When You’re No Longer at Home
When You’re No Longer at Home
Wandering in Memoir and Fiction: Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s ‘Michel the Giant’ and Chuang Hua’s ‘Crossings’
As a boy born and raised in Togo, Tété-Michel Kpomassie climbed a coconut tree and encountered a snake high above the ground. Terrified, he fell more than thirty feet. It’s a miracle he survived, but the priestess of the local snake cult suggested the boy had done something to offend the gods.
How to make amends? Though just a teenager, Kpomassie would have to leave home and serve as a priest in the cult for an indeterminate stretch of time. But no: If he had to leave home, Kpomassie figured he’d go to Greenland instead.
Greenland?
The Shifting World
As many of you know, I’m reading a classic memoir and novel each month this year and posting a review. My books for May, Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland and Chuang Hua’s Crossings, both deal with characters out of place in the world. As travelers who trek across oceans and settle into strange cultures, Kpomassie and Chuang Hua’s stories are foreign in more ways than one. Perhaps not so surprisingly, they’re also immediate and relatable.
We don’t have to move across the world for the world to move beneath us. Even for those who never travel beyond the place of their birth, the cultural and societal landscape moves underneath our feet at a pace requiring constant adjustment and adaptation. We regularly face unknowns, forced to reckon with the unfamiliar. We’re all immigrants and refugees, sometimes even at home.
Chuang Hua’s story involves a large well-to-do Chinese family who flees their country amid its midcentury upheavals. The family eventually settles in the U.S. but not the middle daughter, Fourth Jane. (All the children bear names with their birth order.) She remains notably unsettled, restless.
As an adult she must escape the confines of the family, especially her domineering father and their complicated relationship. “I am in exile here voluntarily in order to rest,” she explains, “to remove myself from ties for the moment.” So Jane travels to Paris, straight into another complicated relationship. She begins an affair with a married newspaper writer. Even then, even there, she can’t escape her past.
Lacking the rootedness of home can leave us feeling disoriented, out of touch. Chuang Hua amplifies that feeling by disorienting us, the reader. She eschews quotation marks, plays with punctuation, and sometimes uses only pronouns to refer to characters even after scene changes. What’s happening? When? Where? To who? And let’s just talk about all those scene changes.
Mimicking the sudden jumps of human thought and memory, the narrative bounces back and forth chronologically, even mid-paragraph, with no cues and few clues. You’re there in her Paris kitchen while she cooks duck for her lover, when suddenly you find yourself back in the U.S. at a family party or arguing with Dad. It takes a few pages to sense how the narrative works but, once you get it, making sense of the passages offers the same reward as solving a series of puzzles.
Kpomassie’s narrative is considerably more straightforward, though his journey was not. He was, after reading a book about Greenland and the Inuit, entranced by the thought of the place and its people. So when the priestess of the pythons claimed his life and service, he ran away from home.
It took Kpomassie several years to earn enough to make his way out of Africa and again out of Europe, but he slowly made his way north to Denmark. All the while, his goal never faded, and at twenty-four years of age he boarded a boat for Greenland.
To the Far, Far North
He isn’t ready for what he sees, nor are the locals when he gets there. Most have never seen a black man (“their small daughter, took one look at me, turned bright red, and started to scream”). And yet here he is, walking among them, his only plan being to see and explore their world, so different from his own. Being alien need not lead to alienation; the hospitable locals welcome him, and Kpomassie remains openminded and curious about the Greenlanders’ way of life.
Starting in the South, he works his way North, finding families to shelter him and boats to take him up the coastline. All the while he records his experiences, eating whale skin, trapping seal, seeing the Northern Lights, riding in dogsleds, and more. Many such moments are expected, given the location of the story, but they’re all rendered with such novelty they can’t help but surprise.
Other moments catch the reader off guard entirely—for instance, the Greenlanders’ ritualized wife-swapping and the viciousness of husky packs, from which children must be kept apart or risk their lives and from which even grown men aren’t always safe. The fact that the Greenlanders’ butcher and eat their dogs from time to time? That’s a surprise. The fact that they tend to eat the rabid ones? More surprising. The fact they eat them raw? Well, now. . . .
Kpomassie writes with little judgment, largely just observing and recording. Many passages leave the reader smiling: falling out of high-speed dogsled, playing soccer on a frozen bay, licking frozen beer like popsicles. What comes through with every page is his intense love for Greenland and its people. Kpomassie, as John Derbyshire wrote in the New Criterion, “accomplish[ed] what must surely be the most astounding act of cultural assimilation in all of human history.”
“Do people ever know their true reason for embarking on a long journey?” asks Kpomassie near the end of his story. “So many causes, motives and impulses intertwine to form the semblance of a reason.” We go because we’re human. And we either stay or move on again for the same reason, the travels shaping our sense of self as we go.
At Home in the World
We all struggle with our displacement. We move across the world while it moves below us. And those who best regain their footing might surprise us. Fourth Jane’s little brother Fifth James marries a white woman; their parents at first outright refuse to recognize her, though her father softens in time.
Meanwhile, Jane’s paramour, an enlightened liberal, can’t shake his disdain for America. At one point he tells her she should consider moving back to China where they “would welcome you with open arms.”
“Don’t be simple-minded,” she responds. “I couldn’t live without America. It’s a part of me by now. For years I used to think I was dying in America because I could not have China. Quite unexpectedly one day it ended when I realized I had it in me and not being able to be there physically no longer mattered.”
Having lived in both China and America, she now contains them both. When he insists she ignore the part of her experience his chauvinism can’t stomach, she refuses. “I can’t separate any more,” she says. “If I were to live in China today I would have to conceal one half of myself. In America I need not hide what I am.”
Tété-Michel Kpomassie’s Michel the Giant and Chuang Hua’s Crossings were the May books for my 2024 classic novel and memoir goal. For novels, here’s what I’ve read so far and what’s in store for the rest of the year:
January: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
February: Alice Walker, The Color Purple
March: Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
April: Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
May: Chuang Hua, Crossings
June: Willa Cather, My Àntonia
July: Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
August: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat
September: Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
October: Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes
November: George Eliot, Middlemarch
December: Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying
For memoirs:
January: Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
February: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
March: Richard Wright, Black Boy
April: Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
May: Tété-Michel Kpomassie, Michel the Giant: An African in Greenland
June: John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
July: Stephen King, On Writing
August: Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road
September: Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
October: John Stuart Mill, Autobiography
November: C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
December: Beryl Markham, West with the Night
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Kpomassie's book is something I need to read. I have travelled to both sub-Saharan West Africa and to Baffin Island opposite Greenland. I encountered African immigrants on Baffin Island and wondered what led them to travel so far to a place so different. Just the extreme change in climate would need courage. My friends in West Africa often wore padded coats and knitted hats in the mildly cool early mornings of the sub-Saharan dry season, and I remember one of them saying to me, while rubbing his hands to warm them on one such morning, "Now we are in Canada!" On the other hand, the Inuit of Baffin Island informed me that even going to the southern part of Canada was too hot for them and that to cool off during Baffin Island's brief chilly summers, they swam in the river supplied by a nearby glacier.
I don't believe I could do Crossings, the scene changes would be too much for me.