Abstract
This essay discusses the novel The Drift Latitudes (2006) by the Anglo-Sudanese author Jamal Mahjoub. By telling the stories of the German refugee Ernst Frager and his two British families, I argue that Mahjoub’s novel utilizes the tropes of transnational travel and migration to present a critique of discourses of purity and nationalism. Through its uncovering of silenced family narratives, the novel hybridizes British and European identities and underlines the need to remember the stories of ordinary people omitted from official histories. As the novel’s supposedly British families appear to possess transnational links with Sudan, Germany, and the Caribbean, the novel reconstructs European identity as transnational and in need of historical reassessment. As a further contribution to the importance of hybrid identity, the story of black cultural identity and its construction in post-Second World War Liverpool is told in tandem with the importance of black music as a means of constructing black diasporic identity.
Mapping the latitudes
The fictions of the British/Sudanese/cosmopolitan European writer Jamal Mahjoub centre upon travel, migration, and transformation. While his early novels address such questions as dislocation and exile, his recent narratives have sought to construct a historical understanding of the hybrid roots and routes of modern European identity and its many-layered history. Whereas The Carrier (1998) opens up a new perspective onto the constitution of European modernity through its Arab protagonist’s ordeals in seventeenth-century Denmark, Travelling with Djinns (2003), a cosmopolitan road novel following its protagonist’s journeying from Denmark to Spain in an old Peugeot, explores the transformation of Europe by showing the presence of global migration in allegedly homogeneous nation-states. This issue of mobility as a characteristic of postcolonial identity is also central to Mahjoub’s recent novel The Drift Latitudes (2006). Spanning various phases and places in the history of twentieth-century Europe, this narrative focuses on the mysterious German refugee Ernst Frager, a machinist, inventor, and believer in technology. It also examines the lives of his two daughters who do not know each other: while Rachel marries a Sudanese man and leaves Britain, Liverpool-born Jade, the daughter of Ernst Frager, and the West Indian Miranda, searches for a sense of identity in contemporary Britain. Through Frager’s life, or lives, in Germany and his two families in Britain, the novel weaves together human fates in various countries and evokes a variety of cultural memories and silenced pasts.
In this essay I discuss the intertwined discourses of history, travel, and home as portrayed in The Drift Latitudes. I argue that the novel problematizes simplified understandings of globalization and migrant hybridity by showing that travel and migration are not merely features of globalized late modernity but historically characterize European identities. As a sign of this, the thematics of travel and migration are supported in the novel by locating the characters in transcultural frameworks such as the emerging transatlantic culture of jazz and the everyday mobility of various ordinary border-crossers. The novel foregrounds the notion of memory and the related need to tell the stories of those whom conventional history forgets, including refugees and migrants. Through its treatment of the various (and forgotten) pasts of migrants, it shows how European identities are in constant flux and how seemingly distant people and places, such as Liverpool and Sudan, are invisibly linked through silenced family connections, creating further imagined communities. In this way the novel uncovers alternative accounts of European pasts, transforming the cultural memory of the continent.
The concerns of The Drift Latitudes appear to continue, but also transform, what several critics have seen as central issues in Mahjoub’s earlier novels, usually characterized by the cross-cultural movement of his migrant protagonists. For example, Tina Steiner’s (2009: 67) reading of the novels Wings of Dust (1994) and The Carrier emphasizes the role of translation and translators, characters who dwell in the space(s) between two cultures, as a way of producing new forms of knowledge. While such knowledge may be considered subversive by authorities, Mahjoub’s insistence on its dissemination, as seen in The Carrier in Rashid’s journeying to seventeenth-century Europe to learn more about the era’s great invention, the telescope, emphasizes transnational mobility. In other words, Mahjoub appears to believe in the power of cultural hybridity or, as Steiner puts it, in the fact that the “cross-pollination of Western and African/Islamic knowledges can be beneficial” (2009: 79). Other readings of Mahjoub’s fiction emphasize similar themes, and Theo D’haen and I, for example, have separately discussed The Carrier’s images of Europe. D’haen (2005: 134) suggests that The Carrier appropriates the European genres of travel writing and the novel, and by challenging their stereotypical modes of representation, reconstructs Europe’s marginalized Others as active participants in modernity, my own reading of the novel locates it within the critical framework of hybridity and emphasizes the ways in which it challenges the nationalist and xenophobic discourses characterizing the relationship between the “host” and the “immigrant” in European nation-states. In Sten Pultz Moslund’s view (2009: 189; see also Moslund, 2010), however, the novel’s central trope of the telescope and the telescopic gaze resists traditional understandings of the migrants’ special position providing them with a particular “stereoscopic” or “double vision”. What Moslund (2009: 190-191) argues that the telescope, as an instrument based on lenses and the manipulation of vision, shows that all seeing, including that by the migrant, is discursively positioned, a finding that challenges the assumptions of what he refers to as dominant cosmopolitan hybridity discourse and places importance on the recognition of multiple hybridities.
Approaching home: Asking for directions
Mahjoub’s works, from The Carrier to The Drift Latitudes, like many other contemporary narratives of diaspora, rely on the tropes of travel and home to address questions of identity and its transformation. Home, as several scholars have shown, plays a major role in diasporic literatures, but its meaning has transformed from a secure site of being into a mobile and travelling concept. As Susheila Nasta puts it in her Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain: “Home, it has been said, is not necessarily where one belongs but the place where one starts from” (2002:1; emphasis in original). In the era of globalized modernity, this transforming role of home is particularly important. Rosemary Marangoly George has suggested that twentieth-century migrant writers explore the connection between identity and a place-based definition of home but eventually refuse to finalize such a closure: “Home in the immigrant genre is a fiction that one can move beyond or recreate at will. The association between an adequate self and a place to call home is held up to scrutiny and then let go” (1996: 200). In other words, the identity of the migrant is constructed through the experience of travel. Similarly, Rosemarie Buikema’s (2005) analysis of the writings of the Moroccan-Dutch author Abdelkader Benari suggests that the narrative critique of home does not emphasize a place; rather, the desire to reconstruct home is a way of coping with the loss of stories, cultural memories, and myths. What is created is a new sense of “homesickness”: “Homesickness, the desire for a home […] is a longing to come home to the magic of stories, a longing for the feeling of community that emerges through the actual telling” (Buikema, 2005: 184).
This suggests that postcolonial narratives of diaspora and migration rearticulate the notion of home and sever its links with a mythical geographical homeland. Rather, diasporic identity as “homesickness” is based on what the theorist Avtar Brah refers to as “homing desire” and defines as a way of negotiating between “the discourse of ‘home’ and ‘dispersion’ […], inscribing a homing desire while simultaneously critiquing discourses of fixed origins” (1996: 192-193; emphasis in original). In Brah’s (1996: 193) view, the notion of “homing desire” is not necessarily an attempt to re-enter the point of departure, but it may be brought to life through participation in a shared culture. As I will argue, through this sense of home as a shared site of belonging, Majoub’s novel seeks to promote through its representation of diasporic lives. Home, in other words, is not a static and unchanging site or a nostalgic retreat into the past. Nikos Papastergiadis has emphasized the ambiguous role of home in modernity:
The search for home is neither a nostalgic retreat to a familiar past nor a defensive reaction against the brutalities of the present. The meaning of home is now found in the future-oriented projects of constructing a sense of belonging in a context of change. (1998: 9)
In the context of diasporic literature this “homing desire”, as Susheila Nasta suggests, also involves attempts to reconstruct home in other spaces and can be defined as “a desire to reinvent and rewrite home as much as a desire to come to terms with an exile from it. Diaspora is therefore as much settlement as displacement” (2002: 7-8). In my view, this indicates that fictions of diaspora are not mere nostalgic lamentations but actively redefine the migrant’s sense of self and home. Travel, then, is not opposed to home but is a means of seeking belonging and a way of emphasizing the multiple historical and contemporary dis/locations of the migrant subject. In other words, diasporic narratives of travel seek to relocate and reinscribe belonging in a changing world.
The issues outlined above are particularly relevant for Mahjoub’s The Drift Latitudes. All of its three different narratives – those of Ernst Frager’s life story, Jade’s search for her identity, and Rachel’s letters from Sudan to her half-sister – show that home is not bound to a place and that the experience of diaspora characterizes the identities represented in the novel. This search for identity and belonging is emphatically present in the novel, as seen in Jade’s search in particular, and its key characters are not infrequently portrayed reflecting on their life and its different phases. For example, Rachel’s letters tell of the various turns of her family life in Khartoum, her son’s death and husband’s estrangement, but also reveal how she reconstructs her identity by participating in a healing ritual with a group of Sudanese women (see Mahjoub, 2006: 150-156). 1 Similarly, Ernst and Jade refer explicitly to moments that change the direction. Jade, forced to face the aging of her mother Miranda (whose name links the novel with Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and the changing situation at her workplace, is “convinced that she was on the cusp of change, that everything in her life was about to collapse around her; work, her mother, these were the vital signs. She knew she was helpless to stop it. The only question was what would come next” (55). In contrast, Ernst Frager, as indicated in his family name, asks questions concerning the direction of his life in situations that mark a new phase in his life:
There were key moments in his life, tangential notes, when he lost all sense of balance and found himself nudged in a new direction. Such nodes of transition were announced by a mixture of fear and childish excitement, his stomach tumbling over and over as if he was standing on the edge of a high cliff, trying to talk himself out of it and knowing he would jump anyway. (4)
Furthermore, this sense of the power of transformative moments is supported by Rachel’s words in one of her letters to Jade: “Ever since I learned of your existence I have felt the way one might feel after driving for hours through the dark in the middle of nowhere, when suddenly there appears, dead ahead and far away in the distance, a tiny pinprick of life” (100-101).
Rather than merely showing that identity is in flux and in constant movement, which would be a critical commonplace, it should be noticed that in Mahjoub’s novel these transformative moments are travels both in and across time and space. These different modes of travel, including Ernst’s relocation from Germany to Britain, Jade’s search for her father past, and Rachel’s disillusioned life in Sudan with her estranged husband, are all transnational and cross various national and cultural boundaries. What is particularly important is that through the overlapping of their stories, the characters are located in more than one narrative: the figure of the German refugee functions to link together the two daughters, who until then are unaware of each other’s existence. This can be seen as a realization of the homing desire as articulated by Brah (1996: 192-193). In the novel the diasporic daughters, one black, the other one white, appear to be part of the same history. Thus the novel both problematizes their own narratives of origin and reinscribes hybridity into their identities. The moment of revelation is also one when a sense of belonging and community may emerge, as is evident in Jade’s thoughts:
Everything in her life seemed to have been leading her up to this point. The accident, the falling arc, the dead man, the letters from Rachel. All of it suggested that she had reached a point of no return. Rachel’s letters provided a line of escape that led away from the chaos of the present into the labyrinth of her past. It was a tempting offer. A necessary one, too. But it would not be easy. It made Jade aware of how much she had cut herself off, from her mother, from anything to do with herself, in the process of making herself into what she was today. There was a pleading note, a vulnerability in Rachel’s letters which set off a tremoring echo deep in Jade’s memory, a buried mirror that she cast away from herself long ago. (118)
The reference to a mirror image, meaning here also her hitherto unknown sister, emerges as a source of support found lacking by Jade in the beginning of the novel. The building accident, the “falling arc” that kills an illegal immigrant camping out at the building site and eventually leads Jade to lose her position at the architect’s company, is a result of the lack of a mirror: “The arch which had collapsed would eventually have been countered by a twin on the opposite side. It supported itself, once it was in place” (24).
This incident emphasizes the fact that a dearth of community and belonging is evident in Jade’s personal story. Growing up as a mixed-race and fatherless child in Liverpool in the 1960s and 1970s, she has frequently found her identity problematic:
Was it because as a child Jade had never really been sure if she was black or white? She knew less about what she was than what she was not. It wasn’t about the colour of your skin so much as about the way you thought. She asked her mother about it, but all she got out of Miranda was that she was herself, and that was all that ever mattered. (61)
The response, however, is not enough as Jade feels offended even by one of her favourite songs, Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side”, the lyrics of which in Jade’s view transform black women into a mass of “colored girls” forced to utter meaningless words: “Dup de dup de dup, dedupdup dup de dup” (61). In later life, Jade leaves Liverpool, marries and divorces the French photographer Etienne, and in her attempt to avoid the racial trap, aims to make a career as “an architect” rather than as “a black architect” (119). When she realizes that her career is coming to a halt as she is likely to be forced to leave her job, scapegoated for the accident, she bitterly reflects on the issue:
She got to her feet and walked over to the window. From the dome of St Paul’s to the Lloyd’s building, the ghosts of other architects, past and present, haunted the skyline; Christopher Wren, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Richard Seifert. Male architects draw the world, the women just fill in the shading. She was a woman and she was black, well, brown. What could she actually hope to achieve? (33)
Jade’s disappointment with the white-dominated corporate world develops further when she seeks to hire a solicitor to defend her in case the company sues her. Yet Arburgh’s analysis cannot help her. If Jade were to accuse her employers of discrimination, they would mostly likely expose her old drink driving conviction and label her an alcoholic who has neglected her tasks. To emphasize Jade’s dislocation, the setting of the interchange is a traditional English-style restaurant described as “Old England; a place you could visit, but where she would never belong” (121). 2 While once she had been sure of her fixed position, seeing no need to dwell on her history, 3 she is now ready to reflect on her racialized identity and relationship with Britain.
Mobile and migrating identities
The title of the novel, The Drift Latitudes, is a sign that its promoted mode of identity is a mobile one. The novel refers to the notion of drift on two particularly interesting occasions. The first reference connects the idea of drift with Jade, adding to her character by using an intertext, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jean Rhys’s famous and “haunting novel” (61) addressing the effects of colonialism and patriarchy through the fate of Bertha Mason, the first wife of Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester. 4 Jade recognizes that this novel, telling of the fate of its creole protagonist, has been particularly important for her during the late teen years when it helped her work out her own in-between identity: “Was it ambiguity that drew her to Jean Rhys, the fact that the author seemed to be neither of this world nor of that?” (61). The links between identity and change are further addressed by contrasting the chosen mode of mobility with mere drifting. In Mahjoub’s novel, the Sargasso Sea is described as a part of the Caribbean where the lack of wind leaves the boats “stranded in a sea” where they “drift for weeks at a time”, which leads to “a kind of madness descending while they were trapped in motion, unable to move” (61).
In the context of the novel’s general thematics it can be argued that it juxtaposes drifting lives with moments of revelation, preferring activity to passivity, and responsibility to indecisiveness. This becomes evident in the words Jade utters when she decides to hire the detective Arthur Quail to discover the identity of the illegal immigrant nicknamed Thursday who dies under a collapsing building. When asked to explain her reasons for this, she claims to have “a personal sense of … complicity” and asks whether it is “so unusual to feel responsible for the consequences of your actions?” (103); the same issue is also evident in her teenage daughter Maya’s emerging ecological consciousness. 5 Finally, the notion of drift is further elaborated on in the final chapter of the novel. It contains a letter in which Rachel writes about the nineteenth-century colonial explorers’ attempts to reach the origins of the river Nile. The rainy season, however, transforms the rivers into flooded plains where explorers with their “waxed moustaches” seek to navigate the “maze” in order to “realise the foggy dream of a glorious empire”:
Ships ran aground, fatally lodged on obstinate humps of silt banks that shift unpredictably. Flat-bottomed steamers drifted in circles for weeks. There were tales of anguish and even cannibalism. People on board went insane, driven mad by the sun and their inability to distinguish one channel from another in that watery labyrinth. (201)
Rather than drift, madness, and hopelessness, the novel promotes self-understanding. Yet this self-understanding is coupled with an awareness of history, as seen in Jade’s decision to clarify the story of her father with the help of his only remaining friend, the dying Waldo Schmidt, and in Rachel’s attempt to connect with her newly found half-sister through her writing of letters.
At another level the idea of drift is treated as an effect of colonial and postcolonial violence, as something that is rather imposed upon people than chosen. While the British colonialists of the nineteenth century sought to expand their rule over the world, the postcolonial state of Sudan fights against its own minorities in the name of politics masked as religion. As Rachel puts it in her first letter to Jade, she daily observes the powerless refugees moving silently past the houses “in sleepy suburban side street[s]”, groups of displaced people who no longer inhabit “their own landscape, with the cattle kraals, smoky dung fires, and grass huts of the unbound tracts from where they hail” (11). In so doing the dislocated are stripped of their agency and mode of life and transformed into powerless “figures” doomed to drift “through nothing towards nothing” (202). The similarity between the violent era of colonial conquest with the nationalist postcolonial state is explicitly stated in Mahjoub’s novel by drawing a parallel between the colonial past and the postcolonial present: “They are here because their place in the world was taken from them. Their homes and villages burned and bombed, the earth scorched back to the time before God cut open the sky with his axe, as they believe, to give birth to man” (202). Nomadism, then, while considered by several cultural critics a privileged mode of being – and travelling – in the postmodern world, 6 is far from an idealized choice in The Drift Latitudes and is represented as yet another way in which power objectifies underprivileged people and reduces them into passive “figures” in the landscape.
Haunting memories
To counter views that confine refugees and other often undocumented people in the margins, as objects of media spectacle, claimed to be a mass, but with no voice to tell their stories, The Drift Latitudes argues for the importance of memory and history. As the epigraph of the first part of Mahjoub’s novel, a phrase from Derek Walcott’s Omeros, puts it: “Time is the metre, memory the only plot” (1). This is also evident in the words exchanged between Jade and her mother in the first chapter of the novel:
“That’s so people remember”. “Remember what?” “Remember not to forget is what”. (8)
The role of memory and the past is crucial in the novel. As Jade’s search for her – as well as her father’s – past shows, history affects the present in a manner that the novel discusses as a form of haunting. In fact, Waldo Schmidt, her late father’s only living friend, describes memory as “an odd thing” in the sense that “[f]acts remain buried in the mind like a ghostly shadow”, but after many years they are suddenly able to “make themselves plain” (184). The novel includes several further references to ghosts, haunting, and the dead. These include Jade’s collection of animal skeletons, 7 her act of hiring a private detective to find out about the true identity of the dead immigrant, Thursday, and the story of “Shelley’s Ghost”, an invisible visitor who is claimed to have once threatened the life of the famous poet in a North Wales inn. 8 However, the proper ghosts of this novel are those created by history but whom it wishes to forget – it is they, migrants of various kinds, whose stories must be remembered. In addition to the members of the Frager family, the novel pays particular attention to refugees as seen in the description of nomadic refugees in Rachel’s letters quoted above and in Ernst Frager’s impressions upon his return to post-Second World War Germany:
The roads were clogged with wanderers. There were reputed to be twenty million refugees on the move: returning, leaving, trying to find their families, or just pulling their belongings in circles, on horse carts, trolleys, prams. Where were they going? Ernst wondered. What did they hope to find? (176)
Similarly, contemporary migrants such as the victims of economic globalization, are present everywhere but nobody is able to trace their journeys: “They wash your windscreens at traffic lights. They stack the shelves at late-night supermarkets. They drive you home in minicabs […] It’s the state of the world” (31). 9 What makes their presence haunting is that it disrupts dominant narratives and shows that what they claim to have suppressed may return and trouble their official truths. This is clearly evident in Rachel’s thoughts following her mother’s funeral, as she imagines histories of a particular kind, “revenant histories, never concluded, the fruit of that nebulous, unresolved desire to make sense of it all” (42; emphasis added).
As mentioned by both Brah (1996) and Nasta (2002), diasporic identity relies on communal and shared memories that are linked with a particular place. Mahjoub’s novel, as revealed in the title of its first part, “Revenant Kin”, addresses the issue of belonging by using the idea of a dispersed family whose reunion cannot be hindered. While people such as Rachel’s brother would rather remain silent about their unpleasant kin (including a German father, a sister converted to Islam and living in Sudan, and a West Indian half-sister) these transnational family affairs cannot be evaded or escaped – revenant they return. What this means is that by hybridizing the English family the novel presents a critique of nationalism: its imaginings of new identities and new homes show the presence of multiplicity and hybridity in the apparently “pure” spaces of privileged national identities. As a result, the novel transgresses the formerly and allegedly monocultural spaces of the European nation-states to present a critique of all forms of alleged national and cultural essentialisms. As the novel puts it, “purity was an illusion. Everything is in perpetual contention; rising and falling, growing, dying” (177). Furthermore, in the world of Mahjoub’s novel hybridity is represented as the state of being in nature. This recognition of the lack of purity is evident in Ernst’s gazing at British nature where he sees “a rare example of mélange geology: a variety of rock fragments were swept together and embedded in a different bedrock” (46).
Music of diaspora
The realization of the multicultural character of (European) history and the need to voice alternative narratives of the past is a general characteristic of Mahjoub’s novels (see Nyman, forthcoming). As Geoffrey Nash (2007: 99) has remarked of The Carrier in particular, its foregrounding of “a lost historical memory”, suppressed and silenced by the West, seeks to uncover the fact that once Muslim culture and civilization was at least equal to that of Europe. Similar issues play a significant role in The Drift Latitudes where they are not limited to the interchange between Europeans and Arabs but are explored in a more general framework of intercultural exchange. This becomes evident when Ernst Frager arrives at Liverpool for the first time in 1957 and remembers having read Herman Melville’s “entranced” 1839 description of the multilingual port: “The tow writhed in bubbling of foreign babble; the heated patois of Germans, Dutchmen, Icelanders, and Danes, Chinese, Swedes, Spaniards, and of course the Irish, all falling over one another to be heard. One in two sailors was a foreigner” (82). While the image of Liverpool’s multiculturality in Melville’s novel as recalled by Frager is rather freely constructed, Mahjoub’s intertextual reference to Herman Melville’s Redburn (1986/1849) deserves further commentary from the perspective of cultural interchange and hybridity. Redburn, indeed, narrates interesting encounters with sailors from all over the world, including the Indian seaman Dallabdoolmans: “So instructive was his discourse, that when we parted, I had considerably added to my stock of knowledge. Indeed, it was a God-send to fall in with a fellow like this. He knows things you never dreamed of; his experiences are like a man from the moon – wholly strange, a new revelation” (Melville, 1986: 242). What links Mahjoub and Melville is the fact that the notion of travel functions for both writers as a way of encountering alterity, enabling the formation of a new identity. Timothy Marr has pointed out that for Melville travel was “a potent means of expanding the provincial horizons of national aspiration” (2001: 9). Marr (2001: 10-11) also points out that in his letters to his brother, written during the same journey which was to give birth to Redburn, Melville creates for himself an ethnic voice, writing in non-standard English and signing the letters with the racialized name “Tawney”.
Liverpool, a city which is also associated with the transatlantic slave trade, plays a significant role in Mahjoub’s novel as enabling the crossing of racial boundaries. Its historical narratives of race, including both those of slavery and post-Second World War immigration to Britain, emphasize the migrants’ dislocation but also point to the possibility of their empowerment. This space, open for various transcultural encounters, comes to mark the beginning of the next phase in Frager’s life: “Here, finally, in this city, of all places, he had found the antidote to that vacuum inside him” (57). The “antidote” is his relationship with Miranda, “a hat check girl” who occasionally sings jazz at the Blue Nile club and dances with those “who made her laugh, or the ones who wore their loneliness like fog” (84). This club, described as “a place where people hung their normal lives in the cloakroom for a few hours of affordable glamour, complete with lacklustre upholstery and cracks in the plaster”, is also “an enchanted cave” and “[a] magic carpet” (83). It is run by its exotic owner Ismail Bilal, a former seaman with a “Nubian childhood”, now referred to as “the genie, the djinn, the big chocolate giant winking in the oil lamp” (83). Bilal, after hearing jazz for the first time at a New York club, identifies strongly with black music and wants to recreate a similar space in Liverpool. Much more important than the luxuries of champagne, velvet, and glamour (141) is the music he responds to strongly: “His heart beat in his throat. Men like him playing. Africans, and this was their music. He had never thought to find such a thing here, in the richest country in the world” (142). The Blue Nile becomes a prime site of cultural interchange and hybridity, and its sounds are described as “a cacophony of places and styles from every corner of the planet” (80). The musical hybrids performed are of various kinds, mapping global space with various musics:
A profusion of musical innovations blew in through the door before blowing off, down the street, across the sea, some of them never to be seen or heard of again. Django Reinhardt meets Trini Lopez. Cajun crosses Texas honkytonk. Jamaican ska cut up by a soaring Ornette Coleman aspirant playing a kettle like a muted trumpet. (81)
The Blue Nile offers its clientele access to the emergent transatlantic culture of black music that permeates all social and ethnic groups. The local harbour workers, for instance, are shown to willingly enter the world of jazz: “Most of the time it was just plain old Dixieland waterfront jazz. Out-of-tune four-piece combos of machine fitters and stevedores, off-duty tug pilots who could manage a passable imitation of New Orleans syncopation” (80). While the club “wasn’t New York”, it is nevertheless a magical place where “everyone looked good. Once the music began to flow you could be anything or anyone you wanted to be” (82). In other words, the club functions as a site of transformation allowing for the birth of new and hybrid identities as a result of cultural mixing. In its ambivalence and liminality, it plays the role of what the cultural theorist Homi K. Bhabha calls the Third Space, the site of the formation of hybrid identity, where it is possible to feel “the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world – the unhomeliness – that is the condition of extra-territorial and cross-cultural initiations” (1994: 9; see also Kuortti and Nyman, 2007: 1-18).
The role of music in the novel, then, is to construct sites and spaces of transgression and boundary crossings. This is the case with Frager, who has first heard jazz in his German submarine stuck at the bottom of the North Sea in 1918 when Scott Joplin’s ragtime transformed “the oppressive atmosphere” with its “sheer verve” so that everybody was soon “bobbing their heads and tapping their feet in time” (94) and comes later to associate music with transformation. Later Frager, while working as an interpreter in Germany in 1946 and encountering a ruthless Nazi scientist, comes to realize that a technological worldview with a belief in the possibilities of progress by perfecting machines is no longer accessible to him. If he followed such a path, he would risk devoting his life to murder like his Prussian mirror, a “wasted man […] a mirror of possibility” (182). In Mahjoub’s novel this crisis leading to his transformation from a man of science is set in a “cracked chapel” where a black American sergeant sings a spiritual with a “booming voice which made the old walls tremble” (182). As such, black music comes to function as a counter-narrative of Western rationality and a semiotic and postcolonial critique of the symbolic and colonial order. To quote the novel: “But now he saw there was beauty in incompleteness, a sublime grace, a gritty, human kind of imperfection” (183), a beauty that language is unable to represent or grasp. This is what happens to Ernst Frager: unable to find the right words “to express what he felt at that moment” music takes over his mind, and this music is jazz, officially alien to the German territory: “Scott Joplin; the evenings in Berlin spent in the American zone listening to jazz; Sidney Bechet’s 1939 recording of Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’” (183). Significantly, jazz, a genre originating from the African American experience, comes here to represent freedom unavailable in Nazi Germany – as historians of music have shown, jazz, although it was found repulsive by the Nazi propaganda machinery, was constantly present in Nazi Germany (see Kater, 1989: 11-43). 10 In the novel, jazz tells of Frager’s desire to transgress the cultural boundaries of the ordered German – and European – existence.
The novel also discusses the travels of music from a more general and postcolonial perspective by linking them with a variety of migrant and diasporic experiences. The performers at Bilal’s club are, like its owner, migrant contributors to cultural hybridity who are rooted in travel and mobility from one part of the world to another. Coming from places as diverse as Portugal, Buenos Aires, Piraeus, and Turku, Finland, they perform their fado, ragtime or zither music, and disappear:
Who these musicians were and how they got there, where they went to, what ever became of them was part of the great untold mystery of the world, of the sea, of harbour life and finally of the Blue Nile. They came and they went, drawn to the club by recommendation, by rumour, by accident. (81)
Consequently music becomes a part of the hybridity that the dominant historical narratives seek to suppress. Global flows are evident in the musical genres referred to in the quotation above, including Portuguese fado and Greek rembetika. While the bouzouki sounds of Piraeus emerge as a result of the exodus of the Greeks leaving Minor Asia in the 1920s, the novel’s Finnish orchestra, which represents the popularity of the big band sound all over Europe at the time, is a further example of transcultural cultural exchange and local adaptation. As Paul Gilroy (1993) has argued, forms of music such as jazz and tango emerge from the cultures of the Black Atlantic with their roots in cultural contacts based on slavery. Rather than expressions of any authentic “Afrocentric” or other experience, they are expressions of “the flows, exchanges, and in-between elements that call the very desire to be centred into question” (1993: 190). Music, in Simon Featherstone’s view, plays a central role in this process: it “is both of the moment – an expression of voice, sound and body – and always on the move betwixt and between places, bodies and histories” (2005: 35). This idea is also voiced by Mahjoub’s Miranda:
You can’t make music without pain, she said. You only have to listen to Billie Holiday to know that. It was the pain of leaving home. They took people from Africa to the New World and it was like a voyage between past and future. It was in that dark ditch of history, that silent beat, where jazz began. A moan of loss, crying back across leagues and centuries, trying to reach what they had left behind. (157)
In narrating music and its travels, Miranda’s role is emphasized. Not only does she provide a moment of self-transgression for Frager as a jazz singer, but it is through her mother that Jade connects with her history. Jade hears her West Indian mother, the ailing Miranda (a descendant of slaves), making sounds in her sleep: “Holding her close, she felt the sound coursing through Miranda’s body like a fever: a strange purling guttural chant, part spiritual, part blues, that might have been spoken in Wolof, Hausa, or Nubian” (165). Ironically, Miranda is suffering from dementia and losing her memory.
Music, the novel argues, is a way of understanding the multifaceted experience of diasporic travel and global mobility, and this recognition may be of assistance in the reconstruction of identity. Its effect on the German Ernst Frager appears as an opportunity to transcend time and space, transgress the ordered reality, and reach a utopian space:
The notes leapt from the soprano saxophone out into the unknown, bending and changing all that lay before them, lifting Ernst up, blowing him backwards into the future, down centuries, over ruined cities, carrying him out over the frozen valley, the clouded peaks, out to the blue ribbon of sky beyond. (183)
Similarly, the records Jade buys from a Soho record shop lead her to a further connection with her past and transform her long-held contention that jazz is artificial and merely an attempt by white boys to appropriate blackness, as was the case with a former boyfriend of hers at the University who treated her as “some kind of trophy” (147). The records she buys help her in her desire “to know it all. The whole story” (149). And this story is the story of diaspora and homesickness central to the reconstruction of the migrant subject, a story that is both a cultural and personal search for meaning. The songs of Nina Simone, for instance, trigger a sense of recognition and comfort, linking Jade with her mother who used to sing them when she was a child, a fact that she had forgotten (149).
In other words, black music is an integral part of the experience of the black diaspora, present in its pains but also able to provide access to a utopian world with more security. 11 In Mahjoub’s novel, music becomes the narrative of diasporic experience rooted in pain and loss of history in a situation where it is the only remaining marker of identity:
Gospel, blues, and jazz. It all came out of that feeling of loss. They lost their language, their history, so they had to make it up. That’s where it comes from, trying to make yourself understood. You don’t have great buildings and libraries, all you have is the story you tell. That’s who you are. It is in the telling of the tale. (157)
What is demanded from Jade should she wish to enter diasporic identity is to accept the irrationality of jazz, “the music of displacement […] Music for people like you and me, the in-betweens” (148). 12 As defined in Mahjoub’s novel, jazz resists European modernity and its order: “The great European philosophers never understood jazz. Freud, Jung, Adorno, none of them saw what it meant. Why? Because it breaks all logic, breaks down the idea of progress because it breaks up linear notions of time. Time stands still, it moves in circles, it takes unpredictable leaps” (148). Through jazz it is possible to understand the character of black diasporic identity, represented in the novel by combining the metaphors of jazz and the city. This is an identity consisting of different synchronic voices which belong together:
The great cities, like jazz, she thought, were composed of thousands of discordant notes that come together at times to create harmony. The jazz of cities is the syncopated distillation of unexpected elements which allows us to live together: none of it makes sense, except the sense we give it. (148)
Conclusion
This essay has argued that Mahjoub’s representations of European identities problematize nationalist discourses by showing the presence of silenced and forgotten networks and narratives. In representing transnational and diasporic communities the novel reinscribes hybridity in spaces apparently void of it, voices alternative narratives of the past, and thus recasts the relationships between European nation-states and their non-European Others. For Mahjoub’s characters, Jade and Rachel in particular, this leads to a reconstruction of identity and the revaluation of belonging. Their imagined community, to use Benedict Anderson’s (1991) term, is one not limited by borders but a transnational one. While Rachel seeks connection with her father’s second family, Jade locates her identity in the transnational tradition of black diaspora through its music. By hybridizing the notion of the English family, the novel both critiques appeals to purity and, more significantly, recasts the notion of the hybrid family as a general European condition. The uncovering of historical memories and the related need to tell alternative stories of the past, stories that transform both the present and the future, is what The Drift Latitudes seeks to achieve. Similarly, the novel’s various narratives of travel and their contribution to the hybridization and transformation of both culture and the characters reveal an insistence on the inevitability of change as a result of cultural interaction and communication. Similarly, the novel’s stories of transforming European identities, supported with intertextual references to various writers, are ways of reconstructing and redefining home for diasporic people and linking the postcolonial text with its predecessors and the cultural tradition. In a world characterized by migration, as the life of Ernst Frager shows, home is not related to a fixed place or a mythic homeland/Vaterland but it is tied with the possibility of belonging and may be realized in transnational and transcultural spaces and through various forms of culture from music to literature.
Footnotes
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.