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Literature
Kwame Dawes
We should understand the crossroads. It is the place of mythical and symbolic im-
portance. In Caribbean and African traditions, the crossroads is a guarded sacred
place for it is a place of meeting not just of the living, but also of the living and the
dead. I have little doubt that our interest in this symbol is related to the idea of
intersections, the meeting of cultures, the interaction that happens when various
cultures meet. In many ways, by finding in the place of the world of literature a
metaphor that speaks of a meeting of people, ideas and cultures as well as a meeting
that crosses times and involves the living and the dead, what we are doing is sug-
gesting that the very concept of comparative literature is one marked by exchange,
by the quite positive exercise of various cultures coming together.
But these meetings are not all positive. They are meetings that unsettle our com-
forts, that remind us of what we do not know in as much as they remind us of what
we know. In the traditions of Africa and the Caribbean, there is almost always a
guardian of the crossroads, someone who is acutely aware of the limitations of
human beings in their capacity to find union and positive connection at the cross-
roads. The guardian is the keeper of the stories, the interpreter of the stories and
the teller of the stories. In many ways, we are working with a rich vein of metaphors
in this very idea. The guardian is the mapper of the worlds we are speaking of. And
it is no accident that the very incarnation of this myth of the crossroads is rooted
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in a quite ancient tradition of the crossroads, a tradition that crosses so many cul-
tures—one of the few things that we can safely call universal.
The myth of the crossroads raises other fundamental questions that have been
raised since the beginning of this enterprise called humanity, and that we have not
found a useful answer for. There is a reason why we cannot find an answer. It is be-
cause the very process of the questioning is at the heart of the value of this dilemma
and it makes what we are engaged with here so important. It tells us that what we
do must be done with an openness to the possibility of what can enrich our world,
and yet with a deep sense of what the dangers are.
Most of you would know the mythos of the tower of Babel. The circumstance
that presents itself in the narrative called Genesis is one that would actually make
much of what we do in comparative literature, absolutely redundant. “Now the
whole world had one language and a common speech.” With their common speech,
the people arrived at a profound truth. They determined that if they were able
to maintain this singular speech they would be able to dominate and control the
world. For some reason, this hubris has come to be seen as a kind of arrogance—a
sense of invulnerability borne out of the monolingual power that they possessed.
They chose to build a tower to announce their power. God, speaking to himself,
determined that this was not a good idea. So his action was to destroy the remark-
able tower and create multiple languages, causing confusion among the people. The
languages pushed people apart. They went to different areas of the world. Implicit in
this moment is something else. It is the suggestion that the enmity of wars and con-
flicts emerged out of this scattering, this separation which was marked by language.
We might have long debates about the theological and philosophical implica-
tions of this narrative, but it would seem more useful to treat it as an encounter
with a myth that helps to theorize not so much about how things came to be, but
about how things are. This is an acceptable way to read the passage, even if not one
that all of us hold to. Instead, then, of seeing this as a narrative about how languages
came about, it may be a way to help us to understand the implications of languages.
Where a single language dominates, hubris is likely to emerge. But it can be produc-
tive, and it leads to the productivity that ultimately leads to hubris. And yet, there
is implicit in this narrative a sense that the world is intent on coming together in
a single language. The very idea of human experience is marked by the desire for
language to reach across its own divides and find meaning and truth. So our reality
is that the world is a place of multiple languages. But we also know that language
is not static. Language is mutable. It shifts, it moves and reshapes itself over time
and over various geographical spaces. Language is fluid, language mutates and then
becomes what it was not. We use language, thus, to control, to change, to challenge
and to obfuscate. Babel is about the reality of language as both a force of communi-
FRAGMENTATION
I befriended a boy in Senegal who can
recite the Qu’ran three times—all
Works Cited
Dawes, Kwame. “Flight.” Prophets. Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 1995.
Hemmy, Kirsten. “FRAGMENTATION.” The Antioch Review 63.2 (2005): 308–09.