Sounding diasporic dislocation: The object voice in postcolonial short stories

www.intellectbooks.com 11 fict 11 (1+2) pp. 11–25 intellect Limited 2021 Short fiction in theory & Practice Volume 11 Numbers 1 & 2 © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Intellect Ltd. Article. English language. https://doi.org/10.1386/fict_00033_1 Received 13 July 2020; Accepted 9 October 2020 JORGE SACIDO-ROMERO University of Santiago de compostela Sounding diasporic dislocation: The object voice in postcolonial short stories ABSTRACT Jacques Lacan conceives of the voice as more than meets the ear: that is, as an objeta that must be subtracted from the acoustic field to preserve the coherence of reality as a symbolically constructed order in which subjects are inserted and from which they derive a sense of identity. Disruptive manifestations of the object voice are frequent in the modernist and postmodernist British short story, a form which, on account of its brevity and limited scope, renders more sharply the traumatic nature of such episodes, which thus become more memorable and engaging for readers. The short story, likewise, is an apt vehicle for postcolonial and diasporic subjectivities characterized by the tensions and psychic distress provoked by their liminal location between different cultures and their heterogenous and often conflicting interpellations. After an introductory part which elaborates on the interrelations between object voice, the short story genre and the postcolonial subject, this article examines two recent stories by Koye Oyedeji (‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’) and Diriye Osman (‘Earthling’), in which existential conflicts become so acute that they trigger aural hallucinations, which determine the central characters’ predicament in the context of the migrant diaspora in Britain. KEYWORDS Koye Oyedeji Diriye Osman ‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’ ‘Earthling’ voice objet a psychosis Jorge Sacido-Romero 12 Short fiction in theory & Practice This article is Open Access under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The CC BY licence permits commercial and noncommercial reuse. To view a copy of the licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ INTRODUCTION: VOICE, SHORT FICTION AND THE POSTCOLONIAL SUBJECT When one thinks of the connection between voice and short fiction, the first thing that may, perhaps, come to mind is the short story’s origins in the oral tradition. One may, for instance, recall the figure of the Anglo-Saxon scop (‘bard’), or refer to Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, in which he describes the ‘storyteller’ as the one who imparted wisdom on his listeners, as the voice of ‘[e]xperience which [was] passed on from mouth to mouth’ (1968: 84). Benjamin laments the passing of this figure in modern times and its substitution by practitioners of the genre of the ‘short story’ (tellingly, he uses the English term in the German original). Though Benjamin’s line of reasoning is complex and somewhat ambiguous in its argumentative richness, it seems clear that he takes issue with the development of the modern short story in the Anglophone world as the narrative practice farthest removed from the ideal oral storytelling situation. My search for the acoustic, aural, vocal dimension, presumably lost in the modern short story, does not aim at clarifying its line of connection with the oral tradition, but at exploring the not infrequent thematization of the voice – of voices heard, overheard or silenced – as a motif intimately connected with issues of identity and subjectivity. Joseph Conrad’s ‘Karain: A Memory’ (1897), James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters’ (1914), E. M. Forster’s ‘The Story of a Siren’ (1920), Virginia Woolf’s ‘The Haunted House’ (1921), Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Demon Lover’ (1945), Muriel Spark’s ‘The Girl I Left behind Me’ (1957), Angela Carter’s ‘The Executioner’s Beautiful Daughter’ (1974) or many of the stories by Janice Galloway are just a few examples of a long list of short narratives in which the voice stands out as a disruptive element determining the central characters’ predicament. But, of course, the central role of sound, aurality, acoustics and voice in a character’s situation and his or her identitary vicissitudes is not the province of the short story alone. Joyce’s Ulysses, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, Spark’s The Comforters or the central episode of the Marabar Caves in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India show that sound is also a theme in modern and postmodern long narratives. Yet what makes the short story so special in connection with sound and voice derives from its most prosaic and self-evident characteristic: its brevity. Short stories are short, and though shortness could be considered a limitation, in the sense that it does not allow for character or plot development, it can also be considered a strength in the sense that it sharpens the focus on (in the cases under consideration) particular vocal events that engage readers actively in unravelling the mysteries of the voice, a universal phenomenon the implications of which are far-reaching. Whereas textual instances of the auditory as manifested in the voice may be diffused in the vastness of narrative detail in novels, so as to be more easily forgotten, they reach short stories’ readers more sharply and become memorable, something to reflect on or return to. Brevity entails the inclusion of a small number of details and so demands a more alert readerly engagement. Sounding diasporic dislocation www.intellectbooks.com 13 Historians of the modern British short story, like Adrian Hunter, have highlighted that, already at the onset of its tardy development in the 1880s and 1890s, the short form served to articulate radical views that were critical of the political and moral values of Victorian ideology (Hunter 2007: 34–42). Paul March-Russell condenses this view by speaking of ‘the use of the short story as a means of evading the constraints of literary realism and its basis in the agreed social norms of everyday society’ (2009: 45). He goes on to claim that this proclivity to ideological critique is a permanent feature of the genre: ‘the short story’, March-Russell writes, ‘has acted at various times as a resource for writers to contest the dominant beliefs in social progress and formal cohesion’ (2009: 222). Indeed, the contestation of reality’s coherence in a sharp manner in terms of its impact on readers is a faculty of the short narrative form to which writers from different backgrounds have resorted. Though Frank O’Connor’s view that the short story articulates the ‘lonely voice’ of ‘a submerged population group’ (1976: 86) may be considered a bit restrictive, I agree with Hunter’s view that ‘the short story is, and always has been, disproportionately represented in the literatures of colonial and postcolonial cultures’ perhaps because it ‘is particularly suited to the representation of liminal or problematized identities’ (2007: 138). Indeed, identitary conflicts are more intense and their negotiation more demanding in situations of dislocation and diaspora in which postcolonial subjects frequently find themselves (Simich et al. 2009). There are cases, however, in which the successful negotiation of conflicting polarities is compromised, leading to an increase in the diasporic subject’s mental distress (Simich et al. 2009: 259, 261). The latter is, to different degrees, I should add, what happens in the two stories by young male writers of the African diaspora settled in Britain chosen for discussion; two pieces that have received no critical attention and which are analysed in full below. Koye Oyedeji’s ‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’ (2005, 2017) and Diriye Osman’s ‘Earthling’ (2013) feature central diasporic characters that undergo major crises of identity that we may confidently classify as ‘psychotic’, and which are primarily manifested in the presence of the voice as object in the Lacanian sense of the term: that is, as that piece or remainder of the Real in the subject and the Other, the Symbolic Order, the order of language, ideals and regulations that shape our identity. Its eruption, as in the case of the gaze as object, is a universal experience that may trigger the disintegration of reality and subjects’ safe inscription in it. This disturbing experience pushes subjects to, or even across, the border of mental imbalance rooted, as they always are, in particular social-cultural contexts. Jacques Derrida claimed that the voice (speech, phonē or the spoken word) has been considered in the Western tradition as the transparent medium of presence and self-presence versus writing as the truly originary exterior element that spoils this vocal identitary fantasy by driving a wedge of indissoluble difference between subject and self-presence (1976: 6–26). Contrary to Derrida’s view, authors of a Lacanian persuasion like Mladen Dolar or Slavoj Žižek have stressed the fact that the voice that causes an undeniable illusory effect of self-presence is that which ‘at the same time […] undermines most radically the subject’s self-presence and self-transparence’ (Žižek 1996: 100, original emphasis). Žižek writes in The Indivisible Remainder: I hear myself speaking, yet what I hear is never fully myself but a parasite, a foreign body in my very heart. […] The stranger in myself acquires positive existence in different guises, from the voice of conscience and Jorge Sacido-Romero 14 Short fiction in theory & Practice the opaque voice of the hypnotist to the persecutor in paranoia. […] In the antagonistic tension between signifier and object, voice is thus on the side of the object. (1996: 100, first emphasis in original, second emphasis added) Mladen Dolar, in his book-length discussion of the object voice, calls attention to the similarity between the couple of opposites eye/gaze and (drawing on Jacques-Alain Miller) ear/voice. Gaze and voice are partial objects (objets a) precisely because they are not attached to, respectively, the eye and the ear. In Lacan’s famous description of the mirror stage, the image with which the child identifies dissimulates the gaze as object, as that which cannot ‘be present in the field of vision, yet haunts it from the inside’ (Dolar 2006: 41). Similarly, the voice qua object must be subtracted from the field of the audible, dissimulated by really existing sounds (words and music, above all), yet haunts it from the inside (Dolar 2006: 41). Were either of these two objects present, reality would lose its consistency and, in the most extreme manifestation, become persecutory, hence the seemingly paradoxical definition of the object voice as silence, as that which the ear cannot hear, as more than meets the ear. When Miller states that ‘the voice as object a does not in the least belong to the sonorous register’ (2007: 139), he is echoing Lacan’s argument in connection with verbal hallucinations: ‘Indeed, it is a mistake to take verbal hallucination to be auditory in nature, when it is theoretically conceivable that it not be auditory at all’ (2006: 446). Lacan illustrates his point by way of reference to a clinical case of psychotic delusion of murderous persecution affecting a mother and her daughter in which, ‘[i]n the locus where the unspeakable object was rejected into the real, a word [nevertheless] made itself heard’ (2006: 448). The verbal hallucination is not audible in the empirical sense because it is heard in the patients’ heads alone, it being the main symptom of their psychotic imbalance. In ways akin to Lacan’s patients, the protagonists of the stories by Oyedeji and Osman hear voices in the psychopathic sense of the term. They hear what cannot be heard, they are bombarded with manifestations of the object voice that disrupt their sense of reality, which they revealingly try to counteract verbally and acoustically. Told in the third person though subjectively focalized, both stories’ protagonists suffer from verbal hallucinations that have to do with the identitary dislocation characteristic of diasporic subjectivity. While Homi K. Bhabha sees in dislocation an opportunity for sociocultural transformation and the postcolonial subject’s self-refashioning (1994: 172), some have criticized this view for being overconfident and even elitist (Ahmad 1995; Wilson 2015; Sharif 2016). Though dislocation may be in some cases emancipatory, as Bhabha maintains, it may also be traumatic and disabling (Wilson 2015). I will begin discussing Oyedeji’s story, in which the character’s lost balance is not redressed, and then move on to Osman’s piece, which ends on a much less pessimistic note. Explicitly in Oyedeji’s title and implicitly in Osman’s plot, the connection with Paul Gilroy’s British-oriented heuristic construction of ‘the black Atlantic’ is relevant for an argument that revolves around sound and voices and their relation to diasporic dislocation. Gilroy puts much emphasis on contemporary popular musical styles (soul, hip hop) as important elements in the creation and sustainment of structures of feeling that reach beyond and across the boundaries of single nations and ethnicities linking Africa, Europe, North America and the Caribbean in a ‘web of diaspora identities and concerns’ (1993: 218). Sounding diasporic dislocation www.intellectbooks.com 15 TALKING AND WRITING AGAINST THE VOICE: KOYE OYEDEJI’S ‘POSTSCRIPT FROM THE BLACK ATLANTIC’ (2005, 2017) London-born Koye Oyedeji is neither a prolific writer nor is it easy to find information about his personal background. ‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’, published online in Wasafiri in 2015 and later collected as the opening piece of the anthology Bare Lit (2017), tells the story of Lawal, a young man who in the 1970s leaves his native Yourubaland – a region that includes a large part of Nigeria (south of the Niger river), parts of Togo and Benin – for Britain after raping a servant girl and getting her pregnant. He flees the consequences of his criminal act after confessing to his father about it in the hope of making up for what he had done. Furthermore, he is convinced his future success in England will ‘make his father proud’, and this way ‘seal the fissures he had created and discard the past as though it were merely old clothes’ (Oyedeji 2017: 7). Readers learn later in the story that the father had been instrumental in Lawal’s decision to leave for the sake of the family’s reputation when they come across a reference to ‘the bastard child, born out of wedlock, who his father had hurried him away from’ (Oyedeji 2017: 13). This story is divided into seven sections and opens with Lawal already on board the ship bound for Liverpool, leaving behind his past and full of auspicious thoughts about his future (Oyedeji 2017: 5). Oyedeji’s character confidently entertains the possibility of radically reorienting his life, ‘disabus[ing] himself of any past wrongs’ (Oyedeji 2017: 6) and becoming‘a part of this alien community; fresh produce in the Mother country – a land both strange and familiar’ (Oyedeji 2017: 7). Lawal’s attempt to start his life again with a clean slate in England remains, nevertheless, tied to the past, to a father whose approval he seeks to regain. Lawal’s predicament is determined by, to put it in simple psychoanalytical terms, his sense of guilt. Sigmund Freud describes guilt as the fear of the loss of the love of others, the pain derived from the lack of recognition or love from the Other and from the social order in which the subject is inscribed, beginning with the parents whose‘critical influence’ is ‘conveyed to him by the medium of the voice’ to be followed by the shaping discourses addressed to the subject by various agents of socialization (1961: 78–83; 1957: 96). The struggle to regain this recognition indicates the rectifying power of guilt through adequate behaviour and personal achievement. But, in Lawal’s case, matters are complicated by his particular sociocultural background, in which the voice plays a central role. He stops his ears to the words of condemnation proffered by his ancestors, objects of worship in Yoruba religion, in which they are considered ‘spiritual superintendents of family affairs’ who can communicate with their living relatives (Dopamu 1999: n.pag.). Spurred on by his hope of success in a secular land that is also the ex-colonial power, Lawal fails to interpret the rough weather the ship goes through once she enters European waters as a sign of his dead ancestors’ rage for his shameful offence against his family’s honour. Yet, the first section concludes thus: But the ancestors were talking. And he was talking over them with all these thoughts – thought after thought after thought. If he had stopped for silence, he might’ve heard something rippling, his evil catching up with him, slow crawling across the ocean with him. (Oyedeji 2017: 7) Jorge Sacido-Romero 16 Short fiction in theory & Practice 1. For a recent similar view, see Nikesh Shukla’s ‘Editor’s Note’ to the collection The Good Immigrant, where he denounces ‘the systemic racism that runs through this country [the UK] to this day’ (2016: n.pag.). Lawal is capable of provisionally neutralizing his ancestors’ accusatory voices by the power of his inner speech, through which the projection of a happy future in Britain is articulated. As Laura Simich, Sarah Maiter and Joanna Ochocka (2009) maintain, the situation of the diasporic subject is one of social liminality, of inhabiting a threshold where conflicting identitary vectors interact, forcing them to negotiate these so as to reach a desirable point of mental balance and wellbeing. Uprooted from ‘the comfort of a home’ (Oyedeji 2017: 6) that he had spoiled on account of his shameful act, Lawal tries to acquire a sense of belonging in England, to turn the host land into a new homeland. The compensation for his struggle would be the love (acceptance, recognition) from this new Other (‘they’), as psychoanalysis maintains. Lawal’s expectation, his ‘thought’, is announced in the title of the second section in capital letters: ‘HE THOUGHT THAT THEY WOULD COME TO LOVE HIM IN TIME’ (Oyedeji 2005: 7, emphases added). But he soon finds out that this new environment is rather inhospitable, even hostile, to his project of a new life; though, it must be added, there is no hint in the story of Liverpool’s past as a slavers’ port. As the author himself unequivocally stated elsewhere: ‘this country [the UK] remains institutionally and inherently racist’ (Oyedeji 2005: 347).1 The story’s second section begins with an abrupt affirmation of the erosion of Lawal’s sunny expectations: ‘… But Liverpool was no good to him. He was never allowed to settle. Never allowed to feel as if he might belong’ (Oyedeji 2017: 7). After a year in Liverpool, he tries London, but things do not get better for him there. He attends lectures at the Polytechnic and lives in a South London apartment building in which ‘[p]iss stains crawled down the stairwells […] and the walls were spray painted with British National Party slogans, calling cards that demanded “WOGS GO HOME”’ (Oyedeji 2017: 8). A girl disappears from a neighbouring flat, following a previous case of kidnapping, most likely by a sexual abuser, that had been referred to in the cryptically ominous remark with which the story opens, namely, the title of the first section: ‘IT DIDN’T SEEM TO MATTER THAT THE FIRST GIRL WENT MISSING WHILE HE WAS STILL AT SEA’ (Oyedeji 2017: 5). This metaleptic comment hints at a connection between the kidnappings and Lawal’s fate in England, which will become evident at the very end of the story. These young girls’ disappearances arouse fear in the community in which Lawal lives but never feels at home. Lawal’s discomfort increases as written warnings sprayed on walls by right-wing nationalists turn into racist insults voiced at him in the streets on account of his skin colour and his accent: ‘A familiar crop of slurs – Nigger. Golliwog. Sambo’ (Oyedeji 2017: 9). He attempts to assuage his feeling of dislocation, trying hard to make sense of this series of insults addressed to him by the Other. Each time, he works on their sounds once at home: ‘he would peel the words apart and try to reassemble them with his own understanding’ (Oyedeji 2017: 9). Whereas he had been able to pacify his ancestors’ critical voices through thoughts of prosperity, atonement and renewal, he is now incapable of doing the same with the insults heard in the streets of England, where his high hopes clash with the crude reality of everyday racism. He seeks refuge in religion and joins ‘a south London Pentecostal Church’, a congregation made up of other Africans (Oyedeji 2017: 9). Condensing the progress of Lawal’s growing distress, the title of the third section is less auspicious than the preceding ones: ‘GOD MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE BEEN BY HIS SIDE’ (Oyedeji 2017: 9). It opens with a racist physical attack, as four skinheads, Sounding diasporic dislocation www.intellectbooks.com 17 ‘impulsive and united by their fear of invasion’ (Oyedeji 2017: 9), toss Lawal over a balcony, from which he falls three floors down onto the concrete below. Surprisingly, he survives the impact, but ends up with a terrible headache that is described in aural terms as a pain that ‘rang between his ears’, as ‘murmurs of a dull throb’ (Oyedeji 2017: 10, emphases added). It is then that he ‘heard the first two of what would be many voices. Two voices in his head. Two girls that screamed and pleaded with him to stop’ (Oyedeji 2017: 10). This attempt on his life triggers Lawal’s madness, which manifests in a Babel of auditory hallucinations. The latter bespeak not only his fear but also his guilt for (sexual) crimes he did not commit but for which racist society blames him. Furthermore, the attack aggravates his guilty feelings for raping the servant girl back in Africa ‘several times’ (Oyedeji 2017: 14). Not sure which God has saved him from dying, Lawal reaches a breaking point, announced in the title of the fourth section (‘IT WAS GOING TO BE A BURDEN TOO MUCH TO BEAR’ [Oyedeji 2017: 10]), and proclaims that he will embrace all religions and praise all Gods. Because of his polytheistic turn, the Pentecostal congregation asks him to leave, and the aural hallucinations increase: ‘The voices he heard made it difficult for him to work or study’ (Oyedeji 2017: 11). Voices have now invaded the space of sustaining thoughts and balancing understanding. As Žižek writes with reference to the object voice, ‘voice is that on account of which ‘I can’t hear myself think’, so that the subject’s basic plea to his or her voice is: ‘Would you please shut up, I can’t hear myself think!’ (1996: 100). At the limits of his resistance, Lawal tries to silence the voices by speaking: ‘Lawal would talk […] to strangers because he found that when he talked the voices dimmed a little’ (Oyedeji 2017: 11). A battle of voices, therefore, is taking place in him as a last-ditch attempt at cultural negotiation in a situation of utter and unbearable dislocation. Speaking to others, interacting with or inside the Symbolic Order, is Lawal’s way of diminishing the effects of the disquieting and unquiet Real manifested in the auditory hallucinations. But, as the title of the fifth section reads, ‘THEY WERE VOICES CLOTHED IN GLOOM’ (Oyedeji 2017: 11), and they increase in number: ‘two, six, eight voices were now in their hundreds. Conversation was his only palliative; he was only able to speak over the voices when he had someone to speak to’ (Oyedeji 2017: 11). Lawal is called names in the streets of London like ‘The Nigerian Voodoo Man’ or ‘The Witchdoctor’ (Oyedeji 2017: 12) and, when the skinheads go after him again, he locks himself in his apartment, ‘shut[ting] the world out’ and ‘his landlord out’ (Oyedeji 2017: 12). Having no one to talk to now, Lawal turns to writing ‘transcriptions of the quickened voice that whispered beneath his every act. It helped, not as much as talking did, but it numbed him somewhat’ (Oyedeji 2017: 12). In his delirium, he uses every clean surface available to write on and fills his apartment with scribblings (on the refrigerator, plug sockets, tables, the skirting, over the bath). Writing, far from tainting presence and undermining meaning, as Derrida maintained, reveals itself, like speech addressed to and coming from the Other (the Symbolic Order), as a way of stabilizing meaning against the mortifying and disrupting object voice of psychotic delusion (Žižek 1996: 101). The voices he hears transform reality into a violently suffocating realm that ‘sicken[s] […] him’, a theatre populated by empty shadows who stubbornly identify with their roles in life: ‘he looked out amongst the flats, he saw us – you, me – for what we really were, lead actors in our stories, marked by our inability to shed our sense of significance’ (Oyedeji 2017: 12–13). In the midst of this radical loss of his sense of reality caused Jorge Sacido-Romero 18 Short fiction in theory & Practice by the hubbub of auditory hallucinations, Lawal ‘confesse[s] aloud, for the first time’ that he has raped the house girl at his Nigerian home, repeatedly (Oyedeji 2017: 13). He finally voices his guilt, a spoken confession he has tried to avoid all this time in the hope of making up for it through achievement and integration in a host land which has proven inimical to his expectations and daydreams of fortune and success. In the sixth section, titled ‘when they found him, they found their assurance…’, his mental derangement is aggravated, as the voices he hears become indistinguishable and incomprehensible: ‘There were so many voices now that they talked over one another, and he could no longer make out what was being said’ (Oyedeji 2017: 14). He takes this tormenting ‘din’ as ‘a warning for others and punishment for him’ (Oyedeji 2017: 14), decides to ‘fast for forty days for the lives of others and for his own salvation’ (Oyedeji 2017: 15), thereby sacrilegiously attempting to follow Christ’s example, till ‘the authorities broke in on the seventh day, after the water he left slowly running in the bathroom sink overflowed to a point where it began to drip into the flat below’ (Oyedeji 2017: 15). The police find him ‘lying on a mattress naked and emaciated, whispering prayers as he lay in his waste, his urine and his faeces’ (Oyedeji 2017: 15). Alone in his flat, the battle of voices continues, previously as a spoken confession of his offence, and now in the form of prayers addressed to God qua Other to appease his guilt and assuage the pain inflicted by the punishing voices. On the wall above his head, they read his confession scribbled in excrement, ‘I raped her’, which the text describes as the ‘Postscript from the Black Atlantic’ of the title (Oyedeji 2017: 15). Lawal’s written confession could be understood as an pessimistic remark added to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), in which the situation of postcolonial, diasporic subjects is presented as full of possibilities for social transformation and subjective repositioning through the construction of a sense of transnational and intercultural community of black people in the West where sound, music in particular, is viewed as a unifying force. In his attempt at counteracting the effects of persistent auditory hallucinations, Lawal clings to the words written on the wall, which are repeatedly vocalized to render them more effective: ‘It was the one sentence he felt he could hold on to through the orchestra of noise, and he muttered this over and over again as one police officer retched and another radioed for an ambulance’ (Oyedeji 2017: 15, emphases added). He is sent to a mental institution and considered guilty of having kidnapped the missing girls in London, as the police take the Postscript on Lawal’s wall as a confession of this crime rather than the one he committed in Nigeria; and this in spite of the fact that a few weeks later, while Lawal is already in custody, another girl disappears. GETTING FREE FROM THE VOICE: MUSIC AND LOVE IN DIRIYE OSMAN’S ‘EARTHLING’ (2013) Oyedeji’s story is historically located in the 1970s and 1980s and places the emphasis on racism as the determining factor that aggravates the central character’s sense of dislocation to the point of total mental breakdown. Like Lawal, Zeytun, the female protagonist of Diriye Osman’s ‘Earthling’, reaches England after a traumatic experience in her country of origin, but in Zeytun’s case it is the conflicts deriving from her sexual orientation that intensify her dislocation as manifested in aural hallucinations rather than racism properly speaking, which plays a minor role at most. The story takes place in present-day Britain, Sounding diasporic dislocation www.intellectbooks.com 19 2. There is much more relevant information available on Diriye Osman’s life than on Koye Oyedeji’s thanks to the details made public on his webpage ‘Diriye Osman/The Afrosphere’ (https:// www.diriyeosman. com/). which in Osman’s piece is presented as a multicultural society rather than an inherently racist one, which contrasts with Oyedeji’s own view on contemporary British society. Osman, who is also a visual artist, was born in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1983 and left for Nairobi, Kenya, with his family in the early 1990s, fleeing the war in his country.2 He spent most of his childhood and early adolescence in Kenya before he moved to Britain in 2001, at age 17, ‘dreaming of a more fruitful existence there’ (Osman 2017a: n.pag.). After a year in the United Kingdom, he was diagnosed with psychosis and sent to a mental hospital in Woolwich, London. The event that triggered his mental illness was coming out to his family who rejected his non-heteronormative sexuality. He describes his feelings as ‘a growing sense of dislocation brought on by the expectations of my family and my desire not to disappoint them […]. I began to hear voices in my head […] [and] stopped speaking altogether’ (Osman 2017a: n.pag.). Thanks to reading – particularly short story writers like Alice Munro, ZZ Packer, Lorie Moore or Junot Díaz – Osman regained his voice (2017a: n.pag.). But reading was not enough: ‘I hungered for characters and stories that echoed my own experiences. When I couldn’t find any, I began writing my own’ (2017a: n.pag.). Ironically, the very same African culture (his strictly Muslim family included) that violently opposed any public manifestation of homosexuality, to the point of confining it to the realm of the repressed/unspeakable, is singled out by Osman as one source of inspiration for writing stories as Somalis have always resorted to storytelling in times of crisis. To the contemporary writerly culture that influenced him, Osman adds traditional African oral storytelling as a practice with which he also identifies. Osman privileges the short story genre over other genres. ‘For me’, he told Elmi Ali in an interview, ‘the short story is the ultimate literary form […] [Y]ou feel an intense sense of accomplishment [...] It’s perfect for me’ (Ali 2013: n.pag.). Furthermore, he told the interviewer that he had written two novels, but discarded them because it was in ‘writing gay stories’ that he was to find his voice (Ali 2013: n.pag.). In finding his voice in stories, Osman was able to silence the disturbing voices he heard in his head and to find a place in a Symbolic Order that excluded him, above all, because of his sexual orientation. Osman states that his acute psychic unrest derived from his ‘life-long guilt and repression’ brought about by the collision of what he called the ‘opposing polarities’ of unwavering family expectations and wild hedonistic experiences (drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity) (2017b: n.pag.). Art, he claims, revealed itself as his way to reach a balance, ‘to delve into my subconscious and exorcise my demons’, he says (2017c: n.pag.). The author heroically confronted a situation of permanent dislocation by transforming it into an opportunity for self-refashioning and subjective repositioning through art and a reliance on his body (his sexuality and effeminacy, in particular) (Osman 2017c: n.pag.). In this way, Osman’s portrayal of his situation is reminiscent of what Gloria Alzandúa says about how liminal subjects (those that belong neither here nor here) inhabit ‘la frontera’ (‘the border’) creatively, invoking images of bodily suffering: ‘Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create. It is like a cactus needle embedded in the flesh’ (1987: 73). Making a virtue of necessity, as it were, both Osman and the lateadolescent/young-adult characters of his Fairytales for Lost Children (2013) negotiate the conflicting vectors that intersect the borderland of diasporic subjectivity. Some of the fictional characters, like Osman himself, have auditory hallucinations, as is the case for Diriye, the main character in the story