The impossibility of return

Frontiers

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 54-86

  Williams, Piper Kendrix ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33847080912     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/fro.2007.0009     Document Type: Review

References (83)

1. Carole Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1994). Davies uses the phrase "migration horror stories," anecdotes of black women's experiences as they migrate, to disrupt the linearity of her analysis in her chapter "Writing Home."
2. Ibid., 21.
3. Caroline B. Brettell, "Theorizing Migration in Anthropology: The Social Construction of Networks, Identities, Communities, and Globalscapes," in Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, ed. Caroline B. Brettell and James F. Hollifield (New York: Routledge, 2001), 109.
4. Edouard Glissant, Le Discours Antillias (Paris: Seuil, 1981). A partial translation by J. Michael Dash has been published as Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), 16.1 have modified Dash's translation: Dash uses "reversion" and "diversion" for "retour" and "dé tour" in Glissant's French. In these cases, I have used the original French.
5. Winston James, "Migration, Racism and Identity Formation: The Caribbean Experience in Britain" in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, ed. Winston James and Clive Harris (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 243.
6. Marita Golden, Migrations of the Heart An Autobiography (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 65.
7. Ibid., 14.
8. James refers to the idea of "pigmentation" in Caribbean cultures in his essay. See Migration, Racism, and Identity Formation, 234-35.
9. Nègre in French translates as both negro and nigger.
10. Maryse Condé, Hérémakhonon (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1982), in.
11. Myriam J. A. Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 215.
12. Golden, Migrations, 3-4.
13. Ibid., 73.
14. Ibid., 65.
15. Ibid., emphasis mine.
16. Condé, Hérémakhonon, 56, emphasis mine. The final idea appears in English in the original French edition.
17. Ibid., 61.
18. Ama Ata Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa (London: Longman African Classic, 1987), 9. The play was initially staged in Ghana in 1964.
19. In her analysis of the play, Angeletta K. Gourdine, drawing on W.E.B. DuBois, argues that "Eulalie's vision of Africa epitomizes a double consciousness: she recognizes that part of her is linked to Africa as geographical and cultural space, yet her knowledge is encoded in an Other discourse. Much like the speaker in (Men's "Heritage" identifies Africa with exotic scenes of "copper sun, or scarlet sea" and "spicy grove, cinnamon tree," Eulalie's idyllic Eden constructs an exotic African text." (See "Slavery in the Diaspora Consciousness: Ama Ata Aidoo's Conversations," in Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo, ed. Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and Gay Wilentz (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999), 33.
20. Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, 24.
21. Ibid., 9.
22. Ibid., 10.
23. I use the phrase "fall apart" with a nod to the title of Chinua Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart (London: Anchor Books, 1994).
24. Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity, 13-14.
25. James, "Migration, Racism and Identity Formation," 248.
26. The important difference in these examples may be the motivation to migrate. In the Caribbean, blacks migrate to European homelands and so are migrating to a colonial homeland. In the case of the texts studied in this article, the motivation to migrate is to leave the colonial or racist home in the New World and "return" to Africa.
27. Ibid., 248-49.
28. Golden, Migrations, 67.
29. James, "Migration, Racism and Identity Formation," 249.
30. Condé, Hérémakhonon, 4.
31. Golden, Migrations, 98.
32. Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, 17.
33. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). In his chapter titled "Diasporas," James Clifford traces the ways "diasporas exist in practical, and at times principled, tension with nativist identity formations.... Indeed, claims of primary link with the 'homeland' usually must override conflicting rights and the history of other in the land. Even ancient homelands have seldom been pure or discreet" (252). Clifford's analysis highlights the problems those seeking connection in the diaspora confront when they romantically imagine a homeland.
34. Ato's mother is not asserting a unique bias or misunderstanding. Instead her ideas about race and nationality suggest a larger conversation about the relationship between ideas of American identity and whiteness. See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993).
35. Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, 18.
36. Ibid., 18.
37. Ibid.
38. James, "Migration, Racism and Identity Formation," 248-49.
39. Davies, Black Women, Writing, and Identity, 4.
40. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, "Feminism and Cultural Memory," Signs 28, no. 1 (2002): 2.
41. Golden, Migrations, 86.
42. Ibid., 69.
43. Ibid., 72.
44. Ibid., 58.
45. Ibid.
46. Condé, Hérémakhonon, 13.
47. Golden, Migrations, 86.
48. Ibid., 147-48.
49. Brettell, Migration Theory, no, emphasis mine.
50. Chancy, Searching for Safe Spaces, 4.
51. Ibid., 24.
52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 69.
54. Ibid., 42.
55. Ibid., 67.
56. See Celeste Fraser Delgado, "Mother Tongues and Childless Women: The Construction of 'Kenyan"Womanhood,'" in The Politics of (M)othering: Womanhood, Identity, and Resistance in African Literature, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka (London: Routledge, 1997), 132.
57. Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, 39.
58. The idea that a woman's lack of children can always be understood as barrenness, essentially natural and not manipulated by individuals, resonates with Nana's earlier metaphor of tree roots to understand tribal identity. In the cultural context of the village, people's lives are easily interpreted through naturalized metaphors. Women's reproductive choice is missing in this narrative. This worldview may travel through the diaspora, but like all things routed through trans-Atlantic journeys, much is lost.
59. Golden, Migrations, 60.
60. Ibid., 105.
61. Ibid., 87.
62. Ibid., 61.
63. Ibid., 154.
64. Ibid., 113.
65. Ibid., 142.
66. Ibid., 143.
67. Ibid., 114.
68. Condé, Hérémakhonon, 77.
69. Ibid., 71.
70. Ibid., 176.
71. Ibid., 179.
72. Ibid., 182.
73. Ibid., 182-83, emphasis mine.
74. Golden, Migrations, 204.
75. Ibid., 206.
76. Ibid., 215.
77. Aidoo, The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa, 45.
78. Ibid., 9.
79. Ibid., 47.
80. Ibid., 48.
81. Ibid., 51.
82. Ibid., 52.
83. Ibid., 234.