When is solidarity phoney? Credit: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty

Fin de siècle Europe was big on human zoos. From the 1870s to the 1920s, Antwerp, Paris, Barcelona, London and Milan all featured at least one. In 1900, the Austrian poet and heartthrob Rainer Maria Rilke visited a human zoo in Zßrich and was sorely disappointed. The West Africans trafficked and put on exhibition were not savage enough for his taste.
Rilkeâs poem âDie Aschanti,â about his visit to the exhibition, is characterised by sadness. In the exhibition, he writes, there are âno brown girls who stretched out / velvety in tropical exhaustion,â âno eyes which blaze like weaponsâ and no mouths âbroad with laughterâ. What a bummer. Rilke has to settle for ordinary, human and fundamentally inauthentic Africans: âO how much truer are the animals / that pace up and down in steel gridsâ.
The Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole studies Rilkeâs attitude to human zoos in his essay âThe Blackness of Panther.â Its title is partly annexed from a more famous Rilke poem, âThe Pantherâ, about big cats behind bars in Paris. Cole draws a parallel between the panther, or the captured African in a human zoo, and the way the African is perceived more generally amongst a segment of Western society. Like the new collection it is part of, Black Paper (released last week), it examines what it means to be an African person in a world shaped by white peopleâs cultural norms.
Cole finds the codes associated with it to be restrictive. âWas I African?â he asks in one passage, about growing up in Nigeria, because âI didnât feel it. What I felt was that I was a Lagos boy, a speaker of Yoruba, a citizen of Nigeriaâ.
âThe Africans were those other people,â he writes, âsome of whom I read about in books, or had seen wearing tribal costumes in magazines, or encountered in weird fictional form in moviesâ. He does not see his reflection in them. The label, then, is a fiction imposed on him by western culture.
Cole is more sympathetic to the general term âBlackâ, but even here he acknowledges how rooted it is in one singular definition. The label âBlackâ was not âabout every Black person in the worldâ, he writes, but âit was localized to the American situation. To be Black in America, that localized tenor of âBlackâ had to be learnedâ. Having a âBlack skin (sometimes just a shade or two off-white) was the admission to the classroom, but Black American cultural codes were the lessonâ. Cole writes that he has learned to love the codes, since moving to America over twenty years ago, while acknowledging that âit wasnât the only Blackâ that he knew.
These are quandaries that have recently been explored by another, perhaps less well-known, novelist who grew up in Nigeria and later studied in America. Timothy Ogeneâs new novel Seesaw (out next week), set in the very recent past, is a playful and lacerating satire on the codes the black immigrant needs to satisfy in order to curry favour with a self-styled progressive institution in America.
Frank Jasper, the protagonist and narrator, is a failed novelist from the fictional southern Nigerian city of Port Jumbo, based on Ogeneâs home town Port Harcourt. Ogeneâs first novel, The Day Ends Like Any Day, has a similar title with Jasperâs first novel The Day They Came for Dan. But unlike Ogeneâs novel, which won the Book of the Year award with the African Literary Association, Jasperâs novel does so badly that he decides to write a review of it under a pseudonym for an obscure website entitled The Ganges Review of Books. Very soon after this appreciative review goes up, the website completely disappears in favour of a screen selling viagra.
Jasperâs big break comes in the form of the William Blake Program for Emerging Writers, which allows him to travel to a New England college town and get mentored by other writers. When he arrives, he is bemused by protests he encounters on campus. They donât fit with his conception of American radicalism. âMy idea of an American radical protest,â he writes, âwas ossified and romantic, involving pictures of people in long hair smoking marijuanna, playing drums and banjosâ. What he witnesses instead are protestors that âmight as well have been business executives, clear-eyed with state-of-the-art digital equipmentâ. In other words, the self-styled revolutionary vanguard of progressive institutions have become much like the old-school establishment of old.
On campus, Jasper also meets a fellow African writer Barongo Akello Kabumba, who is from Uganda. And a British-Indian academic called Sara Chakraborty, who grew âup in Surrey as the grandchild of Afro-Asian immigrantsâ. He takes a strong dislike to the pair:
âpartly because I didnât understand the depth of their moral authority, the immutable authority with which they said things about the world and people and identity and the âpost-colonial worldâ in a few days than in all the years I lived in itâ.
Their conception of the âpost-colonialâ world, and the position of Africans within it, is sterile and monolithic: Jasperâs post-colonial world âwas nothing like the fully formed and footnoted gunfire sentences I heard from Sara Chakraborty, nothing like the costumed performers of the Ugandan writerâ. Instead, it âwas just another tired world of complicated people trudging along, like anywhere else, mostly oblivious of life beyond their neighbourhood, full of pain or courting happiness, vile or honestâ.
Underpinning that passage is a plea for moral universalism: for seeing that, despite their differences, the post-colonial world is fundamentally as emotionally rich and also as boring as the Western world. And Ogene demonstrates this very combination in the novel itself. Apart from the zestful humour in the narrative, there is also tedium. In the passages set in Nigeria, for instance, Jasper is a slacker par excellence, who spends much of his recreational time taking drugs and watching pornography. The novel reminds me not only of post-colonial novels, or campus novels, but also of the decadent novels of Michel Houellebecq, in which a buoyantly satirical attitude to twentieth-century Western society is combined with hardened cynicism. Â
And Jasper is a thoroughly cynical character. While acknowledging the silliness of race experts, those who tell guilt-ridden white people what they want to hear, he occupies the position of black expert to his advantage. He was âstill in the US whenâ his agent
âsold me to the Montana-based group as an âunderstanding expert on all matters black and ethnicâ. He had played up my background as a âson of the black Atlantic whose maternal ancestors were descendants of slaves who came back to West Africaââ.
He adds with acidic scorn: âif Americans were going to devour themselves, he said to me afterwards, someone might as well hide under the table for crumbsâ. This cheerfully parasitic attitude is not one that Cole explicitly argues for in his essays, which are scrupulously analytical. But it does demonstrate that the analogy of the human zoo, while powerful, fails to capture the symbiotic relationship between the patronising white person and the African. To put it bluntly: itâs a grift that seems to satisfy both parties. The Africans at the zoo were forcibly captured; the African novelist freely moves to the West.
Jasperâs relationship to his status as a race expert is, however, ambivalent: while it materially enriches him, it also deforms his humanity. âI wasnât advancing any single ideology,â he considers, âor worldview or notion of progress, and wasnât trying to attack anyoneâ. Rather,
âI just wanted to exist and cry and laugh and fuck and live and die without prefixing or suffixing my actions with any universal idea of blackness or Africaness or whatever thing out there I was supposedly tied to as a POC or BAME or warped extension of someone elseâs imaginationâ.
This warped tendency doesnât just apply to black people. Other ethnicities feel it too. In an interview with Lauren Oyler, the Argentinian novelist Pola Oloixarac talks about the inspiration for her latest novel, Mona, which is out in the UK next year. âI was a person of colour when I was in the US,â she says, but âif I took a plane and went anywhere else, or if I crossed the border I wasnât a person of colour anymore. So it wasnât an essential trait. It was more of a particular fiction that was imposed on meâ.
The titular protagonist of the novel is Peruvian and, like Jasper, is already the author of one novel and living in an American college campus:
âMona had arrived at Stanford not long after the waves she made with her debut novel tossed her onto the beach of a certain impetuous prestige â and at a time when being a âwoman of colourââ began to âconfer a chic sort of cultural capitalâ.
The narrator of Oloixaracâs deliciously acerbic novel adds that, again invoking our opening analogy, âAmerican universities shared certain essential values with historic zoos, where diversity was a mark of attraction and distinctionâ.
When Mona is nominated for a prestigious literary prize in Europe, she travels to Sweden, where she meets a diverse range of writers, whose background she anatomises like a modern-day Carl Linnaeus (the pioneering Swedish taxonomist). There is the obnoxious French male writer, the pious Israeli female author, the sexy Scandinavian writers. There is a sense that she is trapped by the instinct to perceive these characters solely through the prism of their identity. And a part of the narrative tension is this tendency against a countervailing emphasis on a personâs particular experiences. She chafes at being seen as the âLatin writerâ: âThe phony solidarity of having a âLatinâ culture in common with other writers was something that always repulsed herâ.
She recognises, like Jasper and Cole, that such labels do not reflect the humanity of an individual. While they can breed important forms of solidarity, and can be useful in analysing prejudice and discrimination, we shouldnât cling to them too tightly. It is ironic that many self-styled progressives, many of them well-intentioned, do so. It illustrates the comfort, under a progressive guise, that comes with being attached to racial essentialism: the comfort of expecting people from other racial or ethnic backgrounds to fulfil a role.
Labels should be used, if they are to be used, as the start of someoneâs identity, not the full definition of it. They should be used to open the doors to a deeper understanding of who that person is, rather than perceived as the only thing that matters. The alternative is race representatives, people who are exhibited, or exhibit themselves, to a white audience, to be gawked at and cuddled, and are expected to possess a morality befitting a child.
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