Migritude’s Decolonial Lessons

Abstract

In this essay, I trace the deep time of the Indian Ocean through and against which Shailja Patel fabulates the notion of migritude and, in particular, what its valences are for solidarities between black and brown Kenyans and other south-south relationships. Attentive to the multiple voices she invites into the text and the material objects that she imbues with those voices, I show how Patel animates histories otherwise obscured toward a larger political project of reckoning with Empire's violences. The essay in three movements meditates on (1) the transmutation of Migritude across generic forms; (2) in the book text, the grafting of Patel's familial history onto (macro) History, which ruptures the telos of modernity by exposing its violences; and (3) the consciousness raising that occurs as Patel accounts for the sexual violence British soldiers perpetrated upon Kenyan women and children from the colonial to the postcolonial period. Migritude's decolonial lessons move transtemporally toward the past to repair relationships between women in the Global South, and into our present and its conditional futures to imagine new solidarities and alliances in the heartlands of the dispossessed. KEYWORDS Indian Ocean; migration; East African Asian Literature; British colonialism; feminist studies Shailja Patel's Migritude (2010) is a multi-polar movement narrative 1 that weaves together numerous histories: of the South Asian diaspora in East Africa; of those South Asian Africans who migrate west to Europe or North America; of those who turn east toward Australia or return to South Asia; as well as those, who like her, after time in the Global North, return to Africa. These transit lines visualise not only the paths migrants take, they reveal circuits of capital across contingent time as the narrator describes her family's first migration from South Asia to East Africa and, later, of family members who travel to England and the United States, and of those who remain in (or return to) East Africa. The migrations that Patel focuses on the most are the ones mediated through EuroAmerican colonial/imperial power from the 19th century onwards. Thus, even in Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies is co-published by NISC Pty (Ltd) and Informa Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group)

Cultural Mobilities Between Africa and the Caribbean

“…As with Patel's Migritude, several migrant literary texts and art forms provide a meaningful and wide-ranging view into mobility's "missing element; namely potential" (Leivestad, 2016, p. 133). As Qadir (2018) says, "the text underscores the necessity of multiple artistic and storytelling traditions required to bring silenced narratives to the fore" (p. 226). Investigations, then, into migrant art forms and other expressions of motility would give a more concrete view of the unquantifiable and affective aspects that shape mobility.…”