L. Glover
Notes
1 1 Frantz Fanon, Peau noir, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952): 50. “Parler une langue, c’est assumer un monde, une culture.”
Foreword Saidiya Hartman
An autobiography of reading, observes Dionne Brand, offers the possibility of troubling the terms of being and the social arrangements produced by colonial texts and antiblackness. An autobiography embraces multiplicity, serial and collective iterations of Black life and becoming, in contrast to the autobiography where the definite article identifies “the subject to be made through colonial pedagogies” and the imposed plot of development and belonging. “An autobiography gestures to the world of a reading self,” writes Brand.1 The open question is how might acts of reading trouble, if not topple, the subject, the plot, and the world created by slavery, capitalism, and coloniality. Maboula Soumahoro’s Black is the Journey, Africana the Name is an autobiography of reading, a critical memoir that also gestures to a self shaped and created by reading practices, more specifically, a self engendered by diaspora literacy.2 Black study, as elaborated here, is not confined to matters of curriculum or the reading list, but is an embodied practice and a labor of the heart. The memoir, crafted through an extended set of textual encounters, is an account of linguistic estrangement and chosen blackness. Soumahoro’s autobiography of reading engages a range of thinkers and texts, most notably Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Frantz Fanon, Yaa Gayasi, Paul Gilroy, Edouard Glissant, Stuart Hall, Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Achille Mbembe, and Léonaro Miano, in explicating the history of the Triangle, the symbol for the three continents involved in the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. These writers have provided a critical lexicon for understanding blackness and diaspora, a knowledge suited to the dimensions of the tout monde, and their imprint on this work of autotheory is indelible. Among the central questions of this text: What is the relation between lived experience and the production of ideas? What language is best able to convey the Black presence in France? What justifies the use of the “I” in scholarly work and critical theory? The text wrestles with these questions at the level of form and proposes an answer in a journey through a world of ideas and across the space of the Atlantic. The “I” of this critical memoir is forged by transatlantic histories and Black geographies.3
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name traces Soumahoro’s development as a young woman of African descent in France, and the belated recognition or embrace of Black identity in the French Hexagon, a context which makes nearly impossible any understanding of her position in the world or her daily experiences as a Black girl growing up in the banlieue. The brutal incommensurability between the routine violence of racism and the seeming neutrality of the discourse of universalism and color-blindness thwart any effort to think or address the processes of racialization and enclosure in the metropole, let alone undo them. With disavowal and blindness as the official mandate of the nation-state, Soumahoro endeavors to find a way of naming the self and narrating her experience in defiance of the imposed terms (of impaired citizen and not-quite French); she is unwilling to be silent about the forms of address that imperil and disfigure Black life or the racial reason cloaked as education and graduate training. This lucid and impassioned book attempts nothing short of dismantling the master’s house.4
A journey of dispersal and gathering might be the best way to describe Soumahoro’s reckoning with the histories of the Black Atlantic and African diaspora. Black is the Journey, Africana the Name recalibrates the conception of diaspora by amplifying the presence of Africa in the diaspora, not simply as origin, but as haunted and disfigured by the millions gone or lost to the slave trade, by the graves without bodies. The text embraces a language of blackness, which is figured by histories of struggle and emergent solidarities across the globe. It is an autobiographical example of the forces of dispossession and racialization that have produced the diaspora, as well as the exigencies and predation of capital, the interminable and recurring wars, and the longing for the good life that continue to expand and reshape the contours of blackness. This insightful and persuasive meditation on the meaning of the terms “Black,” “Africa,” and “diaspora” explores the legacy of transatlantic slavery, racialization, coloniality, and impaired citizenship.
The book is less interested in providing an overview of this history, than in attending to the character of Black existence in the contemporary world. It situates France firmly within this history of slavery and coloniality, yet this history is disavowed and whitewashed in the republic’s instrumental deployment of universalism and fidelity to Reason. The significance of colonial slavery for Blacks across the globe was that it “inscribed a new sociopolitical order on the body.” Soumahoro deftly attends to the burden of racialized embodiment. To have a body is to be tethered to the world and assigned a place within it, to be condemned to the lowest rung in the vertical hierarchy of human life. These histories of slavery and coloniality are written on the body, lived in the present, and traverse the diaspora, establishing relations across the Atlantic (even when this relation is defined by misunderstanding and friction, what Brent Edwards describes as décalage, “the joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation and the point of linkage”).5 These histories and their repercussions are shared in the Triangle and in the world, even as they are lived differently. They have produced the shared features of Black life in the modern world and bridge seemingly diverse formations. We are all living in the wake of slavery.6
In her journeys across the Atlantic and graduate education in the US, Soumahoro discovers a body of critical thought and literature, a frame of reference for understanding the histories and structures that make Black lives precarious and disposable in America, Europe, and Africa, a conceptual toolbox capable of perceiving and attending to the Black presence in France. This detour through the US and the history and literature of Black life in the Americas leads Soumahoro to claim blackness – she became Black of her “own volition.” Soumahoro’s retracing of the Triangle and the journey from the French metropole to New York City, a reverse journey of the Black Americans who traveled to Paris in the hopes of escaping racism, is a detour, an indirection that allows her to engage critically the situation of Black Europe at the level of generality. “The detour,” as Glissant writes, “is the ultimate resort of a population whose domination by an Other is concealed: it then must search elsewhere for the principle of domination, which is not evident in the country itself: because the mode of domination (assimilation) is the best of camouflages.”7 This indirection, according to Brent Edwards, can indeed be “strategically necessary in certain conditions.”8 It proves to be essential for Soumahoro. It makes possible the production of “a common elsewhere” shared by the Black world. Glissant writes that “detour is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by return: not a return to the dream of origin, or the immobile One of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement from which one was forcefully turned away.”9 Soumahoro confirms this. As she writes: “The detour had proven necessary, fundamental. It had been a matter of distancing myself in order to return. It had been a matter of distancing myself in order to return under better circumstances – by putting an end to all that had been silenced, or unconsidered when it came to race. After ten years, my return to my homeland was complicated” (p. 60). Soumahoro returns to the point of entanglement, her natal land, the place that denies her blackness and stigmatizes it, anchoring her in a body perpetually inscribed as a stranger.
For Soumahoro, the meaning of diaspora is one of expanding and overlapping multiplicities – a rhizomatic network affiliating Africa, Black Europe, and the Americas. There is a Black diaspora and there is an African diaspora. The former is articulated through histories of slavery and dispossession, coloniality and relentless acts of resistance; the latter circles round and gestures toward Africa presented as an ideal, historical origin, point of departure, lost homeland, and figure for imagining a future life, an anticipated freedom. This Africa is the vessel for emergent and realigned sociality and radical possibility.
