1 Introduction: Problematising Diaspora

The study of Diasporic Literature has largely been premised on the various meanings and contestations of the term ‘diaspora.’¹ The problematisation of the term ‘diaspora’ has always been inevitable, especially given the insufficiency of its general theoretical collocates like postcolonialism, and the currency of such concepts like transculturalism.² The term has largely been used to refer to the aftermaths of migration and dispersal, and the critical objects and processes that have enabled us to rethink issues of cultural identity.³ In its frequent uses, the word ‘diaspora’ does not just connote movement but “forced dispersal and reluctant scattering”⁴ and is related to such historical events and conditions like Jewish people as a country-less nation or the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Enslaved Persons. In that regard, the word is predominantly and closely related to forced rather than voluntary displacement. Displacement signals removal from ‘original location’ which, after displacement, will be an object of memory, remembrance and commemoration out of which a new identity is forged or shaped. Thus, diaspora is premised on the “location of residence” as a counterpoint of the “location of belonging.”⁵ The relationship between location of belonging (also referred to as a homeland)⁶ and location of residence (hostland) is characterised by tension. This tension could be resolved through assimilation (leading to belonging) in the location of residence or return to the land of belonging. In both instances (assimilation or return), the nation-state plays a central role in terminating the diaspora, that is, in creating conditions in which the diaspora ceases to be a category by which individuals identify themselves.

Regardless of this more simplified definition, the term has always been subjected to vigorous debates to the extent that some scholars have regarded it as a compromised term.⁷ For instance, the idea of dispersion presupposes the existence of an original location/homeland from which a community is scattered. The ‘homeland orientation’⁸ of this definition sees home as the single source of identity to which one will eventually return. Such a definition ignores the fact that the recreation of cultural connections to a specific place does not necessarily mean the longing for return. In other words, “decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return.”⁹ However, the recreation of cultural connections (even without longing for return) speaks of distinct boundaries, or boundary-maintenance.¹⁰ It is this boundary-maintenance

that enables one to speak of a diaspora as a distinctive ‘community’, held together by a distinctive, active solidarity, as well as by relatively dense social relationships, that cut across state boundaries and link members of the diaspora in different states into a single ‘transnational community’.¹¹

The flaw in this definition of a boundary- and homeland-oriented diaspora is that it can be easily challenged by counter-currents like hybridity¹² where identity “is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”¹³ However, while hybridity seems to be oriented towards boundary-erosion instead of boundary-maintenance, one is still reminded of Clifford’s “changing same” assertion, that is, we can only speak of hybridity if we recognise the existence of separate discrete entities that can be mixed to produce a hybrid. This, again, agrees with Brubaker’s observation that “diaspora can be seen as an alternative to the essentialization of belonging; but it can also represent a non-territorial form of essentialized belonging.”¹⁴

It is in that regard that Chariandy uses the term ‘postcolonial diasporas’ as an attempt to make the term ‘diaspora’ more adequate and to venture beyond its perceived generalisations and homebound limitations.¹⁵ Scholars like Tölölyan have also argued that “transnational communities are sometimes the paradigmatic Other of the nation-state and at other times its ally, lobby, or even, as in the case of Israel, its precursor.”¹⁶ Such a relationship between the nation and diaspora means that it is not clear if the terms are oppositional or, in some contexts, distinguishable. Additionally, ‘hybridity’, one of the key terms and components of diaspora, supposes an in-betweenness, which begs the question as to what in-betweenness really means. It is as if the term is based on the idea that cultures exist as separate incommensurable units, the mixing of which gives rise to something hybridised.¹⁷ In that regard, Chariandy’s proposition to use the term ‘postcolonial diasporas’ is fraught with shortcomings in the sense that it seems to be privileging the view of ‘home’ and ‘foreign’ as discrete, homogenous arrangements, only this time multiplied.

The study of diaspora from this postcolonial perspective has continued to be critically challenged, especially by transcultural scholars. Schulze-Engler, for instance, challenges the inherent assumption of ‘postcolonial disapora’ which seems to privilege migrant literature in the metropoles of the West whereas literature everywhere in the world is, in one way or another, linked to transnational or transcultural contexts.¹⁸ The transcultural approach takes into consideration how societies and cultures have been altered by globalisation, thereby altering our own perceptions of them. This means our understanding of literary texts can no longer be predominantly moored to frameworks that link them to discrete traditions and cultures, something that diaspora as a term seems to be guilty of. Many scholars have expressed their disenchantment with the term ‘diaspora’ because of this inherent weakness. This has led to theoretical searches for a concept that goes beyond the limitations of diaspora. For instance, Brubaker speaks of the ‘diaspora’ diaspora because of how the term diaspora has been overstretched, dispersing its meanings “in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space.”¹⁹ My own deployment of the concept of postdiaspora in 2017, at a point when the concept had not yet become fashionable among many scholars, and subsequent theoretical interventions that have used this concept, can be understood in this context.²⁰ It is also in the same search for a concept that goes beyond the limitations of the term ‘diaspora’ that I propose the deployment of postdiaspora in the study of T.L. Huchu’s speculative trilogy (now pentalogy),²¹ namely, The Library of the Dead,²² Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments,²³ and The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle.²⁴ The questions are: if diaspora is about how dispersed communities navigate the tenuous relationship between homeland and hostland, and if how they define themselves is born out of that tenuous relationship, how do second, third and subsequent generations define themselves? In terms of the home left behind which, in all respect, is handed down to them via memory and stories? What do we say of the 1.5 generation,²⁵ or the generation that was born in the diaspora and imagines itself as belonging in the hostland? What do we say of this generation’s offspring and the offspring of its offspring as we see in T.L. Huchu’s speculative fiction corpus? In other words, when we do away with the definitives of homeland and diaspora, and go for indeterminacies, what do we call the new creature? While the question of intergenerational diasporic modes of belonging is not entirely new, Huchu’s novels allow us to hazard new questions, not just about the limits of diaspora, but the limits of thinking of diasporic people as belonging to a nation. Huchu’s approach to Ropa aligns with Selasi’s Afropolitan manifesto: “Don’t ask where I’m from, ask me where I’m local.”²⁶ In that regard, in his construction of Ropa, Huchu wants us to understand her as an Edinburgher and not as a Zimbabwean migrant in Scotland or as a member of the Zimbabwean diaspora in Scotland.

2 Towards a Postdiaspora

While the term postdiaspora has been around for some time (Burt utilised the concept as early as 2003),²⁷ it was only significantly utilised by Laguerre,²⁸ Chidora,²⁹ Noble,³⁰ and Rollins³¹ as a response to what they saw as the inherent shortcomings of the term ‘diaspora.’ Burt uses the term to locate spin-offs of Shakespeare’s plays in Bollywood and Hollywood, suggesting that the trans-cinematic influence of Shakespeare should also make us rethink issues of location and identity. Laguerre sees the term as more encompassing, since it can even be deployed to explore the various complexities of spaces that, in diaspora parlance, are regarded as homelands. In that regard, postdiaspora has a more representative ‘multisite’ consciousness which enables different scales of analysis. In my 2017 thesis, I encountered certain characters (for example, children born in the diaspora) who resisted classification as diasporic citizens and whose consciousness was not characterised by the memory of a home left behind. For Rollins, the narrative indeterminacies of particular diasporic texts called for an approach that addressed these indeterminacies. For Noble, the multiple registers of home and abroad between which Caribbean women journey call for a term that explains the cultural politics of new postcolonial ethnicities and their diasporas. In Noble’s study, the question is: how do we characterise the experiences of the Caribbean migrant in London who, when in the Caribbean, must also identify as being in the African Diaspora? This agrees with Spencer who asks: how do we categorise a homing desire that is different from longing for a home that has been left behind? Do we need to speak of ‘new diasporas’ to capture this complexity?³² Thus, Spencer underscores the need to deploy a term that captures the experiences of those who are no longer outsiders, but who continue to encounter the shifting patterns of being in the world, a world, most importantly, whose transculturality has already been acknowledged and accepted.

Since its tentative introduction to diaspora scholarship, postdiaspora has gained much traction among Caribbean scholars to the extent that some of them have, perhaps prematurely, already begun to problematise it. Noxolo problematises a postdiasporic approach that is concerned with a chronological movement from migrant to diaspora to postdiaspora; or the weakening pull of diasporic sensibilities; or delinking from a forgetful diaspora.³³ Noxolo refines the postdiasporic approach to be concerned with personal entanglements that problematise diaspora while not completely dismissing it, which is the focus of this paper. Thus, she suggests a (post)diasporic approach which allows her to keep “both diaspora and postdiaspora in play, refusing a definitive move from one to the other, but recognising that both have valid claims.”³⁴ In my attempt to deploy the concept in the study of Huchu’s speculative fiction corpus, I avoid the parenthetical approach agitated for by Noxolo because it does not necessarily, beyond personal idiosyncracies, offer any conceptual solutions to her problems with postdiaspora. In my 2017 approach, I avoid regarding postdiaspora as referring to ‘after’ diaspora, as Noxolo observes to be the problem with postdiaspora (as compared to (post)diaspora), but instead see it as a disarticulation of diaspora, that is, an approach that is based on the complication of ‘diaspora’ and not its demise. Disarticulation, in this context, does not refer to negation but complication, that is, the disruption of the neat taxonomy of a teleological movement from home to diaspora. This approach, which I maintain in this paper, does not require the parenthetical reconfiguration of the word postdiaspora because I do not regard it as radically useful to our understanding.³⁵

While the concept of postdiaspora has been used mainly to reconfigure understandings of the experiences of Caribbean, Afro-Caribbean and Asian diasporans in artworks, its use in the scholarly analysis of Afrodiasporic writings is still at an embryonic stage. Indeed, the term postdiaspora has not been deployed in the study of Afrodiasporic writing.³⁶ Given the continuous shifting of patterns of being in the world and the shifting of lenses through which being in the world is analysed, I propose a postdiasporic approach to Afrodiasporic Literature, because it encompasses more patterns of analysis than the concept of diaspora. I utilise the concept with the awareness that in postdiasporic narratives, what is absent is an immigrant perspective that keeps looking back to the old in order to deal with the new, because in this instance, there is nothing ‘old’ and ‘new’ to deal with in the strictest sense. This makes postdiaspora the point where diaspora is disarticulated, a point, perhaps, where the intersections and energies of exile/migration circulate, terminate, and reemerge.³⁷ The term postdiaspora, therefore, follows the spirit of Beauregard who speaks of the “discontents” of diaspora,³⁸ or Chow who agitates for resistance against the “lures of diaspora.”³⁹ In both Beauregard’s and Chow’s cases, the idea is that diaspora itself is an essentialisation of identity, arriving at definitions of what identity is in terms of difference. The continued use of ‘roots’ or ‘homes of origin’ can be understood in this context. While I acknowledge the need to resist the lures of diaspora as suggested by Beauregard and Chow, my approach does not seek to disavow diaspora but to suggest postdiaspora as an addition to the conceptual frameworks by which the identities of those who move are understood. The question that arises becomes: what can be said in relation to those narratives that seek to undo this neat taxonomy of home and host that diaspora feeds on? What is left when diaspora is undone? It is in this context that I seek to analyse selected texts, namely, The Library of the Dead, Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, and The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, by highlighting how the main character therein resists neat categorisation and makes the reader consider locating her beyond the limits of diaspora. The crucial question is: how does the postdiasporic framework help us understand the conditions of particular texts in Afrodiasporic writing, especially given the reductionism and insufficiency of the concept of diaspora? What defines Huchu’s central character, Ropa? In asking these questions, I am reminded of Webner’s situational thesis in which “the fact that people bear multiple identities and that determining which identity is performed, stressed or highlighted depends on, indeed is often determined by, the social situation. The definition of the situation frames social interactions in terms of one identity rather than another.”⁴⁰ Thus, Huchu created a trilogy in which the identity of Ropa is not easily premised on diaspora, social class or profession but on a range of situations. In fact, it is an identity that disarticulates diaspora, making it possible for us to think of Ropa’s identity as more complicated, thereby calling for a postdiasporic framework that will enhance our understanding of Ropa’s experiences, as I shall demonstrate later.

Because of the inherent assumptions of diaspora, the study of Afrodiasporic Literature has inordinately focused on typical themes. These include, for instance, clash of cultures, culture shock, a search for identity, alienation, rootlessness, nostalgia, location, dislocation, relocation, to name but a few; all of this based on the uprooting of characters from their homeland. The authors’ location in terms of a previous ‘original’ location is also important. Thus, NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names⁴¹ is studied in terms of her ‘original’ location in Zimbabwe; Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah⁴² is studied in terms of her ‘original’ location in Nigeria. The connection of the novel to the author’s native land, I argue, is somewhat limiting. By setting his stories in Edinburgh, and avoiding exploring a Zimbabwean background to his novels (as Bulawayo does, for instance), Huchu is also deliberately denying the diasporic framework a totalising dominance over our understanding of the experiences of the descendants of migrants. For that reason, instead of viewing the term ‘diaspora’ as enriching our understanding of Afrodiasporic literature, I view it as limiting. It is limiting precisely because it is based on a reading of literary texts that ignores the more transnational, trans-ethnic and transcultural nature of human experiences captured in a variety of literary texts from the Afrodiasporic canon. Thus, my proposition of postdiaspora stems from a transcultural perspective. I intend to recognise and deploy postdiaspora as a more fluid framework of looking at selected narratives. I will critically analyse, from a postdiasporic perspective, the selected speculative fictional texts which come from the canon of what is referred to as Afrodiasporic literature. This means that my concern is with interpreting the texts beyond the limiting interpretations that have hitherto been given on the basis of the diasporic perspective.

3 T.L. Huchu’s Postdiasporic Corpus

Speculative fiction from Africa has largely been seen through the prism of the speculative turn in which African writers engage in a great deal of revising the single story about Africa.⁴³ The assumption is that for a long time, African literary fiction has predominantly peddled a monolithic representation of Africa as a place of chaos, poverty, disease, and death. Binyavanga Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write About Africa,” is perhaps one of the most cited expositions of this single story.⁴⁴ In that regard, the postcolonial venture of writing back to the empire is regarded as the African writer’s responsibility to correct colonial stereotypes. In the same vein, speculative fiction from Africa is seen as bearing the responsibility of reimagining the future of Africa away from the usual stereotypes. The speculative turn, then, is about revisioning Africa through new ways of telling its story. While one may express reservations about saddling writers from Africa with the responsibility of representing Africa and viewing African Literature as a single entity, thereby limiting our reading of their writings to the act of studying Africa only (and not style and other creative concerns),⁴⁵ one can borrow the idea of revisioning and extend it to Afrodiasporic writing. How does a writer venture beyond the usual stereotypes of representing Africans in Europe (as alienated, homesick individuals suffering from culture shock and grappling with issues of racism and belonging, for instance) and what does speculative fiction offer in that regard? One could say, then, that speculative fiction’s ability to unfetter itself from “the limits of realist representationalism”⁴⁶ makes it possible for writers to reimagine the diasporic experience by venturing beyond its limits and simplistic binaries of homeland and hostland.

T.L. Huchu’s postdiasporic focus predates the speculative fiction trilogy under study. His 2013 novel (which he wrote under his full name, Tendai Huchu), The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician,⁴⁷ attempts to create a character, Chenai, who can be understood as existing beyond and against the diaspora. This is because while the parents of Chenai are living in the diaspora with its ambivalences that include rootlessness, Chenai seems to have arrived at an Edinburgh with which she identifies. She does not even need to perform her belongingness. At the same time, she seems to be existing at a level of disarticulation, that is, at a point where she does not need to articulate diasporic experiences, or imagine the home that was left behind by her parents as a reference point. There is a lack of continuity between the generation of migrants who exited home and the generation that was born after entry into the diaspora. Thus, Chenai cannot be read as an extension of the Magistrate, her father. She refuses to exist in terms that are represented by her parents. In the case of the Magistrate, it is the belief that his culture expects children to behave in a certain way, like addressing elders with respect, something that Chenai has problems with, especially with regard to her relationship with Alfonso, her father’s clownish friend turned secret agent. Chenai’s disarticulation of these ideals places her against the Magistrate, against the Magistrate’s experience of home, and against the Magistrate’s experience of the diaspora. The Magistrate’s acute lack of technological dexterity further relegates him from Chenai’s world so that he exists more on the periphery, whereas his daughter exists on the inside. Clearly, Chenai’s home is Edinburgh, as she has not only fully settled down there but has even married a ‘native’ Edinburgh citizen. While for the Magistrate Edinburgh is a foreign space which he would exit one day on his way back to Zimbabwe, what Gopinath calls “redemptive return,”⁴⁸ for Chenai Edinburgh is a home. Chenai’s recognisable Scottish accent, with no trace of Zimbabwe in it, places her against the Magistrate who continues to yearn for a single point of lost origin. That yearning is completely absent in Chenai. She does not have anything to remember about a lost home and chooses to ignore the memory of her father. She only indulges her father’s memory, like during the instance when they do gardening together, in order to strike concessions with him. Otherwise, it is apparent that she is not in search of Zimbabwean cultural nuggets to use in the future, probably in her new home with her Scottish husband.

In his speculative fiction trilogy (which has become a pentalogy),⁴⁹ Huchu further develops this trajectory, but this time by creating a post-apocalyptic Edinburgh in which old arrangements have become stuff for the archives. Thus, subterranean libraries in which the past is interred feature prominently, including in the eponymously titled The Library of the Dead. While Huchu has been prolific, releasing a single installment of the series each year since 2021, the same cannot be said about the scholarship on the series. Much of the scholarship on Huchu has focused on his novel The Hairdresser of Harare which was the first Zimbabwean literary text to tackle an LGBQTI theme.⁵⁰ To date, no academic article exists on any of the installments in the Edinburgh Nights Series. The only MA thesis written on The Library of the Dead for instance attempts to create connections between Ropa and a Zimbabwean homeland, going as far as trying to interpret the name Ropa as pointing to blood ties with Zimbabwe.⁵¹ The name Ropa is erroneously translated to mean ‘blood’ when, in fact, the name is a popular shortened version of Ropafadzo (‘Blessing’), a popular name among the Shona in Zimbabwe. Contrary to Francová’s thesis, my analysis of the trilogy and deployment of postdiaspora are meant to venture beyond the usual attempts to treat the characters in Afrodiasporic writing as carrying an immigrant identity which enables the diaspora to exist. I want to propose that Ropa’s identity disarticulates the immigrant thesis and, together with the post-apocalyptic speculation of the trilogy, allows Huchu to explore postdiasporic possibilities.

4 The Post-apocalypse

It is important for us to explore how the post-apocalypse is utilised by Huchu in order to create conditions for the postdiaspora. While Huchu’s speculative fiction and postdiaspora trajectory thrive on imagining a ‘new’ world, the author imbues that world with realist possibilities. The series is a reflection, albeit post-apocalyptic, dystopian and perhaps distorted, of the modern world. Thus, instead of ear pods or headphones with which one could listen to an audio book, Huchu would rather have a worm (witty reference to bookworm?) which one inserts into the ear. Things from our current world have become antique and vintage indulgences for the rich. Tourists have become rare sights. It is a world that has been separated from our present world by what the novels repeatedly refer to as ‘the event.’ Instead of ‘Long Live the Queen’ we now have ‘Long Live the King’ which, in retrospect, is not really strange.⁵² The idea, therefore, is to push boundaries by asking, “what if …?” In the case of Huchu’s series, the idea is to push boundaries of how we view the human condition, including the condition of those who are descendants of those who have moved. So instead of Huchu’s post-apocalyptic world being divorced from reality, it is in fact connected to it. However, instead of focusing on what being diasporic means to his characters, as he did with all of his diasporic characters (with the exception of Chenai) in The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, Huchu does not, even remotely, focus on this. Instead, the focus is on how our future can be presaged on the basis of magic and technology. Magic, in Huchu’s series, is not a counterpoint of technology, but its complement. Huchu seems to have latched on to what our storytelling has always focused on: using magic, horror, adventure, and so on to show that there will always be a battle between good and evil and that there will always be heroes and villains, and to make us reimagine our present world from a different perspective. What if it no longer matters to ask where someone comes from?⁵³ In asking this question, I want to focus our attention on the fact that this has never been the question in Huchu’s series. Ropa, her grandmother, and her sister are local to Edinburgh, especially its underbelly, and central to its society of magical enquirers. Their identities have nothing to do with the discourse of homeland and dispersion, but with the magicians’ fight against those who want to use magic for nefarious ends, just as technology is being used for nefarious ends in our modern world. That Huchu could imagine a world in which he breaks away from the usual themes of culture shock, nostalgia, and ambivalence that characterise Afrodiasporic writing demonstrates the philosophy that undergirds his vision for Afrodiasporic writing and how we need to rethink our diasporic discourse. The post-apocalyptic fantasy world of an Edinburgh that is still familiar has given Huchu the freedom to explore what is possible in our present world. Clough asks and answers the question of why we write speculative fiction when he writes, “So, why bother writing speculative fiction in this day and age? Because it’s in these imagined worlds that we find the freedom to explore the deepest questions of existence, identity, and society.”⁵⁴ Huchu’s series, therefore, allows us to imagine and explore, as he does, a postdiasporic world, as I shall demonstrate.

5 Huchu’s Speculative Fiction Trilogy: Synopses

The three novels that make the trilogy under study are The Library of the Dead (2021), Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments (2022) and The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle (2023). By the time this research commenced, Huchu had released The Legacy of Arniston House (2024).⁵⁵ The stories feature Ropafadzo Moyo (known as Ropa throughout), a young teenage narrator who, at the beginning, freelances as a ghost-talker but ultimately lands a dream internship under the mentorship of Sir Ian Callander, the Secretary of the Society of Sceptical Enquirers, a society of professional magicians who are at the apex of scientific magic in Scotland and Scottish society in general. It is an alternative, dystopian, post-apocalyptic and post-catastrophe Edinburgh universe in which magic is a dominant science. It became such because of what is referred to as The Event. In the first three novels of this series, The Event is only mentioned in passing. What The Event is all about is never explored. However, we know that The Event changed everything, reducing most of Edinburgh to a slum, with a few pockets of glamour here and there for the rich and for those who are at the apex of Scottish magic. Fifteen-year-old Ropa, her grandmother and her little sister Izwi live as squatters in a trailer park. In such a society, Ropa offers ghost-talking, which is not considered as magic, as a way of fending for her ailing grandmother and her sister. She acts as a go-between between the dead and their living relatives, delivering messages to the living to fulfil the wishes of the dead whose ghosts are still lingering because of outstanding matters. She also owns a pet in the form of a fox called River. However, because in The Library of the Dead (the first installment in the series), she helps solve a mystery of children who disappear and only reappear after they have aged and their youth has been sucked out of them (she utilises the library of the dead to find more information about the mystery and to also learn more about magic which comes naturally to her), she lands a dream job as Ian Callander’s intern.

In Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, Ropa, on the basis of her work in saving the children in The Library of the Dead, is offered a dream internship under the mentorship of the man who is at the apex of Scottish magic. During this time, she is consulted by Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, a hospital that combines both magic and medicine to cure patients with mysterious ailments. This time, a patient has a strange ailment in which their soul seems to be tethered somewhere inaccessible to magic or science, at least until the source of the ailment is known. Ropa’s job is to find the source of the ailment, so she digs deep into the history of Scotland, the Royal Bank of Scotland and magic. In finding the source of the ailment, she also saves important documents of the library of magic and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Her ghost-talking skills are an important cog in her attempt to solve the mystery.

In The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, Ropa, still an intern of Ian Callander, is tasked with helping to plan for a conference of magicians at Dunvegan Castle. On the eve of the conference’s commencement, an ancient Ethiopian scroll is stolen and a librarian is murdered. Ropa, almost sixteen now, is tasked with solving the murder. Ghost-talking proves to be vital in the investigation. At the end of the story, fed up with the Society’s hypocrisy, Ropa retires from her internship and from Scottish magic. The story ends with Ropa aboard the English Magician Royale’s chariot, and it is possible that in the next installment, she would be working with English magicians (an overt nod to the history of tensions between England and Scotland which plays a central role in the present of the trilogy).

6 Ropa, the Postdiasporan?

Ropa was born in Edinburgh to parents who were (possibly) born in Edinburgh. Only her grandmother was born in Zimbabwe before migrating to Edinburgh. We know this because in The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, we are told that some of the advice that Ropa is given by her grandmother is taken from her life as “a little girl growing up in her village in Zimbabwe” (263). Thus, Ropa exists outside the definition of the 1.5 generation that I referred to earlier. By extension, she exists outside the definition of a diasporan, as I shall illustrate. In creating her, Huchu was more deliberate, choosing to defy stereotypical representations of immigrant experiences. In an interview, Huchu particularly makes this important distinction:

I know it’s fashionable to present culture shocks and state these things as profound issues surrounding identity and all that bollocks, but I’m very comfortable straddling the two nations. Any notion of cultural purity on one side or the other is utter nonsense – that boat sailed from the Clyde 150 years ago and she ain’t coming back.⁵⁶

Having made his mind up about discarding the cliches of diasporic representation, Huchu draws from Scots which he infuses with “a little bit of Shona,” making Ropa declare:

I’m an Edinburgher through and through. Wake me up blindfolded in Granton and I’ll tell you the hour from the scent of the air. This is my first time ever outside the city proper. Like, not for a day trip, but actually spending time outside Edinburgh. Scary. I’m used to the rhythms of the city, the bustle and tussling that comes with it. Out here, everything’s too quiet for my liking. (TMDC: 29).

Ropa’s declaration here brings to mind Taiye Selasi’s Afropolitan manifesto: “Don’t ask where I’m from; ask where I’m local.”⁵⁷ To say Ropa’s experience is local does not mean it is simple; it is a disavowal of nationhood. Ropa feels at home in the city she grew up in and would probably have felt at home in one or two other places had she been given a chance to be local in those cities as well. That is why she does not identify as Scottish, but as an Edinburgher, because being local means being shaped by the experiences of the place one lives in. Zimbabwe, therefore, does not play a central role in how Ropa views her world and how she communicates with those around her. One could even hazard the suggestion that Ropa’s ‘villages’ (a direct response to her grandmother’s Zimbabwean ‘village’) are the different parts of Edinburgh, and the wisdom these villages impart to her is therefore a different one from her grandmother’s. In pointing this out, I want to avoid the mistake of thinking of this as the negation of diaspora; rather it is a complication of it: via her grandmother Ropa has knowledge of but not identification with Zimbabwe.

This disarticulation of a diasporic identity (only choosing what is useful of what her grandmother taught her) puts Ropa at odds with her grandmother who, like the Magistrate in The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician, thinks that the teenager is lost. It is not just a matter of generational gap at play, but the fact that Ropa’s world has always revolved around Edinburgh. She is far removed from a diasporic identity that is supposed to revolve around the tenuous relationship between Scotland and Zimbabwe. In other words, Ropa does not see herself in terms of an immigrant identity but situationally, as a member of the poor of Edinburgh, or as a member of the Society of Sceptical Enquirers (by dint of her internship) or as a sleuth (because of her investigative work). Never is an immigrant identity hinted at even by those with whom she converses. In using the mbira, she recognises it as “an ancient instrument about the size of a small laptop” (TLD: 13). It is only the Zimbabwean reader who would recognise it as a Zimbabwean instrument (the non-Zimbabwean reader would probably use google). In Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, Ropa subtly stresses the fact that the world that invented the mbira is far removed from hers when she describes the mbira as “[a]n old-school musical instrument the Shona people use to commune with the souls of their ancestors” (66). The sense of ownership that one expects in a diasporic individual who is typically keen to perform the identities of the home left behind is completely absent here. Thus, it is ‘their ancestors’ and not ‘our ancestors.’ Her use of the mbira and other Zimbabwean songs, therefore, is not because of Zimbabwean-centred consciousness or any ideological indulgences but because both the mbira and the songs do the job. After all, she was taught by her grandmother. In other instances, she turns to Scottish magic for solutions. In one instance of ghost-talking in The Library of the Dead, Ropa says, “I play a slow tune, ‘Gavakava,’ something to bring the tempo right down, soothe tempers and ease the mood” (13). In another episode of ghost-talking in The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle Ropa chooses to blend the mbira with a Scottish song, creating a beautiful melody that fuses the mbira’s staccato harmony with the ghost’s bag pipes:

Then the song comes to me and I play, trying to capture the tone and prosody of the human voices. ‘The Dark Island’ is a timeless, gut-wrenching melody. I approximate it as best I can with my mbira. The ghost sways, forty-five degrees to one side, then the other. Like a pendulum swinging. My song carries strangely, distorted in this warped space. Then I hear that haunting drone of the pipes. It bores through every fibre of my being. The force of it ripples out from my centre, through flesh, to the tips of my hair. As though the piper were playing out from within me into the world. No piece of music’s ever hit me like this before. (218–219).

Thus, Ropa utilises whatever she has in her arsenal – mbira, Shona songs, Scottish songs, Scottish, as long as it works. But in all this, she sees herself as an Edinburgher. This says much about Ropa’s postdiasporic identity in that when using the mbira, she can only approximate the melody, as if there is a disconnect between the mbira’s possibilities of expression (and therefore a diasporic identity) and Ropa’s Edinburgh present. The approximations are “distorted in this warped space,” implying that there is no easy cultural access to the sounds of a ‘homeland’ artifact, and that, by extension, diasporic identity itself is a distorting concept.

I want to go back to Ropa’s situational identity again as a way of further illustrating what it means to be postdiasporic. Situational analysis

theorizes the fact that people bear multiple identities and that determining which identity is performed, stressed or highlighted depends on, indeed is often determined by, the social situation. The definition of the situation frames social interactions in terms of one identity rather than another. For example, you may be a South Asian, a Pakistani and British, but as a factory worker, you share interests with fellow workers, irrespective of your ethnic identity.⁵⁸

In the trilogy, Ropa is a member of the poor of Edinburgh. She lives in what she calls “His Majesty’s Slum Hermiston near the bypass on the south-western outskirts of Edinburgh” (OLMA: 36) where she has developed a sense of comradeship with members of the community, including the gangs who have claimed numerous back alleys of Edinburgh as their own, and an old man called Gary O’Donohue who is besotted with Ropa’s grandmother but does not know how to tell her. The slum used to be farmland but is now “a bomb site filled with caravans, trailers, refashioned shipping containers, tents, sheds and sheet-metal dwellings” (OLMA: 37). The members of this slum see themselves in relation to the rich of this dystopian Edinburgh, so they “look out for each other. More so than the council estate across the bypass” (37). Again, the disarticulation of a diasporic identity is apparent here, especially if one thinks of the council estates as the (imagined) locus of diasporic (working class) identities in Britain since the 70s and 80s.⁵⁹ In her relationship with members of the Society, who have varying degrees of fortune that place them high up in the social and professional hierarchy, Ropa’s identities also fluctuate between an intern, apprentice or a ghost-talker (a profession which is not considered as magic). Thus, in The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle we are told that Ropa’s status “seems to hover between an intern and an apprentice depending on the situation” (73). When there is work to be done, she is an apprentice, but when it comes to renumeration for that work, she is an intern. Her immigrant background is never mentioned, neither does it constitute something she has to stress or battle with (even mentally) in her daily interactions.

Ropa’s disarticulation of her grandmother’s memory of home comes out more clearly in her selective application of some of her grandmother’s teachings, not because she, like her grandmother, has an affective attachment to the home left behind, but because, like any useful piece of information, it is applicable to the situation at hand. Remembering, sometimes through rituals, the home left behind is certainly a key diasporic practice. In Our Lady of Mysterious Ailments, Callander accuses Ropa’s grandmother of failing to “impart [her] so-called chivanhu craft to Ropa – except for some of the basics” (191).⁶⁰ For that reason, Callander sees it as fit for Ropa’s little sister, Izwi, to be educated in proper Scottish magic at a proper Scottish school of magic. On her own part, Ropa thinks the Shona magic is lame and a waste of time in Edinburgh where scientific magic dominates and assures one of getting a proper job. She considers her ghost-talking as some freelance work she has to do to feed her grandmother and Izwi while waiting to get a proper job as soon as she finishes her internship. For Ropa, one “can’t go back to the ancestors and all that mythical stuff” (196). It is interesting to note that what her grandmother considers as her reality and upon which her diasporic identity is built is a mere myth for Ropa. Such views pit her against her grandmother who thinks that she is drifting away. We can only agree with Ropa’s grandmother if Ropa had been ‘originally’ tethered to Zimbabwe. As it is, she exists further away from her grandmother’s diasporic identity to the extent that it is impossible to think of her as drifting away from what she has never been part of. Looked at closely, Ropa’s utilisation of a Shona instrument and Shona songs sounds more like the appropriation of what is pragmatically useful for a particular situation than a performance of Zimbabwean diasporic identity/ies.

In fact, even though Ropa views herself as an Edinburgher, the appropriation of what is useful, regardless of where it originates from, is at the centre of how she navigates the world of scientific magic and her daily interactions. In her narration, Ropa borrows widely (except from the Shona world from which she borrows the mbira and songs). When she refers to Chris Robson and his coal as “Smaug guarding his treasure” (57) in The Library of the Dead, Ropa is referencing The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The Brounie, which is fed milk by an enslaved human called Wilson references the Brownie of Scottish folklore. In order to cast a spell, Ropa invokes Prometheus while her friend, Priya, invokes Helios. In all the novels in the trilogy, the Promethean spell is Ropa’s go-to spell. In order to cast the spell, Ropa incantates: “Spark of Prometheus from the eternal flame of Mount Olympus, I call upon thee to light this forge of mine” (144). As Ropa explains in The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, it is not really Prometheus who causes the spell to be effective, but the will of the magician. Prometheus is only invoked to channel the magician’s will. It is this aspect of magic that allows it to be blended with science. The Library of the Dead itself is a mish-mash of various artistic traditions, from Gaelic to Arabic, as if “different artists had a go at different periods, creating something more like sophisticated graffiti than classical art” (81). This creates something in which “there are no central points of reference” (81), which is the point. Edinburgh is thus a concrete location in which the story takes place and in which Ropa lives, but the reference points are wider and more varied than Edinburgh. It is therefore not imprudent to conclude that Ropa identifies more as an Edinburgher (because she is local to it) than Scottish, but borrows from a variety of cultures in her everyday and professional life. She is transcultural, which is symbolically represented in the circle of friends she has created. She is friends with Priya and Jomo, and associates with Kebede, Samarasinghe (the Magician Royale), Max Wu, Abdul, Qozmos and so on, who, though Edinburghers (except for Kebede and Qozmos who are Ethiopians and the Magician Royale who is English) could also be, even though it is not suggested in the trilogy, postdiasporic descendants of immigrants.

This brings me to the language of Ropa’s communication. Ropa does not use formal English; her language is predominantly drawn from Scots, but slangified in a way that, as the author says, “results in tension, something sonically pulling in different directions.” In order to express shock, Ropa would sometimes use “Yahweh!” or “Krishna!” In The Mystery at Dunvegan Castle, she uses “Guten appetit” (388) to point the middle finger at the Committee of Magicians before she announces her resignation. Her linguistic repertoire is wide and deployed indiscriminately and frenetically. Instead of falling back on something from the Shona world, as would a writer from Zimbabwe who is living abroad, Huchu creates a character whose appropriation of Shona cultural resources is only limited to the level of talking to ghosts.

7 Huchu’s Postdiasporic Vision

Finally, I want to focus on what Huchu is driving at in his speculative trilogy (which has become a pentalogy). In his essay on African Speculative Fiction, Gibson Ncube falls back on Wainana’s famous satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa,”⁶¹ to appreciate how African speculative fiction reimagines Africa and its future away from what he calls Western-centric cliches, or the “single story” which “obscures and obfuscates the diverse range of African experiences.”⁶² Latent in Ncube’s revisioning perspective is the treatment of Africa as a singular notion or entity. In literary studies, this essentialisation manifests in the naming of African Literature as a single category, as if all the literatures of the region carry a singular vision. We can only speak of the category of African Literature if we believe that nations and continents are distinct and discreet categories. It is this belief in distinctiveness that has given us the concept of diaspora. The assumption in Ncube’s category of African Speculative Fiction is that speculative fiction from the African continent is a homogenous body, which takes me to Taiye Selasi’s declaration: “African Literature doesn’t exist.”⁶³ Interestingly, when Huchu published The Hairdresser of Harare, he was predominantly referred to as a Zimbabwean writer. With the publication of The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician (a spy novel on the literary fiction side – perhaps reflecting Huchu’s genre-bending tendencies?) Huchu noticed a trend – he was starting to be predominantly referred to as a Zimbabwean-born writer residing in Edinburgh. With his latest Edinburgh Nights Series, Huchu is now typically referred to as the writer from Edinburgh, or a local writer (in Edinburgh press), or a Scottish writer or a Zimbabwean-born Scottish writer.⁶⁴ The indeterminacy of Huchu’s identity as a writer would perhaps apply to Ropa’s grandmother who, like Huchu, grew up in Zimbabwe and later moved to Scotland. They are both diasporic. But for Ropa, Scotland, in fact, Edinburgh, is all she knows, which is why she regards herself as an Edinburgher through and through. She does not yearn for a home left behind, something that Afrodiasporic literature seems to focus on. In that regard, she is postdiasporic.

However, this is not so simplistic and straightforward as it may sound. For instance, T.L. Huchu has found himself being regarded as a Zimbabwean/African writer and winning or being nominated for Africa-related awards for speculative fiction. Even though writers from Africa who create speculative fiction might be functioning individually, one gets the sense that there are intentional steps to bring these writers together to represent a movement or a collective vision, thus aligning with Ncube’s taxonomy of African Speculative Fiction. Going by Ncube’s analytical focus, Ropa’s use of the mbira, for instance, allows Huchu to “move beyond simply mimicking Western science fiction tropes, instead forging a unique identity rooted in the continent’s rich cultural heritage” and thereby “breathing new life into [the traditions] within a futuristic context” in which “the future of Africa is one filled with promise, innovation, and the indomitable spirit of a continent ready to reclaim its rightful place on the world stage.” Such a collective vision is already apparent, for instance, in bringing writers (from Africa) of speculative fiction together to write under a shared vision. The Nigerian magazine, Ominana, or the Nommo Awards for African Speculative Fiction make writers and their speculative works coalesce into something that can be taxonomized as African Speculative Fiction. Thus, even though African Speculative Fiction does not exist, it exists.

Additionally, it is telling that for Huchu to articulate a postdiasporic vision, and because of the dominance of ‘diaspora’ as an epistemological framework and signifier, he had to get rid of the world as we know it. It took an apocalypse for Huchu to build a world in which the postdiasporic vision is less tenuously achievable. While Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate and the Mathematician articulates the same vision in a story in which the world is as we currently know it, Chenai is still recognizable as the daughter of a Zimbabwean migrant. In other words, she has not moved so far away from Zimbabwe as Ropa has, because there is still a Zimbabwean community which she comes into contact with and that is the reality for Zimbabwean diasporans. In the post-apocalyptic world, such a reality does not exist. The community that is available for Ropa and her grandmother and sister is either that of fellow inhabitants of the trailer park, or her grandmother’s ex-colleagues and former heartthrobs in the Scottish Magicians’ world. Ropa’s identity is therefore a product of these interactions.

8 Conclusion

I want to conclude this essay by restating the link between African Speculative Fiction and the postdiaspora. The basic assumption of postdiaspora is that the nation is disarticulated by the postdiasporic subject who has become so advanced in their identities that it is difficult to think of them in terms of country of origin. Yet, as the discussion progressed, it became clear that postdiaspora does not necessarily mean the atrophying of diasporic identity. I am proposing a scenario which is not based on a simplistic movement from Homeland to Diaspora to Postdiaspora but an existence of all of these, entangled. Thus, while Huchu uses Ropa in the Edinburgh Nights trilogy to communicate a postdiasporic vision, it is possible to read her ability to talk to ghosts (she is the only one who does that, together with her grandmother) to represent a unique scenario of Africa in Europe or Zimbabwe in Edinburgh. One cannot be postdiasporic without the existence of the diaspora. As we listen to Ropa, at the back of our minds is the knowledge that she is from Zimbabwe and that this link to Zimbabwe is an indelible aspect of her ghost-talking craft. Just as Huchu, the Scottish writer, is also a Zimbabwean writer, African writer, or Zimbabwean writer residing in Scotland (and this is not a spectrum but an entangled mass), Ropa is postdiasporic because of the existence of the diaspora. The importance of the postdiaspora, though, is in its ability to accommodate Ropa for whom an immigrant or diasporic identity is not enough. Moreover, if we are to, transculturally speaking, look at human experiences as entanglements, then the postdiaspora is part of this entanglement and allows us to develop new ways of understanding the experiences of those who move or have moved.