Reading new black fiction of East Asia: An ex-centric approach to transnational literary studies

Introduction

In 2007 two books of fiction appeared which, while very different from each other, both explored past and present relationships between Africa and East Asia. The first, A Fragile Hope by Ken Kamoche, is a collection of short stories, the majority of which dramatize the contemporary experiences of expatriate West and East Africans in East Asia. In A Fragile Hope, Kamoche, who is a professor in Business Studies, draws not only from his professional interest in Afro-Chinese business relations but also from his own observations as a Kenyan working at City University Hong Kong. The second book is Burma Boy by the London-based Nigerian author, Biyi Bandele. In this novel Bandele fictionalizes the stories told to him by his father of his experience as a soldier in Burma during the Second World War.

In their different ways these two books reflect and respond to the increasingly high profile international relations between Africa and East Asia. However, whilst scholarship in Politics and the Social Sciences has been quick to examine these relationships through their various disciplines, literary criticism has responded much more slowly. As we shall see, this unresponsiveness is, at least in part, a result of critical models that fail to account effectively for such relationships despite rhetorical professions to the contrary. In what follows therefore, I want to develop an experimental approach that might start to open up new ways for thinking through transnational literature generally, and African–Asian literature particularly, in a postcolonial (even post-postcolonial) context.

In 2001, Ato Quayson called for greater attention to “ex-centric” perspectives in postcolonial narratives of the nation (2001: 191–2). His emphasis with this term, he explains, is

on the idea of the off-centre, the view that falls outside the perspectives of sanctioned historical tellings of the nation, or, as is often also the case, from that of literary historians who seize the already available shapes of national history to account for the direction and rates of transition of the literature itself. (2001: 192; emphasis added)

Quayson calls upon us to see the narrative of the postcolonial nation from multiple other perspectives that may or may not be competing with each other and the dominant narratives of nation. A focus on such ex-centric perspectives, Quayson argues, enables us to comprehend the decolonizing process fully as one that was “far from univocal or straightforward” (2001: 192). Quayson’s desire for attentiveness to ex-centric perspectives resembles and recalls Homi Bhabha’s earlier focus on the liminal, “third space” of postcoloniality in The Location of Culture (1994). However, the urgency of Quayson’s more recent call indicates the failure of scholarship to engage effectively with postcolonial literature in the ways that he and Bhabha suggest. For, while postcolonial literature itself has long engaged in dramatizing ex-centric perspectives, critical responses have not kept pace. Instead the binarisms that Bhabha and Quayson seek to challenge persist, perhaps most forcefully in the superimposed socio-political matrices, “the already available shapes of national history”, through which postcolonial texts continue to be read.

One way in which Quayson and Bhabha have been answered is in the continued growth of transnationalism as a field of discourse. However, in a recent article on the state of the field in Asian Studies, Eric Hayot (2009) points out the persistent dominance of America as the interlocutor of Area/Ethnic Studies in the Humanities. Whilst welcoming what he calls the “transnational turn” in “global American studies”, Hayot notes that “the danger […] is that the final turn of its analysis becomes a revelation about the nature of the United States, or Americanness, so that the rest of the world becomes interesting only when it says something about us.” (2009: 910). In response to North America’s persistent dominance as the grounding site for discussion and comparison in the Humanities, Hayot proposes an “aesthetics of the diverse”, which can enact the complexity it wishes to illustrate, holding it “in suspension, without reducing or simplifying it” (2009: 910). ¹ Hayot’s proposition echoes Quayson’s call for ex-centric reading, by seeking a hermeneutic process that can “hold in precarious balance the relation between example and exemplarity, allowing their objects to function simultaneously in relation to larger fields of meaning and to a remainder that escapes literary criticism’s performative convention” (Hayot, 2009: 911).

In the context of my discussions here, the continued focus of contemporary scholarship in the Humanities on North America (and, to a lesser extent, the UK) as a triangulating third space for African–Asian relationships has kept Africa and Asia themselves out of view as spaces in which such relationships might occur. ² As Hayot’s comments suggest, Humanities scholarship needs to refocus its attention on ex-centric spaces and ex-centric qualities in postcolonial literature in order to avoid the limiting, centripetal pull of the Anglophone north. This is not to ignore recent scholarship in Indian Ocean transnationalism, where work has been done to explore South Asian–African relations and cultural production. ³ However, in terms of East Asian–African relations there is a considerable paucity. Moreover, this paucity is inversely proportionate to the relative predominance of East Asian culture as the relational subject of African–Asian studies that locate themselves in North America. ⁴

In studies of African–Asian relations, the kind of hermeneutic process that Hayot outlines must extend itself beyond, or place itself ex-centrically in relation to, the dominant theoretical approaches of the field generally and of postcolonial studies particularly. First, this means moving beyond Britain and North America as triangulating locations for the discussion of African–Asian relations. However, it also means looking for alternatives to the ethnocentric and cultural-materialist approaches that have dominated the discourse on African–Asian relations. In both instances these approaches are grounded in a dialectic by which the boundaries that are crossed in African–Asian relations can be identified as such, that is to say, as boundaries that have been crossed. The function of this dialectic has been undeniably useful in exploring and explaining cross-cultural encounter. However, such dialectical reading can frequently miss Hayot’s “remainder that escapes”.

These dialectical approaches continue to draw considerably on W.E.B. Du Bois’s theorization of the colour line, whereby the “discrimination and insult” suffered by people of colour at the hands of white races “binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas” (2007: 59). However, despite Du Bois’s own questioning of this ideal, the theoretical criticism that has continued in his wake still too often assumes an unqualified non-white interracial solidarity, and glosses over disruptive specificities that disturb the community that is desired. Thus, for example, when Bill Mullen, a Du Bois scholar himself, examines Kalamu ya Salaam’s poem, “We Don’t Stand a Chinaman’s Chance Unless We Create a Revolution”, his interest is in the circulation of an idea of liberation embedded in Marxism and inherent in the ideals of the Cultural Revolution (Mullen, 2006). For Mullen, therefore, the presence of China in Salaam’s poem signifies a transnational, transracial, transhistorical crossing of boundaries between Asian and African American political expression. What slips from view is the problematic reification of Chinese experience in the poem, where Salaam claims that “after Mao & crew did their do / A chinaman’s chance got so good /… / Regardless of the problems and perplexities / Of China’s current state” (Mullen, 2006: 256). Salaam assumes an equation between China, as an independent, revolutionary nation, and its people. But the individual experiences of these people, as subjects of that nation and subject to its revolutionary action, and symbolized in the poem by the singular “Chinaman”, are problematically erased through this homogenizing incorporation of the Chinaman into “China”. Moreover, the slippery evasiveness of “did their do” fails to acknowledge exactly the “problems and perplexities” that beset the Chinese in China as a result of what Mao “did”. A certain kind of theoretical trumping is going on here, to which specificity and an aesthetic of the diverse lose out. While I do not wish to ignore the nuanced discussions of race relations that have emerged in recent years, my point is that over-simplifications of this kind remain in current postcolonial scholarship despite critiques such as Hayot’s, Quayson’s and, indeed, those much earlier of Aijaz Ahmad. ⁵

By contrast, an aesthetic of the diverse demands that we are alert to the ex-centricities of a given text or group of texts, rather than reducing them to a particular set of principles defined in terms of predetermined features or values. Moreover, in staying open to textual ex-centricity we can stay open to other interpretative possibilities. Readingex-centricity as the “remainder” that Hayot sees escaping “literary criticism’s performative convention”, we find, contrary to Hayot, that in fact it can provide us with a hermeneutic point of entry. This is to say that if we can be alert to the suggestiveness of our texts we can attempt to avoid, or at least hold off for longer, reducing our reading to predetermined matrices of interpretation (such as “the already available shapes of national history” to which Quayson alludes). This is not, however, to advocate a New Critical utopian relationship to the text but rather to propose a renewed commitment to holding in view those aspects of a given text that emerge to disrupt our preconceptions with their ex-centricities. In what follows, then, I develop a reading of Kamoche and Bandele’s works that takes its hermeneutic entry point from what is ex-centric in both texts. In doing so I want to provide an experimental model for exploring African–Asian relations as they are presented in contemporary fiction that can do justice to the complexities that such fiction presents, yet which recent criticism has failed to accommodate satisfactorily.

In tracing the “remainder”, or excess, of these two texts as a point of hermeneutic entry, I take as my starting point two eccentric and ex-centric mythological figures who emerge in different ways from the texts: Eshu (the Yoruba trickster god) and gui (the Mandarin word for ghost but which is also used as a common insult for strangers). My aim however is not to identify these figures as actual characters or presences in the books but rather to explore their implications as instances of Hayot’s “remainder”. Thus, picking up on Kamoche’s deployment of the word gui as a common contemporary insult I treat the term as a textual excess — a term that goes beyond its basic usefulness in realist dialogue — and take the broader connotations of gui as a point of interpretative entry into the text. Following an examination of these broader connotations I show how the term’s cultural history opens up Kamoche’s stories for us, helping us to unpack their complex dramatizations of cross-cultural negotiations. My starting point with Eshu is Bandele’s own claim that his writing is inspired by this Yoruba god (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 179). Once again, rather than trying to identify Eshu as a character in the novel, I take the qualities associated with Eshu — in particular his troublesomeness — as an entry point for critical engagement with the text. By explaining the characteristics of Eshu I show how he provides a governing aesthetic to the novel.

Gui and Kamoche’s A Fragile Hope

In Kamoche’s short fiction it is the figure of gui that emerges as remainder or excess, and which provides us with a point of interpretative entry into the stories’ concerns. The term itself emerged in China as a designation of foreignness during the nineteenth century. In The Clash of Empires, Lydia Liu explains that gui surfaced as a predominantly derogatory designation for foreigners following the British attempt to eradicate another term, yi, meaning “barbarian”, from diplomatic documentation in the early nineteenth century (see Liu, 2004: 31–69). In the wake of the first Opium War there was, not surprisingly, considerable expression of popular resistance to the British through songs, stories, and poems. It was in these forms that the figure of the fan gui, or “foreign ghost”, took root. Liu’s account of this mobilization of the term under the specific circumstances of the Opium Wars can be augmented by a recognition of the larger cultural associations of gui. Liu herself acknowledges that these associations reach beyond the English notion of “devil” (by which gui is colloquially translated), “ranging from the occult, fantastic, or repulsive to the spiritual, the exotic, and the playful” (2004: 100). Under this broader spectrum of association the figure of the gui populated folk tales and ghost stories in the eighteenth century and was as much a strange or eccentric figure as a fearful one. Thus, whether as a political term of resistance or as a folk-cultural figure of strangeness we can see latent in gui a figuration of something out of place, the presence of something that belongs elsewhere or nowhere at all: gui is both eccentric and ex-centric.

In the twentieth century, the language of gui and of ghosts was once again turned to political ends in the discourses and counter-discourses of the Cultural Revolution. In his study, The Age of Wild Ghosts: Memory, Violence and Place in Southwest China, Erik Mueggler explores how ghosts were incorporated into strategies of response to the violence and privation that accompanied the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. ⁶ Mueggler notes how young activists “convinced others that their every word and deed sprang from a source outside themselves and their networks of kin and friends: the person and thoughts of Chairman Mao” (2001: 266). To the families of these activists “the abrupt change in manner of [these] youngsters could be explained only as possession by wild ghosts […] their unfamiliar slogans […] seemed like the half-coherent ravings of the possessed” (Mueggler, 2001: 267). This initial response, which read the ideological performance of activists as a form of spirit possession, attempted both to explain and to resist this performance as metaphysically other.

Mueggler’s account complicates gui’s more common valence during the Cultural Revolution and after, when it had been used within the language of political orthodoxy to label counter-revolutionaries. Xing Lu notes that at denunciation rallies the stage was called dou gui tai (ghost stage) and that those denounced were made to perform their ghost status with painted black faces and gui tou (ghost head) haircuts (2004: 60). In such enforced performances we can detect the apparition of the gui of post-Opium War folk culture haunting this use of the term. Denunciation of counter-revolutionaries often figured them as under the sway of Western culture and ideology. Thus the association of gui with the predatory foreign imperial powers of the previous century was transplanted onto the supposedly Western-leaning counter-revolutionary. On the dou gui tai the counter-revolutionary was transformed into an outsider both in relation to the nation and the physical body politic. Thus, whether seen in its official or its subversive operations during the Cultural Revolution, gui signifies an agent of disturbance that is distinctly other.

In Kamoche’s “Random Check” we find the associations both of the Cultural Revolution and of resistance to strangers resonating through the story. The narrative centres on a Kenyan entrepreneur in Hong Kong, Maina, and his relationship with Polly, a Cantonese girl who is carrying their child. The relationship shocks and upsets the families of both, whose mutual racial prejudice is foregrounded. When his brother-in-law is shot in a car-jacking incident in Nairobi, Maina’s family, who see him as a wealthy, international trader, ask him to help with medical fees and later funeral costs. Maina is frustrated by his family’s expectations and by his inability to help them more. However, whilst these events serve to underscore his distance from his family they create a tenuous bond between him and Polly’s mother. For when Polly tells her mother, Fong-tai, about the car-jacking it recalls to Fong-tai her own memories of the Cultural Revolution, from which she had escaped to Hong Kong as a young girl:

The more she reflected on what Polly had said about Fei Jau [Africa], the more deeply she felt the pain of her family’s disintegration.

“I thought we left all this behind. It’s strange how the world goes round and round, isn’t it?”

Polly nodded, her eyebrows raised. Sometimes Ah-Mah could be so enigmatic.

“The world of Ah-Maina,” Polly looked up with surprise. Ah-Maina. Mister Maina. Ah-who? Normally it was “that boyfriend of yours,” or “your hak gwei [black ghost] friend.”

“See how this world comes knocking on our door. Reminding us of things we thought we forgot. And Fei Jau is so far away.” (Kamoche, 2007: 78) ⁷

What comes to bind Fong-tai to Maina is not therefore a shared experience of discrimination along colour lines, but rather the shared experience of indiscriminate violence, which is the result of political and social instability.

The term gui helps to bring this connection into focus. The historical resonance of the term in relation to the Cultural Revolution complicates Fong-tai’s apparently racist attitude towards Maina as “hak gwei” or “black ghost” and her later sympathy for his family’s experience of arbitrary violence. Implicit in the passage quoted above is the fact that her own family’s “disintegration” was a result of the violence and loss incurred during the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, given her exilic status in Hong Kong, we are encouraged to presume that her family may have been subject to or fled from something like the humiliation of the dou gui tai. Of course, Maina’s own sense of increased distance and misunderstanding between himself and his own family following his brother-in-law’s death is not of the same order. However, the divisive resentment of economic success, which had presumably been the occasion of his brother-in-law’s shooting, and which Maina’s own presumed economic success brings to family negotiations around the funeral, echoes in a different register the violent divisions drawn along economic and class lines during the Cultural Revolution. Maina and Fong-tai have been made into ghosts by the haunting violence of a geographical and temporal elsewhere, which has estranged them from their families. The image of the ghost thus stands not simply as a symbol of haunting diasporic displacement but as a mobile figure of death as loss, violence, and exclusion.

The othering work of the term gui can also be seen in Kamoche’s story, “A Glimpse of Life”, about Kalenga, a Zambian Ph.D. student in Shanghai, whose older Chinese girlfriend, Huiqing, becomes pregnant. For both of them, Huiqing’s pregnancy stirs complex responses and emotions. Huiqing, who had thought she was infertile is shocked to find she is pregnant and overjoyed to find she is not what the women of her village called “a stone woman” (Kamoche, 2007: 50). For Kalenga, her pregnancy offers the glimpse of hope that he might finally father the son that his clansmen have demanded. Kamoche’s story thus shows up the similar pressures of Kalenga and Huiqing’s family cultures, whilst also indicating the tensions and prejudices between those cultures. For, while Huiqing’s pregnancy offers them the possibility of fulfilling the traditional expectations of their respective distant homes, the similarity of these familial pressures fails to provide a basis for cultural acceptance of a mixed-race child. Kalenga recognizes the difficulties Huiqing would face raising “a black kid on her own, in this society where black people are known as hei gwei, or black devils” (Kamoche, 2007: 48). Moreover, he recalls his own clansmen too, who “have not forgiven me for accepting a scholarship in what they dismissively called a poor communist country” (Kamoche, 2007: 51–2). The spectre of racial prejudice thus appears once again in the inevitable othering of Huiqing’s “gwei”, or ghost, child.

In “A Glimpse of Life” we find once more, then, that the social heritage tying Africa to Asia is not, as W.E.B. Du Bois suggested, a shared history of “discrimination and insult” (2007: 59). Instead, despite the mutual disdain of each culture for the other, which Kamoche draws our attention to through references to “hei gwei” and China as a “poor communist country”, the story points up the common if not “shared” experience of familial pressures and the tensions that arise between traditional familial values and the (frequently familial) demands for urban/professional success. The voices of their disparate provincial homes persist in the space of the (foreign) metropolis, haunting both Huiqing and Kalenga. The continued claims of their provincial origins create a tension whereby their cultural roots call into question the significance of their metropolitan reality. In so far as Kalenga and Huiqing bring the expectations of their cultural roots with them to the city we can read this as a kind of self-haunting. This is brought to a head with Huiqing’s pregnancy, where their unborn child focalizes competing pressures through the child’s tantalizing absence. Huiqing’s decision to abort is the decision to refrain from materializing that irresolvability: to remain self-haunting rather than endure the incompatible realities of single-motherhood, as a business woman in Shanghai and as the mother of a mixed-race child in a racially intolerant environment.

The associative meanings of the term gui (“gwei”) radiate out from its particular usage in the phrase “hei gwei”. At the most obvious level the discrimination, which marks the Chinese view of Kalenga and singles him out as “hei gwei”, is mirrored in the Zambian view of China, vocalized by Kalenga’s clansmen dismissing China as a “poor communist country”. Although this mutual discrimination is something held in common, it is divisive rather than unifying. Kalenga is as problematically ghostlike and disturbingly other in China as China is to his Zambian relatives. However the burden of mutual discrimination, which the term gui brings to the fore, is matched by the provincial and diasporic haunting of the metropolis that the story presents, and which the meaning of gui invites us to recognize. Intimate and yet foreign to each other, estranged from their roots and yet haunted by the persistent values held in their provincial homelands, they exemplify the unheimlich experience of diasporic globalization. Moreover, it is this, in the end, that is shared by the two: something tantalizing, incomplete, out of place, and haunting.

In these stories the shared history of discrimination along coloured lines does not bind Africans and Asians together in the way that Du Bois and others might hope. Rather, this shared history of discrimination is reinscribed along fault lines between African and Asian cultures. Where understanding and unity appear in these stories, such as Fong-tai’s empathy with Maina, it is in the unexpected similarities of events or social norms experienced in otherwise disparate cultural and geographical contexts. Thus the term gui, as signifier of disruptive difference, becomes an ex-centric point of resonance for Kamoche’s Chinese, Kenyan, and Zambian protagonists. What connects these characters is their common experience of gui-like otherness that results from the political, economic, and social forces to which they are subject.

Bandele’s Burma Boy and Eshu

Kamoche’s East Asia-located fiction turns on assumed oppositions between Chinese and African people and their cultures, and in this respect it maintains the polarization of identity that underpins much theorizing about cross-racial encounter. Kamoche may purposely challenge social, historical, and hierarchical conceptions of racial opposition, as the discussion of gui demonstrates, but the bipolar structure of such oppositions remains a necessary framework. Biyi Bandele’s Burma Boy goes further, however, rupturing this binary opposition as a mode of identity formation. The novel unpacks the tense multiculturalism and multilingualism of the Burmese front during the Second World War to show the fissures and unities that characterized the social make-up of the military units at war.

Reading Burma Boy ex-centrically, this disturbance of identity is illuminated by Bandele’s interest in the Yoruba god, Eshu, who traditionally sows the seeds of confusion in his wake in order to prompt a re-examination of what might otherwise be taken for granted. Bandele claims that Eshu has constantly defined his aesthetics, “even before I realized it” (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 179). He illustrates Eshu’s characteristic powers with a popular story of the god in which two men, seeing a stranger walk past them, disagree about the colour of the stranger’s hat. This disagreement escalates over time into a major feud and the two men end up in court. It is only then that the stranger reappears and, revealing himself as Eshu, shows that in fact both men were right since his hat has one colour on one side and another on the other. “Why didn’t he step in to clarify things earlier?” one might ask. Eshu’s wilful causation of strife is part of the lesson, explains Bandele: the two men only learn the value of their friendship and the value of listening to another’s point of view when they see the damage that results from failing to acknowledge these truths (see Bandele and Yai, 2006: 164–7). It is this aesthetic of confusion and belated revelation that inspires Bandele. Like the pre-Opium War folkloric figure of gui, Eshu is thus a wandering stranger, a provocative, eccentric (and ex-centric) figure of dissonance, the trickster of folk narrative. Furthermore, just as gui indicates a disturbing persistence of something that should not be, something troublingly other and unheimlich, Eshu, for Bandele, is a symbol of the mobility of truth. As Bandele puts it, Eshu demonstrates that “the centre is everywhere” (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 167). The suggestion, which Eshu manifests, that the truth is available to “all who render themselves transparent to it” presents an unceasing cycle of othering and identification (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 167). The inevitable self-negation of this process of “rendering transparent” becomes a necessary condition to the active apprehension of truth.

This trickster god provides Bandele with a model of ambiguity, what he calls a “very syncopated way of making judgements on the world” (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 179). Part of the appeal of that syncopation is the fact that it takes time for meaning to emerge in stories of Eshu. As Bandele explains, “Often I would read a story and it would totally confound me, and then months later, sometimes years later, I would suddenly understand it” (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 179). Moreover, the god “manifests himself to you by the extent to which you make yourself transparent to him” (Bandele and Yai, 2006: 172). Indeed, in Bandele’s discussion of Eshu the quality of transparency is paramount; it characterizes the ways in which Eshu’s stories become evident, and the ways in which the god operates, as one who makes transparent the problematic opacity of a situation or misunderstanding.

Whilst Eshu does not appear directly in Burma Boy, Bandele’s own suggestion that the ambiguous aesthetic of the god’s characteristics underpins all his writing invites us to trace that aesthetic in his text. The novel opens in Nigeria where Ali Banana, barely a teenager, volunteers to fight for King Joji (King George), along with other boys from his village. When he arrives in Burma he joins D-Section of Thunder Brigade, part of Wingate’s infamous Chindits, whose role is to create mayhem behind the Japanese lines. Besieged and yet still operating out of a camp called White City, D-Section comes under increasing pressure from the Japanese. On the final mission of the novel Ali becomes separated from those with whom he set out. Lost and without rations he overcomes his solitude by communing with snakes and leeches. He finally returns to the camp naked and eating the leeches which are feeding upon him.

As with many of the fronts of the Second World War neither of the embattled parties was primarily local: the war in Burma was fought by soldiers who came from around the globe, with each side mobilizing armies from within their other colonies to fight for this particular one. On the British side troops were conscripted from Nepal, India, Uganda, Gambia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Somalia, Malawi, Tanzania, and Ghana. Allied to the British were Koreans, Chinese, and Americans. On the Japanese side were conscripts from China and Korea, alongside military support from Thailand.

Bandele indicates the complexities of this multinational warfare primarily through language. His Nigerian characters are multilingual; some of them have already seen action in the East African campaign of the Second World War and therefore have adopted wartime English patois. Elsewhere are Hausa-speaking British sergeants and, most strikingly, a SOAS trained Hausa-speaking Japanese soldier. Bandele draws attention to the phonetic tangibility of language by his reproduction of English pidgins; for example, Sergeant Major becomes “Samanja” and Captain becomes “Kyaftin”. But he also foregrounds the linguistic mobility of this military front through the proliferation of names which accrete to his characters, often as puns, word games, or vocal mimicry:

Guntu’s real name was Dogo, which means the tall one, but Guntu was actually quite a short man. And since Farabiti Zololo, who was tall, was also called Dogo, it was decided that Guntu – whose real name was Dogo – would be called Guntu, which means the short one, and Zololo – who was quite tall – would be called Dogo, to avoid confusion. It was all quite confusing at first for the short Dogo, but after a while he got used to being called Guntu which wasn’t his name at all. But neither was it Dogo. His real name was Guntu but he’d changed it to Dogo when he joined the army. (Bandele, 2007: 68)

The influence of Eshu is evident here in the playful linguistic fertility that atomizes the social cohesion of the British “front” to the point of estranging the novel’s protagonists, even from themselves. Indeed, tempting though it might be at first sight to read Ali Banana himself as the figure of Eshu, it becomes clear that the god is rather to be found in the narrative play of the novel itself, and in its very language in particular. Linguistic confusion, such as that exemplified in the passage above, is used to explore the fault-lines of cultural difference, within Nigeria, within the British Empire, and within the world itself. Tensions between Hausa and Yoruba soldiers appear along the seams of language — one soldier’s inability to speak the other’s language (properly), for example. This tension is complicated further in an exchange of insults with a Hausa-speaking Japanese soldier. Kyaftin Gillafsie’s admiration for one of his Hausa proverbs and enquiry as to where he learnt his Hausa elicits the response that, “‘I wasn’t talking to you, white bastard’” (Bandele, 2007: 166). This response is “roared back in English” (Bandele, 2007: 166). In this example the cultural and racial signification of languages breaks down completely. Language can no longer be relied upon to indicate national or cultural identity but enacts a troubling mobility. The Nigerian soldiers’ initial suspicion is that the soldier has learnt his Hausa from a prisoner of war, Grace; but, since Grace’s Hausa is not good, “Grace was a Gwari man”, the Japanese soldier is deemed a wizard, “because he’s learnt to speak the language better than his teacher” (Bandele, 2007: 167). However, this mobility is not fantastical, unlikely as it first seems to the soldiers in White City. As Gillafsie explains, the Hausa-speaking soldier is probably one of the many Japanese students who attended the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, prior to the war (Bandele, 2007: 167).

The apparent improbability of a Japanese Hausa-speaker is contradicted factually in a way that troubles not only the Nigerian soldiers but also broader common assumptions about the lack of linguistic relations between Asia and Africa prior to the Second World War. ⁸ Rather than focusing on direct encounters between the Japanese and Nigerian soldiers Bandele draws our attention to these linguistic relations. These act metonymically within the novel to indicate the larger historical complex of African–Asian relations that operated within and beyond the parameters of late colonialism. Like Eshu and his misleading hat, the Hausa-speaking Japanese soldier confounds the novel’s protagonists and readers. The confusion embodied in the Japanese soldier’s mastery of Hausa is only resolved through a revelation of truth about the mobility of language and its capacity to escape our expectations. This is what the Japanese soldier makes transparent, in the manner of Eshu as Bandele explains it. Moreover, this revelation, or making transparent, acts as the textual “remainder” to which Hayot refers and which may be read, as I have suggested, as a hermeneutic entry point back into the text.

The characteristics of Eshu, and in particular his disturbing “syncopation” of meaning, can thus provide for us an interpretative key for understanding the novel’s extended engagement with linguistic encounter and confusion. Like Eshu this confusion produces ambiguity and at times strife between protagonists that can only be resolved through a reconfiguration of social expectations and an acceptance of alternative (linguistic) positions. Moreover, this linguistic confusion provokes the reader, too, to acknowledge the multiple and often ex-centric histories that have too often been excluded from previous accounts of the Second World War. Rather than obscuring the operations of colonialism beneath a seamless blanket of homogeneous linguistic hybridity, a sort of wartime Esperanto that can dissolve all difference, the polyphony of Bandele’s text reveals the complexities inherent in the final years of British colonialism. His soldiers constantly escape their identities (national, cultural, local). Moreover, this shifting of identities inevitably foreshadows the political shifts that were to follow the end of the war, particularly in the cultural divisions that emerged in Nigeria following independence.

Language becomes not simply the medium but also the image of the soldiers’ negotiations of their identities, as Hausa or as Nigerian or as British colonial subject or as enemy or as man. The multivalency of these negotiations challenges the polarities that govern much racial discourse by positing multiple, and at times paradoxical, modes of identification and affiliation. Moreover in the challenge of such multivalency, Eshu appears once more, as a governing force of paradox and mutability. The socio-historical criteria for conceptualizing race and racial alliance break down in the face of arbitrary realities that cut across such ideals. Thus, at the end of the novel as Ali Banana attempts to find his way back to White City through the jungle, Bandele writes:

He was in Burma to fight King George’s war and that was the end of the matter.

The Japs were King George’s enemies and that was the end of the matter.

The Japs were his enemies.

He would kill the Japs or the Japs would kill him.

That was the end of the matter.

It was a different matter though with the men around him whose deaths he’d witnessed. They were all men he’d come to know very well…. (Bandele, 2007: 207)

Once again direct African–Asian contact is displaced by a linguistic re-articulation of that contact. Ali Banana here adopts English military patois (as opposed to a Nigerian English pidgin) in his rationalization of his situation. Ali’s patois reduces Japanese to “Japs” and syntactically reduces Ali himself to a proxy for King George. This linguistic reduction signals the arbitrariness of his position in relation to the Japanese, a point that is underlined by the emphatic repetition of the syntax. Just as Eshu creates arbitrary enmity between the neighbours who argue over the colour of his hat, Ali and his Japanese rivals become mere polarities of each other, as the chiasmic structure of the central sentence makes clear. The repetitions within the passage thus draw attention to the practical irrelevance, to his understanding of himself and his fellow soldiers, of the socio-historical factors that have brought Ali to where he is. Although his situation is marked by the experiences and languages he shares with the others in his battalion, these are not indicators of race, as the Japanese Hausa-speaker and the passage above make clear. Instead, Ali Banana’s process of “coming to know” his comrades is characterized in the book by negotiations of difference and ambiguity both linguistic and cultural. Burma Boy thus finds and defines affiliation and identity not through racial classification (whether biological or socio-historical) but in the interactions between self and other mediated by language.

Conclusion

At the start of this essay I suggested that we need to pursue more varied approaches in our critical discussions of cross-cultural encounter than are currently in place, particularly in the field of African–Asian relations. In putting into practice the sort of ex-centric, critical approach that Quayson and Hayot have called for, I have focused on gui and Eshu as figures of Hayot’s textual “remainder” ― that aspect of the text which exceeds the text to suggest itself as a point of critical entry. What comes to light, whether in the figure of gui or the aesthetic of Eshu, is not, however, the expression of colour solidarity along Du Boisian lines, which Mullen and others highlight in the work of writers such as Kalumi ya Salaam. Instead what emerges is an emphasis on processes of cultural negotiation, differentiation, and identification.

Explaining his notion of a “third space” of critical discourse Homi Bhabha draws on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (Rutherford, 1990: 210–1). Bhabha presents the task of translation as a metaphor for creating that “third space” transposing the act from language to culture: “if […] the act of cultural translation […] denies the essentialism of a prior given original or originary culture, then we see that all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity” (Rutherford, 1990: 211). It seems to me, however, that one crucial space for further investigation, from a postcolonial perspective, is that of language itself. As the texts studied here demonstrate, an attention to linguistic deployment brings to the fore the hidden ambiguities of African–Asian cross-cultural encounters both in the late colonial and in the postcolonial era. These ambiguities have frequently eluded literary critical discussions of African–Asian relationships in the past because of a scholarly focus on the Anglophone north as a triangulating locus for such encounter. Shifting our attention not only to other geographical locations but, more importantly, to language as a space of negotiation itself, enables us to expose alternative and ex-centric perspectives. As East Asia and Africa develop stronger political and economic ties, and migration between the two regions increases, new expressions of interaction are coming to the fore. Reading these along the lines of previous scholarship that privileges the West as site of encounter is an inadequate response. We must develop an alertness to the ex-centricities of contemporary post-postcolonial fictions in order to do justice to the complexities of experience that they present.