This unity of spilt blood": tracing remnant consciousness in Kofi Awoonor's Comes the Voyager at Last.

Publication: Research in African Literatures

Publication Date: 22-JUN-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Indiana University Press

With AfricanaAirways, we can renavigate the



Middle Passage, clear the old debris and freshen the waters with iodine and soul-clorine. And our journey into SoulTime will be The distance between the Eye and the Ear Kofi Anyidoho, "HavanaSoul" There was an Old Testament prophet who named his son The remnant shall return. They must have lived in times like this. We have a different metaphor, though; we have our own version of hope that springs eternal.... AMAECHINA: May the path never close. Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah

Kofi Awoonor's Comes the Voyager at Last is a novel that is characterized by migration stories, stories that situate various voyagers in the midst of their cultural passages. In the novel's dedication, Awoonor connects writers from Africa and her Diaspora, identifying people of African descent as "extended family members in Babylon." Voyager is an orphic journey designed to contextualize both the "unity" and the dissonance that connect African and African Diaspora cultures. The novel's epigraphs, the first from Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" and the second from a Methodist requiescat, echo this unity of opposition. Awoonor juxtaposes Keats's references to Ruth amidst "the alien corn" against the hymn that describes a voyager whose spiritual journey also ends in an unfamiliar space, one that is "upon the farther shore":

Now the labourer's task is done, Now the battle day is over, Now upon the farther shore Lands the voyager at last (1)

Building upon these "alien" associations early in the novel, Awoonor describes the ways in which people of African descent will eventually survive the legacies of slavery. In his provocative association of the idea of home with the upheaval of forced migration, Awoonor commoves the relationship between culture and belongingness by focusing on the tensions that shape African and Afro-descent identity both on the continent and in Africa's diaspora. Awoonor aptly demonstrates this connection in his description of the new "tribal" subjectivity embraced the novel's captive narrator:

... [T]hat was what we had become in the unity of spilt blood, the only tribe we shall ever know. My vow was not to become oblivious of this blood that would bear us, like the mounting wave of survival, from defeat to defeat (or was it victory?) and lead us home. In that blood is encapsulated the poison of the being of the bird and the beast, the blast of the plant in its denudation while it crackled and smoked under the furious assault of the bird and the beast. There would be a light, incandescent, trembling in the blazoning flowers that would lead us on. (30)

In the fusion of these competing and metaphoric references, Awoonor speaks to the cultural situation that has evolved as a consequence of the transatlantic slave trade and the European colonization of Africa. The ensuing migrations, both the forced and the voluntary, have continually shaped African and African Diasporan notions about the relationships between space, time, and culture.

Awoonor's concept of the "unity of spilt blood," though marked by the African and African Diasporan notion of limbo time, suggests something significant about the ways in which migration frames the possibilities for cultural and ontological wholeness in the migratory subject. (2) Awoonor's focus on time is fundamental to the migration motif. Time provides the mythological framework for the multiple and generational migrations at the center of the text. For much of the novel, the characters, those named and unnamed, those identified as African and as African American, are pictured in the liminal spaces defined by the middle passages that are their lives. Like the African captives whose cultural rootedness was systematically ruptured by their journeys to the slave markets of Britain and the New World, Awoonor's characters literally exist in the turbulence of the middle passage. In this liminal state Awoonor's protagonists struggle to focus simultaneously on surviving their middle passages, while they cling to the memories that will eventually replace "home." Awoonor's focus on home is defined and redefined throughout the novel because it is constructed by the dual migrations and cultural memories of his characters. I see this relationship as one that is deeply rooted in both African and African Diaspora cultures precisely because the notion of "home" is continuously contingent upon cultural memories that--by virtue of a variety of phenomena including colonization, racist praxis, migration, and ethnocentrism--are always constructed in migratory spaces. "Home" becomes defined by remnant consciousness: the ontological, physical, and spiritual manifestations of reclaiming an African cultural heritage despite the complexities of what passes as African given the multiple ways in which--and the multiple audiences for which--Africans identify themselves. The possibility of this connection is in itself empowering; however, it is made all the more so by the fact that its very existence refutes the Western insistence that such a reclamation is impossible.

Despite the fact that home no longer exists, the desire that replaces "home" is a significant cultural mooring in the face of this impossibility. It is what contours remnant consciousness, a paradigm that shapes much of Diaspora writing and one that Awoonor certainly draws upon in the ways in which he structures the relationship between identity and place in Comes the Voyager at Last. Whether disconnected from their homes by choice or by force, this cultural remnant envisions their parent culture(s) through an elaborate melding of memory, mystery, and history. "Home" is characterized by a desire that transcends Western notions of nostalgia. "Home" is what is absent from the cultural specificity of the moment, mired as it is in the rupture of familial and social bonds. This notion is evident in the way Awoonor figures "home" in his description of remnant consciousness:

There is no feeling like the home going feeling that I hear grips people who stray away from their homeland ... a place you carry in your memory, a place built into an edifice of joy and sorrow, stamped at the end of the processional march of your folks in long gone days, where you learnt the syllables and movements of every sidewalk and mean alley, of every neighborhood drunk, every cop, trader, and publican, every communal joy and sorrow. A place where you walked in your own footsteps hearing the footfalls of folks before you.... (8)

Remnant consciousness situates a remembered culture as it existed prior to the moment of rupture, a moment that assumes mythic proportions in the Diasporan search for cultural wholeness. Ultimately, the remnant's hunger for this quintessential "home" produces an image of the space that is grounded in tradition and enhanced by the desire to remember and recreate a particular cultural moment. Remnant consciousness, then, is a term that embodies this hunger for a remembered home that is situated in the desire for cultural wholeness, even if this memory revolves around epistemological or religious systems that have framed, but are...

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