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180 e p i l o g u e The Future of the Past: The New Historical Fiction With the rise of African American cultural tourism, the launching of the UNESCO International Slave Routes project, the immigration of more African writers to the United States and Britain, as well as the growth of academic interest in the legacy of the slave trade, writers in the last decade (loosely the first ten years of the twenty-first century) have been even more attuned to the historical effects of the slave trade and its centrality to contemporary concerns and cultures. Wole Ogundele has correctly assessed postcolonial African literature as largely lacking a historical novel that explicitly depicts the era of the slave trade, writing, “Anyone interested in the historical novel cannot but be struck by the relatively small number of African novels that can be so categorized , and by the ambiguity of the contents of those few.”1 In the late twentieth century, as we have discussed, West African writers seemed to include the slave trade largely in traces and metaphors that reveal the long-term suffering exacted by the loss of twelve million people. Recently, however, that trend toward the metaphorical and away from the historical novel has changed. In the 1990s, two novels that defied the trends described in this study were published by well-known West African authors. Ayi Kwei Armah and Syl Cheney-Coker (of Sierra Leone) wrote noteworthy novels that deal explicitly with the slave trade from the perspective of African Americans who returned to Africa to discover their ancestral homes, only to find those places unwelcoming and uncomfortable for a variety of reasons. Both novels seem to respond to the imperative espoused by the critics whose ideas launched The Future of the Past 181 this study—namely, the recent West African desire for an author to write historical novels that deal with the legacy of the slave trade in Africa and that respond to African American interest in and novelization of the transatlantic trade. Armah’s Osiris Rising (1995) is a didactic take on the way the slave trade continues to haunt the relationship between African and African American people, in both their political and intimate lives, as it navigates the complicated terrain of Africa as an ancestral home for African Americans.2 Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (1990) narrates the transgenerational saga of African Americans who, through a series of colonization projects, settled in what is now Sierra Leone.3 Focused on the return of these African Americans and their invention of an Africa that was meant to serve their postslavery needs, this historical novel takes the slave trade in Africa as a foundational backdrop to the story of these colonists, but is primarily narrated as a novel of return in the postslavery era. These two texts, written by West African writers, take the African American experience of Africa as a focal point, engaging in the conversations initiated by African American neo-slave narratives and travel narratives to Africa. Still, while these texts explore the implications of the transatlantic slave trade and the “Black Atlantic” networks of knowledge that were produced by the trade and represent a transition from the metaphorized discourse studied here toward more overt engagement with the trade, these novels are not the historically grounded novels of the particularly African experience of the slave trade that so many critics seem to desire. Around the same time as Armah and Cheney-Coker were writing novels of slave trade legacies, several West African poets began to take up the challenge of writing literary works that represent the African experience of the transatlantic slave trade as well. Kofi Anyidoho and Niyi Osundare both see the slave trade as part of the memory-work of their poetry. Still, as poets, their work aptly turns to oblique references and skilled metaphors that capture the image of slave trade violence on the shores of Africa. Kofi Anyidoho’s poetry often depicts diaspora concerns of the Middle Passage4 and African American anger that “your people sold ma people” and took away their “real names,”5 but he also expresses African memories of the “Polar Bears” who “set upon our Dream and tore it into shreds.”6 Niyi Osundare’s poetry echoes the “cacophony of chains”7 and “summon[s] these scars”8 of the “civilizing massacres of Abomey,”9 and at last of “ankles long oblivious of the appetite of the chains.”10 Both...

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