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Crossing Borders: Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2016.0005

1080-6512

Justine McConnell,

Joseph Conrad and Literature

Crossing BordersBernardine Evaristo's The Emperor's Babe Justine McConnell (bio) I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here. —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness At the turn of the third century CE, Rome was ruled by the emperor Septimius Severus; as a consequence, so too was a large part of Britain. Of Libyan origin, Severus's African accent was cause for remark in antiquity, but his African roots were no impediment to him rising right to the pinnacle of the imperial ranks (Scriptores Historiae Augustae 19.9; Evaristo 144). In the modern era, it can surprise us that ancient Rome was unhindered by racial prejudice, though it should not.1 Many have argued—the acclaimed Howard University Professor of Classics, Frank M. Snowden, Jr. most conclusively—that responses to "race" configured differently in the ancient world. What Snowden demonstrates, first in Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience and then in Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks, is that while the ancient Greeks and Romans noticed skin color and differing physical features, they did not attach prejudicial attitudes to them.2 Nor was it only darker-skinned peoples that excited their attention: the pale skin and red hair of the Gauls garner just as much comment as the dark skin of peoples from the area that they referred to as Ethiopia (but which covered a far larger and less-defined area than modern Ethiopia). This is notwithstanding the fact that the ancient Greeks and Romans did associate darkness with death and the underworld, and sometimes with ominous portents; nevertheless, there is no evidence that this black-white binary crossed over into people's thinking about skin color. This article will explore Bernardine Evaristo's 2001 verse-novel, The Emperor's Babe, set in London at the time of Severus's reign. Examining the work's transnational themes, I will suggest that these sit alongside a transhistorical dimension that merges antiquity with modernity in order to reflect not only on British society under the Roman empire, but also on British society in the twenty-first century. Evaristo's novel crosses borders of three types: temporal, spatial, and generic. She is not alone in this maneuver: other contemporary literary figures such as Derek Walcott and Kate Tempest perform a similar kind of border-crossing, and as with Evaristo, each has done so by engaging with the myths, literature, and history of ancient Greece and Rome, as I will discuss. Such a mode of creativity and intertextual engagement brings ideas of the transhistorical to the fore: Evaristo's novel is, outwardly, set in the third century CE, but the Londinium she depicts has clear twenty-first-century features, seen most prominently in the use of language by the novel's protagonist, Zuleika, [End Page 103] as well as in the way the poem reflects on contemporary Britain. Alongside this crossing of temporal boundaries is a crossing of spatial ones. Embodied not only in the Libyan-born Roman emperor, Severus, but in the central character Zuleika, the "emperor's babe" of the title, who is the daughter of Sudanese immigrants to ancient Londinium. Depicting an experience of the African diaspora in which London is the place of settlement, Evaristo's story of diaspora is focused on Britain. However, continental Europe has an important place in this tale too, not merely as a result of the Roman occupation of Britain, but also in literary terms: as I will argue, the most revealing predecessors to Evaristo's work can be found in the Homeric and Virgilian epics of classical antiquity. Of Nigerian and English parentage, Evaristo is frequently categorized as a "black British" or a "postcolonial" writer, despite her own hesitation about such designations (Niven 18–19; Hooper 13–14). John McLeod, in his short article "Some Problems with 'British' in a 'Black British Canon,'" is surely right to identify that "the concept of transnationality is useful precisely because it emphasises the continuity of national formations while bearing witness to the crossing of their borders" (58). This is very much in evidence in The Emperor's Babe, which is as concerned with the experience of migration...