Fears, Doubts and Joys of Not Belonging

Chapter 9. Willful and/or Imposed Alienation in Recent African Emigration Narratives

197 Chapter 9 Willful and/or Imposed Alienation in Recent African Emigration Narratives: Chimamanda Adichie’s T The Thing Around Your Neck, Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, and Henri Lopes’s Une enfant de Poto-Poto By Robert Alvin Miller and Gloria Nne Onyeoziri In discussing the notion of alienation in a West Indian context, Alain Brossat and Daniel Maragnès explain that often, in its development, we see the word “alienation” slip discretely from the classic meaning conferred on it by German philosophy (Entfremdung: the fact of being a stranger to oneself) to the sense of madness or mental illness. Everyone knows that Fanon was a psychiatrist and that his training influenced his views on the colonized, leading him to detect in the latter’s behavior attitudes that he considered neurotic if not psychotic. (27)21 As Brossat and Maragnès go on to question the validity of applying a psychiatric concept of alienation to West Indian culture in general, their observation reminds us of the need to understand the varied and changing ways in which people become strangers to themselves. As African writers become increasingly aware of the fact that the everyday experience of Africans is played out in a world where emigration to destinations in Europe and North America is a 21 All translations from French in this study are ours. 198 common part of life, narratives focusing on the lives and witnesses of Africans living out their cultural identity in foreign cultural contexts are becoming more and more frequent. These are no longer the narratives of alienation and return, the “Ambiguous Adventures” of the early post-colonial period: the sense of radical separation between the native land and the foreign metropolis has been blurred by new forms of communication and new obstacles to “enracinement,” forcing a new generation of African writers to reconceptualize the experiences of alienation of African men and women leaving their countries of birth. Alienation from one’s community of origins becomes more of a negotiation, a game of frustration, deception and misunderstanding than an absolute existential rupture. At the same time, alienation from and within the new community is becoming more complex and multi-faceted, involving not only rejection by that new community but also betrayal by the very people one imagines to be the closest representatives of one’s origins. In the world of African Emigration narrative in the early 21st century, characters’ cultural assumptions about the metropolis are confused with crumbling assumptions about themselves and those closest to them. Old languages compete in new contexts; futures and destinies get lost in a maze of conflicting and contradictory claims to cultural identity and moral value. None of the authors discussed in this study suggests, however, that this moral-cultural confusion occurs in a brave new world of reciprocal global acceptance: old forms of prejudice and systemic exclusion continue to find their place in the magma of changing experience. Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de l’Atlantique, Henri Lopes’s Une Enfant de Poto-Poto and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck, all reflect these changes in African emigration narratives, but with remarkable diversity of style and political perspective. Careful study of this diversity will lead us to the conclusion that the history of African communities is being re- 199 written in newly imagined spaces of alienation and conflicted memory. As a major new Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Adichie has been placed by Susan Andrade in the tradition of African women writers who tell politically significant stories through family narratives: “Like novels by Nwapa, Emecheta, Bâ, and others, Adichie’s novels represent a politics of the family while quietly but clearly telling stories of the nation” (91). Andrade goes on, however, to suggest that Adichie also represents a significant change in that she is prepared to “represent national imagery more directly” (92). This becomes, in Adichie’s first novel Purple Hibiscus, an explicit juxtaposition of a private pater familias and a public persona: “By thematizing the schism between public and private, making the public man the opposite of the private monster, Adichie makes a simple correspondence impossible; the metaphor moves from out to in, and yet the interpenetration of the spheres is reemphasized” (99). The short story format of The Thing Around Your Neck allows Adichie not only to explore national issues such as dictatorship, police brutality and violence but also...