We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World

MEMOIRS AND BIOGRAPHY Manthia Diawara. We Won't Budge: An African Exile in the World. New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003. 255 pp. $26.00. Cloth.

Manthia Diawara courts controversy in his poignant meditation by both challenging conventional wisdom and dissecting the ironies, vagaries, and contradictions (ah, the sweet contradictions) inherent in African immigration to France and the United States. Polemical scarcely describes Diawara's perspective on the illogic and hypocrisies of the enforced, if not expected, march toward cultural assimilation and toward contested national and racialized identities when Africans migrate and often reluctantly settle abroad: "Little do the Amadou Diallos of the world know," writes Diawara, "that the black man in America bears the curse of Cain, and that in America they, too, are considered black men, not Fulanis, Mandingos, or Wolofs" (ix). In France, on the other hand, it is the image of the perpetual, undocumented immigrant (les sans-papiers) that dominates public perception. Though Africans are frequently French citizens and nationals, they decidedly do not enjoy the "model minority immigrant" status accorded them in the U.S., the shootings of Ousman Zongo and Amadou Diallo notwithstanding. In these contexts, immigrant Africans have become the stuff of a twisted French dilemma and a manipulative American dream. That is to say, there is an inner contradiction between the American creed and the French credo-the belief in equality and liberty for all-and the legitimized practice of according unequal treatment to people of African origin. African youths embrace the specious promises of belonging proffered by the "West" only to realize after landing on its shores how empty those promises truly are.

Drawing from nuanced remembrance of his newcomer years in the U.S., Diawara speaks to those conflicted feelings through the device of literary irony, reinforcing the impression of a distorted reality that drives migration and eventual settlement. When he arrives in the U.S. during the 1970s, he runs head first into the prevailing black nationalist rhetoric of the period, coupled with the strident demands of its proponents to know why he did not remain in their romanticized Africa. "Because every boy's and girl's dream there is to go to Europe or America," replies Diawara. "This is because everything is from those countries. The clothes we wear are from there; the education we receive is from there; the music and even the food are from there. Everything good we know is from there; even God is from there. So we come ourselves to see where all these good things are coming from, to be part of the West ourselves. Of course, now that I am here myself, after being in France, I see some things differently. The racism of the West has turned me into a black nationalist" (254-55).

Whether it delights or enrages the public (and it is certain to do both), We Won't Budge should be praised for daring to take on issues considered taboo, social questions concealed within a consistently racist humanism masked as "integration." It is from such policies of fabricated inclusion that, to borrow from Sartre, suitable slaves and monsters are fashioned by necessity and complicity. And yet, Diawara's human adventure is seductively contradictory, in a Fanonian sense, when, for example, he juxtaposes the disdainful reception of Africans in France with descriptions of his most cherished places, suggesting a deceptively inviting world: "I don't know why I care about Paris," he observes. "Sometimes I feel that Paris does not care about me. But I keep telling people that Paris is my favorite city in the world. I love the cafés, the cuisine, and the big boulevards. They make me feel good, as if they were made for me and for people like me, who enjoy these vestiges of modernity" (25).

His approach to African-on-African and African-versus-African American tensions also reflects a number of ironies and contradictions. Although he clearly acknowledges the deleterious effects it has had on contemporary Africa, the "West" appears to be curiously embraced for its modernity and its popular culture by Diawara and his compatriots. However, to suggest that Diawara is praising the West while denouncing Africa is to miss the point. The effects of slavery and colonialism are but two of the dominant forces driving both poverty and prosperity in Diawara's lived realities. And yet his and his friends' taste and desire for rock-and-roll and jazz along with French cuisine and its café culture, which Diawara captures so vividly, become surface representations of a transcultural habitus constituted through those very forces and reconstituted through migration.

Bamako, Paris, Washington, New York are among the hubs on this journey, in addition to the more local, contested terrain of family and community. all in all, Diawara initiates a much needed conversation about the bittersweet experience of African immigration, the heated tensions emerging among blacks in the diaspora, and the responses of one man ensnared reluctantly in this melee. The strength of Diawara's captivating, often disturbing narrative lies in its critique of that conversation, of an African diaspora disrupted by globalization and transnational life, and, more interestingly, of an African in exile-Manthia Diawara himself.