Ishmael Beah's Radiance of Tomorrow and In Koli Jean Bofane's Congo INC.

The politics of migration are radically tethered to the politics of the environment and the multinational corporations that instrumentalize and commodify people, the environment, and the land's resources. In our contemporary neoliberal mode of governance, the health of people and the planet is rendered secondary to the concerns of quenching the seemingly insatiable greed of multinational corporations. While the planet and its resources have been instrumentalized, people are viewed as impediments to neoliberal “progress” and neocolonial “development.” The instrumentalization of nature is nothing short of the commodification of nature with the goal of maximizing profit that attends the process of accumulation by dispossession as articulated by David Harvey. Environmental devastation and accumulation by dispossession create an understudied phenomenon that African literature attends to: migration, forced or otherwise, due to environmental devastation. Migrating as a result of environmental devastation often results in regional forms of migration that both novels represent and that extends our investigation of the myriad of forms of migration tracked throughout the course of this book. Although First World Western countries are primarily responsible for the global environmental crisis, it is the poor in the putative Third World and future generations who will largely bear the burden of the West's unsustainable living practices and the corporate and capitalist consumer ideologies sustaining them. Environmental devastation forces those in targeted resource areas to migrate due to the pollution of water and destruction of lands and resources that decreases the livelihood of those affected by environmental devastation.

Recent environmental studies discourse is awash with a host of neologisms attempting to grasp the environmental crisis. The concepts range from the Anthropocene to the Capitalocene and the Eurocene. The aforesaid labels purport to mark epochs to locate a timeframe, or better an origin story, for the emergence of our environmental crisis. In the Eurocene, it is the emergence and planetary spread of European practices of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and the ascension and acceleration of consumer capitalism. In the Anthropocene, it is the emergence of man and carbon to create the Thermocene.

Novels of African migration open up the horizon for the possibility of exploring a host of pressing themes and political and social concerns. The goal of this book is to not simply chart a single theme—changes in subjectivity or identity, for example—under the banner of African migration literature. Rather, its purpose is to explore and expose the promise and possibility of African migration literature, specifically novels. Thus, the scope is intentionally broad in focus. As the title suggests, what I hope to demonstrate is that novels of African migration encompass a wide range of issues, including (but not restricted to) civil war, race and racism, and environmental devastation. This book is consciously designed to incorporate a host of migratory experiences, for example, exile because of civil war, participation by women in the sex trade in Antwerp, and the postmigration experience in Paris. This book, then, explores the imaginative worlds opened up by African migration literature and the migratory imagination that underwrites this body of literature. In the following introduction, I seek to do the following:

• 1. historicize African migration literature in its current manifestation by briefly presenting a synopsis of African migration literature;

• 2. introduce two categories that guide this project, the migratory imagination and an adaptable theoretical framework I have called theory on the move; and

• 3. providing an outline of each chapter in the book.

Migration has been a mainstay in African literature, a heterogenous body of literature representing a vast array of subject matters. Modern African literature is inaugurated with Chinua Achebe's 1958 consciousness-raising Things Fall Apart, though classic novels such as Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts precede Achebe's classic (Irele 2). Since its modern configuration, African literature has consistently taken up the issue of migration.

Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air

In a 2018 speech at the University of Central Florida, Dinaw Mengestu states it was the “absence of stories” and “absence of the lives of family members” that motivated him to write The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (Cole “An Interview”). In a separate interview at the same venue, Mengestu says his debut novel is a composite of both fact and fiction where he took factual details from his family and used them as the basis to craft his fiction (Cole “An Interview”). In response to a question concerning what his “novel has to say to all Americans, regardless of ethnic and racial background, about national identity,” Dinaw responded, “I don't know if novels are supposed to say anything. I think they exist to complicate and expand upon our understanding of the world and it is up to the reader to create their personal meaning out of the narrative” (Cole “An Interview”). Mengestu is surely being modest in his assessment that novels have the ability “to complicate and expand” the readers’ engagement with the world. Mengestu delivers a hermeneutic at the intersection of the reader, world, and text and routes it through the epistemological categories of understanding and personal meaning. Readers expand their understanding of the world with the aid of the novel.

Like most projects people have invested considerable time and energy into, this project began simply out of an appreciation for African literature. I spent many years reading and thinking deeply about African literature. At first, I read through the classics and earlier generations of African literature by engaging the work of Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Mongo Beti, Camara Laye, and Ama Ata Aidoo, to name just a few of the authors I drew inspiration from. From there, I began to read more deeply in contemporary African literature. Along the way, I engaged with major contemporary African authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Teju Cole, Uzodinma Iweala, Chris Abani, Fatou Diome, Taiye Selasi, Yaa Gyasi, and others. I was immediately drawn into their powerful stories. It became evident through a sustained engagement with this literature that the theme of migration, and its attendant themes of race and racism shifting identities, and the like, mirrored a lot of the African American literature reflecting the Great Migration. Works like Paul Dunbar's Sport of the Gods, Toni Morrison's Jazz, Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices, and William Attaway's Blood on the Forge were constantly in my thoughts as I engaged this new generation of African literature in relation to their African American literary ancestors. Like the African American migration novel, this new generation of African writers grappled with similar themes, albeit in a fashion often charting international migratory patterns. For example, many African American writers wrote about heading north to escape racial and political violence or to find better job opportunities. These themes are reflected in the African migration novel and solidified my desire to undergo an intense study of this body of literature.

My friend Cajetan Iheka and I often communicated about what new African literature we were reading and what aspects of the texts we drew inspiration from; we shared and collectively constructed syllabi and taught classes on Black migration narratives that compared African American, African, and Caribbean migration narratives. We tossed around the idea of producing an edited collection on these works. We left the themes and author selection quite open, not wanting to restrict contributors to a certain time frame or to a particular thematic concern. The result was a collection entitled African Migration Narratives: Politics, Race, and Space.

The 2019 Netflix drama Joy tells the story of Joy and Precious, two African women from Nigeria who live in Austria working as street prostitutes. The title character, Joy, is a seasoned sex worker who is close to paying off her sixty-thousand-euro debt to Madam, herself a former prostitute, who helped Joy and Precious settle in Austria.1 Precious has only recently arrived and is just beginning sex work. The film opens with an unidentified young woman in the house of a juju practitioner in Nigeria. The woman wants to go to Europe, and the juju practitioner is performing what viewers learn is a common ritual for women who are being funneled into the sex trade industry. The ritual is said to protect them on their journey to Spain, Germany, or whatever country they are traveling to. Viewers soon learn that it is a ritual designed to ensure the obedience of young women who wish to go to Europe and work in the sex trade out of economic desperation. During the ritual a shrine is constructed, and the women are told that if they fail to deliver money as instructed, then the powerful shrine will be used to inflict harm on them from afar. Throughout the ritual the unidentified young lady is forced to repeat “If I call the police on my master, this shrine shall kill me.” The film subsequently shifts to the title of the film, then to the streets of Austria where viewers are introduced to both Joy and Precious (1:08–6:09).

The rest of the film delivers a profound insight into the lives of African women in the diaspora who find themselves caught up in the sex trade. The movie ends with Joy paying off her debt to Madam, only to be arrested by immigration—presumably based on a tip from Madam—and sent back to Nigeria where we see Joy plotting to return to Europe. What the film dramatizes is ripped straight from reality. According to Princess Inyang Okokan, a former victim of sex trafficking in Turin and other places in Italy who now helps African women leave the sex trade, the rituals are often done by practitioners of juju who prey on young, impoverished, rural women seeking a better life abroad (“Sex Trafficking”).

The Book of Bones and Gilbert Gatore's The Past Ahead

It has been over twenty-five years since the Rwandan genocide. The genocide was largely ignored both inside and outside of the African continent. Nelson Mandela, who was elected president of South Africa in 1994, brought attention to the crisis. Outside the continent, attention to the crisis was more pronounced; yet action to stop it was all but nonexistent. In February of 1994, Amnesty International expressed concerns about arms being transferred to Rwanda and ending up in the hands of militia groups (“Rwanda: Arming the Perpetrators of the Genocide” 8). The profound failure of the Western world to try to put an end to a genocide that could have easily been stopped with a limited number of forces has largely been forgotten. Bill Clinton, speaking of his failure to respond to the genocide, stated that it is one of the biggest regrets of his presidency. He said in a CNBC interview in 2013 that “if we’d gone in sooner, I believe we could have saved at least a third of the lives that were lost” (Flanigan). Unclassified documents now reveal the Clinton administration was aware of a “final solution” against the Tutsis prior to the start of the pogrom, which cast doubt on his claim that only a third of the lives would have been saved (Bryer & Clinton). Perhaps Clinton failed to act due to having previously faced scrutiny for the Black Hawk Down blunder in Somalia that left nineteen American troops dead, dragged through the streets of Mogadishu: the spectacle of which was aired repeatedly on the news. The event still weighed heavily on an American populace who were hesitant to throw their support behind a military engagement in Africa, depleting national treasure, and risking the lives of American soldiers.

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits

Wilfried N’Sondè's The Heart of the Leopard Children and The Silence of the Spirits allow our investigation of the migratory imagination to explore two novels centered on the postmigratory condition in the suburbs and projects of Paris to showcase the expansive imaginary capacity of the African migration novel. The migratory route carved out by the protagonists from the Republic of Congo to Paris is often overlooked if only because of its underrepresentation. The Republic of Congo (colloquially known as Brazzaville) is often overshadowed in historical discourses and our collective imaginary by the Democratic Republic of Congo, no doubt because of the latter's tumultuous colonial and postcolonial history that has garnered significantly more scholarly attention. Historians have been busy producing massive and popular tomes such as King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism by Adam Hochschild, Congo: The Epic History of People by David Van Reybrouck, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa by Jason Stearns, to name just a few of the monumental historical studies that have recently emerged.

On the literary front, however, the creative works emerging from the Republic of Congo have been gaining increased attention due in no small part to Indiana University Press's commitment to translating and publishing Francophone African literature by authors from the Republic of Congo in its Global African Voices series. Wilfried N’Sondé is one author the series is committed to translating and publishing. N’Sondé is often classified as an “Afropean” author because he is firmly integrated in and, more importantly, contributes to European culture (Thomas “The Heart of the Leopard Children” xi). He hails from Brazzaville, was raised in Paris, and is a practicing musician living in Berlin. His literature carries the traits of an Afropean sensibility and aesthetic.