An interview with Manthia Diawara.

• Author: Sangudi, Genevieve
• Position: Interview

Manthia Diawara is a professor of comparative literature and director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University as well as a prominent filmmaker and author. He has studied and written extensively on the issues of African immigration, his own experiences in Africa, France, and the United States, and the immigrant's search for identity. The Journal of International Affairs spoke with Diawara on 13 February 2004 in his NYU office.

JIA: In both We Won't Budge and In Search of Africa, you return to Africa to find long-lost friends and a past that's fraught with contradictions. Why do you keep going back to Africa--in your travels, in your films, in your writings?

Manthia Diawara: I think actually that's a very important question for at least two reasons. One, I actually can't help but keep going back to Africa, in spite of everything that I say, because going back to Africa is like going back to, pardon the sexist term, a mother's breast, in a way. It's like going on a pilgrimage, it's like I'm renewing myself, it's like re-testing myself, it's like trying to figure out if I'm real because that's one of the things that I said in In Search of Africa. Sometimes I walk down the street in this country and I don't feel like I have a history. I don't feel like I exist. My history is always buried in the dustbin, in the trash. My leaders are called dictators or they're called tribalists. So the need to redo that history makes me keep going back.

And then finding my childhood friends--I'm a very nostalgic and romantic person. My friends remind me that the world has changed. They cannot stay the way I left them, they have moved on and I have moved on. So that metaphorically is a message to the whole West. The West wants Africa to stay primitive just as I want my friends to remain as they were when we were children. This could go back to African-American relations with Africa. It could also go back to the whole 20th century art--modernism and its relation to primitivism. That's really the challenge I've been working out in returning to Africa, whether it's love, hate, whether it's modernity against primitivism, whether it is literally going for nourishment, whatever it is. It really has to do with man's attempt to have origins, even though origins are wrong. It has a very romantic thing in it, it has a very sad thing in it, you can't do anything about it, and it also has something very revolutionary about it. This is ironic, because most people think that nostalgia is not historic, that it's just a refuge--a place you go to run away from history. But actually my past is my future, because by going back to Africa, every time I go, I'm awakening the ghosts of my history--the Soninke, (1) the Malinke, (2) my own mother, all the people who had invested in me. Every time I go back to Africa, I'm actually calling them into action and they are projecting me into the future, so my past is my future in that sense.

JIA: In We Won't Budge, you contrast the primacy of the individual in France with the identity politics of the U.S. The book is in part an exploration of this tension as it exists in the individual, namely you, who has changed homes and identities and also had cultural and racial identities imposed upon him. From a moral standpoint, how does obligation to self rank with obligation to others--family, community, or homeland? How does one reconcile conflicting pulls?

Diawara: Well, the book is very personal. First, what I wanted to do is to show my commitment both to the American system of democracy and the French system of democracy. In France, you cannot talk about a community, you cannot talk about race, and you cannot talk about group rights. You really cannot talk about these things in France, but the individual has primacy. And the individual symbolizes for them the ultimate of human rights. People are known as individuals, not as people coming from Africa or other places. This is really the way the French constitution is supposed to make things obvious. And in the United States, you really need to organize yourself in your group in order to have rights. You know, you fight as a group, as black people, and so on. But at the same time, when you earn these rights as a group, you suddenly get trapped in the group. You suddenly get this group identity, which may be good, but may be tiring at times. So what are you...