Migrant identities in recent South African fiction
by Jacobs J.U.
J M Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) engages, at a deep narrative level, with the theme of migration that has also been taken up by a number of other South African writers during the past decade to the extent that it has come to signal an important direction in South African fiction. The narrative of Coetzee's novel, which is set in urban Cape Town and rural Salem, may be seen in many ways to rehearse, and also to reverse, in contemporary contexts the exploitative and violent historical encounters in South Africa between immigrant colonising cultures and migratory indigenous cultures on the Western and Eastern Cape frontiers. This history of migration behind the contemporary cultural collisions in the novel is underscored, for example, by David Lurie's own professional and domestic dislocation from his home and from his academic position in Cape Town and his relocation to temporary abodes, first with his daughter Lucy on her farm outside Salem, and afterwards at the animal shelter in Grahamstown where he ends up working. Emigration is also further emphasised by Lurie's advice to Lucy after her rape to leave South Africa for Holland, the home of her Dutch mother. Coetzee himself a semi-expatriate based in both Cape Town and Chicago at the time of writing the novel--suggests in Disgrace that migration, whether enforced or voluntary, has informed cultural identities in South Africa from the beginning.
Coetzee himself became part of the present-day South African diaspora when he emigrated to Australia in the period between the publication of Disgrace in 1999 and Elizabeth Costello in 2003. In Slow Man (2005), his first fully Australian novel which is set in Adelaide where he now lives, Coetzee foregrounds the theme of migration much more explicitly than in his previous novels. His protagonist, a retired portrait photographer, Paul Rayment, was brought at the age of six by his immigrant French mother and Dutch stepfather from France to Australia, where he eventually settled after a brief return to France as a young man. "'I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience'" (2005: 192), Rayment declares to his novelist-visitant, Elizabeth Costello. He has had the experience of having been uprooted from his country of birth, of having tried to recover a native French cultural identity, and of being forever uncertain about any notion of having a "true home" (192) but having to settle instead for "a domicile, a residence" (197) in his adoptive country. Or, as he formulates his sense of cultural dislocation: "'I am not the we of anyone'" (193). Although he can pass among Australians in a way that is no longer possible for him among the French, Rayment defines his essential cultural detachment to Costello in terms of his lack of full ownership of the English language:
It is from the background of his own--although much more accomplished - English language competence that Rayment describes the English spoken by his nurse, Marijana Jokic, a recent immigrant from Croatia: "she speaks a rapid, approximate Australian English with Slavic liquids and an uncertain command of a and the, coloured by slang she must pick up from her children, who must pick it up from their classmates" (27). As the child of immigrants, Rayment also understands the double cultural allegiance of the immigrant Jokic family: to the old country whose memories they have brought with them in the form of photographs of "baptisms, confirmations, weddings, family get-togethers" (64), as well as to the new country with whose cultural icons they strive to identify themselves. Marijana comes to see that in Rayment's collection of old "photographs and postcards of life in the early mining camps of Victoria and New South Wales" (48) there is a historical record that corrects her common European perception that Australia with its colonial settler and immigrant population is a country with "zero history" (49), and she comes to grasp that her own story forms part of that national history. As Rayment puts it to her: "'Don't immigrants have a history of their own? Do you cease to have a history when you move from one point on the globe to another?'" (49). At a later stage in the narrative it is given to the meta-fictional Elizabeth Costello to offer her own version of the migrant identity when she explains to Rayment: "'... there are those whom I call the chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted in their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there'" (198). At least on one narrative level, the traumatic amputation of Rayment's right leg after his cycling accident may also be seen to symbolise the severance of a chthonic identity as a result of migration: "But in his case the cut seemed to have marked off past from future with such uncommon cleanness that it gives new meaning to the word new. By the sign of this cut let a new life commence" (26).
Few major South African writers have elaborated quite as fully on the nature of what Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello calls migrant "butterflies" as Breyten Breytenbach has done throughout his writing career. His most recent prose work, A Veil of Footsteps: Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character (2008), provides yet a further chapter of the Breytenbach macrotext. A demanding work, sometimes irritatingly so (and for this the author asks for the reader's indulgence), A Veil of Footsteps needs to be read in relation to Breytenbach's earlier works, especially from the late 1980s on, such as Memory of Snow and of Dust, Return to Paradise, Dog Heart and Woordwerk, whose themes and techniques it continues and still further develops and refines (see Jacobs 2004). In its combination of autobiography and fiction, travel narrative and metafiction, poetry and philosophical reflection, it offers a complex and profound disquisition on death, art and the migrant condition.
In A Veil of Footsteps Breytenbach maps as rarely before the metaphysical dimensions of his exilic state, of his being an inhabitant of the Middle World, as he explains it, "where the dialectic between space and movement can be enacted" (2008: 221). A self-described nomad and wanderer, "a bird blown from one region to the next" (101), he traces his own nomadism back to the residual Khoi blood in his Afrikaner veins, the ethnic and cultural legacy of his South African "heartland" (139) to which he always returns. Compulsive journeying, points of arrival and departure, nodes of temporary locatedness, belonging everywhere and nowhere, home and homelessness--these and many other themes contribute to the richness of this text about a text in the making, and of a life lived and a verbal art practised in increasing awareness of the spectre of death. The narrator and his various personae--here mainly the ironically named Breyten Wordfool--are presented with unflinching honesty and self-knowledge in a narrative world in which biography, history and dream fantasy are consciously merged and paraded before the reader in a "migration of images" (10).
The fictional memoir offers remarkable, if ambivalent, descriptions of the cities that have featured in Breytenbach's nomadic life: the Mother City, Cape Town, which is both affectionately and critically evoked; Paris, his adoptive home that he has come to know too well not to be disgusted by many of its inhabitants; New York in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of 9/11; the former slave island of Goree where he spends much of his time; and the Catalan village where he has also established a home. All are homes where he also feels unhomed, together with the other emigres, refugees, illegal and legal immigrants, nomads and economic migrants of all kinds in this narrative that leads rhizomically from one topic and chapter to another in a fictional nomadism that Breytenbach has made distinctively his own.
All of these migrant figures are contained, however, within the larger framework of Breyenbach's own admission of "how passionately, desperately passionately, frustratingly passionately [he] fights over the same theoretical and experiential and remembered and dreamed African being-scape" (217), and of how regularly he returns specifically to the African diaspora, especially in its contemporary manifestations. African migrants populate this text of memories: in Paris, the many blacks on the streets of the 13th arondissement, the Cameroonian owner of a favourite restaurant in Montparnasse, and the illegal North African immigrants who share a train compartment with Breytenbach; and in Spain, in Barcelona the "black Africans without identity papers or permits hanging out on the Placa Catalunya with bundles and plastic bags containing all their worldly possessions" (86) and the Nigerian and Ghanaian prostitutes, on the roads the Moroccan immigrant families heading home for the holidays, and in the South the increasing number of illegal immigrants being captured as they land on Spanish beaches or whose dead bodies are washed up there. Diasporic dispersals, too, are what characterise contemporary South Africa in Breytenbach's narrative: in Cape Town, he observes "how much the coloured population of Mother City carry in them the fused memories of slavery, of displacement, of exile ..." (133); the inhabitants of the tin and cardboard shack settlements on the Cape Flats are "mostly migrants from the devastated Eastern Cape" (134); and parts of the central city have been taken over by Nigerians, Congolese and Zaireans. And immigration into South Africa is matched by emigration from the young democracy, as Breytenbach details:
The historical African diaspora and its continuation into the present-day dispersal of Africans into diasporic communities around the world, including South Africa, have also been taken up in a number of recent South African novels. In The Pickup (2001) Nadine Gordimer foregrounds geographic and cultural dislocation and relocation as her theme: on the one hand, the present relocation of white South Africans, themselves the descendants of immigrant European settlers, to the United States and Australia, and on the other, the flocking of illegal immigrants from other African countries into cities such as Johannesburg (see Jacobs 2006: 124-9). Gordimer's narrative engages with the plight of illegal aliens--from Congo, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Mozambique--who form a major but undocumented substratum of South African society, living under constant threat of deportation from the country and forced into visibility by periodic outbreaks of xenophobic violence against them.
Gordimer employs her usual social typification in presenting the figure of the mechanic, 'Abdu', who belongs to this international underclass of illegal immigrants who have overstayed their visitors' permits and are eventually ferreted out by the Department of Home Affairs. His personal history is a representative one: he comes from a generic, Islamic African country that is a construct of colonialism and characterised by government corruption, religious oppression and conflict across its borders. 'Abdu's' home country is presented as a paradigmatic Third World nation: a place of poverty, dismal health standards, patriarchal subjugation of women, and political gangsterism. It is the African home to which he has been repatriated from other countries he had entered illegally, and where, after his return, he spends most of his time haunting the visa sections of various consulates in his attempts to apply officially to immigrate--to Canada, New Zealand, Australia--only to be rejected time and time again.
Gordimer's treatment of the themes of home and of being 'unhomed' which feature in all of her earlier novels is given a new twist in The Pickup when her South African protagonist, Julie Summers, herself of British immigrant descent, marries 'Abdu', voluntarily leaves South Africa and returns to his native country together with him. His home village on the edge of the desert becomes another one of the heterotopias in Gordimer's fictional landscape: a place where contradictory discourses co-exist. 'Abdu', determined to get away from the wretched village, persists in his applications until he finally obtains a precious permit to enter the United States; Julie, however, is received and becomes integrated into her husband's family home, which provides her with
a nexus of family ties that she has not known before in South Africa. She has come home in a way that her husband cannot grasp, and at the end of the narrative when he leaves to establish a new home in the United States, she refuses to join him. The trajectories of their respective migrations into and out of Africa are diametrically opposed, probably irreconcilable.
Zakes Mda's most recent novel, Cion (2007), engages with the African diaspora from the perspective of African American culture in two different narrative chronotopes. The town of Kilvert, Athens County, Ohio, is the setting for a historical narrative that deals with slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century, and a contemporary one that provides a thinly fictionalised reflection on African American and Native American, and also South African, culture and the politics of identity. The African, African American and South African cultural worlds are mediated through the re appearance in Cion of the (meta)fictional Toloki, Mda's professional mourner from his first novel, Ways of Dying (1995). Toloki presents himself as a migrant persona: he was "conjured . into existence a decade or so before" (Mda 2007: 2) by Mda in Durham, England, and, after his birth as a fictional being in South Africa, was transported back to Durham, only to be 'abandoned' there until his author later brings him along from Durham to Athens, Ohio, where he finds himself in another fictional narrative.
Mda's novel chronicles the diasporic history of Africans in the United States through the stories of the ancestral slave woman, the Abyssinian Queen, and her two sons, the half-brothers Abednego and Nicodemus, and the parallel story of the slave-dealing Irishman Niall Quigley, who is himself tricked into slavery. As a context for all their stories, the narrative provides a comprehensive account of the commercial enterprise of slave-breeding in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century--the whole obscenity of breeding slaves as a long-term investment, the livestock needing "many years to mature and be ready for the market" (91), the rotation of studs over the female slaves in the breeding bays with the aim of breeding mulatto children, the dangers of inbreeding, the separation into house slaves and field slaves, as well as the paradoxes of there having been white slaves as well as black slaveholders. Mda's readers are introduced to the operation of the Underground Railroad with its conductors and stations and supportive abolitionists, and all the main role-players in the drama around slavery and its fugitives--slave traders, slave chasers with their dogs, slave stealers and bounty hunters--are encountered in the narrative.
Toloki's narrative probes in detail the consequences of this nineteenth-century racial engineering in North America, and also foregrounds the complex ethnic identities formed by intermarriage between fugitive African slaves, Native Americans, and also Irish immigrants who had sought sanctuary in Tabler Town, as Kilvert was formerly known. During the days of oppression these people had suppressed their Africanness and Indianness and celebrated their white ancestry; however, Toloki realises, their now wanting to reclaim all three heritages as a source of pride and uniqueness has resulted in racial and cultural uncertainty: "But they no longer remember who they were, on the African and Native American side" (238). The creolisation resulting from the diasporic dispersal of Africans in North America is also pursued in the novel in terms of cultural continuity and discontinuity, especially as regards African and African-American traditions. Toloki observes that certain African cultural practices have survived only in the African diaspora, whereas some others actually have no African roots but are purely inventions of the diaspora:
Among the most important metafictional tropes that Mda's novel provides for its hybrid fictional discussion of cultural mixture, change and innovation is the tradition of quiltmaking in Kilvert, and in particular the reverence for old quilts that "embody the life of the family" (30) and are carriers of memories. In the lore of Kilvert, especially the African design, which supposedly originated with the Abyssinian Queen in the 1830s, represented not simply "beauty for its own sake" (48), but was encoded with secret messages in the patterns, colours, ties and stitches that mnemonically--in the tradition of the tales of "the storytellers and the griots of the old continent" (109)--provided guidelines for fugitive slaves and "reminded them of their duty to freedom" (109). According to the quiltmakers of Kilvert, the creation of expressive textiles that spoke secret languages to the initiated can be traced back via the Abyssinian Queen to the "old continent" (48), and Toloki similarly believes that their quilting is a development in the New World of an ancient African tradition of "talking fabrics" (143). Mda's narrative 'quilt' in Cion may also be seen as a New World development of an artistic tradition that has its origins in Africa.
Theorising the African diaspora
A number of questions arise from the various representations of migrant identity in these novels and the different notions of an African diaspora. Are the Australian immigrant protagonists in Slow Man entitled to be included at all in the category of diaspora? Does the current wave of emigration of the descendants of colonial settlers from South Africa, featured in The Pickup and in A Veil of Footsteps, amount to a secondary diasporic dispersal or out-migration? Do the present-day African economic emigres and political refugees trying to gain a foothold in Europe (in A Veil of Footsteps) or in South Africa (The Pickup) constitute an ongoing African diaspora as an extension of the slave diaspora? How feasible are the attempts of Gordimer in The Pickup and Mda in Cion to present past and contemporary South African history in relation to an African diaspora? Even allowing for a more relaxed use of the term, how legitimate is it to include all African migrants, often from very diverse national backgrounds and historical experiences, in the homogenising/pan-Africanist concept of an African diaspora? Or is it perhaps plausible to conceive of uniformly traumatic, contemporary African experience that would permit such inclusion under the blanket of a generic African diaspora?
In their introduction to Theorizing Diaspora (2003), Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur acknowledge that diaspora and diasporic are contested terms, and they caution against "the uncritical, unreflexive application of the term 'diaspora' to any and all contexts of global displacement and movement" (3). What needs to be interrogated, they maintain, is how diaspora is "historicized and politicized", especially in relation to contemporary "ideas of nationalism, transnationalism and transmigration". Braziel and Mannur point out that diaspora,
Other contemporary theorists of diaspora studies such as Ato Quayson and Khachig Tololyan also remind us that "not all dispersals amount to diasporas" (Quayson 2007: 581; Tololyan 1996; 2007), and that in the world today social scientists have had to devise various, different ways of talking about the consequences of globalisation, transnationalism and cultural hybridity. Diaspora studies provides a useful lens for doing so--in Quayson's formulation: "The binary settler and migrant emphases of earlier models of migration studies are now making way for understandings of transnational networks, with diaspora studies providing the scholarly focus through which the social sciences and the humanities elaborate these phenomena" (2007:588). Diaspora studies, Quayson emphasises, "is first and foremost an interdisciplinary academic discipline" (589), involving, amongst other disciplines, "history, sociology, political science, ethnic studies, international relations, public health, human rights, and literary and cultural studies".
Although ideas of what constitutes a diaspora might vary greatly, and the term is often used in a casual way, the typology developed by Robin Cohen in GlobalDiasporas: An Introduction (1997), from William Safran's (1991) identification of the key characteristics of diasporas, beginning with the Jewish diaspora, has nevertheless remained an important point of reference for subsequent theorists. According to Cohen, diasporas would normally exhibit several of the following features:
(1) dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically ['victim' diasporas, such as the African and Armenian]; (2) alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work ['labour' diasporas, such as the Indian] , in pursuit of trade ['trade' diasporas, such as the Chinese and Lebanese] or to further colonial ambitions ['imperial' diasporas such as the British]; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealization of the supposed ancestral home; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive, creative, enriching life in tolerant host societies. (1997: 180)
In her introduction to Diaspora andMulticulturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments (2003) Monika Fludernik points out that the first two of Cohen's nine criteria for a diaspora to come into existence are mutually exclusive, the second one applying to a wide range of ethnic immigrant and postcolonial communities across the globe. She prefers to open Cohen's second criterion up into three further categories: the "colonial diaspora", and, adopting Vijay Mishra's terms, the "old and new diasporas" (1996:4212). For Fludernik the really 'new' diaspora consists of "(admittedly free) labour movements across the globe", a type of diaspora "motivated by professional considerations--the movement of individual professionals and their families to mostly anglophone industrial nations", and now including also "cultural and political elites" (2003: xii-xiii).
In her study, Diaspora: An Introduction (2008), Jana Evans Braziel builds on her previous work together with Mannur and outlines, as she phrases it, "the historical roots and contemporary routes of international migration" (11) in order to understand the various ways in which human migratory populations have been and are still being dispersed from their homelands. Braziel begins, like other theorists, with the standard models of the Jewish and African diasporas, and she too acknowledges the diaspora typologies of Safran and Cohen. She offers an important clarification as regards the imprecise use in contemporary discourse of diaspora as a synonym for terms such as transnationalism and global capitalism:
Braziel further contributes a taxonomy of distinct groups of people whose movement from "a native country across national or state boundaries into a new receiving (or 'host') country" (27) qualifies them for inclusion in present-day diasporas: colonial settlers "living outside of their motherlands and dispersed from the continental confines of Europe" (28); transnational corporate expatriates who move freely across national borders to do business; students, mainly from developing countries, on study visas in developed countries;postcolonial emigres who have relocated themselves to the colonial motherland; refugees from political persecution, civil war or state violence in their own country "who have been granted political asylum within a host country" (29); political asylees (or asylum seekers) who are in the limbo between seeking refuge in a host country and not yet having been granted formal asylum; detainees "who are held in detention camps at immigration prisons" (32); internally displaced persons who have been uprooted from their homes as a result of "violence, civil warfare, famine, disease, 'ethnic cleansing', political persecution, or religious oppression" (33) and who seek shelter elsewhere within their native countries; economic migrants who move from their home countries to work in host countries because of a whole range of economic constraints and opportunities; and undocumented workers ("illegal aliens") who have gained entry into a host country to make a living there but who have not obtained the legal permits needed for them to enjoy the status of economic migrants.
The characters in the South African novels referred to in the first section of this essay exhibit most of the typological features and fit into the diasporic taxonomies outlined above, and may therefore reasonably be approached within the general framework of diaspora. Importantly, what all these fictional subjects share is what Aisha Khan calls a "diasporic consciousness" (2007:142), a sensibility "that both marks the very act of uprooting as shaping their sense of self and that memorializes displacement in everyday discourse and practice" (2007:161). The particular interest of a diasporic consciousness for the literary scholar lies in the ways in which the different stories of dislocation and relocation are narrativised in the individual and group memory, and a diasporic personhood and cultural identity are shaped. Recent theorists have, however, stressed the extent to which diasporic communities, despite their collective memory and strong ethnic group consciousness and solidarity, are equally shaped culturally through continuous interaction with host societies. Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram have argued that the development of a diasporic identity formation does not follow the standard psychological model of acculturation, but that the conflict within and displacement from a native culture are followed by ongoing engagement and negotiation with host cultures: "Far from being a linear process that proceeds along a teleological trajectory, immigrants variously experience contradictions, tensions, and a dynamic movement that spirals back and forth" (2009:146). It is this dynamic that also underlies Stuart Hall's often-cited argument that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, and that it undergoes constant transformation, is "a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'" (1990: 225), and is predicated on the future as much as on the past. Cultural identities, Hall says, "are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning ..." (226). And the experience of diaspora, he maintains, "is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity" (235). Hall's view of diasporic identity in terms of internal division and motility rather than fixed essence is echoed, more specifically in a black context, by Paul Gilroy's thesis that the "history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade" (1993:xi), and that cultural doubleness and intermixture are the legacies of the African diaspora. Or, as more recently formulated by Genevieve Fabre and Klaus Benesch in their critical reassessment of the concept of an African diaspora: "diaspora is less a condition or a state than a search for identity that is constantly contested, re-imagined, and re-invented" (2004:xiv).
Picturing the African diaspora
Patricia Schonstein Pinnock's novel Skyline (2000) provides one of the most inventive treatments of the African diaspora and its legacies of "cultural doubleness and intermixture" in recent South African writing. Skyline was published shortly after Coetzee's Disgrace, and is dedicated to the child victims of the 16-year-long civil war in Mozambique. Skyline engages directly with the issue of the African diaspora by representing an African diasporic community in central Cape Town. The novel takes its title from the name of a featureless, run-down apartment block at the top of Long Street. The building has become occupied largely by illegal immigrants and refugees from the rest of Africa, who share its crowded spaces, renting beds and corners of rooms. In the words of the young South African female narrator, who is also a fledgling writer: "Not many have the right to be here and most of them carry forged papers or pay bribes to stay in the country. They arrive from all over Africa by taxi, by bus, by train. Some hitch rides on overland transporters. Manyjust walk" (2000:8). Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Somalis, Angolans--some are economic migrants, others are survivors of various wars in every part of the continent; all of them, the narrator says, have "stories written on the parchment of their hearts which they don't recite easily. They are stories which have crept out of the edges of civil wars and scattered into the fleeing wind. You can read the words in their eyes, stained by despair; in their mouths, silenced and tightened by horror. You can even read the words in their torn and weary clothes" (11). They survive in Cape Town by selling sweets, South African flags, African curios, or drugs, on the sidewalks and at traffic intersections, at the Pan-African Market, or from Skyline itself. As a group, they are the objects of the xenophobic distrust of black and white South Africans alike.
The question of whether an immigrant African community in another African country (here South Africa) can technically be regarded as forming part of the African diaspora is answered in part at least by Michael A Gomez, a contemporary historian of the African diaspora who defines his subject as "people of African descent who found (and find) themselves living either outside of the African continent or in parts of Africa that were territorially quite distant from their lands of birth" (2005:1; emphasis added). The state of being 'out of Africa' can also be experienced elsewhere in Africa. The further question of whether the African diaspora can or should be spoken of as a unified experience, considering "the complex pattern of communities and cultures with differing local and regional histories" (2), Gomez says, has no easy answer. The mostly illegal African immigrants in Pinnock's novel have, for example, gravitated towards Cape Town because of, amongst other factors, civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Congo, genocidal conflict in Rwanda and Sudan, corruption and failed democracy in Nigeria, and economic and social collapse in Zimbabwe. What Gomez does make clear, however, is that there can be no essentialist model of the African diaspora, and his definition of the term allows for a vast range of different experiences: it "consists of the connections of people of African descent around the world, who are linked as much by their common experiences as their genetic makeup, if not more so" (2). Brent Hayes Edwards, in his genealogy of the African diaspora concept, similarly argues that diaspora points to internal as well as external differences within and among transnational black groupings; "in appropriating a term so closely associated with Jewish thought", he says, "we are forced to think not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in terms of a complex past of forced migrations and racialization--what Earl Lewis [1995] has called a history of 'overlapping diasporas'" (Edwards 2001:64). Although the truth remains, as Fabre and Benesch state, that whether real or imagined, "Africa is the matrix of the African diaspora, the lost homeland and center" (2004: xv), they remind us that "[t]hough still a land of origin, Africa has shifted conceptually: it has finally become an amibiguous place, a conflict-ridden continent" (xvi). Because of the differences among the various experiences of dispersal, they point out that "[t]he idea of an African diaspora was thus gradually replaced by that of multiple diasporas, unified solely through their lost center and mythic homeland, Africa" (xvii). And currently:
The heterogeneity and the cultural displacement and syncretism of the African diasporic experience can perhaps best be conveyed by means of a fictional work that shares this cultural doubleness and hybridity. In Skyline Pinnock has devised an ecphrastic structure whereby the individual and collective stories of the residents of Skyline can be told. Her novel provides one of the most self-reflexive and wide-ranging examples of ecphrasis--"the literary description of a work of art" (Hollander 1998: 86)--in contemporary South African fiction. More precisely, Pinnock's fictional discourse needs to be distinguished from the merely iconic, for, as John Hollander, quoting Jean H Hagstrum (1958), explains, truly ecphrastic literary works are those "that purport to give 'voice and language to the otherwise mute art object'". Furthermore, as an ecphrastic fictional construct Skyline combines both actual ecphrasis, where a literary work incorporates actual, particular works of art that pre-exist it, and notional ecphrasis, where a literary text incorporates descriptions of purely fictive works of art. It might be still more accurate to describe Skyline as an iconotext, in terms of Peter Wagner's argument in Reading Iconotexts (2007). Wagner goes beyond the word-image opposition and the traditional view of texts and images as 'sister arts', to break down the barriers between literature and visual art. In what he calls an "iconotext" neither image nor text is free from the other, but they are mutually interdependent in the ways they establish meaning. And in the case of Skyline, image and text merge to convey what it means individually and collectively to experience the African diaspora, to attempt to depict its overlapping histories of conflict and dislocation, and to write about it from a South African perspective.
The novel consists of forty more-or-less symmetrical chapters, in each of which the (sometimes overlapping) main stories are narrated, and almost all of which conclude with the description of a painting. As it turns out at the end, the paintings are all by the narrator's self-taught, close friend, Bernard, a traumatised refugee from the war in Mozambique where his wife was killed and his three children abducted, their fates unknown to him. Most of these fictive paintings have titles; some, however, are untitled. In most of the descriptions of the fictive paintings, an actual, well-known work from the history of Western art is explicitly cited as the inspiration for Bernard's painting, the inspiration being based on a particular colour, an element of composition or technique, a figure, a mood, or a theme. In a few cases, there is no actual Western painting given as the source for Bernard's painting. His paintings tend to be stylistically mixed and experimental, but have an expressive, aesthetic logic of their own, and do not simply reproduce either the fictional narrative or their source paintings. (The innovative frames improvised by Bernard for his paintings are often also described: one made from rusty, flattened Coca-Cola cans, another out of pigeon feathers and beads pasted onto cardboard, a third out of twisted wire threaded with bottle tops--all of them recognisable contemporary African artefacts.)
For example: Renoir's richly exotic, reclining "Woman of Algiers" serves as a point of departure for a painting titled "It is the Woman of Rwanda", of an equally richly colourful, fat black woman, inspired by the figure of the hairdresser, Princess, who is a refugee from the Rwandan genocide and whose daughters' terrible fates she cannot bring herself to tell anyone. Henri Rousseau's naive fantasy, "Sleeping Gypsy", provides a model for Bernard's painting "It is the Woman Travelling", based on the actual story of the woman who has fled with her small children, silenced by the horrors that they have witnessed, from the war in Sudan and come to South Africa on foot, sleeping in the desert on the way. There are no source paintings given, however, for "It is the Treasures Bought from Heaven", which serves to memorialise the Ghanaian, Kwaku, who has come to Mandela's promised land to find his fortune, only to die there of AIDS, or for "It is the Dealing on Long Street", which has as its subject the Nigerian drug dealers in central Cape Town.
The narrator and the other principal characters in the narrative are also interpreted by Bernard with direct reference to sources in Western art: the narrator's alcoholic mother, represented in Bernard's charcoal drawing "She Has Sorrow in the Kitchen", bears a resemblance to the gaunt figure of the woman in Picasso's "The Frugal Meal". The narrator's autistic younger sister Mossie, who has a passion for beads, is depicted with reference to Modigliani's hauntingly vulnerable "Little Girl in Blue". Bernard's painting of Raphael, the narrator's Jewish friend from school, titled "It is the Fine Young Man", is based on Chagall's "The Fiddler", and mimics its lightness and spontaneity, although the background architecture has been transposed from Russian to Cape Dutch by Bernard. The transvestite, Alice the Spice Girl, is the subject of Bernard's "You Can Buy the Love Here", which is derived from Rossetti's "Astarte Syriaca" and whose voluptuousness Bernard's portrait shares, whereas his untitled painting of Adelaide, the homeless woman, is based on Cezanne's "The Negro Scipio", the common element between them being the weariness of spirit conveyed by both figures. The unframed painting of the blind couple, Gracie and Cliff, together with their two guide dogs, and simply titled "It is the Beauty", has as its inspiration Matisse's "The Conversation".
Bernard also attempts to come to terms with aspects of his own life in his paintings: his portrait of the lonely Portuguese Senhora, on whose husband's estate he worked as a domestic servant in Mozambique and who was brutally murdered by rebels, has its origin in Matisse's "Portrait of Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe", the expression in the Senhora's eyes alone resembling the gaze of Madame Matisse. In an untitled painting, Bernard can only recall the tender dignity of the figure of his wife working in the tobacco-sorting shed on the Senhor's estate by means of Giotto's "Madonna". There is no source painting, however, for "It is the Death of the Holy Mother under the Trees", Bernard's depiction of the stripping naked and massacre of the holy sisters of a religious order by Mozambican rebels.
Bernard, like so many of the diasporic Africans who live in Skyline, has been permanently damaged by war and can never escape from its spectre. To convey this, he has painted an untitled triptych on the subject of war (Chapter 17). This is his most ambitious work, each of its three panels consciously modelled respectively on Chagall's "War", Goya's "The Third of May, 1808", and Picasso's "Guernica". Bernard's triptych is a work, the narrator says, "which should have stood on its own, and it should have been executed on a much larger canvas. But the overwhelming despair it transmits, together with the pain and sense of useless slaughter, suggest that the artist would have been overcome by the horror and palpitation of the episode he was capturing, had he dared to express himself as hugely as did Picasso" (79).
By means of an elaborate intertextuality canonical works of a European artistic tradition have been appropriated and pictorially and narratively reinterpreted in a postcolonial, diasporic African context. The individual experiences of each of these Africans and marginalised South Africans have been framed within Bernard's paintings to record and interpret their stories of unspeakable loss and longing, and collectively the paintings narrativise an African diaspora. Taken together, all the mutually inscribed and depicted stories and paintings are held, in turn, within the larger framework of the narrator's commitment to "those who have turned their backs on what they left behind and built a new life here at the top of Long Street" (55), to "try to re-embroider [their] splintered words into the finery they once were--old litanies from Ethiopia; chantings from Sudan; fables from Eritrea ...". In her ecphrastic engagement with the theme of the African diaspora, Pinnock has endeavoured textually to link contemporary histories of African dispersal back to an ancestral past, and also to bring Western cultural traditions in relation to new African practices, thereby presenting through the artistic syncretism of her novel the ongoing re-imagination and cultural transformation of the splintered African diasporic self.
Chapter 39 has no description of a painting to conclude it; it describes, instead, the killing of Bernard by the insanely jealous Giovanni, owner of the delicatessen. The final chapter, Chapter 40, tells of Bernard's paintings being catalogued, exhibited at the National Gallery in Cape Town after his death, and then, appropriately, dispersed in an artistic diaspora among his friends and on permanent loan to the National Gallery and the Pan African Market. The chapter concludes with a last description of a painting, comparable in its way to Vermeer's self-reflexive "Allegory of Painting", or to Velasquez's "Las Meninas", or to Picasso's paintings of himself in his studio with his models. (None of these is mentioned as a source, however, and it is left to the reader to supply the possible intertexts.) This is Bernard's largest painting, titled "It is the Portrait of the Artist with his Good Friends", and self-reflexively shows him working at his easel, surrounded by those who knew and loved him, and who formed his subjects. And in the left corner of the canvas, as a metafictional strategy, is painted a copy of Sister Wendy Beckett's The Story ofPainting: The Essential Guide to Western Art, which Pinnock also includes in her Bibliography at the end and which is the actual source of most of the paintings she describes in the novel.
It is worth noting, in conclusion, that gathered together into this compendium volume on "Western" art are nineteenth- and twentieth-century European painters who themselves were exiles and emigres--from Revolutionary Russia, from Fascist Spain, from Nazi-occupied France--and who have all found their collective, diasporic identity and artistic home in the larger category of'Western Art'. The final lesson of Pinnock's novel may be that what we now uncomplicatedly refer to as Western art is itself not an essential, unified concept, but refers rather to the cultural products of long and continuing histories of migration, and to works of art that are themselves scattered among art galleries and collections all over the world.
References
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Mishra, Vijay. "The Diasporic Imaginary: Theorizing the Indian Diaspora." Textual Practice 10(3): 421-47.
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by Jacobs J.U.
J M Coetzee's Disgrace (1999) engages, at a deep narrative level, with the theme of migration that has also been taken up by a number of other South African writers during the past decade to the extent that it has come to signal an important direction in South African fiction. The narrative of Coetzee's novel, which is set in urban Cape Town and rural Salem, may be seen in many ways to rehearse, and also to reverse, in contemporary contexts the exploitative and violent historical encounters in South Africa between immigrant colonising cultures and migratory indigenous cultures on the Western and Eastern Cape frontiers. This history of migration behind the contemporary cultural collisions in the novel is underscored, for example, by David Lurie's own professional and domestic dislocation from his home and from his academic position in Cape Town and his relocation to temporary abodes, first with his daughter Lucy on her farm outside Salem, and afterwards at the animal shelter in Grahamstown where he ends up working. Emigration is also further emphasised by Lurie's advice to Lucy after her rape to leave South Africa for Holland, the home of her Dutch mother. Coetzee himself a semi-expatriate based in both Cape Town and Chicago at the time of writing the novel--suggests in Disgrace that migration, whether enforced or voluntary, has informed cultural identities in South Africa from the beginning.
Coetzee himself became part of the present-day South African diaspora when he emigrated to Australia in the period between the publication of Disgrace in 1999 and Elizabeth Costello in 2003. In Slow Man (2005), his first fully Australian novel which is set in Adelaide where he now lives, Coetzee foregrounds the theme of migration much more explicitly than in his previous novels. His protagonist, a retired portrait photographer, Paul Rayment, was brought at the age of six by his immigrant French mother and Dutch stepfather from France to Australia, where he eventually settled after a brief return to France as a young man. "'I am not unfamiliar with the immigrant experience'" (2005: 192), Rayment declares to his novelist-visitant, Elizabeth Costello. He has had the experience of having been uprooted from his country of birth, of having tried to recover a native French cultural identity, and of being forever uncertain about any notion of having a "true home" (192) but having to settle instead for "a domicile, a residence" (197) in his adoptive country. Or, as he formulates his sense of cultural dislocation: "'I am not the we of anyone'" (193). Although he can pass among Australians in a way that is no longer possible for him among the French, Rayment defines his essential cultural detachment to Costello in terms of his lack of full ownership of the English language:
"As for language, English has never been mine in the way it is yours. Nothing to do with fluency. I am perfectly fluent, as you can hear. But English came to me too late. It did not come with my mother's milk. In fact it did not come at all. Privately, I have always felt myself to be a kind of ventriloquist's dummy. It is not I who speak the language, it is the language that is spoken through me. It does not come from my core, mon coeur." He hesitates, checks himself. I am hollow at the core, he was about to say--as I am sure you can hear. (197-8)
It is from the background of his own--although much more accomplished - English language competence that Rayment describes the English spoken by his nurse, Marijana Jokic, a recent immigrant from Croatia: "she speaks a rapid, approximate Australian English with Slavic liquids and an uncertain command of a and the, coloured by slang she must pick up from her children, who must pick it up from their classmates" (27). As the child of immigrants, Rayment also understands the double cultural allegiance of the immigrant Jokic family: to the old country whose memories they have brought with them in the form of photographs of "baptisms, confirmations, weddings, family get-togethers" (64), as well as to the new country with whose cultural icons they strive to identify themselves. Marijana comes to see that in Rayment's collection of old "photographs and postcards of life in the early mining camps of Victoria and New South Wales" (48) there is a historical record that corrects her common European perception that Australia with its colonial settler and immigrant population is a country with "zero history" (49), and she comes to grasp that her own story forms part of that national history. As Rayment puts it to her: "'Don't immigrants have a history of their own? Do you cease to have a history when you move from one point on the globe to another?'" (49). At a later stage in the narrative it is given to the meta-fictional Elizabeth Costello to offer her own version of the migrant identity when she explains to Rayment: "'... there are those whom I call the chthonic, the ones who stand with their feet planted in their native earth; and then there are the butterflies, creatures of light and air, temporary residents, alighting here, alighting there'" (198). At least on one narrative level, the traumatic amputation of Rayment's right leg after his cycling accident may also be seen to symbolise the severance of a chthonic identity as a result of migration: "But in his case the cut seemed to have marked off past from future with such uncommon cleanness that it gives new meaning to the word new. By the sign of this cut let a new life commence" (26).
Few major South African writers have elaborated quite as fully on the nature of what Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello calls migrant "butterflies" as Breyten Breytenbach has done throughout his writing career. His most recent prose work, A Veil of Footsteps: Memoir of a Nomadic Fictional Character (2008), provides yet a further chapter of the Breytenbach macrotext. A demanding work, sometimes irritatingly so (and for this the author asks for the reader's indulgence), A Veil of Footsteps needs to be read in relation to Breytenbach's earlier works, especially from the late 1980s on, such as Memory of Snow and of Dust, Return to Paradise, Dog Heart and Woordwerk, whose themes and techniques it continues and still further develops and refines (see Jacobs 2004). In its combination of autobiography and fiction, travel narrative and metafiction, poetry and philosophical reflection, it offers a complex and profound disquisition on death, art and the migrant condition.
In A Veil of Footsteps Breytenbach maps as rarely before the metaphysical dimensions of his exilic state, of his being an inhabitant of the Middle World, as he explains it, "where the dialectic between space and movement can be enacted" (2008: 221). A self-described nomad and wanderer, "a bird blown from one region to the next" (101), he traces his own nomadism back to the residual Khoi blood in his Afrikaner veins, the ethnic and cultural legacy of his South African "heartland" (139) to which he always returns. Compulsive journeying, points of arrival and departure, nodes of temporary locatedness, belonging everywhere and nowhere, home and homelessness--these and many other themes contribute to the richness of this text about a text in the making, and of a life lived and a verbal art practised in increasing awareness of the spectre of death. The narrator and his various personae--here mainly the ironically named Breyten Wordfool--are presented with unflinching honesty and self-knowledge in a narrative world in which biography, history and dream fantasy are consciously merged and paraded before the reader in a "migration of images" (10).
The fictional memoir offers remarkable, if ambivalent, descriptions of the cities that have featured in Breytenbach's nomadic life: the Mother City, Cape Town, which is both affectionately and critically evoked; Paris, his adoptive home that he has come to know too well not to be disgusted by many of its inhabitants; New York in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of 9/11; the former slave island of Goree where he spends much of his time; and the Catalan village where he has also established a home. All are homes where he also feels unhomed, together with the other emigres, refugees, illegal and legal immigrants, nomads and economic migrants of all kinds in this narrative that leads rhizomically from one topic and chapter to another in a fictional nomadism that Breytenbach has made distinctively his own.
All of these migrant figures are contained, however, within the larger framework of Breyenbach's own admission of "how passionately, desperately passionately, frustratingly passionately [he] fights over the same theoretical and experiential and remembered and dreamed African being-scape" (217), and of how regularly he returns specifically to the African diaspora, especially in its contemporary manifestations. African migrants populate this text of memories: in Paris, the many blacks on the streets of the 13th arondissement, the Cameroonian owner of a favourite restaurant in Montparnasse, and the illegal North African immigrants who share a train compartment with Breytenbach; and in Spain, in Barcelona the "black Africans without identity papers or permits hanging out on the Placa Catalunya with bundles and plastic bags containing all their worldly possessions" (86) and the Nigerian and Ghanaian prostitutes, on the roads the Moroccan immigrant families heading home for the holidays, and in the South the increasing number of illegal immigrants being captured as they land on Spanish beaches or whose dead bodies are washed up there. Diasporic dispersals, too, are what characterise contemporary South Africa in Breytenbach's narrative: in Cape Town, he observes "how much the coloured population of Mother City carry in them the fused memories of slavery, of displacement, of exile ..." (133); the inhabitants of the tin and cardboard shack settlements on the Cape Flats are "mostly migrants from the devastated Eastern Cape" (134); and parts of the central city have been taken over by Nigerians, Congolese and Zaireans. And immigration into South Africa is matched by emigration from the young democracy, as Breytenbach details:
Twenty-seven percent of people with university education have already left. Thousands of doctors now work abroad. There are Diaspora colonies in New Zealand and Australia and Canada and Britain and in the States. They meet for church services and sing and cry their hearts out. Displaced families work all over Africa. I don't know of a single Afrikaner family who hasn't at least one member living outside the country. The Indians and the Coloureds are following ... (240)
The historical African diaspora and its continuation into the present-day dispersal of Africans into diasporic communities around the world, including South Africa, have also been taken up in a number of recent South African novels. In The Pickup (2001) Nadine Gordimer foregrounds geographic and cultural dislocation and relocation as her theme: on the one hand, the present relocation of white South Africans, themselves the descendants of immigrant European settlers, to the United States and Australia, and on the other, the flocking of illegal immigrants from other African countries into cities such as Johannesburg (see Jacobs 2006: 124-9). Gordimer's narrative engages with the plight of illegal aliens--from Congo, Senegal, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and Mozambique--who form a major but undocumented substratum of South African society, living under constant threat of deportation from the country and forced into visibility by periodic outbreaks of xenophobic violence against them.
Gordimer employs her usual social typification in presenting the figure of the mechanic, 'Abdu', who belongs to this international underclass of illegal immigrants who have overstayed their visitors' permits and are eventually ferreted out by the Department of Home Affairs. His personal history is a representative one: he comes from a generic, Islamic African country that is a construct of colonialism and characterised by government corruption, religious oppression and conflict across its borders. 'Abdu's' home country is presented as a paradigmatic Third World nation: a place of poverty, dismal health standards, patriarchal subjugation of women, and political gangsterism. It is the African home to which he has been repatriated from other countries he had entered illegally, and where, after his return, he spends most of his time haunting the visa sections of various consulates in his attempts to apply officially to immigrate--to Canada, New Zealand, Australia--only to be rejected time and time again.
Gordimer's treatment of the themes of home and of being 'unhomed' which feature in all of her earlier novels is given a new twist in The Pickup when her South African protagonist, Julie Summers, herself of British immigrant descent, marries 'Abdu', voluntarily leaves South Africa and returns to his native country together with him. His home village on the edge of the desert becomes another one of the heterotopias in Gordimer's fictional landscape: a place where contradictory discourses co-exist. 'Abdu', determined to get away from the wretched village, persists in his applications until he finally obtains a precious permit to enter the United States; Julie, however, is received and becomes integrated into her husband's family home, which provides her with
a nexus of family ties that she has not known before in South Africa. She has come home in a way that her husband cannot grasp, and at the end of the narrative when he leaves to establish a new home in the United States, she refuses to join him. The trajectories of their respective migrations into and out of Africa are diametrically opposed, probably irreconcilable.
Zakes Mda's most recent novel, Cion (2007), engages with the African diaspora from the perspective of African American culture in two different narrative chronotopes. The town of Kilvert, Athens County, Ohio, is the setting for a historical narrative that deals with slavery in the United States in the nineteenth century, and a contemporary one that provides a thinly fictionalised reflection on African American and Native American, and also South African, culture and the politics of identity. The African, African American and South African cultural worlds are mediated through the re appearance in Cion of the (meta)fictional Toloki, Mda's professional mourner from his first novel, Ways of Dying (1995). Toloki presents himself as a migrant persona: he was "conjured . into existence a decade or so before" (Mda 2007: 2) by Mda in Durham, England, and, after his birth as a fictional being in South Africa, was transported back to Durham, only to be 'abandoned' there until his author later brings him along from Durham to Athens, Ohio, where he finds himself in another fictional narrative.
Mda's novel chronicles the diasporic history of Africans in the United States through the stories of the ancestral slave woman, the Abyssinian Queen, and her two sons, the half-brothers Abednego and Nicodemus, and the parallel story of the slave-dealing Irishman Niall Quigley, who is himself tricked into slavery. As a context for all their stories, the narrative provides a comprehensive account of the commercial enterprise of slave-breeding in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century--the whole obscenity of breeding slaves as a long-term investment, the livestock needing "many years to mature and be ready for the market" (91), the rotation of studs over the female slaves in the breeding bays with the aim of breeding mulatto children, the dangers of inbreeding, the separation into house slaves and field slaves, as well as the paradoxes of there having been white slaves as well as black slaveholders. Mda's readers are introduced to the operation of the Underground Railroad with its conductors and stations and supportive abolitionists, and all the main role-players in the drama around slavery and its fugitives--slave traders, slave chasers with their dogs, slave stealers and bounty hunters--are encountered in the narrative.
Toloki's narrative probes in detail the consequences of this nineteenth-century racial engineering in North America, and also foregrounds the complex ethnic identities formed by intermarriage between fugitive African slaves, Native Americans, and also Irish immigrants who had sought sanctuary in Tabler Town, as Kilvert was formerly known. During the days of oppression these people had suppressed their Africanness and Indianness and celebrated their white ancestry; however, Toloki realises, their now wanting to reclaim all three heritages as a source of pride and uniqueness has resulted in racial and cultural uncertainty: "But they no longer remember who they were, on the African and Native American side" (238). The creolisation resulting from the diasporic dispersal of Africans in North America is also pursued in the novel in terms of cultural continuity and discontinuity, especially as regards African and African-American traditions. Toloki observes that certain African cultural practices have survived only in the African diaspora, whereas some others actually have no African roots but are purely inventions of the diaspora:
I have observed that people of African descent in America often create African heritages that no one in Africa knows about. There are some who are descendants of kings and queens who existed only in the collective imagination of their oppressed progenitors. I also know there are many rituals and traditions long dead on the mother continent, that were preserved and transformed and enriched by the slaves to suit their new lives in America. (119)
Among the most important metafictional tropes that Mda's novel provides for its hybrid fictional discussion of cultural mixture, change and innovation is the tradition of quiltmaking in Kilvert, and in particular the reverence for old quilts that "embody the life of the family" (30) and are carriers of memories. In the lore of Kilvert, especially the African design, which supposedly originated with the Abyssinian Queen in the 1830s, represented not simply "beauty for its own sake" (48), but was encoded with secret messages in the patterns, colours, ties and stitches that mnemonically--in the tradition of the tales of "the storytellers and the griots of the old continent" (109)--provided guidelines for fugitive slaves and "reminded them of their duty to freedom" (109). According to the quiltmakers of Kilvert, the creation of expressive textiles that spoke secret languages to the initiated can be traced back via the Abyssinian Queen to the "old continent" (48), and Toloki similarly believes that their quilting is a development in the New World of an ancient African tradition of "talking fabrics" (143). Mda's narrative 'quilt' in Cion may also be seen as a New World development of an artistic tradition that has its origins in Africa.
Theorising the African diaspora
A number of questions arise from the various representations of migrant identity in these novels and the different notions of an African diaspora. Are the Australian immigrant protagonists in Slow Man entitled to be included at all in the category of diaspora? Does the current wave of emigration of the descendants of colonial settlers from South Africa, featured in The Pickup and in A Veil of Footsteps, amount to a secondary diasporic dispersal or out-migration? Do the present-day African economic emigres and political refugees trying to gain a foothold in Europe (in A Veil of Footsteps) or in South Africa (The Pickup) constitute an ongoing African diaspora as an extension of the slave diaspora? How feasible are the attempts of Gordimer in The Pickup and Mda in Cion to present past and contemporary South African history in relation to an African diaspora? Even allowing for a more relaxed use of the term, how legitimate is it to include all African migrants, often from very diverse national backgrounds and historical experiences, in the homogenising/pan-Africanist concept of an African diaspora? Or is it perhaps plausible to conceive of uniformly traumatic, contemporary African experience that would permit such inclusion under the blanket of a generic African diaspora?
In their introduction to Theorizing Diaspora (2003), Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur acknowledge that diaspora and diasporic are contested terms, and they caution against "the uncritical, unreflexive application of the term 'diaspora' to any and all contexts of global displacement and movement" (3). What needs to be interrogated, they maintain, is how diaspora is "historicized and politicized", especially in relation to contemporary "ideas of nationalism, transnationalism and transmigration". Braziel and Mannur point out that diaspora,
[o]nce conceptualized as an exilic or nostalgic dislocation from homeland [...] has attained new epistemological, political, and identitarian resonances as its points of reference proliferate. The term 'diaspora' has been increasingly used by anthropologists, literary theorists, and cultural critics to describe mass migrations and displacements of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in reference to independence movements in formerly colonized areas, waves of refugees fleeing war-torn states, and fluxes of migration in the post-World War II era.... (4)
Other contemporary theorists of diaspora studies such as Ato Quayson and Khachig Tololyan also remind us that "not all dispersals amount to diasporas" (Quayson 2007: 581; Tololyan 1996; 2007), and that in the world today social scientists have had to devise various, different ways of talking about the consequences of globalisation, transnationalism and cultural hybridity. Diaspora studies provides a useful lens for doing so--in Quayson's formulation: "The binary settler and migrant emphases of earlier models of migration studies are now making way for understandings of transnational networks, with diaspora studies providing the scholarly focus through which the social sciences and the humanities elaborate these phenomena" (2007:588). Diaspora studies, Quayson emphasises, "is first and foremost an interdisciplinary academic discipline" (589), involving, amongst other disciplines, "history, sociology, political science, ethnic studies, international relations, public health, human rights, and literary and cultural studies".
Although ideas of what constitutes a diaspora might vary greatly, and the term is often used in a casual way, the typology developed by Robin Cohen in GlobalDiasporas: An Introduction (1997), from William Safran's (1991) identification of the key characteristics of diasporas, beginning with the Jewish diaspora, has nevertheless remained an important point of reference for subsequent theorists. According to Cohen, diasporas would normally exhibit several of the following features:
(1) dispersal from an original homeland, often traumatically ['victim' diasporas, such as the African and Armenian]; (2) alternatively, the expansion from a homeland in search of work ['labour' diasporas, such as the Indian] , in pursuit of trade ['trade' diasporas, such as the Chinese and Lebanese] or to further colonial ambitions ['imperial' diasporas such as the British]; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealization of the supposed ancestral home; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive, creative, enriching life in tolerant host societies. (1997: 180)
In her introduction to Diaspora andMulticulturalism: Common Traditions and New Developments (2003) Monika Fludernik points out that the first two of Cohen's nine criteria for a diaspora to come into existence are mutually exclusive, the second one applying to a wide range of ethnic immigrant and postcolonial communities across the globe. She prefers to open Cohen's second criterion up into three further categories: the "colonial diaspora", and, adopting Vijay Mishra's terms, the "old and new diasporas" (1996:4212). For Fludernik the really 'new' diaspora consists of "(admittedly free) labour movements across the globe", a type of diaspora "motivated by professional considerations--the movement of individual professionals and their families to mostly anglophone industrial nations", and now including also "cultural and political elites" (2003: xii-xiii).
In her study, Diaspora: An Introduction (2008), Jana Evans Braziel builds on her previous work together with Mannur and outlines, as she phrases it, "the historical roots and contemporary routes of international migration" (11) in order to understand the various ways in which human migratory populations have been and are still being dispersed from their homelands. Braziel begins, like other theorists, with the standard models of the Jewish and African diasporas, and she too acknowledges the diaspora typologies of Safran and Cohen. She offers an important clarification as regards the imprecise use in contemporary discourse of diaspora as a synonym for terms such as transnationalism and global capitalism:
While transnationalism as a term aptly describes the movement of capital, finance, trade, cultural forms of production, and even material forms of production across national boundaries that serve to erode the nation-state as the foundation or ground for capitalist economies, diaspora remains a primarily human form of movement across geographical, historical, linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries: as such, it remains a lived, negotiated, and experienced form oftransnational migration; it is in this sense that diasporic subjects may be understood to be transnational migrants, or transmigrants. (27)
Braziel further contributes a taxonomy of distinct groups of people whose movement from "a native country across national or state boundaries into a new receiving (or 'host') country" (27) qualifies them for inclusion in present-day diasporas: colonial settlers "living outside of their motherlands and dispersed from the continental confines of Europe" (28); transnational corporate expatriates who move freely across national borders to do business; students, mainly from developing countries, on study visas in developed countries;postcolonial emigres who have relocated themselves to the colonial motherland; refugees from political persecution, civil war or state violence in their own country "who have been granted political asylum within a host country" (29); political asylees (or asylum seekers) who are in the limbo between seeking refuge in a host country and not yet having been granted formal asylum; detainees "who are held in detention camps at immigration prisons" (32); internally displaced persons who have been uprooted from their homes as a result of "violence, civil warfare, famine, disease, 'ethnic cleansing', political persecution, or religious oppression" (33) and who seek shelter elsewhere within their native countries; economic migrants who move from their home countries to work in host countries because of a whole range of economic constraints and opportunities; and undocumented workers ("illegal aliens") who have gained entry into a host country to make a living there but who have not obtained the legal permits needed for them to enjoy the status of economic migrants.
The characters in the South African novels referred to in the first section of this essay exhibit most of the typological features and fit into the diasporic taxonomies outlined above, and may therefore reasonably be approached within the general framework of diaspora. Importantly, what all these fictional subjects share is what Aisha Khan calls a "diasporic consciousness" (2007:142), a sensibility "that both marks the very act of uprooting as shaping their sense of self and that memorializes displacement in everyday discourse and practice" (2007:161). The particular interest of a diasporic consciousness for the literary scholar lies in the ways in which the different stories of dislocation and relocation are narrativised in the individual and group memory, and a diasporic personhood and cultural identity are shaped. Recent theorists have, however, stressed the extent to which diasporic communities, despite their collective memory and strong ethnic group consciousness and solidarity, are equally shaped culturally through continuous interaction with host societies. Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram have argued that the development of a diasporic identity formation does not follow the standard psychological model of acculturation, but that the conflict within and displacement from a native culture are followed by ongoing engagement and negotiation with host cultures: "Far from being a linear process that proceeds along a teleological trajectory, immigrants variously experience contradictions, tensions, and a dynamic movement that spirals back and forth" (2009:146). It is this dynamic that also underlies Stuart Hall's often-cited argument that cultural identity is based on differences and discontinuities rather than on fixed essences, and that it undergoes constant transformation, is "a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'" (1990: 225), and is predicated on the future as much as on the past. Cultural identities, Hall says, "are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning ..." (226). And the experience of diaspora, he maintains, "is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of 'identity' which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity" (235). Hall's view of diasporic identity in terms of internal division and motility rather than fixed essence is echoed, more specifically in a black context, by Paul Gilroy's thesis that the "history of the black Atlantic yields a course of lessons as to the instability and mutability of identities which are always unfinished, always being remade" (1993:xi), and that cultural doubleness and intermixture are the legacies of the African diaspora. Or, as more recently formulated by Genevieve Fabre and Klaus Benesch in their critical reassessment of the concept of an African diaspora: "diaspora is less a condition or a state than a search for identity that is constantly contested, re-imagined, and re-invented" (2004:xiv).
Picturing the African diaspora
Patricia Schonstein Pinnock's novel Skyline (2000) provides one of the most inventive treatments of the African diaspora and its legacies of "cultural doubleness and intermixture" in recent South African writing. Skyline was published shortly after Coetzee's Disgrace, and is dedicated to the child victims of the 16-year-long civil war in Mozambique. Skyline engages directly with the issue of the African diaspora by representing an African diasporic community in central Cape Town. The novel takes its title from the name of a featureless, run-down apartment block at the top of Long Street. The building has become occupied largely by illegal immigrants and refugees from the rest of Africa, who share its crowded spaces, renting beds and corners of rooms. In the words of the young South African female narrator, who is also a fledgling writer: "Not many have the right to be here and most of them carry forged papers or pay bribes to stay in the country. They arrive from all over Africa by taxi, by bus, by train. Some hitch rides on overland transporters. Manyjust walk" (2000:8). Zimbabweans, Nigerians, Ghanaians, Somalis, Angolans--some are economic migrants, others are survivors of various wars in every part of the continent; all of them, the narrator says, have "stories written on the parchment of their hearts which they don't recite easily. They are stories which have crept out of the edges of civil wars and scattered into the fleeing wind. You can read the words in their eyes, stained by despair; in their mouths, silenced and tightened by horror. You can even read the words in their torn and weary clothes" (11). They survive in Cape Town by selling sweets, South African flags, African curios, or drugs, on the sidewalks and at traffic intersections, at the Pan-African Market, or from Skyline itself. As a group, they are the objects of the xenophobic distrust of black and white South Africans alike.
The question of whether an immigrant African community in another African country (here South Africa) can technically be regarded as forming part of the African diaspora is answered in part at least by Michael A Gomez, a contemporary historian of the African diaspora who defines his subject as "people of African descent who found (and find) themselves living either outside of the African continent or in parts of Africa that were territorially quite distant from their lands of birth" (2005:1; emphasis added). The state of being 'out of Africa' can also be experienced elsewhere in Africa. The further question of whether the African diaspora can or should be spoken of as a unified experience, considering "the complex pattern of communities and cultures with differing local and regional histories" (2), Gomez says, has no easy answer. The mostly illegal African immigrants in Pinnock's novel have, for example, gravitated towards Cape Town because of, amongst other factors, civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Congo, genocidal conflict in Rwanda and Sudan, corruption and failed democracy in Nigeria, and economic and social collapse in Zimbabwe. What Gomez does make clear, however, is that there can be no essentialist model of the African diaspora, and his definition of the term allows for a vast range of different experiences: it "consists of the connections of people of African descent around the world, who are linked as much by their common experiences as their genetic makeup, if not more so" (2). Brent Hayes Edwards, in his genealogy of the African diaspora concept, similarly argues that diaspora points to internal as well as external differences within and among transnational black groupings; "in appropriating a term so closely associated with Jewish thought", he says, "we are forced to think not in terms of some closed or autonomous system of African dispersal but explicitly in terms of a complex past of forced migrations and racialization--what Earl Lewis [1995] has called a history of 'overlapping diasporas'" (Edwards 2001:64). Although the truth remains, as Fabre and Benesch state, that whether real or imagined, "Africa is the matrix of the African diaspora, the lost homeland and center" (2004: xv), they remind us that "[t]hough still a land of origin, Africa has shifted conceptually: it has finally become an amibiguous place, a conflict-ridden continent" (xvi). Because of the differences among the various experiences of dispersal, they point out that "[t]he idea of an African diaspora was thus gradually replaced by that of multiple diasporas, unified solely through their lost center and mythic homeland, Africa" (xvii). And currently:
With the rise of new, postcolonial African nations and, concomitantly, an increase of migratory flux and the appearance of multiple, temporary homelands, the cultural, historical, and geographical differences within the black diaspora itself are being increasingly recognized. Today scholars are more interested in how these various forms of diaspora are connected to each other than in links between the dispersed former Africans and a mythic homeland or spiritual center. (xviii)
The heterogeneity and the cultural displacement and syncretism of the African diasporic experience can perhaps best be conveyed by means of a fictional work that shares this cultural doubleness and hybridity. In Skyline Pinnock has devised an ecphrastic structure whereby the individual and collective stories of the residents of Skyline can be told. Her novel provides one of the most self-reflexive and wide-ranging examples of ecphrasis--"the literary description of a work of art" (Hollander 1998: 86)--in contemporary South African fiction. More precisely, Pinnock's fictional discourse needs to be distinguished from the merely iconic, for, as John Hollander, quoting Jean H Hagstrum (1958), explains, truly ecphrastic literary works are those "that purport to give 'voice and language to the otherwise mute art object'". Furthermore, as an ecphrastic fictional construct Skyline combines both actual ecphrasis, where a literary work incorporates actual, particular works of art that pre-exist it, and notional ecphrasis, where a literary text incorporates descriptions of purely fictive works of art. It might be still more accurate to describe Skyline as an iconotext, in terms of Peter Wagner's argument in Reading Iconotexts (2007). Wagner goes beyond the word-image opposition and the traditional view of texts and images as 'sister arts', to break down the barriers between literature and visual art. In what he calls an "iconotext" neither image nor text is free from the other, but they are mutually interdependent in the ways they establish meaning. And in the case of Skyline, image and text merge to convey what it means individually and collectively to experience the African diaspora, to attempt to depict its overlapping histories of conflict and dislocation, and to write about it from a South African perspective.
The novel consists of forty more-or-less symmetrical chapters, in each of which the (sometimes overlapping) main stories are narrated, and almost all of which conclude with the description of a painting. As it turns out at the end, the paintings are all by the narrator's self-taught, close friend, Bernard, a traumatised refugee from the war in Mozambique where his wife was killed and his three children abducted, their fates unknown to him. Most of these fictive paintings have titles; some, however, are untitled. In most of the descriptions of the fictive paintings, an actual, well-known work from the history of Western art is explicitly cited as the inspiration for Bernard's painting, the inspiration being based on a particular colour, an element of composition or technique, a figure, a mood, or a theme. In a few cases, there is no actual Western painting given as the source for Bernard's painting. His paintings tend to be stylistically mixed and experimental, but have an expressive, aesthetic logic of their own, and do not simply reproduce either the fictional narrative or their source paintings. (The innovative frames improvised by Bernard for his paintings are often also described: one made from rusty, flattened Coca-Cola cans, another out of pigeon feathers and beads pasted onto cardboard, a third out of twisted wire threaded with bottle tops--all of them recognisable contemporary African artefacts.)
For example: Renoir's richly exotic, reclining "Woman of Algiers" serves as a point of departure for a painting titled "It is the Woman of Rwanda", of an equally richly colourful, fat black woman, inspired by the figure of the hairdresser, Princess, who is a refugee from the Rwandan genocide and whose daughters' terrible fates she cannot bring herself to tell anyone. Henri Rousseau's naive fantasy, "Sleeping Gypsy", provides a model for Bernard's painting "It is the Woman Travelling", based on the actual story of the woman who has fled with her small children, silenced by the horrors that they have witnessed, from the war in Sudan and come to South Africa on foot, sleeping in the desert on the way. There are no source paintings given, however, for "It is the Treasures Bought from Heaven", which serves to memorialise the Ghanaian, Kwaku, who has come to Mandela's promised land to find his fortune, only to die there of AIDS, or for "It is the Dealing on Long Street", which has as its subject the Nigerian drug dealers in central Cape Town.
The narrator and the other principal characters in the narrative are also interpreted by Bernard with direct reference to sources in Western art: the narrator's alcoholic mother, represented in Bernard's charcoal drawing "She Has Sorrow in the Kitchen", bears a resemblance to the gaunt figure of the woman in Picasso's "The Frugal Meal". The narrator's autistic younger sister Mossie, who has a passion for beads, is depicted with reference to Modigliani's hauntingly vulnerable "Little Girl in Blue". Bernard's painting of Raphael, the narrator's Jewish friend from school, titled "It is the Fine Young Man", is based on Chagall's "The Fiddler", and mimics its lightness and spontaneity, although the background architecture has been transposed from Russian to Cape Dutch by Bernard. The transvestite, Alice the Spice Girl, is the subject of Bernard's "You Can Buy the Love Here", which is derived from Rossetti's "Astarte Syriaca" and whose voluptuousness Bernard's portrait shares, whereas his untitled painting of Adelaide, the homeless woman, is based on Cezanne's "The Negro Scipio", the common element between them being the weariness of spirit conveyed by both figures. The unframed painting of the blind couple, Gracie and Cliff, together with their two guide dogs, and simply titled "It is the Beauty", has as its inspiration Matisse's "The Conversation".
Bernard also attempts to come to terms with aspects of his own life in his paintings: his portrait of the lonely Portuguese Senhora, on whose husband's estate he worked as a domestic servant in Mozambique and who was brutally murdered by rebels, has its origin in Matisse's "Portrait of Madame Matisse with a Green Stripe", the expression in the Senhora's eyes alone resembling the gaze of Madame Matisse. In an untitled painting, Bernard can only recall the tender dignity of the figure of his wife working in the tobacco-sorting shed on the Senhor's estate by means of Giotto's "Madonna". There is no source painting, however, for "It is the Death of the Holy Mother under the Trees", Bernard's depiction of the stripping naked and massacre of the holy sisters of a religious order by Mozambican rebels.
Bernard, like so many of the diasporic Africans who live in Skyline, has been permanently damaged by war and can never escape from its spectre. To convey this, he has painted an untitled triptych on the subject of war (Chapter 17). This is his most ambitious work, each of its three panels consciously modelled respectively on Chagall's "War", Goya's "The Third of May, 1808", and Picasso's "Guernica". Bernard's triptych is a work, the narrator says, "which should have stood on its own, and it should have been executed on a much larger canvas. But the overwhelming despair it transmits, together with the pain and sense of useless slaughter, suggest that the artist would have been overcome by the horror and palpitation of the episode he was capturing, had he dared to express himself as hugely as did Picasso" (79).
By means of an elaborate intertextuality canonical works of a European artistic tradition have been appropriated and pictorially and narratively reinterpreted in a postcolonial, diasporic African context. The individual experiences of each of these Africans and marginalised South Africans have been framed within Bernard's paintings to record and interpret their stories of unspeakable loss and longing, and collectively the paintings narrativise an African diaspora. Taken together, all the mutually inscribed and depicted stories and paintings are held, in turn, within the larger framework of the narrator's commitment to "those who have turned their backs on what they left behind and built a new life here at the top of Long Street" (55), to "try to re-embroider [their] splintered words into the finery they once were--old litanies from Ethiopia; chantings from Sudan; fables from Eritrea ...". In her ecphrastic engagement with the theme of the African diaspora, Pinnock has endeavoured textually to link contemporary histories of African dispersal back to an ancestral past, and also to bring Western cultural traditions in relation to new African practices, thereby presenting through the artistic syncretism of her novel the ongoing re-imagination and cultural transformation of the splintered African diasporic self.
Chapter 39 has no description of a painting to conclude it; it describes, instead, the killing of Bernard by the insanely jealous Giovanni, owner of the delicatessen. The final chapter, Chapter 40, tells of Bernard's paintings being catalogued, exhibited at the National Gallery in Cape Town after his death, and then, appropriately, dispersed in an artistic diaspora among his friends and on permanent loan to the National Gallery and the Pan African Market. The chapter concludes with a last description of a painting, comparable in its way to Vermeer's self-reflexive "Allegory of Painting", or to Velasquez's "Las Meninas", or to Picasso's paintings of himself in his studio with his models. (None of these is mentioned as a source, however, and it is left to the reader to supply the possible intertexts.) This is Bernard's largest painting, titled "It is the Portrait of the Artist with his Good Friends", and self-reflexively shows him working at his easel, surrounded by those who knew and loved him, and who formed his subjects. And in the left corner of the canvas, as a metafictional strategy, is painted a copy of Sister Wendy Beckett's The Story ofPainting: The Essential Guide to Western Art, which Pinnock also includes in her Bibliography at the end and which is the actual source of most of the paintings she describes in the novel.
It is worth noting, in conclusion, that gathered together into this compendium volume on "Western" art are nineteenth- and twentieth-century European painters who themselves were exiles and emigres--from Revolutionary Russia, from Fascist Spain, from Nazi-occupied France--and who have all found their collective, diasporic identity and artistic home in the larger category of'Western Art'. The final lesson of Pinnock's novel may be that what we now uncomplicatedly refer to as Western art is itself not an essential, unified concept, but refers rather to the cultural products of long and continuing histories of migration, and to works of art that are themselves scattered among art galleries and collections all over the world.
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