"Why Did You Leave There?": Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson

Diaspora 3:2 1994 "Why Did You Leave There?": Lillian Allen's Geography Lesson Michael Eldridge University of Minnesota I'm sure you are expecting something will be said by me About the sweet land ofliberty The Lion and Attila the Hun, Guests ofRudy Vallée (1934) Early last November, Minneapolis, where I live, concluded a mayoral campaign in which race, masquerading as "crime" (surprise!), figured as the single most important issue. Although FBI statistics showed that violent crime had actually decreased over the last several years, there had been enough sensational anecdotal evidence to the contrary to keep the Minneapolitan unconscious haunted by the bogeyman who has arisen to account for the city's perceived decline. This spook (I use the word advisedly) figures centrally in a myth not so much of Paradise Lost as Paradise Spoiled: 10, 15 years ago, the story goes, this was a prosperous, clean, safe city, full of hardworking , tolerant, and liberal citizens. And then, they arrived, and kept on coming: aliens from Chicago, St. Louis, and (sotto voce) Gary—gangsters, criminals, and promiscuous welfare cheats bent on swindling their generous and gullible hosts out of hard-earned tax dollars ("'Moneyapolis,' they call us") and generally disrupting their peaceful way of life. Now it's getting to the point where it's almost as bad as New York. ' Such sentiments aren't surprising, perhaps, for an area June Jordan once dubbed the "Heart of Whiteness," an area like many others, really, where decent folk struggle with what are euphemistically called the "contradictions" of late capitalism, and turn, all too predictably, to xenophobia. In fact, the details of Minneapolis's explanatory narrative don't have to be altered much to fit the local circumstances of another North American metropolis comparable in size and "minority" demographics to the Twin Cities. On the surface, anyway, this second city wasn't always quite so resolutely whitebread as its Minnesota counterpart—in fact, its happily selfcontained , "colorful" ethnic enclaves were for years the source of official civic pride and boosterism—but it did see itself as similarly safe, clean, and prosperous. And then somehow over the last decade 170 Diaspora 3:2 1994 or so the same something happened; compared to the idyllic city of folk discourse, the now-unrecognizably ugly, smelly, and crimeridden metropolis might as well be (again) New York or—the more frequent comparison—Tokyo. For even ifthe current mayor got herself elected on an anticrime platform that, as in Minneapolis, has meant more black teenagers taking more and more police bullets, it's finally south and southeast Asians who've most recently borne the brunt of the scapegoating for this urban decay. Consequently, the angstbehind this second instance ofthe mythis expressed almost as often in terms of aesthetics as of public safety: the abundance of "Chinese" (read "tacky") restaurants in the city's downtown seems to generate about as many laments as the presence ofteenaged Asian gang members. Nevertheless, both versions ofthe familiar xenophobic story (and others like it all aroundthenorthernhemisphere)identify dark-skinned immigrants as the source ofthe trouble. The second metropolis is of course Toronto, incidentally host of the 1993 "national" (!) MLA conference.2 To add some depth to this hearsay, I want to turn to a particular Torontonian, Lillian Allen, who emigrated there from Jamaica not during the time of Paradise Spoiled but in an earlier wave: in 1969, when she and thousands of other West Indian migrants, legal and illegal, had belatedly discovered that political independence for their home countries still didn't add up to economic independence. I'm invoking some ofAllen's work as a reggae/performance poet3 not only for its insight into issues of migration, but also for its anticipation (and correction) of current theory on geography, transnational economics, and, most crucially, diasporic cultural production. Finally, I want at least to suggest how it might prod whites (whose stagnation, not blacks' migration, is surely the larger "problem") to think more productively about color and ethnicity. For my understanding of "diaspora aesthetics," I need first of all to bow in the direction of the triumvirate of black British cultural critics: Kobena Mercer, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy. Gilroy...