The New African Diaspora

22. Self, Place, and Identity in Two Generations of West African Immigrant Women Memoirs: Emecheta’s Head above Water and Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me

22 SELF, PLACE, AND IDENTITY IN TWO GENERATIONS OF WEST AFRICAN IMMIGRANT WOMEN MEMOIRS: EMECHETA’S HEAD ABOVE WATER AND DANQUAH’S WILLOW WEEP FOR ME F. Odun Balogun . . . maybe not too late For having first to civilize a space Wherein to play your violin with grace —Gwendolyn Brooks, “Children of the Poor” Given the history of land alienation, geographic and social space has enormous significance for black peoples. Slaves were violently uprooted and transplanted into alien spaces, and colonized Africans were forced to yield power over their lands to foreigners. As exiles, whether voluntary or circumstance-compelled, members of the new African diaspora also intimately know the psychological anxiety of land alienation, which, in any case, is a common experience for all immigrants irrespective of where they come from. In a sense, the central theme of black history and literature has been how black peoples have coped in the last three centuries with the trauma of land alienation. Thus, my interest in the past few years has concerned how African and African American writers depict the problematic relationship of the black self to the self’s place of habitation as a factor of identity formation. Here my limited objective is to examine from a comparative perspective the depiction of the self-placeidentity relationship with particular reference to two West African immigrant women memoirs, namely, Buchi Emecheta’s Head above Water and Meri Nana-Ama Danquah’s Willow Weep for Me. I wish to explore, from these examples of two distinct generations of African women immi442 Self, Place, and Identity 443 grants, the extent to which the autobiographical female self is a product of the self’s relationship to her place of physical location. In other words, what is the relational role of the concepts of self and place in identity formation in these two works? Before proceeding, however, I wish to clarify the meaning of these concepts. The term “self,” often called “mind” or “soul,” is a problematic category in metaphysics, where, depending on the philosopher’s intellectual orientation and methodological/analytical approach, it can be said to be an abstraction that really does not exist, a mere illusion. However, as Richard Taylor insists in his book Metaphysics, the nihilistic answer to the question about the existence of the self yields place to affirmation whenever the philosopher approaches the question not with an outward-inward focus that moves from nature to the self, but with an inward-outward mode that seeks the self in nature. It is then that the metaphysical search for the self ends, not in the discovery of nothingness, but in the realization that the self is one with nature (124–126). Whether or not one shares Taylor’s transcendentalist philosophical view, there is no denying that the self can be apprehended only in reference to the non-self, beginning with the mix of biological and psychological shell that the self inhabits and including the geographical, racial, cultural, and social locales of the self. Hence, sociologically , the “self” can be seen as the identity one fashions out for oneself based on both the perception one has of one’s place in society and the character of one’s identification with the society’s cultural values. In other words, “self” as self-identity is the sum of how one regards oneself in the context of other selves and the cultural and moral principles by which one chooses to live. One of the most crucial determinants (advocates of metaphysical determinism would say, the only determinant) of self-identity is the relationship of the self to the self’s place in time, the two latter categories, “place” and “time,” being almost indistinguishable in metaphysics (Richard Taylor 72–80). Pragmatically defined, the term “place” is the geographical setting located in a specific chronological time that is characterized by a certain intellectual or philosophical atmosphere and within which the self is situated and functions. Indeed, as Charles Taylor puts it in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space, a space in which questions arise about what is good or bad, what is worth doing and what not, what has meaning and importance for you and what is trivial and secondary” (28). The concepts “self” and “place” have always operated in literature in a symbiotic relationship, and the weight of importance attached to each concept in relation to the other depends on the philosophy of the literary...