Diasporic Tensions in Selected Postcolonial Novels

Diasporic Tensions in Selected Postcolonial Novels

Background to the study

Literature has continued to fulfill its unique functions in national development. This clearly shows that no society exists significantly without its literature neither can literature function and blossom in isolation of the society. Globalization is very common these days as people tend to read beyond their horizon, that is to think beyond one‟s nation and think of people on the other side – diasporas or immigrants. According to Colin Palmer, migration took place around ten to twenty thousand years ago when Asians migrated to America. They left their country to settle in North and South America. Some equally settled in the Caribbean Islands. The Jewish diaspora started about two thousand years ago. Muslims started creating communities by spreading their religion and culture to Asia, Europe and Africa in the eight century. Europeans began colonization of African countries around 15th century and gradually got into other countries all over the world. Migration gave birth to diaspora which in turn produced racism. Racism, the aftermath of migration started in the late seventeenth century. David Goldberg‟s Racist Culture contends that race is one of the central conceptual „inventions of modernity‟ (12). Thomas Bonnici views a diaspora community as a „many-tongued chorus‟ with their separate histories linked together. In his article, „Caryl Phillip‟s Crossing the River (1993): Tensions in Diaspora, Displacement and Split Subjects‟ he writes that there are two types of diaspora which are forced (involuntary) and modern (voluntary) diasporas (131). From the article, the word „Diaspora‟ reveals variety of experiences, a state of mind and a sense of identity. Diaspora is the movement of indigenous people or a population of common people to a place other than their homeland region and its experience or tensions is all about what migrants face while in the diaspora and after they return to their motherland. This work looks at diaspora as people who settled far from their ancestral homeland. 2 Academic discourse on diaspora started in North America among African descent - W. E. Burghardt Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 where he writes that „… slavery was indeed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all sorrow, the root of all prejudice….‟ (5), The Negro in 1915 and Carter G. Woodson founded the Association of Negro Life and History and a journal – The Journal of Negro history in 1915. Du Bois as a member of Pan African Movement, tried to bring Negroes all over the world together. After analyzing immigrants problems, Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folks, chapter two declares that „the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line‟ (9), wondering what the future of black folks outside Africa would look like as he writes that the Negro is born with a veil and in „a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness. …One ever feels his twines – an American, a Negro: two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two waring ideas in one dark body…‟ (4). He goes ahead to write that „… the black man‟s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seen like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness, - it is the contradiction of double aims‟ (5). The two types of African diaspora have been in existence for many years in different parts of the world. Compulsory African diaspora is the triangular system of diaspora which is between Africa, America and Europe and voluntary African diaspora which is popular because of political, social, cultural and economic relations does not end at triangular system but adds one more system which makes it a quadrangle which is between Africa, America, Europe and back to Africa which is what the four novels under study is all about. The authors believe that slaves and African-Americans ought to look for their actual root and go back to Africa. Bernard Logan believes that the largest number of African migrants comes from countries with „a large population; a pro-western, capitalist outlook; speakers of English, unstable economic conditions; …and a colonial legacy that had not been too culturally dominant‟ (603).

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