Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
1/2010
Till KINZEL
Technische Universität Braunschweig
Englisches Seminar
Bienroder Weg 80 38106 Braunschweig Germany
till.kinzel@gmx.de
Abstract. This paper explores the implications of mass migration and the conditions of
hybridization for early 21st century Western societies in texts dealing with migrant
experiences. The novel Goodbye Lucille (2007) by the Afro-cosmopolitan writer Segun
Afolabi will be explored with respect to the crucial problem of an ethics and politics of
belonging, related to the recent controversies surrounding multiculturalism and issues of
migration. This text deals with the “in-between world” of migrants and negotiates
questions of identity, alienation and belonging in a so-called transcultural/transnational
context. The issues raised in Segun Afolabi's fiction are addressed by employing the ways
of thinking developed in political philosophy, including recent phenomenological attempts
to theorize the notion of “home” and “belonging” (e.g., by Karen Joisten, but also Martin
Heidegger) in order to deal with the complexities of the issue. The question, “What
constitutes the good life for the individual and the political community?”, needs to be
considered by taking into account the current plurality of approaches to forging identities
in the political sphere as well. The subtlety of literary accounts of this phenomenon –
literature may indeed be one of the best diagnostic instrument for studying a society –
sheds light, I suggest, on the conditions of politically relevant identity formations. A close
reading of literary texts such as those by Afolabi offers an important contribution to a
realistic, and therefore complex and complicating, account of our overall situation in the
Western world with respect to the politics of belonging.
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identity (Larise 16). For if, that is, difference and identity necessarily go
together and affirming the one does not eliminate the other, identity
negotiations turn out to be standard operating procedure for anyone.
Negotiations of identity are therefore always situated in a field where
difference is limited by identity, so that the non-identity of identity and
non-identity is necessarily confirmed. Whereas political controversies about
multiculturalism necessarily have to focus on more abstract considerations
and principled arguments about which structures and which policies should
be established or maintained, the literary realm is a much more ambiguous
“space” whose status is somewhat precarious. For this literary “space” as
such might well be an in-between space, which, however, is not true for
political spaces such as nation states with clearly demarcated borders and
one constitutional law for their whole territories. Rejecting older ideas
about the aesthetic autonomy of works of art, postcolonial theories of
literature, in accordance with many other theoretical movements of recent
decades, tend to emphasize a whole range of non-literary contexts in their
interpretations of literary works. Especially the widespread use of the
hyphen to categorize so-called postcolonial writers can be seen as a form
of contextualization that at least some of these writers regard with a
considerable amount of scepticism, to say the least.
The writer I want to focus on in this paper, Segun Afolabi, does not
make theoretical statements but rather points to possible literary models as
a source of intertextual relationships: Afolabi is reported to cherish
especially writers like Caryl Phillips, Jamaica Kincaid, Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, Kazuo Ishiguro, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison (Battista). In
another interview he also mentions writers such as Omar Rivabella,
Graham Greene, JM Coetzee, Lorrie Moore and Albert Camus (The
Farafinist). No clear ideological or aesthetic position emerges from this
assemblage of writers but the intimation that Afolabi understands himself
as a writer's writer who does not want to be circumscribed by one tradition,
one way of writing, one point of reference in terms of identity.
Segun Afolabi's work so far consists of a volume of short stories, A Life
Elsewhere, and a novel, Goodbye Lucille, mostly set in Berlin in 1985
(Patterson). Not all of these texts lend themselves to a treatment within the
theoretical frame I here employ. But already the very beginning of his
novel Goodbye Lucille highlights the issue that I want to call the politics of
belonging. The first sentence of the novel reads: “I left London to get away
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from myself” (1). Displacement thus sets the tone for the novel as a whole,
a displacement, however, that is not enforced by some other power but
self-induced. One might well describe Vincent's move to Berlin as a form
of freely chosen exile. As one of the few reviews of Afolabi's works so far
has it, “exile is a fundamental trope in Afolabi's stories, which tell of
displacement, dispossession and loneliness.” Among the things that people
strive for in their attempts to get along in the world are “casual sex,”
“alcohol,” “a place to call home.” In the case of the photographer Vincent,
the novel's autodiegetic narrator, it is all these three things, but especially, it
seems, “a place to call home.” This striving after “a place to call home”
points to the crucial issue of “homelessness” in late modernity and in the
early 21st century when translocations have become almost something like
standard operating procedure for ever-increasing numbers of people. In
Vincent's mind, life presents itself in spatial terms as he envisions it as a
never-ending road, in fact as “a shapeless, ragged road with turnings,
random as a game of chance” (219). This notion of a “shapeless, ragged
road” with its implications of randomness points to the underlying
structural parallels of Vincent's movements through the world to
picaresque modes of episodic narration centered around an often
somewhat marginalized narrator. It is precisely the picaresque notion of the
necessary inconclusiveness of the social integration of the individual
(Ehland 13) that links Vincent's picaresque position to his attempts to
construct a viable identity for himself. Vincent's marginality is of particular
relevance in connection with a politics of belonging that is based on
recognition as the pre-condition of participation. The fact that Vincent
switches off “at the mention of politics” indicates that he does not think
highly or at all about the political possibilities of creating a sense of
belonging (4).
PHILOSOPHICAL INTIMATIONS
OF A THEORY OF BELONGING
This period in time could be said to be the age when human beings face
the task to identify with a certain place without being completely bound to
it and determined by it. The German philosopher Karen Joisten has
offered the most intriguing reflections on the philosophy of home
(Heimat) that I know of, taking her cue from the phenomenological
analyses of human life offered by Husserl and Heidegger. It was the latter,
incidentally, who offered reflections on the connection between who we
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return, but that he would certainly remember it. Returning to the place one
left is always an option, it seems, even though the return need not take
place in spatial terms. In fact, as Vincent's aunt says, leaving a place does
not mean leaving your memories behind: “You know, when you leave a
place, if you move away in favour of another, you can never completely
forget the first.” The translocation his aunt is speaking of does not do away
with the place one leaves behind. Translocation does not mean a complete
rupture with the earlier spatial dimensions of one's life. She goes on to say
that the former place “is like a stone tied around your heart. It keeps you
from floating away from yourself, from losing something essential that
once belonged to you.” (249) This statement of Vincent's aunt points to
the ambiguous valorization of translocations in so far as they could seem to
be liberating to the person who leaves one place in favour of another. But
this liberating aspect of translocations may also be very limited since it is
only a liberation in terms of space not in terms of mind – translocated
bodies are not freefloating entities but tied by mental and/or emotional
strings to one's essential being. Place here is encoded as something both
spatial and mental – place maintains its notional hold even on those whose
life consists of a series of translocations.
The transitoriness of his life in terms of place is something that is taken
for granted by Vincent's uncle who asks him: “What will you do when you
finish in Germany?” Vincent, however, rejects the implications of his
uncle's question (which point not so much to new places to go to but to a
return to his homeland where he still believes to have some influence that
might procure a job for Vincent). He does not understand his uncle's use
of the term “finish,” for he seems to regard Berlin as his new home: “It's
where I live. I've made no plans to live anywhere else.” (257) Vincent is
obviously not very enthusiastic about Berlin – it just happens to be the
place where he lives. He recognizes the fact that his uncle Raymond “was
always on the move, forever changing his place in the world,” thus
representing a perfect example for an existence defined or determined by
translocations galore. Vincent is not sure about the motivation behind his
uncle's restlessness; he offers two conjectures: 1) love of adventure, 2)
inability to settle (164). In contrast to his aunt's emphasis on the fact that
one cannot ever forget the place that one leaves or left behind, Vincent
attributes to his uncle the desire to start all over again. Translocating is here
connected to the possibility or the promise of “Living life from a clean
slate” (164). It is this tension between remembering and renewal which
seems to be a key feature of human life in the context of (not only
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Vincent the photographer sees many things but does not make any
attempts to make these impressions cohere and analyse them within the
context of a theoretical framework. So what we learn about the goings-on
in Berlin is not systematically linked to political or social issues. Politics
appears more like an accident. This is illustrated by the way the murder of
the Social Democrat politician Heinrich Henkelmann is treated. It also
shows in the way Vincent gets involved with asylum seekers from all kinds
of countries. For some unexplained reason he wants to take their
photographs but when asked by one of them, Arî, a Kurdish refugee, for
his reason to do so, he cannot offer a plausible answer at first: “It's my job.
And I want to.” (32) When the Kurdish Asylbewerber (asylum seeker) insists
that Vincent should let him know when he realizes why he took the
photographs, Vincent is finally compelled to reveal some of his concerns:
“I think I want to find out why people leave places. Their impulses. What
makes them get up and go . . . What that can do to a person. I'm still not
clear about . . . Do you see what I mean?” (33) In Vincent's way of looking
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writings. He does not belabour any ideologial points but rather seems to
employ the ductus obliquus in more hinting than highlighting tensions and
feelings of unpleasantness. Telling stories of identity always already implies
the negotiation of difference in time and place so that, in the course of this
on-going negotiation, we turn out not to be “but creatures of our origins” –
as e.g. the narrator in the novel No New Land by the Canadian writer M. G.
Vassanji says (Vassanji 9) – but creatures whose temporal and spatial
origins cannot be made to go away completely. This problematic is sure to
remain a permanent feature of the transnational world as it seems to be of
continual concern to writers like Afolabi who neither complain about
homelessness, nor offer nostalgia as a way to cope with the feelings of loss.
Homelessness is a necessary condition of life in a transnational world, but
it is not a condition that determines people's life completely. Vincent for
one thus seems to feel neither particularly rooted nor uprooted--looking
for a sense of home, achieving Geborgenheit, is surely important but cannot
ever succeed once and for all. We can, however, say that by retelling the
episodic events of his life, by presenting his assorted observations and
memories and weaving them into a narrative that is framed by the
“goodbye” of the novel's title, Vincent achieves some measure of
autonomy, appropriating the spaces he inhabits by narrative means, even
occasionally (perhaps accidentally) changing actual topographical features
of his fictional Berlin so that the U-Bahn station Krumme Lanke has two
exits instead of just one (189). By changing the actual topographical
features of Berlin the German city he subtly undercuts his fiction's
appearance of referentiality, highlighting the constructed nature of the
cityscape he inhabits or moves through (Piatti 26-31). Despite the refracted
nature of Afolabi’s narrative, he pinpoints key features of middle European
life in the 1980s. The way in which he does this is to offer his fictions as a
foil for closer observation of the faultlines of European culture, in much
the same way that issues of representation are embedded in the fictional
presentation of so-called third-world countries and provide “narrative forms
of knowledge.” (Nünning 66).
Vincent clearly looks for a way to position himself through narrative,
thereby constructing his identity not as something fixed once and for all
but as an identity in becoming. His position as a “migrant observer,” of the
migrant as observer, on the margins of German society helps him to
register events that people belonging to the majority population normally
would not note. In line with his job as a photographer, Vincent observes
Berlin through a camera eye. But although he can look at things without
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blinders, the sheer semiotic overkill is too much for him to make more
than a fleeting sense out of the many pictures he takes. The refracted way
in which German society is depicted through the photo camera eye of
Vincent is reminiscent of another book that is conjured up by the
“Goodbye” in the title of Afolabi’s book – Christopher Isherwood’s
Goodbye to Berlin. Afolabi, however, does not adopt the narrative technique
of the camera eye but rather nods towards it by incarnating the principle of
the camera eye in Vincent as the focalizer who often perceives without
properly understanding the goings-on around him.
When Isherwood’s book – a novel made up of semi-independent short
stories – begins with the sentence, “I am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking,” he offers a model for the way
Vincent comes to look at another Berlin, several decades later (Isherwood
7). This time, it is a Berlin divided by the wall due to the Cold War, a city
both in the center of the world and a meeting place of many culture but at
the same time somewhat parochial.
Ultimately, it is the stories that count and that, in their interminable
attempts to make sense of the goings-on “in-between,” create a sense of
identity that also includes a sense of home. The sense of home that
Vincent develops is tenuous, to be sure, but it is also a real possibility. This
fact is underlined in its tenuousness and its humanizing potential by the
epigraph to Afolabi's novel. This epigraph is a line from the last page of
Kazuo Ishiguro's novel of paradigmatic and almost unbearable
Englishness, The Remains of the Day: “It is curious how people can build
such warmth among themselves so swiftly.” What the narrator of
Ishiguro's novel refers to in this passage are things like banter and talk that
create a certain kind of community among complete strangers. In this
particular scene of the novel, Stevens the butler sits on a bench and listens
to conversational exchanges that reveal what he took to be a “group of
friends out together for the evening” as “strangers who had just happened
upon one another here on this spot” behind him (Ishiguro 245). When he
notes that they were laughing merrily, the narrator immediately adds the
sentence Afolabi quotes as his epigraph and that I quoted above. This
intertextual reference could then be read as a reminder of, or pointer to,
the possibility of a community to which one can in fact belong. This may
be merely a faint intimation of a utopia of belonging, a tenuous possibility
but also a real one. As Joisten points out, the condition of being on one's
way is constitutive for human beings, since they constantly move back and
forth between one's place of settlement and the openness towards the
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world (Joisten, Aufbruch, 75-6). This constant movement back and forth as
an essential feature of the human condition provides the general
framework or foil for understanding Vincent in his own very particular and
seemingly haphazard movements that shape the narrative of his identity.
By narrating his own search for a “home,” Vincent provides the readers of
Goodbye Lucille with food for thought in Heidegger’s sense: belonging to a
certain place in the way of dwelling there is something that has to be
learned. And when human beings start to think about their place in the
world they engage in the politics of belonging, or, to appropriate another
of Heidegger’s statements, they overcome their homelessness by beginning
to think about it (Heidegger 36).
But what is also present in the quote from Ishiguro is the inescapibility
of getting things wrong, of misreading them. Stevens's supposed
recognition of swiftly built-up warmth is based on a double misreading of
things as they are--warmth among strangers is not built up swiftly; the
warmth that may come into being among strangers is a most transitory
thing which can easily revert to cold indifference. Thus Stevens comes
across as the paradigmatic unreliable observer who has observed things
and goings-on around him all through the novel while hardly ever decoding
the signs properly. His semiotic incompetence increases the obligation on
the part of the reader to fill in the gaps by re-reading Ishiguro’s novel
(Vianu 239). There is something bleak to this vision of Stevens misreading
again and again the people around him, something that is barely recognized
by Stevens himself, it would seem. This uncertainty of what to make of
other human beings in one’s search for a place of one’s own is something
which also infuses the narrative stance of Afolabi's novel of goodbyes and
arrivals.
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