- The Fula from America: An African Journey
"What a brutal fucking irony that is, yeah?"
The phrase resonates through Minnesota-based writer/performer Carlyle Brown's recent solo show, The Fula From America,a narrative meditation that traces the affective contours of the African diaspora, and dwells on the paradoxes of travel in the post/neocolonial world. In 1983, disillusioned by the collapse of pan-Africanist ideals in the era following independence in Africa and the Civil Rights movement in America, the young Carlyle sets out for Africa to "discover himself" by returning to his ancestral homeland. He lands in Dakar, Senegal, with nothing but a small backpack, his Afrocentric convictions, and the business card of a friend from Ghana, on which is scrawled the phone number of a high-ranking civil servant in Freetown, Sierra Leone. By the time he leaves Sierra Leone, he is literally running for his life as the city founded by freed slaves disintegrates into another episode in the ongoing state of emergency that has become a way of life in West Africa. Unlike his African brethren, however, he has a safe place to call "home" and the freedom to go there. This, for "American Kal" (as he has been dubbed by his African friends) is the greatest irony. In his few weeks in Mama Africa, he has been alternately humiliated and rescued by his instinctive exercise of the rights and entitlements of American citizenship, the very rights of inviolable individualism historically denied Brown and his African-American kin in the country of their birth. Words like freedomand homeshatter under the pressure of their encounter with postcolonial realities, and our narrator is returned to a complex, refracted, painfully ambivalent sense of belonging to a land that had robbed his ancestors of family, culture, and history and imprisoned them in slavery.
This most brutal of ironies plays out within a fairly conventional framework of theatrical storytelling: linear narrative, a bare stage with modest lighting and audio support, intimate direct address to the audience. Within this simplicity of means, however, Brown's performance is dizzyingly epic in scope: with deft economy and unassuming wit he traverses four hundred years of colonial and postcolonial history, racial memory, and political economy. On the one hand, he draws on the rich tradition of the travelogue, replete with colorful detail—boy soldiers in olive drab and lime-green plastic sandals, ramshackle "taxis" shared with goats and chickens—and equally colorful characters. (These last were rendered with skill and acuity by Brown, with an attention to the minutiae of gesture and accent that allowed the charm, cunning, kindness, and occasional cravenness of their subjects to shine through without caricature.) On the other hand, Brown's work is a fine-grained autoethnography, attending to the subjective awareness of its narrator as he negotiates unfamiliar social and cultural worlds, locates himself, and is located at new interstices of power and discourse. When Brown's program notes remind us that travel is a quest in which "the only thing we will discover is ourselves," the gesture is far from narcissistic. With this claim, his narrator foregoes the cosmopolitan prerogative of objectivity (traveling to discover the Other) and commits to an ethics of self-exposure. He evokes for us the ridiculous vulnerability and profound social ignorance he experienced as a traveler—his struggle to regain autonomy that read to his hosts as self-delusion, stupidity, arrogance, or sheer insanity; the privileges he enjoyed as a guest of the Freetown elite (including the unwelcome one of being furnished with a twelve-year-old prostitute); his alarm at the ruthless opacity of quotidian African violence; and his exemption from the necessities that poverty imposes on African lives. And he places all this insistently in the context of Africa's tragic inheritance from colonial modernity and global capital, an inheritance [End Page 267]that keeps it poor and unstable and at the same time beholden to the powers that impoverish and destabilize. This kind of travel, Brown shows us, is bewildering...