The African Dreams of Migration: Donato Ndongo's "El sueño, " Langston Hughes, and the Poetics of the Black Diaspora. Issue 1 (2nd January 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Murray, N. Michelle
• Is Part Of: Symposium. Volume 72:Issue 1(2018)
• Page Start: 39
• Page End: 52
• Publication Date: 2018-01-02
• Subjects: Black Diaspora -- "El sueño" -- Harlem -- Langston Hughes -- migration -- Donato Ndongo -- poetics; Literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Philology, Modern -- Periodicals; Romance literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809.03
• DOI: 10.1080/00397709.2018.1421838
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0039-7709

Abstract

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