The Problem of Return in the Local Gambian Bildungsroman

Summary

Recent African fiction can help provide critical and compassionate perspectives on African migrants, complementing or correcting the impressions encouraged by images in the international media of sinking ships, and corpses washing ashore in the Mediterranean Sea. This is the argument of Dominic Thomas (‘The Global Mediterranean’: 153) with respect to Francophone African literature from the past twenty years; of Debra Faszer-McMahon and Victoria L. Ketz (African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts: xvii) with respect to Africans’ fictional accounts of journeys to Spain; and of Bimbola Oluwafunlola Idowu-Faith with respect to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Americanah. In ‘Fictionalizing Theory, Theorizing Fiction’, explaining how the character Obinze leaves Nigeria because of ‘the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness’, Idowu-Faith proposes that Americanah reveals an oversight in the empirical scholarship on migration, which tends to consider little apart from the economic forces that motivate emigration (3). Idowu-Faith sees the voluntary return to Nigeria of Ifemelu and Obinze in the same light, namely, as choices that cannot be explained by quantitative or even rational factors, but merely by a vague preference for home, or hunger for excitement. Thus fiction constitutes data for sympathetic understanding of urgent socio-political realities.

Idowu-Faith overstates the novelty of the suggestion in Adichie's novel that flight from choicelessness might be a primary reason for migration from Africa and, equally, for return migration to Africa. Such themes are also examined, for instance, in Chris Abani's GraceLand and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness, not to mention Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah. She also understates the force of economic factors in Adichie's account of African migrants, for surely Ifemelu and Obinze are both content to resettle in Nigeria partly because they recognize they will be able to join its elite society? However, she is on stronger footing when she begins approaching the literary text not as a source of socio-political data but as a creative writer's advocacy for one particular response to that data, as, in her words, ‘a subtle call to intending migrants plagued by “choicelessness” and looking for something exciting somewhere else, to first look inwards within the homeland’ (17-18).