DIAPORIC TENSIONS IN SELECTED POSTCOLONIAL NOVELS

 

 

BACKGROUND OF OTHE STUDY

Literature has continued to fulfill its unique functions in national development. This clearly shows that no society exists significantly without its literature neither can literature function and blossom in isolation of the society. Globalization is very common these days as people tend to read beyond their horizon, that is to think beyond one‟s nation and think of people on the other side – diasporas or immigrants. According to Colin Palmer, migration took place around ten to twenty thousand years ago when Asians migrated to America. They left their country to settle in North and South America. Some equally settled in the Caribbean Islands. The Jewish diaspora started about two thousand years ago. Muslims started creating communities by spreading their religion and culture to Asia, Europe and Africa in the eight century. Europeans began colonization of African countries around 15th century and gradually got into other countries all over the world.

Migration gave birth to diaspora which in turn produced racism. Racism, the aftermath of migration started in the late seventeenth century. David Goldberg‟s Racist Culture contends that race is one of the central conceptual „inventions of modernity‟ (12). Thomas Bonnici views a diaspora community as a „many-tongued chorus‟ with their separate histories linked together. In his article, „Caryl Phillip‟s Crossing the River (1993): Tensions in Diaspora, Displacement and Split Subjects‟ he writes that there are two types of diaspora which are forced (involuntary) and modern (voluntary) diasporas (131). From the article, the word „Diaspora‟ reveals variety of experiences, a state of mind and a sense of identity. Diaspora is the movement of indigenous people or a population of common people to a place other than their homeland region and its experience or tensions is all about what migrants face while in the diaspora and after they return to their motherland. This work looks at diaspora as people who settled far from their ancestral homeland.

Academic discourse on diaspora started in North America among African descent - W. E. Burghardt Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 where he writes that „… slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice….‟ (5), The Negro in 1915 and Carter G. Woodson founded the Association of Negro Life and History and a journal – The Journal of Negro history in 1915. Du Bois as a member of Pan African Movement, tried to bring Negroes all over the world together. After analyzing immigrants problems, Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks, chapter two declares that „the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line‟ (9), wondering what the future of black folks outside Africa would look like as he writes that the Negro is born with a veil and in „a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. …One ever feels his twines – an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two waring ideas in one dark body…‟ (4). He goes ahead to write that „… the black man‟s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seen like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness, - it is the contradiction of double aims‟ (5).

The two types of African diaspora have been in existence for many years in different parts of the world. Compulsory African diaspora is the triangular system of diaspora which is between Africa, America and Europe and voluntary African diaspora which is popular because of political, social, cultural and economic relations does not end at triangular system but adds one more system which makes it a quadrangle which is between Africa, America, Europe and back to Africa which is what the four novels under study is all about. The authors believe that slaves and African-Americans ought to look for their actual root and go back to Africa. Bernard Logan believes that the largest number of African migrants comes from countries with „a large population; a pro-western, capitalist outlook; speakers of English, unstable economic conditions; …and a colonial legacy that had not been too culturally dominant‟ (603).

 

Two major events that have left a permanent and deep scar in the history of Africa and Africans are slavery and colonization. These two events are reflected in postcolonial literature which hinges on Diaspora and African literatures. Slavery was the first means of contact the whites had with Africans, this ugly experience according to Opata Damain,

„leads one to a change of identity‟ (84). Slavery according to Gilroy‟s The Black Atlantic,

„enables an alternative vision of cross-culture fertilization, hybridity, and diasporas…chart the migration, displacement, borrowing, affinities and affiliations that link black intellectuals to the project of the enlightenment‟ (122).

Colin A. Palmer in his article, „The African Diaspora‟ explains that the major African diasporic movement is as old as the history of humankind believing that Africans „have been on constant motion for over 100,000 years, travelling all over the globe, transforming it in many ways and being transformed themselves‟ (56). Some Africans equally moved to Europe, the Middle East and Asia around the fifth century, these groups of people include traders, slaves and soldiers. This gave rise to African communities in India, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Middle East and Asia long before Christopher Columbus started his voyage across Africa. The most popular and widely studied African diasporic movement/stream is that of the Atlantic slave trade which began in the 15th century. This singular act saw millions of Africans in America. The latest African Diasporic stream which is more pertinent to the current study, (dispersed in Europe and the Americas - North and South and in between the Caribbean), started in the 19th century which is the movement and the settlement of Africans on their own in various societies. African nations have witnessed a lot of economic, social and political changes from pre-colonial times to the present era which literature has done justice to by highlighting varied critical issues of pressing concern (217).

African diasporic communities have felt the harmful impact of colonization for generations. They have remained connected across time and space through their histories of resistance and oppression. Colonial writings are writings produced by authors belonging to the colonizing power and those written before or during independence in the concerned region. It is obvious that the colonizers fought tooth and nail to civilize the colonized.

Colonization created a master – servant relationship, the colonizers and the colonized. Colonial experience is so bad that the only way to come to terms with it is for the colonized to talk about it and write about it. Chike Okoye concurs with this view when he states that,

„experiences and instances of colonization produced literary reactions from the colonial subjects‟ (preface vii). No wonder Chinua Achebe dissects pages from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad in his essays. In one of Achebe‟s essay „Africa is People‟, Achebe writes that Africa is not primitive huts and wide-eyed kite worshipping, „Africa is not fiction. Africa is People‟(157).

Today, Africans still migrate to other countries – both African and non-African countries. Colin Palmer is of the view that immigrants face oppression and alienation in their new countries. American president, Donald Trump expressed his feelings towards immigrants in his country. Shear and Davis in their article „Stoking Fears, Trump Defied Bureaucracy to Advanced Immigration Agenda‟ said that Donald Trump in 2014 tweeted „Our government now imports illegal immigrants and deadly diseases. Our leaders are inept.‟ In the same article, the president said that Nigerians would never „go back to their huts‟ in Africa once they see America. According to Daily Sun, Friday, January 19th 2018, Donald Trump remarks that „‟once Nigerians had seen America they would never „go back to their huts‟ in Africa.‟‟(17). Immigrants have emotional attachment to their ancestral home. The African diaspora under study here is the one caused by slave trade and colonization and voluntary movement of Africans (started in the 19th century). This constitutes millions of Africans who are united by racial oppression and they fight against it. They are challenged with the problem of realizing themselves as they brought their different culture, histories, ideas and worldviews with them and their influences depend on their experiences as slaves and histories of the societies where they come from. African immigrants in England, Canada, United States of America and Germany form a distinct minority while they comprise the overwhelming majority in Haiti and Jamaica. Therefore, blacks in America who usually occupy a minority status are seriously marginalized. Palmer classified African diaspora into six groups. Three groups belong to the prehistoric ancient times (formed before the construction of colonial states) and the remaining three belong to the modern times which are associated with the Indian Ocean slave trade to Asia, the Atlantic slave trade to the Americas and voluntary movement of Africans to different parts of the world. The last

group is pertinent to this study.

According to www.pewresearch.org>2016/12/15>int, the number of the world‟s international migrants is around 244 million people, that is 3.3% of the world‟s populations. www.forbes.com explains that Eric Zammour, a prominent French figure, blamed French Muslim communities (immigrants) for some troubles in France. Terrorist attack is now rampant in France as there is usually one every year. It has the largest Muslim population among UK, Germay, Spain and France. Their newspaper, „Causeur‟ once had the following as one of its headlines „Immigration: France falls apart‟. Immigrants in France are marginalized, a journalist, Elizabeth Levy explained that „the debate over immigration in France is still impossible‟. In September 2016, the president of France, Emmanuel Macron sent in a new immigration proposal, he later said that he wanted

„a complete overhaul‟ of his country‟s policy. This proposal is tougher on immigration. According to an article „France Struggles with Its Immigrants In The Midst Of National Security Concerns‟ by Andy J. Semotiuk published in the net on 17th January, 2018, (www.forbes.com) „… economic migrants should be turned back, while genuine refugees allowed to stay‟ in France. The article also goes ahead to explain that the marginalization of minorities in France is worse than elsewhere as descendants of French immigrants cannot consider themselves „French‟ even the successful ones like celebrities. For an immigrant descendant to be a French citizen, he must at 18 reside in France at least for 5 years since age 11, or the child will request for citizenship at age 16-18 equally residing for five years since age 11, but becomes a French citizen automatically when born if one parent was also born in France. A child born to unknown parents or stateless parents is automatically a French citizen. Marrying a French citizen and living with him or her for four to five years earns you a French citizenship. These minorities mainly live in ghettos where drugs, unemployment and violence are the order of the day. They are left without medical care and security. Children born by tourists or short- term visitors in France are not French citizens, in other words French citizenship is not acquired by virtue of birth in France. „Immigration‟ is a serious topic in France now as descendants of immigrants find it difficult fitting in. According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org.wiki.immigration, the French National Institute of Statistics (INSEE), percentage of immigrants in France as at January 2016 was 7.9 million, which was 11.8% of their population. France has to open up and

accept immigrants like America does if they want to stop immigration problems. They have to accept their country as multicultural and not homogeneous and also realize that national identity cannot be based on one ethnic origin.

In 2017, according to Lindsay Huth in his article „Immigration in America by the Numbers‟, population from China, India and Philippines is close to 14% of immigrants living in the US. The original World Trade Center was a large complex of seven buildings in Lower Manhattan, New York City and they were destroyed during the September 11, 2001 attack by an immigrant turned terrorist(Osama Bin Laden). Immigrants face racism or ethic discrimination in the United States which has been a major issue over the years. Legally or socially sanctioned privileges and rights were given to white Americans while migrants like the Jews, Arabs, East and South Asian have faced continuous discrimination in America. In American election of 2008 that brought Obama in as the US President, racial divisions persisted throughout the election though he received greater percentage of the white vote [43%] than John Kerry [41%].

But actually, immigrants especially blacks, suffer racial disparities because according to

„Race and Crime in the United States‟, the US sentencing commission reported in March 2010 that black offenders receive sentences that are 10% longer than white offenders for the same crime (10). A July 2009 report by the sentencing project found that two thirds of the people in the US with life sentences are immigrants, especially non-white. „Hate Crime‟, an article, observes that most hate crimes in the United States target victims on the basis of race. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, violent-hate-crimes against Hispanic people increased by 300% between 2011-2012.

www.channel4.com/news reports that there were riots for two weeks after the shooting of Michael Brown at Ferguson Missouri in August 2014. Riots were on between late November and early December 2014 after the white police officer who shot Michael Brown was not indicted. According to the report, the grand jury decided that the police officer should not stand trial for killing a black teenager (Michael Brown). In August, 2015 there were riots for two days during the anniversary of a black man who was fatally shot by one twenty eight year old Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. The allegation was that Brown stole from a store and Wilson was notified. He went looking for Brown and incidentally Brown was approaching him unarmed when Wilson fired a total of twelve

bullets several times at him. The shooting sparked unrest in Ferguson and later United States Department of Justice exonerated Wilson of criminal wrongdoing. On March 4th, 2015, the US Department of Justice reported the conclusion of its own investigation and cleared Wilson of Civil rights violations in the shootings. The write-up is of the view that

„blacks are likely to die at the hands of police‟.

The death of Freddie Carlos Gray Jr on 19th April, 2015 was an incident in which a suspect died in police custody and later protests turned into riots in Baltimore. https://en.m.wikipedia.org.wiki.Death has it that Gray, a twenty five year old African American was arrested by the Baltimore Police Department on April 12, 2015 for possessing an illegal switchblade. Gray was badly beaten by the police men. A bystander reported that the police were „folding‟ Gray. „…one officer bent Gray‟s legs backwards, and another held Gray down by pressing a knee into his neck‟. While being transported in a police van, Grey fell into coma and was taken to University of MaryLand R.Adams Cowley Shock trauma centre where he died on April 19th, 2015. The six police officers with him in the van were charged to court and Gray‟s death was ruled a homicide. Gray‟s death resulted to series of protests. One of the protests resulted to thirty – four arrests and injuries to fifteen police officers. After his funeral on April 27th 2016, looting and burning of local businesses became the order of the day and curfew was established. On May 1, 2015, state prosecutors said that Gray did not commit any offence while his death was ruled a homicide by a medical examiner‟s report. They were all released from jail after posting bail. On September 2, 2015, it was decided to hold separate trials for the accused. In May, 2016, officer Nero was found innocent while officer Goodson was also found innocent on June 23, 2016. On July 27th, 2016, „all charges against officers, William G. Porter, Miller and White were dropped‟. On July 7th, Rice was declared innocent. „On September 12, 2017, the U. S. Department of Justice announced it will not bring federal charges against the six Baltimore police officers involved in the arrest and in-custody death of Freddie Gray‟

Abdullahi „Abdi‟ Omar Mohammed was shot by 8:00pm at 200 South Rio Grande Street, Salt Lake City, US on February 27th, 2015. The shooting sparked riots that same night in

Salt Lake City. https://en.m.wikipedia.org.wiki has it that Omar, a Somali refugee was shot and injured by police after allegedly being involved in a confrontation with another person. Omar, a seventeen year old boy was armed with a metal broom stick, and was asked to drop it by a responding officer, on refusal, he was shot four times. His shooting led to immediate civil unrest and later controversy. Omar later came out of coma on March 13th, 2015. The Salt Lake County District Attorney‟s office declined to file charges against the officers involved.

Apart from France and America other countries also marginalize immigrants, according to

„The Times of Israel‟, Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday 19th of March, 2018 said that the „more than 200 kilometers (120 miles)‟ border fence with Sinai was recently completed to help prevent „… severe attacks by Sinai terrorists, and something much worse, a flood of illegal migrants from Africa‟. The Israeli government plan to stop illegal migration, drug and weapon trafficking.

To make the condition of African migrants worse, they are equally maltreated in their own continent. North African country, Libya forcefully takes immigrants travelling through the desert to Europe into slavery and as farm labourers. They at worse kill these immigrants to collect their vital organs for sale. These migrants travel through deserts and sea. Nigerians are marooned in foreign lands. Unfortunately, there are trans-border criminals who exploit and subject the African migrants to horrible experiences. In an article titled „600 Nigerians in Chinese prisons- Envoys‟ in the Daily Sun of Tuesday, 27th February, 2018 (43), the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Nigeria in Gwongzhou, China, Mr. Wale Okolo announced that about six hundred Nigerians languish their lives in different prisons in Gwongzhou province due to one offense or the other. According to Wale, some of them have overstayed their visa while others are engaged in one criminal act or another, ranging from drug trafficking to stealing. About five thousand and twenty seven Nigerians who migrated to Libya illegally were subjected to hard labour, slavery and prostitution. They were held in inhuman and extremely difficult conditions. This is all about diaspora. According to an article captioned „Trafficking: We‟re sorry, FG tells 493 Libyan returnees‟ in the Daily Sun newspaper of Monday, January 8th, 2018 (39), four hundred and ninety

 

three of them were brought home (back to Nigeria) by the Federal Government of Nigeria while plans to bring back more were ongoing. Most of them were trafficked and sold to slavery, and Nigerian Government promised to train them in different skills to help them adjust and face the challenges of life. On Monday, 8th January, 2018, Daily Sun reported that nearly thirty four thousand migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean since 2000 in an article titled „Migrants drown as boat sinks off Libya coast‟ (44).

The sufferings of black immigrants have become more than ever before pertinent as Africans move away from their continent looking for greener pastures. Bearing in mind the sufferings of black immigrants especially, African desent writers in narratives attempt to write and deal with such issues during and after colonialism. This gave birth to postcolonial literature. Postcolonial Literature cannot exist on its own but as a resistance to the colonizers ideas and thoughts. Chike Okoye puts it this way: „Postcolonial literature does not exist wholesomely on its own: it rather exists as a reaction or resistance to the mainstay and dominant colonizer‟s ideology and discourse‟ (3). Postcolonial literature is according to Ashcoft et al writing which has been „affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day‟ (50). African writers like Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong‟o, Camara Laye and Frantz Fanon to mention but these four, seek to awaken political and cultural nationalism, they tend to counter the colonial stereotypes of Africa and Africans. Achebe calls out racism and neocolonialism in all their obvious, skillful, cunning and subtle manifestations. In his essay „An image of Africa: Racism in Conrad‟s Heart of Darkness, he shows the destructive effects of racism and injustice in Western society. Though Achebe is late, his literary „sons and daughters‟ carry on his good works. Charles Nnolim says that there is no organized academy of letters known as sons and daughters of Achebe but it is used to show writers who adopted Achebe‟s style. Ngozi Chimamanda Adichie and Ayi Kwei Armah are some of Achebe‟s numerous literary children.

Diasporic tensions are the experiences problems encountered by diasporas in their different stations and their home;and when they finally come back. Cultural identity, race, dispossession, displacement, hybridity and Diaspora are some of migrants‟ experiences or

tensions and they are well articulated in the novels studied in this work. This work explores the concept of Diaspora and other experiences to show their inter-relatedness, illustrate how diasporic experiences or tensions are articulated within the ambit of the four selected texts - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie‟s Americanah, Ayi Kwei Armah‟s Osiris Rising, Isidore Okpewho‟s Call Me By My Rightful Name and Teju Cole‟s Every Day is for the Thief, and bring to limelight the predicaments of Africans so that those planning to leave their countries will have a rethink. For instance, diasporic tensions is beyond identity, issues on The Black World and the African Diaspora show that black world and the African Diaspora is all about Blacks‟ welfare outside their ancestral home. There have been problems, difficulties, contradictions and ambiguities concerning skin colour as the basis for racial discrimination. Walter Rodney writes:

The colour of our skin is the most fundamental thing about us. I could have chosen to talk about people of the same island, or the same religion, or the same class-but instead, I have chosen skin colour as essentially the most binding factor in our world. In so doing, I am not saying that is the way things ought to be. I am simply recognizing the real world that is the way things are. Under different circumstances, it would have been nice to be colour blind, to choose friends solely because their social interests coincide with mine but no conscious black man can allow him self such luxuries in the contemporary world. (16).

In the four texts under study, skin colour poses a serious difficulty and becomes a setback to the protagonists and other characters. They are deprived of many privileges and their rights. Ifemelu, Otis, Ast, Obinze, Aunty Uju, Ras, Dike, Ginika and Emenike, could not get jobs because of their skin colour and their natural kinky hair. In trying to survive, foreign and alien identity is imposed on them which cause serious psychological problems to the immigrants. Kofi Anyidoho in The Pan African Ideal in Literatures of the Black World writes:

There are bridges to build, even if most of these can be no more than mental bridges reconnecting one psyche to ancestral time despite irreversible physical separation. There are wounds to heal, even though some of these wounds lie so deep and so close to the heart. (10)

 

The racial discrimination meted out on blacks especially their colour (blackness) is enough to give a lot of them mental stress and psychological problems.

Another issue is diasporic tensions and celebration of Identity. Language factor is a serious factor for African literary writers as many of them still write their stories and poems in their colonial masters‟ languages. Kofi Anyidoho writes:

The crucial difference is that literary creators on the continent have not altogether lost access to indigenous African languages the way in which those in the diaspora have.

For those on the continent, the central question is whether to create in an imposed colonial language or in an indigenous African language. (20)

The four texts under study use English language and on few occasions their local languages are used to drive their points home. Achebe writes „Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.‟ Kofi Anyidoho states that Ayi Kwei Armah contributes to this debate about using African local languages to write African literature when he writes that Ayi Kwei Armah in

„Our language Problem‟ argues that the real way out is not for African writers to choose their various mother tongues, but for the adoption of one central language. (21)   The issue is that Africans do not want to lose their identity believing that language signifies identity. They believe that loosing ones identity (language) is a dangerous, awful and risky betrayal.

Finally, the tensions of diasporic return migration shows that many immigrants return home (Africa) after many years abroad. Writers like Kamau Brathwaite and Maya Angelou return to Africa (Ghana) after spending many years abroad. This made them have outstanding African experience quite different and opposite of the ones they had abroad.

A return to origin is seen in the four texts under study. Apart from the four protagonists, many other characters return to Africa to look for their identity, self fulfillment and true self and they finally settle down to life free of racism . Anyidoho writes that „The journey back into the memory bank of the collective, submerged consciousness, stands out as a major artistic movement…. (

The major intention of this work is to analyze the psychic effects of these characters as exposed in the texts and equally establish the implications of displacement and imposed identity issues.To discover if the protagonists are far-fetched from the identity postulations of Peter Burke and Sheldon Stryker alongside other attendant vices that have been the major preoccupation of the four texts under study. It explores what the characters experience when at „home‟ – motherland and when abroad. Three theories, the trauma theory, identity theory and psychoanalytical theory are adopted to critically analyze this research, because each narrative can be examined from different directives bearing in mind that the different methods may not be that different in the end.

However, it is good to note that in actual sense, migration is not too bad as it helps to boost the migrants‟ countries‟ economy because migrants remit several billions of dollars to their countries. Immigrants also boosts economic growth, creates skilled workers and dynamic societies in their new found countries thereby making government to receive more revenue. Unskilled immigrants are also part of agriculture and other necessary services. Immigrants contribute more in taxes than the benefits they receive. Ian Golding writes that „migration has always been one of the most important drivers of human progress and dynamism‟ in one of his articles titled „How migration shaped our world – for the better‟. To buttress his point, he goes ahead to write that it was immigrants that founded companies like Yahoo, Google, Intel, PayPal and eBay in America