African Exiles

Tales of exile tend to reveal history’s subtle ironies. While one of my great-great-grandfathers fled Baku in the wake of Stalin’s communist takeover in 1917, relocating to the Iranian shores of the Caspian sea, my father would be exiled from Iran precisely for being a communist. Exiles of one kind or another have shaped the arc of my family tree as far back as I can tell, and the same can be said for millions of others.

Over the past three years, I devoted a considerable amount of time to assembling The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020), which tells the story of civilization through the literature of exile, displacement and migration, featuring poems, short stories, diaries and letters produced by ninety-nine writers working in twenty-five languages across six continents. While working on this book in the wake of the Trump administration’s racist ban on Muslim-majority countries and the EU’s criminal unresponsiveness to the crisis in the Mediterranean, I witnessed a proliferation of ill-conceived books with titles like Refugee Tales, Banthology: Stories from Unwanted Nations and A Country of Refuge. These books coast on an utterly un-nuanced, catchpenny approach to so-called “representation,” leading only to the furtherance of stereotypes and tokenistic inclusivity. Though they include work by fascinating, complex voices, many of these titles seem set on merely anthropologizing the other by oversimplifying and labelling the experiences of the people they purport to be showcasing. Our critical culture has been fully complicit in this. A book matters, we are told, because in it, “refugees are given a voice,”or because it is written in “the oldest and largest ongoing refugee camp in the world." Such assessments sensationalize and dehumanize the subject, who is denied any cultural specificity, instead referred to always as a “refugee.” (The above quotes are taken from a published article.)

My intentions with The Heart of a Stranger were simple: I wanted to showcase the dizzying wealth of literature produced by exiles, from ancient Egypt to the present day, and open a window into the phenomenon of displacement across different cultures, religions, historical periods and political affiliations. I focus on texts born of first-hand experience in order to emphasize individual perspectives that reflect our shared humanity. In the more contemporary sections of the book, I opted to foreground texts that explicitly rejected the classificational fetishism that has jeopardized our ability to discuss so-called refugees, migrants, and asylum seekers as actual people, rather than case studies. Assuming that people can be neutrally assigned dehumanizing categories is a dangerous gamble. After all, the citizens of today can very quickly become the refugees of tomorrow, especially given the ongoing assault on civil liberties around the world.

Despite my family’s experiences, and a predilection for the work of many exiled writers, the task I had set myself was certainly daunting. Early on in the project, it quickly became clear that human experience dispersed in a thousand different directions when refracted through the prism of exile. The South African writer Es’Kia Mphahlele (1919–2008) once noted that the history of African displacement was a narrative of exiles within exiles, citing the example of Haiti, whose people had first been enslaved and made to leave the African continent, then forced to throw off their French colonial heritage, and finally made to grapple with the legacies of the U.S. occupation. Each successive exile increased the magnitude of Haitians’ cultural disinheritance.

Aiding my efforts to unpack the African exilic experience, my partner Zinzi directed me to Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784), the first published African-American poet, whose work spoke to the never-ending deracination described by Mphahlele. Named after the slave ship that bore her, Wheatley was taught to read and write and encouraged to pursue her patently vast intellectual ambitions. Dismissed as a writer of naive verse by Thomas Jefferson­­—see Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America’s First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers—and held up by abolitionists as living proof of Black intelligence, and domestication, Wheatley has been alternately hailed as the progenitor of Black American literature and reviled as a race traitor. As illustrated by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers in The Age of Phillis (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), much of what we know about Wheatley was shaped by Margaretta Matilda Odell’s Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, A Native African and a Slave (1834), a compendium of “undocumented speculations” and “outright falsehoods,” which painted Wheatley’s life after her manumission as a sad series of misguided mistakes. Chief among these, supposedly, was her marriage to the freeman John Peters, who was blamed for leading the young poet astray (although there’s ample evidence to the contrary).

For The Heart of a Stranger, I selected Wheatley’s “A Farewell to America,” a poem written in anticipation of her chaperoned journey to London in 1773. While in many ways that journey marked the beginning of the end for Phillis Wheatley, if not Phillis Peters, “A Farewell to America” is saturated with the author’s obvious excitement at being allowed to undertake a journey altogether different from the one that had first brought her to the Americas. The poet sings at her newfound ability to “with astonish’d eyes explore / the wide-extended main” and “mark the vale where London lies,” such simple human wanderlust that is in stark contrast to an excerpt from Olaudah Equiano’s (1745–1797) The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, which I also included in my anthology:

Often did I think many of the inhabitants of the deep much more happy than myself; I envied them the freedom they enjoyed, and as often wished I could change my condition for theirs. […] One day they had taken a number of fishes; and when they had killed and satisfied themselves with as many as they thought fit, to our astonishment who were on the deck, rather than give any of them to us to eat, as we expected, they tossed the remaining fish into the sea again.

Born into a slave-owning aristocratic family in the Kingdom of Benin, Equiano was kidnapped at an early age and sold into slavery, eventually winding up in colonial Virginia, before he was able to buy his freedom at twenty-one. The Interesting Narrative was one of the most renowned books of its era, not only providing a detailed descriptions of the Middle Passage, but also key eyewitness accounts of several battles during the Seven Years’ War, turning Equiano into an abolitionist celebrity speaker.

Of course, untold millions died in far greater anonymity than either Wheatley or Equiano, all victims of King Cotton’s brutal Transatlantic network of slavery. The fight against this anonymity felt to me perfectly embodied by Fred D’Aguiar’s “At the Grave of the Unknown African” (1991), in which the renowned Guyanese poet elegizes a nameless 18^th century black servant buried in the English city of Bristol. One of the principal hubs of the British Empire’s slave trade, Bristol is indelibly marked by the “Triangular Trade” between Northern Europe, Western Africa, and the Caribbean, with seemingly every urban or topographical feature making some reference to the city’s history of slavery. Inspired by Derek Walcott’s lines from Another Life, “we were blessed with a virginal, unpainted world / with Adam’s task of giving things their names,” D’Aguiar’s poem, written in rhyming couplets, is structured as a diptych, with the first section voiced by a Black Briton, namely D’Aguiar himself, speaking in the early 1990s. The second part is voiced by the Unknown African.

After winding his way “via White Ladies’ Road and Black Boy’s Hill,” D’Aguiar finds himself standing in the cemetery of the Henbury Parish Church, whose lawns are strewn with empty Heineken cans. There, D’Aguiar contemplates the “whitewashed headstone” of an 18^th century servant, which fails to mention its occupant’s name. More than two hundred and fifty years after his death, the “barefaced fact” that the servant is unnamed “feels like defeat.” Addressing the Unknown African directly, D’Aguiar writes:

African slave without a name, I’d call this home
by now. Would you? Your unknown soldier’s tomb

stands for shipload after shipload that docked,
unloaded, watered, scrubbed, exercised and restocked

thousands more souls for sale in Bristol’s port.
Cab-drivers speak of it all with yesterday’s hurt.

The good conservationist calls it her 300-year war;
Those raids, deals, deceits and capture (a sore still raw).

St Paul’s, Toxteth, Brixton, Tiger Bay and Handsworth:
petrol bombs flower in the middle of roads, a sudden growth

at the feet of police lines longer than any cricket pitch.
African slave, your namelessness is the wick and petrol mix.

In this passage, D’Aguiar traces the roots of the violence perpetrated against Black communities in the UK (enshrined in the names “St Paul’s, Toxteth, Brixton, Tiger Bay and Handsworth,” sites of violent police raids on Black homes and businesses in the 1980s), linking them directly to the fate of the unknown African lying beneath the ground. We also see D’Aguiar accepting his permanence in Britain (“I’d call this home / by now”) while simultaneously depicting just how difficult that process of acceptance has been for him, and for people who look like him, precisely because of the enduring discrimination originally seeded by Britain’s slave trade.

D’Aguiar ingeniously switches gears in the poem’s second section, turning the conceit of speaking on behalf of historical figures entirely on its head: “Stop there black Englishman,” the Unknown African begins, “before you tell a bigger lie. / You mean me well by what you say but I can’t stand idly by.” In recognition of the fact that there may be no correct way of summoning the dead, D’Aguiar has the Unknown African reject the notion of being individually commemorated. Since the dead cannot write or sing, he urges the poet to consider the community as a whole, enjoining the author to tell the story of what happened to him, “and countless like me, all anon. / Say it urgently. Mean times may bring back the water cannon.” Later on, the poet challenges the very notion of oblivion by having the Unknown African ask, “What can you call me? Mohammed. Homer. Hannibal. Jesus. / Would it be too much to have them all?” And so, the Unknown African is able to reclaim, if only for a moment, his rightful global inheritance.

Echoes of D’Aguiar’s Unknown African resurface in the Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu’s “Lampedusa,” which shifts the focus from the Transatlantic slave trade, to the one centered around the Mediterranean today, where the flow of migrants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East has led to a cordon of detention centers and human trafficking rings around that sea. “Lampedusa” records one of many forgotten episodes, when a rickety fishing boat carrying 518 passengers sank on October 3, 2013, taking 368 victims with it, almost all of them Eritreans fleeing their country’s repressive dictatorship. Sibhatu based her poem on conversations with some of the tragedy’s survivors, whom she met in the months following the shipwreck. Here she captures the final stage of these peoples’ journey, when, almost in sight of Fortress Europe, it appears the boat is bound to sink:

  To send a distress call,
  they set a sail on fire, and as the
  flames began to spread, some frightened people
  jumped overboard and tipped the boat.
They were all adrift in the freezing sea!
Amidst that storm, some died right away,
some beat the odds and cheated death,
some who could swim tried to help
some drowned using their last breath
to send messages back to their native land.
some called out their names and countries of origin
before succumbing to their fate!

Of course, while Mphahlele was right to see African exile as its own phenomenon, shaped by specific forces, no two exiles are ever alike. The word exile—especially within Blackness—invariably conjures images of a journey, usually a forced one. But exile didn’t merely occur when Black people were transported elsewhere, it also took place when foreign invaders showed up on their doorstep to stay. There is perhaps no better depiction of this kind of exile than Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s “A Colonial Affair,” excerpted from Detained: A Writer’s Prison Diary (Heinemann, 1981):

The settlers in Kenya were really parasites in paradise. Kenya, to them, was a huge winter home for aristocrats, which of course meant big-game hunting and living it up on the backs of a million field and domestic slaves, the Watu as they called them. Coming ashore in Mombasa, as was clearly shown by the photographic evidence in the 1939 edition of Lord Cranworth’s book, Kenya Chronicles, was literally on the backs of Kenyan workers. “No one coming into a new country,” he writes, “could desire a more attractive welcome. We were rowed ashore in a small boat and came to land on the shoulders of sturdy Swahili natives.” This was in 1906. By 1956, Sir Evelyn Baring, the governor, could still get himself photographed being carried, like a big baby, in the arms of a Kenyan worker. Thus by setting foot on Kenyan soil at Mombasa, every European was instantly transformed into a blue-blooded aristocrat. An attractive welcome: before him, stretching beyond the ken of his eyes, lay a vast valley garden of endless physical leisure and pleasure that he must have once read about in the Arabian Nights stories. The dream in fairy tales was now his in practice. No work, no winter, no physical or mental exertion. Here he would set up his own fiefdom.

While The Heart of a Stranger was warmly welcomed, reviews of this anthology, and others like it, have largely overlooked the contributions of authors of color, in particular those of African origin. Such oversights neatly reflect the institutional barriers still facing non-Western authors and the complications presented by white gatekeeping in the literary industry overall. Indeed, reviewers appeared more interested in the fact that I’d omitted the work of Ovid and Joseph Brodsky than in considering the writers whose work I did include. Sadly, nobody seemed that enthralled with Sibhatu’s poem, or the work of the Malian writer Souéloum Diagho, or Sol Plaatje’s chronicle of how the Anglos and Boers in colonial South Africa dispossessed native populations. Same with Ethiopian memoirist Martha Nasibú’s account of her captive childhood (when her country was invaded by fascist Italy), which I think represented some of the finest writing in the book.

Unfortunately, The Heart of a Stranger will not be the last anthology of its kind. As the story of our collective civilization clearly shows, we have been banishing one another on account of ethnic, religious, sexual and political differences for longer than we can remember, and as the first two decades of the twenty-first-century have proven, we do not appear to have tired of these practices. Exile, therefore, remains as ripe for investigation as ever. I’ll leave the last words to Souéloum Diagho, from the opening line of his poem included in The Heart of a Stranger: “Exile gnaws at me, the world’s negligence irks me.”