Taking the Temperature of True North
Despite the fact that I am, as W.E.B. Du Bois would say, a New
England Negro, I do not like the cold. Another thing that I do not
like, especially in an academic talk, is too much reference to the
autobiographical. So, in defiance of my two dislikes, I will, in this
essay, talk about the cold, myself, and the contours of the diasporic
blackness that Isaac Julien images so beautifully and provocatively in
True North.
As a scholar of African American literature and cultural studies,
questions of diaspora concern me nearly everyday. As Brent Edwards
points out in his essay on "Diaspora" in Keywords for American
Cultural Studies, the 20th century saw many minority cultures claim
"diasporic" status as a way to link them to other "like" minorities in
other places, to strategize bids for representation and power
trans-nationally and trans-culturally.[1]
This change in perspective,
from minority to diaspora, gave the multifarious gatherings of black
people dispersed across the Atlantic by the trade in slaves a relation
to one another that could be historicized, analyzed, strategized and
politicized. A claim for diaspora became a claim for globalized
community, a claim for a diversity of related, but not at all
essentialized blacknesses. In my own work, I have been concerned about
how, for example, New England Negroes and black British "luxury" slaves
expressed their identities through clothing in the 18th century. I have
examined the campy and fantastical self-portraiture of a Nigerian-born
American artist in New York and his collaboration with an African
American artist who spent some formative years in Tanzania—they called
their double-portrait "Sisterhood."[2]
As I do this work in my writing
and in the classroom, I am always concerned with what Paul Gilroy calls
the "routes" that black people and blackness as an idea has traveled—whether
the route leads to an interrogation, as in Countee Cullen's
famous poem, "Heritage," in which the poetic persona is pre-occupied
with the question of "What Is Africa to Me?" or if the route leads
instead to the North Pole, as in True North, what "roots" these
investigations nurture and what they preclude is uppermost in my
mind.[3]
Although Julien's film does not ask, explicitly, "What does all this
ice mean to me?" I think about this question all the time, not in my
work, yet, but in my personal life. I'm married to a Swedish man and
spend every summer and every other winter holiday season in Stockholm.
You can imagine that more than once, on a bitterly cold day in late
December, with no sun in sight, I have absolutely found myself saying,
"what does all this ice mean to me?" The beginning of True North
was shot in the Ice Hotel (Is Hotellet) in Jukkasjärvi, northern Sweden;
I still have an unused gift certificate for a weekend there given to us
as a wedding present. Last summer, my family vacation took place
entirely above the Arctic Circle and in the midnight sun, ending in
Tromsø, Norway, home to the world's northernmost university, brewery,
botanical garden, and planetarium, and very close to the northernmost
golf course. We spent most of our time on a series of islands to the
north west called Lofoten, home to tiny fishing villages with great food
and, surprisingly, the odd charming boutique hotel. In every single
place we went last summer, I fully expected to be the only black person
or person of color for kilometers. While there would, of course, be no
replay of James Baldwin's alienating experience of African-diasporic
singularity in Switzerland, recounted famously in his 1955 "Stranger in
the Village" essay, I nevertheless expected to be adding the diversity
to this northernmost landscape.[4]
I was wrong. People, indeed "folks,"
had gotten there before me and not just to visit—in every single
place we went (and my husband is a lover of the off-the-beaten track),
another diasporic person was in evidence. These villages are in the
diaspora now.
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