who gets to be free?

on complicity and language

Freedom is not something that one people can bestow on another as a gift. They claim it as their own and none can keep it from them.

—Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of Ghana

I had a different post scheduled this week. About where I am right now, in a part of the world I have never been to before, with five writers I absolutely adore; about the things I am learning here, the food I am eating, the new experiences I’m having. But part of the point of us being here, on this residency, is to think about freedom, and to think about the here and now. So, let us consider both—freedom, and the here and now.

I’m currently in residence in Accra, Ghana, at the Library of Africa and The African Diaspora. Part of LOATAD’s mission is to redefine the literary canon; to centre the African and diaspora voices whose work has been long marginalised. The shelves that line this library are replete with the ingenuity of African writers—both fiction and nonfiction, political and literary—and I have been humbled by how few of these names I have come to know in the 36 years of my life, and how little I really know about the writers I was aware of.

I did not know that the great Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o—one of the authors who, last week, was a favourite for the Nobel Prize for Literature—was born James Ngugi, and did not renounce that name until he was 32, when he both embraced Frantz Fanon’s conception of Marxism and saw his name as a colonial name. I didn’t know that he subsequently campaigned for African writers to reject English and write in their pre-colonialist languages, a position that Nigerian author Chinua Achebe challenged, arguing that English gave African writers a broader audience, notably in colonialist countries. I didn’t know that in the late 60s, at Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s urging, the University of Nairobi dropped its English literature courses and replaced them with ones that centred both written and oral African literatures instead.

I didn’t know this, despite reading work by both authors, because the question of self-definition through language has never been relevant to my life or my work. I can access Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o’s work in my language, without context, and just as a work of literature; he, on the other hand, could not produce that work without grappling with these questions. My language is the colonial language; there is no freedom that I have been denied in that regard. When we speak of privilege, it is this privilege we are speaking of.

A year ago I had a conversation with my friend Carolina Orloff of Charco Press about indigenous languages in South America and the limited translation thereof. About how, for most people, work or speech in these languages can’t be accessed outside of one or even two prisms of colonialism; they are only translated into Spanish, which might then be translated into English, which only then makes it accessible to the rest of the world. The words of those people, most of the time for most people, are refracted twice through colonial language, their meanings irrevocably changed in the process.

Of course, its not just meanings that change; it is context which is removed. The other day I listened to my friend Chika Jones deconstruct, just by hearing the names of other Yoruba people, a whole plethora of information: where the person is probably from, where they came in their family line, whether or not they were born after a set of twins in their family. Whereas English privileges the distinct identities of naming, this is something that is not universal. Yet that universality is always presumed.

We think of freedom as a concrete thing; to be physically unencumbered. We think of it that way because the only freedom we can imagine, as people who have never been unfree, is one that is grounded in a physical experience. It is this conception of freedom that allows us to look at a people whose country, existence and history has been defined by another, by us, and say—look, aren’t you free now? Aren’t you a free man now?

If pushed, we might think of it as a state of free choices without punishment; that you can choose same-sex partners without suffering violence, attend protests without suppression, speak your politics without losing your job or home. This is the type of freedom that we think about most with relation to ourselves, in countries like the UK; they are quite recent freedoms, some being dismantled in law as we speak.

But real freedom is not just either of these. It is the space and chance to define oneself without constraints, in your real state: without the imposition of frameworks or limitations on you by force. To be able to express yourself without using the language of people who have oppressed your culture. Jean Paul-Sartre said that existence precedes essence; that there is no model for a person before they are born, and that they must encounter themselves and then rise up in the world to self-define as they grow. But how can this be true, for a person who is not encountering themselves as they truly are, but by how a colonial force has defined them? How could Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o encounter himself when he was given a colonial name—James Ngugi—and not a name from his own people, whilst also living in a country controlled by colonial extraction and underdevelopment? He was encountering someone else, a man refracted through a colonial mirror. It is difficult, perhaps, to hold the thought that we experience an expansive freedom that we can barely acknowledge. But it seems to me, as people from colonial countries, that we do.

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Last week, my fellow residents and I went on a trip around some spots in Accra, including the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum and Memorial Park. Nkrumah was the first prime minister, and president, of Ghana, having led the country (formerly known as the Gold Coast, after one of the primary resources that could be stripped from the area—the other, of course, being people) to independence from the British. Ghana’s relationship with Nkrumah was soured by a coup d'état in 1966, after which he lived in exile, but broadly he is now remembered as a brilliant political leader and writer, a socialist, a dedicated pan-Africanist and a strong and effective voice against colonialism.

As a group, we stood at exactly the spot where Ghana’s independence was declared. We read the many quotes plastered on the walls, taken from Nkrumah’s writings and speeches. It was impossible not to feel a weight of history in that place, not to feel the importance of what the quotes spoke of: solidarity, justice, freedom—complete freedom—for an entire nation.

We have been thinking, on this residency, on the here and now. An almost unholdable concept, one that slips through your hands whenever you even think you might begin to have a grip on it. The period feels more changeable, more volatile than many of us are used to (though this volatility is unfortunately well known to people who have lived their whole lives in post-colonial countries). To even attempt to reflect this time feels like an act of refraction; as I wrote this week in a piece produced from this residency, you wonder which here, whose now you are supposed to be holding.  

It has been impossible for me not to think of complicity, in this place. Of the quite wildly privileged position to have been born in a place that does not have to reckon with its own sovereignty; to have grown up in an environment bolstered by the wealth of riches taken from other places. To live in a luxury that has been paid for by the poverty of other nations. But more than this: to live in a context where the struggles of huge swathes of humanity are simply an issue that you can engage with or not, as you decide to. When the writings and voices of unfree people exist mostly as a silence, for you, because you do not want to think about their struggles.

For myself, I cannot imagine being born in a place where your access to yourself is defined by another. When your movement is restricted by where a greater armed force says you can go. When the quality of food and water available to you is set by what colonialism has done to the land you live on. Where how much food, and water, and power you get, and whether or not you can leave your land, is decided by someone whose political project is one that keeps you diminished, with the complete uncritical backing of the entire western world. Many of us cannot even begin to imagine this, so we do not think that the situation is one worth considering or speaking on. It is only when we are forced to look, through the viewpoint of a particular atrocity, that we begin to see what we’ve accepted as normal is the loss of freedom of an entire people.

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Last week, my friend and co-resident Alycia Pirmohamed wrote a searching post on green orientalism and colonialism here, and I highly recommend reading it.