Of humans and other “humans” also known as nahums: sameness and difference in Eustace Palmer’s Canfira’s Travels

Abstract

In this paper, I show how Palmer’s novel—through a privileging of a discourse of sameness and difference duality—illustrates and interrogates notions of self and otherness. What is self, and what is the other? How are these two different from one another? To what extent are they the same? How do we and should we react when we encounter difference and otherness or sameness, or what appears to be such? These are some of the questions that will serve as signposts as we accompany Canfira on his peregrination through what he refers to as a “strange land.” Ultimately, the essay seeks to show how Eustace Palmer exploits the sameness-difference duality to levy a mordant criticism against individual characters and entire groups, demonstrating in the process the shakiness of the claim to essentialism inherent in the sameness-difference discourse, as well as the dangers of conformity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The novel is specifically mentioned by Palmer’s protagonist (119).

2 When unscrambled, the name Canfira becomes “African.”

3 The term is used here rather advisedly. As we shall see, there is no real transformation in Canfira; we see instead a manifestation of his true character.

4 Referred to as “falamakata fiva” in Sierra Leonean Krio.

5 This passenger in turn calls another a “baboon” (12) and he, like many other passengers, is unabashedly frightened.

6 Raselinoreans are called “Ras people” by their neighbors, either to despise them or simply because they cannot easily pronounce their appellation. Interestingly, after initially objecting to the nomenclature, the citizens of Raselinorea have now come to appropriate it. It is worth noting that “ras” is a particularly nasty slang for “arse” in Sierra Leonean Krio, as it is in other English-based creole languages or pidgins, such as Jamaican Creole.

7 The Krio equivalent of this adage is “doti wata sef kin ot faya,” which means that dirty water, like clean water, can put out a fire. The proverb, almost exclusively used in a sexual sense, means to satisfy a sexual urge, any woman or man will do.

8 We see a similar praise for the grace and strength of the palm tree in Yema Lucilda Hunter’s Road to Freedom. Toward the end of their first depressing rainy season in their battered settlement in Freetown, Deannie, the narrator, finds strength and renewed hope in the tree: “It was so tall and so incredibly slender as it soared gracefully toward the sky. How, I asked myself, could a tree be so slender yet strong enough to grow so tall?” (144).

9 Ifars, unlike Socrates, is not arrogant enough to claim he has been sent by God as a Jeremiah to his people. All the same, the idea itself is invoked in the novel when Canfira complains about Ifars’ persistent critique of his society: “His main defect, I thought, was the tendency to think of himself as God’s gift to Raselinorea, as the epitome of uprightness” (193).

10 This scene also reminds us of the scene of the execution of General Tamba Masimiara in Syl Cheney-Coker’s The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar (395).

11 Freud admits that “the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with whatever excites fear in general” (219).

12 In a characteristically shameless Raselinorean style, Canfira tries to steal money from his friend (327).

13 “To recognize” is to know again, as opposed to ‘cognize,’ which is to know a first time.

14 After his first steamy tryst with Kaynda, the “guilty” Canfira (guilty for sleeping with his friend and savior’s girlfriend) wonders: “Could it be that my nature had degenerated, that I was gradually descending to the level of the beings among whom I now find myself?” (136). From atop his superiority complex, Canfira once again fails to acknowledge his sameness with the people of Raselinorea. He doesn’t need to descend to their level; he was already there before he came among them. The earliest indication of Canfira’s lasciviousness—not to mention his sexism—is on the plane just before their crash landing. He tells us: “I had been sitting next to a very pretty girl who took a very lively interest in me… In between admiring her shapely legs and the curve of her bosom, I was secretly planning to take her address… I was already dreaming of many sensual evenings we would have together, even though I was engaged to another pretty young thing. Well, boys must be boys…” (11). One does not become what one is not.

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Mohamed Kamara

Mohamed Kamara has a BA from Fourah Bay College (the University of Sierra Leone) and an MA and PhD from Purdue University and Tulane University, respectively. He teaches French and Francophone literatures and cultures at Washington and Lee University, Virginia, where he is also a faculty member of the Africana Studies program. Mohamed has published short stories, as well as articles on Léopold Sédar Senghor, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Birago Diop, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, the teaching of the Francophone African novel, and French colonial education. Mohamed is currently working on a book-length study of the representation of French colonial education in Francophone black African literature.