JOURNEYING SOUTH-EAST THROUGH NORTH-WEST

by Chuma Nwokolo Jnr.
Writer in Residence, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Paper presented during SABDET panel titled 'Writing in the Diaspora, Writing for the Diaspora' on Tuesday 12th September 2006 at the African Studies Association of the UK (ASAUK) biennial conference at SOAS 11th-13th September 2006

I suppose I ought to apologise for inserting such a fanciful title into an academic programme like the ASA’s biennial conference. But I won’t. After all, by travelling north-west from this point, we should return here (more or less) via south-east. In a sense, true diasporic writing should always go full circle.

In Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, his character, Mustapha, confesses: ‘I am South that yearns for the North and the ice’. This statement will read very curiously indeed in the bleakness of an Aberdeen winter where natives, whether literary or otherwise, are more likely to groan: ‘I am North that yearns for the South, and the sun.’

There is a yearning for Elsewhere that is at the root of all journeying, whether spiritual or physical. No doubt, Segun Afolabi, winner of the Caine Prize, had that location in mind from the title of his new book, A Life Elsewhere. In the end, what the faithful sojourner finds is a more faithful mirror into his own soul. Speaking of which, every great book is, at the end of it, a faithful mirror into a human soul.

The first casualty of diasporic writing is language. However faithful the rendering, however real the connection, it is almost always rendered in a language alien to the culture of the people. Language is of course the crucible of all culture. An excellent translation is like the drawing of a sword from a scabbard. We get the point of course, when we look a sword in the eye, but no sword is eloquent enough to describe the sheath from whence it came, how much more the writer in the diaspora, who holds up for his culture, not so much a mirror as a photograph, or a picture painted from memory.

How for instance to translate the first words of this splendid Igbo folksong:

Mbe echipu, ajambele;
Mbe echipu, ajambele;
O ga, ga, ga…

Fine, I shall translate it, but when I have failed to convey its splendour, do remember that I did warn you. Here’s an English translation:

So, tortoise sets out, and goes abroad.

At this point, being fairly versed in both Igbo and English, I will gamely give up the translation, because there is little relationship between the magical melody of the Igbo and the banal functionality of the English. It takes work of peculiar genius to bear translation. (Of course, where you have work of genius as we certainly do in this folksong, you also need a particular genius in the translator.) Often, translating culture from language to language is little more than the relaying of a colour film onto a black and white television.

Melvin Bragg in his Adventures of English, says: ‘One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of its native language.’

Still, it remains the fact that much literature produced in Africa today is already being produced in European languages. For this reason, it is just as well that we don’t over-indulge Diaspora Agony. Truth is, diasporic movements develop literature as effectively as it does technology. There is a diasporic bestseller waiting to be written. Its title? The Adventures of Iron. It is a thriller that relates the story of the migration of the knowledge of Iron-working (which was once as jealously protected as the knowledge of nuclear enrichment is today) from, through, or to the African civilisations of Nok, Meroe, Egypt and Niane among others.

But there is another folkloric bestseller waiting to be written. Or rather, translated. As I was singing,

Mbe Echipu...

Our diasporic tortoise sets out in search of the nuts from the African Oil Palm. (Now, if you haven’t eaten oily palmnuts roasted in an open hearth, dripping its surfeit of red, I’m afraid you haven’t lived.) Tortoise ventures into a world parallel to ours, where trees and fish don’t just speak, but sing melodious verse. Tortoise finds his first palm tree and asks of it:

‘How many bunches have you ripened?’
‘One,’ she replies.
‘Maka i buho nkwu!’ cries a disgusted tortoise,
(very loose translation: ‘And you call yourself a palm-tree!’).

Tortoise shuns the measly harvest and sets out again. (As we see, territorial aggression provoked by a lust for oil has a very long history). He finds another palm tree and makes the same enquiry. Turns out that this tree has two bunches. I must warn: our protagonist is a creature whose greed approaches human dimensions; Tortoise’s chorus doesn’t change:

‘Maka i buho nkwu!’

(A journey owns the sojourner, weans him of inessentials [near-identical prehistoric hand axes are found all over the world, from Cape Town to Siberia; it is not likely that these rock tools travelled, but the knowledge of their creation certainly did]. For this reason, A journey prepares the traveller for departure; a journey is a kind of death - if not ours, theirs. When Ibn Battuta returns from his lengthy journeys he finds that his parents were dead, and that not many others had survived the Black Plague. To set out on a journey, a sojourner needs a destination, but the dynamics of disasters like war and desertification can create a logic of their own, creating journeys that produce their own involuntary destinations - and their own unique stories as well.)

Mbe echipu…

And so tortoise continues to journey until he finds a tree with ten ripe bunches (very useful, these ten mini adventures, complete with their ‘ajambele’ chorus lines; they will do to sate wide-eyed children in the restless hour before bedtime). Having found a suitably fruitful palm-tree, tortoise’s lateral journey turns vertical. He begins to climb.

O lia, lia, lia,
O lia, lia, lia…

He climbs and climbs and climbs, eventually, harvesting his ten bunches. (If there ever was a physiological impossibility, this was it, but hey, this is folkloric fiction.) At this point the plot thickens: a single nut breaks loose of its bunch and falls into the river. Tortoise leaves his rich harvest of a few thousand palm nuts and dives into the River Niger in search of the one. Our journey becomes aquatic.

O gwue, gwue, gwue,
O gwue, gwue, gwue…

On he swims, on and on and on. Finally, he meets Siam-Siam (in this song, the fellow known to the rest of Igboland as the delectable fish, Asia [pronounced more sibilantly than the continent], takes on the more melodious name Siam-Siam).

‘Did you eat my nut?’ asks tortoise.
‘If I ate your nut,’ swears Siam-Siam, ‘may I be a fish dinner.’

Off swims tortoise, on and on he swims, until he meets, Okpo the fish. Once again this urbane fish takes on the melodic identity, Kpom-Kpom.

‘Did you eat my nut?’ goes Tortoise.

Okpo swears just as violently as Asia and Tortoise is persuaded of his innocence. Off he goes again. (It is rare that the diasporic journey is focussed on such a discrete fleece. More often it crystallises around an vague unease with a status quo.) At this point, Tortoise happens across the most malevolent of fishes, a crustaceous character who glares, in a most Al Quaedaish fashion:

‘So I ate your nut,
So what are you going to do about it?’

Tortoise is shaking with indignation. (By the way, this story also had me shaking, with inspiration, years ago, inspiring my short story, Silence in Heaven.) Despite his rage, and the righteousness of his cause, Tortoise is far too prudent to declare war. (O, that we might learn!) He clambers out of the river.

On he goes, our indefatigable tortoise. Having exhausted the horizontal, vertical and aquatic dimensions, his journey veers off into spiritual realms. Tortoise visits God. He knocks on His door. Now, the God of Igbo cosmology is not as liberal as Job records. Tortoise has barely gone ‘Kpoi Kpoi’ when the Divinity roars:

‘Those knuckles that dare knock on My door,
let them be frozen to that door!’
‘But…’ protests tortoise,
‘That tongue that dares address the Lord,
let it be frozen in its mouth!’

Following which God then proceeds to judgement. It is an ordinary moral (are you so incensed tortoise, by the loss of a single nut?) but it is not a banal morality. It is a morality of proportionality, of balance, a morality that 21st century civilisation has morphed and refined beyond belief.

There is a balance in the sojourn. There was another bestseller that cried to be written, which cry was recently heard by Melvyn Bragg. In The Adventures of English, he writes his ‘biography of a language’, painting an engaging 1,500-year long history of a language that journeyed to the ends of the world - and returned victorious. He tells how English uses a period of her conquest by a colonial French to nourish a previously anaemic language with an involuntary diet of French registers. English has grown, not by building walls but by travelling widely, and with every journey absorbs a commonwealth of wisdom, learning and culture.

But for every ‘Adventures’ of English, there are many more ‘Dirges’ to Seroa, to Ajawa, to Duli… and to the thousands of other languages and coextensive cultures, that are dead and buried with no markers for their graves, no songs to paint the flowering of their language, no books - diasporic or otherwise - to record the fruiting of their culture. Exile can sharpen and intensify memory and experience, but diasporic writing that is not leavened with experience soon dries out its roots.

Clearly, there is a critical mass formula at work here. There is a point at which a ‘colonial‘ language’s relationship with an indigenous language and culture leads, not to the enrichment of that indigenous culture, but to an extermination of it.

There is also a critical point at which the journeys that cross-fertilise the different cultures of humanity with the morality of balance spins out of kilter. The Sahara was once verdant pastureland, peopled and planted, trafficked by herds of cattle, drained by lakes and rivers… until the balance of seasons, of rainfall and sun, was broken. Sometimes, the diasporic journey is not rounded out by a circumnavigation of the world. Sometimes cultural deserts emerge. It is not often that an Ibn Battuta travels the known world and returns home to roost.

Keith Richburg, in his book, Out of America, makes the point exactly when he concluded (after a nightmarish hike through poignant Africa with her nadir in genocidal Rwanda): ‘I‘ll also know that none of it affects me, because I feel no attachment to the place or the people. …. By an accident of birth I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today - my culture and attitudes, my sensibilities, loves, and desires - derives from that one simple and irrefutable truth.’

A more cynical way of versifying this passage is:

‘Love of God and country
Sown in wealthy soil
Spawns a rugged, dogged love of any country.’

But Keith’s point is well taken: the point being that the (voluntary and involuntary) journeying or cull of a significant fraction of Africa’s intellectual and human resources is a critical factor in the mix, in the past and present relationship between impoverishment and wealth, of culture and the rest. The point being that the Diasporic memory is not accurately inherited. In Tayeb Salih’s Seasons of Migration to the North, his character Mustapha leaves his sons to the care of the narrator, saying: ‘If they grow up imbued with the air of this village, its smells and colours and history, the faces of its inhabitants and the memories of its floods and harvestings, and sowings, then my life will acquire its true perspectives as something meaningful.’

These memories do not flow in the bloodline (in spite of Isidore Okpewho’s new novel, Call Me by My Rightful Name, in which a young African-American receives traumatic abduction memories from a Yoruba ancestor who suffered an Equiano-style abduction). Olaudah Equiano himself could not have passed on the memories of his Igbo village, vividly recounted in his 18th century autobiography, to his hopeful descendants in a 21st century Manchester. Keith Richburg did not acquire those smells and colours and histories that Tayeb Salih’s Mustapha spoke of. In the diaspora, traditions become more frangible. They are denuded of their bulwarks. They may live a potted life in the greenhouse of a good book, but they seldom thrive in the hothouse of foreign streets.

Tayeb Salih wrote of a Sudan he knew. I recently visited that country for the first time. Many times during that journey, I had to remind myself that I was not in a locality of my native Nigeria; such was the resonance of the colours, the faces, some streets. And among the most friendly people in the world it is difficult to be homesick. But I was however required by law to register with a department with the significant name: ALIEN REGISTRATION OFFICE.

Sudan has had migrants from the ethic groups that people the space of Nigeria for millenia. Other groups have myths that trace their descent to civilisations that thrived in the old Sudan. Today we all wear the tag ‘Alien’. And no surprise, where many indigenes of the space, Sudan, have to live as refugees in their own country. Yet, there was a toing and a froing that is at the heart of The African Journey that sowed and fertilised, not just technology but language, experience, wisdom and culture. Something structural has happened to that balance of journeying - and there is a critical mass equation that we need to figure out. Urgently. It is not just a race to sustain culture, it is much more fundamental than that. It is as fundamental as the 500 ‘minor’ ethnic nations interred upon the American continent to found and fertilise the present Dream.

I suppose I should end this writing more positively, but I can’t (I can just hear Tortoise snort: ‘And you call yourself a writer!’).

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