A personal quest: Travel writing as self-exploration in Eddy L. Harris’s Native Stranger: A Blackamerican’s Journey into the Heart of Africa

Abstract

In Native Stranger: A Blackamerican’s Journey into the Heart of Africa (1992), Eddy L. Harris explores what it means to be the person he is. What, if anything, connects him to Africa? What is the relation between the person he knows himself to be, and the person others see? Searching for answers to his questions, he finds himself caught between his attempts to remain open to new ways of seeing and understanding the world, on the one hand, and succumbing to the pressures of monolithic narratives about African otherness, race, belonging, roots and the past, on the other hand. This tension gives rise to an ambiguity and a number of contradictions which make the text fold back on itself. His literary project therefore ultimately serves to raise questions not only about his own identity and place in the world, but also about the conditions of writing about the self. Central among the contradictions that permeate the text is a doubling of epistemological perspectives, which can be described as an effect of what W. E. B. Dubois famously termed double-consciousness. While Harris is able to use the contradictions that arise from his writing to explore and represent the complexity of the questions that are foregrounded in his text, he is unable to answer them. His project is in other words a kind of failure, but as this article argues, this failure is the price that Harris pays to access the full complexity of selfhood, beyond political and social narratives about collective identity and how the present is shaped by the past.

In his travelogue Native Stranger: A Blackamerican’s Journey into the Heart of Africa (1992), Eddy L. Harris sets out on a “personal quest”, convinced that “all roads lead to the same place. They all lead to a better understanding of place and self” (Harris, 1993/1992: 34, 35). ¹ His almost one-year-long journey takes him across the African continent from Tunisia to South Africa. During this time, he meditates on what the continent means to him as a Black American, and journeys through a semantic cartography of entangled notions such as the cultural memory of slavery, privilege, colonialism, historical heritage and, of course, identity. ² At the end of his account of this epic journey, he concludes that the most fundamental question still remains unanswered: “Who am I?” (311).

Harris’s writing explores the complex relations between identity and place. He uses the context of travel to discuss ways in which geographical, social, and temporal context shape how we perceive ourselves and our place in the world. Native Stranger is Harris’s second travelogue, following Mississippi Solo: A River Quest (1988), a book about a journey down the Mississippi River, and followed by South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride Through Slavery’s Old Backyard (1993), which chronicles a motorcycle trip through the deep South. He has since published a memoir about his life in New York’s Harlem, Still Life in Harlem (1996), as well as a number of works in French, and is currently working on a documentary film about a second journey down the Mississippi River.

At the heart of Native Stranger, there is a struggle for an authentically individual voice that can speak for and about itself without being drowned by external narratives of racial heritage or African otherness. The semantic and ideological weight of the notion of Africa threatens to lead Harris away from what constitutes the core of his self-exploratory writing — the subjective, phenomenological reality of his own life — and towards entrenched narratives and views of the continent and its diaspora. This gives rise to a set of contradictions that become central in the narrative, so central that they propel the narrative forward as much as Harris’s account of his travels does. While he emphatically refuses to identify with Africa on the basis of the fact that he is black; he cannot ignore the fact that “the specter” of Africa, “looms like the shadow of a genie” in “the mind and perhaps dreams of every person with black skin” and has a specific significance for people of African descent (13).

The contradiction between a refusal to subscribe to narratives of racial sameness and vague feelings of being somehow connected to the continent is not in itself something that makes Native Stranger unique in Black American writing about Africa. Such a tension is common in accounts of symbolic return journeys from America to Africa from the latter half of the twentieth century. Early Black American literature of travel, often written by missionaries and proponents of the back-to-Africa movement, was typically influenced by Afrocentric ideas and imagined Africa as a homeland, a continent that in contrast to the pre-civil war US embodied freedom and self-determination. ³ At the onset of the Cold War and during the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, however, it became increasingly common for travellers to emphasize how little they actually felt they shared with the Africans they met on their journeys (Pettinger, 2003: 88). In Maya Angelou’s All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), while living in Ghana the author realizes that the Black American experience is “unique” and radically different from that of the Africans among whom she lived (Lavecq, 2015: 82). Richard Wright too came to this realization when visiting Ghana in the early 1950s. His Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954) is one of the better known Black American travelogues about Africa. Before going to the Gold Coast (today’s Republic of Ghana), Wright is excited by the thought of discovering his own Africanness, but like Harris he eventually decides that he is not African in any meaningful sense and that he is unable to bridge the epistemological and cultural gaps that exist between him and people he meets. “I had understood nothing”, Wright confesses. “I was black and they were black, but my blackness did not help me” (2008/1954: 161).

In contrast to Wright and Angelou, Harris does not just reflect on and try to get around the contradictions that arise from uneasy negotiations of sameness and difference. Harris uses these discrepancies to oscillate between different positions and views of the world and to explore the conditions and limits of self-representation. This ultimately makes Harris’s writing fold back on itself. What is framed as a project of self-exploration in which Harris struggles with the contradictory notions of sameness and difference, kinship and alienation, turns into an exploration of writing itself. The central question of Harris’s book — who am I? — generates another question, which is less overt but nevertheless always subtextually present: is it at all possible to write about the self without losing control of the text to entrenched monolithic narratives about Africa and racial heritage?

I

Harris finds himself “trapped” between “two extremes” when travelling in West Africa (137). One is the notion that Africa is not a metaphorical racial homeland to which he can return. The other is the unshakeable “thought of running into someone who looked like a relative”, which makes him wary of what such a connection would entail for his sense of self, because “that would have been too concrete, too much proof. My Africanism was abstract and I wanted it to remain so” (138). Put differently, he is troubled by the idea that something outside of the narrative, something more solid than an idea, might force itself upon him and limit the horizon of possibilities in his writing. If he accepts the notion of Africa as a homeland, it will inevitably define how he will see and relate to the continent he travels through. To Harris, this notion is therefore something that intrudes on him, something that “creep[s] upon” and interferes with his view of himself and the world (27).

Initially, Harris seems to imagine that every person has a “true” self, which exists beyond social identities and others’ preconceived notions. The authentic self is not necessarily static and granted by birth, however, but can be brought into being and shaped by will under the right circumstances. When he writes that he wants to “shed my former self as if it were a snakeskin and see life, if possible, from a new point of view”, he relies on the entrenched liberal view of the self as something that is, in the final analysis, self-contained, autonomous, and its own author (35). He emphasizes the fact that “the external me” which others see does not always match the “internal” self (35). This discrepancy is not just due to the fact that people tend to define the person they see by the colour of his or her skin, but Harris implies that for black people in the West, this true self is particularly difficult to reach, because of the fact that blackness is such a powerful identifier. He is therefore “half one thing, and half another” — the person he is perceived to be, and the person he really is (35). His wish when his journey begins is to find a true self, if not in Africa, then deep within himself.

Harris’s belief in the ability of the self to create and shape itself is particularly obvious in his discussions about the relation between self and place. However, because he is unable to ignore the fact that external forces are involved in the fashioning of the self, there is also from the very beginning of the text a certain ambivalence in Harris’s discussion about identity and selfhood. In a passage about how he sees himself and how he has become the person that he is, Harris writes about a trip he made as a seven-year-old with his father to the St. Louis neighbourhood where his father grew up. While he appreciates this glimpse into the past, it is not obvious exactly what this past means for his understanding of himself:

I liked driving through my father’s old neighborhood and listening to stories of how it all used to be, stories I had heard a thousand times. They are part of the history of who I am. But I never wanted to live there. My time and place are elsewhere. I have a sense of who I am and where I belong, but I do struggle with the knowledge that I would not be who I am if all the pieces had not come into place as they did, if the slightest wind had blown vaguely off course. (28)

A source of ambiguity in the passage is the fact that it is not obvious if there is a semantic difference between the phrases “my time and place” and “where I belong” and if the place where Harris feels he belongs is the place he comes from or the place where he finds himself. His visit to his father’s neighbourhood gives him insight into his past, but this past seems to be something external — an elsewhere — and is only arbitrarily connected to who he is and where he should be. Perhaps there are not just two different ways in which belonging can be understood in this passage, but also two contradictory sides of the self: one that is rooted in the past and that is the result of the course of history, and one that is autonomous and that becomes what it is through its own choices and experiences — by writing its own story, as it were.

The passage about his visit to his father’s old neighbourhood appears at the beginning of the text, and serves to signal that his journey to Africa is not to be understood as a narrative about a Black American’s symbolic return to Africa. Because of Harris’s investment in a view of the self as irreducible to something other than itself, he avoids subscribing to entrenched narratives about Africa and Black American identity that would limit his ability to define himself. This does not mean that he views the past as irrelevant for his understanding of who he is, but it can be understood as a way to claim the right to define the meaning and relevance of the past in the present. The tension between the view of the self as autonomous and the view according to which the self is an extension of something other than itself is not primarily philosophical but political: the autonomy that Harris strives to achieve is something that is (supposedly) bestowed upon white, but denied Black Americans. Therefore, by not fully subscribing to any one established narrative, Harris opens up for the possibility of an inner transformation that will allow him to represent himself as free of the weight of the past — a moment in which his view of himself is fully his own.

This moment, however, never actually arrives. Harris’s self-explorative project and journey relies on an attempt to achieve a level of discursive freedom that ultimately proves impossible to reach. He strives to distance himself from any preconceived notions that the reader may have about his reasons for going to Africa and cautions that his narrative is not constructed around any entrenched narratives about heritage or racial sameness:

Because my skin is black you will say I traveled Africa [sic] to find the roots of my race. I did not — unless that race is the human race, for except in the color of my skin, I am not African. If I didn’t know it then, I know it now. I am a product of the culture that raised me. (13)

Race evidently means little in this passage, and consequently seems to bring little to Harris’s understanding of himself and his place in the world. This, it seems, is something he has learned while travelling in Africa. Immediately following his rejection of the presumably preconceived assumption that he travels to Africa to find his racial roots, however, he not only reintroduces race as a meaningful concept, but also seems to confirm the imagined reader’s supposed preconceptions about his reasons for going to Africa. He writes that Africa is an idea that to Black Americans is “always there”, “dormant and not altogether harmless” (13). It has been heard about since childhood, described as “a magnificent faraway place, a place of magic and wonder” (13). Harris is “not African” and the differences between himself and Africans “are more than apparent, the similarities only slight and superficial” (21). That said, he recognizes that “somewhere deep in the hidden reaches of [his] being, Africa beats in [his] blood” (27):

Although I am not African, there is a line that connects that place with this one, the place we come from and the place we find ourselves, those lives and our lives. And I longed to follow that line. But what if those old promises of Africa were only lies? What if I hated the place? Only in traveling there could I discover the truth. (14)

Though Harris reintroduces the notion of a racial heritage through the vague metaphor of the “line” that connects one place with another, this notion can only become real through his journey. It is not a view to which he subscribes, but something that might prove to be true at a later point in the narrative. What Harris does initially, in other words, is not to reject ideas in themselves, but the notion that his decision to go to Africa is based on a specific view of what Africa means to him as a Black American. However, during the journey he may well find out what Africa means to him. He thus defers articulating the meaning of the journey and projects this meaning into the future, a future which is both a moment in Harris’s life and a later point in the narrative.

On the one hand, then, Harris recognizes that the self is shaped by forces beyond its control. On the other hand, the kind of agency that the journey affords the traveller and that writing affords the author is very much at the heart of the text, because it is this that makes the narrative more than just an account of a series of events and locations that Harris visits. Immediately after the passage about his trips to the neighbourhood where his father grew up, Harris writes that “perhaps, then, by going to Africa I could see the past and then get rid of it, shed myself of this roots business once and for all, those invisible shackles that chain us too often to the past” (28; emphasis in original). Key here is, of course, the intertextual reference to Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family (1976). In his novel, which has been seen as the catalyst of the rise of popular family history in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s (Little, 2011: 242), Haley uses fiction and his own family history to link a “pre-literate African past to his own literary, professional present via the terrible saga of slavery” (Taylor, 1995: 46), and to ameliorate one of slavery’s continued effects on the present — the erasure of narratives of belonging and heritage. Haley’s novel famously ends with an autobiographical account of the author’s “return” to a village from which he believes that a distant ancestor, Kunta Kinte, was kidnapped by slave traders. There he meets a local historian who confirms that Kinte was indeed from the area and Haley is subsequently received as a long lost member of the community. Harris, however, uses the imagery of slavery — chains and shackles — not to refer to an absence of genealogical narratives that root the individual’s identity in the past, but to discuss the burden that the past can be for the self. It is a burden that he in his writing tries to face unblinkingly, but also to move beyond and leave behind.

In Harris’s view, then, even though the past has a central place in the text, it is secondary to his expressed expectations on his journey and his narrative. Africa and the history of slavery become symbolic stops on his journey into the future and toward a truer self that is unchained and no longer weighed down by history.

II

The idea of the transformative power of writing has particular theoretical consequences in the context of travel writing, primarily because travel to an extent frees the subject from the moorings of social relations that determine how one is perceived by others. Travel writing has therefore often been seen as a kind of literature in which identity is particularly malleable. In an interconnected world, where almost unlimited information about most places is readily accessible, the primary focus of the travel account as a literary form is arguably not so much place as the “reshaped sense of home and self that results from the journey” (Totten, 2008: 53). Andrew Hammond argues that a drive among travel writers “to sever the selfhood from the beliefs and practices” prevalent in their home cultures in order to “search for higher, absolute truth” became increasingly central in the high modernist era (2003: 186, 172). Ever since, travel and “nomadism” have become staple metaphors for theoretical work and attempts to think beyond established patterns and conceptual frameworks (see Bauman, 2000: 82). Tim Youngs has also pointed out that this is particularly true in Black American writing, in which narratives of “re-identification of oneself through movement” have always been crucial (2010: 78).

The centrality of internal difference in literature of travel — difference from one’s normal social identity — connects the combined practices of travel and writing with what Derek Attridge in his theoretical work on the “singularity” of literary works refers to as “the arrival” of alterity. By this Attridge means the creation of something that is not yet articulated, which is allowed to “impact upon the existing configurations of an individual’s mental world” (2004: 19). Alterity in the sense that Attridge uses it is what the author “is able to apprehend and articulate by reforming and revising the forces that are excluding it” (2015: 143). The fact that Harris distances himself from preconceived notions and entrenched narratives about Africa and identity, together with his desire to “step out” of himself, may be seen as an attempt to open the text to alterity and to the possibility of the becoming of a new and at the same time truer self.

In South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride through Slavery’s Old Backyard (1993), published a year after Native Stranger, Harris writes about how solitude makes it possible for him to re-articulate his identity and become who he really is to himself. Travelling through the American South, he camps at the shore of Lake Cumberland, where he sits and thinks about what it means to be a member of a society where racial categories continue to shape people’s lives:

If I move my eyes down I can see the brown skin of my nose. I can see the black shadow of my moustache. But unless I lift my arms or move my head and look down at myself, I am colorless, shapeless, two eyes looking out, and yet utterly whole and perfect. An abstraction. A thought. An idea. When I am alone, without other men’s opinions of me, without their eyes attempting to define me, without the ways they treat me, their reactions to me, their fear and their loathing and their disgust, and even their kindness, without other men I am simply me. (1993: 93)

In this book, the journey allows Harris to move in and out of social contact with others, and consequently in and out of a version of the self that is compartmentalized by others along racial lines. In the solitude of nature, he achieves the kind of authenticity and autonomy that he strives for in Native Stranger. The closest he gets to this experience in his African travel account, however, is an intense feeling of being “black in Africa”, as he writes, and thus part of a racial majority (108). This feeling occasionally lets him imagine himself not only as one in the crowd, but as seamlessly part of the world around him. This typically happens when Harris travels together with Africans, as he does when he enters Banjul in the Gambia together with Peter, whom he has befriended while riding a bus from Senegal. Though to “eat what the Africans eat and go where they go” does “not make a man African”, Harris decides that he must to do as Peter does (143, 195). He decides to travel together with Peter for a while, and follows his example when the latter boards a ferry at the northern side of the Gambia River without a valid ticket. This, his conscious decision to do as his African friend does, has the effect of narrowing the gap between Harris and the world:

We sit in the bow of the ferry […] The river-spray mists all around us in a cloud that shields us from the heat. Clouds drift in the sky. Schools of thin silvery fish float near the surface of the water. Sea gulls dive down to pick at them. Banjul rises. (146)

In this moment, the erasure of the boundaries between self and the world does not so much reveal a “true self” as it breaks down the cultural difference that separates Harris from people around him. This is reflected in the choice of pronouns in the passage, where “I” has become “we”. He does not become more African or less American, but the anonymity that the absence of visible difference affords him, gives him and the reader a glimpse of the humanness that according to Harris exists beyond racial categories — the humanness whose roots he has come to Africa to seek.

While travel has been understood as a context in which social identities and entrenched beliefs are replaced, many key theoretical works in the field posit travel literature as a kind of writing which is particularly susceptible to the pressures of hegemonic discourse and colonial narratives. It is often seen as closed to what Attridge refers to as the arrival of alterity, because of travellers’ cultural bias and situatedness inside the cultural logic of their home cultures. While associated with existential autonomy and negotiation of identity, the influence of Saidian discourse analysis on travel writing studies has led to an emphasis on the impact of hegemonic discourses on individual travel accounts. Influential studies have therefore concentrated on “identifying recurring tropes” and “explaining their power” in order to demonstrate the embeddedness of travel narratives in, primarily, colonial discourse (Burton, 2014: 11). In Harris’s case, it is not only colonial discourse that impacts upon the text, but also Afrocentric narratives of belonging, which threaten to answer Harris’s questions for him and thus become an obstacle in his self-exploratory project.

In Native Stranger, these contradicting forces — the travel narrative’s simultaneous openness and closedness to alterity — have dramaturgical effects. Alasdair Pettinger has pointed out that in Black American travel literature, the simultaneous romantic assertion and rejection of kinship between the author and Africa(ns) often takes the form of “a passage from one to the other in a rhetoric of disappointment” (2009: 318). By contrast, Harris begins his account by both romantically asserting a connection to Africa and rejecting this notion. He writes that he has an

eerie feeling Africa could teach me about life and what it means to be human, deepen my appreciation for all that I am and all that I have, help me to find, perhaps, the face of God, perhaps even my own face, help me to step out of my cozy little world, out of myself so that I could see myself better and better define myself. (27)

Believing that Africa will change him somehow, he lies awake at night, unable to sleep (26). Even before he sets out on his journey, the monolithic narratives that surround the notion of Africa seem to grab his imagination and begin to pull him in different directions. He writes that “the vision of Africa as homeland” “nags” at him, because “a black man cannot visit Africa without such thoughts creeping upon him” (27). His feeling of being trapped between two forces helps build up a tension and a sense of volatility in the narrative, and this tension can only be resolved through Harris’s self-reflexive writing.

To the journey as experience and narrative, then, is ascribed the power of transforming the self. It remains an unrealized promise, however. Harris soon learns that there are limits to how much the journey and his writing can change his view of himself, because no matter how far away he travels from his home and his normal life, his relative privilege as a Westerner defines how he can see himself and how he is seen by others.

III

As has been argued above, Harris’s efforts to “unshackle” himself — to escape the pressures of narratives about belonging and feelings that creep up on him when he thinks about Africa — feed into the dramaturgy of his narrative. He envisions a moment when his writing will release him from the “trap” he finds himself in and resolve the contradictions at the heart of the text. This moment keeps being deferred and never actually arrives. In the end, Harris fails to find his “true” self and is unable to answer the fundamental question of who he is. Instead, the contradictions that structure the narrative, the extremes that he finds himself trapped between, become part of his view of himself. Put another way, the obstacles that he is forced to negotiate in his narrative about his search for self become constituent elements of this narrative.

Like Richard Wright, Harris conveys his identity as an American as something that ultimately makes it impossible for him to fully engage with the notion of Africa and the meaning it could potentially add to his search for a true self. Thus, his identity as an American limits the number of directions his self-exploration could take. However, this Americanness is not primarily an ideological identity whose meaning is derived from narratives of American exceptionalism. His Americanness is more concrete: he is used to a certain level of comfort and certain rights as an individual, he implies, and therefore has a hard time accepting the powerlessness that he experiences at the hands of bureaucrats and hotel staff, shop owners and customs officials who possess what he sees as a colonial mindset. In one of many passages where he finds himself in confrontation with authorities and service personnel, Harris is at the airport in Casablanca, on his way to Mauritania. He has had a package sent to him, containing rolls of film for his camera, and goes to the post office at the airport to pick it up. There, he learns that his package has indeed arrived, but when he tries to have it released to him it proves easier said than done. He has to deal with a series of “nasty”, “fat”, and “mousy-looking” men whom he alternately scolds and tries to bribe, eventually realizing that he has no choice but to give up (81–2). Resigned, he goes to a café where he buys three bottles of Pepsi, which give him some comfort since they taste “like home” (84). He discusses the Americanness that the Pepsi bottles embody as a part of him that he cannot shake off. “Africa frightened me”, he writes, and “I frightened myself as well. Would I not be able to rid myself of my American sensibilities even for the short time of this voyage?” (84). He does not offer an answer to this question, because it is of course already apparent that his background and cultural belonging are inescapably part of him and his writing.

However, like so many things in Harris’s writing, this Americanness too is contradictory and carries within it a form of internal difference. Though the fact that he is an American is something he cannot get around, his is an Americanness that does not come with the same set of privileges of self-definition that white Americans to a larger extent possess, according to Harris:

I am American. And I am black. I live and travel with two cultural passports, the one very much stamped with European culture and sensibilities and history. The other was issued from the uniquely black experience, which is like no other, born of slavery and hardship and tied to a land we might call home but that we blacks do not know, and most have never seen — Africa.

Blackamericans are different from white Americans, different from Americans who are also Italian or French or Irish, different in our experience. Their distinctions are not racial but ethnic and regional. They share common histories and culture and color. Because they are not marked they can hide inside American society in ways we cannot. And they have access to their homelands in ways we have been denied. Proximity, money, cultural awareness. Africa is far away and expensive to reach. (28)

Paradoxically, the double metaphorical passports that Harris carries with him from his life in the US afford him access to something that resembles epistemological freedom, but at the same time lock him into two socially determined ways of being. He writes early in the text, between passages where he emphatically rejects the notion of being “African”, that perhaps Black Americans are an “African people” and therefore “see the world and react to it differently”, in other ways than white Americans, because Black American language, style, and understanding of love and religion are marked by their differences from white Anglo-American culture (29). On the other hand, he writes, “we are an American people”, who belong to and are products of Western culture and therefore also see the world “through American eyes”. To see things differently, in other ways than other Americans, then, is to see things from a particular American perspective. The difference between the black and the majority perspective is a difference that defines the notion of Americanness.

Harris’s dual passports occasionally let him see events and places from more than one perspective. This doubling of perspective is discernible in his account of his visit to Gorée Island off the coast of Senegal, in a chapter suggestively and perhaps ironically titled “Beginnings of Brotherhood”. Gorée Island was used as a shipping hub in the days of the slave trade and is today visited by tourists wishing to connect with this dark chapter of Atlantic history. As a symbolic site that embodies the memory of atrocities committed during the days of the transatlantic slave trade, Harris’s description of the island is distinctively fractured. He arrives late in the evening, and in the gloom of dusk the island looks to him like the mutilated bodies that were brought here to be shipped off to the Americas. It “sits like a scab on the smooth skin of the evening sea, raised like a welt, ugly and dark in the distance and misshapen” (123). The following day, however, when he views it up close in the daylight, it is stripped of its symbolic status and instead attains aesthetic values. Now, “the island is as pretty and precious as a prize, its low buildings glimmering faintly pink in the newly risen sun” (123).

In her discussion about this passage, Zara Bennett points out that Harris’s description of the island suggests “that the narrator is unsure how to read and respond to Gorée” (2006: 13). She writes that “the narrator seems to resent its pleasing appearance because it distracts the eye and, potentially, the mind” (14). Consequently, it threatens “to jeopardize the transmission of the island’s infamous history”. In Harris’s account, the beauty of the island indeed contrasts with its ugly part in the history of slavery. However, the ambiguity of the passage calls for a different interpretation when read from a viewpoint that focuses on Harris’s reluctance to subscribe to one specific narrative about Africa and Black American identity. Obviously, Harris indeed sees the island as a symbol of the history of pain, degradation, and suffering, but this symbolism does not cancel out the beauty of the little seaside village, where “bright red flowers peep around corners and over garden walls” and “flashes of blue from the sea and from the sky sparkle under the arches” when he views it through the eyes of a detached Western tourist (123). The passport that is “stamped” with “European sensibilities” allows for a different view of the relation between past and present than the passport that is “issued from the uniquely black experience” (28). Harris’s unwillingness to prioritize a certain positionality before his attempts to write unconditionally about his memories and experiences of his time in Africa makes it possible for him to explore both the aesthetic and symbolic values of the island. The island’s ugliness impresses itself on him through the link between past and present, but he is able to appreciate its beauty from a perspective in which this link is less concrete.

Harris’s sense of an internal fracturing of identity shares its basic elements with the notion of double consciousness, famously explicated by W. E. B. Dubois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Initially, Dubois saw this condition as a debilitating splitting of the self into “two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals” (1990/1903: 8). This “two-ness” is “born when one’s self-understanding collides with social constructions of race that limit one’s ability to actualize one’s vision of the self” (Watson, 2013: 16). Harris similarly sees the two-ness as emanating from the world around the self. He says in an interview that his self-reflexive travel writing allows him to “delve into” this sense of carrying two passports, which is “almost fostered on us as part of American society, because that society won’t allow us to just be American” (Hållén, 2014: 288). He thus confirms Tim Youngs’s view that the context of travel and the displacement of the subject that travel entails in Black American literature bring double consciousness to the surface of the text (2010: 79).

Harris’s use of travel and its contexts to frame the process of the fracturing of the self presents it as a willed and not entirely unpleasant experience. This may seem like a watering down of the destructive force that Dubois ascribes to it in his original discussion of double consciousness, but Harris is of course not the first to see the appeal of the creative possibilities that the splitting of subjectivity entails. Although the doubleness that both Dubois and Harris discuss is caused by the pressures of socially imposed narratives of race, later commentators on double consciousness have remarked that it has often been turned into an advantage: what Dubois initially saw as a “peculiar sensation” that fractures the subject and denies it the wholeness that other people supposedly enjoy, he and others after him have later understood as something that can be used for subversive purposes (Dubois, 1990/1903: 8). The subversion stems from the fact that double consciousness makes it possible to see and represent things as if from two different perspectives. In this sense it is similar to the “highly accomplished rhetorical strategy” in Black American literature that, according to Henry Louis Gates, makes possible “a remarkably self-reflexive representation of the ironies of writing a text in which two foregrounded voices compete with each other for control of narration itself” (Gates, 1989/1988: 240). Paul Gilroy goes one step further in his discussion of double consciousness in The Black Atlantic, wherein he underlines the impact of Dubois’s journeying “inside and outside the veiled world of black America” on Dubois’s thinking about the concept, which Gilroy sees as a tool for radical critique of modernity (1993: 127).

Harris’s two metaphorical passports characteristically lead the text in two different directions. One is toward a recognition of the fact that the view of the self as autonomous and self-contained will inevitably remain an abstract idea that cannot be realized. The other is the fact that Harris to some extent avoids giving up his attempts to free himself from the pressures of entrenched narratives about identity and about Africa simply by allowing the text to contradict itself. The destabilization of the narrative that is the result of the frequent contradictions and pervasive ambivalence safeguard the text from the influence of beliefs, views, and opinions that are not Harris’s own. His wavering between different and sometimes contradicting views of his connection to Africa and the relation between place and identity can therefore be seen both as caused by the pressures of external discourse and as a strategy to avoid these pressures.

However, Harris’s moving between different views of his own position in the world eventually makes him aware of the impossibility of stepping out of himself, ridding himself of the past, or shedding the skin of his old self, as he writes. Ironically, these limits are not set so much by narratives of race, but by the Americanness that he in other contexts is denied. When visiting Dakar, Harris teams up with Mamadou, a man that he meets by chance. They go to an upscale hotel bar where the customers are mainly white tourists served by a black staff, but are turned away because only guests at the hotel are allowed in the bar. Outraged, Harris takes Mamadou to a different bar at a pier nearby, where Harris “saunter[s] in” and orders drinks for himself and his new friend. Having been served, they enjoy their drinks, watching the white tourists with their “fleshy bellies, wide hips” (133). As his anger subsides, Harris becomes aware that as a comparatively affluent Westerner he is hardly different from the white tourists around him, who have been the target of his frustration with the colonial mentality of both blacks and whites: “I do not want to be like them”, he writes, “but in many ways I already am and cannot help it, more like them than these others whom I so visibly resemble” (133). This realization makes the children playing on the beach below seem to be “a world away”.

Harris’s struggle to resist any intrusions from outside when exploring and defining a self is thus disrupted when he has to face the fact of his own relative privilege. The passport of European sensibilities becomes a symbol of the fact that, from a global perspective, Harris is first and foremost a relatively affluent and privileged Westerner and that imagination or writing alone cannot hide this fact and give him access to a different self. As has been mentioned above, he is not alone in this realization among Black American travellers. Another writer who came to the same conclusion is Ebony writer and co-editor Era Bell Thompson, who travelled through Africa at the same time as Wright travelled to the Gold Coast. Her difficulties in trying to adapt to the inconveniences of African travel made her realize that she, after all, was not a “prodigal daughter”, “repatriated African”, and “African cousin” as she at times styled herself in her travel account, Africa, Land of my Fathers (1954: 109, 204). Harris’s two passports allow him to imagine what it would be like to be someone else and to see the world from that person’s point of view, but also remind him that there are definite limits as to how effective such exercises can be. Like Thompson, he learns in a new way that he indeed is not African. This is what he as the narrator of the story has said all along, but in this context the effect is not to make possible new ways of articulating a self by rejecting external definitions of himself. This time the realization has the opposite result: it reveals a part of the self that remains unaffected by the creative power of writing.

Before he arrives in Dakar, Harris stops to photograph the river that marks the border between Mauritania and Senegal. Harris is arrested, his camera is taken from him and he is taken to a guard post where he is interrogated by the station commandant. When he produces his passport, however, the commandant seems to “soften” and becomes quiet (100). It is eventually decided that Harris will get his camera back, but will also be expelled from Mauritania:

I was not angry about being deported but about something else, I wasn’t quite sure what just then. Perhaps I was angry about the general unfairness of earning a certain measure of respect because of the passport I carried, a passport that was a barrier keeping me from knowing certain fears and degradations, keeping me safe. (101)

The naivety of Harris’s search for the authentic is in this context (presumably unconsciously) made obvious by the fact that to express this wish is to ignore the fact that one chooses to experience what it is like to not have a choice. This wish is common in Western travel literature, but in Native Stranger it highlights the privileged position Harris enjoys as a Westerner, as someone who can deliberately put himself in certain situations in order to imagine what it is like to be someone else. Nevertheless, by pointing out that his status as a Westerner affords him certain positive benefits, Harris recognizes that he is unable to experience and therefore represent what it means to lack these privileges from any other position than that which he inhabits as a Black American travelling in Africa.

Of the two metaphorical passports that Harris carries, it is the one stamped with “European culture and sensibilities and history” that proves to be a barrier to authentic experience. However, the passport of black experience also makes him accept that his relation to Africa as a Black American is, at least to an extent, defined by history and other forces outside of his own writing. In the paragraph that follows the one quoted above, Harris describes how he interpreted his anger at the time:

I blamed it on the heat, told myself that the desert and the sun had burned holes in my soul, but as I looked then across the river and faced black Africa I was confronted with the realization that those passing through Senegal and bound for the Americas had been in chains, and I knew then that the holes were being burned into my soul by the mingling in my blood of acids of various strains of my African ancestry, and deep in the consciousness I shared with my forefathers I remembered how others among my peoples had turned tribal and fought among themselves, collaborated with what should have been the common enemy, and enabled the white man to buy and steal and enslave my African ancestors. As I was escorted out of Mauritania I was outraged, for I could see in a small way how slavery can happen, how many horrors can happen. Men following orders, hiding their humanity. (101–2)

The perspective shifts to the passport of “black experience”, but a markedly American black experience. Instead of being unable to “feel the helplessness the Africans feel” as he writes elsewhere in the book (174), he magically gains some insight into the suffering of his ancestors who were shipped off to America. He portrays his anger at being denied insight into what it means to be African and to suffer at the hands of corrupt politicians because he is an American. But his anger makes him more Black American than he is in other situations, such as when he reclines in a deck chair beside Mamadou at the pier in Dakar and realizes that he is more like other Western tourists than he perhaps would wish. The doubleness affords him a degree of epistemological freedom and lets him experiment with his view of the world. However, since it makes him realize that he is like the white tourists on the pier in Senegal but also that he carries the memory of slavery in him, it is also an analytical device that makes him aware that there is a limit to this epistemological freedom and that there are things that writing cannot change.

IV

In fine, the closest Harris gets to resolving the contradictions that structure his narrative is to reinterpret his blackness as a form of Americanness, as other travellers have done before and after him. However, what sets Harris’s case apart from many similar accounts of travels in Africa is the fact that the text centres on and actively engages with its internal conflicts and contradictions. The fact that Harris allows the tensions at the heart of the text to run their course forces him to admit that he is unable to reach satisfactory closure in his project of self-exploration. His text therefore reads as an examination not of the possibilities of discovering a true self and resolving the dilemmas that history forces upon the self, but of the possibilities and limits of writing.

Derek Attridge observes that because the arrival of alterity in the writing process to some degree requires the relinquishing of control, “there is always an element of risk in the process of creation” (2004: 26). In Native Stranger, Harris paradoxically fights to remain in control of the text by letting the contradictions of the narrative play out at the text’s core. His frankness at the end of his narrative, when he writes that he has yet to work out who he is, indicates a certain level of authorial control. His “failure” is not unexpected: he signals at the very beginning of the text that his journey has made him no wiser about these issues. It is in other words possible to read this failure as a dramaturgic device that is orchestrated rather than a disappointing outcome of his literary project. His Sisyphean self-exploratory project reveals the level of complexity involved in any attempt to find a way to deal with a past one must live with, in a present one must live in.

Less conspicuous than Harris’s fear and anticipation of his discovery of an authentic self is the risk that he takes when he struggles to resist the pressures of external narratives of heritage and belonging, while refusing to once and for all reject the idea that he is somehow connected to Africa. Even though his experiences in Africa leave him with a renewed sense of what it means to be a Black American, he never fully and finally arrives at a definition of his relation to Africa. The Africa to which he finds himself looking back, is therefore remarkably abstract and ephemeral:

The Africa in my dreams and the Africa I remember, now that I have been there, come together and diverge to form crisscrossing patterns of texture and color, light and shadow, like a haunting abstract work of art that dominates corners of the imagination, a tapestry weaving itself out of what is real and what is pure imagination, a tapestry whose colors and cultures collide and overlap, changing from country to country, religion to religion, from place to place and village to village. (18)

This is how Africa appears at the moment of writing, in which introspection assumes the form of a narrative. In this too, then, Harris is inevitably unsuccessful, but it is a failure that serves to map the limits of literary representation. For Harris, Africa is finally too complex, diverse, and overdetermined to be neatly reduced to an image that is comprehensible and possible to understand. His connections to Africa, and all the things it means for him, are too numerous, too complex, and too resistant of definition to be accounted for.

Attridge argues that in works of literature that are open to the arrival of alterity, of something new and not previously articulated, “failure is frequent, when the otherness that seemed to be on the horizon turns out to be another version of the same; conversely, success can often look like failure at first” (2004: 26). The series of shortcomings and moments in which Harris’s writing collapses in upon itself leads up to a moment where his representational project is transformed into something else — an exploration of the ways in which writing at once can and cannot represent and shape a self in becoming.