Navigating the African Diaspora: The Anthropology of Invisibility

2 Remembering Khartoum and Other Tales of Displacement

CHAPTER 2 Remembering Khartoum and Other Tales of Displacement Our view of the passage of time influences the value we attach to past events far more than is the case for the Dinka,whose points of reference are not years counted serially,but the events themselves.In the example of the man who called his child “Khartoum,”it is Khartoum which is regarded as an agent,the subject which acts,and not as with us the remembering mind which recalls a place.The man is the object acted upon. —GODFREY LIENHARDT, DIVINITY AND EXPERIENCE: THE RELIGION OF THE DINKA If we were to configure the architecture of contemporary anthropology, the resulting structure might reveal the explorations of experience,material culture,and space and time to be essential features of its fragile identity . One of the pioneering figures of this world was no doubt Godfrey Lienhardt, who mapped the meanings of Dinka cosmology in his classic Divinity and Experience (1961). In the heart of the work, Lienhardt considers memory, experience, and the significance of naming a child “Khartoum”—the son of a man once imprisoned in the city. Located at the confluence of the White and Blue Niles, the two tributaries of the Nile River, the capital city of Khartoum has long been associated with events that mark it as an international crossroads: hostage crises, diplomatic assassinations, and the rising and falling of refugee slums on its outskirts accommodating both the displaced from neighboring nationstates Chad, Eritrea, and Uganda and its own citizens fleeing war-torn regions in the south and west. Remembering Khartoum does not just entail the acknowledgement of the enduring traces of place on both a 72 REMEMBERING KHARTOUM present and future life. It also constitutes an “act of exorcism,” ensuring against potential harm of any kind. For the many people of southern Sudan,Khartoum has symbolized not only a seat of the national political power but also a site of ethnic discrimination, and religious and cultural intolerance. Indeed, as the legacy of residence in a place may have lasting significance across the generations, this type of experience can be integral to diasporas. In fact, some diasporic experiences are bounded by exclusionary activities of states, militias, and others in the homeland only to be met with intolerance and racism in the adopted lands that act as safe havens to those escaping violence elsewhere (Pred 2000). Lienhardt introduced a generation of anthropologists to the complexity of experience and the embodiment of aspects of the profane as well as the unseen world in everyday life. As we consider the nature of New African Diasporas, we must perhaps acknowledge the capriciousness of the work of historicity and the precarious state of those at times figured by diasporas through the disfigurement of their dispersal and the provisional status of all cultural identity. I think it is this kind of presence and contingency that we attempt to capture with such words as diaspora, dwelling, travelling , and exile, the lineaments of profound change expanding outward like the spokes of a wheel in the real time of daily practice and future lives.We make the vehicle of displacement the trope that stands in for the experience of diaspora or what we might even call the culture of diaspora. Cultural innovation is an integral part of any journey,as it is often what people do in moments of transition that marks their arrival in a new world.As in Dinka,remembering Khartoum,we tend to focus on an event (often departure ) and the prolonged state of arrival and displacement of the migrant, the refugee, or the exile. I would like to suggest that diaspora is not merely a form of transportation—a way of going from here to there—but rather a way of being here or there and all the points in between.1 What I have in mind is what Clifford has referred to as“dwelling in travel”(Clifford 1997). Diaspora is a kind of passage, but a passage that encompasses the possibility of never arriving, of drifting endlessly betwixt and between the new world’s boundaries.Rather than seeking“assimilation”as a goal,diaspora is a way of being“other”among the established,of keeping alive the drama of the voyage of “otherness” in worlds that seek sameness and homogeneity. At times, the ambiguity of the voyage is imposed (refugee, displaced person ,rebel,immigrant),and at others,it is embraced as a marker of identity. [3...