The African Dreams of Migration: Donato Ndongo's “El sueño,” Langston Hughes, and the Poetics of the Black Diaspora

ABSTRACT

Perhaps the first text about immigration in Spain, “El Sueño” (1973) by Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo Makina (Niefang, Equatorial Guinea, 1950), narrates a Senegalese man's difficult journey via patera (rickety boats used to cross the Mediterranean) from Africa to Europe. Throughout the short story, suggestive allusions to the poems “Harlem” (“Dream Deferred”) and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes (1902–67) articulate displacement and movement and thus connect Ndongo's story to concepts integral to the African Diaspora. The essay examines the term “diaspora” through analyses of Ndongo's short story in relation to Hughes's poetry. Here, the term “diaspora” does not only refer to human migrations, but also to a literary geography that moves beyond the Middle Passage and slavery to construct new continuities between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Effectively, the narrator of “El sueño” invokes Hughes's depictions of the unarticulated dream, spectral rivers, and fraught mobility to render a vision of frustration and torment with dire consequences for Africans. Indeed, Ndongo's hazy, nightmarish “sueño” sheds light upon the ongoing significance of diaspora. Specifically, he reveals the harsh realities Africans seeking refuge endure as they attempt to access “Fortress Europe.”

KEYWORDS:

• Black Diaspora
• “El sueño”
• Harlem
• Langston Hughes
• migration
• Donato Ndongo
• poetics

Notes on contributor

N. Michelle Murray is an assistant professor of Spanish at Vanderbilt University. Her first book project, Home Away from Home: Migration and Domestic Economies in Contemporary Spanish Culture (forthcoming, U of North Carolina P for North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literature), explores portrayals of immigrant women and domestic work in democratic Spain. She has published articles in Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Letras Femeninas, and Research in African Literatures.

Notes

1. While the word dictadura describes a “classic” dictatorship, the dictablanda in Spain was a “soft” dictatorship marked by increased economic prosperity and less persecution. Historians have divided the Franco dictatorship into the dictadura (1939–59) and the dictablanda (1959–75), which manufactured a Spain touted as “different” to attract tourists all while the nation remained beleaguered by underdeveloped capitalism and Franco's National Catholicism (Afinoguénova and Martí-Olivella xvi).

2. As Isidore Okpewho notes, finding commonalities among black people in Africa and the Americas has proven difficult. He claims, “‘Essentialism’ has emerged in recent diaspora discourse as an ugly label for any tendency to see the imprint of the homeland or ancestral culture—in this case, Africa—in any aspect of the lifestyles or outlook of African-descended peoples in the western Atlantic world” (“Introduction” xv). Indeed, rooting Afro descendants without falling into racist traps continues to pose a challenge because of diverse social and political realities of black people in the diaspora.

3. Some studies focused on Spanish immigration include Cornejo Parriego's Memoria colonial e Inmigracion (2007), Flesler's The Return of the Moor (2008), Faszer-MacMahon and Ketz's African Immigrants in Contemporary Spanish Texts (2015), Martin-Márquez's Disorientations (2008), Ugarte's Africans in Europe (2012). At the same time, many scholarly works that purport to study “European” immigration frequently limit their focus to wealthy, formerly imperial nations that have problematically served to define Europe—Great Britain, France, and Germany—while ignoring Spain and other nations marginalized from the European Union, such as those in Eastern Europe.

4. See Corkill, “National Identities, Immigration and Racism in Spain and Portugal,” and Malgesini, “Spain and the EC: Sluicegate for Europe's Migrant Labor Market.”

5. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon writes, “The black man among his own in the twentieth century does not know at what moment his inferiority comes into being through the other … And then the occasion arose when I had to meet the white man's eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. The real world challenged my claims. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema” (83).

6. Putnam notes, “Of the forty thousand foreign-born blacks resident in Harlem in 1930, only 15 percent had arrived between 1901 and 1914. More than twice that many arrived in the four years from 1920 to 1924” (470–71). Additionally, “[d]ozens of British Caribbeans played leading roles in radical politics, literary production, or both, founding or editing periodicals including the Voice, the Crusader, the Emancipator, Opportunity, the Messenger, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association's Negro World” (Putnam 470).

7. Branche translates the term malungo as “my comrade-with-whom-I shared-the-misfortune-of-the-big-canoe-that-crossed-the-ocean” (4; emphasis in original).

8. The term “Fortress Europe” refers to increased border controls implemented from the 1990s to the present to deter migrants from entering the continent and to capture them if they enter clandestinely. See Carr, Fortress Europe: Dispatches from a Gated Continent.