literature’ as it “ not only calls for a redrawing of the map of literary history but also challenges the way literary studies is often organized in nationally separated contexts” (Frank 2008, p. 10). It is this term I will use when discussing the novels and related texts in this chapter, viewed within the wider realms of contemporary and postcolonial literatures.
Literature as a Cultural Map of Migration
While there is precedent for using literature as a cultural artefact for better understanding migration in several disciplines, it has yet to be seen or utilised as a map of contemporary migration. The editors of Writing Across Worlds: Literature and Migration offer us an argument for using literature as a way of gaining insights into the experience of migration:
Literary accounts focus in a very direct and penetrating way on issues such as place perception, landscape symbolism, senses of displacement and transformation, communities lost and created anew, exploitation, nostalgia, attitudes towards return, family relationships, self-denial and self-discovery and many more. (King, Connell and White (eds.) 1995, p. x)
Amanda Lagji has moved this argument forward by writing on the inter-relationship between literature and mobility studies as literature is “embedded in and reflective of cultural imaginaries” and “helps us to see how we make meaning out of, and subscribe meaning to mobilities, foregrounding the interpretive work of making sense of movement and stillness” (Lagji 2018, p. 7). If we look specifically at mobility in terms of migration, contemporary fiction, and more specifically migration literature, can thus be argued as ‘making meaning out of’ both the journeys described in such works and the moments of stillness during which waiting (for a chance to cross a border, for news from a smuggler, for money to arrive, for an asylum claim etc.) is also a form of moving forward. This discussion feeds into the idea of contemporary fiction as a cultural map of migration. As the borders are crossed, so the map is drawn, but the authors of, and the visible bodies within, this map is not only the state actors who have imposed the border upon the landscape, but the border crossers and border writers themselves.
Landscapes, Vulnerable Bodies and Imagined Others
In The Gurugu Pledge a group of black Africans who have travelled from all over the continent wait on Mount Gurugu in Northern Morocco for their chance to cross the border into Melilla, Spain. They play football and tell stories to pass the time. When two women in the group become ill after a sexual assault and one of them experiences a miscarriage, the group tries to climb the fence on mass, leaving the women, who are too weak to climb, tied to the top to be found and taken care of. It is likely that they die there. The character with the last word, for the narration switches in and out of third person and inhabits different characters along the way, decides not to cross and remains on the mountain but facing south, towards the Zambezi river and away from Europe. At this moment, a common understanding of the journey is inverted. The route charted on maps of modern migration takes us from the south to the north, yet the final geographical gaze of the novel faces pointedly in the opposite direction.
In Signs Preceding the End of the World, Makina travels from Mexico to the USA in search of her brother and to deliver a package for one the men who help her cross. Surviving a clash at the border during which she is shot, she makes her way to the city where her brother should be, but she cannot find him. In the end she discovers that he has changed his identity, taking on that of a young American man who signed up to the army without his parents’ permission, and thus she realises her brother will not come home. Makina, having always believed she would return, also ends up getting American papers.
The novels deal specifically with liminal areas, the Spanish/Moroccan border and US/Mexico border respectively and their characters’ identities are shaped in relation to the landscape they inhabit, the cultures they bring with them, and the cultures they meet in the countries they journey to. The landscape then must also be shaped by them in some way. Both novels also include the epic themes of journey, death and the underworld and discussions on migration, immigration, nativism, profiling, transnationalism, transculturalism, language hybridity, the apocalypse/end of the world, thus lending themselves to an investigation such as this.
In both works there is a tension between the body and the border. The vulnerability exposed by the breakdown of previous collective identities and the creation of a new identity, that of the migrant. In The Gurugu Pledge we see this clearly when one of the protagonists states: “They told me I no longer have a country, that’s what they said at the border: you’ve no country any more, now you’re just black.” (Laurel 2017, p. 75). This happens as he crosses into Morocco. The transition between one state and another is thus both physical, as in the crossing of a boundary between two territories, and internal, changing the very nature of his identity. Makina’s search for her lost brother in Signs Preceding the End of the World can also be viewed as a search for a stable identity within a new culture. Whereas the characters portrayed as living on Mount Gurugu in Morocco, located near the Spanish territory of Melilla, speak of their stories and journeys as a way of both commemorating and shedding their pasts, a process which feels necessary for them to survive this passage into a new culture that awaits them on the other side of the fence.
In his exploration of diasporic identity Brah also expresses this link been migrant identity and the repetition of narrative:
This means that these multiple journeys may configure into one journey via a confluence of narratives as it is lived and re-lived, produced, reproduced and transformed through individual as well as collective memory and re-memory. It is within this confluence of narrativity that ‘diasporic community’ is differently imagined under different historical circumstances. By this I mean that the identity of a diasporic imagined community is far from fixed or pre-given. It is constituted within the crucible of the materiality of everyday life; in the everyday stories we tell ourselves individually and collectively. (Brah 2003, p. 183).
Although this echoes the repetition of stories within the camp on Mount Gurugu, I would argue that a diasporic perspective does not cover the transient nature of the migrant camps we now have at the borders of Europe and within Europe itself, that this situation more generally, and specifically within The Gurugu Pledge, somehow creates a further displacement, as there is nowhere to settle, yet history has also been lost. This is also represented by the ‘invisible’ nature of these spaces within traditional maps, and the invisibility thus transferred to the occupants.
One character in The Gurugu Pledge states: “none of us are from anywhere” (Laurel 2017, p. 121), during the process of storytelling, and another, “…I will not mention anyone or anywhere by name” (Laurel 2017, p. 15). As Carol Phillips notes, a migrant’s relationship to home can become complicated, both as a form of protection (to be identified by their true origins may endanger the traveler), and emotionally as there is often no possibility to return to the place in which you once ‘belonged’: “Our identities are fluid. Belonging is a contested state. Home is a place riddled with vexing questions” (Phillips 2001 p. 6). A map of this nature thus naturally draws lines between countries and interspaces which may seem geographically distant and culturally disparate.
Signs Preceding the End of the World goes as far as to use geographical markers as chapter breaks—The Earth, The Water Crossing, The Place Where The Hills Meet, The Obsidian Mound, The Place Where The Wind Cuts Like A Knife, The Place Where Flags Wave, The Place Where People’s Hearts Are Eaten, The Snake That Lies in Wait, The Obsidian Place With No Windows Or Holes For The Smoke. These headings are laid out to depict Makina’s journey, creating a map personal to her, ‘drawn’ in her own words and reflective of her culture, while also suggestive of the ancient pathway to the underworld as understood in ancient Aztec mythology and consequently referencing Spanish colonial history in Mexico. The Gurugu Pledge instead uses stories with geographical descriptions to map people’s journeys and experiences across the continent—even though this is most often done without place names.
