University of Toronto Quarterly

the black diaspora as it is

The term “African diaspora” initially came to be used in the 1950s and 1960s in the scholarship on the anti-colonial struggle in Africa, which has made it “a politically charged formulation” since this time (Redmond 64). However, in the 1980s and 1990s, the concept of diaspora in itself began to be used more widely in a way that departed from the more static sense of “dispersion” that had previously been used in describing human mobility. As Roza Tsagarousianou and Jessica Retis write, if “dispersion refers to the process of populations spreading beyond the bounds to their place of ‘origin,’ diaspora connotes processes of making sense of this dispersion, of creating infrastructures of narration and action in transnational and trans-local contexts” (1–2). Robin Cohen speaks of a form of diaspora within this context that he describes as “diaspora as consciousness” and that can be productively applied to the experience of the Black diaspora more precisely, in which diaspora came in time to represent “a means of breaking free from the ‘essentialist’ discourse that previously informed the subject matter [of ethnicity and race]. Notions of what constituted ethnicity became more fluid, hybrid, and negotiated, and ‘diaspora’ was a way of mapping how complexity and difference arouse [sic] as cultures traveled, interacted, and mutated” (24, 27). In response to a “more classic” view of diaspora, a more dynamic form emerged that Claire Alexander associates in part with the work of Paul Gilroy and that is intent on conveying “the present- and future-oriented aspect of” diaspora, conceived as a process whose “key focus is the encounter between the diasporic community and its place of settlement, rather than the ‘homeland.’” Diaspora, in this manner, “becomes a way of rethinking racial and ethnic identities as socially, historically and politically constructed rather than given, as subject to unequal relationships of power, and open to the ‘play’ of individual and collective agency” (495).

In the United Kingdom, the work of Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy figured prominently in the new discourse on the topic. In “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall sets, in contrast to a traditional, essentialist understanding of diaspora privileged by the Négritude movement (223), another kind of diaspora, one that “recognises that, as well as the many points of similarity, there are also critical points of deep and significant difference which constitutes ‘what we really are’; or rather – since history has intervened – ‘what we have become’” (225; emphasis in original). He goes on to speak at length of the three main, simultaneously occurring “presences” that make up the difference of Caribbean identity in particular – those of Africa, Europe, and the Americas (230–35). In this sense, Hall claims to use the term “diaspora” metaphorically rather than literally. As he writes, “diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return.” Instead, the experience that he has in mind is to be defined “not by essence or purity, but by the [End Page 3] recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235; emphasis in original). For his part, Gilroy’s name is now virtually indissociable from The Black Atlantic, the book and expression that he first deployed in describing the Black diaspora. In terms that resemble Hall’s, he associates diaspora not only with a sense of “connectedness” but also with a “logic of unity and differentiation.” The value of the concept is to be found, he says, “in its attempt to specify differentiation and identity in a way which enables one to think about the issue of racial commonality outside of constricting binary frameworks – especially those that counterpose essentialism [radical sameness] and pluralism [radical difference]” (120). As such, the “multiplicity” of diaspora “is a chaotic, living, disorganic formation. If it can be called a tradition at all, it is a tradition in ceaseless motion – a changing same that strives continually towards a state of self-realisation that continually retreats beyond its grasp” (122).

Somewhat less commented on in the English criticism is the work of Édouard Glissant, the Martinican writer and thinker whose thoughts on diaspora are nevertheless worth taking into consideration as they are obliquely referred to in Dominoes at the Crossroads and pertain to the francophone setting that Kellough is also writing out of. First published in French in 1990, Glissant’s Poetics of Relation makes a similar distinction between a static and a more decentred conception of diasporic existence, which he bases on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of the rhizome and its opposition to the root:

The root is unique, a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it. In opposition to this they [Deleuze and Guattari] propose the rhizome, an enmeshed root system, a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently. The notion of the rhizome maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a totalitarian root. Rhizomatic thought is the principle behind what I call the Poetics of Relation, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.

(Glissant, Poetics 11)

Such a rhizomatic existence also entails a form of movement, or “errantry,” identified as a type of nomadism. Unlike an “invading nomadism,” however, “whose goal [is] to conquer lands by exterminating their occupants,” the nomadism of Relation is the “circular nomadism” of those who “are driven by some specific need to move, in which daring or aggression play no part.” Such nomadism entails not “the enjoyment of freedom” but, rather, “a form of obedience to contingencies” (11–12). Beyond this, Relation is also characterized by Glissant as a “chaos-monde,” which “is neither fusion nor confusion: it acknowledges neither the uniform blend – a ravenous integration – nor muddled nothingness. Chaos is not ‘chaotic.’ But its hidden order does not presuppose hierarchies or pre-cellencies – neither of chosen languages nor of princenations” [End Page 4] (94). The disorder of the chaos-monde is thus not random; there is a logic to it, but it is not the logic of hierarchy or domination. It evolves in an open form of “fluidity” (94).

Recent scholarship has continued to engage with the work of these authors and the more complex understanding of the diaspora that it has engendered (see Dunn and Scafe; Gopinath 67; Scafe and Dunn). Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, in particular, has fared ambivalently with regard to this subsequent work, which has continued to draw on his groundbreaking view of the Black Atlantic while pointing consistently to “its limits, its blind spots” (Chambliss, Hayes Edwards, and Mitchell 19). In her introduction to the 2023 special issue of Cultural Studies, Reframing the Black Atlantic, Aretha Phiri acknowledges the importance of Gilroy’s book on the Black Atlantic, which has “facilitated the term’s universal circulation and helped cement its scholarly relevance and value” in the humanities and social sciences (191). However, she also notes the critiques that have been made of the work, relating, for example, to Gilroy’s narrow recourse to a Black literary and musical aesthetic that is represented in unproblematically resistant ways, to his neglect of African nations and nationalisms, and to their possible relations to diasporic communities. She cites others who have pointed to the book’s androcentric, heteronormative, and heteropatriarchal viewpoint as well as to its general focus that excludes the global South (192–93).

From a Canadian standpoint, George Elliott Clarke was perhaps the first to direct this kind of criticism at Gilroy, seeing The Black Atlantic as perpetuating the historical tendency to ignore Black Canadian literature in academic critical discourse. Gilroy confronts us once again, he states, with “the blunt irrelevance of Canada to most gestures of diasporic inclusiveness.” Under these terms, Canada can be seen as being “patently absent” from a Black Atlantic cast as being founded on maritime crossings between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Gilroy’s Black Atlantic “is really a vast Bermuda Triangle into which Canada – read as British North America or Nouvelle France or even as an American satellite – vanishes” (Clarke, Odysseys 8–9). As suggested here, Gilroy’s neglect can also be seen more broadly as being based on a disregard not only for Black Canadian literary production but also for Canada as a whole, customarily taken as the lesser distant relative of the United States. Winfried Siemerling’s The Black Atlantic Reconsidered, with its in-depth historical study of Black writing in Canada going back to the first part of the eighteenth century, has gone a considerable way in filling the gap in the critical literature highlighted by Clarke. Dominoes at the Crossroads can also be taken as one of the latest contributions to this effort that has taken shape over recent decades among Black Canadian authors to “engag[e] directly with diaspora contexts” (Siemerling 5).

“petit marronage” and the wake of history

Dominoes at the Crossroads is very much concerned with representing the Canadian specificity of the Black Atlantic. In “Petit Marronage,” the [End Page 5] narrator meditates on the evolution of her own style as a jazz musician in a way that reflects her own unique positioning within the diaspora. “In a way,” she concludes, “the question became a cultural one: How to fuse an African-American musical sensibility with a Caribbean one, and how to enact that fusion in a Canadian context? I would need to create my own genre, and not be content to mimic the established vocabularies” (Kellough 85). Likewise, the narrator’s description of his drive through town and its surrounding area in Erroll’s BMW following his initial arrival in the fictional island country in the title story, “Dominoes at the Crossroads,” reflects the chaotic nature of diaspora:

We drove through the center of town during the midday rush. Tourists strolled the boulevards. Traffic backed up all the way through town. Soldiers stood observing intersections with rifles held against their chests. Teenage girls dressed in short-shorts, flip-flops, and torn tank tops sold bananas car to car. ... Music from the island-themed bars competed with car horns, vendors’ voices, and motorbike engines. Dust and unfiltered exhaust mixed with the heat. Inside the bars, tourists sat at lottery machines and drank mojitos.

(49)

The town gradually recedes to a single-lane country road: “Erroll wove around potholes, stopped for goats, and slowed to greet street vendors with a shout. Trees and tangled bush rose up. The road inclined, then swung back down as we entered the hills. Green rushed past our windows and the damp air rolled through the car” (49). In this manner, the space is shown to comprise a range of urban and rural realities and is characterized by a disorderly mix of race, gender, and class differences. Adding to this sense of cultural eclecticism is the collection’s short fiction form itself, with its multiple narrators, perspectives, and characters that at times return or overlap.

Dominoes at the Crossroads also acknowledges elements that have at times been overlooked in the more common anglophone readings of diaspora. While the Caribbean is the primary locus of return in the collection, the African presence in the diaspora can be observed in the story “Porcelain Nubians” as well as in “Shooting the General” and “Ashes and Juju,” the latter of which have at their centre Hamidou Diop, the minor African character in Hubert Aquin’s 1965 novel Prochain épisode. In returning to the character, Kellough provides the reader entry into the mind of a character who is otherwise kept at the margin of the canonical work of Quebec literature. As a Senegalese Canadian, Diop is also francophone and contributes to Kellough’s attempt to draw attention to the francophone side of the diaspora as well, as do the narrators in “Porcelain Nubians” and “Navette,” who belong to Haitian immigrant families in Montreal. The bilingual aspect of the author’s diasporic experience is further established by the epigraphs that open Dominoes at the Crossroads – one in French by Aimé Césaire, the other in English by (the francophone) Maryse Condé – as it is by the reference to Glissant’s novel La Lézarde in “Dominoes at the Crossroads,” which calls up not only the French history of the Caribbean [End Page 6] but also the Antillean author’s well-known understanding of the diaspora itself.

As previously stated, Dominoes at the Crossroads is centrally concerned with the historical origins of the diaspora. However, this history is not represented in the linear manner of conventional historical discourse but, rather, as something that is lived as part of a non-linear temporal simultaneity that integrates past times and experiences into those of the present and future. This sense of crossing vectors of time is an effect produced, first, by the collection’s overall form consisting of thematically interconnected narratives but is most succinctly reflected in its opening story, “La question ordinaire et extraordinaire.” The story is the published text of a lecture given in the twenty-second century by the great, great grandchild of Kaie Kellough on the history of the city of Montreal, now named Milieu, that recognizes the Black presence in this space dating back to the early colonial period of the seventeenth century. As the lecturer states, “The future is encoded in the past, and in certain events that decide our lives for us” (Kellough 22).

This temporal simultaneity that characterizes the diaspora is fundamentally the result of the transatlantic slave trade, in whose aftermath Black people continue to live today. As Clarke puts it, African Canadians “were forged in the crucible of the slave trade” (Odysseys 73), and this population “coalesced” as the outcome of four centuries of migration, motivated at first by slavery but then by anti-slavery, anti-racism, and a desire for socio-economic improvement (Whiteout 32). Christina Sharpe has described this general phenomenon as that of living “in the wake” of the slave past, an expression that plays on the multiple meanings of “wake.” In allusion to the Middle Passage, a wake can be thought of as “the track left on the water’s surface by a ship” (Sharpe 3). It can be thought of as a “state of wakefulness,” of “consciousness” of the “larger antiblack world” that continues to impact Black lives in the present day (4–5) but also as “a watch or vigil” over the dead that requires an attending to the memory of the dead, in addition to the needs of the dying, those who are “always living in the push toward ... death” (10). In the wake, Sharpe says, “the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present” (9). Again, it entails a form of consciousness; it “is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (13–14). Glissant also acknowledges the origins of the diaspora as being located in Africa and the slave trade in the opening chapter of Poetics of Relation. More precisely, he sees the institution of the plantation system as another of its originating sources as well, identifying the plantation as “one of the focal points for the development of present-day modes of Relation. Within this universe of domination and oppression, of silent or professed dehumanization, forms of humanity stubbornly persisted. In this outmoded spot, on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies of our modernity begin to be detectable” (Glissant, Poetics 65). Siemerling has noted how much contemporary writing by Black Canadian authors has turned its attention toward this past and is “preoccupied with ‘presenting’ the past” in the two senses of the term, not [End Page 7] only through its literary representation but also by demonstrating how this past lives on in the present (11). At the same time, the experience of slavery in Canada has been “routinely marginalized” in studies of the Black Atlantic (4). Although Kellough has not produced the kind of historiographical work that Siemerling is referring to here, with an interest in directly exploring the past, very often in Dominoes at the Crossroads he is implicitly setting the experience of his present-day characters within a context that remains under the influence of the past. In so doing, he also contributes in a manner to the filling of the historical gap identified by Siemerling.

“Petit Marronage” is the story in Dominoes at the Crossroads in which this present-day relation to the slave past is most extensively explored. The narrator, who is identified as being a woman later in the collection (148–49), is a middle-aged Canadian jazz musician who is reflecting back on a career that began with small, low-paying gigs performed throughout Canada. As such, she situates herself as participating in what could be called the tradition of Black revolt through flight and movement. The story opens with the narrator contemplating the nature of the music she plays, which she sees as originating in the plantations of the Caribbean. As she breathes into her saxophone, she claims to “always picture a lush vine sprouting from the bell of the horn, tumbling to the floor, and slithering across the floor until the ground is covered in leaves. ... I am back to where my ancestors might have marooned, after they were introduced to the Caribbean’s plantations” (Kellough, Dominoes 76–77; emphasis added). As vivid as it may be, however, the narrator’s sense of origins remains imprecise, which leads to a branching out of her overall understanding of her past. In addition to the Caribbean, the music she plays has in a similar way taken her “to the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, to a remote cabin that might have inspired a story by Harriet Beecher Stowe, even to a different hemisphere. It may transport me to places that are not in my family history but to which I have some connection, through the sweep of the diaspora” (77). We hear in this passage an evocation of the Middle Passage, of the American South, and of the African continent itself, all crucial points of interest in the history of chattel slavery. Concurrently, the narrator’s work as a musician brings with it travel that allows for a feeling of escape from this history through movement: “I wanted freedom, and saw it as the endless deferral of return. To fly, to maroon, to run, I wanted to define my trajectory. ... I wanted the agitation of flight. Flight was distinct from discovery or conquest. Its core principle was movement” (85). The narrator’s situation allows for travel as pleasure as well, unlike her ancestors who, when captives, had movement forced upon them. She describes herself as having attained a middle ranking in the “hierarchy” of touring musicians, which will sometimes find her flying first class in the company of “executives” and being chauffeured by festival volunteers or in limousines (84).

The narrator’s movement in life as a result of her work will take her to many places in the world. In “Petit Marronage,” which is presented as her written memoir, she recounts a handful of experiences that took place in [End Page 8] Canada in particular. The memoir begins in the guise of a slave narrative, with the narrator telling of how in the 1990s she ran away from her Toronto home at the age of sixteen in order to make her way to Montreal, which she saw as a city with history that was unlike Toronto. In defiance of her parents who wanted her to focus on her future, she is drawn to the past; and she wears her hair in dreadlocks, which make her look “anti-establishment” in her parents’ view (Kellough, Dominoes 78–79). The history she finds in Montreal is not what she expected, however. After a first day of drifting in a city filled with vacant business windows and “For Rent” signs, she ends up in a decrepit Saint-Louis Square: “I crashed on the grass facing the 19th century sandstone homes, the ones in which the poet Émile Nelligan was rumored to have lived. The houses had once been majestic, but their paint was now curling, their balconies were eaten by wood rot and were home to families of squirrels, and their wrought iron railings were gnawed by rust.” Once an esteemed space of great social value, it is now occupied by squeegee punks, drunks, and other itinerants (80–81).

In recent times, criticism has been directed at the field of diaspora studies for its failure to take colonial history into account in its theorizing of diasporic community and for its taking for granted the settler nation while “eras[ing] Indigenous understandings of nationhood and sovereignty” (Gopinath 69–70; see also Davis 32–36; Krishnamurti and Lee 7–9). The narrator’s final encounter with history in Montreal turns out to be with the Iroquois man cast in bronze squatting at the base of the Maisonneuve Monument in Old Montreal’s Place d’Armes. On the one hand, the figure is an emblem of a lifeless, hegemonic history that has contained Indigenous experience in Canada. Yet the narrator also seems to identify with the man in a way that sets her experience of the diaspora within the horrors of the colonial history of the Americas more widely. As she gazes into the man’s eyes, she writes, “I touched his face, and that touch became a caress. I wanted to say something to him, but all I could think of was, bonjour” (Kellough, Dominoes 82). Ironically, in her longing to connect with the past, her means are limited to the sadly inadequate language of the colonizer, even as her physical contact with the man allows for a form of connection outside of language that is more genuine. It is at this point that the narrator chooses to return home to Toronto, sensing perhaps that the city’s atmosphere of European historicity and charm that had initially seduced her is simply in reality the facade of a colonial past that has little to offer her (80).

Inserted toward the end of this segment, however, is a brief passage narrated in the first person by a different character who, given certain historical details, can be identified as Marie-Joseph Angélique, the enslaved woman who in 1734 set fire to the home of the family who owned her, a fire that would quickly spread and consume a large part of the historic city of Montreal (Kellough, Dominoes 82–83). There is no explanation provided for the presence of this passage in the story. Though, earlier, the narrator does identify the form of the memoir that she is writing in as being a “subgenre of fiction” (78), suggesting that the unexplained scene is possibly an imagined reconstruction of a moment in Black Canadian history intended to fill a void felt by the story’s [End Page 9] main narrator, a narrative fragment inspired by the latter’s time in Montreal.³ The Montreal experience will repeat itself throughout the remainder of the story as the narrator tells of criss-crossing Canada over the span of her career – on the bus at first as a young musician, then in more comfortable circumstances. Consistently, she will encounter a residual White supremacy mixed in with an erasure of Black history, which she tries to remedy through a form of sublimation. Whatever anger or resentment she feels is channelled into her music or into other fictional reconstructions of the past.

“dominoes at the crossroads” and the colonial present

Another important narrative in the collection when dealing with the representation of diasporic experience is the title story, “Dominoes at the Crossroads.” As with “Petit Marronage,” there is some direct attention given to history in the story. The main reason that the narrator and his partner, Tamika, are in the fictional island country in the narrative is that Tamika is a scholar researching events surrounding the Grenada Revolution of 1979. But the story’s greater interest lies in how it explores the ongoing effects on the present of a colonial history that, on the surface, often seems to have been surpassed and to have disappeared.

Of course, the history of slavery is also the history of empire and colonialism as the cheap labour of Africa was needed to extract and exploit the natural resources of the Americas. Peter Moopi and Rodwell Makombe open Coloniality and Migrancy in African Diasporic Literatures by noting how Africans and African migrants today continue to be affected by what they term a “logic of coloniality” – that is, economic, political, and social systems and structures “that seek to keep former colonised territories and peoples on the darker side of Western modernity.” As they go on to explain, “Africa and other former colonised territories occupy the darker side of modernity because economically they continue to perform the same functions that they used to perform during colonialism while politically they continue to model quasi-colonial systems of governance that keep the majority of their citizens on the margins of national political affairs” (1). This “colonial matrix of power,” they say, is “characterised by asymmetries of power and unequal circumstances of existence that date back to the colonial encounter.” As a result, certain “patterns of power and patterns of thought that survived the end of colonialism continue to wreak havoc globally” (14). While Moopi and Makombe are dealing with contemporary African migrancy in their book, what they claim here with regard to the ongoing effects of colonialism in the world applies equally well to the formerly enslaved of the Caribbean. As Shana Redmond would have it, the people of African descent in the world today are subject not only to physical violence and state violence but also to the violence of neoliberalism (67). [End Page 10]

However, while acknowledging this sense of “continuity” that characterizes the diaspora as a consequence of Black people’s former “insertion into the plantation economy,” it is equally important to recognize the sense of difference that the diaspora holds (Hall 227). As Andrea Davis notes, people of African descent in Canada, in particular, have been “routinely reduced to a homogenizing Blackness that erases historical, cultural, and ethnic specificities in the service of a narrative of sameness that marks all Black people through the historical lens of chattel slavery” (37). Yet, taking up Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, Kameelah Martin and Donald Shaffer also see life in the diaspora as moving in a different direction – as being “increasingly synonymous with cultural hybridity,” a state of existence “simultaneously negotiating multiple cultural and geographic identifiers” (1). While this sense of diasporic difference and hybridity has often been approached from a more cultural vantage, it can also be productively seen through the more socio-economic viewpoint of intersectionality, a term first used by Kimberlé Crenshaw as a way to move beyond “single-axis” frameworks of analysis that tend to disadvantage individuals whose experience spans multiple categories of identification (139–40).

In the article in which the term first appeared, Crenshaw’s focus is on Black women, whose experience of discrimination was commonly ignored in the existing discourse of anti-racism, which tended to privilege Black men, and feminist discourse, which favoured White women.⁴ Since then, the term has evolved to take in a wider range of experiences, as highlighted in Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge’s working definition of intersectionality, which they use in their book on the topic. The authors see the concept as interrogating

how intersecting power relations influence social relations across diverse societies as well as individual experiences in everyday life. As an analytical tool, intersectionality views categories of race, class, gender, sexuality, class [sic], nation, ability, ethnicity, and age – among others – as interrelated and mutually shaping one another. Intersectionality is a way of understanding and explaining complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences.

(Collins and Bilge 2)

As such, categories such as race, class, and gender are not “discrete and mutually exclusive entities, but rather build on each other and work together; ... while often invisible, these intersecting power relations affect all aspects of the social world” (2).

“Dominoes at the Crossroads,” in particular, is centrally concerned with the class distinctions that operate within the diaspora, the “crossroads” in the title itself being suggestive of the dynamism of the metaphor used by Crenshaw to [End Page 11] describe intersectionality, where the accident of discrimination is said to occur at any given moment at an intersection where the traffic of power is flowing in multiple directions (149). The class hierarchies at work in “Dominoes at the Crossroads” are the ultimate outcome of the combined colonial history of the Caribbean, Britain, and Canada. In a way that undermines the usual White/Black relations of power, coloniality in the story is maintained by Erroll, the narrator’s older cousin at whose home he will stay, along with Tamika, during the couple’s time in the island country.

Erroll’s background is given immediately in the story’s opening in a way that positions him in opposition to the island’s lower-class locals. Born on the island, Erroll moved to England as an adolescent, where he would eventually start a small record company promoting his home country’s music. Having grown the business, he eventually sold it to Chris Blackwell, a cultural imperialist of sorts, with Blackwell being the White English record producer who in the 1960s was the first to export Jamaican music to the United Kingdom, leading to its global spread and popularity. The magnitude and neocolonial nature of the business deal is reflected in the fact that it was reported on in Rolling Stone, a prominent organ of Western capitalist pop culture. Having made his fortune, Erroll returned to his home country, buying a property in the countryside and building a colonial-style home for himself. He is married to Irene, who remains peripheral to the story, who may or may not be racialized but who is identified as a Londoner from a privileged upper-middle-class family as well as being a world traveller with a taste for the exotic (Kellough, Dominoes 48–49). Although he wears the dreadlocks associated with reggae culture (49), the way Erroll chooses to spend his money further aligns him with the colonial elite – most notably, driving a BMW in a space where people struggle to feed themselves. His disregard for the locals is demonstrated as well by the speed at which he travels, “leaving only inches between his car and several school girls walking in a line” along the roadside (51). At the same time, he is reluctant to buy food in town because he finds it overpriced (49). Erroll’s desire to maintain a division between himself and the local population can be seen in how his home is set behind a gate and protected by a half-dozen guard dogs, at whom he will “bark bac[k]” as the characters first enter the property after their drive in from the airport in town (51), suggesting that his socio-economic viciousness is equal to that of his dogs. Ultimately, Erroll has exploited his country’s cultural (rather than natural) resources to his own ends, is conscious of his privilege and does not seem all that troubled or preoccupied by it, which creates a parallel between his character and another in Glissant’s La Lézarde, the novel being read by the narrator in the story that has among its cast of characters a man called Garin, a local boy turned hoodlum and mercenary.

Unlike Erroll, the narrator and Tamika have a desire to interact with the locals on a more egalitarian footing. In response to Tamika’s anxiety over a recent travel advisory warning against visiting the island country, the narrator reassures her that he has “roots” in the country and understands the local [End Page 12] culture and will therefore be able to avoid trouble (Kellough, Dominoes 48). Likewise, in researching the Grenada Revolution, Tamika appears to be making an attempt to reconnect with her own family’s Caribbean origins (53–54). However, the narrator, in particular, is unable initially to see how his Canadian class privilege actually creates an impediment to any interaction with the locals, which the locals themselves have no reason to want to overcome. The characters are given the opportunity to engage with the locals when they stop to buy food on their drive out of town at the beginning of the story, but they are succinctly rejected by the handful of men they encounter. “We pretended at relaxation, but the locals watched us closely, with their stern, sun-hammered faces, and barely acknowledged us,” the narrator relates (50). The travellers elicit mistrust and scorn, in part perhaps because of the cavalier manner in which they purchase the food for their next meal. The narrator greets the men, believing that his “accent would be familiar. One of them grunted and curled his lip, revealing the glint of a gold tooth.” The men’s aggression in the scene is equally directed at Tamika through a form of hostile flirtation, with one of them commenting on her skin colour, referring to her as “brownin” in a whispered tone meant to be audible (50). The scene efficiently captures the common mistrust and rejection that biracial people historically have been subjected to in Black diasporic culture as a legacy of slave society.⁵ Elsewhere, speaking of the complicated relationship that Black people in Canada sometimes have with their family’s country of origin, Kellough notes that existing cultural differences can often represent a “barrier” to people’s “entry into their maternal and paternal culture” (qtd. in MacLeod). In another self-reflexive passage in Dominoes at the Crossroads, Kellough himself identifies as someone who has benefited from the privilege of being “a middle-class light-skinned man” and who also makes claims to being of Guyanese heritage, creating a parallel between himself and the narrator in “Dominoes at the Crossroads” (114–15).

In the dialogue that ensues between the narrator and Tamika upon arriving at Erroll’s, it is evident that the couple is bothered by their rejection by the locals. But the narrator’s view on the matter is slightly off, effectively casting himself as the victim in the encounter. “That’s one thing that always makes it difficult to visit this place, that you always stand out. It’s unnerving,” he states. Tamika goes on to bring nuance to his apparent belief that it is the locals’ unfriendliness that is the source of his being singled out: “you’re simplifying things. You look like you might have roots here, but it’s your light skin, your linen shirts, and khaki pants from the Bay, it’s your braided leather loafers, which I love, and it’s your 400 dollar Cutler and Gross sunglasses. It’s in your walk and the way you carry yourself” (Kellough, Dominoes 51). She identifies the problem as being one of class difference: “This is country, man. Some people here don’t have electricity. No work. They play dominoes the whole day. [End Page 13] They’ve spent their lives here, and you’re a wealthy high brown international with nice clothes and a pocket full of bills, relaxing up in the hills” (52). In addition to this, part of the couple’s rejection may also simply be due to their being associated with Erroll, who is, in all likelihood, known to the locals and who seems to have little concern for the economic chasm that isolates him from the other inhabitants of the island.

Not long after the incident in which Tamika observes one of Erroll’s groundskeepers mime in an exaggerated manner the shooting of Erroll’s dogs, the narrator’s reasoning in fact begins to suggest that he may have more in common with his cousin than with the locals, as he suddenly becomes “secretly thankful” for the dogs protecting the property and the barrier they create against the island’s inhabitants (Kellough, Dominoes 56). Indeed, it is the narrator and Tamika’s lack of direct contact with the locals that ultimately leads them to project their colonial, middle-class fears onto the impoverished population of the island country rather than accept Erroll’s straightforward claim that the four rough-looking men who have come to talk to him at the gate to the property are simply labourers who occasionally do work for him (54–55). This sense of fear will culminate in the somewhat frantic dream in which the narrator envisions the island being overtaken by local rebel militia forces.

The main reason for the couple’s misinterpretation of reality is due to the fact that much of their knowledge of the space has come to them filtered through secondary sources. There is the suggestion that the travel warning in the story’s opening issued by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the public media outlet of a colonial liberal democracy, may be overblown: while the conflict reported on is violent, the violence appears to be one-sided, with one of the farmers having been shot and another mauled by dogs. Indeed, the farmers involved, armed with farm implements, appear to have been promptly suppressed by the military (Kellough, Dominoes 48). Likewise, although the couple has acquired extensive knowledge of the region through reading, they have not been able to effectively connect this book learning to the lived reality of the locals in the present time. In researching the Grenada Revolution, Tamika has immersed herself in a historical period that is separated from the present by more than thirty-five years. In seeking to better understand the region’s history, she may inadvertently be reinforcing the wedge between herself and the locals, whose culture and society have surely evolved since the end of the 1970s. For his part, the narrator is shown throughout the story reading La Lézarde, a novel published in 1958 and dealing with a political reality of 1945. Although Glissant’s novel is not unduly violent, its fictional setting is characterized as being corrupt and by a muted yet persistent tension between the powerful and the poor. Erroll’s labourers make a second appearance at the end of the story, and one of them again pretends to shoot the dogs, suggesting that this may simply be a harmless habit (Kellough, Dominoes 63). The apparently hostile gesture appears to be a dark joke made by an individual who customarily has to face the aggression of a pack of dogs each [End Page 14] time he goes to work. From this perspective, the man’s desire to shoot the dogs may be entirely justifiable. The workers’ final gesture in the story of waving in greeting to the narrator signals that whatever animosity they feel is probably directed at the dogs, not at the narrator (64).

Reflecting on how intersectionality, as an analytical tool, has come to foster over time a more “complex understanding of individual identities,” Collins and Bilge note how the concept allows for individual identities to no longer be seen as “a fixed essence that a person carries from one situation to the next” but, rather, as something that is “differentially performed” depending on the social context – social contexts that are in turn “shaped by intersecting power relations” (167). This sense of shifting identities is reflected in the positioning of the privileged characters in “Dominoes at the Crossroads.” Undoubtedly discriminated against due to their skin colour when in England or Canada, Erroll, Tamika, and the narrator find themselves occupying the place of the colonizer as a benefit of their class status when situated in the starkly under-privileged space of the Caribbean.

“we free kings” and the diaspora becoming

The fact that “Dominoes at the Crossroads” is the title story of Kellough’s collection implies that the sense of complicity that is involved in it is also central to the book’s general meaning. The story raises the question as to how a Black person can equitably make a life for themselves in a ubiquitously neocolonial world. In this manner, “We Free Kings” is also about class difference and hierarchy. In the story’s opening, the narrator claims to live with his family in West Vancouver, considered to be one of British Columbia’s wealthiest municipalities, even if his wife’s family is from Surrey, a nondescript suburb of Vancouver, which would seem to indicate that the family’s wealth has not been inherited (Kellough, Dominoes 124). Indeed, toward the end of the story, the narrator will recall having himself been happy to leave behind “the dingy brick city” of Montreal when offered a job in Vancouver as a young man, with the suggestion being made that he is originally from the low-income, working-class Montreal neighbourhood of Saint-Henri (138–39). Triggered by the news of the recent murder of Delroy Portmore, a famous gay Jamaican fashion designer, the narrator begins to reflect on the “desperate” poverty of most people living in the Caribbean and how this can lead to such acts of violence. Yet his mindset also comes across as conflicted. “Suddenly,” he says, “the world appears terrifying, predatory, unfair, but West Vancouver insulates me from these realities, so much so that I don’t know how to consider them, I don’t realize that I, the benefactor of global inequalities, may be the predator” (125–26). It is never clearly stated in the narrative how the narrator earns his living, but he does claim to have “studied media” and to have “co-hosted a show on college radio” as an undergraduate in Montreal, giving the impression that he may now be working in broadcasting, a field preoccupied [End Page 15] with promoting an image of diversity and inclusion, meaning that racialized people working in it are potentially exposed to being exploited for their physical appearance (126). Whatever the narrator is doing professionally, he is being well paid for it. If he sees himself as a “predator,” it may be because he realizes that he is gaining financially from participating in a colonial culture that consistently strives to cover over historically persistent, systemic racial inequalities. In this manner, the narrator finds himself in a situation similar to Erroll’s in “Dominoes at the Crossroads,” with the distinction that he seems to feel guilty over it.

In addition to the intersection of race and class, “We Free Kings” is also about the expression of sexuality as the story centres on the narrator’s recollection of an aborted same-sex relationship he had in Montreal in the 1990s with another young man named Camilo. Joane Nagel writes of how “[h]eterosexuality plays an important role in defining racial, ethnic and national group boundaries by designating who is a member in good standing and who is an outsider and traitor” (206). This is especially the case with White supremacist nationalist discourse; however, heterosexuality also “set[s] the standard for approved ethnosexual identities and practices in ethnic groups and nations around the world, and homophobia continues to dominate the discourses of racial, ethnic and national politics. ... Virtually all communities define and enforce sexual rules governing with whom their members should have sex and what kind of sex they should have” (206–07). As Davis puts it, queer identities today “constitute a fraught site of struggle in diasporic communities,” which are themselves “mediated not only by external power struggles, but also by internal contestations over ... intersecting categories of difference” that include gender and sexuality (16). In the story’s inset narrative, the narrator recalls meeting Camilo during a radio interview that he was hosting for his college radio station in relation to an upcoming spoken word event. Camilo appears “with a group of four of his brethren,” a term that commonly signifies a sense of friendship and solidarity but that has an ironic connotation in this context pertaining to the androcentric and heteronormativity (Kellough, Dominoes 127–28; emphasis added). Yet Camilo stays behind after the interview, and the two begin to connect over a shared interest in music and Jamaican culture.

In fact, the scene as a whole serves to some extent to create an overall sense of diasporic unity and belonging rather than division as the upcoming poetry event is to bring together artists from Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa (Kellough, Dominoes 126). For their part, as Montrealers, the narrator and Camilo have family ties to Guyana and Haiti respectively, a similarity that again helps create a certain feeling of intimacy (128), and Camilo’s unexpectedly kissing the narrator only seems to reaffirm this sentiment of shared experience. The narrator decides to attend the event the following week in the hope that he will once more be able to see Camilo, although he also recognizes that he will not be able to approach Camilo too directly since it is likely to “make him nervous, or embarrass him” in front of his heterosexual companions (130). The atmosphere at the event is initially “jubilant,” but, following the intermission, [End Page 16] Camilo is the first to take the stage and launches into a homophobic rant that immediately creates an anxious stir in the room (131). As the first woman steps on stage to confront Camilo, the latter appears to be caught up in a disagreement that he does not fully understand between an allegiance to a hetero-normative masculine culture and the expression of his own sense of being: “Camilo looked from her to the audience, and hesitated in his delivery. He stood there, suspended between his poem and silence, glancing at the woman then at the audience” (133). Camilo has no opportunity to conclusively make the decision to go on or not as the microphone is taken from his hands by another woman who has by now come onto the stage and begun to recite her own poem on the need for “a revalueshan” involving the gay and lesbian person (133). What ensues as the poets fight over the control of the microphone is literally and metaphorically a struggle over the future of the diaspora and its discourse on gender and sexuality.

As Hall has written, cultural identity is not only a matter of “being” but also one of “becoming.” Identity “belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories.” As with any historical formation, “they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialized past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power” (Hall 225). The divisions and differences within the diaspora have suddenly been made apparent in the story. As the narrator recounts, “When that [second] young poet in fatigues, whose name I later found out was d’bi, snatched the microphone, she also stole the emphasis of the evening. She told us that we didn’t have to be complacent. We didn’t have to live according to our parents’ island strictures. It was one of the most courageous things I’d ever seen” (134–35). However, in the days that follow, articles in the community newspapers challenge the validity of the female poet’s intervention, claiming that she violated Camilo’s right to free speech, and the prior unity among the poets of the three cities is “splintered” (134). The diaspora has come to see, or has finally exposed, that it is not, and has never been, as unified as it professes to be, that it is in fact founded on a struggle over the idea of what it is and desires to be, which is a continual, future-oriented endeavour.

At the same time, “We Free Kings” demonstrates that the struggle over the future of the diaspora occurs not only at a collective level but also at an individual level. The story opens with an indication of the conflicted nature of the narrator’s present-day emotional life: “When I read that Delroy Portmore was murdered I wanted to scream, but instead I sobbed. ... I felt guilty, as if I’d indulged myself, as if I’d done something I shouldn’t do” (Kellough, Dominoes 124). The sadness brought on by the news of Portmore’s death is not due to some deep attachment to the famous fashion designer because the narrator has only just learned who he was. It seems to be more clearly related to the circumstances of the man’s death, to the fact that the murder of this person who had recently come out to his family is presumed to be a hate crime (124–25). The narrator appears to be crying over his [End Page 17] own comparable situation, as a queer man unable to come out to his family and friends possibly out of fear of the social repercussions for doing so. If he feels dejected at this later stage in life, it may be because he has not acted courageously like the female poet whom he remembers from his youth but has cowered within conformity like Camilo. Reflecting on the radical political existence of the twentieth-century Cuban revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos, he states that such behaviour “seems outrageous to me, like the premise of a video game. I cultivate normalcy. I’m a father and husband. The loudest color I wear is navy. I stay ahead on all my payments, drive a charcoal Volvo sedan to work, studiously avoid debt, and blend in the best I can.” He has chosen a life of predictable “bourgeois comforts” for himself (137).

Nevertheless, thinking of the stable family life that he has made for himself, he is also profoundly satisfied: “something about this [way of life] is so idyllic, so radiant when compared to the brick and broken streets, the sullen darkness and cold of Montréal, that I wish time would stop and this moment would extend forever in both directions, into the past so it erases everything and is all that I remember, and into the future so it’s all we ever experience, this muted, unassuming joy” (Kellough, Dominoes 137). His divided state of mind is reflected in the “anger” he feels toward the Caribbean community because of “its smallness, its self-consciousness, and its insularity.” On the one hand, he wishes for his “children to grow up as far from that community as possible”; on the other, when this anger recedes, he hates himself for his “weakness” in contesting the situation (139). The narrator has created a life for himself and his family that allows them to live largely outside the harmful reach of race and the racism that others in the diaspora suffer from, which is what all people ideally have the right to hope for. Yet this way of life also isolates him from the realities of a systemically racist world that he does nothing to resist. To “live” under such conditions is at once desirable and regretful (139). The sadness triggered by Portmore’s death, then, is a form of mourning not so much for the Jamaican man himself but, rather, for the death of the narrator’s own younger non-conforming self and the potential for a different future existence that the younger self had once represented. Caught in a role that was not entirely wished for, the narrator has become someone other than who he fully wants, or wanted, to be, illustrating the difficulties and pitfalls of navigating the future.

conclusion

In the closing chapter of The Black Atlantic, which deals with the notion of diaspora, Gilroy reflects on how anti-Black racism has tended to deny “historicity” to Black art and culture and how a sense of “invariant tradition” that circulates within Afrocentric thought itself has also tended “to rely upon a linear idea of time that is enclosed at each end by the grand narrative of African advancement” in a way that removes Black life from the actual “erratic flows of history” (188, 190, 191). In response to this sense of [End Page 18] tradition, Gilroy, in his book, seeks to integrate into a spatial understanding of diaspora “a diaspora temporality and historicity, memory and narrativity that are the articulating principles of the black political countercultures that grew inside modernity in a distinctive relationship of antagonistic indebtedness” toward it (191). Such a conception of a Black modernity – “fragmented along axes constituted by racial conflict” – is thus seen as being able to “accommodate non-synchronous, heterocultural modes of social life in close proximity. ... [It is] founded on the catastrophic rupture of the middle passage rather than the [linear, continuous] dream of revolutionary transformation” (197).

Glissant’s view of the time of diaspora is equally discontinuous. Speaking of what he refers to as a Caribbean literature “of memory,” which he sees as having emerged in response to the plantation system after its collapse, he writes that memory in this literature “is not a calendar memory; our experience of time does not keep company with the rhythms of month and year alone; it is aggravated by the void, the final sentence of the Plantation; our generations are caught up within an extended family in which our [unilinear] root stocks have diffused” (Glissant, Poetics 68, 70–72). Commenting on the nondialectical temporal aspect of Glissant’s notion of Relation, Siemerling writes that Glissant’s thought puts forth “alternative temporalities” that generate “space for other ways to speak the past, [that] help to envision different futures, creating space for new hopes and transformation” (24).

In a different vein, Tsagarousianou and Retis warn against taking diasporas unproblematically “as ‘revolutionary subjects’ or even benevolent agents of social change.” Instead, they see diasporas in more pragmatic terms as “carry[ing] in their cultures and their everyday practices the potential to unsettle and to question, to challenge certainty with ambiguity, homogeneity with their difference” (16; emphasis added). Likewise, in an interview with Phiri, Michelle Wright explains how in her work on Blackness during World War II she has tried to resist the linearity of the historical narrative that sees Blackness as having been defined primarily by the experience of slavery and racism in the past. Such a narrative, “framed around an organizing principle of transatlantic, Middle Passage slavery or racism,” tends to provide people with “a really skewed view of what it means to be Black, that is, that these are the only things we (have) experience(d)” (Wright 334). It is important to move away from the figure of the victim, of the morally pure person that this narrative tends to promote, in her view, as “the thing with morally pure people is (1) very few people are truly morally pure and, (2) it also means that you become rather simplistic – you are the object to which things happen and of which you suffer.” While there may be some validity in this, Wright says, “it doesn’t begin to capture the complexity of what went on in the slave trade, much less of Blackness” (335).

Dominoes at the Crossroads seeks to engage with this socially and temporally diffuse view of diaspora in a way that at once recognizes the centrality of the slave past to diasporic experience while also attempting to problematize its [End Page 19] role in people’s everyday lives in the present. My own linear presentation of time in Kellough’s collection – moving from past to present to future – goes against and simplifies the non-linear temporality that the work actually puts forth, artificially reordering it to make it legible. The narrator in “Petit Marronage” perhaps has a better way to frame the issue as she reflects on the narrative form more broadly: “At which point does a story begin? The question is unanswerable because some relevant event, thought, or observation always predates the action. There can never be a total story, one that encompasses everything past, present, and future” (Kellough, Dominoes 77). The narrator is thinking back on her own life story, yet the statement applies equally well to the short story collection as a whole. As she goes on to add, “Writing is read in the present time, but it can easily move among different times, from the past through the future. It can disappear into alternate timelines. ... It can play double Dutch with time and memory, can illustrate how the past sometimes follows the future, and the present sometimes freezes in its advance” (77–78).

The scattered time of diaspora is also aptly captured in “Notes of a Hand,” the brief text that closes the collection. Playing on the meaning of “hand,” as the hand of writing and the hand of labour, the monologue can be taken in an abstract sense as the diaspora speaking through the voice of an ancestor having come from a number of times and places at once, ranging from the African continent to the Americas, from the year 1700 to the present. The ancestor, who identifies as the “amanuensis” of some greater force, opens by proposing to make an attempt to “describe myself” (Kellough, Dominoes 201). What follows are nine distinct series of place names – of countries, states, cities – that can be taken as just as many possible sites of diasporic existence. The names sometimes repeat themselves or are transposed. Each series is accompanied by dates that indicate, in a usually continuous manner, an amount of time lived in each space, with each succinct narrative concluding with a dash signalling its unending nature and orientation toward an elusive fulfillment, an untapped potential. Each series of places and dates can be said to represent the trajectory of one individual’s lineage within, and constitutive of, the diaspora:

• Benin: 1700

• Virginia: 1700–1750

• Mississippi: 1750–1804

• Haiti: 1804–1922

• Miami: 1922–1970

• Edmonton: 1970–2017

• Toronto: 2017–

• or ...

• Songhai: 1700

• Saint-Domingue: 1700–1805

• Cuba: 1805–1985

• Miami: 1985–1990 [End Page 20]

• Dartmouth: 1990–

• or ...

• Benin: 1700

• Pernambuco: 1700–18–

• Panama: 18––18–

• St-Vincent: 18––1919

• Chicago: 1919–1924

• New York: 1924–1926

• Montréal: 1926–(201–03)

The ancestor goes on to describe the non-linear circularity and perpetual movement that characterizes life in the diaspora, claiming that

[t]here is something of me in Benin, certainly, and yet I am scattered by the trade, by the trade winds. I am flung to the southwest, from Île Gorée toward Bahia, then a short distance north to Pernambuco, up to the Guainas, and then along that “mighty curve” of the Antilles, from Barbados to Trinidad and upward through Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Cuba, up, up through Panama and into Florida, and up until we reach Mont Royal, then the few short hours north through snow and spruce to Québec, oldest of walled cities in North America, and finally across to Halifax, from where 600 Jamaican Maroons weighed anchor for Sierra Leone.

(205)

It is a narrative that begins in the African continent, only to eventually return to it in a different guise. In this voice can be heard the consciousness of diaspora, the product of a troubled past in which the envisioning of a future better world is perpetually maintained in the thought and action of the everyday.