transience and evolution. From his birth, “the name Julius linked [him] to another place and was…one of the intensifiers of [his] sense of being different in Nigeria” (Cole, 78). Thus, even his native home, in the truest sense of the word, escapes conventional connotations of comfort and intimacy, subduing any sense of belonging or origin that Julius might have nurtured. Moreover, his estrangement from his mother erases any sentimentality associated with his past, which, to him, becomes “an entire vanished world of people, experiences, sensations, desires, a world that [he] was the odd continuation of” (80). Even Julius’ process of bereavement for his father is ostensibly disconnected from that of his mother, as their “stoicism was disunited”; the one time during which kinship is most needed is the very time that highlights the emotional schism of their filial relations (78). Moreover, although Julius travels to Brussels with a professed reason of reconnecting with his oma, his grandmother, the amount of time he devotes to this pursuit only costs him “fifty centimes for the twenty-five minutes of Internet use” (101).
In fact, he is unsure even on the status of her vitality, and after a few days in the city, feels that his visit serves “no purpose, unless being together in the same country, as [he] and [his] oma now were, was, by itself, a comfort” (100). Alas, even before his physical relocation to America, Julius’ estrangement from his family and native ties created the breeding ground for a fugueur, as flight and transience become the only constant themes connecting his disparate narratives.
Indeed, the notion of fugue as a conscious departure from one’s familiar territory can be construed as an allegory for immigration itself. Kristeva attributes the fugal tendencies of the foreign immigrant to a feeling of aloofness that can be described as “not belonging to any place, any time, any love…a lost origin” (Kristeva, 7). The irony, then, lies in this fact: the stereotypes from which immigrants, in the process of migration, wish to liberate themselves are the very constructs of identity through which they are viewed in their new country. Ironically, Julius,
being an immigrant himself, is complicit in the singular dissection of immigrant populations into their respective backgrounds, as he often distinguishes passersby by their race or ethnicity. For instance, his feverish obsession with constructing the personal histories of his fellow bar mates, whom he finds out are Rwandan and not Congolese, restricts his perception of their narratives to their native home (139). The theme of immigrants’ lost identity is repeated extensively – almost fugal in its reiterative capacity – throughout the novel. Saidu, an inmate with whom Julius becomes acquainted, is just one example of the masses of immigrants who experience exile from their home country and ultimately fall at the hands of their own racial misperception. In leaving Liberia, a source of oppression and discrimination that he’d thought would be reversed in his migration, Saidu is welcomed by America with shackles and intolerance and is robbed of his chance to foster a new identity (69). Farouq, whom Julius meets later in the novel, tells a similar oppressive tale of his encounter with the principal of an American school, where he worked as janitor: in trying to dissociate himself from the connotations associated with a Muslim servant worker, he realized he was only “wasting [his] time in the attempt to cross [the line]” (113). Like Julius, these characters seek desperately the familiarity of a home but, by nature of their migratory tendencies, instead become completely estranged from a sense of belonging.
Apart from highlighting Julius’ tendencies for physical and emotional flight, Cole deliberately includes instances where his narration is evidently unreliable, much like the amnesic tales of a fugue patient. In this sense, Julius’ accounts of his estrangement from the world may themselves be estranged from the truth. For instance, he selectively chooses to expound on his “sudden reencounter of someone long forgotten, some part of [him]self [he] had relegated to childhood and to Africa,” yet he vehemently denies knowledge or recognition of their past together (156). It is only much later in their renewed relationship that he realizes he was “the
villain…in [her] version,” as the acquaintance who sexually overpowered her in her youth and forever tainted her attitude towards trust and sexuality (243). And yet, it is ludicrous to an unbiased observer that such an emotionally salient event could have ever escaped his memory, except in a version of the account that flees from the original truth. Indeed, Cole’s purposeful inclusion of a purposeful error – the misrecognition of the woman he’d raped – destabilizes the portrayal of Julius to the reader and establishes the duality of narration that parallels Julius’ duality of self. This style of unreliable narration is interspersed throughout the novel; in one instance of flâneurial observation, for example, what Julius initially perceives as a “lynched man dangling from a tree” is revealed to be only a “dark canvas sheeting on a construction scaffold, twirling in the wind” (75). The duality between his internal and external thoughts is further divulged when he confesses to the seemingly harmless dishonesty of his narratives: “Perhaps [Nadège] fell in love with the idea of myself that I presented in that story…[as] the listener, the compassionate African who paid attention to the details of someone else’s life and struggle” (70). Being on the receiving end of these carefully crafted stories, the reader suddenly assumes the role of the psychiatrist, noting with certainty the ways in which Julius’ narration, intentionally or unintentionally, flees from reality His mental state is eerily evocative of that of his own patients, “paranoid schizophrenics [who] were good storytellers because they engaged in world building,” or “insane [people who experienced] a deep down, in-the-gut disjunction between actual reality and a sort of personally invented reality” (201, 202). Indeed, the ostensible duality of narration that Julius maintains in the novel highlights the irony of the solipsistic attitude of the fugueur and reinforces the experience of dissociative fugue that defines Julius’ role in his urban setting.