from Research in African Literatures Volume 32, Number 3The Nation as a Contested Construct
Emmanuel Yewah
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In his landmark study in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson opens what has become a continuous debate on the idea of the nation and nationalism by defining the nation as "an imagined political community--and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (15). He explains: "It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them. Yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion" (15). In fact, he adds, "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined" (15). To imagine the nation that way is to focus on its physical structure, that is, as a landscape with fixed boundaries, rather than as an inscape, amorphous and fluid. For as Anderson contends, the nation is "imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lies other nations" (16). To think of the nation as sovereign, that is, an independent, self-governing entity modeled on monarchies at a time of great historical and intellectual changes in Europe, a period of increasing religious pluralism, adds yet to that false notion of the nation. Yet the question remains: how can such a recent, false notion as nation cause so many to be willing to die? Or, as in the case with some African writers, be willing to create works that " [offer] blueprints of national formation?" The answer lies perhaps in the political leaderships' or, indeed, pseudo-sovereigns' abilities to dictate this false notion to his people as truth.In recent years, however, writers like Sony Labou Tansi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nuruddin Farah, disillusioned by the broken promises of "les soleils des indépendances," betrayed by postcolonial rulers who have appropriated national discourses, conscious of dictators' human rights abuses within their imagined sovereign space, have turned their creative endeavors into weapons to challenge, indeed to deconstruct what Jean Franco has called in another context "any signified that could correspond to the nation" (204). Such subversive activities of de-centering the nation, of questioning established national boundaries, have taken various forms. Some of the writers have created grotesque, ubuesque, composite political figures and endowed them with larger-than-life qualities that transcend national boundaries while undermining their flattering attributes by also endowing them with self-destructive tendencies as well, tendencies that together nullify their existence. Farah's Maps transgresses all kinds of boundaries--social, gender, generational, identity, and geographical--to show the idea of nation as having "a shifting and unstable significance." On his part, Ngugi's decision to write in the Gikuyu language has implications beyond the established boundaries of his imagined community Kenya. As will be shown later in the discussion, such a decision aims at developing his local language so that it can effectively express the complexities of local realities and through that empower the Gikuyu-speaking masses to actively participate in shaping their own destiny. For Labou Tansi, contesting takes the form of highlighting the arbitrariness of national boundaries by making them fluid so they can be mapped and remapped at will by dictators, and by intertwining the existence or destiny of the nation with that of unstable political figures. In doing so, Labou Tansi as well as the other writers in question here seem to pave the way for the nullification of the nation itself.
For many women writers, who, to borrow from Homi Bhabha, "have always been placed on the limits of [their] nations' narratives"(302), contesting various boundaries has often come through their way of framing what might be considered personal, individual, local issues, everyday life stories in ways that transcend the boundaries of their imagined communities. Indeed, for all those writers and critics, the nation can no longer be interpreted as Walker Connor puts it simply as "a social group which shares a common ideology, common institutions and customs, and a sense of homogeneity" (333), but must be seen in its complexity as "a contested referent" (Esonwanne), a "shifting referent" (Cobhan), "imagined communities" (Anderson), an "imagined construct" (Paredes), or, indeed, a contested construct. These competing descriptions of the nation reflect scholars' and critics' fascination with the concept and represent current debates on the idea of the nation in the American academy.
In the opening paragraphs of his essay "The Nation as a Contested Referent," Uzo Esonwanne makes a "tour d'horizon" of that debate prompted by Fredric Jameson's article "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism" in which he characterizes all "Third World" texts as "national allegories." As he explains, "Third world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic necessarily project a political dimension in the term of national allegory." The story of the private individual destiny, he adds, "is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society" (69). Jameson's assertion may have some validity in that studies by Walter Benjamin, the allegorist par excellence, have led the latter to conclude that allegory reflects a cultural situation in which "any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else" (175). In the field of allegorical intuition, Benjamin contends, "the image is the fragment, a rune" (176).
Patrick McGee's reading of Benjamin in the light of African literature seems to explain Jameson's contention. Allegory, he argues, "arises from a culture in which the real world has become meaningless, devoid of intrinsic value, fragmented yet mysterious" (241). McGee's comments clearly depict the colonial situation that had disrupted the coherent picture of precolonial reality. It had also distorted the African past and in its place had introduced a copy of the colonialist's own traditions, or simply invented new ones. In either case the result was the fragmentation of the Africans' perception of their own world, making that world meaningless for them. The allegorist, according to McGee, "merely arranges the fragments of this world, its images, to produce a meaning the fragments could not produce by themselves--a meaning not identical to the intention of the allegorist but reflecting his or her relation to the given historical context" (241). Jameson's qualification of allegory as "national" places the individual allegorist in the larger context of the nation which in this case, should be understood as what Homi Bhabha calls that "curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public significance" (2). Bhabha's "realm" is today being undermined and abused by dictators who have arrogated the imagined national space for themselves by inscribing their personal stories in the narrative of the nation in the guise of collective history.
Jameson's assertion has other implications. It seems to pigeonhole all Third World writings, keeping them from transcending the conceptual boundaries of their imagined national communities. Guy Ossito Midiohouan's comment about national literatures is appropriate here. He decries "many a practitioner of nation-specific criticism [who] has stumbled when attempting to determine the locale and context of a number of African novels; so much so that we can claim that quite a few writers have found themselves pigeonholed, against their will, within air-tight mythological constructs which have very little to do with their work" (37). Moreover, it does assume, and falsely so, that the writer in these so-called Third World societies can always, and does indeed, recapture the collective memory of the people since his/her own individual memory is always subsumed. Furthermore, Jameson assumes that the concept of the nation from which he derives the adjective "national" is in itself a fixed, stable and an easily definable entity.
Literary and cultural critics as Jean Franco challenge assumptions and broad generalizations of that nature in other contexts. She questions whether "national allegory" "can be any longer usefully applied to a literature in which nation is either a contested term or something like the Cheshire Cat's grin -- a mere reminder of a vanished body" (204). Her reading of contemporary Latin American literatures leads to the conclusion that "not only is 'the nation' a complex and much contested term, but in recent Latin American criticism, it is no longer the inevitable framework for either political or cultural projects" (204). Going back to the forties and fifties she adds, "[T]he novel more and more became a skeptical reconstruction of past errors. The novel made visible that absence of any signified that could correspond to the nation. [. . .] In place of an identifiable microcosm of nation, such works offer a motley space in which different historical development and different cultures overlap" (205). These Latin American writers like their African counterparts, disillusioned by the wave of dictatorships that until very recently hampered any form of development on the continent, or contributed to the total disintegration of their nations, portray the nation rather cynically as a necropolis in which "[individual] and collective identity, social and family life [are] like shells from which life [has] disappeared" (205).
This study draws on the work of these critics and seeks to expand the debate to bring in such aspects as the role of ethnic languages in national integration or disintegration and the political cultures of dictatorship derived from both indigenous and inherited systems. It also discusses strategies used by some women writers to undermine the concept of nation. Additionally, it attempts to link the discussion to the idea of Pan-Africanism by positing that contestation may indeed be a way of breaking down artificial boundaries so as to realize, even if imaginatively, the dream of a united continent. My choice of the term construct reflects my own inability to grasp that elusive concept; it is also meant to distinguish it from community, a term that, even when imagined, conjures up the idea of the nation as a fixed physical space. More importantly, it conveys the idea of the nation as an artificially made structure and, therefore, as something that could be taken apart and reconstructed. And here I am reminded of Iliana Pardes's essay "Imagining the Promised Land" in which the nation is seen as an "imagined construct" or an "inscape rather than a landscape of national identity" (9).
Pardes conceives of the nation not so much as a physical entity but rather as a construct of the mind, a mental structure in the process of mapping and re-mapping itself; indeed as something whose shape or shapelessness can be manipulated at leisure by leaderships, like Sony Labou Tansi's dictator Lorsa Lopez in L'état honteux, to fulfill their immediate desires. Animated by anticolonialist sentiment, Lopez sets out to "fabricate" his nation's boundaries by reshaping them into the form of a square, ironically using the same arbitrary methods that colonialists had used to carve out the continent in the nineteenth century. The new dictator is led to the presidential mansion where his first action is to re-draw the map of his country: "Cherchez-moi de l'encre rouge" 'Get me some red ink,' he orders. Then he proceeds to draw by hand in a manner reminiscent of children's drawing in straight lines and joining the edges of these lines to form the new boundaries of the state, a state that is square in shape. However, in this arbitrary process, he truncates the old colonial territory leaving out parts of it to the neighbors while at the same time incorporating parts of the neighbors' territory into his. As the text describes, "Et il traça à main levée les nouvelles dimensions de la patrie: . . il traça quatre lignes droites qui se rejoignaient deux à deux, laissant des parties du territoire national chez nos voisins et prenant à nos voisins des parties de leur territoire parce que mes frères et chers compatriotes c'est la décision de ma hernie: la patrie sera carrée." The justification for his arbitrary action is that he and his people cannot continue to be crammed in the narrow strip of land drawn up by the colonialist. In his words, "Nous ne pouvons pas vivre dans un entonnoir tracé par les colons, quand même!" He concludes by appealing to the collective consciousness of his people, here represented by the pronoun "nous" 'we' through a rhetorical question, "Quel peuple sommes-nous si nous n'avons même pas le loisir de fabriquer nos frontières?" 'What type of people are we if we do not have the liberty to remake our boundaries?' (10-11).
As in all dictatorships, the arbitrary finds its way into all decision-making processes as national boundaries shift and names of countries change according to the whims of dictators. Labou Tansi's perspective here seems to be to destabilize the borders of national territory, symbolic of most African states, by creating an alternative nation and superimposing it on the "merde" of the disintegrating "état honteux" ("land of shame," shameful state," disintegrating state").
Nuruddin Farah's comment that an entity such as a country or a nation exists simply in his imagination since he has lived in exile from his native Somalia for about twenty years captures vividly Lopez's idea above of boundaries as imaginary. For a little under twenty years, Farah states, "I have dwelled in the dubious details of a territory I often refer to as the country of my imagination. I have always considered countries to be no more than working hypotheses, portals opening on assumption of allegiance to an idea. [. . .]" Moreover, he adds, "[A]t times though one's loyalty may be owed to another idea equally valid [. . .]. During the long travel out of one hypothesis to another [. . .] a refugee is born, who lives in a country too amorphous to be favoured with a name" (Homing in on the Pigeon).
The idea of the nation, as Rhonda Cobhan points out, has also "had a shifting and unstable significance within African political discourse" (84) in that dictators have arrogated for themselves the power to define national character and have systematically subverted the process of recapturing collective memories by rewriting their personal stories in the guise of the collective history of their nation. Indeed, Richard Bjornson's study of Cameroon politics in The African Quest for Freedom and Identity reveals how Ahidjo, in his attempt to fashion a Cameroonian national identity and to hold such slippery notion together, crafted a national discourse under the slogan "l'unité nationale" inspired by the Négritudinist philosophy of homogenization. Rather than developing distinct ethnic and regional characters and celebrating these differences, the idea was to create a melting pot from a multiplicity of peoples from different cultural, social, and especially linguistic backgrounds. For a while, in spite of perceived marginalization by the anglophone minority and the massacre of UPC adherents during the struggle for independence, "ethnic identity" seemed blurred and the coalition held together. Since November 1982 Ahidjo's discourse has been replaced by what Paul Biya, his successor, terms "Renouveau." In spite of the promise of a new beginning in his approach to governance, ethnic dissatisfaction has reached an all-time high. That heightened ethnic sentiment has created a situation whereby the very notion of a Cameroonian nation has become problematic, indeed, meaningless to many who have been shut out of macropolitical nationalist discourse dominated by Biya and his ruling Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) party.
Similar efforts to redefine the nation by an appeal to a collective legacy such as "common ideology," "common institutions and customs," were behind Mobutu's "authenticité." We can find many other examples on the continent of leaders' attempts to forge and impose their personal vision on their people. The disparity between these pseudonationalistic discourses and those leaders' practices of stressing ethnic identities and differences in order to separate and control has, nonetheless, led not so much to a false sense of unity among the different nationalities within the nation but to the rise of ethnic consciousness. And the question arises as to what impact that ethnic awareness or ethnicity has in "nation-building" or "nation-destroying," to borrow from Walker Connor.
According to Esonwanne, "[W]hether projected as an impediment to 'nation' formation or as source of 'authentic' African aesthetic symbols," ethnicity "often serves as a useful tool in the struggle between the various critical formations, prominent among whom are cultural conservationists [. . .] and syncretists [. . .]" (56). A similar argument has been made by Kwame Anthony Appiah who asserts that "it has always been true that in large parts of Africa 'tribalism' [. . .] far from being an obstacle to governance, is what makes possible any government at all" (170). If ethnicity is not "a destabilizing, or potentially revolutionary force," one may ask as Kimani Gecau has done whether "ethnic languages divide the nation." Gecau raises the question as his contribution to the debate on the role of ethnic languages in Kenya sparked by the authorities' push to introduce Kiswahili as one of Kenya's official languages, and by the publication of Ngugi wa Thiong'o's I Will Marry When I Can in Gikuyu.
Gecau rejects the privileging of Kiswahili over other ethnic languages by the authorities who claim that, as a modern language with well-developed grammar and vocabulary, it is more "capable of assuming greater technological burden where it is put to the test" (15). He advocates the development of other ethnic languages at one and the same level so they will express common thought, "the platitudes of everyday life," or "communicate, analyse, and explain all aspects of present-day realities" (18). In the process of such development, he believes, all linguistic communities' intellectual levels will be raised. He writes:
I will, therefore, argue that since language is an instrument of communication and cognition and since it is the product and reflection of a people's condition of life, languages of different nationalities [nationalities here referring to various ethnic groups] at one and the same level of development will serve common social relations and will express more or less common thought. The major differences will be in form, not in the content. Thus we find nationalities sharing more or less similar folk-tales and myths, more or less same world-view.And this is why people will find similarities in our communal pre-capitalist societies. (18)
Furthermore, he argues that developing these languages along "technical and literary lines" (247) will not marginalize them, as has been the case hitherto, on grounds that they are "tribal-oriented, parochial in state, and quite simplistic in form" (247). Rather it will enrich those languages, making them capable of expressing today's complex realities and of "recapturing" the elaborate bodies of knowledge of traditional scholarship, which, as Paulin Hountondji asserts in another context, has "been driven out of the conscious memory of the peoples who, at a given time, produce[d] them" (247)--driven out first by the colonialists and then by their satraps who have systematically subjugated any form of knowledge contesting their legitimacy. Inasmuch as Gecau's objection to privileging one local language over others by adopting it as a national language makes sense in theory, it does, however, raise the practical question as to how many local languages in Kenya can be made into national languages.
For Ngugi, language is a "carrier of peoples' culture," and any attempt to decolonize the mind must start with bringing back into conscious memory local languages that had been suppressed by the colonialists and imperialists. As he states, "[L]anguage is a carrier of a people's culture, culture is carrier of a people's values; values are the basis of a people's self-definition--the basis of their consciousness. And when you destroy a people's language, you are destroying that very important aspect of their heritage [. . .] you are in fact destroying that which helps them to define themselves [. . .] that which embodies their collective memory as a people" (143). With the issue of language placed in the context of Ngugi's Marxist philosophy, it becomes clear that empowering the masses takes on a political dimension in that it aims at eroding the imperialist/neocolonialist structure. More importantly, giving the people the means of producing and disseminating knowledge and the power to articulate problems about their ethnic group could be one of the means by which they transcend the boundaries of their imagined community in order to connect with other masses or marginalized groups in the world dealing with common problems such as "neo-colonialism, poverty, hunger, totalitarism" (Midiouhouan 37). As Midiohouan so aptly puts it, "our role today should not be to cultivate our difference and legitimize borders but rather, as the writers themselves have done, it must be to assume responsibilities to confront our common reality and our common destiny" (37-38). Nevertheless, in the process of opening up to others, of articulating proud, self-reflexive knowledge, such ethnic nationalism could also articulate hatred of others.
Advocating the development and use of their ethnic language seems to be a way for both Ngugi and Gecau to capture the instability of the foundation of their nation and the bitterness of their society or, to borrow from Edna Aizenberg, to find a "literary language to symbolically enact their disillusionment" (89). They want to empower the masses of Gikuyu-speaking people who, like many other groups in rural areas, have been marginalized from the political process, enabling them to participate in staging their own human drama. Empowering the people as such may, as Gecau has argued quite convincingly, help in nation-building in that it may actually strengthen the nation's roots at the micro-level and help at the macro-level to achieve what Alon Confino has suggested in another context, that is, to "construct across the lines that [divide] them a certain idea" (45) of Kenyan society. Some critics have questioned whether such mobilization of the people for development does not contribute to their "domestication" rather than their liberation. In an interview with Hansel Eyoh, Gecau admits that theater can be used for domestication, but adds, "[W]hen you talk about domesticating or liberating theatre we should remember that theatre does have to develop the people who take part in it; it helps the people taking part in it to develop a confidence that they can articulate their own problems. I think this is what is feared in the theatre--the possibility it offers to people . . . to ask questions and to articulate their own problems" (66).
Empowerment could have a destabilizing effect on the nation in that it may lead to demands for self-determination which, as Connor notes, in Africa as in other parts of the world, has led ethnic groups (minorities in some cases) to "question the validity of present political borders" (331). In other words, empowerment may raise ethnic consciousness, exacerbate interethnic conflict, and promote agitation for self-government by various "nationalities." All of that may lead to the disintegration of Anderson's imagined communities or what Ali Mazrui has called a "political nation," which, to borrow from John Stuart Mill, is an entity in which "a portion of mankind [. . .] united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others- which make them cooperate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves" (359-60). Thus, Ngugi's attempt to resurrect the Gikuyu language that European settlers and their satraps had relegated to the realm of dialects, or indeed suppressed, may turn out to be a more subversive act than perhaps intended in that it may lead to the rise of "politically decentralized" but "culturally united" societies or "cultural nations," mini-nations, with the potential of undoing the whole structure, the imagined construct that we have come to know as Kenya. For as Connor has indicated, a "global survey illustrates that ethnic consciousness is definitely in the ascendancy as a political force, and [. . .] state borders, as presently delimited, are being increasingly challenged" (327). It should be noted, however, that the challenge to the existence of the nation is not limited to countries with many competing local languages, but extends to those that share one language. For instance, Haile Selassie's problematic promotion of Amharic in Ethiopia did not end ethnic conflict; neither did the sharing of one language in Rwanda prevent the genocide of the mid-nineties.
Whereas Ngugi uses his ethnic language to challenge and to capture the instability of the foundation of the imagined community called Kenya, other writers of the antineocolonial, antidictatorial tradition, critical of modes of governance derived from both indigenous and inherited political cultures, have created characters in their works, who defend their national boundaries yet turn that national space into slaughter houses for imagined enemies charged with threatening national security. These characters are endowed with disparate qualities not attributable to one specific national figure, but that transcend national boundaries. For instance, the warning at the opening of Henri Lopes's Le pleurer-rire, is quick to say that no such figure as Bwakamabe really exists because he is a composite of many different figures on the continent. As this ironical statement clearly suggests, "non, les lecteurs sains savent qu'il n'existe pas de Président aussi léger, burlesque et cruel que Tonton. Les masses héroïques d'Afrique ne le tolèreraient pas et les autres peuples du monde épris de justice et de paix les aideraient à le renverser" 'no, sane readers know that there is no president as mindless, burlesque, and cruel as Tonton. Heroic African masses would not tolerate him and other peace and justice lovers the world lover would help to overthrow him' (11). Qualities attributed to Tonton could easily apply to "Le Guide Providentiel," Tuboum, Messie-Koï, and all other similar figures. As incarnations of their nations, they rely on the continued existence of such nations for self-definition.
The discussion thus far has focused on male writers, some of whom had produced what Franz Fanon calls "the narrative of liberation that saw as its task the realization of the 'truths of the nation' in the face of colonial disfigurement" (181). But such nationalistic writings have "given way to a narrative that challenges the nation and the identity wrought by independence" (181). The question that remains is what role women writers have played in this process of nation-building or, in this context, nation-destroying. As noted elsewhere, the women's question has always been left out of discourses of the nation. Critics accuse women writers of not responding creatively and imaginatively to the macropolitical and socioeconomic situations of their nation or not exploring the public space as their male counterparts have done.
In her lucid and thought-provoking chapter "Women and the Nation," Partha Chatterjee searches for a theoretical framework to analyze the women's question in Asia and Africa, introducing the concept of inner/outer, home/world, and spiritual/material. Her discussion of those dichotomies indirectly provides an answer to those critics. As she explains:
Applying the inner/outer distinction to the matter of concrete day-to-day living separates the social space into ghar and bahir, the home and the world. The world is external, the domain of the material; the home represents one's inner spiritual self, one's true identity. The world is a treacherous terrain of the pursuit of material interests where practical consideration reign supreme. It is also typically the domain of the male. The home in its essence must remain unaffected by profane activities of the material world--and woman is its representation. (120)
Indeed, the space and role assigned to women in the preceding quotation is typical of "gender roles in traditional patriarchy." According to R. Radhakrishnan, such nationalist rhetoric makes women "the pure and ahistorical signifier of 'interiority'" (84). "Ahistorical" here need not be negative in that it is on the fringes of historical processes that these signifiers generate antihegemonic, anticolonialist discourses. For as women writers point out in an interview conducted by Margaret Busby, they have had "to struggle against colonisation by their own men and by those traditional attitudes that reserved formal education for male children"(33). Moreover, conscious of the fact that "what truly matters in the life of the nation are practices in the inner space," the domains of women, some women writers have used their insider position to subvert nationalist discourses by challenging their objectification and the roles that they have been conditioned to play; to question what Kenneth Harrow calls "their subordinated position in the emergence of new patriarchal structures or the revalidation of old ones" (CFP).
That is the case with Mariama Bâ whose education helps her not only to acquire the tools and the knowledge of her "ghar" but, more importantly, to transcend that space keeping her from "bahir," that is, to the world beyond the boundaries of her nation. For instance, when Ramatoulaye recalls with fondness her schooldays with Aissatou and other girls from across West Africa, her statement suggests a breaking down of physical, ethnic boundaries as the entrance exams into secondary schools are for the whole region rather than for autonomous republics. Although the girls are from different parts of West Africa, they are all destined for the same mission of emancipation that transcends boundaries: "to lift us out of the bog of tradition, superstition and custom, to make us appreciate a multitude of civilizations without renouncing our own, to raise our vision of the world, cultivate our personalities, strengthen our qualities, to make up for our inadequacies, to develop universal moral values in us" (15). Education frees her from the prison-house of taboos, traditions, and the conservative ideology that she, as a woman, has been conditioned to naturalize. Her nationalism is problematic in that she wants to preserve her traditional culture but also wants to break down its barriers so as to be able to engage with other world traditions. Such a totalizing concept of modernism, reminiscent of the Négritude movement, seeks to break down boundaries including those of the nation. Like her male counterparts discussed earlier, Mariama Bâ uses her knowledge of her ghar to question nationalist ideology and through that transcend the boundaries of her community.
While Mariama Bâ's questioning of the nationalists discourse is rather subtle, in Ama Ata Aidoo's Changes such questioning is obvious. About Ali, one of the main characters, son of a trader whose father had a wife in each of his eight favorite stops on his trade routes and who was brought up in Bamako, the narrator says:
Bamako was home. Then having settled the question for the convenience of his heart, he had proceeded to claim the entire Guinea coast, its hinterland and the Sub-Sahel for his own [. . .] he had assumed the nationalities of Ghana, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Togo. Naturally he carried a passport to prove the genuineness of each. (24)Jane Bryce's comment on Ali's identity highlights Aidoo's attempt to erase national identity and in its place ascribe to her character a transnational identity. Put differently, she uses this character to question what constitutes nationality and identity. More importantly, Aidoo seeks to deconstruct the very idea of national boundaries. As Bryce aptly puts it:
[N]ot only does Ali collect countries as his father collects wives, but the business he runs--a travel agency--is only a modern version of his father's trade. Ali's inheritance is the freedom to choose, without the restriction of national boundaries, who he will be, where he will live, what women he will have. He thus constitutes a conundrum central to the text. (4)
Following those comments, Bryce queries: "[I]s Aidoo questioning the whole idea of nation, of ethnic affiliation, identity tied to place, home, country--the very things for which the exile longs?" (4). By creating a character that crisscrosses boundaries as Ali does, Aidoo intends to break down imaginary national boundaries imposed by colonialism and, in the process, resurrect the old pan-African ideal of a United States of Africa.
If one accepts Ernest Renan's idea that the nation is "a soul, a spiritual principle" guided by two things, "the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; and the present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form" (19), then one can understand that these subversive activities convey the writers' frustration with political leadership. The latter has highjacked their nation's independence, marginalized ethnic identities as well as ethnic languages, appropriated national discourses, and selectively suppressed memories, which otherwise would lead to questions about their legitimacy. As they distort a common past, they make it impossible to build a common future. Breaking down national boundaries as such allows for a new configuration and forces a remapping of the terrain. It also paves the way for the creation of alternative groupings to the "merde" that exists today. Making the boundaries of these nations fluid may indeed be the initial step towards responding to the question of whether the Pan-Africanist dream of more than four decades ago can ever be realized.
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