Black is the Journey, Africana the Name. Maboula Soumahoro
describe Soumahoro’s reckoning with the histories of the Black Atlantic and African diaspora. Black is the Journey, Africana the Name recalibrates the conception of diaspora by amplifying the presence of Africa in the diaspora, not simply as origin, but as haunted and disfigured by the millions gone or lost to the slave trade, by the graves without bodies. The text embraces a language of blackness, which is figured by histories of struggle and emergent solidarities across the globe. It is an autobiographical example of the forces of dispossession and racialization that have produced the diaspora, as well as the exigencies and predation of capital, the interminable and recurring wars, and the longing for the good life that continue to expand and reshape the contours of blackness. This insightful and persuasive meditation on the meaning of the terms “Black,” “Africa,” and “diaspora” explores the legacy of transatlantic slavery, racialization, coloniality, and impaired citizenship.
The book is less interested in providing an overview of this history, than in attending to the character of Black existence in the contemporary world. It situates France firmly within this history of slavery and coloniality, yet this history is disavowed and whitewashed in the republic’s instrumental deployment of universalism and fidelity to Reason. The significance of colonial slavery for Blacks across the globe was that it “inscribed a new sociopolitical order on the body.” Soumahoro deftly attends to the burden of racialized embodiment. To have a body is to be tethered to the world and assigned a place within it, to be condemned to the lowest rung in the vertical hierarchy of human life. These histories of slavery and coloniality are written on the body, lived in the present, and traverse the diaspora, establishing relations across the Atlantic (even when this relation is defined by misunderstanding and friction, what Brent Edwards describes as décalage, “the joint is a curious place, as it is both the point of separation and the point of linkage”).5 These histories and their repercussions are shared in the Triangle and in the world, even as they are lived differently. They have produced the shared features of Black life in the modern world and bridge seemingly diverse formations. We are all living in the wake of slavery.6
In her journeys across the Atlantic and graduate education in the US, Soumahoro discovers a body of critical thought and literature, a frame of reference for understanding the histories and structures that make Black lives precarious and disposable in America, Europe, and Africa, a conceptual toolbox capable of perceiving and attending to the Black presence in France. This detour through the US and the history and literature of Black life in the Americas leads Soumahoro to claim blackness – she became Black of her “own volition.” Soumahoro’s retracing of the Triangle and the journey from the French metropole to New York City, a reverse journey of the Black Americans who traveled to Paris in the hopes of escaping racism, is a detour, an indirection that allows her to engage critically the situation of Black Europe at the level of generality. “The detour,” as Glissant writes, “is the ultimate resort of a population whose domination by an Other is concealed: it then must search elsewhere for the principle of domination, which is not evident in the country itself: because the mode of domination (assimilation) is the best of camouflages.”7 This indirection, according to Brent Edwards, can indeed be “strategically necessary in certain conditions.”8 It proves to be essential for Soumahoro. It makes possible the production of “a common elsewhere” shared by the Black world. Glissant writes that “detour is not a useful ploy unless it is nourished by return: not a return to the dream of origin, or the immobile One of Being, but a return to the point of entanglement from which one was forcefully turned away.”9 Soumahoro confirms this. As she writes: “The detour had proven necessary, fundamental. It had been a matter of distancing myself in order to return. It had been a matter of distancing myself in order to return under better circumstances – by putting an end to all that had been silenced, or unconsidered when it came to race. After ten years, my return to my homeland was complicated” (p. 60). Soumahoro returns to the point of entanglement, her natal land, the place that denies her blackness and stigmatizes it, anchoring her in a body perpetually inscribed as a stranger.
For Soumahoro, the meaning of diaspora is one of expanding and overlapping multiplicities – a rhizomatic network affiliating Africa, Black Europe, and the Americas. There is a Black diaspora and there is an African diaspora. The former is articulated through histories of slavery and dispossession, coloniality and relentless acts of resistance; the latter circles round and gestures toward Africa presented as an ideal, historical origin, point of departure, lost homeland, and figure for imagining a future life, an anticipated freedom. This Africa is the vessel for emergent and realigned sociality and radical possibility. Even those with immediate natal claims and for whom this intimacy or relation might be taken for granted as a matter of fact dream of Africa. Both the terms “Black” and “diaspora” yield to possibility, or, at the very least, bear the potential for a different grammar of futurity,10 a questioning of given narratives of origin and belonging, a detour from national citizenship and territorially bounded community.
Black is the Journey, Africana the Name is a memoir of intellectual formation as much as it is a work of criticism and theory. Its subtitle might easily be: “the crisis of the Black intellectual inside the French university,” given the obstacles and impediments intended to thwart questions of race and racism in France and redirect Soumahoro’s course of study. How can one think critically about blackness in a context in which such analysis is interdicted? In order to engage in the project of Black study, Soumahoro was forced to cross the Atlantic. While enrolled at Columbia University and the City University of New York, she studied with Maryse Condé and Edouard Glissant and, for the first time, read Black thinkers and writers from around the world in her university courses. This journey across the Atlantic and a decade of dwelling in New York cultivated the embrace of a transatlantic Black identity, a diasporic identity, which she encountered on the pages of critical and literary texts and in the streets of the global city. This transatlantic roaming and dwelling was a productive detour. This decade of study challenged and expanded her conception of blackness and diaspora and provided much needed critical tools to think the specificity of her condition as a Black citizen of France, a task that was difficult if not impossible inside France. As a result of this education in Black Studies, Soumahoro was able to disenchant the discourse of universalism and read the Black presence in France in a radically different register.
This knowledge of diaspora informs Soumahoro’s refusal of the prevailing terms and the imposed language of color-blindness and its abstract yet exclusive Frenchness. Exclusion and anti-blackness are hidden behind the mask of the “universal.” Rather than cling to the promise of disembodied citizenship, or enshrine it as an aspiration, Soumahoro takes for granted the fact that Black people are French citizens. It is not an esteemed gift for which the Black population of the metropole must prove worthy. As she writes: “This belonging to the French nation is not a diploma, not even a reward or a point of pride: it is simply a matter of fact” (p. 89).
There is the fact of French citizenship and there is the choice of blackness. The claim to blackness entails a politics of affiliation, a “conscious entry into a transnational community defined by its literary and artistic production, its spiritual practices, and its firm anchoring in intellectual traditions” (p. 90). While the racialization of population in the context of capitalism and colonial slavery has divided life into categories of the human, the not quite human, and the not human,11 blackness transcends this hierarchy. It is more than fungible life and dispossession; rather, it entails relentless acts of resistance, refusals of the given, and conjures other visions of the world. It provides a guidepost for those in search of a language capable of illuminating the condition of the marginal and the wretched, the stranger in the house, those bereft of a mother tongue.
French is my mother tongue, though it is not my mother’s tongue. Might France be my mother? … This linguistic gulf, result of a displacement, a migration, themselves echoes of a far longer history of displacements and migrations – might it reveal something about a vision of the world and of global history that are somehow incarnated in my Black body, moving through a society that claims to be blind to race? (p. 16)
This autobiography of reading is also an account of linguistic estrangement. The question of a mother tongue is as pressing for Soumahoro as any other Black writer in the diaspora,