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Life From Elsewhere

Journeys Through World Literature

Steerforth Press

THE DREAM CALLED AFRICA

ALAIN MABANCKOU

I made a decision a long time ago not to shut myself in, to tune in to the sound and fury of the world, and never to take a rigid view of things. I didn't become a writer because I emigrated, but once I'd left it, I saw my country differently. In my early writings — all drafted in the Congo — I felt there were pieces missing; my characters were confined, stifled, they needed me to give them more space. Emigrating heightened the sense of unease which I've always believed is at the heart of all creative activity. You write because "something's not quite right", to try to move mountains or get an elephant through the eye of a needle. Writing grounds you; it's a cry in the dark, too, and the tilt of the ear to the horizon.

I was born in Africa, in Congo-Brazzaville, and spent much of my early life in France, before settling in the United States. The Congo is the base of my umbilical cord, France the adoptive land of my dreams, and America the place from which I look back on the trail I've left behind me. These three geographical places are now fused, and sometimes I forget which continent I went to bed in, which one I'm in as I write.

I've been to so many towns, and loved them all. I'm amazed by all these places that are nothing like where I grew up. I arrive with a heart that's light, and a mind free of thoughts of any kind. The true emigrant does not export his customs or tastes, seeking to impose them on the host country. It's the contrast between the place where we live and our "natural milieu" that brings childhood images back up to the surface, the street noises, the suffering, the joy of our own people. The tornado season reminds you of the virtues of a clear blue sky, the swoop of a free-flying bird and the explosion of a scent you can't quite name, until one day you remember it also grows round the back of your father's hut.

With the proliferation of means of communication we've created new regions, networks shooting off throughout the world. "Rome is no longer in Rome", the writer becomes a migratory bird, who remembers the country he came from, but chooses to stay and sing on the branch where he's perched. Do the songs of these migratory birds still come under the banner of their national literature? I'm not sure they do, any more than I believe literature can be contained within specific borders. I wouldn't mind where I lived, provided it sheltered my dreams and let me reinvent my own world. I am both of these things: writer and migratory bird.

My concept of identity goes far beyond notions of territory or blood. I am nourished by each one of my encounters. It would be futile to stick merely to one's own patch, ignoring the endless interactions and consequent complexity of this new era in which we are all connected in ways that have nothing to do with geography.

In America I have often come across French people who considered me truly their compatriot, as though away from home, irrespective of racial origins, the French were prepared to broaden their sense of citizenship. As though a clearer definition of nationhood might be reached by leaving our homeland and meeting afresh somewhere where our culture can finally become the substantial link between us.

Just as we now need to reconsider what we mean by territory, we also need to re-examine the term identity. We should really look back at the origins of the word to remind ourselves of the extent to which the fearmongers have managed to transform a fluid idea into an ideology which is both static and suicidal for a nation. In the first instance identity derives from the self, the "I", the existence of an individual within society. It is what makes an individual or a group particular and singular. Just as an individual has an identity card, a group might have one too. But what features would we register on the identity card of a group? Identity is a statement not of what we are but of what we might become through intersection and exchange, through friction and migration, in an era which looks set to become that of the utmost complexity for the human race. In this respect, as an African, I no longer consider my continent as a land apart. Africa is no longer just in Africa. As they disperse throughout the world, Africans create other "Africas" and embark on new adventures, which may considerably enhance the cultural standing of the black continent. The black diaspora thus becomes a kind of "mobile Africa", a platform for African cultures. It is the birth of a new identity, not necessarily attached to Mother Africa, but with an autonomy of its own.

What is the nature of the connection, then, between Africans born in Europe and those who remain in Africa? They are two contradictory, and occasionally conflicting cultures, because they do not share the same vision of Africa, because Africa is a dream for some and a reality for others. An African born outside the African continent may well have little sense of connection to the Africa of his ancestors, which feels remote, distorted by news reports which reflect back an image of a land in the constant throes of tragedy and incapable of exploiting its immense riches. Equally, this same African, born outside the continent, is not recognized in his or her country of adoption, where the immigration laws and the policies of European governments grow increasingly inflexible. He doesn't belong "back there", but is not quite accepted "here" either. How will he react? What he needs is a way to express his condition, and what we are seeing is the emergence of an African "subculture".

The Africans of the diaspora are certainly aware of their attachment to Africa, but they mythologize the continent, and turn increasingly to black American culture, to which they feel closer. Perhaps we should also remember that black Americans — who chose to be called "African Americans" — also mythologize the black continent. African cultures survive, but in somewhat utopian form, based on an idea we have of the black continent. More often than not, when a diasporan black returns to Africa, he — or she — experiences a sense of total disconnection. They come face to face with a world quite unlike what they imagined. We need only consider, for example, the relationships between African Africans, black Americans and other people of black origin. Their mutual incomprehension results from the difficulty of defining what might be meant by "African identity", simply because no such thing exists — or ever could exist. Because this identity is the sum of the experience of black people all over the world. The African living in Africa encounters quite different situations to those of an African living in Europe, and black Americans have a history which an African from Africa could never understand. The coloured American has been subjected to migration by deed of history: the slave trade. He has had to fight for decades for his civil rights and for recognition as a citizen of the United States. The "continental" African, on the other hand, struggles against the dictatorial regime of his country, with famine, with the consequences of underdevelopment, while the European African is constantly questioning the real nature of his condition.

Seen from this angle, globalization requires us to see ourselves as one element in a much larger, more complex culture which absorbs our individual experience and multifarious encounters. And as we come to assess the consequences of globalization, it should not surprise us to find black Africa pushed into the background, even though migration lies at the heart of its culture, and though courtesy and hospitality have long been the proudest boasts of the black continent ...

When people ask me about the influence of emigration on my writing, I find it impossible to give a precise or definitive answer. Probably because I become increasingly convinced that changing places and crossing borders feeds my anxieties and contributes to the creation of an imaginary country, a place that finally begins to look something like where I first came from, the Congo Republic.

Translated by Helen Stevenson

A COMPASS WITH TWO SOUTHS

ANDRÉS NEUMAN

They say you never forget the south. But what happens to memory when you have two souths? The best thing about not being born in Granada is that one day, as a South American boy, I had the chance to feel I was arriving in Granada. Today, almost twenty-five years later, I'm still living in Andalusia: in the south of the south of Europe.

When we were children, my brother and I felt as if we were living in a Julio Cortázar story, where there is often a door that opens onto another reality. Inside our house, within the four walls of our family microclimate, we were in Argentina. But as soon as the door was opened, we went out to play in Spain. The frontier between the two countries was no more than a doorknob. As I write now, I have that same sensation.

I think my impulses to write come mainly from a sense of perplexity towards my mother tongue. Emigration produced an intimate conflict with my own language. To be able to communicate with my new schoolmates in Granada, I spent a couple of terms mentally translating from Argentine Spanish to peninsular Spanish: I was looking for equivalences, comparing pronunciations, thinking every word from both sides. At first, this exercise cost me a great effort. After a while, however, it became a spontaneous reaction. It's as though my right ear could hear the language of one shore, my left ear that of the other shore, while my mouth tried to articulate what both of them had perceived. Nowadays I am no longer capable of thinking or writing without submitting everything I say to a kind of forked listening, possibly something akin to the bewilderment of a passenger in transit.

* * *

Granada faces a daily paradox. Traditionalist, centuries old, caught up in its own legend, its streets are however constantly invaded by hordes of polyglot tourists and drunken students (forgive my stating the obvious). It can seem as if time has stopped for the city, and yet it is filled with travellers in transit. Hardly any tourist stays more than one or two days, hardly any students stay on here after they have graduated. This fugitive destiny gives the city a certain liquid quality that modifies its tendency to stasis. In this it is similar to the architecture of the Alhambra.

In recent decades, Andalusia has undergone a rapid transformation. On the way, it has often had to face a cultural dilemma: how to modernize without defrauding the tourist? How to reshape the identity of somewhere that millions of visitors from the world over come to see thinking only of bullfights, sun and siesta? Apart from idyllic villages, flamenco and home cooking, Andalusia boasts countless artists still alive, in addition to Picasso; an intense university life; a growing scientific presence (Granada's Science Park is among the best in Europe); classical orchestras; and even good football. That is possibly why one of the biggest challenges Andalusia faces is to make its own identity more foreign.

Despite its hackneyed folkloric image, the lands of Andalusia do not offer a single aesthetic, let alone a unified spirit, whatever on earth that might mean. As a region of poor emigrants, African immigrants and adventurers to the Indies, as well as a melting pot of races for more than a thousand years, Andalusia not only receives you, but even more importantly allows you to remain a foreigner. I think this is the best thing one can say of anywhere.

* * *

The literary canon appears to contain two paradigms for a Latin American author living in another country: exile from dictatorship or economic migration. My family situation doesn't fit either of these categories. My parents' emigration from Argentina did have a political overtone, as they decided to leave when former president Menem pardoned the military leaders responsible for the dictatorship and genocide from 1976 to 1983, but no one expelled them or persecuted them, as had happened with my two uncles and aunts, as well as many thousands of other Argentine families. Nor did I have to leave for strictly professional or economic reasons, still less to get on in the literary world: I was simply a young boy who travelled with his parents as part of their luggage.

Like a piece of luggage lost in an unfamiliar airport, our homeland is a certainty which in fact depends on circumstances. For anyone who thinks it implies a specific country, spending half your life in another one creates a huge question mark. For anyone who thinks our true homeland is our childhood, it's enough to remind them that there are events that can split a childhood in two: a war, a death, exile. As a final proof of patriotism, it's often insisted that a writer's homeland is his or her language. But if this were the case, the work of those authors who changed the language they wrote in could not be explained.

I'm thinking for example of Nabokov, who following his Russian, tsarist education went on to revolutionize English prose. Or Beckett, as Irish as his master Joyce, who later became part of the French avant-garde. Or Cioran, whose originality of thought seems to me impossible to separate from his transfer from Romanian to French: a writer from the margins adopting a central language. Or the Polish Conrad, whose particular observation of mankind was as close and meticulous as was his learning of the English language. Or Rodolfo Wilcock, who can be studied as an Argentine writer in Italian. Or Hector Bianciotti, who adopted French and eventually became a member of the French Academy, only to spend all his time writing about his Argentine childhood. Or another writer I admire, Charles Simic, whose poems steeped in North American orality reflect his Balkan origin. Or the strange poet Alfredo Gangotena, who was born in Quito but emigrated to Paris. He wrote the greater part of his work in French, and continued to do so after returning to his native Ecuador. One of his poems opens with an untranslatable rhyme: "J'apprends la grammaire / de ma pensée solitaire (I learn the grammar / of my solitary thought.) In every poem, to some extent, grammar and solitude rhyme.

Many years after his death, Gangotena was finally translated into Spanish. To be translated into one's own mother tongue! Perhaps something similar happens to a writer whenever a compatriot reads him.

* * *

Literature does not really have a mother tongue. Writing translates words into a different language, whose grammar is constantly a matter of debate. The strangeness that a poem stammers in every syllable somehow reproduces the experience of the foreigner when he is trying to pronounce another tongue. In both cases, the point of departure is the feeling of distance with regard to language. Not knowing exactly how to say what we are saying.

If poetry and translation are closely connected, this is not simply because many poets work as translators. It is more because, deep down, every poem sets up a silent translation mechanism. A state of suspicion towards language. Translators need to have doubts about every word, just as poets do. To the point that foreignness ends up invading their own linguistic homeland. Like someone spending the night in a hotel in their own city.

When a book is translated, its author — if he or she has the good luck and bad taste to be still alive — not only witnesses a transfer, but also a revelation. He learns what his book is capable of saying, or what it might have said. It's often claimed that a poor translation can ruin a masterpiece. But what is not so often stated is that good translators can broaden and improve any text. In this sense, a translator is simply a super-reader. In other words, a reader with the ability to rewrite. That is why I never entirely expect a translator to respect me, or a reader to understand me. What I really want is for both of them to invade me, transcend me, to give me their passport.

* * *

There are a couple of expressions that are very common in Buenos Aires that have always surprised me: the way exterior refers to any country that is not Argentina, and the way interior is used to refer to any city that is not Buenos Aires. Beyond the geographical, these spatial terms suggest a binary way of understanding how we belong to a nation. In or out. Given the huge increase in migratory flows over the past few decades, this characterization may already have started to become obsolete.

Nowadays there are many third realities and frontier identities. That is true for the hundreds of thousands of Latin American families living in Spain, where they have became mixed, and their memory, language and emotions have become hybrid. Can it be said that this phenomenon is exterior to the culture and history of their native lands? Many of these immigrants have not only mixed with their Spanish neighbours, but also have children born there. This will necessarily mean a reformulation of national identity on both shores: there are increasing numbers of Spaniards brought up by Latin American families; more and more native Latin Americans who have grown up in Spain. There is something absurd about asking them what they are, which side they come from, which shore they prefer to give up. Like it or not, they are frontier citizens.

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Excerpted from Life From Elsewhere by Asmaa Al-Ghul, Chan Koonchung, Amit Chaudhuri, Mahmoud Dowlatabadi, Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, Hanna Krall, Andrey Kurkov, Alain Mabanckou, Andrés Neuman, Elif Shafak, Samar Yazbek. Copyright © 2015 Pushkin Press. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
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