“There is . . . a consistent intellectual trend within the nationalist consensus that is vitally critical, that refuses the short-term blandishments of separatist and triumphalist slogans in favour of the larger, more generous human realities of community among cultures, peoples, and societies. This community is the real human liberation portended by the resistance to imperialism” (217).
Hailu’s representation of nationhood both overlaps with and departs from Benedict Anderson’s influential 1983 analysis of nationalism, Imagined Communities. Of the conscripts, Hailu writes that “all of them, together, were thinking about their country at the same time” (16) as they travel on ship; when they awake the next day, the land is still visible, “which made them happy even though they didn’t know the place. It was a vast piece of land that linked with and formed part of their country” (16). This synchronized conjuring of, and attachment to, a shared space beyond knowable locality somewhat corresponds to Anderson’s account of the nation as “imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). But rather than unknown humans, it is the unknown land itself that provides the foundation for their imagined communion and identity. When it comes to the human members of this space, Hailu offers particularity, not abstract generality: “Those with parents and siblings and those with wives and children were absorbed in their memories. Those who did not leave behind families thought of their friends or people who were close to them” (16). The shared physical landmass mediates heterogeneous human networks, in a dialectic that is absent from Anderson. Of those networks, it should be remarked that Hailu’s novel consistently features a variety of primary affective relations. The protagonist Tuquabo’s primary relationship is with his parents; for the bereaved woman who features towards the end of the book, her significant relative is her deceased brother. At no point does Hailu endow romantic or marital relationships with an elevated social or ethical significance, nor advocate a rigid gender hierarchy. Arguably, his approach delinks the projects of patriarchy and nationalism and criticizes the version of masculinity that prompts Tuquabo to fight. There is little support in the novel for viewing the nation through the ideological lens of heterosexual reproduction, a view that feminists have critiqued for reducing women to the role of biological reproducers, cultural transmitters, or symbolic abstractions of the nation.
If the land mediates national identity, for Hailu, the sea (helped by God) mediates international identity. The novel’s narrative logic is too complex for detailed discussion here. It involves the spiritual framing of the sea as a sublime, humbling power that causes the soldiers to appreciate the “expansiveness of the human race and culture inhabiting the world” (19) and to become critical of the ethnocentric insularity that frequently accompanies landlocked existence. Hailu celebrates and calls for cosmopolitan connection and exchange in a way that does not seek to erase but rather to complement national, cultural, and religious differences. He positions international Christianity (in the form of the Coptic Church) as a historical precedent for a future pan-Africanism, less for doctrinaire than for pragmatic reasons. For the Eritrean soldiers who sail on this ship, their biblical knowledge works to identify, authorize, and venerate the foreign geography and ancient monuments that they encounter as they travel north. Their encounter with the Suez Canal provides the positive emblem of a modernity that enables Asian and African connection, accomplished through “the ingenious Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps” (20). As such, the canal, and de Lesseps, contrast in chapter 2 with the city of Asmara, which the Italians are said to have made “perfect,” “beautiful and affecting,” “with well-made streets and roads lined with trees on each side” (11). This opening affirmative portrait of Asmara immediately gives way to Hailu’s horrific train station scene, where, as previously discussed, train carriages devour soldiers and the station unleashes violent chaos. What the Suez scene reveals is that the modern technology introduced by Europe is not problematic in itself; the problem lies with the imperial social relations which it has accompanied.
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