Abstract
Sakiru Adebayo opens his important book, Continuous Pasts: Frictions of Memory in Postcolonial Africa, with a commentary about the recurrence of political violence in Africa. He rightly traces part of the origins of this violence to the brutality of colonial rule in Africa, while also suggesting that we should not overstate the legacies of colonialism as the cause of conflicts in Africa. Rather, understanding the politics, narratives, and afterlives of conflicts in Africa involves acknowledging the multilayered histories of past atrocities that implicate both colonial and postcolonial institutions. Bringing together memory studies and African studies, Continuous Pasts is a captivating examination of how the past remains tangible and continues to shape the present. In addition, it examines how postcolonial African literatures make sense of that past within a continent affected by the legacies of slavery, colonization, postcolonial crises, and ongoing experiences of transnational migrations.
Adebayo’s keen attention to “frictions” is a significant strength of his book as the term captures the complexities inherent in “how the past is constructed, confronted, and contested” (p. 3). Frictions as a conceptual locus in the book unpacks the turbulent work of institutionalizing state politics and governance in the aftermath of brutal conflicts, even as it emphasizes the work of memory as a central part of this process. In post-conflict societies in Africa, memory does not only allow for grappling with the painful histories of the past, it also becomes a site for further frictions, for state repressions, for resistance to silences, and for creating counternarratives. Adebayo also uses frictions of memory in postcolonial Africa to challenge the theories, concepts, and “master narratives of memory” (p. 3) which are often centered on the scholarly examination of the Holocaust and Western historical events (p. 3).
Examining four African literary texts that it describes as “post-conflict fictions of memory in Africa,” the book posits that “the post-conflict fiction of memory in Africa demonstrates how the past is etched on bodies and topographies, resonant in silences and memorials, continuous even in experiences as well as structures of migration” (p. 4). Adebayo’s argument invites us to understand the complexities and contours of memory discourse in Africa by showing how the past is harnessed within the particularities of each country it discusses while also reflecting their underlying similarities. The primary texts drawn from are Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution, and Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana. Using these, the book argues that
the aforementioned literary texts invite critical deliberations on the continuity of the past within the realm of positionality and the domain of subjectivity—that is to say the past is not merely present; instead, it survives, lives on, and is mediated through the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and implicated subjects as well as secondary and transgenerational witnesses. (p. 4)
Adebayo locates four specific manifestations of the survival and presence of the past in the book, namely, intergenerational transmissions (Half of a Yellow Sun), shapes of silences (The Memory of Love), structures of migrations (Children of the Revolution), and memorial sites (The Shadow of Imana). It is useful to reiterate that each manifestation of the present pasts constitutes a site for the frictions of memory. Furthermore, in his evaluation of these four manifestations of present pasts, Adebayo adopts memory frameworks such as postmemory, concatenated memories, ancestral memory, and African transnational memory to ground his analytical discourse of the books.
Chapter 1 examines Chimamanda Adichie’s book, Half of a Yellow Sun as a work of postmemory and ancestral memory. The chapter appropriately analyzes the novel about the Nigerian-Biafra War of 1967–1970 as a work of postmemory because Adichie never witnessed the war, but inherited its memories and trauma from her parents who were survivors of the war. Adebayo further pursues the case for postmemory by citing other autobiographical writings and public interviews by Adichie which all corroborate the narrative account in Half of a Yellow Sun. By reading within and outside the text, the chapter showcases a capacious engagement with one of the most critically acclaimed novels on post-conflict experiences in African literature. Adebayo argues that “while Adichie’s postmemorial endeavor gestures toward the necessity of repair on national and familial levels, it also represents, complicates, and even anticipates the ongoing frictions over the memory of Biafra in Nigeria today” (p. 26). However, while several parts of the novel fit into the framework of the postmemorial, Adebayo is also quick to stress the limits of postmemory within a postcolonial African context where the memory of slavery, colonialism, and civil wars are cumulative (p. 46). In addition, Adebayo states that Adichie’s continuous reference to her ancestors in several interviews invites one to think critically about ancestral memories.
The second chapter, on Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love, a novel based on the Sierra Leonean Civil War (1991–2002), examines the silence that surrounds the history of the civil war, and how this silence leads to various kinds of frictions. Adebayo interrogates the “hidden and open spaces of silence and their implications for memory or forgetting in post-conflict Sierra Leone” (p. 52) and examines how the novel “animates reflections on the nexus between political silence and the construction of a postcolonial, post-conflict nation-state” (p. 52). Adebayo achieves this robust analysis of silence by interrogating the novel as a work of textual silence. He also distinguishes between silent memory and silenced memory: the former refers to a covert remembering of the past by characters who remain mostly silent after the war, and the latter identifies the attempt at covering up details and atrocities of the past by deliberately disremembering it.
In chapter 3, Adebayo examines African transnational memory (ATM, subsequently) as a form of regional memory that occurs within the context of African migrations. Focusing on the experience of the Ethiopians who left the country during the Derg communist revolution, the chapter analyzes Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution, in order to examine “the traversal of memory across continental borders as well as the frictions that occur when immigratory and emigratory memories come into contact” (p. 77). The analysis brings to sharp focus how melancholy shapes immigrants’ structures of memory and the practices of belonging in a new country. It is within these structures of memory and practices of belonging that ATM emerges as a “circulation of memory practices, cultures, and institutions across national and cultural formations within the continent” (p. 92).
Chapter 4 returns to the exploration of ATM, but with a focus on the transnational dimension of the Rwandan genocide as seen through the “Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember” project that was carried out by 10 writers from Kenya, Chad, Ivory Coast, Guinea, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, and Rwanda. Adebayo examines The Shadow of Imana by Véronique Tadjo, a text produced by the project, as an example of the manifestation of an ATM. Centering the question of witnessing the pain of others, the chapter “investigate[s] how the text enhances our understanding of the multiple frictions involved in ethical witnessing” (p. 100). Apart from ATM, the chapter also introduces Alison Landsberg’s concept of prosthetic memory in order to examine how the author, Tadjo, “interpolates herself into the memory of the genocide, especially during her visits to specific memorial sites, and . . . question[s] whether those acquired memories could be regarded as prosthetic” (p. 101). The concluding, fifth chapter, brings together the different seams of each of the four previous chapters, tying them together by especially focusing on how they all contribute to the discourse on the futurity of memory. Adebayo argues that in his analyses of the four texts, one of the major implications of the futurity of memory is that “the future in the postcolony is under siege, that is, the spectral presence of the past, layered with injustices in the present prevents survivors and victims from aspiring to a future” (p. 119).
Adebayo is a perceptive critic whose endearing and simple prose does not reduce the depth and incisiveness of his analysis. Continuous Pasts is thus a reflection of analytic depth, breadth, and succulent prose. The book is an important contribution to African studies and memory studies. It joins other recent works such as Jill Jarvis’ Decolonizing Memory: Algeria and the Politics of Testimony and Arthur Anyaduba’s The Postcolonial African Genocide Novel, invested in interrogating how the trauma and memory of multilayered histories of colonization, anticolonial resistance, and civil conflicts in Africa continue to shape politics and cultural representations from Africa.
However, in a book that aspires to articulate a regional memory in Africa (p. 13), using different memory concepts might seem counter-productive. The book uses familiar concepts in memory studies such as postmemory, prosthetic memory, and introduces other concepts such as ancestral memory and ATM. Using different concepts of memory lends to the notion of frictions and the particularities of memory politics in each of the nations studied in the book. Of course, the book introduces ATM as an example of regional memory. The only problem with the current formulation of ATM is that the emphasis on the transnational, which denotes movements and crossings, means the concept might not be productive for articulating memory politics within a nation-state. Again, I understand the impulse to sometimes transcend the nation-state in the analysis of memory. However, transcending the nation-state and accounting for memory politics within the same must not be a question of this or that; it can always be both.
Accounting for memory politics both within and beyond the nation-state is where Adebayo’s ancestral memory becomes very productive. Unfortunately, the elaboration of this concept in the book is somewhat (should read is somewhat lean) lean. At a very basic level, the idea of ancestry is agile, not easily curtailed by space and time. It simultaneously reaches into the past while also commenting on the present, accounting for common histories and events without equally dismissing individual experiences and identities within those histories. The point here is that a transnational memory can be an ancestral memory.
This leads me to a final point, which renders itself in the form of a question for memory studies scholars: do we need another new concept for studying memory? Are new memory concepts always expedient? Within the last two decades alone, there have been several concepts that have been proposed within the multidisciplinary field of memory studies. One is beginning to wonder whether the next stage in the development of the field is about inventing new concepts or expanding upon the ones that are already in circulation. It might also seem that the drive to invent new concepts is in tandem with the capitalist and neo-liberal impulse for production and survival. An anxiety for survival that is not just influencing memory studies but arguably the humanities and humanistic social science disciplines whose continued existence are being threatened. Adebayo has thankfully given us a concept that is not only important but expedient because of the peculiarity of where his work engages. We will rightly need to digest and build on this important work.
