Joining Africa: From Anthills to Asmara by Charles Cantalupo (review)

Joining Africa consists of thirteen chapters, a preface, and an epilogue. Almost two-thirds of the book deals with and lucidly discusses the author’s forays into Eritrean literature and culture. This explains why the preface summarizes and privileges the author’s experience in and about Eritrea; with that small African country becoming a tropic axis around which coalesce Cantalupo’s other experiences. Put differently, the preface reveals the drift of Cantalupo’s narrative, symbolizing it as a “kind of ant tunneling through the sand,” and leading to a moment of arrival, a bonding with Eritrea and, by extension, Africa.

Cantalupo’s book has its genesis in a mourning ritual, in Freud’s sense of the term. A dream he had of his dead wife being back in bed with him sends him scouring for existential and etiological explanations in faraway places: “It made me think that I could understand her death and how to go on with my life if I became or at least wrote from the perspective of a kind of Orpheus, seeing her as a Eurydice” (1–2). The first chapter from which the above words are taken is, in the main, a meditation on life’s fragility and ephemerality. Mount Kilimanjaro’s monumental stature reminds him of the “smallness” of humans, while the recurring image of the skull of a dead wildebeest underscores life’s transience. The gory death of a thief at the hands of a vigilante mob in Lome, Togo, and his Senegalese guide’s existential life in Dakar denote life’s cruel vagaries and vicissitudes. Cantalupo comes to Africa from the other direction, from Europe/America, hoping to move on and find peace and purpose in life after his calamitous loss.

The memoir is a moving tribute to unity in diversity. It is written in a poetic prose whose form reflects the cruel content from which the author is trying to transcend. The immediate reason for the memoir, as mentioned above, is to find meaning and, if possible, closure to a personal tragedy. It is also written to cope with the uneasy realization that there is no one master culture that could, like a master computer, read all other cultures. This realization dampens the author’s previous infatuation with the efficacy and self-importance of his Euro-American tradition. The dyadic nature of this content demands a form that could carry the weight and burden of these two experiences. The conflation of the two experiences gives complexity to Cantalupo’s narrative, which has as its confluence a redemptive contour that helps him emerge on the other side.

The journey is about a need to heuristically sift through and make sense of contradictions. Early on he problematizes the symbolism with which we associate such value-laden binaries as East/West, white/black, Euro-American/African. He shows how directions become synonymous with ideas, concepts, and epistemes. His earlier resolve to devote himself to knowing “Western culture before seeking out or learning any other” leads to a confusing culture shock. A visit to the National Museum in Cairo reveals the author’s ignorance: “floor after floor packed with what I didn’t know, I felt disoriented, but I left feeling overwhelmed with desire and starved. In between, I lost who I was” (4). Here Cantalupo proves two important things: after all, Egypt was the seat of learning for Orpheus and, second, the truth in Goethe’s oft-quoted dictum, “One would never be able to claim to know his/her culture without first knowing other cultures.” After this faltering moment, Cantalupo comes to relish and respect differences between continents and among countries without saddling/burdening them with dichotomizing constructs. This knowledge increases as he travels to countries in West, East, and North Africa. Here, he also sheds light on an earlier residue of Occidental knowledge: “Why did I consider Africa as a single entity, not merely as a continent but culturally too, when I knew and...