Modern African humans effecting Atlantic middle passes

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay challenges the traditional focus of the Black Atlantic on Anglophone-dominant movement and culture by prioritizing Afro-Francophone discussion, through a philosophical contextualization of Fatou Diome’s Le Ventre de L’Atlantique in conversation with Aminata Traoré’s Le Viol de L’Imaginaire. The essay offers an exploration of fugitivity or exile from colonially structured material conditions and lived experiences of unfreedom in African contexts, notions present in both narratives. After presenting and analyzing a key element of the encounter between Western human beings and African human be-ings, it considers a central element of Diome’s novel, in counterpart with a central theme of Traoré’s text. It explores the idea that the type of fugitivity that transpires in Diome’s novel, and the kind of exile of which Traoré speaks, can be understood as, in part, a result of a salient feature of the relationality between human beings and human be-ings. In that Diome’s Salie and Traoré tell their communities what they know about the West and how Africans really fare there, they break through community lies and ignorance that aid and abet – but do not, at the root, cause – the complex situation of capture and captivation that coerce or seduce Africa’s youth into varying states of fugitivity or exile. Both propose reimaging and rebuilding Africa for Africans – an endeavour requiring that African youth remain in Africa.