SOURCE: “Exile, Alienation and Literature: The Case of Es'kia Mphahlele,” in Africa Today, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1986, pp. 27-35.

Exile is a prime cause of alienation, and alienation is (surely) something to be deplored. The nineteenth-century psychotherapist was often called an “alienist.” “Alienation of the affections” seems at one time to have been an indictable offence within family case-law. And everywhere the song of the exile has been poignant:

Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.(1)

It is true that Dante, when exiled from his native Florence, put a brave face on it by claiming philosophically, “My country is the whole world.” And when his recall to Florence was offered him on dishonourable terms he rejected the offer with the words “Can I not everywhere behold the light of the sun and stars; everywhere meditate the noblest truths, without appearing ingloriously and shamefully before the city and the people?” In the same stoic spirit Epictetus, born a Greek slave, had earlier urged men to claim that they were “citizens of the world” rather than “countrymen of Athens or Rome.” But these seem desperate and unreal remedies.

Is there not, however, another way of interpreting exile and alienation? Ovid was expelled from Rome (9 AD) by Augustus, partly for having offended with his Ars Amatoria, and partly for some scandal affecting the imperial family. He was sent to Tomis on the Black Sea where he wrote the Tristia and his Epistolae ex Ponto which contain moving and fine accounts of his sufferings. Or, to take a case from the Russian diaspora—dissident writers expelled from the USSR: some have bitterly complained that by this means Russia has lost those who have given most to Russian culture; whereas a few, like Joseph Brodsky, have actually had their Russian-ness enlarged, not stifled, by the acquisition of a new (the English) language.² These are poignant examples—and many others could be adduced.³ Their achievement is to show what creative art can make of adversity.

And at the dimension of world history a similar argument is available. Marx made alienation and its cures the centre of his early work. But even he sees a kind of necessity, and therefore of opportunity, in the stages that have to be overcome—the dialectic is description, not exculpation, but his implication is that evolution is recordable. And in a narrower, more localised context, Mr. Terry Eagleton makes a similar point. He opens his Exiles and Emigrés with an extended epigram:

If it is agreed that the seven most significant writers of twentieth century English literature have been a Pole, three Americans, two Irishmen and an Englishman, then it might also be agreed that the paradox is odd enough to warrant analysis.⁴

This issue is raised in a striking form by the publication of two books: a Life of Es'kia Mphahlele, Exiles and Homecomings, by N. Chabani Manganyi,⁵ and a year later by Prof. Mphahlele's autobiography, Afrika My Music.⁶ The latter is a continuation of his own well-known earlier Down Second Avenue⁷ which appeared in 1959; this second part covers from 1957–1983. Prof. Manganyi's life is useful, particularly for the inclusion of many letters, notably between Mphahlele and his English South African friend Norah Taylor; but it is long-winded, and contains a number of tiresome and self-conscious taped discussions between Mphahlele and his friends which are embarrassingly hearty and “spontaneous.” The autobiography is sharper, concise and full of graphic descriptions and illuminating comparisons. This second part takes us from his flight from South Africa to Nigeria in 1957; his teaching in Lagos and Ibadan; to Paris as Director of the African Program of the Congress for Cultural Freedom; on to Kenya as (briefly) Director of the Chemchemi Centre; then to Denver, Colorado, for his Ph.D., which took the form of his first novel, The Wanderers,⁸ and earned him a teaching post at that university; while there he was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature; then he was elected Professor at the University of Pennsylvania; and finally, after a preliminary visit to South Africa for a conference in 1976, he returned to his home country for good, ending up as Professor of African Literature at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Mphahlele's first step towards exile was a short-term move from South Africa to Lesotho (then Basutoland). Here is what it meant to him: He went there

… in search of something. What it was I didn't know. But it was there, where it wasn't, inside me … I stood one night a few yards from the foot of a hill. You find solid palpable darkness in Basutoland … When you take the first step into exile, you take on the universe and breathe fire … Myriad voices great and small keep telling you: bitterness will sour your spirit. It will spoil the music, the poetry, and will turn you into a dilettante.⁹

But it was not until his final one-way ticket out that the fact of exile hit him. The first effect was surprising, exhilarating.

I kept feeling in those days of exile that that country [Nigeria] and its people were doing something to me, deep in the core of my being … Nigeria was retrieving Africa for me. It made me feel, perhaps for the first time, immensely African.¹⁰

It taught him that “back in South Africa I had always mistaken anger for bitterness … (Now) wholesome and purer emotions like anger became possible. I was free to be angry.”¹¹

This lesson was never unlearned. But soon Nigeria, like so many of his places of exile, proved but a staging post: Paris, Uganda, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, the year's stay in Kenya—they were tiring, restless, but enlarging. In Paris he mastered French with remarkable rapidity, and this opened up for him the rich world of Francophone African poets and novelists—he has done some valuable translations of some of these. But the cosmopolitan experience enabled him to take a fresh look, from inside, at “Western culture.”

In South Africa he had had a love-hate relationship with “European” (sc. “white”) culture. He had immersed himself in all that was available to him—especially poetry, drama and the novel. Indeed he was (rightly) suspicious of the desire of some white “Africanists” to preserve indigenous literature and art; he felt that their motives had been patronizing and regressive. Yet he had been aware that the black elite in South Africa could become alienated from their less literate countrypeople. Indeed, he had started a little magazine, The Voice, which was a good training for his later work on Drum magazine. The Voice concentrated on prose fiction and especially to expose the treatment of blacks on white farms, in prisons, etc. He formed a group of writers who produced a dynamic movement—“it was the black man writing for the black man … not addressing himself to the whites—no appeal or pleading to the white man to try to understand us.”¹² But now, after his immersion in European life and culture he could begin to make distinctions within the white world. And when he moved to America he found yet another version of “European culture.” Older Europe had said to him that history has already been made. But

with those hamburgers, Coca-Cola and Cadillacs, Americans seemed to be saying all the time that there could be no past … History and culture were like material artifacts, something for recycling so that the present might prove more abundant. The future? It could only be resplendent in its promise.¹³

But he found something else which was crucial. In Denver he began to look at American negro poetry of protest, and found not only “what it feels like to be a black American,” but

if we look at the poetics that I began picking my way through, we realise this is what poetry should have been doing since man gave that first cry to articulate his feelings. Something happened to poetry subsequently that turned it into a mere cerebral activity for the poet's own private amusement or that of his coterie. This was one of the aberrations of alienated Western man. It was thus, all over again, conflict and challenge that were to shake up poetry with an awareness of mission.¹⁴

So we get a double alienation, not just of the exile from home, but also from those he is exiled among. Out of this Mphahlele develops something of a mission. He explained to an American colleague “You might say that Denver was antiseptic. Denver had no smell, you see. It's high and pure air,” whereas he needed to guide himself by his sense of smell.”¹⁵ When he bought a house in Denver its owner left a piano in the basement because it would have cost 60 dollars to remove. Mphahlele hacked it to bits with an axe. “That was a moment of glory for me. I did not see why I should inherit someone else's junk. You love your own junk because it has a smell that expresses you.”¹⁶ But his mission was not only to the American whites. At a symposium on “The Function of Black Criticism at the present time” a number of distinguished African writers were present. They discussed various forms of literary expression appropriate to a black world, and Mphahlele suddenly exploded with “the novel is a bourgeois form.” Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian poet-novelist, took exception to this. But Mphahlele grabbed the microphone:

“No, no, no. I did not say narrative. I said the novel, which as a specific kind of narrative is bourgeois because it developed in a bourgeois culture.”¹⁷

Mphahlele's pioneer work while still in South Africa was a thesis on the black man as portrayed in South African fiction—black and white, though mostly white. This was his M. A. thesis for the University of South Africa, and it formed the basis of his first major work, The African Image.¹⁸ This was a wide-ranging, perceptive survey of the field—the first of its kind. He followed it while in Denver with a serious critical essay on “Poetry and Conflict in the Black World” which, with five other shorter essays together make up the volume Voices in the Whirlwind.¹⁹ Here he expresses, sometimes pugnaciously, views which he could never have formulated without a period of exile. He could be laudatory.

Negritude caught on with the Caribbeans and then with the Africans. And now that colonialism has receded … the Afro-Americans have taken it back and are producing volumes of verse vindicating their black pride … (They) have mastered the language of “felt thought.” They do not try to use rhetoric and do their thinking for them … The poignancy that we read in the American and Caribbean poetry of alienation shows again and again that this is where negritude began, that it was not mere gesturing but alienation felt deep down in the marrow.²⁰

But Mphahlele is also too good a critic to let the bogus and the shoddy go by, and this has earned him some unpopularity. Thus, while accepting that negritude can be “a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values,” he criticises

the way in which too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticises Africa—as a symbol of innocence, purity and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person and proud of it—it is often a healthy state of mind.²¹

Protests of course followed. In America Mphahlele found that some had formed an image of him as “a king of Afro-Saxon or Euro-African who can't be trusted to speak for Africa, is still less fitted to penetrate Black American writing.”²² And when, on his return to South Africa he visited the National University of Lesotho at Roma many students opposed him. He tried to explain that he had “come back to claim my ancestral heritage, to assert my role as a humanist,” but they still insisted that he was “a traitor to the cause in ever having returned.”²³

In fact the protests were largely misplaced. What was being demanded of him was that he should become a mere propagandist. But again and again he has denounced “art as propaganda.” Many, he says, have seen African literature as “functional”—writing to advocate the black man's cause. But this draws a dangerous line of distinction.

between a function in which an author vindicates or asserts black pride or takes a sociopolitical stand, (and) a function in which he seeks to stir humanity as a whole … The functions overlap, and the bigger the rift between them the more stridently the propaganda wells out, the more life's ironies and paradoxes are overlooked, and the more the reader feels his sense of belonging assailed or unduly exploited. It is not that protest is necessarily faulty; indeed all art … is a kind of protest, a criticism of life. Much depends on the writer's vision and the way he protests.²⁴

The problem could hardly be better stated. And the mention of “humanity as a whole” is particularly significant. For what Mphahlele is really raising here is the deepest issue of all: the relation of the particular to the universal.

Mphahlele's detailed studies of Black African, Caribbean and Afro-American writers show his concern for the particular distinctiveness of this genre of writing. But he is also aware of the ambiguities of this very distinctiveness, because his experience as a South African never left him wherever exile took him. In South Africa he was battling precisely against the (white) government's claim that

the schooling he [the black South African] had been receiving (British oriented and steered mostly by mission institutions) alienated him from his own people, and frustrated him because, as the structure of society stood, he could never compete with the white man.²⁵

Mphahlele had to agree about the alienation. Indeed in another context, concerning the Francophone contributors to Présence Africaine (Sedar Senghor, Birago, David Diop, etc.), he himself said that

it is only the elite who have been assimilated and who assert this importance of being Negro—negritude … Poetry inspired by negritude is for an elite, because only the elite are plagued by the problem of identity.²⁶

But the South African answer to this alienation was that of total excision: cut the black man off from “European” education and leave him with his homogeneous culture.²⁷ Mphahlele, like all self-respecting blacks, would solve it by eliminating the barriers. That battle is still engaged.

To show his pride in the distinctive blackness of African writing he has a paper on “The Fabric of African Culture” in which he lists such features as family relationships, “rites of passage,” the relation of the individual to the group, music and dance, and loyalty to the past—the spirits and ancestors.

Always Africans gravitate towards one another in towns. A European suburb always looks dead on weekends … Africans on the other hand, swarm the streets on weekends, just walking about and visiting.²⁸

These broad elements of the “African personality” are common to most societies on the African continent. Apart from that, “we are all ambivalent personalities, switching from one form of response to another as we find convenient.”²⁹ Elsewhere, for instance, he says

Although I am African, the Nigerian or the Kenyan or the Zambian experience is alien to me in the cultural specifics. And if I want to explore imaginatively and sympathetically any such experience, I cannot afford to skip the specifics … I have to be alive to the similarities between my experiences and the other black man's at different periods of history.³⁰

In fact Mphahlele turns the tables neatly on the kind of white critic who exaggerates the distinctiveness by saying (as one did) that because only the black man can write authentically about being black (a proposition with which one must agree), therefore “Negro suffering is not of the same kind as ours,” and so the non-black can never understand or enter into the emotion of a black work of art. Mphahlele's response to this was to appeal to an extremely interesting and little-known article in the British Journal of Aesthetics by an Indian philosopher, Professor Krishna R. Rayan, on the place of emotion in art. Prof. Rayan there showed that

The theory of Rasa-dhvani—The suggestion of emotion in art—first made its appearance in Sanskrit literary criticism of the ninth century through the writings of Anandarvardhana. Although T. S. Eliot did not become acquainted with Sanskrit criticism till as recently as 1955, his “objective correlative”—the formulation that “in art, states of sentience are suggested through their sensuous equivalents”—corresponds very closely to the Sanskrit theory.”³¹

In other words there can be unlikely correspondences of aesthetic phenomena, and even of the interpretation of them, over widely separated geographical and chronological spaces. It is interesting, by the way, that in his account of his early self-education in South Africa Mphahlele discovered

the incisive qualities of the Scottish and English ballads and saw in them an exciting affinity with the way in which the short story works: the single situation rather than a developmental series of events; … action, vivid and dramatic; singleness and intensity of emotion; … the often terrifying and intense focus on a situation … (etc.) They are so close to our own folk tales that depict violence and the supernatural.³²

All this suggests that there are certain human ‘universals’ which the separate study of non-related cultures can demonstrate. Dr. Wole Soyinka has coined a valuable phrase to describe some such principle: he calls it the “metaphysics of the irreducible.”³³ However much Soyinka may have on occasions disagreed with Mphahlele, it seems that they would agree upon this.

A challenge to this conception might come, indeed has come, from the political left. Dr. T. Eagleton, in the book quoted earlier, criticised T. S. Eliot's use of mythology, especially in The Waste Land, as implying that a common principle underlies all manifestations of life.

This is a fundamental presupposition of the anthropology Eliot uses … (sc.) the belief that men, always, and everywhere, are basically alike … It is a belief which Eliot certainly held. He believed in a “common principle underlying all manifestations of life” (Jessie Weston) … This belief is related to Eliot's general conservatism … To believe that all men are always and everywhere much the same is to believe that radical change (with the exception of religious, extra-cultural change) is an illusion … and is to undermine the significance of particular cultures and histories in the light of a primitive, permanent, and universal substratum of consciousness.³⁴

However, I do not think that Mphahlele need feel that his withers can be wrung by this particular species of naive marxism. He is not so simple-minded as to hold that social change, indeed class change, is incompatible with a “profound belief in common patterns of emotional and cultural presuppositions.” Indeed, his whole career has been devoted to asserting both together. And this is underlined by a striking contrast between two works of his, both produced since the ending of his exile. The first is a novella, Father Come Home,³⁵ in which with a remarkable power of recall he travels back to his childhood (for the story must contain elements of autobiography) to picture a barely literate boy growing up in 1913 in a Northern “Native Reserve,” whose father has deserted the family, and who sets out to find him (he is only fourteen). It is delicate, economical of words (no purple passages), poignant as well as funny, and so sharply defined that not the slightest noise, smell, encounter is swallowed up in verbal fog. Perhaps he needed to travel those thousands of jet miles over the many continents he has dropped down upon to be able to come back and see what was all the time “back there.” But the same travel will have taught him that the rich, tumultuous but devouring and debilitating experience of exile is recognisable wherever humanity has suffered it. And we can say that the Greek, the Hebrew, the Chinese, the Malay refugee could find in their own lives echoes of his recent poem, “A Prayer,” written since, and about, his final return after nineteen years of exile, to his native land:

Nineteen years I've roamed the continents
renting one glasshouse after another
whence I've gazed and gazed
upon the wilderness of exile
all around me …
still turning around in circles
sowing seed
on borrowed land
for crops we'll always have to leave behind.(36)

Notes

1. John Keats, Ode to a Nightingale, st. VII.

2. See Henry Gifford's Review Article of Joseph Brodsky, Selected Essays (Viking Press, 1986) in the Times Literary Supplement, London, Sept. 19, 1986, p. 1019).

3. I am grateful for some of these references to an unpublished essay on “Exile” by Mr. Richard Welch.

4. Terry Eagleton, Exiles and Emigrés (Chatto & Windus, 1960) p. 8 (The examples he refers to are Conrad, Henry James, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, & D. H. Lawrence.).

5. N. Chabani Manganyi, Exiles and Homecomings, a Biography of Es'kia Mphahlele (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1983).

6. Es'kia Mphahlele, Afrika My Music, an Autobiography, 1957–1933 (Ravan Press, 1984).

7. ———. Down Second Avenue (London, Faber, 1959).

8. ———. The Wanderers (New York, Macmillan, 1972; London, English Edition, 1973).

9. Manganyi, op cit. 131.

10. Ibid., p. 169.

11. Ibid., p. 195.

12. Ibid., p. 137.

13. Ibid., p. 245.

14. Mphahlele, Voices in the Whirlwind and Other Essays (New York, Hill & Wang, 1972) pp. 60–1.

15. Manganyi, op. cit. p. 278.

16. Afrika My Music, p. 132.

17. Manganyi, op. cit. p. 279.

18. Mphahlele, The African Image (London, Faber, 1966; revised and enlarged ed., 1974).

19. See note 14, supra.

20. Voices, pp. 190–1.

21. Ibid., p 165.

22. Manganyi, op. cit. p. 272.

23. Afrika My Music, p. 212.

24. Voices, p. 189.

25. Ibid., p. 211.

26. Ibid., p. 195.

27. The insistence in 1976 of compulsory Afrikaans as the medium through which all “Bantu” education should be conducted for blacks was a political, not a pedagogic, policy, and was the final spark that ignited the Soweto explosion of that year.

28. Voices, p. 156.

29. Ibid., pp 157–8.

30. Voices, p. 96.

31. Krishna R. Rayan, “Rasa and the Objective Correlative” in The British Journal of Aesthetics, Vol V, No. 3 (July 1965) pp. 246–260. Cit. Voices, pp. 77–8.

32. Afrika My Music, p. 17.

33. Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African Mind (Cambridge University Press, 1976), p. 184. (I have discussed Soyinka's work and similar themes in comparative literature, in an extended Review-Article, “Shared Propulsions,” in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature vol. 21, no 3, April 1977, pp. 65–78).

34. Terry Eagleton, op. cit., pp. 157–8.

35. E. Mphahlele, Father Come Home (Ravan Press, Johannesburg), 1984 (Illustrated by Goodman Mabote).

36. E. Mphahlele, “A Prayer,” in The Unbroken Song—Selected Writings (Ravan Press, Johannesburg, 1981). This volume also contains some of Prof. Mphahlele's best short stories.