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Manthia Diawara is a professor of comparative literature and director of the Institute of Afro-American Affairs at New York University as well as a prominent filmmaker and author. He has studied and written extensively on the issues of African immigration, his own experiences in Africa, France, and the United States, and the immigrant's search for identity. The Journal of International Affairs spoke with Diawara on 13 February 2004 in his NYU office.
JIA: In both We Won't Budge and In Search of Africa, you return to Africa to find long-lost friends and a past that's fraught with contradictions. Why do you keep going back to Africa-in your travels, in your films, in your writings?
Manthia Diawara: I think actually that's a very important question for at least two reasons. One, I actually can't help but keep going back to Africa, in spite of everything that I say, because going back to Africa is like going back to, pardon the sexist term, a mother's breast, in a way. It's like going on a pilgrimage, it's like I'm renewing myself, it's like re-testing myself, it's like trying to figure out if I'm real-because that's one of the things that I said in In Search of Africa. Sometimes I walk down the street in this country and I don't feel like I have a history. I don't feel like I exist. My history is always buried in the dustbin, in the trash. My leaders are called dictators or they're called tribalists. So the need to redo that history makes me keep going back.
And then finding my childhood friends-I'm a very nostalgic and romantic person. My friends remind me that the world has changed. They cannot stay the way I left them, they have moved on and I have moved on. So that metaphorically is a message to the whole West. The West wants Africa to stay primitive just as I want my friends to remain as they were when we were children. This could go back to African-American relations with Africa. It could also go back to the whole 20th century art-modernism and its relation to primitivism. That's really the challenge I've been working out in returning to Africa, whether it's love, hate, whether it's modernity against...