Sarah Quesada’s invitation letter stated that this conference is convened jointly by the Stanford Forum for African Studies (SFAS), the Stanford Division of Languages, Cultures and Literatures, and the Centre for African Studies. I want to thank all three units for the extraordinary privilege of being asked to mount a Stanford podium and deliver a keynote lecture at a time when Stanford University speeches have become the new cool online thanks to the life and genius of one of America’s greatest gifts to humanity: Steve Jobs.
Sarah Quesada’s invitation letter stated that this conference is convened jointly by the Stanford Forum for African Studies (SFAS), the Stanford Division of Languages, Cultures and Literatures, and the Centre for African Studies. I want to thank all three units for the extraordinary privilege of being asked to mount a Stanford podium and deliver a keynote lecture at a time when Stanford University speeches have become the new cool online thanks to the life and genius of one of America’s greatest gifts to humanity: Steve Jobs.
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Because he is no longer with us and precisely because my reference to his commencement address here at Stanford University in 2005 and the modes of its preservation, canonization, and dissemination online evoke modes of remembering and the ritual of totemizing the remembered by collapsing the distance between the profane and the sacred, I cannot but see in the evocation of that illustrious Stanford commencement speaker a segue to the keyword around which I am going to organize my thoughts in this lecture: memory.
I must warn you about two things. I am a public intellectual in matters Nigerian. I am a gown with a permanent voice in town. This lecture has an extensive audience beyond Stanford. A fragment of that audience can be very impatient with, and unforgiving of the arcane diction of high-tension theory and academic discourse. Theory here will therefore blend with the overall folksy and verbal arts structure of the lecture for you must know already that I am a storyteller.
Bearing this in mind let me first acknowledge obvious debts of intellectual and theoretical filiation. Yes, you got me. My title, “Capitalism and Memory”, speaks of a direct debt to Eric Williams’s magnum opus, Capitalism and Slavery, just as the theme you have chosen for your conference, “The Black Atlantic: Colonial and Contemporary Exchanges”, speaks of your conceptual debt to Paul Gilroy and the cottage industry of theoretical disquisition spawned by his brilliant but problematic book, The Black Atlantic. At a slightly different remove from these two classics are two other monumentally important books that are equally going to haunt my submissions here: Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. The echoes of each work will, hopefully, be loud enough for you not to miss them as I proceed with my current effort respectfully in the shadow of what has come before it.
“Iba - For Those Who Went before”, says Wole Soyinka in a Yoruba reiterative act of acknowledging the superiority of precedence.
The difference between my project and what obtains in the epistemic field of these illustrious precursors is one of slant and nuance. Eric Williams’s economism, for instance, remains one of the most powerful and moving accounts of how the symbolic elements that David Diop builds into one of the most famous bursts of imagery in African poetry, “the blood of your sweat/the sweat of your work/the work of your slavery/the slavery of your children”, are all to be found at the foundation of capitalism. Blood. Sweat. Work: the foundation of mercantilist capitalism, industrial capitalism, colonialist capitalism and all their heirs and hues in our postmodern present when corporate capitalism and casino capitalism (apologies to Susan Strange) are now pretending that we shall forget where they are coming from, their bloody history, once they rename themselves globalization.
Those of you who have read Eric Williams attentively would have noticed that he refers to the energies which capitalism hunted, captured, transported, organized, brutalized, and exploited in the historical process of its own self-constitution and the deification of profit as events whose unfolding could be mapped into linear and specific temporalities. In fact, in Chapter Eight, entitled, “The New Industrial Order”, Williams mentions “three events” whose abolition is “inseparable” in terms of consequences: slavery, the slave trade, and the sugar preference of the West Indian monopoly capitalists. If you look at the other ur-texts by Eduardo Galeano and Walter Rodney that I mentioned earlier, the narrative of capitalism also essentially comes down to specific events authored by the capitalist West on the backs of the peoples of Africa and Latin America.
But I am interested in something much deeper and more abstract than the physicality of these events. I am trying to look beyond the specific ways in which capitalism, be it of the mercantilist, industrialist, corporatist or casino ilk, has organized human history and experience for five centuries as one grand biography of the beast called profit. To look beyond the physicality of the events in question is to move into the abstract territory of the sacred where we encounter the memory of things experienced. Durkheim always comes into the picture whenever I am summoned to reflect on the ways in which Africa and her Diaspora have negotiated the memory of things done to them by capitalism on the one hand and the ways in which they have transformed that memory into a space of contact and engagements which often acquire the halo of the sacred on the other hand.
Privileging an abstraction such as memory over the physicality of the event of slavery itself allows me to work around some of the aporias and fissures associated with the theory of Paul Gilroy and the dramaturgy of August Wilson in terms of where to locate and map the contact zones between Africa and her diaspora. The narrative of Black trauma begins in medias res with Gilroy, what with his emphasis on the image of the Atlantic Ocean and the slave ship gliding on it, both serving as the historical crucible for “the structures of feeling, producing, communicating, and remembering” that Gilroy names “the black Atlantic world”. One obvious problem with a project that traces the roots and routes of these things to the Middle Passage and not to Africa per se is the ease with which we resituate Europe as the History in our histories while ironically claiming to be deconstructing Europe, provincializing Europe, or moving the centre. Hence, what detains Gilroy in chapters four and five of his book is the route that led W.E.B Du Bois to Germany and Richard Wright to France. Ghana, such a monumentally important destination for the two men, is sprinkled sparingly into the picture.
For all the echoes of Africa in the dramaturgy of August Wilson, it is difficult to overlook the fact that the roots and routes of black historical trauma head more in the direction of the Middle Passage than Africa. The floor of the Atlantic Ocean appears to be the beginning of things. Like William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Wilson creates his own fictional world, the mythical City of Bones on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, where the bones of all the slaves thrown overboard become source and origin. Hence, Harry J Elam, JR, is able to describe the City of Bones as “a site that reunites or re-members the collective black body, those lost old bones, making them into a unified structure, a communal site. It is a city that joins past to present and that overcomes loss by recuperating and dynamically maintaining a living African American history.” This explains why it is not too difficult for any native Yoruba to determine that Harry Elam’s discussion of Ogun, via Soyinka, as the backcloth of August Wilson’s dramaturgy is quite a stretch.
The considerably reduced enunciation of Africa in these approaches to narratives of Blackness and black trauma is perhaps indicative of much deeper fissures in the black body politic, which underscore the necessity of reconfiguring memory and its fractal sites of actuation in Africa and the Diaspora. Evidence of such fissures abounds on both sides – in Africa and the diaspora. Consider the long history of return narratives, the memories they bear, and the imaginaries they perform. The return narrative is a gigantic cultural genre with numerous strands. There is the spiritual-mythic return of Le vieux Médouze whose soul returns to Guinée after his transition to ancestorhood in Euzhan Palcy’s great film, Sugar Cane Alley; there is the radical, reverse-exodus model of Marcus Garvey; the eulogistic Négritude model of the Aimé Césaire of the “eias”; the fundamentalist nativism of the Léon Damas of the “poupées noires” fame; the ambivalence of the Richard Wright of Black Power; the blame-Africans-for-slavery-and-exculpate-the-white-slaver proclivities of Henry Louis Gates Jnr; and the I-am-washing-my-hands-off-that-miserable-and-better-forgotten-continent Pontius Pilate approach of Keith Richburg, are all divergent strands of the grand epic that is the return narrative.
As disparate as they are, something unites these various models of the return narrative: the anxiety of contact, the initial fear of the unknown that houses your origin. This anxiety is captured most vividly in the opening page of Richard Wright’s Black Power: “Now that your desk is clear, why don’t you go to Africa”, Dorothy Padmore tells Mr. Wright. “Africa?” Mr. Wright’s dumbfoundment is italicized. Then this bit of introspection: “Africa”, I repeated the word to myself (N.B: Africa is still only a word) then paused as something strange and disturbing stirred slowly in the depths of me. I am African! I’m of African descent… Yet I’d never seen Africa; I’d never really known any Africans; I’d hardly ever thought of Africa”. The entire opening section of Black Power is a paean to the anxiety of contact.
What I call the anxiety of contact as the unifying dialect of return narratives, no matter how disparate they are, Dionne Brand calls “a tear in the world”. Even more than Richard Wright, Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return approaches the question of loss through the problematic of names: “My grandfather said he knew what people we came from. I reeled off all the names I knew. Yoruba? Ibo? Ashanti? Mandingo? He said no to all of them, saying that he would know it if he heard it. I was thirteen. I was anxious for him to remember.” Needless to say, her grandfather never remembered and this inability to find a source of the self becomes “a space” in Brand. But listen to this: “my grandfather could not summon up a vision or landscape or a people which would add up to a name. And it was profoundly disturbing. Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to a fissure between the past and the present”.
Africa. No name. No localizable people. But Dionne Brand and Richard Wright are not alone. The same gaps, the same yawning holes, the same empty spaces characterize imaginaries of the black diasporic world in Africa. Ask any African to name African America or the Caribbean in any of our languages: Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Wolof, Gikuyu. Ask any African when they first came into consciousness of geographies of blackness beyond the African continent in their own native languages and imaginaries. You will get interesting answers.
Interesting answers from, say, this African addressing you right now. My earliest intimations of colour and geography were in Yoruba elementary school readers of the “akomo l’ede Yoruba” fame and in the local lores of the Yagba people in Isanlu, my hometown. I grew up suffused in opaque references to something called “ile alawo dudu” (the land of the black-skinned people) which became Africa once we went to school and encountered the same references in social studies in the English language. The conceptual unity of chromatism and geography in the expression, “ile alawo dudu”, always stood in a binary opposition to “ile alawo funfun” (the land of the white –skinned people), “ilu oba” (the land of the King/throne), or “ilu oyinbo” (the land of white people). Adebola, ku ai gbagbe. Please repeat that statement after me every time you hear it until the end of this lecture. Let’s go: Adebola, ku ai gbagbe. That is how the Yoruba people salute somebody who remembers; somebody who tells a good story. I can’t hear you, say that again. One more time, Adebola, ku ai gbagbe. Good!
Please remember that I am still in primary school – or precisely what we call Nursery/Primary school in Nigeria. At this stage, all references to “oko eru” (land of slavery) in my conceptual world in Yagba referred to the amorphous forms of domestic slavery known to that world. Consequently, between “ile alawo dudu” (land of the black-skinned people) and “ile alawo funfun” (land of the white-skinned people), my language worlded the world as a site of contestations and confrontations between a very black Africa and a very white Euro-America. There simply was no conceptual space yet for our black cousins in the Diaspora. Adebola, ku ai gbagbe! Still can’t hear you, your chorus is: Adebola, ku ai gbagbe! Now, that’s much better.
(TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)
(Keynote lecture delivered at the annual conference of the Stanford Forum for African Studies, Palo Alto, California. Saturday, October 29, 2011)
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