Vamba Sherif

Tribulations of a Migrant Writer

In the late sixties, a young African of Malian origin sent his manuscript to a French publisher to be considered for publication. The editors, who had never heard of this writer before, were astounded by the honesty, brutality, and savagery of the novel. There were passages that could only have come from a troubled man, but there were also those that were profound, meditative, and beautiful. This was the work of an angry and complex man.

The young man was Yambo Ouologuem, and the novel was Bound to Violence. It was published in 1968, and it made history. From an obscure African with an uncertain future in Europe, Ouologuem became a literary star. He spoke English fluently and appeared on American television shows. His future as a writer was assured. But a few years later, some critics thought that they saw similarities between the work of this African genius and those of writers like Guy de Maupassant and Graham Greene. He was accused of committing plagiarism. Bound to Violence was immediately withdrawn from the market, and the future of the writer destroyed. Ouologuem returned to his native Mali a broken man. He would never write again.

Now, more than thirty years later, it has come to light that in fact he had committed no plagiarism, but had been influenced by various writers, and in doing so produced an original and captivating work, just like Tolstoy was influenced by Flaubert’s Madam Bovary when he wrote Anna Karenina. But the damage had already been done, and today the writer languishes away in a city in Mali, unknown, a madman who eschews everything European.

Why was he accused of plagiarism? Was it because he had written a book so original that his readers, who were mostly westerners, thought it could not be the work of an African? Was it because he was young, not even thirty when he wrote the novel? Was it because he was envied by many other writers and critics who could not do what he had done? Whatever the motive, this instance and many others that followed reveal the ambivalence of western critics and readers towards migrant literature. But is that still the case today?

I discovered Ouologuem not in Kuwait where I lived a part of my life, not in Liberia where I was born, but in the Netherlands. I had come to the Netherlands to escape the war in Kuwait and in Liberia. In exile, I read the work of writers like Thomas Mann, which fascinated me as much as the work of Chinua Achebe, and I marvelled at the work of Chekhov and Marquez. Like Ouologuem, I try to make use of these influences. For my second novel I went to Venice because I was impressed by how Mann had portrayed the artist in his Death in Venice. I wrote my third novel because I wanted to try the detective genre, which I admired very much. My first novel, set in nineteenth century America and Liberia, was a result of my fascination with the works of such writers as Frederick Douglas, Toni Morrison and many others.

These influences did not make me a writer. What made me a writer was the struggle to define myself in Dutch culture, and to also understand my country Liberia. When I came to the Netherlands, I had no idea that the language would be so difficult, and that exile would prove so intransigent. My Gbandi, my Mende and my Mandingo—three African languages that are spoken in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea and that shaped my first years and in many ways moulded me into the man I am today—were not enough to find my way in this new country – not even my English or my Arabic.  I wanted to excel, break the barriers that stood in my way, and I wanted to express my love of books like I had done in Kuwait and in Africa, but it was not easy. I had to contend with a culture that was individualistic, to say the least, a culture in which I had to learn to define myself, to recreate my dreams, to choose a clear path to follow. Confronted with these challenges, I sought refuge in the one thing that could provide me some kind of solace: writing.

I started to write stories in Dutch and English. It was then that I discovered that my stories were an attempt to retrieve my past in Liberia; or, as Isaac Bashevis Singer once put it in explaining the reason most of his novels were set in Eastern Europe, an attempt not to forget. I wrote not to forget the Liberia of my childhood;  nostalgia took on a different and more immediate significance. I realized that, in my attempt to become a writer, I was actually writing the history of my country, which was founded by ex-slaves from America. The attempt resulted in my novel The land of the fathers.

The enormous reception this novel received was not unusual. In fact, other migrant writers had produced works that sold better and were critically acclaimed. Something was happening in the West. Gone, it seemed, were the days when migrant literature was looked upon as exotic, didactic and deprived of artistic quality. The incident with Ouologuem seemed ages ago. But was that actually the case? Was that ambivalence not still present, but in another form? Subsequent years would prove that that was not always the case, that some works were valued because of their aesthetic relevance. Outside of the Netherlands, Indian writers like Rushdie, Seth and Roy were setting the standards. It was as if they were saying: ‘Now it is our turn to set the course that literature will take in the future.’

But here are the problems the migrant writers like me still face. The languages I choose to write in, English and Dutch, are not my native tongues. In fact my native tongues, which consist of various languages, are not written ones. Moreover I grew up elsewhere, in Kuwait, where I studied Arabic. At school I was taught Arabic and English, and some basic French. This makes it all the more difficult to express myself in a language that’s not mine. And most importantly, my books are mainly read by Dutch and other western readers. The Liberians, who feature in my stories and who need to see themselves through the eyes of my characters, do not even know that my books exist. And they wouldn’t care less if they knew about their existence, because their first and foremost concern is meeting their basic needs: food, clothing and other necessities. Books are a luxury in Africa.

This is not only a challenge for me as a Liberian writer, deeply influenced by Western and Arabic cultures, but it is a challenge many migrant writers in the West face. Do we continue to write for the West, or are our books intended also for people in Africa, India, China and elsewhere? A writer friend once told me that his book, which had sold thousands of copies in the Netherlands, could not have had the same contents if it had been written in his native country. In fact, he was writing with the Dutch public in mind. Does this mean that the migrant writer writes with his western readers in mind? Are we writing to live up to their exotic taste? These are questions that are difficult to answer and that I struggle with every time I sit to write.

Nevertheless, the influence of migrant writers on the literature of the world is great. Before Ouologuem, before Rushdie, before the brilliant writers of Africa, South America, India, Japan and China, there were writers like Antara Ibn Shaddad, who lived in pre-Islamic Arabia. Antara was of Ethiopian origin, and he belonged to that group of black poets who were referred to as the Crows of Arabs. In a culture replete with poets and in which enemies were defeated by the powers of the spoken word, these men distinguished themselves as great poets. Antar’s poems were so popular that one of them was included among the seven Muallaqat, or the ‘Suspended Odes.’ These were poems that were hung on the walls of the Kabba in Mecca, as an example of the greatest achievement of the pre-Islamic era. It was this man who sang with pride: I am a man, of whom one half ranks with the best of Abs/ The other half I defend with my sword.

Then there was Pushkin, whose father was of African origin. It is now established that Pushkin’s grandfather Abraham Gannibal did not hail from Ethiopia, like many Russian scholars had thought. In his book, Gannibal, The moor of St. Petersburg, the Englishman Hugh Barnes argues that Gannibal hailed from a kingdom that was once situated along Lake Chad. Pushkin’s influence on Russian literature is so great that even Tolstoy acknowledged how deeply he owed his development as a writer to Pushkin. In most famous epic poem, Eugene Onegin, Pushkin sings:

It’s time to drop astern the shape
of the dull shore of my disfavour
and there, beneath your noonday sky
my Africa, where waves break high,
to mourn for Russia’s gloomy savour,
land where I learned to love and weep,
land where my heart is buried deep.

Pushkin wrote about the Russia he knew, even though to some he was that African with savage blood coursing through his veins.

In the end, whatever the origin of the writer, it is his art that matters. It is this that perhaps makes the tribulations of the migrant writer bearable, the fact that he sees the world the way Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Mann saw it: with the eyes of an artist. This is the source of courage even when it all appears confusing, when the toll of exile seems unbearable. It is what keeps the migrant writer going, keeps him setting the course, keeps him setting standards, and surprising the world with his genius.

Copyright © 2008 Vamba Sherif