Preface: Griots from Different Shores

In West Africa, the griot is a staple in the preservation and presenta- tion of the history of the region and the people. Griots, also known as wandering musicians, move extensively within their communities and beyond. In the process they expand their outlook and collect numer- ous diverse experiences that shape their craft. Although, fundamentally, griots’ expertise is endogamous, as it is handed from one generation to another, they are also known to move beyond traditional familial and social borders. Their journeys take them to new locations where they may meet others like them with whom they join forces to develop and recount stories of a particular people. In many ways we see ourselves as such collaborating griots who have broken from the ingrown dictates of the craft and who have brought together the experiences of our travels to tell the stories of West Afri- cans in the United States. We are daughters of two diasporas who have embarked from different shores: Violet from West Africa—from Lagos to Kaduna to Freetown. While she was being introduced to civil rights history by a white Peace Corps volunteer, who shared his Ebony maga- zine with the neighborhood kids, Marilyn was moving from her tiny Jewish community in northern Minnesota to New England to experi- ence the civil rights and social justice movements as a college student. As Violet was leaving Africa for the first time and launching her trans- national travels within Canada and England before finally coming to the United States, Marilyn had found her way to New Bedford, Mas- sachusetts, and Cape Verdean Americans. Several years later, our paths crossed intellectually and the wandering griots finally met to begin our own intricate collaboration. Our partnership is very much representa- tive of this West African genre as we continue to move within the soci- ety we study and in how we have shaped this project. Whether watching

>> ix x<Maryland before breaking bread with a Sierra Leonean family, or observing the complex transnational diasporic existence of West Africans and Afro-Caribbe- ans in South London, Peckham, Brixton, and Bermondsey, England, as participant-observers, much like the West African griots we have wan- dered within these communities, gathering our lyrics for the stories we recount and analyze in this book. Using selective sampling to conduct qualitative, in-depth interviews, we have carried out our ethnographic investigations in a range of loca- tions where West African immigrants are aggregated. Although ours is a nonrandom sample, we have been mindful of selecting key respon- dents to include a gender balance and diverse representations of a wide variety of ethnic, nationality, religious, age, social class, and occupa- tional groups. Thus, we have conducted field work and collected oral histories from those of all walks of life among especially Nigerians in the Houston and Atlanta metropolitan areas; Ghanaians in Chicago and the Washington, D.C.-Maryland-Virginia corridor; Sierra Leoneans in greater Atlanta, the D.C. area, London, and Sierra Leone; Liberians in Providence and Minneapolis-St. Paul; and Cape Verdeans in cities and towns throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, New Jer- sey, and the Cape Verde Islands. With regard to the Francophone West African community, although we conducted some interviews in the New York metropolitan area, we have relied more heavily on the excel- lent existing studies in this field, especially works by Zain Abdullah, Cheikh Anta Babou, Manthia Diawara, Sylviane Diouf-Kamara, Ous- mane Oumar Kane, and Paul Stoller. Our journeys were much enhanced by the skilled graduate and under- graduate research assistance we received along the way. We thank Elisa Vitalo, Estelle Pae, Shelly Habecker, Marcy DePina, Yolanda Curtis, Afua Agyeman, Osei Agyeman-Badu, Sandra Enimil, Veronica McComb, and Annie Wilson. We are enormously grateful to Boston University’s Insti- tute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs, especially the dedicated support for this project that former director Peter L. Berger gave us from its inception. As we embarked on this endeavor, we also benefited from Preface: Griots from Different Shores >> xi the collegiality of Jill H. Wilson of the Brookings Institution, who shared some of her demographic findings on African immigration. We have had the opportunity to present pieces of this research at the University of Minnesota, George Washington University, the University of Massachu- setts Boston, the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, Agnes Scott College, Boston University, Texas A&M University, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the Massachusetts Historical Society’s Immigration and Urban History Seminar Series. The feedback we received at these presentations invari- ably helped to sharpen our analysis and stimulate our thinking. We also thank our editor at NYU Press, Eric Zinner, as well as Nation of Nations series editors Rachel Buff, Matthew Jacobson, and Werner Sollors. We remain particularly indebted to Matt, who read the manuscript with such incisive engagement and, much to our delight, at every stage con- veyed his affirmation of its value with scintillating gusto! Marilyn is particularly grateful to two giants in the field of immi- gration studies for setting her on the path to this project. In separate conversations more than a decade ago, both David Reimers and the late Lawrence Fuchs emphasized the dearth of scholarship on recent immi- grants from Africa and pushed her to build on her earlier research on the history of the Cape Verdean diaspora to explore this broader topic. She has also been fortunate to be part of a small community of women, her “work and play” group, that has been meeting in various iterations for nearly thirty years to shepherd each other through the challenges of leading meaningful professional lives with joy and lightness. She so appreciates the precious connections and loving guidance of Peggy Bacon, Bettina Borders, Kathy Condon, Janet Freedman, Donna Huse, and Sandee Krupp. Marilyn also especially cherishes her friendship with Doris Friedensohn, first kindled at an American Studies Associa- tion convention many years ago. Doris has been not only a keen reader of portions of this manuscript but also a dazzling companion in the dis- sections of American culture and politics. Finally, Marilyn dedicates this book to her mother, Marcella Halter, who during the years that Marilyn was working on it, reinvented what it means to be eighty-something and now ninety-something as an age of stunning vibrancy; to her hus- band, Jonathan DePina, whose incandescent love and unswerving sup- port are simply immeasurable; and to their sparkling and accomplished xii << Preface: Griots from Different Shores children—Conor, Marcy, and Portia—as well as their grandson, Bowen, each of whom combines thoroughly American experiences with deep links to continental Africa, past, present, and, most gratefully, future. Violet owes much of the inspiration, knowledge, and understand- ing for her input in this joint project to entire West African immigrant communities, especially the Sierra Leonean community of metropoli- tan Atlanta. She is most grateful to members of these communities for their gracious accommodation of her sometimes intruding presence and their courteousness as they journeyed with her through changing and conflicting insider (fellow immigrant)/outsider (detached scholar) phases of interactions. Many members of the Nigerian and Sierra Leo- nean communities became her ebi and fambul (relatives). Their support and enthusiasm for this project clearly conveyed the African adage, “it takes a village.” Violet cannot name every member of this village of sup- porters, so she will simply say eshé and tenki to all. However, she would like to acknowledge by name three people to whom she dedicates this book: her mother, Edna Taiwo Showers, whose transnational life con- tinues to shape Violet’s; and her husband, Percy Ayomi Johnson, and her son, PJ, for their love, dedication, and willingness to understand that the many Sierra Leonean and other West African immigrant func- tions they attended as a family were never simple cultural socialization, but potentially vital sources of material for African & American.