In East Asia, our response often manifests as a yearning for the continent's wide-open spaces, it's hosts of animals, it's exotic otherness; a romanticized image from which the trauma of the Middle Passage, the pain of colonization and today's diaspora of coloured persons is erased. It is a delusion I only woke from in 2017, when I was brought up close to the lived experience of fellow writers from Africa at the University of Iowa International Writing Program.

Antoinette Tidjani Alou, writer, scholar, translator and Director of Arts & Culture Université Abdou Moumouni de Niamey (Niger) is one such writer. Vibrant Antoinette lived four doors down the hall. Like me, she was raised in an ex-British colony, was a Catholic who'd married ‘out', and had left her husband and grown children to be in Iowa. I connected instantly. Within the fortnight, we were meditating together in the morning, bonding over coffee and swapping books.

Time zone differences put an end to all that. Also, the polyphonic Antoinette has been publishing mostly in French these days. I don't read French. It has been a while since we sat down together for a good conversation. I'm so thankful for the opportunity today. So, here we go...

AC: Hi Antoinette. I really appreciate your setting time aside to tell my readers a little about yourself and your work. Let's start with the idea of Africa. You live in Niger and have done so for a large part of your life. However, you were born in the Caribbean and educated in many places. In the extract of your book On m'appelle Nina (They Call Me Nina) you write about how your younger Jamaican illusions of a luxuriant Africa were tested upon your arrival in the Sahel. Yet you have now managed to grow a garden in its sands. So, what does Africa now mean to you?

ATA: Oh là là! Audrey, you are really going there. Do you know how deeply that seemingly innocent question resonates in the blood, history and poetry of the historical African Diaspora? It takes me way back to my early teenage years in Jamaica, when Africa was mainly the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Claude McKay (who is also Jamaican). I'll go there with you, if you allow, and evoke one particular poem of the Harlem Renaissance that has a Diaspora poetica persona asking (and answering) that very same question: "Heritage" by Countee Cullen. Here's an extract -

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun or scarlet sea, Jungle star or jungle track, Strong bronzed men, or regal black Women from whose loins I sprang When the birds of Eden sang? One three centuries removed From the scenes his fathers loved, Spicy grove, cinnamon tree, What is Africa to me?

I have long worked at answering your question through scholarship and literary writing. I have a whole paper (presented in South Africa, in 2010) on the subject of my life between homes, "Where do African-Caribbeans living in Africa belong?" My autofiction in English, One life is not enough, has a chapter that documents the journey to the answer/the answers and to the'I' who is answering. Here are some (perhaps contradictory) notes, from where I sit, here-now: I don't know what Africa is. it's too vast. I've lived in only one part of one country, Niamey in Niger. That is far as geography has taken me. Scholarship has taken me deeper into the interior of Niger, I believe. But as for my mythic imagination, my larger sense of "identity" and my personal commitment - Africa is my past, my present, my future. It is huge, beyond nationality, beyond geography. I claim its immensity as mine, wherever it occurs. It is not one country. It is not a monolith. It assembles huge portions of my sense of self in the world.

AC: And what of Jamaica, your home country?

ATA: As a child I saw Jamaica and Africa as related but distinct. Now, I understand the global connections that circulate among the different parts of Global Africa, that bind them together. Still, for me, Jamaica, and indeed the Caribbean, pulse with seminal blood.

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