Displacement, place and race are related terms that I seek to examine in Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore. Of the three terms, the metaphor of place as geo-political landscape where one belongs is the focus of the paper. Where can one find a place of belonging? Is it elsewhere or where one is? If it is else where, what if you die there? These are some of the questions that preoccupy me in the writing of this paper. This is done with the help of theorists like Homi Bhabha, Benedict Anderson and Paul Gilroy. In the paper, I will look at the concept of displacement, then that of place and lastly race.

Displacement has gained currency not only as an action of migration and emigration but has also generated discourse, which Homi Bhabha in Location of Culture sees as “exceeding the barrier or boundary-the very act of going beyond[…]becomes disjunct displaced” (4). This means that displacement whether physical or psychic is a manifestation of “going beyond” and as Homi Bhabha puts it, beyond in this sense “signifies spatial distances” (4). It is worth noting the postcolonial personality is the one, for the most part, who effectuates movement to the metropolis these days and Homi Bhabha again calls this shift of movement as “ the new Internationalism” (15). Displacement as Homi Bhabha sees it goes beyond geo-political frontiers. It is also an attempt to deconstruct modernist concepts that turn to create a modern ‘Universalism’ of “Occidental Self-understanding that enacts a cognitive reductionism in the relation of human beings to the social world” (239). The growth of narratives, in recent years by postcolonial writers has placed emphasis on the phenomenon of postcolonial migration and the plight of the emigrants in Europe and America. Homi Bhabha writes:

For the demography of the new internationalism is the history of postcolonial migration, the narrative of cultural and political Diaspora, the major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities, the poetics of exile and the grim prose of political and economic refugee (5).

Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore revisits the issue of emigration and this time, he handles the issue of the illegal emigrants in Africa today. What necessitates this illegal emigration? How is it carried out? What are its effects?

A Distant Shore dwells on the issue of illegal emigration carried out by Africans to England. In the novel, Africans are lea giving the continent in large numbers to the metropolis in search of a secured and good life. Caryl Phillips’ Africa is a space torn apart by war and misery and the horror that goes with these catastrophes. Gabriel sees his father killed, his mother, his sisters raped and killed. This experience makes him dumbfounded and beyond expression.

‘Did they kill your family?’

Gabriel looks up at Joshua.

‘They were not hiding.’

‘Gabriel, did they kill every body?’ […] Gabriel, you must tell me. Did they kill every body?’ Gabriel shakes his head […] wipes his tears with the back of his hands (78).

Gabriel’s family is metonymic to the lot of all post independence Africa. This kind of scene makes the continent a hostile space to live in. Gabriel’s shock is embarrassing because he is an agent to this kind of power structure that has governed Africa since independence. His uncle Joshua reminds him that he “massacred innocent women and children, and then ran away” (78). This shows the degree of insecurity that exists in Africa today. Thus, making Africans to leave the continent at all cost in search for a better life elsewhere. These Africans, like Gabriel see Africa not their “home anymore” (78).

Besides war that has plagued post independence Africa is also the harsh reality of frustration, poverty, unemployment and disease that is almost sediment in the continent since independence. Workers are badly paid and work under very difficult conditions. Their hopes for the better remain an illusion never to be attained. Gabriel says “one had to be patient, but some days it was very difficult for I was no longer a young man (123). He is a messenger clerk who runs errands for the civil servants. Unfortunately, his state like that of most Africans is precarious because of the “eat syndrome” that has plagued the continent’s leadership. In A Distant Shore, Gabriel tells us that these civil servants spend time popping “Johnie Walker Black Label.” The most unfortunate thing is that Gabriel is very educated and is fit to be a civil servant. He says he “was more educated than others and more ambitious to make something of myself in the world” (126). This zeal by Africans is easily put into an illusion as they cannot attain their dreams and with this, Africa becomes an unwelcome space.

Corruption is also a canker worm in post independence Africa. It is a situation where to have something; one must bribe or be favoured by another person. Commissioning Gabriel to fight for his country, his father gives him cigarettes and tells him what to do:

… [h]e told me that I might be able to use the cigarettes as currency with which to bribe somebody and perhaps smooth my path for what lay ahead […] he reminded me of men who value tobacco more than bread (124).

As a result of these socio-economic and political ills, the continent of Africa remains poor and decayed with its youth seeing no future in the continent. Africa is presented in the novel as a geo-political space whose citizens have no belonging. The lack of belonging now pushes the post independence African youth to emigrate to Europe and America. They see their leaving the continent as going “beyond this nightmare to a new place and a new beginning (Phillips 84). This is the dream of Gabriel and most illegal emigrants in Africa. The only thing Gabriel has in mind is to be given the opportunity of “abandoning his country” (87). It does not matter where he is going and how he leaves. Gabriel’s desire to leave Africa, at all cost, does not even frighten him when Joshua proves reticent to answer his question, “[A]nd what will happen to us when we reach Europe?” (87). He prefers to take the risk. This illegal emigration from Africa to Europe for the past months has being in the headline of News. In October and November 2005, the world was shocked by the risk Africans bore in the desert as illegal emigrant to Spain, passing through Morocco. Their capture, torture and abused by the Moroccan government made Morocco very unpopular among African youth. This shows the degree to which Africans want to leave the continent.

Africa in A Distant Shore is presented as a hostile space not different from what is read in Conradian fiction with its inhabitants being the most unfortunate of its victims. In recent weeks, international and national seminars have been held to see if illegal migration can be checked. One thing is certain that it could if government will stop organizing Champaign seminars; Africans are capable of stopping corruption, tribalism, unemployment, greed and embezzlement. Instead of holding seminars, these things should be check including the institution of human rights. Only then will the youth remain in the continent and will not be “leaving to go to a better place” (93).

From this point, the second term in the title of this paper is place. It is important to note that place is also a discourse of currency in postcolonial discourse. Place as a concept is multidimensional with social and cultural as well as territorial dimensions (Darian-Smith et al 2).While space is nameless and unknown, place is a process which Darian-Smith et al have explained thus:

It is through the cultural processes of imagining, seeing historicizing and remembering that space is transformed into place, and geographical territory into a culturally defined landscape (3).

From Darian-Smith et al, it becomes clear that for one to belong to a place, it demands some recognition of one’s existence and essence. Without this recognition, the territory remains unknown and can not be called place. Erica Carter et al have also expressed this view thus, “it is not space which ground identification but places […] Place is space to which meaning has been ascribed” (xii). Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore presents Gabriel’s country as unknown. It is in fact seen as the ‘blank space’ in Marlow’s map in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. This empty and unidentified space is what pushes Gabriel and his friends into war. Their goal is to transform their geographical territory and give it some meaning. “We are fighting for a purpose. Our aim is to liberate our land from these unscrupulous men who hate us” (125). This means that if the country is without a name, it is because of some individuals that do not want the country to have a name. Thus, the country remains to be identified as “edges and black spaces, filled with cannibals, mermaids and monsters” (Mc Clintock 27). Interestingly, while other parts in the novel are named like England, London, France, Paris, Iraq, Weston and Stoneleigh, African states, even Gabriel’s home country is not given a name. This is simply to show that the space is hostile and therefore necessitates illegal emigration.

Can the African not sit where he/she is and has it transformed? Is it possible to find peace and security in Europe? To answer these questions, it is important to note that Africans have that ‘universalistic stereotype’ in their psychic that stipulates their inferiority and barbarity while Europeans are the civilized and superior ones. Gabriel’s psychic is manipulated by this stereotype. He does not see himself as African but as an English man. “…I am an English man. Only the white man respects us, for we do not respect ourselves” (119). Gabriel’s statement reveals that Africa is a place of social injustice and no regards for fellow man. This is a true picture of barbarism whose opposite is only seen in England by the respect attributed to fellow man.

In as much as the issue of illegal emigration stands out to be obvious in Africa, in order to stay in one space/place means remaining in a ‘fixed’ space which in the long run leads to oppositions of identities like Black/White, Man/Woman, African/European. This fixation articulates and elaborates the concept of Self and Other which has some dangerous consequences.  Homi Bhabha sees this danger in the fact of blackness, woman, and Africa as “over determined from without”. This process guided by stereotypical myths has been a hindrance to progress. By abrogating this ‘fixity’, Bhabha sees some “newness” in a personality and “with newness […] the continuum of past and present” (7) is created. He further explains that:

This interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of cultural hybridity that entertains difference without assumed or imposed hierarchy (4).

At this level, the illegal emigrant can gain a new personality which either builds or destroys him/her. Gabriel and Said are émigrés from the Middle East and Africa to England where they all die because of racism. The fixity of English civility over the other’s barbarity is what makes England not the dream place of Said and Gabriel.

 The Self/Other, English/emigrant, settler/native difference is not rooted in class or history but in biological difference. This is what has come to be known as race which is the last term on the title of this paper. Rey Chow defines it as the “reduction of some from a particular group to the stereotypes, negatives or positives, we have of that group” (qtd in Mongia 122). From Chow’s definition, race stems from biological origins. Its emphases as Benedict Anderson stresses in Imagining Communities are on biological difference and kinship whose function is not influenced by class. Because of this biological emphasis on race, the stereotype insisted upon by Rey Chow seems permanent since people will never have the same origin.

While racism dreams of eternal contamination transmitted from the origin of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations […] the dreams of racism actually have their origins in ideologies of class (Anderson 136).

What the emphasis here connotes is that race is a biological fact but racism is bred by the concept of culture and identity which can lead to the dangers of absolutism and essentialism.  In “There An’t No Black in the Union Jack”, Paul Gilroy shows how Black/White racism has done great harm to post war Britain. Gilroy’s essay vividly elaborates Gabriel’s life as he faces the injustices of racism in England.

Gabriel’s dream of finding England as a place is soon stifled by the facts of racism which is based on the notion of English ‘civility’ and the settler’s ‘barbarity.’ The English insensitivity and fear for strangers and most especially Blacks is a major set back to black African and Caribbean emigrants. Dorothy describes her racist parents thus:

…Mum and Dad, for starters, both of whom disliked coloureds. Dad told me that he regarded coloureds as a challenge to our English identity […] For him, being English was more important than being British, and being English meant no coloureds (37).

Dorothy’s father’s impression about colored elaborates the Other stereotype and this barbarism is only seen in the eyes of a civilize English eye. For this reason, the Blacks are pushed into the second and invisible space. In A Distant Shore, the police is unwilling to properly investigate the cause of Gabriel’s (Solomon) death. Dorothy shows disapproval of this attitude as she says “the police man and police woman came to tell me about Solomon as though they were enquiring about an unpaid ticket” (52). This shows that the ‘eye’ that sees Gabriel does not only look at eye with the interpretations of an “evil eye” to use Homi Bhabha. But Africa and the African is situated in the marginal space. Dorothy’s assertion of Solomon treated as an unpaid ticket is very central as it “initiates a space of inter-cutting that articulates politics/psyche, sexuality/race” (Bhabha 56). For this to be represented, Bhabha again reiterates this racist ideology as seen by the evil eye in these words:

The play of the evil eye is camouflage, invisible in the common, on-going activity of looking- making present, while it is implicated in the petrifying, unblinking gaze that falls Medusa-like on its victims –dealing death, extinguishing both presence and present (56).

The gaze that represents Gabriel as an object of no use, “unpaid parking ticket” reveals this differentiation of race, culture and identity as central issues in the novel.

Gabriel starts experiencing racism upon his arrival in England. He is unjustly locked up because of a young woman, Denise. The ill-treatment he and his fellow in-mate get from the cell leads to Said’s death. This is because of the invisibility of the non-English in-mates in the ‘Eye’ of the warder. The warder, like other English in-mates treats Gabriel as an animal. “Drink your piss. Isn’t that what you lot do in the jungle?” (86).Through out the novel, this is one of the rare times that Gabriel’s continent has been identified with a name “jungle”. This is how African and Africa is considered in  England.

This treatment  makes Gabriel to  realize quickly that England can never be the place of his belonging. He starts struggling to survive and to do so, he is advised to change his identity and name. He now takes the name Solomon. “I come for you after dark. If you have identity papers, please lose them so they cannot send you back to where you are from” (111). It is as a result of that in Dorothy’s eyes- a symbol of British Imperialism- Solomon has no past, no one knows where he comes from, only the name Solomon. He is seen as a nonentity and Dorothy’s unsuccessful effort had been to give  Gabriel an identity of English liking. Without this, Gabriel remains a ‘strange’ person and this strangeness is not welcome in Stoneleigh and that is why Paul and his friends Dalex and Gordon will have him killed, after a series of treats and it is treated as the death or disappearance of an “unpaid ticket”.

Gabriel’s lonely life in England and the difficulties there leave us with the question whether one can find a place of conviviality in any geographical space in the world? Is it not a psychological assumption? Gabriel’s loss of name, identity, culture and continent are all evidences to prove that Europe and Africa are equally hostile spaces to Africans. Unfortunately for Gabriel, he dies an ignoble death in the land of his dreams without attaining the glory of these dreams.

Monju Calasanctius

Tel; 227 22 17 20 94

www.edudisciplines.com

 Works Cited

Anderson, Benedict. Imagining Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread

                of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

Carter,Erica; James Donald and Judith Squire Eds. Space and Place:Theories of

                 Identification and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993.

Chow, Rey. “Where Have All the Natives Gone?” Contemporary Postcolonial

               Theory:A Reader. Ed Padimi Mongia. (1997):122-146.

Darian-Smith, Kate; Liz Gunner and Serah Nutall. Eds Text, Theory, Space:Land,

             Literature and History in South Africa and Australia. London and New

            York: Routledge, 1996.

Gilroy, Paul. “There An’t No Black in the Union Jack: Dialectics of Diasporic  

             Identification”. Third Text. 13 (Winter 1990/91): 3-6.

Mc Clintock, Anne. Imperial Leather, Race,Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial

              Context. London and New York: Routledge, 1995.

Phillips, Caryl. A Distant Shore. New York: Vintage Books, 2005.

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