in their long and arduous trip to the Americas. The first leg of his journey is in the back of a truck, where he is made to lie down alongside other people concealed under a heavy tarpaulin:

As the engine roars to life, Gabriel realizes that, trussed as they are like cargo, this first part of their journey is not going to be pleasant. He can feel the dampness of other men’s perspiring bodies, and it is not possible to distinguish whose arm or leg is pressing up against him (84).

The truck’s cramped quarters conjure up that infamous line drawing from Thomas Clarkson’s History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808) of a cross-section of the slave ship Brookes depicting shackled slaves packed sardine-style into its hull. Whereas in the past, African slaves had only further misery awaiting them on the other side, Gabriel anticipates a better future: “He knows that if he is lucky the past will soon be truly past, and that with every gasp of the acrid air beneath the heavy tarpaulin, life is taking him beyond this nightmare and to a new place and a new beginning” (84). These words, which allude to a linear model of history underpinning post-Enlightenment narratives of progress, are undermined by the novel’s temporal structure.

The subsequent paragraph jumps to a future point in time after Gabriel has reached England, where he finds himself in a state that differs little from the cramped conditions aboard the truck. Sedated and strapped to a bed by his hands and feet, he is confined to a filthy immigration cell where he receives little food or water. The story of one African man’s journey to England is interspersed with scenes of his detention, which is a narrative structure that undermines the character’s own belief that he is escaping to freedom. The England of Phillips’ novel is not a liberating space where the chains of slavery are broken, as British abolitionists once claimed; rather, it exists as a xenophobic nation where new invisible bonds are introduced. The movement back and forth in time between scenes of Gabriel’s escape from his warring nation and his immobilization in a British jail prolongs the nightmarish crossing from which there appears to be little escape. The novel extends the middle passage trauma from sea to land in order to undermine the perception of Europe as a safe haven.

Each stage of Gabriel’s journey echoes the harrowing experience of the African slave’s transatlantic crossing except that continental Europe acts in the place of the Atlantic Ocean. The truck delivers Gabriel to a cargo aircraft that carries approximately one hundred men and women from Africa to an unknown destination in Eastern Europe. On their arrival, the refugees are made to strip naked so they can be hosed down with icy cold water, just as African slaves were when they disembarked from slave ships on the other side of the Atlantic. The migrants are loaded onto a bus and then a boat, which crosses a small body of water to place them in “Europe proper” (90). Gabriel subsequently boards a train for France. For the final leg of his journey across the English Channel, he is forced to stand on a small ledge on the outside of a ferry’s hull while hanging on to a metal chain. His entry into England is reminiscent of the Zong incident recounted by Quobna Ottobah Cugoano in Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787). While journeying from Africa to Jamaica in 1781, the unscrupulous captain of the Zong slave ship ordered that 133 sick and dying slaves be thrown overboard so he could collect insurance for the human “cargo” lost at sea. Cugoano records that one slave was believed to have survived being thrown overboard by hanging on to a rope extended by slaves from inside the ship’s hull.¹⁰

Despite Gabriel’s success in avoiding drowning at sea (his Chinese companion is not so fortunate), he meets an unnatural end at the hands of racist skinheads. On being bound and held captive by a gang of threatening youths, he thinks, “I am a man who has survived, and I would rather die like a free man than suffer my blood to be drawn like a slave’s” (251). Gabriel manages to free himself and attack them “like a madman” (47), for which he is mercilessly beaten to death. The gang’s action, which is to dump the African man’s body in a canal to make his death look like an accident, repeats that of the Zong ship captain. The image of Gabriel’s lifeless body being found face down in a canal allegorically alludes to his drowning at sea. Phillips uses the symbolic value of the middle passage as a space of death to launch a critique of Britain as a free and democratic nation.

The middle passage in A Distant Shore does not simply refer to the journey from one coastline to another, but it is extended spatially and metaphorically to the interior of Britain. Gabriel discovers on his arrival that he has not arrived anywhere, but remains a castaway at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Routing Diasporas
• Part 1 Interrogating Terms
• Part 2 Maps of Intimacy
• Part 3 Nation, Narrative, Diaspora
• Afterword: Diaspora and the Language of Neoliberalism
• List of Contributors
• Index