Pan–African American Literature: Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century

Signifyin(g) Immigrants in the Twenty-First Century

Stephanie Li

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813592794
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The twenty-first century is witnessing a dynamic broadening of how blackness signifies both in the U.S. and abroad. Literary writers of the new African diaspora are at the forefront of exploring these exciting approaches to what black subjectivity means. Pan-African American Literature is dedicated to charting the contours of literature by African born or identified authors centered around life in the United States. The texts examined here deliberately signify on the African American literary canon to encompass new experiences of immigration, assimilation and identification that challenge how blackness has been previously conceived. Though race often alienates and frustrates immigrants who are accustomed to living in all-black environments, Stephanie Li holds that it can also be a powerful form of community and political mobilization.

1

Signifyin(g) on the Slave Narrative

African Memoirs of War and Displacement

Before Dinaw Mengestu won a MacArthur Genius Award, before Open City was extolled in the pages of the New Yorker, and before Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx talk was sampled in a Beyoncé song, the African literary landscape in the United States was dominated by stories of child soldiers and orphaned refugees. Pan-African American literature of the twenty-first century does not begin with novels celebrated for their incisive perspective on the struggles of contemporary black immigrants and complex intraracial dynamics. Instead, the first years of the century witnessed the publication of two best-selling books about African boys displaced by war, texts far removed from the Afropolitan aesthetic or questions about racial authenticity.

In 2006, Dave Eggers published What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006), a genre-bending account of a Sudanese Lost Boy’s resettlement in the United States. Favorably reviewed by every major national newspaper, What Is the What was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and received France’s Prix Médicis étranger. One year after its publication, Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier (2007) topped the New York Times best-seller list. Eggers went so far as to describe Beah as “arguably the most read African writer in contemporary literature” (179), a designation that neatly keeps his own popularity unchallenged. Many reviewers compared Beah’s life story to Eggers’s novel as if A Long Way Gone offers a sequel to Deng’s experiences. Although Beah is from Sierra Leone rather than Sudan and served as a soldier in the government’s army, his book offered American audiences another glimpse of the devastation caused by African civil wars. Despite their differences, both texts present stories of black suffering relieved only through the promise of America and its nation of sympathetic readers.

It may seem incongruous, if not completely misguided, to begin this study with a discussion of a novel written by a white author. However, What Is the What initiated broad interest in the stories of African refugees and child soldiers among American readers of the twenty-first century. A Long Way Gone is one of many popular accounts of Africans escaping war and violence for the relative calm and prosperity of the West; these include Emmanuel Jal’s War Child: A Child Soldier’s Story (2010), They Poured Fire on Us from the Sky: The True Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan (2006), and Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda’s Children (2007), among others. These texts serve as crucial antecedents to the pan-African American novels explored in subsequent chapters. They not only highlight the problematic expectations of white audiences but also, more importantly, offer a model of black intertextual exchange with the most foundational African American literary genre, the slave narrative. This signifyin(g) relationship demonstrates the rich resonances between contemporary African stories and the African American canon. Like What Is the What and A Long Way Gone, antebellum slave narratives were written to inspire political action among curious if disengaged readers. Almost two centuries since Frederick Douglass’s best-selling account of slave life dominated national conversations, horrifying experiences of black victims are once again offered up to Western audiences with the hope that they will bring about lasting and meaningful change.

However, while antebellum readers avidly consumed the stories of former slaves, the stark brutalities of plantation life were a few states away, not situated on a faraway continent that for contemporary Americans often remains more myth than reality. And yet the parallels between stories of African child soldiers and refugees and antebellum slave narratives demonstrate the ever-fraught politics of reading and writing about racialized suffering. This has special resonance for stories about black lives because, as Mengestu reminds us, “What attracts immediate and superficial attention to Africa’s child soldiers, however, is that the brutal existence of a child soldier dovetails neatly with depictions of Africa both as a place born of hell and misery and as a continent that, like a child, can be saved.”1 Mengestu’s comments reflect Cole’s critique of the “White Savior Industrial Complex,” which “is not about justice” but “about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.”2 In such narratives, black victims require heroic white crusaders to bring them not just peace and prosperity but the very tools of civilization: literacy and a broad audience for their inspiring life stories. As demonstrated in later chapters, Mengestu and Cole’s novels implicitly counter these racist conceptions by affirming the complexity and depth of African immigrant lives.

Both stories about African child refugees and antebellum slave narratives depend on a redemptive structure that provides readers with the satisfaction of individual triumph often coded through images of the American dream fulfilled. Douglass concludes his 1845 narrative by describing the freedoms of the North; similarly, Beah ends his memoir reveling in the support he finds among his new American friends in New York. These are stories of black lives deliberately addressed to predominantly white, middle-class American readers. Although slave narratives explicitly indicted aspects of American culture and society, texts about African refugees and soldiers showcase examples of black-on-black violence that are not directly tied to histories of Western colonialism and imperialist intervention; while the conflicts in Sudan and Sierra Leone are certainly derived from a colonial history, this background and its relationship to the United States is obscured by the immediate spectacle of internal strife within the continent. Because of this geographic and political remove, contemporary American readers encounter these stories with a greater sense of their own broad-minded magnanimity. They are not to blame for the atrocities chronicled here, and simply to purchase the book is to contribute to the worthy political mission of its author.

What Is the What, A Long Way Gone, and War Child all draw on rhetorical strategies evident in antebellum slave narratives. By attaching his name to Deng’s story, Eggers echoes a literary tradition involving white authorization of black lives. Moreover, just as Douglass and Harriet Jacobs appealed to their readers through shared ideologies with deep national resonance, Beah and Eggers establish a connection to their audiences by emphasizing quintessentially American tropes of innocence and the desire for a better life. Both Douglass and Jacobs were especially attentive to the gender roles they needed to perform for their nineteenth-century readers; by contrast, Beah largely avoids issues of gender and sexuality in order to emphasize his identity as an innocent. Such a depiction may strain credibility, especially given reports of rampant rape in various African conflicts, but like slave narrators before him, Beah succeeds in offering a story palatable to his readers.3 The middle-class Americans who look to Starbucks for book recommendations (A Long Way Gone was the second selection for the now defunct Starbucks reading club) may be repelled by stories of rape and sexual violence as well as by trauma that lingers far beyond the close of a two-hundred-page book. Instead the arc of redemption so common to antebellum slave narratives also structures Beah’s story, which returns its sensitive, observant narrator to the childhood stolen from him by his involvement in the civil war that gripped Sierra Leone in the 1990s.

The image of latte-sipping Americans reading about Beah’s harrowing experiences as a drug-addicted orphan killing and maiming his fellow countrymen exemplifies what Alexandra Schultheis identifies as the uneasy “politics of humanitarian consumption” (31). What does it mean to read stories of such violence so far removed from their geographic and political origin? How do these texts appeal to Western and specifically American readers in their account of atrocities that include child soldiering and genocide? It bears noting that What Is the What, A Long Way Gone, and War Child are not texts focused solely on self-expression and discovery; rather, they are deliberately crafted to move readers to explicit forms of action. Just as Deng hopes that his readers will help him to better the lives of his Sudanese countrymen both here and abroad, Beah describes the horrors of child soldiering in order to combat the exploitation of other young men.

Identifying a new genre of African literature, the modern slave narrative, Yogita Goyal draws a similar comparison between nineteenth-century slave narratives and a number of recent works, including What Is the What and Francis Bok’s Escape from Slavery (2003). Goyal argues that these texts “reveal the refashioning of the politics of race and diaspora for a neoliberal age, where seemingly universal notions of the human once again underwrite a Western/neoimperial hegemonic agenda” (50). While Goyal carefully delineates the political dangers of mapping a modern slave discourse onto these contemporary texts, my concern here and elsewhere in this study is more literary. I read What Is the What, A Long Way Gone, and War Child as part of a signifyin(g) exchange with the slave narrative form. As the first literary texts produced by people of African descent in the Americas, slave narratives share with these African testimonies an originary place in the development of a racialized canon. The stories of Deng, Beah, and others inaugurated interest in African narratives for twenty-first-century American readers. These texts represent the first wave of African American literature of the new diaspora, setting the stage for later interest in fiction by Cole, Mengestu, Adichie, and others.

Comparing these testimonial works to antebellum slave narratives offers insight into the rhetorical strategies necessary to engage American audiences. Despite centuries of civil rights progress and literary innovations, black writers continue to rely on literary techniques that cater to middle-class ideologies and traditional gender conventions. Although the terms of black self-expression have significantly changed since the antebellum period, What Is the What, A Long Way Gone, and War Child demonstrate how stories of African suffering still contend with racialized expectations that respond to various forms of white privilege. In particular, What Is the What and A Long Way Gone depend on a discourse of innocence with profound racial undertones. Eggers presents himself through a kind of authorial erasure that claims innocence through narrative absence, while Beah draws on long-standing notions of childhood innocence that, as Robin Bernstein demonstrates, have a complex racial history. By contrast, Jal’s book, set during the Second Sudanese Civil War, rejects innocence as a redemptive trope and instead refigures soldiering as a means of combating violence and exploitation through words. These texts reflect both the limitations and possibilities of black self-expression within a political and literary landscape that too often assumes African victimization and white salvation.

Dave Eggers’s What Is the What

Much of the success of What Is the What was no doubt due to Eggers’s reputation as a hip but imminently literary writer and provocateur. Reviewers consistently praised Eggers for his turn away from the self-indulgent postmodern antics of his earlier works and toward a kind of selfless exploration of the consequences of war-torn Sudan. New York Magazine’s David Amsden noted that Eggers was especially well suited to tell the story of one of the country’s Lost Boys because he is “famously, a lost boy himself.” For Amsden, “this wrenching and remarkable book” represents the culmination of all of Eggers’s literary efforts from his uneven if supremely earnest fiction to the founding of the independent publishing house McSweeney’s and 826 Valencia, a San Francisco nonprofit writing and tutoring center that now has chapters in eight American cities. If Eggers had at last sufficiently grown up to narrate the life of a boy orphaned and scarred by war, then America too might be ready to recognize the ongoing suffering and strife of East Africa. Although later writers like Beah and Jal published their memoirs with a greater degree of authorial control, What Is the What served as a necessary first step to introduce American readers to the lives of young African refugees.

One of the defining features of the slave narrative genre is the presence of authenticating documents. Published at a time when questions about black humanity and intelligence were still debated in mainstream venues, slave narratives required the testimony of noted white patrons to be considered credible. Douglass’s 1845 narrative opens with a preface by William Lloyd Garrison, the most famous abolitionist of his day. Garrison’s national reputation and overweening praise affirmed the veracity of Douglass’s account. His preface also serves to instruct readers in how to approach a text so far removed from the daily life of middle-class white Americans. According to Garrison, Douglass is heir to Patrick Henry and endowed “with true manliness of character” (5). He must thus be understood as exemplifying the most revered American values: independence, freedom, and honor. Similarly, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) includes an introduction by noted author and activist Lydia Maria Child that testifies to the truth of Harriet Jacobs’s astounding life story. Slave narratives could not have been published much less read by thousands of Americans without the imprimatur of such famous white authorities.

What Is the What similarly depended on the reputation of a white writer and champion to enter into the public sphere. Deng’s story received national attention only because of Eggers’s involvement in its production. However, unlike the authenticating documents of Garrison, Child, and other white patrons that guaranteed the veracity of various slave narratives, Eggers’s participation in What Is the What confirms its fictionality. The book’s title page attests to the unusual partnership between Deng and Eggers that produced its mixing of distinct literary genres. What Is the What is subtitled The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng but also labeled “a novel” above its ascription to Dave Eggers. The book is clearly not meant to be read like a novel such as The Great Gatsby (1925) or even Eggers’s biographically infused And You Shall Know Our Velocity (2002). Rather, the peculiar amalgamation of fact and fiction liberates Eggers from the expectations of historical accuracy even as he capitalizes on the compelling details of Deng’s life. While abolitionists like Garrison and Child lent credibility to the lives of slave narrators, Eggers’s reputation secures interest in Deng’s story and promises a literary experience that is more than just a conventional account of suffering and salvation. Factual accuracy was paramount for nineteenth-century readers, but for today’s audiences, imminently comfortable with shifting notions of truth, authentication is not about the accuracy of verifying specific details. Rather, Eggers’s name on the cover of What Is the What promises its consumers a really good story.

What Is the What along with Zeitoun (2009), an account of a Syrian American man’s struggle through Hurricane Katrina and published three years later, signaled a radical new direction for Eggers, an author best known for his clever asides and breathless sentences. Both books adopt a direct, even spare prose style. Eggers emerges as a serious, observant narrator whose presence is felt precisely through his studied erasure; as he describes his narrative approach to Deng’s story, “I knew I had to disappear completely.”4 The vibrant, at times overwhelming presence of Eggers in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (AHWOSG) is transformed into a deliberately constructed authorial absence. These texts chart a trajectory from one form of narratorial extreme to the other. Despite such stark differences, they are united by their generic experimentation and emphasis on a community-oriented but self-reliant narrator. Eggers’s unusual narrative approach highlights the fraught geopolitics of cross-racial literary reception. Although he celebrates Deng’s perseverance and sensitivity, his book depends on negative depictions of African Americans. By framing Deng’s story through his assault by two African Americans, What Is the What suggests a sharp opposition between African immigrants like Deng and heartless American blacks. This troubling dichotomy emphasizes the racial stakes of Eggers’s text and the ways in which African stories are shaped, like slave narratives centuries earlier, primarily for white, middle-class readers.

In her foundational essay “Whiteness as Property,” Cheryl I. Harris explains, “The right to exclude was the central principle, too, of whiteness as identity, for mainly whiteness has been characterized, not by an inherent unifying characteristic, but by the exclusion of others deemed to be ‘not white’” (1736). Eggers is a writer deeply conscious of his own racial identity and the privileges that his whiteness has produced. His philanthropic work in many ways seeks to overturn racialized hierarchies by providing greater educational opportunities to disadvantaged youth. These initiatives attempt to shift the white right to exclude into an egalitarian commitment to inclusion. While programs such as 826 Valencia are certainly laudable, the translation of such efforts onto the page becomes more problematic. Both What Is the What and Zeitoun tell the story of men of color with no recognition in the text of how Eggers is connected to these narratives. Eggers effectively transforms the historically grounded white right to exclude into a new white right to include—that is, to transform the experiences of heroic racial others into universal tales of courage and endurance. Despite Eggers’s stated desire to disappear in Deng’s story of oppression and survival, his narrative framing exposes the insistently white underpinnings of his literary project.

The preface to What Is the What is the only section written by Deng, the ostensible narrator of the text that follows. Motivated by a desire to share his story with others, Deng describes how he met Eggers through a mutual associate. They developed a close relationship as Deng “told Dave what I knew and what I could remember, and from that material he created this work of art. It should be known to the readers that I was very young when some of the events in the book took place, and as a result we simply had to pronounce What Is the What a novel. I could not, for example, recount some conversations that took place seventeen years ago. However it should be noted that all of the major events in the book are true” (xiv). Much of what Deng states about his experiences and memory is also true of the substance that Eggers shaped into narrative form in AHWOSG. Nonetheless, while the latter was deemed a memoir, What Is the What must be called a novel. A Washington Post reporter described Eggers’s decision to fictionalize Deng’s story as a way to “solve narrative problems. By labeling the book a n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Signifyin(g) on the Slave Narrative: African Memoirs of War and Displacement
• Chapter 2. Uncanny Rememories in Teju Cole’s Open City
• Chapter 3. The Impossibility of Invisibility in the Novels of Dinaw Mengestu
• Chapter 4. Refiguring the Ancestor in the Fiction of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• Chapter 5. Becoming His Own Father: Obama’s Dreams from My Father
• Conclusion: Blackness Now
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• About the Author