Abstract
Situated within subaltern cultural studies, and building on the work of Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha and Mikhail Bakhtin, this paper tells the story of the “new flâneur,” a recent immigrant and refugee group of continental francophone African youth, who are attending an urban French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada. In it, I offer an alternative cultural framework of “translation” and “negotiation” as a way of seeing that which is supposedly competing and conflicting is indeed re-de-and-transformed and negotiated into New ways that make them radically performed. Their radicalness stems, precisely, from the notation that displaced identities, the focus of the paper, are not oppositionally articulated; on the contrary, they are negotiated, translated, and re-born in a more complex and hybrid space: a third one. This hybridity, I will show, is habitually performed in and through language – in its broad semiological sense. As part of an ethnographic research project, the paper will show the different ways in which the new flâneurs form and perform their identities. Here, the Old and the New are not ethnographically observed in competition; both are translated in the identity formation processes and in the process, they are negotiated so that both are found in the same sentence, in the same garments, at the same time to produce a third hybrid space.
The Paper
To walk is to vegetate
To stroll is to live
– Balzac
Most often than not, subaltern cultural studies takes for granted that identity is best conceived in and within that complex intersection of multiple discourses of difference, subjectivity, language, history, memory and power relations. Ethnographically, however, what does this mean? How do these discourses work and how do we recognize their intersectionality? If identity is no longer, as Stuart Hall (2001) would argue, what does it mean to become? What is understood by language here and methodologically, how do I as an ethnographer access my research participants’ subjectivities, their identities? Grounded on an interpretive linguistic ethnography, this paper is an attempt to answer these questions. As such, it is contextually signified, modestly concluded, and ethnographically conceived. In fact, I am employing an ethnographic approach precisely to avoid the pitfalls of over-generalization.
Generally, the paper is a methodological, pedagogical and discursive intervention into the memetic logic of identity, race and becoming. It tells the story of the “new flâneur,” a recent immigrant and refugee group of continental francophone African youth, who are attending an urban French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada, and who find themselves within what Nietzsche calls a “public gaze” where their bodies are already-always read and imagined as “Black.” They are caught within the spectre of “and”: being continental in Canada and possessing a body that is read in the dominant social imaginary as a diasporic African body. The spectre of “and” is also about what it means to be Senegalese or Nigerian, for example, and Canadian. This gaze, this social imaginary, which is yet to be fully understood within what Handel K. Wright (2003a) calls “cultural studies as praxis,” is a borné shift in rethinking the discourse of race, identity and pedagogy and has three main implications.
First, as I have argued elsewhere (Ibrahim, 2004), these youth were not Black in Africa; however, once in North America, they fall within “the eyes of power” (Foucault, 1980) where they become Black – and where Blackness is conceived as a performative category, a form of speech, an attitude and a social location one takes up. Following Simone de Beauvoir, Monique Wittiq (2003) argued that one is not born a woman, but that one becomes a woman. Accordingly, I am contending, one is not born Black either. In fact, one becomes Black. In this sense, Blackness becomes a code, a language, a set of cloths, a hair-do, a bodily expression, and above all an experiential memory. Second, as Meaghan Morris (1997) has argued, language in cultural studies is increasingly arrested within discourses of différance, temporalization and play. My study attempts to free language by introducing the actual verbal utterance as both an expression of identity and a formation of it.
Becoming Black for African youth meant learning Black English which, in turn, meant becoming Black. That is to say, they are learning Black English because they are becoming Black, yet they are becoming Black precisely because they are learning Black English. Lastly, reflective of and informed by Handel K. Wright (2003a, p. 806) conceptualization of cultural studies as both “an inter/anti/post/disciplinary approach to the study of culture” and “an intervention in institutional, sociopolitical and cultural arrangements, events and directions” (see also Cohen, 1997), and borrowing from textuality and ethnography, I introduce “ethnography of performance” as an approach that allowed me to access the youth identities. For ethnographers, I conclude, identity is best accessed in the performed. Put simply, I have three objectives in this paper: to 1) rethink Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space,” 2) introduce ethnography of performance, and 3) through my research, rethink the relationship between race, identity and displacement.
Flâneurie: Theorizing identity through cultural translation and negotiation
[This] is the dream of translation as ‘survival’ … as sur-vivre, the act of living on borderlines… [Here] the migrant’s dream of survival [is]… an empowerment condition of hybridity; an emergence that turns ‘return’ into reinscription or redescription; an iteration that is not belated, but ironic and insurgent. [T]he migrant’s survival depends … on discovering ‘how newness enters the world.’ The focus is on making the linkages through the unstable elements of … life – the dangerous tryst with the ‘untranslatable’ – rather than arriving at ready-made names (Homi Bhabha, 1994, pp. 226-7, original emphasis).
Clearly, we live in a time of universal subjecthood, where identities and cultures are more than ever “elusive” (Yon, 2000), where sur-vivre – the act of displacement, of flâneur and of living in-between cultures, languages, landscapes and borderlines – has become a second nature. The universal subjects are ones who possess a symbolic, and to be specific, intellectual capital that allows them to be in Australia one year, Canada the following year and Britain or Berkley, California, USA, the year after. As a matter of fact, I stopped asking where Gayatri Spivak, Wole Soyinka or Homi Bhabha are teaching now. However, these universal subjects are not always as privileged. In fact, most of the time they are not at all. They are forced to flee their “home”lands because of economic situation, civil war, political ideology, religious persecution, gender mutilation or forced conscription and dictatorship. Voluntarily or not, they find themselves interstitially torn between here and now and there and memory. They had witnessed enough to see the need to hold on to the Old, but the everyday is reminding them of the need to go on living, to experience and enjoy the New.
Significantly, the Old and the New are conceived here as historical temporalities, ways of being and as social, cultural, national, geographic and linguistic spaces. Thinking “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault (1986) convincingly argued that we live “in the epoch of space of simultaneity… in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the disperse” (p. 22). It is this dispersely heterotopic and semiotic space, this dialectique de triplicité (Lefebvre, 1974), third space, “both-and-also” (Soja, 1996), which is taking place beyond and in-between two (or more) cultures, languages and geographies that I want to explore first. Focusing particularly on identity as an ongoing “event” of translation and negotiation (Ibrahim, 2000a), my interest is to look at the ethnography of sur-vivre, that is, the impact and the outcome of displacement, of flâneurie.
Framing the politics of identity within the poststructural language of cultural studies, Stuart Hall (1990) writes that, “Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as already accomplished fact… we should think, instead, of identity as a “production,” which is never complete, always in process” (p. 222). It is, he continues, an on-going event that is best conceived at the borderland between the Self and the Other. It is a process, a split, “not a fixed point but an ambivalent point” (Hall, 1991, p. 11). Hall (2001) refers to this process of identity formation as the New Identity which he distinguishes from the Old Identity. The logic of the Old Identity is an expression of the Cartesian stable self where the subject is situated within essentialized and static discourses of history, self, and memory; whereas the New Identity discourse is more complexly different. It neglects neither history and the multiple discourses within which the subject finds herself and the contradictory nature of these discourses nor the power relations or the politics of positioning: that is to say, how our gendered, racialized and classed bodies are read socially and historically and the outcome of these social positions.
The borderland between the Self and the Other is what Mikhail Bakhtin (2001) refers to as dialogism. Luminously conceived, perceived and lived, dialogism is a language, a philosophy, a semiotic space where being is conceptualized as an event, human being as a project or a deed and society as a simultaneity of uniqueness. That is to say, one finds oneself in and within a network, “a matrix of highly distinctive economic, political, and historical forces – a unique and unrepeatable combination of ideologies, each speaking its own language, the heteroglot conglomerate of which will constitute the world in which we act” (Holquist, 2002, p. 167). To be able to act, for Bakhtin (2001), also means to be addressed by Otherness. “It is only in that highly specific, indeed unique placement that the world may address us” (Holquist, 2002, p. 167). In a very real sense, Holquist argues, this becomes our “address” in existence, “an address expressed not in numbers, but by our proper name” and it is, very significantly, “only from that site that we can speak” (p. 167).
It is largely through language, through the signature of my “proper name,” that I become an active actor, a subject. As such, I differ from the Other precisely because while I am here, the Other cannot. This, for Bakhtin (2001, p. 365), produces “heteroglossia” and “ideological translation,” where the self becomes “an act of grace, a gift of the other” (p. 364). To be able to receive this act of grace, this gift, however, I must occupy a location, a unique place in the ongoing event of existence that is mine, where existence is an event and my place, my identity in it is understood not only within time and space, but also as an activity, an act, a deed. My identity, my subjectivity which is determined by language (Bakhtin, 2001), therefore, is never singular. I belong as much to myself as I do to the Other, yet the signifier that is my body “makes manifest the subject of its signification” (Lacan, 1977, p. 207); it makes me unique. After all, I could sign my proper name, and “it” only belongs to me.
The moment of identification in this dialectic relationship between the Self and the Other is of extreme importance. It impacts and guides the shape, the form, and the intensity of the ways in which the Self translates the Other and vice versa. The question of intensity is an issue of desire. Elsewhere (Ibrahim, 1998, 2000a, 2000b, 2001, 2003), I showed that my research participants’ desire and identification with Blackness has certainly influenced their translation of the new Canadian context, what they learned and how. They named and identified, somewhat unconsciously, African American popular culture and language as sites for investment and yearning. Identification, I argued, is the starting point of identity formation. When the process of naming takes place, one might conclude, the process of ideological translation is inaugurated and in the case of my research participants, a third space is given birth to.
The third space: A semiology of in-betweenness
My conceptualization of the third space is deeply indebted to Jean-Paul Sartre (1980), Edward Soja (1996) and Homi Bhabha (1990). Though Bhabha’s usage of the term is relevant and directly related, as we shall see, it is different from mine. I ground my analysis in an attempt to ethnographically explore and “see” the complex ways identities are formed and performed and ultimately link them to the processes of learning, whereas Bhabha’s framework is an inter/textual analysis. In doing so, I differ from Bhabha in being contextually specific and also in addressing the play of power relation in the creation of the third space.
In an interview with Jonathan Rutherford, Homi Bhabha (1990) advanced three notions that are relevant to the present discussion, and illuminous of the visuality and the make up of the third space. The first point distinguishes between what Bhabha calls “a creation of cultural diversity” and “a containment of cultural difference.” Bhabha argues that within the Western cultural practices, “although there is always an entertainment and encouragement of cultural diversity, there is always a corresponding containment of it” (1990, p. 208). This containment usually takes place in a subtle way and through a process of normalization whereby the dominant culture becomes the normalizing gaze. In other words, “a transparent norm is constituted, a norm given by the host society or dominant culture, which says that ‘these other cultures are fine, but we must be able to locate them within our grid’” (p. 208).
Unsatisfied with this liberal distinction, Bhabha advanced his second point by introducing his notion of “cultural translation.” It argues that “no culture is plainly plenitudinous, not only because there are other cultures which contradict its authority, but,” he continues, “also because its own symbol-forming activity, its own interpellation in the process of representation, language, signification and meaning-making, always underscores the claim to an originary, holistic, organic identity.” Cultural translation then is:
a way of imitating, but in a mischievous, displacing sense – imitating an original in such a way that the priority of the original is not reinforced but by the very fact that it can be simulated, copied, transferred, transformed, made into a simulacrum and so on: the “original” is never finished or complete in itself. The “originary” is always open to translation so that it can never be said to have a totalised prior moment of being or meaning – an essence. What this really means [Bhabha argues] is that cultures are only constituted in relation to that otherness internal to their own symbol-forming activity which makes them decentered structures (Bhabha, 1990, p. 210).
Cultural translation does not allow for an essentialization of what is known as the “original” or “originary” culture for the latter itself is, and always was, open to and for translation. It is only original in the sense of being anterior, Bhabha argues. He thus convincingly concludes that all forms of culture are “continually in a process of hybridity” (p. 211). However, Bhabha emphasizes, “the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity ... is the 'third space’” (p. 211, emphasis added). Therein lies my different path from Bhabha. I deploy the third space as an ethnographic performance of two or more languages, cultures, and belief systems. Indeed, for me, the third space is a trace, a synthesis, a performative act, and an articulation of these two or more cultures and languages, and since these traces are corporeally articulated, they are thus ethnographically perceptible. However, in the articulation (Hall, 1986), the Old and the New are now metamorphosed in forms that look neither fully like the former nor the latter, but the two: the Old and the New. The Saussaurean bipolar of signifié/signifiant is no longer useful. For me, moreover, the third space sees the body as the locus of embodiment where this semiosis is articulated. Tersely, my unease with Bhabha's definition stems from the fact that it doesn't subjectify, historicize, or make tangible the hybridization project. Where, for example, is the play of race, sexuality, gender, and class in the process of hybridization? In this process of hybridization, where are those who are historically marginalized from the “centers” of power? How does hybridity ethnographically look? Here, the Bakhtinian “ideological translation” responds better to these questions.
For Bakhtin, the result of cultural and ideological translation wherein two linguistic, ideological, and cultural systems are to be mixed is to give birth to an organic world view which, in turn, will be performed in New linguistic and cultural practices. The product of this mixture is or can be “hybrid,” and for me it is socio-linguistically detectable and ethnographically observable. “It is of course true that even historical, organic hybridity is not only two languages but also two socio-linguistic (thus organic) world views that are mixed with each other,” Bakhtin asserts, “but in such situations, the mixture remains mute and opaque, never making use of conscious contrasts and oppositions.” Bakhtin adds:
It must be pointed out however, that while it is true the mixture of linguistic world views in organic hybrids remains mute and opaque, such unconscious hybrids have been at the same time profoundly productive historically: they are pregnant with potential for new world views, with new “internal forms” for perceiving the world in words (2001, p. 360).
In other words, the third space is organic because it is historically situated and partially unconsciously executed. It is an indissoluble mixture of two, or more, linguistic, ideological, cultural, and belief systems. It is third because it is found in the inter-geographies, cultures, languages, and memories (see Figure 1). It is indeed where the “first” and the “second” are produced in the same sentence, in the same syntax, in the same grammar, in the same garment, at the same time. In the case of African students in this research, the product of the ideological translation of the Canadian context which synchronously starts at the moment of identifying and naming Black America/Canada as a site of investment by African students is a third space. That is, the third space for African youth is a product of the memory, experience, and cultural and linguistic behavioral patterns they bring with them when coming into Canada and what they translate in the latter context. They seem to identify with a Canada that is Black, thus making race a crucial category.
Nonetheless, borrowing from Bhabha (1990) the third space “enables other positions to emerge. [It] displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom” (p. 211). These emerging positions are unrecognizable because they are the product of that luminal space where the Old is already in the New and the “different.” The Old and the New emerge and are born from longitudinal negotiations and translations. Bhabha (1990) refers to these negotiations as “the process of cultural hybridity” which “gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognisable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation” (p. 211).
It is the understanding of this semiotic “new area of negotiation of meaning” that might illuminate our comprehension of identity formation processes, I contend, especially the identities of displaced subjectivities (including immigrants and refugees). To do so, Handel K. Wright (2003a) is worth quoting at length. Talking about his bodily experience as an African now living in North America, his displacement, and the different identities “assigned” to him, Wright sees the tension of hybrid identities thus:
[I]n the move from Sierra Leone to Canada and then the USA, I have been assigned and have taken up not only African identity but also ‘black’ identity. The complexity of identity [he continues] means that rather than being singular or merely replacing one form of identity with another (e.g. ceasing to be Krio and becoming ‘black’) identity is a series of complimentary and contradictory identifications operating simultaneously, with some coming to the fore or receding depending on context. I live and work in the USA but am not an American citizen; I am ‘black’ but not African American; I am simultaneously a continental and a diasporic African. (Wright, 2003a, p. 811)
The third space is this simultaneity of tension, being assigned and taking up both “continental and diasporic African” identity. Besides showing the dialogic nature of the third space, Handel Wright also calls for autoethnography in understanding the process of identity formation; for personal testimony, personal experience, which as bell hooks (1994) put it, can be “such a fertile ground for the production of liberatory [praxis] because it forms the base of our theory making” (p. 70). My personal experience as a refugee from Africa now holding the Canadian passport and working in the USA is no different than Handel Wright. Fearful of being essentialized, this experience taught me that displaced subjects find themselves in the borderland of two or more cultures, languages, and belief systems. In the process of understanding and translating the New context, subconsciously, displaced subjects also understand and translate the Old. We are located, I am arguing, in the landscape between the Old —which is part of us—and the New —which is becoming part of us.
When it comes to the African body in North America, as we shall explore subsequently, it is caught between two systems of signifying practices (see also Wright, 2002, 2003a, 2003b). First, in Africa, I am tall, Sudanese, basketball player, academic, having different cultural, linguistic, tribal and ethnic lineages. Here, as Stuart Hall (1997) would argue, my Blackness is outside the shadow of the other North American Whiteness. However, second, as a refugee in North America, my perception of self is altered in direct response to the social processes of racism and the historical representation of Blackness whereby the antecedent signifiers become secondary to my Blackness, and I retranslate my being: I become Black.
Elsewhere (Ibrahim, 2003), I narrated a significant incident in my understanding of what it means to “be” Black in North America. It happened in May 16, 1999, the day I was officially declared “Black,” with a White policeman who stopped me in downtown Toronto, Canada, for no reason other than “We are looking for a dark man with a dark bag,” as he uttered it. After questioning him about my “darkness,” he said, “We are looking for a Black man with a dark bag.” There is no need to mention that my bag is actually light-blue and now, however, I am metamorphosed from “dark” into “Black.” Not that it matters either ways, I reflected after, but some people either can not see or have “color problem.” I am citing it here for two reasons. First, to frame the overall social context where my research participants circulate and form their identities; that is, to further our understanding of the everyday racism, human degradation, and general annihilation of Black people in North America. And second, to acknowledge how the present researcher is implicated in the research and the questions I am asking.
Just hanging out: The study and the ethnography of performance
Between January and June 1996, I conducted a critical ethnographic research at Marie-Victorin High School (Ibrahim, 1998), which was then followed by short-term visits and informal observations in 2003. The research, which took place in an urban French-language high school in southwestern Ontario, Canada, looks at the lives of a group of continental Francophone African youth and the formation of their social identity. Besides their gendered and raced experience, their youth and refugee status was vital in their what I termed elsewhere moments of identification (Ibrahim, 2001): Where and how they were interpellated in the mirror of their society (cf. Althusser, 1971; Bhabha, 1994). Put otherwise, once in North America, I contend, very much similar to (Wright and) my experience above, these youth were faced with a social imaginary in which they were already Blacks. This social imaginary was directly implicated in how and with whom they identified, which in turn influenced what they linguistically and culturally learned and how they learned it. What they learned, I showed elsewhere (Ibrahim, 1999), is Black English as a Second Language (BESL), which they accessed in and through Black popular culture. They learned by taking up and repositing the Rap linguistic and musical genre and, in different ways, acquiring and rearticulating the Hip-Hop cultural identity.
In other words, continental African youth find themselves in a racially conscious society that “asks” them to racially fit somewhere, where it is their racial identity that influences, if not determines their answerability. This dialogism, I also showed elsewhere (Ibrahim, 1998), has strong influence in how African students “see” and translate themselves as well as others, how they go about negotiating their identity formation, and the spaces they eventually occupy. For African students, moreover, these processes of translation and negotiation convert into a re-articulation of what it means “to be” Black in a racially conscious society. Before their arrival to Canada, I argued, African students were not “Black,” in the North American sense, although, like the speaking “I” at this very moment, they had other adjectives that patch together their identities: “Sudanese,” “Somali,” “intellectual,” and so on. However, once in North America, these adjectives become secondary in their moments of identification. That is, soon after our arrival to North America, African students, Wright and I were/are seeking spaces, identities, and representations with which we could say, “We too are Black.” In their search for identification, African youth took up the identifiable Black Hip-Hop youth identity which in turn influenced what they learned and how. What they learned is BESL and how is by taking up and positing a Hip-Hop culture, especially Rap linguistic styles (Ibrahim, 1998, 1999). African youths, in other words, started the odyssey of their identity formation, and heretofore Blackness was/is the spatial representation of similitude, approximation, and affinity: thus becoming Black.
To become Black is not without its discursive politics of resistance. To say —using language, the body or any other media —“I too am Black” is to embody, perform, and ally oneself to and with the political category of Blackness. That African youth locate themselves in/to the margin by taking up Rap and Hip-Hop and speaking BESL is by no means a coincidence. On the contrary, here, culture and language take on a different spin. They are no longer about language and culture per se, but become markers of desire and investment; an invocation of political, racial, and historical space. Downtown Toronto, and other metropolitan cities where African youth reside, is no longer a geographical space, it is also a language, an attitude, and a set of garments. “Whassup homeboy?” is no longer a simple linguistic expression nor about mastering a language. It is a “space,” a way of saying: “I too am Black” or “I too desire and identify with Blackness.” Baggy cloths and the myriad shades of sneakers, bicycle shorts, chunky jewelry, dreadlocks, braids, and other high-fade designs become “spaces” – downtowns? – which African youth perform and occupy very comfortably. They perform these inside and outside the school.
It is here that ethnography of performance has proven to be most useful. As a research methodology, ethnography of performance argues that ethnographers’ best access to their research participants’ inner-Selves is the latter’s verbal and non-verbal performance. Put otherwise, the juxtaposition of what people actually and materially perform on and through their bodies, on the one hand, and what they say and think about those performances, on the other, give ethnographers the least distorted picture of their research subjects and their identities. Ethnography of performance is what might be called “hanging out” methodology. That is, first, it acknowledges that there is no one method that would capture especially the essence of identity, so, second, one is required to use triangulation or multiple methods. Third, since identity is multiple and performed in multiples ways and sites, it requires multiple observations, in different sites and over an extended period of time. The objective is to see a macro-picture, a set of patterns. For this research, I literally “hanged out” with my research participants for six months almost everywhere: classrooms, hallways, school steps, gymnasium, their homes, picnics, night clubs and parties, extracurricular school events, played basketball and became the basketball coach. Simply put, I took thorough notes of their multiple identities: notes that allowed me to see patterns and hence reach certain conclusions. I then asked the participants to reflect on my own observations, notes and conclusions. My research findings therefore are not simply mine, based on my notes and interpretations, but a gift from the youth.
The site of the research, Marie-Victorin (MV), was a small French-language high school (Grades 7-13) in southwestern Ontario, with a school population of approximately 400 students from various ethnic, racial, cultural, religious, and linguistic backgrounds. Besides French, English, Arabic, Somali, and Farsi were also spoken at the school. I spent over six months, as I already indicated, I attended classes at MV, talked to students, and observed curricular and extracurricular activities two or three times per week. Because of previous involvement in another project in the same school for almost two years, at the time of this research I was well acquainted with MV and its population, especially its African students, with whom I was able to develop a good communicative relationship. My background as a continental African also helped me to decipher their narratives and experiences. Clearly, we shared a safe space of comfort that allowed us to open up, speak and engage freely.
At the time of this research, students (or their parents) who were born outside Canada made up 70% of the entire school population at MV. Continental Africans constituted the majority within that figure and, indeed, within MV’s population in general. They varied, first, in their length of stay in Canada (from 1-2 to 5-6 years); second, in their legal status (some were immigrants, but the majority were refugees) and, third, in their gender, class, age, linguistic, and national background. They came from places as diverse as Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaïre), Djibouti, Gabon, Senegal, Somalia, South Africa, and Togo. With no exception, all of the African students in MV were at least trilingual, speaking English, French, and an African language, a mother tongue. Given their postcolonial educational history, significantly, most African youths in fact come to Franco-Ontarian schools already possessing a highly valued symbolic capital: le français parisien (Parisian French).
My research participants were part of this growing continental francophone African population in Franco-Ontarian schools. I chose ten boys and six girls for extensive ethnographic observation inside and outside the classroom and inside and outside the school and interviewed all sixteen. Of the ten boys, six were Somali speakers (from Somalia and Djibouti), one was Ethiopian, two were Senegalese, and one was from Togo. Their ages ranged from sixteen-twenty years. The six girls were all Somali speakers (also from Somalia and Djibouti), aged fourteen-eighteen years. Because some interviews were conducted in French I translated them all into English.
Performing It Through Language
The New Identity, Stuart Hall has argued above, neglects neither history nor memory. This was true in the case of African youth. Taking up the “New,” its linguistic and cultural practices was not done in opposition to their own “Old” culture and language. On the contrary, both cultures and languages, that is to say the historical, linguistic and cultural memories that African students brought with them to Canada, and what they took up/learnt once here (namely, Black popular culture and BESL), are found in the same sentence, in the same garment, on the same body and at the same time. The following is an excerpt, among many others, from my focus-group interview with male students. In it, we see that Sam and Jamal are not citing Black stylized English in opposition to their Somali and French language. There is certainly a space of inbetweenness, of simultaneity, of “inter” language, culture, and subjectivities:
Sam: I don't rap man, c'mon give me a break. [laughs] Yo. A'ait a'ait you know, we just about to finish the tape and all clat. Respect to my main man. So, you know, you know wha'm mean, I m reprezi'in Q7. One love to Q7, you know wha 'm mean and all my friends back in Q7. Even though you know I haven't seen them for a long time you know, I still I got love for them you know who 'm mean. Stop the tapin boy.
Jamal: Kick the free style. [I am translating here from the Somali language] Get me the tape man.
Sam: A'ait this is Sam reprez'in AQA where it's born, reprez'in you know wha 'm mean? I wonna say whassup to all my niggers, you know, peace and one love. You know wha ' mean Q7 represin forever. Peace (rap music).
Jamal: crank it man, 'm coming up (rap music).
Sam: Je reviens man, you know. It's from Mecca yo, e reprezin you know, Mecca a'ait. You ask [laughs]. [In Somli] Put the music up, wallahi bellahi [in the name of Allah]. [In Somali] Look at this, a'ait a'ait.
Expressions such as “a'ait,” “reprez'in Q7,” “boy,” “kick the free style,” “whassup to all my niggers” “peace and one love” are all very common in Rap sphere (Ibrahim, 1998, Ch. 7; Smitherman, 2000). Since Rap itself is a contemporary Black cultural form, re/citing it by African students is in fact a performance of where they want to locate themselves politically, racially, culturally, and linguistically. However, the desire to locate oneself to and with “Black” history and memory is espoused and entangled with the students’ embodied/embedded identities, history, culture, and language. The Somali language was not put off in the advantage of another. It is codeswitched in the same sentence with French and (Black stylized) English. Here, there is no either-or, there is on the contrary this and that. And metaphorically, but also literally, this is how cartography or demarcation of space is indicated, how we tell others who we are or what we have become.
In my focus-group interview with male students, I asked them in French to meditate on my above observation. Here are two significant responses:
Musa: Here, we are in Canada, you see. We are going to keep our culture, but at the same time there is the new technologies, the new musics. There is also glamour and modernization of the cities and towns.
Mukhi: The way we dress, the way we talk, we are in Canada ... The small Angolot you know, the small cloth we put around [the bottom], it is like the way we dress backhome. We need to mix in different genres of dress here. Backhome, for example, we put on Boubou and all that. But, I don't find it embarrassing to go out like that.
“We are going to keep our culture, but at the same time...” This is precisely the performance of tension between the Old and the New, which should be perceived as normal in the third space because there is a continuous code-switching between the two. Mukhi better expressed this idea of tension in his notion of “mix”-ing. This mixing is not done in favor of one or the other: “But I don't find it embarrassing to go out like that,” i.e. in Boubou. The Boubou becomes a signifier of national identity, but an ambivalent one since it is not put on by itself but “mixed” with a touch of Hip-Hop. There is no culture shock. Instead, there is simultaneity, parallelism and dialogism.
Are These Really Moments of Contradiction?
The following are two illustrative moments of the interstitiality, in-betweenness and their ethnographic observability. Again, the significance of these moments stems from the contention that they can be (read as) moments of contradictions. The language of the third space is developed, precisely, to argue otherwise, to make the reading of identity more complex. They may be moments of contention and tension, but, as we shall see, not of contradiction. As displaced subjects (including myself) who encountered new social, cultural, and linguistic spaces and practices, I will argue that African youths have become. They have become a negotiated product of the translated Old and New. To negate one or the other is to obliterate part of what has become. Since the third space is a language of in-betweenness, it does not have a fixed shape or form. Its shapes and forms depend on the sociohistorical conditions and on power relation. Edward W. Said, Salman Rushdie, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, Samuel Beckett, Julia Kristeva, Joseph Conrad, Jacques Derrida (the list is too long to be continued and too complex to get into each of these individuals) are a sample of what the third space might look like. They are products of in-betweenness, an ambivalent product. The two moments cited below, which are excerpts from my observation notebook, are meant to show the ambivalent nature of in-betweenness, the third space. Here they are 1) and 2):
1) The day was April 12th, 1996. It was during lunch and early evening time. The lunch time: I was sitting in the foyer of the school just under the board of the recognized best students by the school. Should I be surprised that all the names, except for two, sounded very French? Dare I say that they brought whiteness to mind? After four months at the school, I am forced to say No to the first and Yes to the second. Najat and a group of seven African young girls were holding a tape-recorder which they brought with them. They stopped in the middle of the foyer in their way from the gymnasium to the library; two girls were having the hijab – veil – on. "Whassup Awad? Man School sucks," Najat talked to me in English. At the beginning of her second sentence, one of the girls plugged in the tape-recorder: it was Cool J who was rapping. Najat turned around and spoke to one female in Somali and hereafter everyone joined in the dance. Hands were moving, bodies were swinging and the girls were talking in Somali, French, and English. Two of the girls, as already cited, were putting on Islamic hijab, others were dressed in Somali national dress: a Boubou, others were dressed in baggy Hip-Hop dress.
2) The second illustrative moment was on the some day around 5:30 p,m. It was a moment of loosening and relaxation after a very busy schedule of practice at the school cafeteria/stage. Everybody was busy practicing for Black History Month activities. The same afternoon group of girls I have just talked about above, plus everyone else, mostly girls, joined the music that was playing on the sound system. It was again Cool J followed by Queen Latifa followed by Toni Braxton followed by African music from Zaire, Egypt, and Somalia. Yusuf (the 19-year old, organizer of the Black History Month gathering—there was no teacher to help and no institutional support) was the DJ. Most girls, including mostly the subjects of my research, were dressed either in costume for the practice or Hip-Hop “mixed” with traditional African dress from South Africa, Somalia, Zaire, among others. Those who knew the songs—most of the crowd—seem to mimic and recite them. The hairstyles seem to vary from dyed to dreadlocks to African braids. During and after the practice, during and after this described episode, everyone was codeswitching between English, French, and students' own languages.
Male and female students, as we can see, did enter the third space. However, given the patriarchal history and prescribed social and Islamic religious “tradition,” the background of almost all research participants, the female body seems to fall under stricter rules and policed more rigidly and systematically. Whereas males seem to enjoy what the Canadian context can offer, including dating, females are mostly denied this privilege (Ibrahim, 1998, p. 248). Clearly gender plays a major role in the intense experience of the third space.
Dialectique de triplicité: An epilogue
You know in any culture, there are advantages and disadvantages, strong points and weak points. I will keep the strong points and leave the rest, there are points we love about our culture and others we don't like. So, it's about your choices, do you accept the weak points or don't you? But that doesn't mean I am rejecting my culture when I choose a new one, I keep what's valuable in my culture.
Amani (17, Female)
Perceptibly noticeable, nonetheless, are the ways in which the New and the Old intermingle in this complex third space. For African youth, to be is to become: to become a double-edged product, an ambivalent one. To become is to be answerable to more than one site. We answer through language, which is no longer an abstract category. On the contrary, it is a performed event in and through which identities are articulated. If identities are multiple, shifting and always in the making, as Stuart Hall (2001) and Judith Butler (1999) rightly tell us, then there are no pre-constructed identities that we just slip into. (Welcome to the constructed New Identity!) Moreover, it is certainly in language that identities are complexly performed. Code-switching then is not just about language, it is also, literally and metaphorically, about subjectivities that are code-switched depending on who is talking to whom, in what context, and for what purpose. The complex identity formation of displaced subjects, immigrants as well as refugees as I have shown, stems from the fact that once they are in the New socio-and-geo-cultural context, they endeavor to look for spaces of identification. African youth “chose” Blackness through arduous, complex and, mostly, subconscious processes of “translation” and “negotiation.” However, this was not done in opposition to, or in competition with their embodied memories and histories. The two, Old and New, are put forth in the same sentence, in the same garment, in the same space, at the same time.
Since I situated the language of the third space in a socio-historical moment and within power relations, it is Blackness that becomes a site of identification for African youth. They identified with a Black Canada and this was “declared” through language and culture, by invoking ritual expressions and bodily performances. Here, their Blackness highlights the extent of their racialized experiences and shows that the Black body speaks a language of its own, a language that is not fully theirs nor is it under their control. On their part, as we have seen, African youth have little difficulty in performing their culture and language along the translated New “Canadian” context. “Competition” and “entitlement,” even “being” and “becoming,” for me, therefore, have to be situated not in their abstract discourses, but rather in their contextual discursive space where to speak is to say — “I can also be partial, ambivalent, and a product of two.” The final question then is what are the possibilities of this partiality, ambivalence, and interstitiality to be named as such? The question, in other words, is multiple subjectivities and not singular ones since to be is to become, and to become in the dialectique de triplicité is to be forever born in two.
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