5.UNITS - Am Lit III - Chimamanda Ngozi  Adichie & NoViolet Bulawaio

The New African Diaspora

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie & NoViolet Bulawayo

• Recent migration (XX century) from Africa to Europe and America
• Diaspora of enslavement vs diaspora of imperialism (cf. Ali Mazrui)
• In the US, the number of Black African residents has increased steadily since the 1970s and keeps growing
• The number of Black Americans who are not African Americans is growing > expanding the notion of blackness in the US

"For the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade. [...] More have been coming here annually—about 50,000 legal immigrants—than in any of the peak years of the middle passage across the Atlantic, and more have migrated here from Africa since 1990 than in nearly the entire preceding two centuries."Sam Roberts, The New York Times, 2005

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of legal black African immigrants in the United States about doubled, to around one million. During that single decade, [...] more black Africans arrived in this country on their own than were imported directly to North America during the more than three centuries of the slave trade. Sam Roberts, The New York Times, 2014

DIASPORIC IDENTITY AND TRANSNATIONAL BLACKNESS

Stuart Hall on CULTURAL IDENTITY and DIASPORIC IDENTITY:

• cultural identity: "one, shared culture, a sort of collective 'one true self', hiding inside the many other, more superficial or artificially imposed 'selves', which people with a shared history and ancestry hold in common. [...] This 'oneness', underlying all the other, more superficial differences, is the truth, the essence [...] of the black experience."
• cultural identity: "a matter of 'becoming' as well as of 'being'. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation."
• the diaspora experience "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."

Aida Mulumeh, 2014

HOW TO WRITEABOUT AFRICA

Binyavanga Wainaina, Granta, 2005

Teju Cole, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Yaa Gyasi, NoViolet Bulawayo

“They (read: we) are Afropolitans—the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon, or collected already, at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you. You’ll know us by our funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes. Some of us are ethnic mixes, e.g. Ghanaian and Canadian, Nigerian and Swiss; others merely cultural mutts: American accent, European affect, African ethos. Taiye Selasi, 2005

Afropolitanism is an aesthetic and a particular poetic of the world. It is a way of being in the world, refusing on principle any form of victim identity—which does not mean that it is not aware of the injustice and violence inflicted on the continent and its people by the law of the world. It is also a political and cultural stance in relation to the nation, to race, and to the issue of difference in general. Achille Mbembe, 2005

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE (1977)

• Nigerian-born
• also a public speaker
• Internationally acclaimed:
• Purple Hibiscus (2003)
• Half of A Yellow Sun (2006)
• Americanah (2013)
• We Should All Be Feminists (2014)

"YOU IN AMERICA" / "THE THING AROUND YOUR NECK" (2001)

You believed that everybody in America had a car and a gun. Your uncles and aunts and cousins believed it too. Right after you won the American visa lottery, they told you, “In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don’t buy a gun like those Americans.” [...]

You wanted to write that everybody in America did not have a big house and car, you still were not sure about the guns though because they might have them inside their bags and pockets. It wasn’t just your parents you wanted to write, it was your friends and cousins and aunts and uncles. But you could never afford enough handbags and shoes and vitamin supplements to go around and still pay your rent, so you wrote nobody. Nobody knew where you were because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible and tried to walk through your room wall into the hallway and when you bumped into the wall, it left bruises on your arms. Once, Juan asked if you had a man who hit you because he would take care of him and you laughed a mysterious laugh. At nights, something wrapped itself around your neck, something that very nearly always choked you before you woke up.

AMERICANAH (2013)

Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea of what that was.

NOVIOLET BULAWAYO (1981)

• Zimbabwean-born
• “I come from a place of colorful names and identity’s a big part of my creative process […] I needed a meaningful identity that could carry the weight of whatever I’m doing”.
• “We are living at a time when the world is becoming smaller—throw a stone in a crowded place and you will hit a couple of people who come from somewhere, who are removed from their homelands for one reason or another. I wanted the novel [We Need New Names] to mirror this reality”

WE NEED NEW NAMES (2013)

We are on our way to Budapest: Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina and me. We are going even though we are not allowed to cross Mzilikazi Road, even though Bastard is supposed to be watching his little sister Fraction, even though Mother would kill me dead if she found out; we are just going. There are guavas to steal in Budapest, and right now I’d rather die for guavas. We didn’t eat this morning, and my stomach feels like somebody just took a shovel and dug everything out.