SESSION: “NARRATIONS OF ‘EXILE’ IN RECENT AFRICAN DIASPORIC LITERARY IMAGINATION”

Paper 1

Christopher N. Okonkwo

University of Missouri-Columbia

OkonkwoC@missouri.edu

“ ‘Coming to America’: Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale

and the Nigerian Expatriate’s Odyssey”

My paper explores Ike Oguine’s A Squatter’s Tale (Heinemann 2000) as an immigrant faction. For the Nigerian immigrant, specifically, coming to America means both navigating geographical, economic, cultural, political, and emotional spaces and forging a shifting identity. Those efforts are, however, complicated by the exigencies of exile and adjustment to a new land, “immense, indifferent, frightening . . . varied, challenging and . . . still full of opportunities” (Squatter’s 196). Reflecting on his odyssey, Obi, the novel’s expatriate-protagonist, narrator and implied author, addresses that paradox: “although I would always be in a sense apart from it, always be more Nigerian than American, I also had to strive for a place inside it; I had to find a way to be both apart from and a part of this vast country” (196).

A Squatter’s Tale sub-texts the experiences of many Nigerian, particularly Igbo, immigrants in the United States. Most important, in capturing their stories in 1990s America, Oguine pioneers a new category of Nigerian and African fiction and as do, for instance, Anzia Yezierska in Salome of the Tenements and Paule Marshall in Brown Girl Brownstones, he brings a fresh, facetious and yet serious voice to America’s immigrant narratives.

Paper 2

Geta LeSeur

University of Missouri-Columbia

LeseurBrownG@missouri-edu

“ ‘Small Island, Go Back Wheer You Come From’: Austin Clarke’s Barbadians in Toronto”

My paper will examine Canadian/Barbadian writer Austin Clarke’s trilogy Storm of Fortune, The Bigger Light, and The Meeting Point in which he documents the adjustments and accommodations the second stream of emigrants during the 1950s had to undergo to make it in Canada. I will examine the ways in which they form coalitions and alliances using language and their native smarts and humor to survive. Of particilar interest to me is how the women’s “communities” are formed and the tactics they employ to make it.

Clarke was one of the first “transplanted” authors to begin a recreation of island peoples in America (Paule Marshall, a second geenration Barbadian, gives us another rendering in Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959).

Paper 3

Patricia D. Fox

University of Missouri-Columbia

FoxP@missouri.edu

“Out of (Hispanic) Africa: A Twilight Where Art Meets Politics”

This project focuses Las tinieblas de tu memoria negras (1987), an autobiographical novel by Donato Ndongo who fled political unrest in Equatorial Guinea in the 1970s. Written in Spain, the text which indicates the trilogy Los hijos de la tribu encapsulates a complex negotiation of narrations: explicitly (1), the juxtaposition of narrators, one the child protagonist, the other his father; (2), as in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, the at once diverging, converging and complicated narrations of the colonial discourse in the guise of the missionary’s role in that system and the experience of the colonial subject in the context of Fang religious rites, traditions and cultural practices (e.g., initiation). Implicitly, the novel rehearses backgrounded aspects peculiar to the sobering encounter of Black colonial with the metropolis (e.g., idealization/demonization of past there and/or present here); the irony that the author would flee to Spain, el punto de partida [point of departure] for a generation of emigres who sought to escape the country’s ultra conservative, four-decade-long dictatorship of Franco (Ilie); and stylistically, the issue of orality and textuality at the heart of musings on “authenticity” and questions of production both mercantile and cultural (Eileen Julian).

Paper 4

Rolland Murray

The Ohio State University

murray1996@aol.com

“Diaspora by Bus: Reginald McKnight and American Constructions of the African Homeland”

From Langston Hughes’ “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” to Alex Haley’s Roots, black American writers have presented Africa as the foundation of a diasporic identity that provides subjects with a sense of rootedness and belonging. Among many contemporary black authors and intellectuals, it has become commonplace to invoke African cultural traditions as a means to both forge cohesive, politically empowering forms of subjectivity and counter the logic of white supremacy.

I argue that Reginald McKnight’s novel I Get on the Bus presents a strikingly divergent, fresh meditation on the black American’s relationship to Africa as homeland. It narrates the trials of a black American who travels to Senegal only to find that the country offers him neither an emancipatory cultural heritage nor a stable base for the formation of his identity. Presenting this character’s return to Africa as a process that dislocates his identity rather than as providing him with a coherent, grounded sense of self, this novel displaces twentieth-century ideologies that frame Africa as homeland and cultural foundation. It casts contemporary diasporic identity as an open-ended process in which the established groundwork for black international solidarity vanishes and the black American subject’s relationship to Africa must constantly be renegotiated.