Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- Leaving Home/ Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature
- ARTICLES
- Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- ‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
- The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’: Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah's Links & Crossbones
- Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye's The Other Crucifix
- No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- ‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah & Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- The Problem of Return in the Local Gambian Bildungsroman
- Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging 185 in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi
- ‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu
- FEATURED ARTICLES
- LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye's The Other Crucifix
from EDITORIAL ARTICLE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Notes on Contributors
- EDITORIAL ARTICLE
- Leaving Home/ Returning Home: Migration & Contemporary African Literature
- ARTICLES
- Alienation & Disorientation in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- Wait No Longer?: The Temporality of Return in Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments
- ‘Our Relationship to Spirits’: History & Return in Syl Cheney-Coker's The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
- The ‘Rubble’ & the ‘Secret Sorrows’: Returning to Somalia in Nuruddin Farah's Links & Crossbones
- Migration, Cultural Memory & Identity in Benjamin Kwakye's The Other Crucifix
- No Place Like Home: Failures of Feeling & the Impossibility of Return in Dinaw Mengestu's The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
- ‘The Backward Glance’: Repetition & Return in Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- Negotiating Race, Identity & Homecoming in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah & Pede Hollist's So the Path Does Not Die
- The Problem of Return in the Local Gambian Bildungsroman
- Returns ‘Home’: Constructing Belonging 185 in Black British Literature – Evans, Evaristo & Oyeyemi
- ‘Zimbabweanness Today’: An Interview with Tendai Huchu
- FEATURED ARTICLES
- LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Summary
In The Other Crucifix, Benjamin Kwakye explores the relationship between cultural memory and belongingness by focusing on the tensions that shape African identity in America. At the centre of the novel is a young Ghanaian man from a poor family who migrates to America for education and economic amelioration. His migration, although voluntary, places the protagonist-narrator, Jojo Badu, in a ‘middle passage’, a life-negating environment in which his cultural rootedness is ruptured, and which he must survive by holding on to memories that will eventually replace his original home. In this sense, ‘home’ and identity are defined by cultural memory, which, in the narrative, takes the form of remnant consciousness: ‘the ontological, physical, and spiritual manifestations of reclaiming an African cultural heritage’ (McKoy ‘This Unity of Spilt Blood’: 195). Remnant consciousness embodies the migratory subject's hunger for a remembered home that is located in a desire for cultural wholeness. Home as it was in Ghana may not exist for Jojo in America; instead, home is replaced by cultural memory which helps to re-situate the migratory subject, but is also necessarily affected by the tensions between competing identities in the origin and the destination. For the migratory subject, remnant consciousness can provide the means to reconcile these competing and seemingly irreconcilable identities. In the case of Jojo, remnant consciousness is what he resorts to in his attempt to resolve the tension between the anxiety of losing his original identity and his desire to create a new one. Nevertheless, as Jojo begins to put down new roots and to define himself according to the truth of his marginality, America also becomes a space for his identity-in-transition, an identity that becomes a matter of choice rather than tradition.
The Other Crucifix does not tell the story of the successful New World man but focuses on the loneliness and the sense of cultural and linguistic displacement that cripple an immigrant's attempts to fulfil the American dream. Disease, breakage and chasm characterize Jojo's immigrant experience.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ALT 34 Diaspora & Returns in FictionAfrican Literature Today, pp. 82 - 102Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016