Fractured Affinities in the African Diaspora: An Interview with Louis Chude-Sokei

Abstract

Fractured Affinities in the African Diaspora:An Interview with Louis Chude-Sokei Erik Gleibermann (bio) and Louis Chude-Sokei Introduction As he recounts in his 2021 coming-of-age memoir, Floating in a Most Peculiar Way, Louis Chude-Sokei has lived a mini-cartography of the modern African Diaspora. He was born in 1967 on the eve of the Biafran Civil War to an Ibo father and a Jamaican mother who had met in the UK. After his father was killed in the war, the young Chude-Sokei immigrated to Jamaica, then to Washington DC, and finally to Los Angeles. But sitting with extended family at the dinner table, the young man searching for Black selfhood in America did not receive visionary affirmations of a joint African, Caribbean, Black American diasporic unity. Instead, he often heard ethnic prejudices and suffered a sense of alienation—immigrant and Black American communities lacked common identity. Out on the streets of South Central, his African American friends echoed a similar view. In our conversation that draws from his memoir and scholarly work, Chude-Sokei and I explored the tensions between cohesion and discontinuity in the African diaspora. He says his life story has made him particularly attuned to the rich interactions of its fragments and fissures. "My ear," he reflects, "is uniquely situated to eavesdrop on multiple conversations." —Erik Gleibermann Gleibermann: Louis, I'd like to get into exploring your memoir, but first, I think a helpful way to frame that conversation is with a startling statistic you reference in your 2014 Transition article "The Newly Black Americans," that more African immigrants have come to this country since 1990 than were brought here during the slave trade. When you add that statistic to the massive Afro-Caribbean multilingual immigrant waves of [End Page 96] recent decades, it's clear the demographics of Blackness in America are changing. The theme you emphasize in the article and also in the memoir is the alienation between various Black immigrant populations and African Americans. To what extent do you view your personal story of negotiating these communities as a lived embodiment of their conflicted perceptions of each other? Chude-Sokei: That statistic from The New York Times in 2005 really gave not just critical ballast to what I was doing as a scholar, but really hit me personally because this narrative in the memoir of being alienated amongst multiple Black diasporas was given a charge. That statistic said that however alienated you might feel in this experience, you're actually representative of a large cultural shift, and there is an ideological warmth that comes when you feel a part of something broader than yourself. The article came out when my first book came out, The Last "Darky," which is about West Indian immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I use blackface minstrelsy as a method for telling the story of how Black West Indians engaged African American culture, and in many cases passed as African Americans in a cultural context where African Americans were dominant. West Indians made up the first surge of Black immigrants in the years after the international slave trade was formally shut down in 1808. Between then and 1965, the number of Blacks coming into the United States was very small, with the exception of West Indians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the dominant group was the Jamaicans. Being half Jamaican and half Nigerian, it's incredibly personal to me. The dominant number of people coming from Africa since 1965 have been Nigerians. I wanted the memoir to parallel my own intellectual understanding of this thing called Black diaspora and how so much of this discourse on it in the academy, which I'm committed to, is actually in flagrant disavowal of some of the tensions and contradictions of Black migration since 1965 and how they were made manifest on the street level. My story comes through Biafra and then Jamaica, the Middle Passage. A lot of Africans since 1965 have come from Biafra-like situations, political instability and genocide. Gleibermann: You are alienated right up until the last page of this book. There's no...