1 Introduction
Refugees are defined in terms of traumatic severance from their homes, communities and home countries. In their narrative accounts of flight or expulsion, danger, displacement and insecurity, “precariousness becomes an existential determination” (1), as Cecile Sandten expresses it in her analysis of how poverty and precariousness are represented in contemporary refugee narratives. Among the many refugee narratives that have appeared in the last few years, two in particular from South Africa, Aher Arop Bol’s The Lost Boy (2009) and Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (2014), deserve closer consideration for the different ways in which their refugee subjects – the former from southern Sudan, the latter from Somalia – are presented. The Lost Boy is in some ways comparable to Gulwali Passarlay’s memoir The Lightless Sky: My Journey to Safety as a Child Refugee (2015), which Sandten discusses in her article, since it is both “a testimonial act” and a reflection – although modest – “on the writing process of the refugee narrative itself” (6). From the position and perspective of a young adult, Bol, like Passarlay, “recollects his traumatic past and the difficulties he experienced as a child refugee, seeking to turn his memories of flight from an oral into a written account in order to be able to make sense of his life, losses, and traumatic experiences” (Sandten 6). A Man of Good Hope, on the other hand, is a much more complex and self-reflexively mediated account of the life of its refugee subject in a text that finally belongs as much to its author as to its subject – and therefore deserves more extensive analysis. What both The Lost Boy and A Man of Good Hope have in common, however, is their foregrounding of the refugee’s experience of being unhomed and subsequent attempts to pursue the idea of home and refigure the self as a member of a community. I propose in this essay to examine in what sense refugee subjects might be said to seek for a home in the narratives of their unhoming, and also in what sense they might be said to be doubly unhomed: not only from their place of birth and subsequent places of refuge, but in the end also from their
2 Home and Unhoming
In The Postnational Self, Ulf Hedetoft and Mette Hjort speak of “a foundational, existential, ‘thick’ notion” (vii) of home that is interdependent with belonging: “Our home is where we belong, territorially, existentially, and culturally, where our own community is, where our family and loved ones reside, where we can identify our roots, and where we return to when we are elsewhere in the world” (vii). Out of this notion of home come our feelings of ‘homeness’ and homesickness, our sense of identity, and national belonging. Along similar lines, Avtar Brah describes home as the site of our everyday lived experience: it “connotes our networks of family, kind, friends, colleagues and various other ‘significant others’. It signifies the social and psychic geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighbourhood or home town” (4). In his book Home: How Habitat Made Us Human (2015), John S. Allen provides a neuroanthropological argument for such existential notions of home. He maintains that “[t]he human need to feel at home has its roots in our evolutionary biology and is reinforced today by our cognitive psychology” (9). Home is the “single primary fix-point” (Allen 228) in our habitat, a central location where we recover physically and mentally from the labours and challenges of the outside world. Home, in this sense, may be regarded as our primary zone of refuge: a protected or controlled environment where we experience empathy through “emotionally vested, mutually beneficial relationships” (48) with the members of a shared household whose lives are synchronised with our own. Home is the basic unit of human societies, and “the building block for human cultures” (14). You can acquire a house, Allen says, but a home is something you have to build yourself, “according to the blueprints drawn from your evolutionary history, cultural traditions, and personal experiences” (180). And, importantly, home is therefore also the place around which our ‘autobiographical self’ pieces together the events of our life into an ongoing narrative (246).
Allen makes a number of important observations about absence from and loss of home. The experience of homesickness is akin to grief (5); but, fortunately, we have the capacity to transfer the sense of home to different locations and situations throughout our lives and to reestablish our feeling of being at home in a new environment (53). To be completely homeless, however, is from a cognitive point of view “to be in an emotionally vulnerable and distressed state” (185). Homelessness is “to be on the margins of society” (181), a source of
It goes without saying that the refugee experience dispels any such ‘foundational’ or ‘existential’ notions of belonging harmoniously to a home, and thereby to a community and home country; such notions would be what Hedetoft and Hjort call “organicist”, or “pre-political” (xii). In The Politics of Home Rosemary Marangoly George also qualifies any essentialist or ‘thick’ notion of home by emphasizing its fundamental ambiguity; she argues that home is also a way of establishing difference because it is premised on select inclusions and exclusions: it is always doubly coded in terms of those who belong there and those who do not. The same ambiguity of belonging and non-belonging applies also to community, which is conventionally conceived of as home writ large, as well as to home country, which, in turn, is thought of as community writ still larger.
Non-belonging is not the same as unbelonging, however: unbelonging denotes a process of alienation or detachment from feeling at home. The sense of unbelonging – expulsion from a secure sense of home – can be registered in varying degrees, from just an awareness (to use Freud’s terms) of what was once heimisch, or familiar, becoming unheimlich, or uncanny, to the condition that Biddy Martin and Chandra Talpade Mohanty describe in their essay “Feminist Politics” as “not being home”: in contrast to living within the safety of familiar and protected boundaries, “not being home” is “a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and resistance, the repression of differences even within oneself” (197). A still further stage of unbelonging is knowing what it means to be “unhomed” and to experience “unhomeliness”, which, as Homi K. Bhabha explains in The Location of Culture, is an “estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world” (13). To be unhomed, he says, is the displacement when you find yourself suddenly “taking the measure of your dwelling” in a state of profound unease (13). In this state of disorientation you are aware that the “recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions”, and “the borders between home and the world become confused” (13). For the refugee, the rupture is traumatic, and its consequences are lasting.
3 Aher Arop Bol, The Lost Boy (2009) – A Refugee Memoir
Aher Arop Bol was born in a Dinka village in southern Sudan at the time of the outbreak of the Second Civil War in 1983 between the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (spla) in the south and the Islamic government in the north – a 22-year-long war in which two-and-a-half million lives were lost, roughly four
The commodification of stories of ethnic suffering obscures the complex politics of international events, stylizes the story to suit an educated international audience familiar with narratives of individual triumph over adversity, evokes emotive responses trained on the feel-good qualities of successful resolution, and often universalizes the story of suffering so as to erase incommensurable differences and the horror of violence. (154)
Most recently, Loren B. Landau has called for a recalibration of “how stories are told about migrants – their rights, suffering and their relationship to the citizens around them”.2 There is a recognisable tendency among migrants, he
More pertinently, in his comprehensive study of writers’ memoirs and their various sub-genres at the turn of the twenty-first century, Through the Looking Glass (2017), Robert Kusek considers the proliferation of memoirs in the present-day “golden age of life writing” (24) as representing a “human turn” in contemporary culture. In response to the questions about whether memoir is a sub-genre of autobiography or biography, whether its subject is the self or the other, and whether it belongs to the realm of non-fiction or fiction (38), he postulates that “memoirs can fulfil the same epistemological, ethical and aesthetic functions that are typically ascribed to works of literature; [and] that memoirs are literature per se” (28). Eschewing the fact vs. fiction binary, Kusek argues that memoirs, more than any other kind of life writing, occupy “a threshold zone, in which historical/factual accuracy co-exists with fiction without qualitatively prioritising one over the other” (63). Furthermore, “since memoirs cannot be reduced to a single narratological formula concerning their narrative voices (in terms of person, level, and time)” (67), Kusek borrows from Ryszard
Aher’s narrative begins in 1987 with his arrival, aged three or four, on the shoulders of his uncle at the Panyido refugee camp on the banks of the Tana River in Ethiopia. Too young to have formed any clear sense of the home from which they had been forced to flee, or why, he registers his unhoming mainly as the absence of his mother and father. Instead of food and shelter, the stream of refugees coming from the bush and crossing the river find in Panyido “nothing but more hungry faces and people crying for help” (Bol 15). The camp is a place of heat, starvation and disease, with the stench of rotting corpses everywhere.
When Ethiopian relief workers eventually arrive, a community of sorts begins to be established: food is distributed, clinics are started, and teams of soldiers collect and bury the rows of abandoned bodies. The 3000 lost boys and 500 girls are separated, and when his uncle disappears to join the spla, Aher is put together with a group of boys between the ages of three and ten in a compound for ‘minors’. They are subdivided into groups of 500 and, under the leadership of older, stronger boys, formed into teams to distribute what little food there is, fetch water, stake out latrines, and fell trees and cut grass with which to build shelters. Later, when they receive food, blankets, clothing and books from the United States Agency for International Development (usaid) and other donors, the children help to build more shelters and classrooms, and begin their first-grade education. Military discipline is maintained, although the boys illicitly barter their aid goods at the nearby Ethiopian market. In 1990, at the age of about seven, Aher, who is from a Dinka animist background, is baptised as a Christian.
Like Panyido, where Aher lives for three years, each of the subsequent places of refuge in his story illustrates George’s argument that home, community and home country are all paradoxically places of inclusion as well as exclusion (9); all are zones of security as well as constraint, places to escape to and also to escape from. When President Mengistu is ousted in 1991 and
At the beginning of 1998, aged fourteen and determined to complete his high school education, Aher travels from Nairobi, via Tanzania, Malawi and Mozambique, to Zimbabwe – bribing police, being robbed by traffickers, and assisted by immigration officials, bus drivers and fellow passengers. Harare proves to be yet another zone of conflict. In the four years he spends there completing his secondary education at a mission boarding school, he becomes part of the community of students and staff at the school as well as of his ever-hospitable Sudanese ‘brothers’. However, it is the self-serving spla representative who is hostile and tries to block the Sudanese boys’ applications for refugee status so as to force them back to fight in the warzone from which they have fled.
In 2002 Aher and a friend finally make it into South Africa by negotiating with human smugglers, crossing the Limpopo River, crawling under the border fence, and being accepted as legitimate asylum seekers at the Beit Bridge border post. With the help of Lawyers for Human Rights and the Jesuit Refugee Services they obtain temporary residence permits from the Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria. Although a number of the lost Sudanese boys have re-grouped in Pretoria, Aher cannot dispel his feeling of despondency.
To help Aher recover structure and meaning in his life, a white Afrikaner woman teacher at the Misericordia International Centre for refugees in
4 Jonny Steinberg, A Man of Good Hope (2014) – A Mediated Narrative
In contrast to Aher’s account of his unhoming and ambivalent homecoming, the story of the Somali refugee, Asad Abdullahi, in Jonny Steinberg’s A Man of Good Hope (2014), is a much more complex narrative construct about different zones of refuge. A Man of Good Hope is a collaborative text, a generic mélange co-constructed by Asad and Steinberg. It is a biographical account of Asad’s life from when, in 1991, at the age of eight, he fled, together with other Daarood people, from his home in Mogadishu to escape the butchery of the Hawiye militiamen who killed his mother. It incorporates his memories of the main stages in his subsequent life of flight, abandonment and struggle in refugee
In his review of the book, Ian Birrell describes Asad’s story as not just another “misery memoir” but as “an epic African saga”. Steinberg’s self-reflexive mediation of Asad’s story and realistic representation of migrant communities place it at a far remove from the kind of “victim journalism” that Landau speaks of: “Many of the accounts [of migrants] offered by South African civil society and scholars rapidly descend into a parade of miseries and indignities. As if the more people suffer, the more deserving they are of not only sympathy, but a place in a hosting country”. The relationship between Steinberg and his refugee subject is a symbiotic one: Asad is the oral source of the narrative whereas Steinberg is the writer who controls and structures the material.6 Moreover, in contracting with Asad to write a book about his life, Steinberg is conscious of the ethics of “[t]rading money for access to a poor person’s private world” (A Man xiii),7 and of the exercise of power that writing a book involves.
The zone of narration in which Asad’s story takes shape is metonymic of his life as a refugee: between October 2010 and September 2011 they sit in the driver and passenger seats of Steinberg’s car, a notebook passing between
The trajectory of Asad’s refugee story begins with his uncle leading a party of fleeing Daarood Abdullahis out of Mogadishu to the nearby town of Afgooye, from where they are loaded onto ‘special trucks’ run by AliYusuf clansmen and travel towards the Kenyan border. At Qoryooley they come under mortar attack and Asad is separated from his family. Heading farther away from what used to be his home in a truckful of strangers marks the moment in his life, Steinberg says, that he “would never again be firmly moored to any particular adult, to any family. He would become a child whose connections to others would dissolve and re-form and disappear again” (5) – like Aher in The Lost Boy. At Afmadow, the last Somali city before the Kenyan border, Asad is handed over into the care of a female relative, Yindy, whose shack and yard become his shelter against the violence outside as refugees start shooting each other amidst rumours of imminent attack by the Hawiye. When the fighting comes closer to the city, Asad and Yindy, who has been badly injured, leave for Dhoobley where fellow refugees build a makeshift shelter for them and Asad, still a child, looks after her and forages across the Kenyan border for food.
When they are overtaken here, too, by the fighting, Yindy and Asad are transported to the border town of Liboi in north-east Kenya where they are absorbed into the refugee camp, one of four collectively known as the Dadaab
All the subsequent places Asad takes refuge in are Somali enclaves in a foreign country – all places of shelter as well as conflict. These locations may also be regarded in terms of what Jopi Nyman calls “alternative spaces” that “are transnational and can be found in spaces between the nations and also in urban spaces amidst migrant communities”, and that show “the extent to which national borders are artificial and porous” (46). Eastleigh is a run-down Nairobi neighbourhood full of Daarood Somalis who have escaped the war and live in overcrowded lodges, each one occupied by a different clan, and all living “somewhere in a zone between illegality and unofficial acceptance” (Steinberg, A Man 46). When tensions between Asad and his adoptive family become too great, he is put into the Hotel Taleh where he lives for two years, spending his days on the streets and nights in the rooms of different families, free but also out of control. When he is eleven or twelve, he is sent by the AliYusuf elders to Ethiopia to wait for his resettlement documents to America. He spends a year in Dire Dawa with Yindy’s hostile family in the Hafad neighbourhood, the Somali part of the town where the streets “smelled and sounded like home, his mother tongue bouncing from one mouth to the next, the world a hive of shouting and laughing” (59). From there he is taken to Wardheer, deep in the desert and full of nomadic people, where everybody is Ogadeni: “the town was in Ethiopia, but it was really Somali. Even the currency people used was Somali in the centre of town, Ethiopian on the outskirts” (64). Abandoned there by Yindy’s family, Asad, aged twelve or thirteen, survives by lugging water barrels for a cafeteria, and then by working as a “kirishbooy”9 for a truck driver, travelling across the Ogaden for the next year and a half, until he is fifteen or sixteen. Living on an Ogadeni truck, moving people and things, gives him a sense of coherence in his life: “To live one’s life on an Ogadeni truck was to be at the centre of the universe” (85).
The (auto)biographical relationship between writer and model, Philippe Lejeune first pointed out, is one of reciprocal possession: “the writer allows himself to be possessed by the model, but at the same time he possesses the model himself in traditional narrative and rhetorical forms” (191). In his narrative Steinberg constantly foregrounds the dialogue between his own role as possessed and possessive author who selects, eliminates, condenses, develops and orders Asad’s memories, which have gaps and suppressions, as well as their own obsessions.10 On the one hand Steinberg carefully prompts Asad and sometimes feeds him the words for describing his feelings, but on the other hand he also chokes back more probing questions – for example, about the young Asad’s reaction to the killing of his mother – and is content to accept what he is prepared to tell.11 Steinberg notes that Asad has different ways of speaking about his mother and Yindy; when recalling a particular night in Liboi when intruders wanted to rape the crippled Yindy, Steinberg says: “it seems from his rapid and rehearsed diction that the memory of that night is gone, that what he really keeps of that moment are the words with which he tells the tale” (35). When Steinberg asks him about the army and rebel roadblocks in Ethiopia, Asad’s “account is quick and stylised, like a story written on a surface of slick, shiny steel. People get taken away, never to be seen again, and then the tale slides on, as if it cannot stop for anything, no matter how alarming or dramatic. I try to think of ways to slow it down” (89). Asad may be reticent when asked about the sexual behaviour of Somali youths, but he is surprisingly forthcoming about the difficulty of his and Foosiya’s consummation of their
It is Steinberg who contributes an account of the allegiances and lineages in Somali society, which stretch back dozens of generations to the Somalis’ six great clan families. He explains the complexities of modern Somali society, as well as the “unwritten rules of conduct” that come from “deep within the lives of the refugees” (23). He compares Asad’s childhood recollections of life in the Liboi refugee camp with the reports of ngos and international newspapers. In 2012 he travels to East Africa, walking in Asad’s footsteps through the Hafad neighbourhood in Dire Dawa, and speaking to Ethiopians about Bole Mikhael in Addis Ababa. He provides an account of the incorporation of the Somali Ogaden into Ethiopia and of Somali clans into northern Kenya when the independent state of Somalia was formed in 1960, and of the 1977 war between Ethiopia and Somalia. He includes the massacre in Wardheer of prominent Somalis by the Ethiopian army as background to Asad’s innocent account of his childhood there two years later, and wonders about “the countless events that do not come into a person’s s head when he is telling his life story to a chronicler. Is it simply a question of chance? […] or do [they] simply lie untouched, out of reach, on the deep ocean bed of his inner world?” (72). Importantly, Steinberg explains how the AliYusuf clan of Qorahay in the Ogaden “understand themselves to be at the centre of the great drama of Somalia’s thwarted nationalism, a part of the limb severed from the motherland” (75), and that in the bloody aftermath of the Somali defeat in 1978 an estimated 800 000 people fled the Ogaden for Somalia – among them Asad’s parents. Asad learns from Steinberg his true history: that he was not from an old Mogadishu family, but that his parents were themselves refugees from the Ogaden, and that the story of his “unraveling” goes back much further than his mother’s death and his own flight – “a notion he had not dreamed of” (77). Asad responds to the “slippery, difficult gift” (91) of this knowledge about his family history with the words: “For my family to have been on the run for such a long time is a very sad thing” (94).
Asad’s journey from Addis Ababa, via Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe, to South Africa at the beginning of 2004 is another story – like Aher’s in The Lost Boy – of smugglers, fake travel documents, arrests, networks of traffickers, corrupt border officials and police, and of crawling through border fences. At an early stage of the journey, when things begin to go badly, Steinberg says, “the stability of the story Asad is telling me begins to give way. […] his memories of the next few days come in the form of flashes and scenes and spectacles, the connections between them not entirely clear”; his “memory
5 Living between Zones
Asad’s life in South Africa brings his refugee experience of negotiating his way across national and cultural borders into sharp focus, as he tries to make a home in various Somali enclaves and make a living by running a spaza, or general trading store, in rural Kirkwood and Sterkstroom in the Eastern Cape, and later in Mabopane outside Pretoria. The store is typically a shack on the edge of a black township, the yard surrounded by a high wooden wall, and the storefront itself covered in wire mesh and bars. Money and merchandise are exchanged through a little half-moon gap at the level of the countertop. In the diasporan Somali community Asad feels himself to be “both in, and yet not in, South Africa” (Steinberg, A Man 182). This ambivalent sense of belonging is reinforced in Kirkwood where, sharing a small cage of a room at the back of the shop with the shopkeeper, Asad encounters his fellow Somali’s deference towards his toyingly hostile black customers. When Asad’s uncle is shot and killed in a robbery in his store in Motherwell outside Port Elizabeth, he is left “feeling that the bottom of his world has fallen away” (198), and leaves the Port Elizabeth area together with the other AliYusuf people.
In 2004, aged about twenty, Asad and an Abdullahi cousin, Kaafi, open a store in the small black township in Sterkstroom, near Queenstown, where they are soon joined by Kaafi’s wife and child, and later by Foosiya. Asad has no recollection of their reunion at the Queenstown bus station, so that Steinberg can only try to imagine it, wishing that he could have witnessed with his own eyes this one event in Asad’s life. Asad finds himself ambivalently positioned between the supportive network of Somali shopkeepers and the corrupt
The motif of living between conflicting zones structures Steinberg’s account of Asad’s life in South Africa. After an abortive attempt to get to the United States via Brazil on a fake South African passport, Asad comes to understand that “Somalis in South Africa lived in two zones” (242): each of the country’s urban centres has a Somali space, a pocket of safety, such as Mayfair in Johannesburg and Marabastad in Pretoria; but to earn a living Somalis need to venture outside their Somali bubble into the dangerous black townships and shacklands. He goes into business with an AliYusuf man who owns a store in the township of Mabopane, but lives in a lodge in Marabastad, in “a pure Somali world” (242). When Asad and his shopkeeper are robbed, badly assaulted and their shop looted, with the cooperation of favourite customers, Asad develops an antipathy towards black people who, he feels, have been reduced by past oppression to “submissive, treacherous slave-beings, beings without self-worth, without honour” (252) and unable to handle the freedom they have attained.
Cape Town, to which Asad relocates, is – like all South African towns – divided into an outer and inner world: “the outer settlements were black townships, the inner towns white neighbourhoods” (177). Mitchell’s Plain Town Centre is “thick with Somalis” (255). Asad and yet another AliYusuf man, Hassan, set up a spaza shop in the township of Khayelitsha, where they live with the “crazy normality” (259) of customers to whom they sell bread and cigarettes every day threatening to kill the foreign “makwerekwere” (258),13 and young hoodlums shooting at them. Khayelitsha becomes yet another place to
Thirty-four Somali families, including Asad and Sadicya, the outcast Galgale woman whom he marries, are relocated from the Soetwater resettlement camp to Blikkiesdorp, where Asad opens another store. Again, the fearful Somalis are intimidated by the township people, and assaulted, robbed and killed by gangsters, often in collaboration with the local street committees and the police. Because Asad will not talk about this period of his life when he becomes a spokesperson for the Somali refugees, Steinberg is obliged to interview the government officials who encountered him during negotiations.
6 Refiguring the Refugee
The trajectory of Asad’s life as a refugee is marked by the disappearance from his life for years on end, and then the sudden reappearance, of his Abdullahi and AliYusuf lineage that shapes his fate. He identifies himself with the persona of the child refugee, which is his equivalent of Aher’s ‘Lost Boy’. As an orphan boy in the Hotel Taleh in Eastleigh in Nairobi, Asad “belonged to everybody […] belonged to nobody” (Steinberg, A Man 47). In his mind, waiting to be claimed by his father, he perceived himself as “living in an unfortunate interval from which he would soon be delivered” (50). In Dire Dawa in Ethiopia, he thought of his life as being “in a holding pattern” and as “merely an unexpected delay in his journey between Islii and America” (61). When Asad tells him about his decision to go to South Africa, Steinberg realises that “[h]e
In South Africa the division between the different zones in which he lives becomes internalised. While waiting for Foosiya to join him in Kirkwood, he perceives himself as two Asads: “The first was a young man saving a lot of money, a man waiting for his wife to come. […] The second Asad was a boy locked in a bolted room. He was trapped there, day in and day out, a lone Somali in a very strange land” (194). His self-detachment and -objectification grow, and when his uncle is killed in Motherwell, Asad sees himself “from a great height, a shivering wreck of a Somali man in a sea of hostile people” (200). Later, when he finds himself in yet another resettlement camp at Soetwater, he feels himself “splitting in two […] in a makeshift camp of the homeless, forging alliances and selling airtime – he was falling backwards into his own past” (273). The prospect of returning to Khayelitsha after the xenophobic attacks also steers him back into his childhood; “Asad the man and Asad the boy” mingle and blur, and he knows that the violence of Khayelitsha has mixed in him, in Steinberg’s formulation, “a strange cocktail of adult and child” (274). On agreeing to move into Blikkiesdorp while awaiting resettlement, he feels that “[w]hatever choices he made, it seemed, his life went around in a circle” (292). When he is eventually interviewed by the Americans with a view to resettlement, he tells “a carefully crafted story” that omits his energy, ingenuity and enterprise, but describes “faithfully and in great detail the incidents of violence to which he had been subject since coming to South Africa […] it was as if he had recorded each act of violence and was replaying the very worst of his life in slow motion” (300). The strategic image of himself that he offers to the Americans is both the truth and a lie: the persona of the refugee is all that remains of Asad Hirsi Abdullahi as in his account he “whittled away at the flesh of his being, leaving only a stick figure, a hapless refugee” (300).
[a] refugee has lost control. Great historical forces have upended him and he no longer has a place in the world. He has become an in-between sort of being, suspended between a past in which he belonged somewhere and a future in which he might belong somewhere once more. But for now he is in abeyance; he is swept this way and that, like flotsam in a tide. (312)
At the back of our thoughts and our actions, I think, stands an image of a completed life, a sense of who we will have been at the moment of our deaths. For Asad, to have lived a fully human life is to have altered radically the course of his family’s history, so that his children and their children and their children in turn live lives nobody in Somalia at the time of his own birth could have imagined. If this is indeed Asad’s idea of a worthwhile life then it must, by definition, entail plunging into the unknown. For there is no bridge from the world of his parents to the one he imagines for his children. Getting there requires jumping over a void in the hope that he will land on his feet on the other side. (313)
Steinberg acknowledges that he has followed Asad to America in order to fiddle and probe some more – however, the book was never Asad’s; he cooperated in its construction for financial reward. Asad abandons the book shortly after beginning to read it, and is unable to pick it up again. The zone of refuge offered by its narrative is no safe haven. The book upsets him, and this turns to anger. What has come out of Steinberg’s relentless digging into his life, he says, is an overwhelming sense of loss: “Everywhere it is loss, loss, loss” (326). Although Steinberg has spent the last couple of years memorialising Asad’s life, there is, he concludes, “no intrinsic value in remembering” (326). Asad “cannot
7 Conclusion
By pursuing the motifs of unhoming, re-homing and contingent homecoming in Bol’s refugee memoir and Steinberg’s book about textualising the life of a refugee, this essay has tried to suggest how the respective works might be seen metaphorically to offer their subjects narrative zones of refuge from their precarious lives. In the case of Bol, however, his ambivalent homecoming to what has only ever been a void in his existence concludes his memoir on a provisional note. In his autobiographical act of self-discovery and self-creation, the subject Aher Arop Bol has to be sought somewhere in the precarious overlap between his traumatic experiences as a child refugee and the persona of the Lost Boy through which he re-imagines them. Steinberg’s more complex, meta-discursive work provides an even less secure narrative refuge for its subject. For Asad to have identified himself with the figure of the refugee and yet not wanting to recognise himself in Steinberg’s text constitutes yet a further kind of unhoming. And for Steinberg to conclude that he has miscast his daring subject as an abject refugee is to unsettle himself as well as Asad from the security of their joint narrative. The truth of Asad Abdullahi’s story is finally to be sought somewhere on the threshold between the zones in which it has been lived as well as textually crafted. The refugee narrative, it appears, provides its subject with, at best, a precarious zone of refuge.
The Lost Boy can be regarded as either an autobiography or a refugee memoir. Both terms will be used here depending on the particular generic narrative feature being discussed.
The article was republished in the South African newspaper The Mercury under the heading “Xenophobia: It’s Time to Upend the Narratives about Migrants”, 10 Sept. 2018, p. 10. Landau is Research Chair on Mobility and the Politics of Diversity at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.
The term is developed by Ryszard Nycz in “Traces of ‘I’: Concepts of Subjectivity in Polish Literature of the Last Century”, pp. 386–87.
It is in this sense that Sturrock views autobiography as a forensic genre: “an expedient by which the writer can reply to the injuries that have been done to him” (49).
The Economist reviewer says that Steinberg “looks at broad social and political themes through the eyes of a single protagonist” (“Finding His Feet”).
Michela Wrong refers to the “form of reverse ventriloquism” that Steinberg has perfected over the years, “in which he becomes the mouthpiece for the Africans whose lives intrigue him. This process must require relentless badgering, as interview is piled on interview, memory upon memory”.
In pointing to the financial arrangement between them, Colette Sheridan says that Steinberg “draws up this deal, all too aware of the unequal relationship that can arise between an author and his subject”.
Leon de Kock describes Steinberg as “an aggregator of stories, high and low, historical, mythical, apocryphal, oral, you name it. Stories and their tellers become secondary characters in his play of tales and their telling, which he brings into view with forensically analytical precision”. Other such works by Steinberg include Midlands: A Very South African Murder (2002), The Number: One Man’s Search for Identity in the Cape Underworld and Prison Gangs (2004), Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through Africa’s aids Epidemic (2008), Thin Blue: The Unwritten Rules of Policing South Africa (2009), and Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City (2011).
A “kirishbooy”, Asad explains, “is in charge of the cargo, flat tyres, the engine: everything to do with the truck except driving it” (82).
Richard Dowden refers to “Steinberg’s diligence in checking and rechecking the narrative and conclusions to make this an authentic co-authorship”.
Carl Rollyson says: “Only through Steinberg’s adroit persistence – he knows when to probe and pry and when to retreat when Asad seems nettled by constant questioning – can the account of Asad’s remarkable, almost miraculous life journey emerge”.
Leon de Kock provides an excellent and detailed analysis of the narrative relationship between Steinberg and his interlocutor: “Steinberg works from the inside out. He places himself at the living, palpitating, always fragile heart of a story-in-the-making as it is being experienced, rendering any sense of fixed or settled trajectory questionable, and he narrates in the present tense, not only remaining in touch with his interlocutor throughout the telling of the tale (and showing him drafts, too, as he writes) but also combing and combining diverse realms of knowledge, testing them against each other, and bringing them to his interlocutor for comment. In a sense, Steinberg the scholar […] defers to the subject of his story. Or, if not ‘defers,’ then certainly ‘negotiates,’ observing and reporting back to the reader on the effect that his own enlargement of the more encompassing story-context has on the interlocutor’s understanding of his own life”.
Kwerekwere (pl. amakwerekwere) is an onomatopoeic (imitative of an incomprehensible sound), derogatory term used by black South Africans in many parts of the country to refer to foreigners, especially African immigrants, and also to people of particular ethnicities from South Africa. Here, where the Xhosa word has been borrowed in a colloquial English-language context, the noun stem -makwerekwere has been retained and the initial vowel a- dropped.