Reconstruction 5.3 (Summer 2005)

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The Place of Race: Ethnicity, Location and "Progress" in the Fiction of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison / Harry Olufunwa

Abstract: This paper examines the ways in which ethnicity and location intersect in selected works of fiction of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison. It argues that the traceable correlation between ethnic origin and geographical location in the novels of these writers affects perceptions of and possibilities for personal and communal growth. Drawing upon Achebe’s No Longer At Ease and Ellison’s Juneteenth, the paper explores the ways in which characters and situations demonstrate the significance of ethnicity as major determinant of progress or catastrophe in multiethnic societies. It argues that the central characters of the two texts are culturally dislocated and are simultaneous representations of hero and outcast because they demonstrate contrasting elements of social centeredness and marginality.

I

<1> With a firm conviction as to its inherent objectivity, Joseph Conrad declares: “[g]eography is a science of facts” [1]. This paper explores what happens when the science of facts is relocated to the imaginative terrain of fiction and is combined with another allegedly factual “science,” that of ethnicity. Such an association is not in itself random, as Edward Said points out:

A group of people living on a few acres of land will set up boundaries between their land and its immediate surroundings and the territory beyond, which they call “the land of the barbarians” …. [T]his universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary. [2]

This reference to what Said calls an “imaginative geography” does two things: it directly contradicts Conrad’s assertion, and it reveals the way in which perceptions of ethnicity are based upon notions of location and place, thereby showing how geography and ethnicity are dependent upon each other for their total meaning.

<2> The novel is a genre that is distinguished by an emphasis on the artistic representation of specific locations. “Setting,” as it is otherwise known, often provides a realistic and metaphysical context in which themes and ideas are realised. This is very clearly demonstrated in the fiction of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison. Achebe’s characters often traverse a landscape that clearly serves as a yardstick for measuring their sense of themselves: Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart is convinced that his destiny is inseparable from that of his Umuofia fatherland; in No Longer at Ease, Obi Okonkwo’s idea of his Nigerianness is paradoxically dependent upon and undermined by his long absence from his country; in Arrow of God, Ezeulu’s power over Umuaro increases with his absence from it in colonial detention; in Anthills of the Savannah, fugitive ex-Commissioner Chris Oriko’s perspectives widen as he flees the wrath of his ambitious leader. In a similar manner, Ellison’s unseen and unseeing protagonist in Invisible Man discovers that his northward journey deepens rather than resolves his problems of racial and personal identity; in Juneteenth, the renegade ex-child preacher Bliss realises on his deathbed that whiteness is no refuge from the psychoses that plague him.

<3> This paper starts from the well-known premise that there is an inherent connection between race and place, and that a distinct association exists between who one is, where one comes from, where one lives and what one becomes. Ethnicity and location constitute crucial determinants of any sense of identity because they establish the coordinates that enable one to determine where s/he is as an individual in relation to the community in which s/he finds her/himself. The various manifestations of location are also interwoven with knowledge as an instrument of domination, as Michel Foucault points out:

Once knowledge can be analysed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power and disseminates the effects of power [4].

This paper will attempt to point out the ways in which ethnicity, as the meeting point of location, culture and fate, impinges upon character and personality. In pursuance of this aim, the third key element, “progress,” will be examined as a representation of the various kinds of physical and psychological traversals of different locations made by the central characters in the novels as they try to advantageously position themselves along the axes of ethnicity and location within their respective societies.

II

<4> The twin focal points of this paper are Achebe’s No Longer At Ease and Ellison’s Juneteenth. Both novels occupy somewhat ambiguous positions in the oeuvres of their authors. No Longer at Ease is generally considered to be one of Achebe’s less successful books. In theme and technique, especially characterisation, it is often regarded as lacking in the depth and insight that characterise his other novels *4.4 Ellison’s Juneteenth was fully forty-eight years in the making, and it was in fact completed by his literary executor, John F. Callahan, who published it as a coherent section of his notes five years after Ellison’s death in 1994. Such delay has led to adverse comment on Ellison’s own artistic powers and somewhat retroactive criticism of his earlier work [5].

<5> Despite these issues, both texts offer a useful testing ground for the ideas of ethnicity, location and progress that this paper investigates. No Longer At Ease and Juneteenth are thoroughly “modern” novels, both in the sense of their form and technique, and in the sense of the acutely self-conscious sensibilities they seek to portray. Both examine different sorts of alienation caused by the peculiar difficulties of personal, communal and racial identity faced by their characters, particularly as these manifest in multi-ethnic societies. Such estrangement is, in essence, a displacement indicative of a disjunction between the assumptions of race and the exigencies of place, and demonstrative of the twists and turns of the characters’ struggle towards a stable sense of self.

<6> Given the backgrounds of Chinua Achebe and Ralph Ellison as African and African American respectively, this cannot but be so. Inextricably tied to the cultural heritage of both is a historic displacement characterised by profound disruptions in the ways of life of their ancestors, and fundamental changes in the way they looked at the world and the world at them. Colonialism and slavery are, of course, the central events in the lives of black people in Africa and in the Diaspora respectively. Both were extreme forms of dislocation that brought the rupture of race and place to the very fore of the black psyche. As Austin J. Shelton claims, black people at home and abroad underwent a traumatic experience whose very name – the Middle Passage – is demonstrative of a destructive interstitiality in which race and place were sundered from each other:

Just as the African in the actual middle passage was physically a slave, the African in the middle passage of his personality orientation after the consolidation of the white man’s governments in Africa was a “cultural slave” [6].

<7> Victims of circumstances they could not even begin to understand, black people experienced a rupture that separated the hitherto near-synonymous notions of ethnicity and location. As slaves, they became the chattel of strange people in strange lands and had to fashion out new cultural perspectives which were often shaped by the unfamiliar cultures in which they found themselves; as colonial subjects, they became strangers in their own lands and were thus subject to the requirements of a people whose beliefs and actions were well-nigh indeterminable.

<8> Far from denying these facts, Achebe and Ellison have, in their fiction and elsewhere, been among the most eloquent spokesmen for the alienation of the modern black person. A child of the earliest Christian converts in his community, Achebe speaks of his family as having lived at “the crossroads of cultures” [7], in an era when Western and African ways of life first came into extended contact. Ellison’s own perspectives were shaped by a particularly acute sense of location, that of the unexplored, protean, pre-statehood “territory.” Oklahoma, where he was born, was a very young state situated in the west, rather than the north or the south, commonly regarded as the poles of African American experience. This offered him a sense of life’s possibilities within the institutional racism of the colour caste system, and allowed him to attain a “transcendent freedom” [8] within restricted limits.

<9> Such pertinent personal histories have enabled both Achebe and Ellison to comment on the fact that displacement, the loss of a relatively stable sense of place, is at the very heart of the black person’s predicament.

<10> In his essay “The Novelist as Teacher,” Achebe emphasises the significance of the historical sense Africans must utilise in seeking to “look back and try and find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us” [9]. Such detrimental precipitation and psychic re-positioning are symbolised in the theme of culture conflict that resonates so powerfully in novels like Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God. An important outcome of this is the alienation which is often manifested in the dislocation integral to an era in which “cultural certitude”10 *10 was lost. This condition is a displacement because it involves a movement away from an inherited African culture towards an acquired foreign culture, resulting in cultural estrangement, as individuals and whole societies are caught between the competing demands of both cultures, while subject to the pressures of increasingly dominant alien values. In other words, colonialism “generates alterity and dislocation on the part of the subject” [11].

<11> This situation is, in fact, inherent in the reality of the post-colonial situation, since colonialism, by posing a set of different values, sets up at least two sets of cultural norms in overt opposition to each other. As Terry Eagleton points out, the “negativity” of an oppressed people is synonymous with “its sense of itself as dislocated and depleted” [12].

<12> In his collection of essays, Shadow and Act, Ellison offers a comprehensive commentary on the various facets of African American life in America, especially as they apply to the psychic and cultural dislocation of a people who have been at the receiving end of an ideology that sought to categorise them as alienable property. A keen perception of location and a heightened sense of place are central to the manner in which he has sought to analyse the African American as “a displaced person of American democracy” [13]. As he was to later claim in agreement with the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “geography is fate” [14].

<13> Apart from both men’s personal and communal histories and the similarities inherent in the comments they have made on race and place, there are useful structural parallels in the patterns discernible in their novels. No Longer At Ease and Juneteenth both deal with a sequence of departures and arrivals in which characters are seen to seek a refuge that protects them from the essentially cultural problems they face. For Obi Okonkwo, it is a succession of homecomings signalled initially by his arrival in Nigeria, which in turn becomes an ostensible re-entry into family life, the re-establishment of ties to his kinsmen and culture, and ultimately, as David Carroll argues, a retreat “into uncertainty” [15]. Each stage in this progression apparently moves him from the status of hero to that of outcast, but in fact both identities are implicated in him from the very start. In the case of Bliss, it is a series of escapes – to whiteness, to amnesia, to the Territory, to adulthood, to Washington, D.C. – away from the strictures and structures [16] of those people and circumstances that have apparently sought to define his life for him. Within the context of the African American situation, he is representative of a particularly acute sort of displacement: that of a “white” child in a black community. This is accentuated by his status as a preacher, which conversely puts him at the centre of black life by making him one of its leaders. Like Obi, he apparently moves from hero to outcast; however here again, his actions only reveal opposing traits already inherent in him.

<14> In this regard, then, Achebe and Ellison both place ethnicity within the context of location by contrasting the notions of cultural marginality and centeredness, and showing how they are unified by the search for a home, or sanctuary, or refuge that is simultaneously representative of the extent of dislocation and the desire for wholeness. Both authors realise that the places which constitute the underpinnings of their settings are more than just spatial entities. Achebe observes that “Africa is not only a geographical expression; it is also a metaphysical landscape – it is in fact a view of the world and of the whole cosmos perceived from a particular position” [17]. Ellison claims, “[t]he way home we seek is that condition of man’s being at home in the world, which is called love, and which we term democracy” [18]. Both, in essence, conceive of ethnicity as inherently linked to a variety of notions of progress: of enlightened, independent vision, of stable relationships, of eventual arrival at the one place one can truly call one’s own, a “homecoming” in the true sense of the word.

<15> No Longer At Ease is regarded by its author as technically superior to Things Fall Apart [19]. While the veracity of that assertion may be contested, Achebe does display an acute awareness of place and the ways in which it intersects with notions of ethnicity, kinship, consanguinity and other ties. Unlike Things Fall Apart, where the thoroughly localised atmosphere of Umuofia is immediately implanted in the reader, the first chapter of No Longer At Ease encompasses an almost bewildering variety of locales – a Lagos High Court, a recently-desegregated club, a town union meeting “somewhere in Lagos mainland” [20], as well as a retrospective return to the time and place of England-bound Obi’s farewell party. The novel as a whole deals with the central character’s traversal of a variety of psycho-geographic locations, as identified by Simon Gikandi:

… Obi has to negotiate three spaces with contradictory claims and cultural contours: an Umuofia that is displaced from its traditions and is in a perpetual state of cultural crisis; a Nigeria that he had earlier hoped would be an erotic space of fulfilment but has become corrupted in its genesis; and an England whose cultural transcripts have shaped his character but whose function as a colonial power is a negation of the most important ingredients in his Africanity – history, home, language. [21]

<16> Obi’s story really begins, significantly, at sea, a location reminiscent of the Middle Passage traversed by the ancestors of his African American cousins, and also a foreshadowing of the dilemmas in which he rapidly finds himself. Lagos, Nigeria’s largest and most sophisticated urban conglomeration, is the focus of Achebe’s attention. Carroll describes it as standing “midway between Europe and Umuofia and [creating] its own highly spiced amalgamation of their different cultural ingredients” [22]. Gikandi claims the city is “a place of vestiges rather than essences, a geographical space which reveals and conceals elements of the new postcolonial culture in the same vein” [23].

<17> All this is evident in the city’s duality, characterised as “two cities in one” (16). Like the Middle Passage, Lagos is a transitional receptacle, and similarly poses as a crucible of searing experience from which Obi emerges, never to be the same again. The city is utilised as a gauge for assessing the growth in the sensibility of the protagonist: it is symbolic of the fascinating world beyond the boundaries of his childhood and becomes representative of the standard accoutrements of modernity. It is where he leaves Nigeria for England after a brief induction into the free-and-easy mores that define its relationships. The city is also the point of an ambivalent return, where he is welcomed with an attempt at extortion more surprising for its offhandedness than for its ineptness. It is the mythical monster that feeds off unwary youth, as Obi is warned: “Lagos is a bad place for a young man. If you follow its sweetness, you will perish” (74-75).

<18> Perhaps most importantly, it is a social terminus, the pseudo-destination that confers the cachet of virtuoso traveller upon Westernised Nigerians like Obi and Clara. Unlike the rich who are merely what they own, virtuoso travellers are where they have been. As “returnees” who are simultaneously “been-tos” [24], and have thus paradoxically “arrived,” they are beneficiaries of spatially configured notions of enhanced social status. Obi is praised among his kinsmen as the hero of a new kind of legend: he is “Obi who had been to the land of the whites” (29), and is consequently one whose standing as a pre-eminent member of the clan has increased in inverse proportion to the distance he has travelled from it. Such contradictory positioning is, in fact, similar to the ambivalence of the Okonkwo family itself, which being Christian, is simultaneously set above and apart from the indigenous culture in which it is supposedly rooted: it is an exemplary model of integration into the emerging Western-oriented structure of socio-cultural relations, but its religious beliefs compel it to reject fundamental traditional mores.

<19> Lagos brings out this fundamental rupture in Obi’s psyche by placing him in a situation in which he must choose between those norms that tie him to traditional culture and those that weaken his attachment to it. His desire to get married to Clara simultaneously expresses a wish for complete acceptance into his culture and a yearning to be free of it. It is the former because marriage will help guarantee the continued existence of the ethnic group, and more importantly, the perpetuation of his line of the Okonkwo family, of which he is the only male. It is the latter because marriage to an osu would, in traditional terms, actually mean the destruction of the family, since such action would end its status as freeborn. Yet within the context of family history, Obi is not unique. He is, in fact, merely carries on what has become something of a family tradition: his proposed marriage demonstrates an iconoclastic penchant reflected in both his grandfather’s suicide and his father’s conversion to Christianity.

<20> Although these notions manifest only in his subconscious, their consequences are apparent on the surface. His proposed marriage to the ritually-displaced Clara is the clearest sign of his own alienation from his culture, for it is the issue which separates him from his close friend Joseph, his kinsmen in Lagos and his parents, and leads him to question the traditional values of which he is ostensibly so proud. Yet, if he is to succeed, the tradition’s values – at least those regarding relations with osus – must be shown to be invalid and without foundation. Obi is in a position where he must abandon one in order to gain the other. He ends up losing both.

<21> Within the broad framework of ethnicity and location, it is clear that Lagos is central to the working-out of this dilemma. The city provides the context in which Obi’s ambivalent status as a bona fide member of his community is most severely tested. Unlike Umuofia, where his family’s lack of complete integration is masked by its Christianity – “We don’t eat heathen food” (53) – or England, where merely conversing in Igbo is sufficient demonstration of cultural rootedness (45), Lagos is a more complex manifestation of the notions of race and place. It offers opportunities for tribal affiliation, but does so in terms that are not acceptable to Obi, such as the Umuofia Progressive Union’s mutual aid code which he regards as almost indistinguishable from nepotism. The city also offers the possibility of rejecting the community’s control, as Obi attempts to do in the case of his relationship with Clara.

<22> Juneteenth is a novel replete with positions and spaces, places and locations that provide points of reference for African American communities in specifically racial, ideological and psychological contexts. Its landscapes “are almost entirely psychological and dialogical, and [easy] to get lost in” [25].

<23> The novel is shaped by an intersection between ethnicity and location which is itself defined by slavery. As an institution founded upon the deracination of its victims and their subsequent definition as permanent “outsiders” forever marginal to U.S. society, slavery has always worked to intensify the dislocation of race and place by placing chattelhood above humanity. Banished from the mainstream, and incorporating an amalgam of different ethnic groups, the African American is the very essence of adaptation, becoming at once everyone and no one, the living embodiment of the many as one whose predicament humanises the grandiloquence of “e pluribus unum.”

<24> Due to the peculiar nature of his history, the African American cannot claim a sense of self rooted in an unambiguous sense of place in the manner an African might. It is a composite identity, a hybrid personality incorporating and transforming multiple ethnicities, encompassing the endurance of degradation and the experience of triumph, all mediated by a doggedness which enables the sufferer to “keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness” [26]. In this way, the unavoidability of an often-excruciating existence is transmuted, and thus transcended.

<25> It is this highly-developed survival ethic based upon incorporation, adaptation and the transmutation of the unendurable into something approaching tolerability that is the context for the emergence of Bliss. Unlike the socially indiscernible protagonist of Invisible Man, Bliss is eminently visible: a “white” boy in African American society, a child preacher who ritually recounts its strengths and weaknesses, and repeatedly dramatises its resurrection-rebirth, he embodies the complexities of African-American life by rediscovering the rivers that have to be crossed on the way to a true understanding of self and community. Although his paternity is unknown and the circumstances of his coming into the community are so patently extraordinary as to be bizarre, the manner of his incorporation into the African American community of the novel is a characteristic act of self-preservation, acceptance and affirmation. As far as the people are concerned, although he may look like one of “them,” he is in fact, one of “us.” There are no contradictions to resolve because the most obvious distinction, that of skin colour, is not seen as a difference.

<27> For Bliss, therefore, place is race. In this community, he is African American. As Reverend Alonzo Hickman’s reminiscences later reveal, he is “a little gifted child [who] would speak for our condition from inside the only acceptable mask … [and who] would embody our spirit in the councils of our enemies …” [27]. In an inversion of both William Blake and Frantz Fanon, Bliss is a child whose blackness is masked by a white skin, and who is to be raised as a “white” boy with a “black” soul [28]. His mission is to demonstrate a benign synthesis of racial influences, and in so doing, expose the irrationality inherent in America’s colour caste system. He is, in short, to be a holistic figure affiliated to whites and blacks alike, one who would reconcile the divisions of ethnicity and location by unifying them in himself. In this context, Hickman’s plan, as has been said of the strategy of prominent anti-slavery campaigner Lydia Maria Child, is to use “miscegenation [as] a political strategy to create an America where race is complicated, multiplied and therefore defused in volatile assimilations rather than confined in separations” [29].

<28> Such a merging of race and place assumes a near-inviolable certainty of ethnic orientation in the individual who is to achieve it. Juneteenth’s tragedy is that this certainty is absent. A series of incidents reveal the gradual disintegration of Bliss’s own sense of himself as a black boy surrounded by supportive and caring black people: the spectre of white parentage raised by the woman who claims him as hers; his confrontation with a circus dwarf who is only as black as his makeup renders him; the alternate universe proposed by the movies where dreams defy reality.

<29> Bliss runs away from his adopted father and community on a Juneteenth anniversary and goes to the “Territory,” the unformed American South-west where race and place are at their most malleable. His exteriorised identity becomes a means of acquiring new personalities which he cannot incorporate within an African American framework because he pursues a distorted Franklinian strategy of self-invention and redefinition [30]. His last speech as Senator Sunraider reveals how these instinctive measures have hardened into a political philosophy:

Thus it is that we must will to remember our defeats and divisions as we remember our triumphs and unities so that we may transcend and forget them. Thus we must forget the past. (18)

<30> He has succeeded in passing for white, but “passing,” as Michael G. Cooke notes, “is the most paradoxical resolution of the social problem of blackness; it is self-assertion as self-denial, self-annihilation as self-fulfilment” [31]. Bliss/Sunraider, in sum, offers two diametrically opposed notions of progress as the link between ethnicity and location. The first seeks to build upon the perception of the United States as a cultural mosaic, an amalgam of races and places. It does not submerge ethnic distinctions in the dominance of the ethnic majority, what W. E. B. Du Bois calls being “bleached … in a flood of white Americanism” [32]. Instead, it attempts to create a cultural ethos characterized by complementarity rather than rivalry. As a child, circumstance conspires to make Bliss a model of such connectedness by making his life just the right combination of opposites – white and black, innocence and knowledge, tragedy and triumph – which identify the mosaic as an undeniable reality rather than merely a hoped-for ideal. The second notion emphasises the traits that split America into hostile ethnic laagers and deny its essential multiculturalism. The emphasis is upon separateness, not incorporation, and in pursuing this, a fundamentally contradictory notion of race and place is established. Racial identity becomes a rigid category, a fixed, unalterable construct ironic in a country whose democratic experiment is founded upon the flexibility of infinite opportunity [33]. As “Senator Sunraider,” Bliss is demonstrative of this paradox because he insists upon racial exclusivity even as he preaches unity. The change from Bliss to Sunraider is thus marked by a mental shift from identity as adaptation to identity as manoeuvre, and concepts of progress as manipulative rather than inclusive.

<31> What the brief discussion above shows is that the principal characters in both novels are confined in a crossroads of sorts. In No Longer at Ease, Obi is caught between the demands of his ethnic group and a still-undefined attachment to the nascent Nigerian nation-state. In Juneteenth, the competing choices are racial (between white and black), ideological (between integrationist and segregationist philosophies) and interpersonal (between individual resolve and communal will). Although both characters seem to have chosen the attitudes upon which they base their actions, the fact that both novels are extended flashbacks concerned with examining how such choices were arrived at is an indication of the ambiguity surrounding many aspects of their respective dilemmas.

<32> Achebe and Ellison are in this regard what Charles Johnson calls “Novelists of Memory,” [34] literary artists whose works enclose individual acts of remembrance within the overall structure of sustained recall as shaped by the technique of flashback. Thus, apart from physical locations – Lagos, Umuofia, Oklahoma, Washington D.C. – some settings are also located in the memory as it manifests at the individual, communal and racial levels.

<33> In Obi’s case, such regressions to an interior landscape take place within the larger framework of his father’s penchant for fetishizing memory and his community’s own recollection of its glorious past. Isaac Okonkwo has an overdeveloped capacity for recollection, as evidenced in his “mystic regard for the written word” (115), a morbid fascination which reflects his unqualified faith in the abilities of his imperial overlords and co-religionists. Like the osu Clara, Isaac Okonkwo is an outcast from mainstream indigenous society, and like her, he is dedicated to a spiritual being. His sense of ethnicity and location is profoundly affected by his religious faith, particularly the memory of the sacrifices made in attainment of it. His location is that of the true believer, and it is dominated by an inflexibility that is unable to reconcile tradition with Christianity, or his own sacrifices with those his son plans to make. Umuofia’s desire for contemporary accomplishment is simultaneously justified and driven by its sense of its past as “the terror of [its] neighbours” (4). Consequently, the community’s perception of Obi’s achievement is essentially that of past martial glory transferred to present times, and with it the parochialism so useful in the past, but unsuitable to the modern age: “We are strangers in this land. If good comes to it may we have our share …. But if bad comes let it go to the owners of the land who know what gods should be appeased” (5-6). Notions of ethnicity and location that lie in the past dominate the communal memory of the Umuofia Progressive Union. Obi’s own forays into the interior landscape of memory are often induced by external circumstances and are the psychological equivalent of his childhood practice of leaving his back till last when taking a cold-water bath. Faced with the icy alienation of life in England, he recalls the communalism of Umuofia. Back in Nigeria and confronted with increasing difficulties, he retreats into comforting reminiscences where life’s uncertainties are not manifest. One of the more outstanding examples is his memory of his mother’s unremitting sacrifice for him as symbolic of a special bond between them, but which ironically becomes the means through which Obi assuages his guilt at not having attended her funeral.

<34> In Juneteenth, viewpoints have hardened, the central catastrophe has occurred, and both Hickman and Sunraider are engaged in the task of tracing how those positions were arrived at. In the senator’s hospital room, they go through their stock of memories and recollections, sometimes jointly and cooperatively, sometimes individually and competitively, a process the novel’s editor John F. Callahan calls “paradoxical shared and solitary acts of the imagination” (introduction, xvii). Through the ebb and flow of memory, various notions of race and place emerge: Bliss’s desperate belief that ethnic origin can be willed; his experience of several sorts of displacement – flight, migration, deracination – as he attempts to remake himself; Hickman’s notion of Bliss as a latter-day Prodigal Son whose return home is crucially dependent upon an acceptance of who he is, not just as black or white, but as a complex combination of both. In analysing their relationship, it becomes apparent that both men have been seeking a utopia where the contradictions of race and place are harmonised. For Bliss, such an ideal location is paradoxically found only in a rejection of those places in which he was most secure, hence Ellison’s description of him as the quintessential displaced individual: “He is a rootless man, an American who has turned upon his loneliness and twisted it into spite and opportunism …. The center does not hold” (358). For Hickman, utopia can only be attained by using the clear orientation of unambiguous self-knowledge, as he claims in the specific case of African Americans: “We know where we are by the way we walk. We know where we are by the way we talk. We know where we are by the way we sing …. Don’t throw what you have away!” (130-1). As Melvin Dixon notes, such a peculiarly African American sense of self is of necessity situated within “a religious secular imagery revealing a moral geography of social and political progress” [35].

III

<35> Ethnicity and location have undergone interesting transmutations in contemporary times. Political independence in Africa ended overt foreign domination, but also exposed the weaknesses of artificial and often-unwieldy nation states, such as Achebe’s Nigeria, where increasingly incompetent governance has compounded the distortions of ethnicity and location [36]. The African American sense of displacement has generated its own logic of orientation, the overall pattern apparently being that of cultural resurgence emerging out of the very substance of historical dislocation:

What was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile – gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world become more likely [37].

<36> In both cases, it appears that replacement has become the main strategy for tackling the problems of displacement: the substitution of colonial tyranny with its indigenous version in Africa; the reinterpretation of the constrictions of exile as the freedom of a subaltern vision. Consequently, “progress,” as a symbiotic connection between ethnicity and location, is deeply problematic. This is clearly evident in the novels, in which both central characters display the qualities of hero and outcast, as has been shown. Obi and Bliss are both representative of the consequences of the dislocation engendered by colonialism and slavery, and both embody the strategy of replacement that their cultures have utilized in an effort to ameliorate those negative consequences. Hence the perception of Obi as alienated from his traditional culture, yet as being at the vanguard of its plans for survival and prosperity in the modern age, and Bliss as demonstrative of both the “central Manichean dynamic – black and white” [38] and the “creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity” [39] whose affirmation are vital to resolving the dislocations of race and place in the United States. As putative saviors whose missions fail because of their inability to understand where their roots lie, Obi and Bliss exemplify displacement and replacement.

<37> Given Obi’s uncertainty about his inherited traditional values and Bliss’s inability to appreciate the worth of his adoptive community, Ellison’s notion of engaged self-recognition is perhaps the clearest demonstration of the fact that the resolution of the rupture of ethnicity and location is a continuous activity whose most appropriate metaphor is that of the journey:

… man does not pick his parents or place in the world where he begins his journey. His problem is to recognize himself through recognizing where he comes from, recognizing his parents and his inherited values. This is a very active, self-creating process. [40]

Obi is found guilty; Bliss dies. Thus, both novels attain narrative closure. But the fact that both conclusions are shown to be inevitable outcomes early in the texts signifies that their stories do not end there. The struggle to reconcile the disunities of race and place is, ultimately, the mission of every human being and possesses a reality beyond disgrace or death.

Notes

[1] Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” Some Modern Writers: Essays and Fiction by Conrad, Dinessen, Lawrence, Orwell, Faulkner, Ellison, ed. Robert Scholes, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, 16. [^]

[2] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 1978; London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1987, 54. [^]

[3] Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” interview, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, Brighton: The Harvester Press Limited, 1980, 69. [^]

[4] See Abiola Irele’s description of Obi as “a passive sufferer of his fate” lacking the stature necessary to the attainment of genuine tragedy. Abiola Irele, “Chinua Achebe: The Tragic Conflict in His Novels,” Introduction to African Literature: An Anthology of Critical Writing, ed. Ulli Beier, 1967; Harlow: Longman Group Ltd., 1979, 184. See also David Carroll’s identical belief that Obi “does not come alive as a unique individual, [thus] we are never encouraged to see in his predicament the more universal theme it implies.” David Carroll, Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet, Critic, 1980; Basingstoke: The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1990, 85. [^]

[5] Edward Margolies, for example, damns Invisible Man as “so very nearly a great book,” and suggests that the then seventeen years of creative drought from Ellison indicate that he is “caught somewhere between Negro blues and the symphonic complexities of Western experience, [and] has yet to find his footing.” Edward Margolies, Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth-Century Black American Authors, Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968, 148. Controversy attended the publication of Juneteenth in June 1999, with many critics arguing that Callahan’s editing could not but negatively affect the overall structure of what was, after all, still a novel-in-progress. See for example Michiko Kakutani, “‘Juneteenth’: Executor Tidies Up Ellison’s Unfinished Symphony,” “Books of the Times,” New York Times, and J. Douglas Allen-Taylor, “Ralph Ellison’s ‘Juneteenth’ is Too Incomplete for Publication.” Online. Internet. January 13, 2001. [^]

[6] Austin J. Shelton, The African Assertion: A Critical Anthology of African Literature, edited by Shelton, New York: The Odyssey Press, 1968, 14-15. [^]

[7] Chinua Achebe, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England,” Morning Yet On Creation Day: Essays, New York: Doubleday, 1975, 119. [^]

[8] Robert Bone, “Ralph Ellison and the Uses of Imagination,” Modern Black Novelists: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Michael G. Cooke, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971, 49.> [^]

[9] Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays 1965-1987, London: Heinemann International, 1988, 29. [^]

[10] Wole Soyinka, “Cross-Currents: The New African After Cultural Encounters,” Art, Dialogue and Outrage: Essays on Literature and Culture, Ibadan: New Horn Press Ltd., 1988, 185. [^]

[11] H. Adlai Murdoch, “(Dis) Placing Marginality: Cultural Identity and Creole Resistance in Glissant and Maxim,” Research in African Literatures, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer 1994), 81. [^]

[12] Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism, Irony and Commitment,” Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, Edward W. Said, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990, 37. [^]

[13] Ralph Ellison, “Harlem is Nowhere,” Shadow and Act, 1953; New York: Random House, 1964, 300. [^]

[14] Quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, 1993; Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1996, 150. [^]

[15] Carroll, 72. Simon Gikandi similarly argues that the novel’s “act of plotting is clearly posited as a process of regression, perversion and retardation.” Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction, London: James Currey, 1991, 90. [^]

[16] The expression is an adaptation of Anthony Appiah’s “Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics of African Fiction,” Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., New York: Methuen, Inc., 1984, 127-150. [^]

[17] Chinua Achebe, “Thoughts on the African Novel,” Morning, 50. [^]

[18] Ellison, “Brave Words for a Startling Occasion,” Shadow, 105-6. [^]

[19] Chinua Achebe, interview, African Writers Talking, eds. Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse, London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1972, 4. [^]

[20] Chinua Achebe, No Longer At Ease, 1960; London: Heinemann Educational Books Ltd., 1978, 4. All subsequent references will be made within the paper. [^]

[21] Simon Gikandi, “Chinua Achebe and the Poetics of Location: The Uses of Space in Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease,” Essays on African Writing I: A Re-evaluation, ed. Abdulrazak Gurnah, London: Heinemann Educational, 1993, 10. [^]

[22] Carroll, 65. [^]

[23] Gikandi, Reading, 87-88. [^]

[24] “Been-to” is defined by Jowitt as “someone who has returned to Nigeria from a (long) stay overseas.” David Jowitt, Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction, Ikeja: Longman Nigeria Limited, 1991, 160. [^]

[25] Judy Lightfoot, “Ellison’s Second Act, Visible At Last,” Seattle Weekly, June 3-9, 1999. Online. Internet. January 13, 2001. [^]

[26] Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” Shadow, 78. [^]

[27] Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth: A Novel, ed. John F. Callahan, New York: Random House, Inc., 1999, 271. All subsequent references will be made within the paper. [^]

[28] William Blake, ‘The Little Black Boy,’ ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Blake: Complete Writings, With Variant Notes, London: Oxford University Press, 1966, 125. The relevant line is “And I am black, but O! my soul is white.” The title of Fanon’s book is Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, 1952; London: Pluto Press Ltd., 1986. [^]

[29] Diane Roberts, The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region, London: Routledge, 1994, 131. [^]

[30] Scott Saul, review of Juneteenth, Boston Review 1999-2000. Online. Internet. January 13, 2001. [^]

[31] Michael G. Cooke, Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984, 33. [^]

[32] W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, 1903; New York: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1961, 17. [^]

[33] For an in-depth discussion of race as a social construct, see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. [^]

[34] Charles Johnson, Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970, 1988; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990, 74. [^]

[35] Melvin Dixon, “Broken Tongues, Broken Homes: Language as Landscape in Afro-American Literature,” Theo Vincent and A.E. Eruvbetine, Concepts of the Ideal in English Studies (Lagos: The Department of English, University of Lagos, Nigeria, 1990) 27. [^]

[36] Achebe himself examines this trend in his commentary The Trouble With Nigeria, 1983; Heinemann Educational Books, 1984. [^]

[37] Gilroy, 111. [^]

[38] Gilroy, 1-2. [^]

[39] Gilroy, 2. [^]

[40] Ralph Ellison, interview, Interviews With Black Writers ed., John O’Brien, New York: Liveright, 1973, 74.. [^]

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