“To Be Black in a ‘White’ Country” - On the Ambivalence of the Diasporic Experience in César A. Mba Abogo's El porteador de Marlow. Canción negra sin color (2007)

Abstract

This essay focuses on the ambivalence of the diasporic experience of the Black subject in Equatoguinean writer César A. Mba Abogo's collection of short stories and poems El porteador de Marlow. Canción negra sin color (2007). It discusses how these texts reflect the experience of alienness and exclusion lived by the Black diasporic subject in a "white" European society, unsilencing a marginalized perspective on African migration to and presence in Europe. Moreover, the essay proposes a reading of the extensive network of references to Black history, knowledge systems, and intertexts evoked throughout the collection as offering a way to transcend the Black diasporic subject's isolation and to connect to a shared and ongoing history of oppression, displacement, and marginalization on the one hand but of agency, resistance, and self-empowerment on the other.