Voices Cut Out of the Past Into the Present”

Blackness in Diaspora Time
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‎The ambiguity of its metahistorical purport notwithstanding, Open City provides a staunch critique of totalizing aspirations of mastery, whether in relation to historical discourse, temporality, space, or through these theme’s metaphorical amalgamation: movement. Repeatedly, Julius is shown as failing in his attempts at mastery, feigning a sense of coherence he cannot quite maintain. The dissolution of linear movement becomes particularly striking in relation to the spacetime of Blackness, both in its physical, bodily dimension and its temporal mediation of race in/as history.
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‎While Julius’s long walks construct a sense of duration, albeit interspersed with the chronicling of personal and urban history, there are moments when the phenomenological experience of time is substantially altered. These moments are almost always connected to a distorted concept of physical integrity, movement, and the body. The moment when Julius is attacked and beaten, is particularly explicit: “We find it convenient to describe time as a material, we ‘waste’ time, we ‘take’ our time. As I lay there, time became material in a strange new way: fragmented, torn into incoherent tufts, and at the same time spreading, like something spilled, like a stain” (219). Here, the physical threat of disintegration is coupled with the dissolution of linear time, throwing into sharp relief the privilege and precariousness of Julius’s ambling, unfettered movements through time and space. But is also serves as an invocation of a different, fragmented temporality that is marked by the ‘human stain’ of race. Opening the scene, Julius sees two young men at a crossing and overhears some of their talk, marked by the kind of vernacular that suggests they are Black. Julius further observes: “They walked effortlessly, lazily, like athletes, and I marveled at their prodigious profanity for a moment, then forgot about them” (212). Julius had exchanged a glance, a nod with them, interpreting this “gesture of mutual respect [as] based on our being young, black, male; based, in other words, on our being ‘brothers'” (212). A few moments later, they pass him again and fail to acknowledge him, causing Julius to be “unnerved” at this misrecognition (212). Seconds later, they attack him, steal his phone, and kick his curled-up body. In truth, Julius is the one who has misrecognized, has failed to see the tenuousness of that purported, superficial solidarity, made porous by economic and class disparities. He has not only misread the age of these boys, who turn out to be “no older than fifteen” (213), but also their “profanity” and the effortlessness of their movements. When they later “melt […] away” to somewhere “deep in Harlem” (214), it becomes clear how the limits of their environment will affect and most likely curb their movements in the world, athletic bodies or not.
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‎Later, when Julius examines his wounds, he seems astonished at the fact that he had never acknowledged the privilege of an intact body: “How could I have been less than completely aware of how good it was to be injury-free?” (215), he wonders. Physical integrity and its relation to movement as such is a particular preoccupation of Julius. While getting on a subway in chapter 2, he notices “a cripple” (24) moving onto the carriage, triggering thoughts on the Yoruba deity Obatala, associated with physical infirmity and blamed for the making of “dwarfs, cripples, people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness” (25). That Julius is able to move freely in New York City, more freely than many others perhaps, is also indicated by a prior passage, where he observes a crowd of women from his apartment window, marching through the nocturnal streets, chanting, beating drums, and blowing whistles. At first, Julius cannot make out what they are saying, but soon it becomes clear that he is witnessing New York City’s “Take-Back-The-Night” movement: “We have the power, we have the might, the solitary voice called. The answer came: The streets are ours, take back the night” (23). Yet the very moment that the women shout “Women’s bodies, women’s lives, we will not be terrorized” (ibid.), Julius shuts the window, distancing himself from his role in and contingency upon the precariousness of other bodies.
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‎Julius feigns a sense of coherence, metaphorically likened to his free and autonomous walking through New York City, in order to make legible the particular textspace that is his story. At certain points of conjuncture, the nodes where his adopted mode threatens to disintegrate, we gain a glimpse of other, underlying (hi)stories. In this sense, Open City employs the structural equivalence to the kind of Benjamin-influenced reading of diasporic narratives that, as Goyal writes, releases “the alternatives that a single line of narrative has to suppress in order to constitute itself as dominant” (2010: 16). Moreover, and not only in form but also in content, the novel stages the contrast between the isolated temporal moment and hero of the “adventure time” chronotope, and the specific historicizing mode of what Goyal terms “diaspora time” – a time which, instead of being defined by “the ‘homogenous, empty time’ of progress” is more appropriately understood as “a time that is characterized by rupture but also by various kinds of imagined or projected simultaneities” (Goyal 2010: 15). A particularly dense exposition of “diaspora time” can be found in chapter 5, which is worth looking at in more detail.
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‎The chapter opens with a memory inserted into the linear progression of the narrative. Julius remembers the day that he and his girlfriend Nadège visited a detention center in Queens. The visit, we learn, is erotically motivated. Julius distances himself from “that beatific, slightly unfocused expression” he identifies with the “do-gooders” organizing the visit (62). Instead, he fantasizes how Nadège might fall in love with the idea of him

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‎acting as “the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle” (70). At the facility, Julius is assigned to a selected inmate, a young man from Liberia named Saidu, who tells him in great detail about the stunted movements of his arduous journey to the United States. Saidu, Julius notes, is “well educated,” showing “no hesitation in his English,” and Julius lets him speak “without interrupting” (64). His story begins roughly 10 years earlier in 1994, in the midst of Liberia’s first civil war, with the bombing of his school – the same school in which “he had been taught about the special relationship between Liberia and America, which was like the relationship between an uncle and a favorite nephew” (64). He recounts the tragic losses of his family members and various confrontations with different military groups, some more fortuitous than others, interspersed with the itinerary details of his year-long flight. Hitching a ride with Nigerian ECOMOG soldiers, walking “on foot to Guinea, a journey of many days,” and crossing the Sahara on a truck full of multinational refugees, he reaches Tangier. Here, he notices “the way the black Africans moved around, under constant police surveillance” (67). Saidu manages to enter European soil on a rowing boat to Ceuta, continues on a ferry to Spain, and then makes his way to Lisbon, where he spends two years working as a butcher’s assistant and then as a barber, sharing a room “with ten other Africans” until he has saved up enough money to fly into JFK airport with a fake ID.
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‎As Julius recounts Saidu’s story in the manner of an extradiegetic narrator, the flow of the story is interrupted by Julius’s doubts: “I wondered, naturally, as Saidu told this story, whether I believed him or not, whether it wasn’t more likely that he had been a soldier. He had, after all, had months to embellish the details, to perfect his claim of being an innocent refugee” (67). This play on the reliability of the narrator is complicated even further by the second part of the chapter, set again during the course of Julius’s primary narration. Here, Julius is confronted with another diasporic narrative, this time presented in the unmarked direct speech that is characteristic of Julius’s encounters with other urban dwellers. In the “underground catacombs of Penn station,” he meets a Haitian, a shoeshine named Pierre, so old-fashioned that the “older term” bootblack seems more appropriate. He tells Julius how he “came from Haiti, when things got bad there,” when both black and whites were killed (70-71).
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‎Pierre’s story spans many decades in New York, is marked by a religious rhetoric, and focuses at length on his life in the service of the Bérards, with whom he had come from Haiti. Even after the death of Mr. Bérard, a “cold man at times” but with a heart, who taught him “to read and write,” Pierre stays in the service of his wife because “Service to Mrs. Bérard was service to God” (73). Pierre is able to work as a hairdresser outside of the house and earn “enough to purchase freedom for [his] sister Rosalie” (72). Only after
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‎the death of Mrs. Bérard does he seek “the freedom without,” finally marrying his sweetheart Juliette at age forty-one and building a school for Black children (74).
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‎While this kind of rhetoric is already peculiar, it is the specific dates and historical events around which his story is built that reveal what an unusual narrator Pierre actually is. The killings, under the “terror of Boukman,” he notes, were as bad as under “the terror of Bonaparte,” indicating the era of the Haitian revolution from 1791 to 1804, namely the slave revolt led by Dutty Boukman and the previous French rule under Napoleon Bonaparte (72).
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‎Pierre also mentions the difficult years of yellow fever in New York City, taking the lives of many, including his sister Rosalie. The last record of yellow fever in New York is dated to 1822 – more than 40 years before the 13th Amendment officially ended slavery in the United States. Set against the hard facts of history, Pierre’s story is not a strange narrative, it is a slave narrative. 52
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‎The presentation of this story leaves no doubt about it being anchored in Julius’s narrated present. What is missing is Julius’s direct reaction to the telling, leaving the temporal plausibility of the story entirely uncommented. When he leaves and steps outside, he merely remarks upon how his “shoes gleamed, but the polish revealed only that they were old and in need of replacing” (74). Julius, it seems, has encountered a walking and talking ghost in Penn Station. Then, however, something remarkable happens to his perception of the city. Julius sees an overturned police barrier and perceives some kind of “silent commotion” (74). The following passage concludes the chapter:
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‎That afternoon, during which I flitted in and out of myself, when time became elastic and voices cut out of the past into the present, the heart of the city was gripped by what seemed to be a commotion from earlier time. I feared being caught up in what, it seemed to me, were draft riots. […] What I saw next gave me a fright: in the farther distance, beyond the listless crowd, the body of a lynched man dangling from a tree. The figure was slender, dressed from head to toe in black, reflecting no light. It soon resolved itself, however, into a less ominous thing: dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind. (74-75)
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‎Julius imagines a violent scene from New York City’s racist draft riots of 1863. More accurately, he experiences the simultaneity of “diaspora time,” in which, as Goyal writes, the Benjaminian “”time of the now’ is shot through with the memory of the Middle Passage” (2010: 15). While Julius may be able to distance his biography from the unfortunate story of Saidu or the anachronistic narrative of Pierre, the history of place simply overwhelms his present and momentarily arrests his linear movement, frightening him and
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‎flooding his ostensibly safe and removed ‘now’ with the knowledge of past continuities.
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‎Apart from illuminating the intricate temporal layering of Open City, the chapter under discussion is also extraordinary in its metafictional purport. The way that Pierre’s story is inserted into the narrative, complete with the register and rhetoric of the slave narrative, but at the same time part of Julius’s intradiegetic world-making, introduces a postmodern play with genre while complicating the generic status of this ostensibly realist novel as a whole. In juxtaposing the generic conventions of Pierre’s slave narrative with those of Saidu’s refugee story, Cole draws attention to the implicit claims of autobiographical authenticity inherent in both stories – and in the overarching frame of Open City itself.
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‎Broadly looking at the generic conventions of the slave narrative, one could call the claim to authenticity both its major concern and formative constraint. As the authorship of these narratives was routinely questioned, the narrative would almost always address the question of literacy, stressing the way that the author had been taught “to read and write” (OC 72), often by his or her master, thus proving to be “well educated” (64) enough to be the author of their own story. In one of the most renowned slave narratives, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), the author is particularly aware of these pitfalls, including several self-reflexive passages addressing the conventions of the memoir and stressing the authenticity of his tale. In its wider reception, especially in the 20th century, the question of this authenticity was further extended to the accuracy of the historical details. Many scholars doubted whether he could have really been born in the “part of Africa known by the name of Guinea” in 1745 or whether he had gained the necessary information on this area and the Middle Passage while growing up in the Americas (Equiano et al. 1969: 1).53 Commenting on this debate, Paul E. Lovejoy writes: “Despite the existence of documentation that refutes his claim to an African birth […] The Interesting Narrative is reasonably accurate in its details, although, of course, subject to the same criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the genre of autobiography” (2006: 318). Elaborating on the function and origin of these debates, he adds:
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‎The issue is clear: are his descriptions of his experiences of Africa and the notorious “Middle Passage” fabricated or are they derived from his personal experience? It might be argued that it does not matter that much in terms of Vassa’s impact on the abolition movement, which was profound, because a fictionalized account of his childhood might have been just as effective for political purposes to garner support for the abolitionist cause as an account that was in fact the truth. (2006: 319)
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‎Distinguishing fact from fiction and the claim to authenticity became crucial questions in the time of abolition and they remain equally crucial questions for an African refugee like Saidu. The gruesome details of Liberia’s civil wars are told to an effect and, as Julius notes, might be embellished “to perfect his claim of being an innocent refugee” (67). Read as fiction, and not merely an appeal to a legal status, Saidu’s story might also be considered effective for political purposes, even, or perhaps especially, if he had been a child soldier in Liberia. One is reminded of certain generic conventions in postcolonial literature, for example the purportedly rallying effect of Dave Eggers ventriloquizing a Sudanese child soldier in What Is the What (2006) or the open debate amongst contemporary African authors on whether bleak depictions of the African continent are “performing Africa” in a way that may be meant to evoke “pity and fear” but merely succeeds in producing “poverty-porn” (Habila 2013: para. 1). We may read this chapter as Cole’s meta-fictional commentary on these debates, and on the generic constrains of diasporic writing. Identifying two examples of narratives that wittingly adhere to their respective genre conventions, we are invited to interrogate the way we actually read Julius’s story, questioning what kind of expectations we bring to the narrative of a young, bourgeois, and cosmopolitan Nigerian. Especially, one might add, if he shares these characteristics with the actual author.
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‎While the generic issues of autobiography naturally dovetail with notions of accuracy and authenticity, the impetus of these questions arises from their convergence at the point of history. This, at least, is what Paul de Man suggests in “Autobiography as De-Facement,” where he notes that since “the concept of genre designates an aesthetic as well as a historical function, what is at stake is not only the distance that shelters the author of autobiography from his [sic] experience but the possible convergence of aesthetics and of history” (1979: 919). Here, de Man also problematizes the notion of the author’s identity verifying the authenticity of an autobiographical text and proposes an understanding of autobiography as mode of reading or understanding that in fact pertains to all texts and all readings. Instead of the life or the subject matter determining the genre, he notes “that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact […] determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium” (1979: 920). For de Man, the notion of writing determining life is fundamentally a function of language folding back unto the subject.
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‎The complex blurring of fictionalized historiographic and fictionalized autobiographical writing in Open City is thus a particular apt illustration of the historical function of genre and also stages the tensions arising from so-called autoethnographic writing. Exposing how we bring certain expectations to these generic forms, as well as positing Goyal’s notion of
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‎”genre as the presence of the past in the present,” we may think about the continuation of certain claims read into the narratives of the Black Diaspora (2010: 10). In the case of Julius’s story, or Open City as an Afropolitan narrative, the claim here may not be to the status as a human being, as in the slave narrative, nor the claim to legal protection and citizenship, as in a refugee’s or immigrant’s tale. Its quasi-autobiographical mode can, however, be read as a claim nonetheless, an appeal perhaps to the status of world citizenship, or more accurately to liberal cosmopolitanism. Bringing Julius’s narrative in conversation with two other diasporic narrative modes exposes the way that liberal Western cosmopolitanism, as it is widely understood, functions as a neo-nationalism that diasporic subjects are generically and legally expected to appeal to. The way that Julius embodies and complicates these claims is an important critique of this kind of surreptitious yet prescribed functionalism of autoethnography and problematizes the ontological status of Black cosmopolitanism.
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‎In a way, the fugitive movements of Liberian Saidu, manumitted Haitian slave Pierre, and ambling Julius are brought into conversation and presented as a single form of Black movement. Through this juxtaposition, the reader is again reminded of how contemporary Black movements are anything but free and continue to be shaped by various kinds of bordering. What may be read as post-racial in the novel’s aesthetics, the rendering of a protagonist author who rejects recognizable racial scripts, is actually a nuanced investigation of how the difficulties of Black movement aren’t always as obvious as the often visible race lines that run through a city or along global borders. These lines sometimes also present a question posed internally, as Julius moves and asserts himself along those visible lines and others, less visible but all the more intransigent. Thus viewed, Open City’s coveys a notion of fugitivity as a response to or escape from the discursive reach of a liberal hegemony commanding very distinct modes of recognition and subjecthood. It may also reveal the author’s desire to slip through the net of any single ascription, including narrow conceptions of Blackness. In “On the Blackness of the Panther,” Cole writes:
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‎Escape! I would rather be in the wild. I would rather be in a civilization of my own making, bizarre, contrary, as vain as the whites, exterior to their logic. I’m always scoping the exits. Drapetomania, they called it, in Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race (1851), the irrepressible desire in certain slaves to run away. (2018: para. 21)
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‎In this chapter of Open City, Julius experiences a simultaneity that transports him through the arduous routes of the Sahara, and the slave ship, to the catacombs of New York City. Embedded in this triadic encounter is not only the acknowledgment of how race in/as history has positioned each of these
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‎men in a particular constellation, but also the anticipation of a certain fugitive movement. How indeed might we think of a Black diasporic encounter that operates outside the theater of representation, and that might have escaped the logic of legitimization and recognition? What if these encounters, what if the dialogism of this novel occurred outside of history or at least outside that model of time which, following Bergson, can only ever account for and measure the moment as that which has passed?54 A model which, at the same time, is also the mechanical, progressive clock-time that sought to mechanize the enslaved and that their fugitive movements seek to resist? As a Boston emissary observed in 1865, the year of emancipation, the “sole ambition of the freedman” appears to be to “cultivate” and “plant” what and when he wishes: “to be able to do that free from any outside control, in one word to be free, to control his own time and efforts without anything that can remind him of his past sufferings in bondage. This is their idea, their desire and their hope” (qtd in Foner 1994: 459). The freedom to experience ‘now’ in its duration, as a state of being in which the past touches present and future in a continuous yet open-ended flow, may be the ultimate utopian horizon limned here.
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