literary homelands essay

Imaginary Homelands Summary & Analysis

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Introduction

The essay Imaginary Homelands describes the plight of the writers in the Diaspora as they attempt to reconnect with their homelands. However, the reconnection fails miserably due to incomplete memory. They are completely out of touch with their homelands and hence grossly alienated.

This essay will focus on the features of semantic and lexical structures employed in order to highlight the question of memory fragmentation. These are metaphors, semantic fields, intertextuality and text types, and register.

Imaginary Homelands Summary

Imaginary Homelands is a collection of essays by Salman Rushdie. The book written between 1981 and 1992 focuses on the author’s experiences in the time when Indira Gandhi was ruling India. The book is divided into six parts: Midnight’s children, The politics of India and Pakistan, Literature, Arts & media, Experience of migrants, and The question of Palestine.

Imaginary Homelands Analysis

Metaphor in imaginary homelands.

There is extensive use of metaphor in the essay Imaginary Homelands by Rushdie. This is driven by the need to convey the theme of alienation that people in the Diaspora are invariably plagued with.

Mostly, the exiles have to do with faint memories, which have gaping hiatuses and therefore, they have to fill in using their imaginations (Seyhan 2000). The use of metaphor, it can be argued, deliberately reflects on Rushdie’s personal history. The metaphors have been discussed as follows.

The old photograph that hangs in the room where Rushdie works is metaphorical. It represents a section of Rushdie’s past from which he has been totally alienated. He was not yet born when the photograph was taken. The old photograph is significant because it prompts Rushdie to visit the house immortalised on it.

This is a black and white image of the house, and as Rushdie discovers, his childhood memories were also monochromatic (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This implies that his childhood memories were untainted.

Pillars of salt have also been used metaphorically. It is an allusion to the biblical story of Lot and his wife in which the latter turned into a pillar of salt upon looking back at the destruction that was befalling their homeland. Pillars of salt, therefore, refers to the dangers faced by those in exile when they try to reconnect with their homelands.

This point to the trouble that Rushdie faced from his motherland when he wrote the novel Satanic Verses which featured Prophet Mohammad sacrilegiously. Consequently, a fatwa was declared on him and he had to be given a round-the-clock police protection by the British government.

Then, there is the metaphor of the broken mirror. The metaphor denotes the distant and almost obscure memories that those in exile have about their homeland. The memories are made up of many pieces that cannot be patched up together. The fact that some crucial pieces are missing aggravates matters. In extreme cases, those living in diaspora have no recollection at all about their homeland.

Consequently, they resort to imaginations to complete the picture. In the essay, the author writes: “…we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). He further admits that he made Saleem, the narrator in one of his earlier works; suspect that “his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory…” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10).

Closely related to the metaphor of broken mirror is the reference to shards of memory. Shards are small jagged pieces that result when something is shattered. It is impossible to reconstruct the original item using them. More often than not, a considerable number of them are irretrievable. This is a reflection of the hopelessly inadequate memories about their homelands that are nursed by those in the diaspora.

They can only afford tiny fragments of memories, which cannot be put together to build a complete picture of their motherland. They then resort to the “broken pots of antiquity” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) to reconstruct their past. Rushdie further argues that as human beings, we are capable only of fractured perceptions (Rushdie 1991, p. 12) because we are partial beings.

Rushdie also likens meaning to a shaky edifice built from scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films among others. This implies that the meaning attached to the memories that those in exile harbour is constantly being amended. The shaky edifice has to receive constant patches and repairs in order to maintain it.

Semantic Fields in Imaginary Homelands

Brinton (2000) defines semantic field as a segment of reality symbolized by a set of related words (p. 112). The words in a semantic field share a common semantic property. There are various semantic fields in Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands.

Rushdie uses the expression “imaginary homelands” as a powerful metaphor to elucidate the shattered vision of the migrant who is abroad. This semantic field denotes the preoccupation with lost memories experienced by those in exile. To them, home is not a real place, but an imaginary rendition authored by discontinuous fragments of memory conceived in imagination.

According to Rushdie, it is impossible to reclaim the lost memories and, therefore, the need to recreate a vastly fictionalized “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 1991, p. 10). This amplifies the alienation faced by those in exile.

Another semantic field is evident in the expressions “lost time” and “lost city” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9-10). In Rushdie’s essay, they refer to a lost history, which those in the Diaspora cannot recover. What are available are the disjointed shards of memory that are scarcely sufficient to build a history on.

Due to this, Rushdie is confined to creating his own version of India and as a result, he ends up writing a novel of memory and about memory. It implies that everything is lost thus making the exiles more alienated from their homelands.

The admonition on the bridge over a local railway line, “Drive like Hell and you will get there” (Rushdie 1991, p. 11) is another semantic field. This statement is curiously ambiguous. On the one hand, it may be a warning against over-speeding whose end result is likely to be death through a possible accident.

On the other hand, it might be a rallying call to drivers to zoom over the bridge so as to get to their destinations on time. Rushdie envisions a contradiction in this ambiguity. He holds fast to it because it is one of the fragments of memories about his homeland.

Then, there is the way in which Rushdie uses the expression “our worlds”. This is a semantic field that denotes people’s individual experiences, aspirations and dreams. In this essay, the author states that individuals have the freedom to describe their worlds according to the way they perceive them.

This is a deliberate attempt to escape the harsh reality of lost memories. He can find refuge in the use of imagination to recreate his own world; one that consists of memory fragments. It underscores the biting alienation afflicting those in Diaspora.

Imaginary Homelands: Narrative Forms

Rushdie’s essay is chiefly a literary text. This is because it employs narration as the method of presentation. The author narrates his moving experiences when he visits Bombay after many years.

He narrates: “A few years ago, I revisited Bombay, which is my lost city, after an absence of something like half my life.” (Rushdie 1991, p. 9). This is an effective way of reaching out to the readers, most of whom may not be familiar with the feeling of alienation experienced in exile.

The narrative forms involve orientation, which sets the scene, time and the characters in the essay. In this case, the scene is Bombay; the time is a few years ago; and the characters include the narrator himself. There is also the compilation, which outlines the problem that leads to a series of events.

In this essay, the old photograph made the author visit Bombay after many years. Narrative forms also involve a resolution. This is the answer to the problem elucidated in the essay. In this essay, the author reverts to the use of imagination to make up for lost memories. He creates the India that he can afford.

Being an essay, it can also be considered a factual text. This is because it entails a discussion on the problem of a fragmented memory. The author draws the reader’s attention to the plight of emigrant troubled by a lost history. Plagued by insufficient recollection, the author, as a literary artist, discovers that he is less than a sage.

Imaginary Homelands: Text Register

Closely related to the text type is the use of register. Register refers to the set of meanings, the configuration of semantic patterns that are typically drawn upon under the specific conditions, along with words and structures that are used with the realization of these meanings (Halliday 1978, p. 23). This draws interest to Rushdie’s contextual use of language in the essay Imaginary Homelands .

Rushdie examines the complex situation that encumbers the writer in the diaspora as they attempt to transform nostalgia into an ideal past (Mannur 2010, p. 28). But seeing the past through broken mirrors diminishes the idealised image of the past.

He further draws an analogy between the old black and white photograph and his childhood perceptions. History had added colour to those perceptions, but nostalgia has drained hue out of them: “the colours of history had seeped out of my mind’s eye” (Rushdie, 1991, p. 9).

Allusions in Imaginary Homelands

The essay Imaginary Homelands makes references to various other texts. These intertextual allusions serve to reinforce the plight of those living in exile. They heighten the alienation and the feeling of loss, which arise as a result of loss of memory. They also serve to build on the plot of the essay; thus, emphasizing the subject matter.

The first reference is made to L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go Between . The first sentence of the novel forms the caption to the old photograph in the author’s room. It states that the past is a foreign country. This implies that those in exile are not familiar with their pasts.

However, the author makes a fervent attempt to escape the harsh reality of the statement by trying to reverse it. He would have preferred to grasp his humble beginning, but unfortunately, he is hopelessly trapped in the present. So, the past becomes a lost home, a lost city shrouded in the mists of lost time (Rushdie 1991, p. 9).

Another instance of intertextuality is evident in the use of the metaphor “pillar of salt”. This has been borrowed from the biblical story in which fire rains down on Sodom and Gomorrah, home to Lot and his wife. Lot’s wife turns back, contrary to the instructions given by the angel, and turns into a pillar of salt.

Similarly, those in forced exile face potential demise should they turn back home. A few do turn back home in spite of the risk they expose themselves to. As for Rushdie, the people back home are baying for his blood as controversy rages about his novel, Satanic Verses.

Rushdie also makes reference to a book he is scripting while in north London. He looks out the window onto a city that is inherently dissimilar to the one being illustrated in the book. This instance is quite relevant here in that it helps bring to the fore the disparity between reality and fiction.

The city described in the book being written is built on some obscure memories, which result from missing history. This is the distortion occasioned by broken memories. In that book, the author makes the narrator to suspect that his mistakes are as a result of distorted memories.

The author draws a parallel to his other work of art, Midnight’s Children . He is still grappling with the disturbing issue of memory. Before penning the book, he spends a long time trying to recall what Bombay, his homeland, looked like in the 50s and 60s. Due to insufficient memory, he shifts the setting to Agra under the pretext of creating a certain joke about the Taj Mahal.

What is evident here is the substitution made by individuals afflicted with incomplete recall in order to make up for the gaps in their memories. This is what informs the rather baffling conclusion that writers are no longer sages, dispensing the wisdom of the centuries (Rushdie 1991, p. 12).

The essay has also borrowed from John Fowle’s Daniel Martin. The opening line in this book thus goes: “Whole sight: or all the rest is desolation” (Rushdie 1991, p. 12). The statement seems to be implying that the problem of broken memories could be universal. It is felt by all, not just Rushdie alone. It also points to the fact that it is not possible to experience a complete memory recall.

Any attempt to total recall may only lead to desolation. This also explains why there is a universal resort to imagination to complete the missing picture. Consequently, writers cease to be sages as they have no wisdom to dispense – only an imaginary homeland.

Rushdie has successfully employed the various features of semantics and lexicon structure in order to express his meaning. Through the use of metaphors and intertextuality, the author successfully depicts the problem of a fragmented memory and explains why those in exile have to resort to imagination in order to recreate the homes they can never attain (Ramsey and Ganapathy-Doré, 2011, p. 162).

The text type used is also appropriate since it helps connect with the reader who may not be familiar to the alienating experiences of those in exile and the reason as to why writers engage in imagination rather than portraying reality.

Semantic fields in the essay have accomplished the intended purpose of expressing meaning to as many readers as possible. Therefore, it is important to study the semantic and lexical structure employed by Rushdie in his works in order to understand them fully.

List of References

Brinton, L J 2000, The structure of modern English: a linguistic introduction , Illustrated edn, Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Halliday, M A 1978, Language as social semiotic: the social interpretation of language and meaning, London: Edward Arnold Publishing Company.

Mannur, A 2010, Culinary fictions: food in South Asian diasporic culture , Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Ramsey, H and Ganapathy-Doré, G 2011, Projections of paradise: ideal elsewheres in postcolonial migrant literature , New York: Rodopi.

Rushdie, S 1991, Imaginary homelands, London: Granta Books.

Seyhan, A 2000, Writing outside the nation , New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

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Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 Paperback – May 1, 1992

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• Print length 448 pages
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books; Reprint edition (May 1, 1992)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0140140360
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0140140361
• Reading age ‏ : ‎ 18 years and up
• Grade level ‏ : ‎ 12 and up
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.84 x 5.16 x 1.02 inches
• #943 in British & Irish Literary Criticism (Books)
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About the author

Salman rushdie.

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury and Shalimar the Clown. He has also published works of non-fiction including The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

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June 2, 1991 Always the Outsider By ROBERT TOWERS IMAGINARY HOMELANDS Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. By Salman Rushdie. he subtitle of "Imaginary Homelands" -- "Essays and Criticism 1981-1991" -- is perhaps too grand a term for this assemblage of Salman Rushdie's seminar papers, television broadcasts, book reviews, movie reviews, public lectures, interviews and articles. Would it have been published now -- and in its present form -- were it not for the high and terrible drama of the author's recent life? Probably not, given the scrappy and occasional nature of a considerable part of its content. Still, enough strong pieces are included to make the book welcome to anyone who has grappled -- in delight or exasperation or both -- with Mr. Rushdie's tumultuous novels or who shares his interest in the political and cultural plight of the migrant. In his view, the migrant -- whether from one country to another, from one language or culture to another or even from a traditional rural society to a modern metropolis -- "is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century." On the complex situation of this emblematic figure, Mr. Rushdie himself can of course speak with unique authority, for he has embodied the outsider, "the Other," all of his life: first as a Muslim in predominantly Hindu India, then as an Indian migrant to Pakistan, next as an Indian-Pakistani living in Britain and, since the publication of "The Satanic Verses," as a "blasphemer" against Islam, a man in hiding, marked for murder. Mr. Rushdie does not pull his punches when it comes to the failings of his adopted land (and by extension Western Europe and the United States) in the matter of racial prejudice. Writing from the position of the British left, in a 1984 essay with the neo-Orwellian title "Outside the Whale," Mr. Rushdie voices his scorn for the current nostalgia for the empire and the raj as exemplified in what he calls "the blackface minstrel-show of 'The Far Pavilions' in its TV serial incarnation" and the "overpraised" "Jewel in the Crown"; nor has he much good to say about Richard Attenborough's "Gandhi" or David Lean's film of "A Passage to India." He writes that "there can be little doubt that in Britain today the refurbishment of the Empire's tarnished image is under way. The continuing decline, the growing poverty and the meanness of spirit of much of Thatcherite Britain encourages many Britons to turn their eyes nostalgically to the lost hour of their precedence. The recrudescence of imperialist ideology and the popularity of Raj fictions put one in mind of the phantom twitchings of an amputated limb." In a piece called "Home Front" (1984), Mr. Rushdie analyzes racism in terms of "the fear of the primal Dark" and "the idea of the Other, the reversed twin in the looking-glass, the double, the negative image, who by his oppositeness tells one what one is" -- only to conclude that "it will not suffice to blame racism and the creation of lying images of black peoples on some deep-bubbling, universal failing in humanity." Nor will it do to excuse racial prejudice on the grounds of its universality. While "it is obviously true that blacks and Asians need to face up to and deal with our own prejudices, it seems equally clear that the most attention must be paid to the most serious problem, and in Britain, that is white racism. If we were speaking of India or Africa, we would have other forms of racism to fight against. But you fight hardest where you live: on the home front." Turning to the literary front, we find Mr. Rushdie attributing his eagerness to break with traditional literary forms in part to his status as a migrant; denied his roots, his original language and the social norms he grew up with, the migrant "is obliged to find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human." Mr. Rushdie is most persuasive when writing about those novelists whose approach to fiction is similar to his own: writers like Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Italo Calvino, who mix fantasy and naturalism, who employ all of the radically disjunctive techniques of modernism and post-modernism to create fictional worlds of their own that are nonetheless linked in a thousand ways to the world as we experience it. In his essay on Mr. Grass ("half a migrant"), he speaks of books that give aspiring writers ("these would-be migrants from the World to the Book") the "permission to become the sort of writers they have it in themselves to be. A book is a kind of passport." For the author of "Midnight's Children," the passports included "The Film Sense" by Sergei Eisenstein, the "Crow" poems of Ted Hughes, Jorge Luis Borges's "Ficciones," Laurence Sterne's "Tristram Shandy," Eugene Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros" and Mr. Grass's novel "The Tin Drum." "This is what Grass's great novel said to me in its drumbeats: Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world." The writing throughout is attractive: lively, allusive, a little flippant. But one could wish that "Imaginary Homelands" had not been quite so inclusive. What is the point of reprinting a 1983 campaign diatribe against Margaret Thatcher ("A General Election")? The account of a two-week trip to Pittsburgh, New York and San Francisco in 1985 ("Travels With a Golden Ass") seems both glib and dated as it revives once again that hoary old comparison of the follies and horrors of American life to those of Rome in its decadence. The reviews of works by E. L. Doctorow, Richard Ford, Saul Bellow and Grace Paley are hardly more than brief appreciations. Whatever weaknesses the collection contains are more than redeemed by the eloquence and pathos of the three concluding pieces, published in 1990. These deal directly with Mr. Rushdie's response to the fanatical (and often politically motivated) reaction to "The Satanic Verses" in parts of the Muslim world. In the first piece ("In Good Faith"), he again proclaims his allegiance to those novels that "attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas" and his "determination to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience of formerly colonized, still-disadvantaged peoples might find full expression." He defends his own novel as being, "in part, a secular man's reckoning with the religious spirit" and goes on to say: " I am not a Muslim. It feels bizarre, and wholly inappropriate, to be described as some sort of heretic after having lived my life as a secular, pluralist, eclectic man. . . . The many Muslims I respect would be horrified by the idea that they belong to their faith purely by virtue of birth, and that any person so born who freely chose not to be a Muslim could therefore be put to death." In the second ("Is Nothing Sacred?"), Mr. Rushdie, without repudiating his secularism, acknowledges the potency of the sacred and the human yearning for transcendence. He proposes that art -- particularly literature -- can be "the third principle that mediates between the material and spiritual worlds," that it can offer us "something that might even be called a secular definition of transcendence." It is the very eloquence of the reasoning in the two preceding essays that makes his statement of submission in the final piece, "Why I Have Embraced Islam," seem so desperately sad. Robert Towers teaches in the graduate writing division of the Columbia University School of the Arts. His most recent novel is "The Summoning." A KISS BEFORE READING I grew up kissing books and bread. In our house, whenever anyone dropped a book or let fall a chapati or a "slice," which was our word for a triangle of buttered leavened bread, the fallen object was required not only to be picked up but also kissed, by way of apology for the act of clumsy disrespect. I was as careless and butterfingered as any child and, accordingly, during my childhood years, I kissed a large number of "slices" and also my fair share of books. Devout households in India often contained, and still contain, persons in the habit of kissing holy books. But we kissed everything. We kissed dictionaries and atlases. We kissed Enid Blyton novels and Superman comics. If I'd ever dropped the telephone directory I'd probably have kissed that, too. All this happened before I had ever kissed a girl. In fact it would almost be true, true enough for a fiction writer, anyhow, to say that once I started kissing girls, my activities with regard to bread and books lost some of their special excitement. But one never forgets one's first loves. Bread and books: food for the body and food for the soul -- what could be more worthy of our respect, and even love? It has always been a shock to me to meet people for whom books simply do not matter. -- From "Imaginary Homelands." Return to the Books Home Page

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Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1981

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A Thematic Analysis of Salman Rushdie's Essay - Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist

Published in the collection Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism in 1991, Rushdie’s essay asseverates the central argument - that labeling a diverse and complex corpus of literature from the different corners of the world under the “new and badly made umbrella” of ‘Commonwealth literature’ does a great disservice to the individuality and intricacies of these works by a falsely simplistic and make-believe title. It leads academics, institutions, and critics to dismiss it as non-serious and peripheral literature that has no association with the great English tradition. Building on this, Rushdie offers brutal and searing criticism of the social and political impacts of this “ghettoization” of literature and questions the very foundation of the inception of such a “racist” classification of literature.

Literary Homelands Essay – Burning Rice, The White Tiger + Related

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I got marked down for my structure by having the ideas of longing and guilt separated by those mini-paragraphs, so don\’t do that. My related text in this essay was a collection of short stories by Norma Dunning called Tainna. If did it again I would pick a text that had more resources to pull from, like maybe a text that was a bit older or is in another syllabus. I know its not perfect but hope it helps!

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Floating in a Most Peculiar Way

The Last “Darky”: Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora

The Sound of Culture: Diaspora and Black Technopoetics

A little over a decade ago, while researching what became my first book, I spent two months in Trinidad conducting archival research at the University of the West Indies. I stayed in a guesthouse run by a Presbyterian Indo-Trinidadian family. When my hosts learned that I was Ethiopian, they told me about the Ethiopian Orthodox community on the island and introduced me to the archbishop who oversaw the congregations in the Caribbean and Latin America.

My visit to one of the churches was a bewildering and moving experience. Thousands of miles from Ethiopia, the rituals with which I was raised were taken up by Trinidadians with a fervor that I had never mustered. In both Ethiopia and the United States, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church still uses Ge’ez (a classical liturgical language, akin to Latin) in its proceedings. Not knowing this biblical language, I had only been dimly aware of the meanings of the chants. In Trinidad the liturgy had been translated into English, granting me new access to a faith I had been born into.

During my visits to Orthodox churches around the island, I befriended a woman named Semrete (a name she adopted after her baptism) and spent many weekends with her family. We talked about how she had come to the Orthodox Church from Rastafari because it offered her a Black Christianity untainted by the legacies of European colonialism. She shared her aspirations to travel to Ethiopia, an opportunity her husband had already enjoyed as a priest. And she made me promise to send her religious calendars and white cotton Habesha dresses and shawls for church once I returned to the United States. It’s a commitment I still keep.

On my last Sunday in Trinidad, after church and then lunch, Semrete’s husband drove us to the eastern edge of the island. There Semrete told me that if we left Trinidad and crossed the ocean, the next piece of land we encountered would be Africa. It was a poetic moment, one that brings tears to my eyes when I tell the story. But while I understood the wistfulness with which she looked across the ocean, I could not share it. Twelve years earlier my family had looked to the United States from the other side of the Atlantic. The church that represented Black Christianity for Semrete was the one my father had abandoned as a student after concluding that it was an instrument of domination in monarchical Ethiopia. I, too, wished to visit Ethiopia, but I was burdened by exile, guilt, and an awareness of impossible expectations.

I do not mean simply to juxtapose Semrete’s imagined Africa with my “real” one. If Semrete had a romantic picture of Africa, I certainly had a rose-tinted view of African America, which I contrasted with Ethiopia’s political conservatism and cultural insularity. The bond she and I shared looking out across the Atlantic was built on recognitions and misrecognitions; it involved both seeing each other and seeing past each other.

I moved to the United States at thirteen and started attending what was then Washington-Lee (now Washington-Liberty) High School in Arlington, Virginia. My classes, full of recent immigrants from Central America and East Africa as well as the children of African American families with long histories in the state, represented the growing diversity of Northern Virginia. I don’t remember seeing any white students. In my sophomore year all of that changed when I was placed in advanced classes to prepare for the International Baccalaureate. Only halfway through the year did a second Black student join my math class.

It was clear that something called race was involved in this vertiginous experience, and I figured I should learn all I could about it. My classes offered few answers, but the Black History Awareness Society, a student group advised by the school’s minority achievement coordinator, a graduate of Howard University, became my entry point. I threw myself into researching the Harlem Renaissance and codirected a play on the great personalities of the period for our Black History Month assembly. I learned about the political movement of Marcus Garvey and the poetry of Langston Hughes. Dressed in a faux fur coat, I played Zora Neale Hurston, relishing the role of a confident and outspoken writer, so distant from my own awkwardness and uncertainty.

At the encouragement of the society’s adviser, I attended a summer program on international affairs at Howard. Two years later, when I arrived at the University of Virginia as an undergraduate, I chose a major—African American studies—and extracurricular commitments with the hope of immersing myself in Black politics, culture, and history. This was my effort to understand my new home and find a place within it. But ultimately, what I found in African American studies was a window onto the world, which brought me to Trinidad, and to Semrete.

In the United States we are prone to understanding race through the neat binary of the color line—Blackness against whiteness—even as our rapidly transforming demographics disrupt that opposition. The scholar Louis Chude-Sokei has made his subject the intraracial encounters, like mine and Semrete’s, that shape the African diasporic experience. Across three books, Chude-Sokei, a professor of English and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University, has explored the everyday interactions through which people from differently positioned African diasporas negotiate their identities. The Last “Darky” (2006) is a study of the blackface performer Bert Williams. The Sound of Culture (2016) examines race and technology through music and sonic expression. In these and especially in his memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way (2021), Chude-Sokei focuses on the “intersubjective and micropolitical process” of diaspora.

To encounter Chude-Sokei’s work is to come face-to-face with experiences that are often silenced—as either too painful to publicly discuss or unproductive to the political causes advanced by insisting on Black unity. He eschews grand moments of Pan-African solidarity, the kind that can demand a single united voice, and insists instead that conflict, contestation, hierarchy, and above all difference within Black communities be taken up centrally in African diaspora studies.

The task of reimagining the African diaspora as multiple diasporas is an urgent one. Reading Chude-Sokei’s work helps us understand the fractious processes that shape the meaning of Blackness, and also offers a way to make sense of the shifting landscape of Black America due to African, Caribbean, and Latin American immigration.

Chude-Sokei writes, in Floating in a Most Peculiar Way , that he learned the word “diaspora” in Los Angeles, at his Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s Sunday dinners. Around the table were West Indians, Nigerians, and later South Africans and Ghanaians. Jamaicans made fun of Nevis for “being so small that you slept in your swimming clothes because if you turned over at night you might drown.” (In response, the Nevisian auntie laughed loudest.) The Nigerians at the table avoided discussing the civil war that pitted Hausa and Igbo against one another. When it did come up, he writes, “it wasn’t described as a national or personal or ethnic tragedy but an African or a colonial one. That way blame could be evaded and the experience shared.”

Eventually, in this group of Black immigrants, dinner conversation would turn to their relationship to African Americans; someone would relay a story of being mocked, or even threatened by a gang, because of their accent or foreignness. Chude-Sokei’s mother, hearing any of this, would “employ the abstraction of Black people” to find a compromise. She stressed what Black people regardless of nationality had in common. By invoking an “imagined global community of Blacks,” her son writes, she sought “to mediate the unpleasant details of personal experience.” This dining table is a perfect encapsulation of Chude-Sokei’s intellectual project: it preserved difference and plurality while also bringing people together. Bickering and bitterness were as constant as sustenance and fellowship.

Chude-Sokei was born on July 6, 1967, in Biafra, the short-lived breakaway republic in eastern Nigeria formed to realize an independent Igboland after a series of anti-Igbo pogroms. That same day war broke out between Nigeria and Biafra. According to family lore, while Chude-Sokei’s mother gave birth, “she could hear the first fruits of the federal government’s bombing campaign against Biafra, and when she’d given birth, there had been word of casualties nearby.”

Chude-Sokei’s father, who was Igbo, served as the commander of the Biafran air force and adviser to the Biafran leader Odumegwu Ojukwu. His mother, a nurse from Jamaica, cared for the wounded and malnourished while comforting those who lost loved ones during the war. Chude-Sokei’s father was killed during the civil war. Just before the fledgling nation collapsed in 1970, Chude-Sokei’s mother fled with him to Gabon. From there she made her way back to Jamaica but soon left for the United States, while Chude-Sokei remained in Montego Bay, having been adopted by family friends. He eventually joined his mother in the United States, first in Washington, D.C., and then in Los Angeles, where relatives from his mother’s side already lived.

In his memoir Chude-Sokei narrates this journey, a personal cartography of decolonization and diaspora. It is a story that refuses the simple binaries of homeland and exile. The country of Chude-Sokei’s birth is found on no map. He arrives in Jamaica with few links to Igbo culture. All that remains with him from his previous life, ironically, is a mysterious song about someone named “Major Tom” that was played on repeat by aid workers in one of the refugee camps in Gabon where he and his mother sheltered. After arriving in America as a schoolboy, he realizes that this was David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” a line from which supplies the title of the book.

Out of place and struggling to understand his origins as a young child in Jamaica, he learns that “Africa,” the place with which he is indelibly associated by his last name and his accent, is freighted with contradictory meanings. Associated with “darkness, magic and trauma,” “‘African’ was still an insult.” And for Chude-Sokei, “being called [African] by Black people was the beginning of my consciousness of self.”

At the same time, an older cousin exposed him to Rastafari teachings and reggae music, which idealized Africa as a historic homeland and a future site of redemption. This cousin took an interest in his Nigerian roots and was particularly enamored of Chude-Sokei’s middle name, Onuorah, meaning “voice of the people.” In exchange for her protection from neighborhood kids who called him “African bush baby,” he satiated her interest in Africa by fabricating “exquisite” stories he passed off as memories.

Years later, while an undergraduate at UCLA , he dates an African American woman, a student of African history, with a similar investment in his Africanness. Until the moment he takes her home, his unplaceable accent, quirky taste in music, and other eccentricities are all signs of an endearing foreignness. As they drive through the streets of South Central Los Angeles, however, the young woman decides that what she had taken to be markers of Chude-Sokei’s African identity were a mask, an elaborate subterfuge orchestrated to hide or reject his rather unremarkable “ ghetto identity.”

Long before they set foot in the United States, Africans and West Indians engaged Black America through cultural products that ranged from jazz, gospel, and hip-hop to fashion, gestures, and slang. In Jamaica, a young Chude-Sokei and his cousins acted out scenes from American TV shows that featured African Americans. They learned what “give me five” meant and honed elaborate handshakes. Above all they practiced their accents in the hope of “spend[ing] eternity sounding like Black Americans.”

When he arrived in the United States at around the age of ten and began to come to terms with what he calls “America’s unique relationship to skin,” Chude-Sokei soon learned a different lesson: rather than mimicry, distinction from African Americans would protect Black immigrants from American racism and best serve their aspirations for mobility and security. He hears from the aunties who later become like family to him that “despite how others might see us we are not like them.” One Gabonese auntie instructs his mother “to keep his accent strong. They must hear him before they see him. The whites have to know who we are so they won’t treat us like them.” Sounding different and reinforcing one’s distinct history and culture were guards against the American tyranny of racism.

This advice is driven home in one of the book’s funniest and most painful moments. When a white classmate calls Chude-Sokei the N-word at a Catholic school in Washington, D.C., and he relays the incident to his mother, the same auntie insists that this has happened because he has been mistaken for a Black American. She tells him that the next time this happens, he should declare, “I am not a slave. My father was not a slave. My grandfather was not a slave. My father’s mother was not a slave…. We are not slaves. We came to this country by choice!” When the boy uses the N-word a second time, Chude-Sokei, now prepared, repeats this catechism to him. But rather than providing the vindication Chude-Sokei hoped for, it prompts the offending kid to break into tears—and Chude-Sokei is the one forced to go to the principal’s office.

While the elders of Chude-Sokei’s family insisted on establishing distance from African Americans, he sought identification and assimilation. In this, Aunt Pansy and Uncle Owen’s son Brian—the “Black American” of the family—became his guide. Brian had lost his Jamaican accent, styled himself in fashionable streetwear, donned an Afro pick in his uncombed hair, and learned the codes of South Central LA.

For a time Chude-Sokei modeled himself on Brian, copying every word and gesture, lifting weights at the local YMCA , and subjecting himself to his cousin’s beatings in an effort to harden up and exude street cred. This hypermasculine expression of Black identity was punctured only by Brian’s love of Prince. From Brian’s perspective, “only one black identity mattered in America.” He told Chude-Sokei that

accent doesn’t matter, racism doesn’t matter, white people don’t matter. Nigerian, African, Caribbean don’t matter either…We—our people—are stupid to hold on to those types of things. That’s why people hate us.

As a student at UCLA Chude-Sokei split the difference, joining both the Black Student Association and the African Student Association, relieved that no Caribbean Student Association existed at the time. Striking the balance became difficult when the BSA adopted the Afrocentrism in vogue at the time. “Radical students were no longer black but African , and the spelling wavered between the conventional spelling with a c or a more militant k ,” he remembers.

The BSA soon took the name Afrikan Student Association, leaving the Africans incapable of either claiming Blackness or Africanness. Yet this interest in constructing an African identity coincided with “an open and casual prejudice towards Africans,” who, Chude-Sokei writes, were described by Black students in the association as smelly or dirty. These petty student politics, soon overshadowed for Chude-Sokei by the Rodney King riots—which reinforced the centrality of anti-Black racism in American life—indicated the sharp dissonance between Africa as an idea that played a significant part in Black political and cultural life and the actual, living, breathing Africans who were now present at the same campus cafeterias.

By the time I arrived in the US the Afrocentrism of the 1980s, itself a last gasp of an earlier Pan-African politics that looked to Africa’s decolonizing nations as sources of inspiration and solidarity, had been eclipsed. No one I met in high school or college wanted to be Afrikan . Instead, classmates associated Africa with safaris or maybe The Lion King . I was asked frequently whether we kept lions as pets.

Still, Chude-Sokei’s experience resembles my own. My family met my growing interest in African American history and culture with suspicion and sometimes derision. I was either in the midst of a juvenile rebellion that expressed itself as rejection of my own identity or else America had brainwashed me. As I applied to college, classmates wondered whether I, a new arrival on American shores, might unfairly benefit from affirmative action policies designed to redress America’s history of slavery and Jim Crow. At the University of Virginia, when faced with a similar choice between Black student organizations and those tailored to African students, I chose the former, and was questioned about it by both Black American and African students. I reacted to this with deflection. I insisted that my Blackness was the most important thing about me. I swept the tensions under the rug.

Both Chude-Sokei and I are part of the wave of African immigrants to the United States made possible by the 1965 Hart–Celler Act, which removed the national quotas that had been in place since the 1920s and expanded pathways for Asian, African, and Latin American migration. This victory was only possible because of the civil rights movement’s wider effort to abolish racial discrimination in the country’s institutions. Opportunities for African immigration paradoxically increased in 1990 after the creation of the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, which, in an effort to diversify the immigrant pool, grants about 50,000 visas annually to those who win a State Department–sponsored lottery. As the historian Carly Goodman recently documented in her book Dreamland: America’s Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction , the Diversity Immigrant Visa was initially designed to favor white, especially Irish, migration to the United States, but ultimately nearly half of those arriving in the US through this program have come from African countries. 1 In recent decades the number of African immigrants to the US has only swelled. In 2005 The New York Times noted that “for the first time, more blacks are coming to the United States from Africa than during the slave trade.”

This rapid expansion of African presence in the US is transforming Black culture. African writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Dinaw Mengestu have added the immigrant experience to the themes of Black literature. Afrobeats artists such as Burna Boy and Wizkid are shaping hip-hop, while African immigrants are increasingly represented on-screen as both characters and actors, as in LaKeith Stanfield’s Darius, a first-generation Nigerian American on the hit show Atlanta , or Aida Osman, an Eritrean American who stars as half of a Miami rap duo in the more recent Rap Sh!t .

At the same time the new African presence in America is the source of anxiety and conflict. Africans, for whom American racism is not the crucible of political formation, resist and resent their conscription into American racial politics. They also fear the distance between themselves and their American-born children, who are more likely to identify with the historical and present political struggles of African Americans. For Black Americans, the growing presence of Black immigrants generates concerns about the distribution of already scarce resources and opportunities.

In 2017, for instance, student protesters at Cornell questioned the general practice of counting the children of recent immigrants as Black in the school’s demographic accounting. They called on the university to “increase the presence of underrepresented black students,” by which they meant “black Americans who have several generations (more than two) in this country.” At its most extreme this might amount to the nativism of an organization like the American Descendants of Slavery, which supports more restrictive immigration policies and calls for reparations and affirmative action for Black Americans who can trace their ancestry to enslaved people in the United States—to the exclusion of opportunities for other ethnic minorities, including the descendants of people enslaved elsewhere.

What it is to be Black in the United States is changing as the country’s composition changes and as we reexamine our history. Although some transformations of the meaning of Blackness are relatively recent, the constitution of Black identity through intraracial encounters goes back at least to the turn of the twentieth century, when West Indian immigrants slowly began to arrive in the United States, settling mainly in cities like New York and Miami. The historian Winston James has detailed how new West Indian migrants contributed to the radicalization of Black politics in the interwar period. Whether in Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association or in socialist and communist gatherings, West Indians had an outsize importance that was immediately recognized.

Chude-Sokei’s memoir identifies the crosscurrents in his own life. In his first book, The Last “Darky , ” he investigates “black-on-black” cultural contestation earlier in American history through the career of Bert Williams, a blackface performer from the Bahamas. Born in Nassau in 1874, Williams migrated to the United States at a young age and became one of the most successful minstrel performers of the early twentieth century. Chude-Soeki takes Williams’s performances as an opportunity to consider assimilation and the construction of a universal “Negro” or Black identity—“a transcendental ‘Negro,’” a figure who would represent the “emergent black counterglobalization that was pan-Africanism.” For Williams, representing a universal figure of Blackness involved suppressing his Caribbean distinctiveness.

More than on the skin, this transmutation of a West Indian Blackness into an African American Blackness occurred through the voice. “The voice is the mask when the flesh looks the same,” Chude-Sokei writes. Through careful study and imitation of southern dialects, Williams presented what many commentators, including African Americans, described as a “natural” performance of the “southern darky.” Offstage, he maintained his native dialect and insisted that African American English was as foreign to him as Italian.

Through his close examination of this Black minstrel performer, Chude-Sokei argues that what passed for a universal Negro was merely one iteration of the figure of the African American. This has broader reverberations for the cultural politics of Pan-Africanism. Does the demand for unity and solidarity among Black people ultimately require the submersion of difference and the elevation of one particular experience of Blackness? If so, what determines which experience of Blackness comes to stand in for the whole? For Chude-Sokei, the predominance of African American voices and experiences is closely linked to America’s geopolitical dominance, which grants those within its boundaries—even when marginalized—access to a world stage.

Something of this structure is visible in more recent history. The police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis galvanized protests around the world, but similar movements against police violence in Brazil and Nigeria, the two countries with the largest Black populations in the world, have not inspired the same global solidarity. This is both because news from the United States is much more likely to travel elsewhere and because the African American quest for emancipation and equality has come to stand in for larger struggles of racialized and colonized peoples around the world. Cousin Brian’s point that “only one black identity mattered” speaks to this disparity of attention.

The idea that the voice differentiates where the skin cannot is a through line of Chude-Sokei’s work. It shows up in the discussion of accents in Floating in a Most Peculiar Way , and it is the focus of The Sound of Culture , which examines race, technology, and humanism. 2 Black music, and especially Caribbean genres like dub, inspire this consideration. Dub, an offshoot of reggae, emerged in the 1970s and involves the remixing of original tracks by removing vocal performance, adding effects like echo, and emphasizing the drum and bass to produce a new electronic music style. This highly technologized sound from Jamaica and its diaspora “would mutate and infect many strains of British dance and popular music,” Chude-Sokei writes. Jamaican sound culture also directly influenced hip-hop through one of the founding fathers of the genre, the Jamaican-born DJ Kool Herc.

The technologized sounds of the Caribbean are a counterpoint to the dominance of African American sound. Moreover, the reverberation and fragmentation of dub refuses the claims of racial authenticity that were central to reggae and have long shaped Pan-Africanism. Within its domain of echoes and repetitions, there can be neither one voice nor one universal experience. Dub is a sonic collage that reimagines the African diaspora as a kaleidoscopic and conflicting multitude rather than a singular whole. The same, across his books, can be said of Chude-Sokei’s work.

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August 12, 2023

In Born in Blackness , Howard French works to counteract the “symphony of erasure” that has obscured and denied Africa’s contributions to the contemporary world.

August 17, 2023 issue

Adom Getachew is a Professor of Political Science and Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination and the coeditor, with Jennifer Pitts, of W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought . (June 2024)

University of North Carolina Press, 2023.  ↩

Chude-Sokei has worked with sound in other media as well, through what he calls his “sonic art/archiving project,” Echolocution. Recently he completed a project in Nuremberg, Germany, titled “Sometimes You Just Have to Give It Your Attention,” an acoustic “investigation” of the former Nazi rally grounds, which received a grant from the German Federal Cultural Foundation. He is collaborating with the choreographer Bill T. Jones to adapt parts of The Sound of Culture for the stage.  ↩

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The Resonance of “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi

This essay is about Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir “Persepolis,” which chronicles her experiences growing up during and after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. The essay highlights how Satrapi uses the medium of a graphic novel to effectively convey the complexities of Iranian society, the impact of political upheaval on daily life, and her personal struggles with identity. It explores the significance of her family relationships, the theme of personal freedom versus societal expectations, and her time in Austria. The essay also discusses the universal appeal of “Persepolis,” its role in offering a nuanced perspective on Iran, and its success in engaging a global audience through powerful storytelling and visuals.

How it works

Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” stands as a gripping autobiographical graphic narrative delineating the author’s upbringing amidst and following the Islamic Revolution in Iran. This opus, bifurcated into dual volumes, proffers a poignant, oftentimes droll, and profoundly intimate portrayal of the intricacies of Iranian society, the reverberations of political upheaval on quotidian existence, and the universal tribulations of youth and self-identification. Through its unparalleled amalgamation of prose and stark monochrome illustrations, “Persepolis” has ensnared readers globally, furnishing an approachable yet profound exploration of history, culture, and self-realization.

At its nucleus, “Persepolis” constitutes a bildungsroman set against the panorama of momentous historical junctures. Satrapi recounts her formative years in Tehran during the waning years of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, an era marked by the ousting of the Shah, the inauguration of the Islamic Republic, and the catastrophic Iran-Iraq War. These episodes transcend mere distant political vicissitudes, entwining themselves deeply within the warp and weft of her day-to-day reality. Through the lens of young Marjane, readers are privy to the metamorphosis of Iranian society, the imposition of stringent religious mandates, and the ruthless suppression of dissent. Her narrative is suffused with an aura of immediacy and authenticity, as she traverses the often treacherous terrain of her motherland with a fusion of naivety, inquisitiveness, and defiance.

One of the most conspicuous facets of “Persepolis” is its depiction of the author’s familial milieu, serving both as her bedrock and her apparatus through which the broader world is construed. Satrapi’s progenitors are delineated as forward-thinking and politically engaged, inculcating in her a sense of equity and a discerning viewpoint on the transformations unfurling around them. Her grandmother, a figure of affection and sagacity, bestows emotional succor and imparts invaluable life aphorisms. These kin relationships are pivotal to the narrative, underscoring the interplay between personal and political identities and the duality of family as both a font of resilience and a crucible of contention.

Satrapi’s decision to convey her narrative through the medium of a graphic memoir is particularly noteworthy. The visual format affords a potent juxtaposition of imagery and text, engendering a multi-layered narrative that engages readers on manifold strata. The utilization of stark, austere monochromatic sketches amplifies the emotive resonance of the narrative, encapsulating both the harshness of the regime and the fortitude of the human soul. This visual approach also renders intricate historical and political contexts more digestible, beckoning readers from all walks of life to immerse themselves in her tale.

“Persepolis” additionally delves into the theme of identity, particularly the dialectic between personal autonomy and societal dictates. As a juvenile, Marjane grapples with the constraints foisted upon her by the nascent regime, from compulsory veiling to the curtailment of Western influences. Her rebellious disposition and yearning for self-expression frequently pit her against the authorities and societal conventions. This inner turmoil is further accentuated when she is dispatched to Austria for her safety during her adolescent years. In Vienna, she encounters the tribulations of cultural assimilation, nostalgia for her homeland, and the quest for kinship in an alien milieu. Her endeavor to reconcile her Iranian heritage with her individual aspirations constitutes a principal leitmotif that permeates the narrative, mirroring broader quandaries of identity and exile.

“Persepolis” transcends being merely a memoir of personal and political chronicles; it emerges as a testament to the potency of storytelling and the resilience of the human psyche. Satrapi’s narrative is suffused with levity, astuteness, and a discerning sense of irony, which serve as coping mechanisms in the face of adversity. Hers is a tale of survival, not merely in the corporeal sense, but also in the preservation of selfhood and the pursuit of significance in a turbulent universe. By sharing her ordeals, Satrapi lends voice to the myriad individuals who underwent analogous circumstances, proffering a form of collective catharsis and an entreaty to recollect and resist.

The global reception accorded to “Persepolis” attests to its universal resonance and the indispensability of diverse narratives in literature. It has been translated into myriad tongues, adapted into an animated film, and extensively scrutinized in academic milieus. Its ascendancy underscores the capacity of graphic narratives to grapple with weighty and intricate issues in a manner that is both immersive and enlightening. Satrapi’s oeuvre challenges the oft-monolithic portrayals of Iran and its denizens, furnishing a nuanced and multivalent perspective seldom espied in mainstream media.

In summation, Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” constitutes a seminal opus that furnishes a distinctive and deeply personal viewpoint on a pivotal epoch in Iranian annals. Through her evocative narration and evocative imagery, Satrapi breathes life into the trials and triumphs of maturing in a milieu beset by political turmoil and cultural discord. “Persepolis” serves as a potent reminder of the import of individual narratives in comprehending the broader human saga, and it endures as a source of inspiration for its candor, wit, and humanity.

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"The Resonance of "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi." PapersOwl.com, Jun 01, 2024. Accessed June 2, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/the-resonance-of-persepolis-by-marjane-satrapi/

"The Resonance of "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi," PapersOwl.com , 01-Jun-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-resonance-of-persepolis-by-marjane-satrapi/. [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). The Resonance of "Persepolis" by Marjane Satrapi . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/the-resonance-of-persepolis-by-marjane-satrapi/ [Accessed: 2-Jun-2024]

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