Displaced Women : Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe [1 ed.] 9781443857543, 9781443855280

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Displaced Women

Displaced Women: Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe

Edited by

Lucia Aiello, Joy Charnley and Mariangela Palladino

Displaced Women: Multilingual Narratives of Migration in Europe, Edited by Lucia Aiello, Joy Charnley and Mariangela Palladino This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Lucia Aiello, Joy Charnley, Mariangela Palladino and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5528-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5528-0

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Foreword .................................................................................................... ix Dialogue and Otherness Textuality of Maps, Photographs and Images: Visual Identity in Slavenka Drakuliü’s Frida’s Bed ............................................................. 3 Mirna Šoliü Narratives of Resistance: Listening to Women Seeking Asylum in the United Kingdom............................................................................... 27 Kate Smith Narrating Identity in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim Patriarca ....................... 45 H. Rosi Song Intercultural Mediations Towards the Literature of Transcultural Idioms: Ewa/Eva Stachniak and Lisa Appignanesi ................................................................................ 61 Elwira M. Grossman I, Christine, an Italian Woman .................................................................. 71 Thérèse Moreau Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators: Therese Albertine Luise Von Jakob-Robinson and Wilhelmina Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü ....... 91 Juliana Joviþiü Memory, Trauma, Testimony In The Land of the Perpetrators: Krystyna ĩywulska’s Holocaust Memoir and Her Migration from Poland to West Germany.................... 117 Peter Davies

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Table of Contents

Displaced Knowledge: The Borders of Language in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below ............................................................................................ 133 Charlotte Latham Migration and Social Issues Visiting French Internees in Switzerland during the First World War: Women in the Construction of National States (1915-1918) ................... 149 Stéphanie Leu Climate Variability and Change: Migration and the Changing Concepts of Identity and Home in the Poetry of European Women ........................ 163 Rachel E. McCarthy The Writer’s Perspective Writing in Two Languages: An Existential Challenge ............................ 177 Silvia Ricci Lempen Narratives of Solidarity Displaced Women: Round Table Discussion .......................................... 185 Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 205

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many people helped the conference on which this volume is based to be a success and we would like to extend our thanks to them all: the Glasgow Women’s Library (particularly Laura Dolan and Adele Patrick) for hosting the event, Glasgow City Council (especially Laura Lambert) for providing funding and receiving delegates at the City Chambers, Kathryn Pender for allowing us to use her artwork for publicity materials, the group of Yiddish students, under the guidance of Heather Valencia, who put together a small exhibition of Yiddish books from the Mitchell Library to coincide with the conference and last but not least, all those who attended, asked questions or gave (and subsequently wrote up) papers. Thank you, grazie, merci.

FOREWORD

The phenomenon of multilingualism has come under scrutiny in the last decade and has attracted the attention of academics as well as that of cultural and political institutions.1 Generally, scholars have approached multilingualism as a sort of aftereffect of postcolonialism and globalisation, while in the ongoing process of European unification and expansion it is framed as the desirable target in a multi-ethnic and multicultural vision of Europe. However, rather than being a point of arrival, involving interaction and conflict between distinct and well-defined national identities, it can be argued that multilingualism is in fact a constitutive element of European identity, an essential though often overlooked feature of European cultural roots. This volume aims precisely to question the assumption that multilingualism and migration narratives should be defined against monolingual ‘national’ narratives and to challenge the idea of Europe being built on consolidated nation states. The essays which appear here mostly originate from the international conference organised by the editors which took place at the Glasgow Women’s Library in March 2012. Interdisciplinary and international, the conference, like this edited volume, brought together specialists working in a range of fields and provided an opportunity for interaction between historians, sociologists, scientists and literary specialists, as well as between theoreticians and practitioners, academics and non-academics. Language, multilingual narratives and interaction between cultures and languages were key themes of the conference. The spread of topics, approaches and disciplines is extensive: largely theoretical contributions (McCarthy) sit alongside others that combine theory and practice (Smith), whilst the voices of practitioners who work at the grassroots with migrant women (round table discussion) are joined by the reflections of a bilingual writer living between two languages and three cultures (Ricci Lempen). The historical and geographical range is equally broad, from the fifteenth century (Moreau) to twentieth and twenty-first century writers (Latham,

1

For example Olga Anokhina (ed.). Multilinguisme et créativité littéraire (Louvainla-Neuve: Harmattan/Academia, 2012) and Adrian Blackledge and Angela Creese (eds), Multilingualism: A Critical Perspective (London: Continuum, 2010).

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Song) and from Central Europe (Davies, Grossman, Joviþiü, Šoliü) to Switzerland (Leu). In spite of the differences, all the papers presented here transcend the idea of ‘national identity’ as an epic heritage or destiny, both linguistic and literary, and suggest a much more fluid definition of citizenship. Working from this perspective and within this general framework, both the editors and the contributors of this volume seek to encourage a broader discussion on women’s narratives of displacement that compels us to rethink the notions of ‘mother tongue’ and ‘native speaker’ and raises philosophical questions about linguistic ownership, in other words, whether a language is owned, appropriated, imposed or rejected. Recent scholarship has already moved in this direction and many are now highlighting the role of multilingual women as cultural mediators in post-Enlightenment Europe and challenging the notion of a ‘Europe of Nations’.2. From a gender perspective, the question of linguistic ownership is even more significant, in that it could be argued that women’s encounter with language (especially literary language) is always characterised by estrangement and dislocation. Paradoxically, women’s experiences of estranged intimacy with the language that they appropriate become a metaphor for that portion of European cultural identity that from its very origin is multilingual and multicultural. Thus, women’s geographical and linguistic displacement can be seen as a paradigm of a modus operandi of marginalised subjectivities compelled, as it were, to translate, and therefore to constantly negotiate the boundaries of their linguistic, social and cultural experience. Out of this displacement, emerge new conceptions of identity, culture and heritage, which are more in tune with the demands of a twenty-first-century vision of citizenship. Lucia Aiello Joy Charnley Mariangela Palladino December 2013

2

For example Agnese Fidecaro, Henriette Partzsch, Suzan van Dijk, Valérie Cossy (eds), Femmes écrivains à la croisée des langues, 1700-2000/Women Writers at the Crossroads of Languages, 1700-2000 (Geneva: Metis Presses, 2009).

DIALOGUE AND OTHERNESS

TEXTUALITY OF MAPS, PHOTOGRAPHS AND IMAGES: VISUAL IDENTITY IN SLAVENKA DRAKULIû’S FRIDA’S BED1 MIRNA ŠOLIû

In this essay I argue that one of the dominant narrative tendencies in contemporary Croatian women’s writing is a visual articulation of female identity. Visuality here is understood as a new intrinsic textual quality resulting from the transposition of visual into textual medium, which ‘enhances the text’s literariness more thoroughly than more traditional, narrative ways of reading,’2 and ‘shapes the verbal features of the work of art’.3 Visuality also represents ‘a register of visibility’ which ‘involves some alternative representational practices such as the pictorial, as a means of making good, of “supplementing” the incapacity of language to make its referents visible,’4 and transforms traditional narratives into ‘interfaces’ which ‘mobilize visual and textual regimes’.5 The intermedial techniques used in textual construction of visual identity for instance include pictorial language and ekphrasis, and the narration of one’s own life as a flow of textual references to visual objects and visual arts, such as photographs, images and maps. 1

Research undertaken for this article was generously supported by a research grant awarded by The Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland and CZ 1.07/2.3.00/30.0004. 2 Ernst van Alphen, ‘Reading Visually’, Style, 22, 2 (1998), 219-29 (p. 219). 3 Jan MukaĜovský, ‘Dialectic Contradictions in Modern Art’, in Structure, Sign and Function: Selected Essays by Jan MukaĜovský, ed. and trans. by John Burbank and Peter Steiner (New Haven: Yale UP, 1978), pp. 148-49. 4 Alexander Gelley, Narrative Crossings: Theory and Pragmatics of Prose Fiction (New Haven: John Hopkins UP, 1987), p. 5. 5 Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, ‘Introduction: Mapping Women SelfRepresentation as Visual/Textual Interfaces’, in Interfaces: Women, Autobiography, Image, Performance, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2005, c2002), p. 2.

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I argue that the reason for using visual techniques in construction of female identity is the power of visual self-recognition in encounters with oneself and others. The use of visual techniques in the narrative text challenges the idea, intrinsic to Western aesthetics, of the surveyed female who ‘turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision – a sight,’6 by offering narratives whereby the female characters become surveyors exploring themselves by looking for their selfidentification in their own art, as well as the visual representations and art of others. As we see in Irena Vrkljan’s novel Marina, ili o biografiji (1986) [Marina, or About Biography, 1991], visual recognition is stronger and more ‘truthful’ than factography, because it is ‘raw’ and unspoiled by facts and stories. Facts are something we learn from the stories of others, and we use them to fill in our own gaps, but images are the mirrors of selfidentification: ‘Marininu fotografiju kada je još bila dijete sad gledam kao svoju. Klica za bilo kakav opis leži više u toj odluci nego u poznavanju þinjenica’7 [‘I now look at the photograph of Marina [Tsvetaeva] as a child as though it were my own. The germ of any kind of description lies more in that decision than in knowledge of facts’].8 While in Vrkljan’s narrative the female narrator reconstructs her life as a stream of intertextual and intermedial references to Marina Tsvetaeva, especially the Russian poet’s letters and photographs, she becomes aware that her narrative body consists of fragments of others’ narrative bodies. The parallel journey between the narrator’s own and Tsvetaeva’s life expands, to include elements of artistic articulation of many other visual auto/biographies. These range from German-Jewish artist Charlotte Solomon’s portrait of young girls, to Salvador Dali’s Surrealist depictions of time and Paul Klee’s ‘Carpet of Memory’.

6

John Berger, Ways of Seeing (British Broadcasting Corporation: Penguin Books, 2008, c1972), p. 41. The idea of the surveyed female has been discussed across genres and art. See for instance Images of Women in Fiction. Feminist Perspectives, ed. by Susan Koppelman Cornillon (Bowling Green: Bowling Green Popular University Press, 1972); Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema’, in Screen, 3 (1975), 6-18; Annette Kuhn, Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982); Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985); The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture, ed. by Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment (London: The Women’s Press Ltd, 1988). 7 Irena Vrkljan, Marina, ili o biografiji (Zagreb: Grafiþki zavod Hrvatske, 1986). 8 Irena Vrkljan, Marina, or About Biography, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (Zagreb: Durieux: The Bridge, c1991), p. 167.

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An inclusion of visual artefacts, such as photographs and images, results in a subversive approach to history and geography, and especially one’s own past. With the fictional possibilities originating in employment of visual means, contemporary Croatian women’s prose has introduced a crucial new approach in comparison with the representation of gender and exile in the late nineteenth- and the twentieth-century Croatian literary canon. It has subverted its deeply ingrained tradition of masculine-oriented discourse of exile-borne nostalgia for the homeland as the place of one’s own, even if the exiled individual considered himself an outcast from his own society. As Renata Jambrešiü-Kirin argues, the most important feature of women’s writing of the 1980s onwards is its being ‘protupriþa tradicionalne muške ‘egzilantske hagiografije’ koja je isticala dvostruku stigma ‘odmetnutog’ intelektualca u tuÿini – njegovu (po)ratnu trauma politiþkog gubitnika i njegovu napornu borbu za održavanje ‘kulturne vidljivosti’ u stranom svijetu’ [‘the anti-story of traditional masculine “exilic hagiography,” which emphasised a double stigma of an outcast intellectual abroad – his (post)war trauma of a political loser and his difficult fight for preservation of “cultural visibility” in a foreign world’].9 Women’s writing discourse has shifted construction and interpretation of identity towards ‘preispitivanja osobnih i kolektivnih odrednica vlastitog identiteta, odnosno intelektualnog angažmana i umjetniþkog stvaranja’ [‘examination of personal and collective traits of one’s own identity, intellectual engagement and artistic production’].10 Visual artefacts become mirrors in which one’s memory is a reflection of others’ memory, and one’s own personal geography a representation of otherness. They link the re-construction of individual memory to the re-construction of one’s own space as a prerequisite of artistic creation and existence, and act as a strategy of creating ‘unhomed geographies’, ‘a possibility of redefining issues of location away from concrete coercions of belonging’.11 The female identities established in this way represent themselves as fluid and hybrid structures, in a dialogue with themselves and others, in a gap between the past, loosely and unreliably mediated through the prism of memory, and the present moment. They become such mainly through exploration of links with visuality and the visual arts. What visuality offers to these narratives of displacement that the use of the written word cannot deliver is an essential role of visual experience in construction, articulation 9

Renata Jambrešiü-Kirin, ‘Za književnicu je pisanje dom: o suvremenoj hrvatskoj ženskoj književnosti u i o egzilu’, Novi izraz, 8 (2000), 3-20 (p. 4). 10 Jambrešiü-Kirin, ‘Za književnicu je pisanje dom’, 4. 11 Irit Rogoff, Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 4.

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and production of memory, as the visual discourse represents ‘osnovna strategija pamüenja-spreþavanja zaborava i sjeüanja dozivanja iz zaborava’ [‘the essential strategy of remembering – prevention of oblivion and recovering the memory from oblivion’].12 The visual artefacts are used as a response to a traumatic experience, so that the visualising act offers hope that the broken world, especially the link between the past and the present, may be healed and re-created. The fictionalising, and thus semantically liberating powers of the visual (especially use of artistic material) reinforce memory and remembering as a confirmation and a challenge of the condition of displacement. It also re-constitutes one’s space in the world, as ‘the finding of absent images heals what has been destroyed: the art of memoria restores a shape to the mutilated victims and makes them recognizable by establishing their place or seat in life’.13 Additionally, the inclusion of the visual into the textual explores a simultaneous existence of the past in the present moment which is crucial for coherence of identity and understanding of trauma, as ‘the continuing spiritual power of an image lives in the interplay between what it reminds us of – what it brings to mind – and our own continuing actions in the present’.14 Finally, the use of the visual defamiliarises and subverts the visual genre itself as well as the viewer’s (or in this case reader’s) expectation of the verisimilitude of the facts it represents: ‘it works with and recontextualizes well-known imagery in order to destabilize the viewer’s ordinary perception’.15 In this way, the use of these artefacts opens up a new perspective on contemporary Croatian women’s prose, which could be generally characterised as a literature of displacement. During the last three decades, by shifting the focus on individual suffering, this literature has challenged and subverted the official interpretations of recent history, in particular the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina at the beginning of the 1990s, and has demonstrated how the employment of visual means, as an artistic subversion of official media representations and manipulations of images of the wars and suffering, has played an essential role in the construction of fragmented, exiled and estranged identities. 12

Aleksandar Mijatoviü, ‘Diskurz fotografije u romanu Dubravke Ugrešiü Muzej bezuvjetne predaje’, Fluminensia 15, 2 (2003), 52. 13 Renate Lachmann, Memory and Literature: Intertextuality in Russian Modernism, trans. by Roy Sellars and Anthony Wall (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, c1997), p. 6. 14 Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes toward a Politics of Location’, in Blood, Bread and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), p. 227. 15 Lutz Peter Koepnick, ‘Photographs and Memories’, South Central Review, 21, 1 (2004), 94-129 (p. 95).

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I will analyse the tendency towards the visual creation of identity in contemporary Croatian women’s prose through the example of Slavenka Drakuliü’s recent novel Frida, ili o bol (2007)16 [Frida’s Bed, 2008].17 Drakuliü’s18 fictionalised biography of Frida Kahlo is based on interpretation of the painter’s selected self-portraits and should not be taken as yet another work inspired by a renewed popularity of the painter, who experienced a rapid and powerful transformation from oblivion to a cultural icon. Instead, it should be discussed within the writer’s 16 Slavenka Drakuliü, Frida, ili o boli (Zagreb: Profil, 2008). Further references will be given in the text in brackets as FB HR (HR meaning ‘Croatian’ followed by page number, e.g. FB HR 43). 17 Slavenka Drakuliü, Frida’s Bed, trans. by Christina P. Zoriü (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). Further references will be given in the text in brackets as FB EN (EN meaning ‘English’ followed by page number, e.g. FB EN 43). 18 Slavenka Drakuliü is a prominent Croatian writer of both fiction and non-fiction and one of the most extensively translated. She also works as a journalist and currently lives in Sweden. Her novels include Hologrami straha (1987) [Holograms of Fear, 1992], Mramorna koža (1989) [Marble Skin, 1993], Božanska glad (1995) [The Taste of a Man, 1997], Kao da me nema (1999) [As If I Am Not There, 2000], Frida, ili o boli (2007) [Frida’s Bed, 2008], Optužena (2012) [‘Accused’] and focus in particular on the themes of the female body, matrimonial relationships and violence. Her non-fiction opus is mainly concerned with the recent social history and wars in former Yugoslavia, especially nationalism and violence against women. They include Smrtni grijesi feminizma (1984) [The Deadly Sins of Feminism], How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992) [Kako smo preživjeli komunizam i þak se smijali, 1997], The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of the War (1993) [The Balkan Express, 2012], Cafe Europa: Life After Communism (1996), ‘Oni ne bi ni mrava zgazili:’ ratni zloþinci na sudu u Hagu (2003) [They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague, 2004], A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (2011). She regularly contributes to different newspapers and magazines such as The Nation, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Guardian. She left Croatia for Sweden after receiving threats following the media campaign in 1992 against her and four other prominent female writers and intellectuals (known as ‘The Witches’) for their political and intellectual stands towards violence against women in the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. For an analysis of her work in the context of contemporary Croatian literature see for instance Andrea Zlatar, ‘Oblici autobiografskoga pripovijedanja u suvremenoj hrvatskoj književnosti’ in Autobiografija u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Matica hrvatska, 1999), pp. 99-122; and Andrea Zlatar, ‘Tijelo: Modus komunikacije’ in Tekst, tijelo, trauma: ogledi o suvremenoj ženskoj književnosti (Zagreb: Naklada Ljevak, 2004), pp. 100-18. The extensive list of translations of Slavenka Drakuliü’s work as well as scholarly and non-academic publications and texts about her work are listed on her personal website http://slavenkadrakulic.com/.

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understanding of displacement as an internal condition, which stems from her experience of exile, violence, disability, isolation and pain, and as such it should stimulate enquiry about the reasons for establishing a narrative relationship with the culturally and geographically remote painter and her artistic expression. While the ‘otherness’ in many contemporary women writers’ narratives refers to the construction of one’s own memory as a simultaneous presence of memory of others, and defines exile as a condition of an obvious physical, geographical and cultural displacement,19 in Frida’s Bed, the space of exile becomes the space of the internal displacement as one’s artistic self at the same time poses as ‘the other’:

19

For instance, in Dubravka Ugrešiü’s Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (1998) [The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1998], the reconstruction of one’s own story is projected towards the creation of an alternative topography of Berlin, consisting of hidden and parallel micro-histories. While trying to make sense of her exilic experience, the female narrator questions her own memory against the memory of others, scattered in forgotten artefacts of everyday life and their representation in visual arts. These range from shabby family photographs shared by immigrants on fleamarkets, as ‘depersonalized signifiers of a distant place and a bygone era’ in the shadow of the Wall (Marianne Hirsch, Family Frame: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge Mass; London: Harvard University Press 1997), p. xi), to exhibition catalogues and visual performances, such as the work of Shimon Attie and Richard Wentworth. The narrative also includes a significant presence of metadiscourse on photography in creation of memory and identity (Mijatoviü, ‘Diskurz fotografije’). The journey through visual representations results in a return to the narrator’s own family album, which, as she realises, is a result of censorship, imposed by selective and authorial principles of nostalgia. Daša Drndiü’s description of a relationship between the female narrators and urban spaces, individual and collective histories, is also accomplished through photographs and photographic lenses, constructing different spatial-temporal relationships in the native town of Rijeka and exilic spaces of Central European cities in Leica Format (2005) and Doppelgänger (2002), as well as Canadian Toronto in Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze ili Umiranje u Torontu (1997) [The Black Madonna]. Both writers treat urban spaces as fictionalised creations of exiles and newcomers who infuse them with their trauma of displacement and their previous topographies, inhabit them as ‘prostori-hibridi napuštenog i ponovno pronaÿenog svijeta’ [‘spaces-hybrids of an abandoned and newly-found world’] (Jasmina Lukiü, ‘Imaginarne geografije egzila: Berlin i Rijeka kao fikcionalni toponimi u prozi Dubravke Ugrešiü i Daše Drndiü’, in ýovjek, prostor, vrijeme: književnoantropološke studije iz hrvatske književnosti, ed. by Živa Benþiü and Dunja Fališevac (Zagreb: Disput 2006), p. 464) and employ their own intimate archives, visual memory and invisible gaze in revision of their histories and urban identities.

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this time it is one’s own art that becomes a mirror of self-reflection, and the relationship with one’s own body the ground of artistic exploration. In the novel, this particular difference stems from the condition of permanent physical pain. As has already been argued,20 the history of Kahlo’s visual arts could be read alongside her medical history and disability caused by inherited spina bifida, polio contracted in childhood, and injuries resulting from a traffic accident. In the narrative, Kahlo’s paintings represent a visual attempt to mend a broken relationship between words and a wounded, estranged body. In other words, they articulate, mediate but also authenticate internal displacement caused by illness, which originates in the inability of words to depict and make sense of pain. They also explore the extent to which it is possible to come to terms with alienation from the body caused by its inability to perform and its grotesque appearance. The body in the narrative exists as an estranged object and an instrument of different invasive medical but also artistic interventions: ‘nikada, osim u najranijem djetinjstvu, odnos prema tijelu za nju nije bio jednostavan. Njeno je tijelo bilo bolni teret i objekt medicinskih intervencija. Zatim objekt njenog slikarstva. Instrument taštine. Instrument užitka, takoÿer, ali ponajprije objekt i instrument’ (FB HR 44) [‘Except for her earliest childhood, her relationship with her body had never been simple. Her body was a painful burden, an object of medication. And later an object of art. An instrument of vanity. And of pleasure, as well – but above all, it was an object and an instrument’] (FB EN 43-44). As a medical object, the body is encased, or rather ‘framed’21 in order to improve, and consequently visually conceal, the painter’s physical condition. Different medical corsets become the real physical confinements which keep her alive and in a physical unity: ‘samo u posljednje tri godine isprobala je dvadeset i osam razliþitih korzeta od gipsa, plastike, željeza i kože. Korzet je bio kavez – što nikako nije metafora – stvarni kavez napravljen posebno za njezino tijelo. Bez njega bi se raspala, meso bi se opustilo, a kosti razišle, ne bi mogla sjediti, kamoli stajati’ (FB HR 91) [‘in the last three years alone she had tried twenty20

Sarah M. Lowe, ‘Essay’, in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005); Mimi Yang, ‘Pain and Painting: Frida Kahlo’s Autobiography’, Autobiographic Studies, 12, 1 (1998), 121-33; Clara Orban, ‘Bruised Words, Wounded Images in Frida Kahlo’, in Text and Visuality: Word & Image Interactions, 3, ed. by Martin Heusser et al. (Amsterdam; Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999); Carlos Fuentes, ‘Introduction’, in The Diary of Frida Kahlo, pp. 729. 21 I use the notion of frame intentionally in order to stress the connection between the theme of the body in the novel and its visual representations.

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eight different kinds of corsets: plaster, plastic, iron, leather. The corset was a cage, and this was no metaphor, a cage constructed especially for her body. Without it her body would collapse, the flesh would sag and the bones scatter, she would not be able to sit, let alone stand’] (FB EN 9596). Orthopaedic support overcomes its function of physical support and becomes a way of life, a rigid self-control one needs in order to function and survive: ‘stroga pravila, ograniþenja koja je sama sebi nametnuo, poput korzeta, pomislila je. Inaþe bi mu se život urušio poput napuklog kamenog stupa’ (FB HR 91) [‘strict rules, restrictions she imposed on herself – like a corset, she thought. Otherwise, her life would have collapsed like a broken column’] (FB EN 96). At the same time canvasses become metaphorical and artistic prostheses of her wounded body, as they are small, and adaptable to her needs: ‘Njene su slike bile malih dimezija kako bi stale na štafelaj na krevetu. Ili na onaj, nešto veüi, u studiju’. (FB HR 98) [‘Her canvasses were small so that they could fit on her lap-easel or on the slightly bigger easel in the studio’] (FB EN 104). However, the visual depiction of the body in pain and internal displacement in Frida’s Bed also represents a continuation of Drakuliü’s narrative poetics organised around the figures of visual artists and visual arts. She explores visuality in representation of the female body, either in self-reflection or in relation to other bodies. For instance, in Mramorna koža (1989) [Marble Skin, 1993],22 the female sculptor, who is at the same time the first-person narrator, is trying to recover a broken relationship with her mother by carving the memory of the maternal body into marble, a porous material whose surface, as the narrator observes, changes with time. In Frida’s Bed, the relationship between the verbal and the visual is obvious but far more complex if the intermedial nature of Kahlo’s art, as well as the narrator’s approach to it, is taken into consideration. Many of Kahlo’s canvasses are accompanied by short verbal supplements, drawing from the confessional tradition of votive images, typical of their small format and inserted inscriptions. They enter into a dynamic semantic relationship with paintings, so that the combination of visual and verbal in her work serves to ‘represent and to bridge the gap in her broken body; to make whole what is divided’.23 A similar structure could also be found in Kahlo’s diaries, whereby sketches and written entries overlap and merge into powerful visual-textual structures.24 Away from the public gaze and 22 Slavenka Drakuliü, Marble Skin, trans. by Greg Mosse (London: Hutchinson, 1993). 23 Orban, ‘Bruised Words: Wounded Images in Frida Kahlo’, p. 163. 24 The diary of Frida Kahlo was published as The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2005).

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scrutiny to which exhibited canvasses are exposed, the intimate diary entries represent a revelation from ‘an uncanny restraint evident in Kahlo’s self-portraits,’ and offer ‘the immediacy of first-hand sensations transcribed and recorded, a disclosure lacking in her paintings’.25 Drakuliü intertextually responds to the visual-textual nature of Kahlo’s art by creating a complex narrative structure, constructed as a predominantly third-person narration with inclusions of the first-person narrator. The third-person narrator here acts as a teller of a biographical narrative, who unfolds and comments on the facts of the painter’s life – her childhood, illness, marriage and death, all from the fictionalising angle given by the fact that instead of biographical chronology the events are narrated from the final moments of Frida’s life. However, not only the reversed chronology but also the inclusion of the first-person narration additionally fictionalises and subverts the biographical genre, as it upholds and authenticates the third-person narrator as a witness of the painter’s own trauma and pain, which occurs as she speaks directly from inside her wounded body. Here the third-person narrator becomes a mediator between the experience of the painter’s pain, somebody who takes narrative responsibility for that pain, and the audience, in this case readers, and, as we are talking about visuality, viewers. Hence the third-person narrator could be seen in this narrative as ‘an appointed witness,’ who verbally transmits somebody else’s trauma, whose ‘appointment to bear witness is, paradoxically enough, an appointment to transgress the confines of that isolated stance, to speak for other and to others [...]’.26 Additionally, the narration of pain helps recognition of the condition of the internal displacement as ‘witnessing to pain helps to reframe its character by providing it with a different structure of interlocution within which it

25

Lowe, ‘Essay’, p. 26. Shoshana Felman, ‘Education and Crisis: Or the Vicissitudes of Teaching’ in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York; London: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. See also Alison Lewis’ article on similar strategies used in articulation of intersubjectivity in the context of East German women’s writing since the late 1960s, discussing the ‘life-saving and sustaining alliance’ in this type of narrative strategy. While accessing another female artist through narrative interpretation of her work, the author effectively ‘authorizes another female subject to speak, act, travel, or simply suffer on her behalf’ (Alison Lewis, ‘Foiling the Censor: Reading and Transference as Feminist Strategies in the Works of Christa Wolf, Irmtraud Morgner, and Christa Moog’, The German Quarterly, 66, 3 (1993), 372-86 (p. 372). 26

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might be expressed and acknowledged’.27 As such the third- and the firstperson narration are interlocked and inseparable from one another, the third-person narrator lends her voice to the painter and transmits hers as an authentication of witnessing. However, the failure of the appointment to bear witness, perhaps resulting from an overwhelming solitude of the endof-life experience, happens at the very end of the narrative. The last moments of Frida’s life preceding her suicide are narrated in the first person, and they represent lyrical meditations about love, life and death, as well as addressing people Frida wished to see before death, especially her sister, with whom she often had a troubled relationship, but who was nevertheless her main caregiver and vital support. In addition to intimate recollections of the past and facing oneself through addressing other people, the first-person narration is also used for meditation on the future that the main character clearly sees happening in front of her: ‘Gdje si sada, Kity? Za sat-dva uüi üeš u sobu i naüi na krevetu moje tijelo koje se hladi. Znam da üeš najprije u nevjerici dodirnuti moje lice jer smrt je, zaþudo, uvijek neoþekivana, þak i kad je to samo pitanje dana ili sati’ (FB HR 146). [‘Where are you now, Kity? Soon, you will walk into the room and find my body in bed, turning cold. The first thing you will do, I know, is touch my face in disbelief, because, strangely enough, death always comes unexpectedly, even when it is a matter of mere days or hours’] (FB EN 158). In this way the first-person narrator, whose voice was verbally mediated by the third-person, now not only takes over the possibility for witnessing, but also gains control over the last life encounters and her own death. However, the narrative mediation of the disabled painter’s voice should also be contextualised within the social and aesthetic context of the writer’s work, as the ‘appointment to witnessing’ carries strong political connotations. Ato Quayson refers to the proceedings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in order to argue that ‘the shift from a non-sufferer of pain to that of a witness of pain is fundamentally one of empathetic repositioning. Empathy is to be seen not only in interpersonal relations; it is also evidenced in entire public apparatuses of witnessing’.28 Similarly, the exchange between the third- and the firstperson narrator in Frida’s Bed recalls not only the strategies used in Drakuliü’s fiction concerning artists and visual arts, but also the narrative strategies in her writings about war-related violence against women as yet another form of displacement. The use of the same narrative strategies in 27

Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness. Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), p. 81. Italics are in the text. 28 Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, p. 80.

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two very different narratives of suffering points to the writer’s inherent interest in writing and arts as ways of coming to terms with trauma and understanding the complex origins of desire to inflict pain. This is done through exploration of the importance of the gaze, the visual nature of memory as ‘an act of the “vision” of the past […] situated in the memory’s present’,29 and also an ability to see as an active pursuit of knowledge about oneself and the world. Similar to Frida’s Bed, in Kao da me nema (1999) [As If I Am Not There, 2000], a fictionalised testimony of a survivor of a Bosnian concentration camp, the narrative exchange is graphically and visually foregrounded with the use of italics: Po Hrvatskoj se veü pucalo, a oni su plivali i pekli ribu i nisu svemu tome vjerovali. Mislili su da je to daleko od njih i da ih se ne tiþe. Odjednom, baš toga ljeta, to što se dogaÿalo u Hrvatkoj prestalo ih se ticati. Kao da smo namjerno bili slijepi, mislili smo da üemo se obraniti od užasa tako da ga ne vidimo. Da ne gledamo.30 [The shooting has already started in Croatia, but the two of them swam, grilled fish over a fire and did not believe any of it. As if we were deliberately blind, we thought we could defend ourselves against the horror by not seeing it. By not looking’].31

Hence the failure to predict the war is the problem of the failure of the visual recognition which, in contrast to an ordinary act of seeing, triggers the production of meanings. As we read from the introduction of ‘Oni ne bi ni mrava zgazili’: ratni zloþinci na sudu u Hagu (2003) [They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague, 2004], essays inspired by the writer’s observation of the proceedings in the International Crime Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), ‘we didn’t see the war coming’32 because of ideological images used in construction of the past and everyday life. Visual blindness and ignorance, resulting from the failure to decode images, consequently leads to ‘the absence of facts,’33 a natural excuse for violence. There is no visual relief in the narratives about

29

Mieke Bal, Looking in: The Art of Viewing (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, c2001), chapter ‘Dispersing the Gaze: Focalizing’, pp. 41-64 (p. 43). 30 Slavenka Drakuliü, Kao da me nema (Split: Feral Tribune, 2001, 2nd edition), p. 25. Drakuliü’s italics. 31 Slavenka Drakuliü, As If I Am Not There, trans. by Marko Iviü (London: Abacus, 1999), p. 21. 32 Slavenka Drakuliü, They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague (London: Abacus, 2004), p. 7. 33 Drakuliü, They Would Never Hurt a Fly, p. 13.

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violence – the artistic act of production of self-portraits as an attempt at visual (self)-recognition, which is the core of Frida’s Bed, is absent here. The visual dimension in story-telling is provided in exchange and agreement between different narrative voices, mainly the third- and the first-person narrator, and the visual strategies they use, particularly focalisation. The third-person narrator becomes a viewer, ‘the seeing narrator,’ ‘the focaliser,’ whose choices of visual perspectives clearly establish a division between ‘the vision through which the elements are presented and the identity of the voice that is verbalizing the vision’.34 The notion of vision is crucial here because everything in the painter’s life, all her recollections and memories are related to images, either mental or painted ones. The third-person narrator tells the story of the painter’s life through a selection of her self-portraits, which loosely follow the chronology of the narration, and transpose the readers into viewers as they are given the impression that the narrative gaze is directly projected at the images, as if they are taken on a guided and intimate walk through the exhibition. The third-person narrator appropriates the painter’s story and her articulation of pain as her own. Telling the story through a selection of the painter’s self-portraits35 thus has a twofold result: on one hand it enables the third-person narrator to create and verbalise her own intimate catalogue of images, to control and manage the way the things are seen. In this way she constructs a fictional, selective biographical narrative, a fictional biography of internal displacement, which could be a shared story, a story of oneself in the other – of a shared pain – regardless of the neutrality of the third-person narration. On the other hand, narrating the story through the selection of the painter’s self-portraits allows the painter to use her own voice, and thus helps to constitute the visual auto/biography on the basis of subjective and artistic visual recognition. In this way the self-portraits act as an artistic tool, ‘in which the artist is both

34

Bal, Looking in: The Art of Viewing, p. 43. References to canvasses in the narration are present in a loose chronological order, and they seem to follow the third-person narrator’s strategies to authenticate the narrative of pain. The canvasses discussed are (in the order referred to and discussed in the narrative): The Dream (1940), Portrait with Maestro (1931), My Dress Hangs There (1933), Henry Ford Hospital (1932), Me and My Doll (1937), A Few Small Nips (1935), Self-Portrait With Cropped Hair (1940), Love Embrace of the Universe (1949), The Broken Column (1944), Self-Portrait Dedicated to Leon Trotsky (1937), The Tree of Hope (1946), Roots (1943), Girl With Death Mask (1938), Frame (1938), Self-Portrait With Dr Farrill (1951). 35

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subject and object and conceives of how she looks in the sense of how she sees rather than how she appears’.36 Finally, commentaries on canvasses, graphically (by the use of cursives) emphasised within the text, represent a prominent part of the third-person narration. They are subjective commentaries, but also meditations on the process of painting, origins and creation of the work of art. They strongly reiterate the physical pain the painter felt while creating images, and in this way emphasise a connection between pain and artistic production. They also explain the process of creation of the work of art, especially the inextricable link between the corporeal and artistic, as the former blends into the latter through the long process of artistic performance. The link is physiological and anatomical – it starts internally from within the body, where the picture is created. Thus the artistic work originates within the rupture of the physical wound, and is nurtured within this rupture, moving into the outside world once the contact between the body and the artistic material is established. In this way the painting becomes a fictional/artistic extension of the corporeal and a representation of the feeling of displacement: Nakon svega, trebalo je vremena da se iz njenog tijela iskristalizira slika. Boje su siüušni kristali koji se dugo talože u organizmu. Zatim putuju krvotokom do vrhova prstiju. Ruka uzima kist i dodiruje boju. Kist dodiruje platno. Zapoþinje process u kojem se kristali sele na platno i tada se dogodi slika’ (FB HR 75) [She needed time for a picture to crystallize. The colours were tiny crystals of pain deposited in her organism over time. They had to course through her bloodstream to the tips of her fingers. The hand would pick up a brush and dab at the paints. The brush would touch the canvas. So began the chemical process of moving the crystals to the canvas, resulting in the painting] (FB EN 78).

In commentaries on the canvasses the third-person narrator subverts the performed narrative detachment and becomes subjectively engaged in the narrated story, as she starts identifying herself as a viewer rather than a story-teller: Gledatelj zadrhti dok zamišlja ono što mu slika tako snažno sugerira. Ali þak ni dva krvava reza, koja prva privlaþe pažnju, ne izazivaju toliko iznenaÿenje kao þinjenica da druga Frida, koja sjedi uz onu prvu, još uvijek u narkozi, u ruci drži korzet’ (FB HR 116) 36 Masha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection: Women Artists’ Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century (London: Scarlett Press, 1996), p. xv.

16

Textuality of Maps, Photographs and Images [The painting is so suggestive it makes you shudder. But even the two eyecatching, bloody incisions are not as surprising as the corset that the other Frida, who is sitting next to the still-unconscious one, is holding in her hand] (FB EN 124). 37

Finally, there are occasional inclusions of the first-person narration in these commentaries, which are, similar to the main narrative, again interlocked with the dominant voice and not visually differentiated from it: ‘Ne mogu više, govori Frida na toj slici’ (FB HR 98) [‘I can’t bear it any more, Frida is saying in this painting’] (FB EN 101). Identification with the viewers, as well as the inclusion of the first-person narration subverts the distance of the biographical story-telling and once again suggests that the act of witnessing is a mediation of one’s pain through the act of writing. The importance of the textual-visual structure of the narrative is striking when we compare the original title used by Drakuliü and its English adaptation. The comparison between the two offers two different expectations and readings of displacement. The original wording Frida, ili o boli [‘Frida, or About Pain’], clearly associates the name of the painter with the condition of pain, and offers an expectation that the narrative which follows should be read as a patobiography. As such it again confirms the idea of pain as an internal displacement as one of Drakuliü’s artistic preoccupations,38 which, in this particular case, stems from disability and disability-related isolation, but should be read in the wider context of the writer’s work. This notion is reinforced by two quotations which introduce the narrative: Kahlo’s own words ‘Mi pintura lleva el mensaje del dolor’ [‘My painting carries the message of pain’] and a seminal study by Elaine Scarry on the incommunicability of pain, the political connotations of this phenomenon, the narrative strategies, especially narration of witnessing, shared between the courtroom and literature, as well as what Scarry calls ‘the nature of human creation’.39 37

From the narratological point of view, ‘you’ is not an adequate translation of ‘gledatelj’, as it changes the visual perspective. Since ‘gledatelj’ translates as ‘a viewer’, the entire sentence would sound like ‘A viewer shudders while imagining what image so strongly suggests to him’. 38 Medical themes and pain are present in other works by Drakuliü as well. Using similar narrative strategies, the novel Hologrami straha (1987) [Holograms of Fear, 1992] describes the trauma and emotional and social isolation of a woman who undertakes kidney transplantation surgery in the USA. 39 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3. The notion of the incommunicability of pain and its political connotations again draws a link

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These words characterise her paintings as an articulation of pain which expands over the limits of corporeal reality (disability), but also ‘leave the wound of disability undressed, so to speak’.40 Hence the painter is forced to look for any type of alleviation of suffering to create an imagined world, which was simultaneously growing as her physical existence was fading. The narrator depicts the search for verbal means which would enable ‘smislenu artikulaciju užasa’ (FB HR 8) [‘a meaningful verbalization of this horror’] (FB EN 2), followed by a pictorial search for a suitable word. Thus the paintings become the medium which returns the power of speech, and map ‘an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth’.41 The paintings also mediate between the outside world and the isolation of the wounded body: ‘Kasnije sam slikala te ožiljke kako bi i drugi doprli do moje samoüe’ (FB HR 35) [‘Later I painted those scars, to let others reach into my solitude’] (FB EN 34). However, the search for suitable representation of pain fails when its origin can no longer be detected and thus no suitable picture/word can be used for its artistic mediation: ‘Veü neko vrijeme nije uspijevala odrediti izvor boli koja je veü odavno postala dio njenog tijela, gotovo sinonim za tijelo, ali sad je postala sveobuhvatna, razlivena, preplavljujuüa. [...] Dezintegracija [Drakuliü’s italics] je jedina precizna rijeþ koja mi je pala na pamet’ (FB HR 119) [‘For some time she had been unable to pinpoint the source of the pain that had long since become a part of, almost a synonym for, her body,

between the novel and Kao da me nema [As If I Am Not There] because it happens at times when reality in its most extreme forms, such as war, overcomes the power of words to describe it: ‘I u tom trenutku ponovo joj upada u oþi kako se nisu u stanju izražavati normalnim reþenicama, nego samo jednosložnim rijeþima, kao da su zaboravili govoriti. Možda i jesu. Možda se to dogaÿa s ljudima u ratu, da rijeþi odjednom postanu suvišne jer više ne mogu izraziti stvarnost. Stvarnost izmiþe poznatim izrazima, a novih rijeþi u koje bi se utrpalo to novo iskustvo naprosto nema’. (Drakuliü, Kao da me nema, p. 63) [‘At that same instant she is again struck by their inability to express themselves in normal sentences; they only use monosyllabic words, as if they have forgotten how to speak. And perhaps they have. Perhaps that happens to people in wartime, words suddenly become superfluous because they can no longer express reality. Reality escapes the words we know, and we simply lack new words to encapsulate this new experience’] (Drakuliü, As If I Am Not There, pp. 65-66]. 40 David T. Mitchell and Sharon S. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, p. 7. 41 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 3.

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but now it had become all-invasive. [...] Disintegration [Drakuliü’s italics] is the only word that comes to [my]42 mind’] (FB EN 127). The choice of title in the English translation – Frida’s Bed – foregrounds a spatial metaphor and emphasises the visual dimension of the narration and the space of suffering as the space of displacement. The name Frida, the subject in the original title, recedes into the background and becomes reduced to a possessive adjective, which relates to the specific and confined space of the bed.43 Similar to Kahlo’s images, the bed becomes the isolated and real subject of narration: bed as a visual and spatial metaphor, bed as a confinement, bed as a place of rest, reflection and calm, bed as a connection between the real and imagined world, bed as the place of internal displacement. Bed also becomes ‘a memory museum to a specific time and place,’44 a spatial framework and a point of departure for the narration, constructed as an exchange between the thirdand first-person narrator, as an articulation of the gap between the past as wholeness, though constantly alive through the permanent presence of pain, and the present as fragmentation, characteristic of the feeling of emptiness and loss: ‘Provukla je prste kroz kosu – lice, kosa, ruke, bili su to još samo dijelovi bivše cjeline. Pokušala je ustati, zatim je odustala. Nije imala snage. Nije imala mira’ (FB HR 7) [‘[She] ran her fingers through her hair – her face, her hair, her hands, they were all parts of what had once been a whole. She tried to get out of bed, but then gave up. She had no strength left. Her mind was troubled’] (FB EN 1). Along with the third- and the first-person narrator, there are also occasional interpolations of other voices, especially second-person narration, which provide an additional visual perspective on the events and create visual images within the text. As an act of witnessing, the inclusion of the second-person narration is directed towards the personality and the body confined to the bed, turning that body into a visual object, a visual representation, and a 42

I have added a possessive pronoun ‘my’, omitted by the English translation, to emphasise the change of the narrative perspective and transposition from the thirdinto the first-person narration. 43 The semantic difference between the original title and its English adaptation is strengthened by the respective book cover illustrations, which clearly enter into a ‘parapictorial relationship’ (Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, trans. by Laurence Petit (Farnharm: Ashgate 2011), p. 68) with the main narrative. While on the Croatian original the choice of illustration is Kahlo’s picture representing the painter’s face gazing directly at the self-portrait, the English translation features the image ‘Dream’, in the centre of which Frida lies in the bed, a concrete space floating in the unpopulated, blank environment created through the act of artistic imagination. 44 Watson and Smith, ‘Introduction: Mapping Women Self-Representation’, p. 1.

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framed picture, a work of art: ‘Ležala si na zelenoj þohi gola, oblivena krvlju i posuta zlatom. Prolaznici su mislili da si ranjena plesaþica iz bara i zato su vikali: Balerina! Bila si tako lijepa – rekao joj je Aleks dok je sjedio pokraj nje drugog dana nakon operacije i držao je za ruku’ (FB HR 20) [‘You lay there on the green felt, naked, covered in blood and dusted in gold. Passerbys thought you were an injured bar dancer, that’s why they called you ballerina. You were so beautiful, Alex told her the day after the operation as he sat by her side, holding her hand’] (FB EN 16). The space of the bed is not perceived as a ‘fixed frame,’45 but it becomes a point of departure for the creation of other spaces, and a movement from one fictional space to another. Frida re-creates her past during the journey through visual, mental images and recollections. Becoming increasingly bedridden, she wants to leave her own body and bed as her first confinement by imagining parallel, fictional and invisible worlds: Kad veü nije mogla izaüi iz sobe, pronašla je naþin da izaÿe iz sebe: zamislila je prijateljicu uz þiju je pomoü prelazila u drugu stvarnost. Njena mala prijateljica nije imala ime. Frida bi došla do nje tako što bi zahuknula staklo na prozoru pokraj kreveta i na zamagljenoj površini brzo, jako brzo, nacrtala vrata. Sasvim mala i nevidljiva. I djevojþica koju bi ugledala, bila je nevidljiva, svima osim njoj (FB HR 9) [Since she could not leave her room, she created an imaginary little friend who helped transport her to another world. Her little friend did not have a name. Frida would blow on the windowpane by her bed and then quickly, quickly trace a door on the foggy glass with her finger. Only the door was very, very small and invisible. The girl was invisible too, invisible to everybody but her] (FB EN 4).

As she becomes confined due to her disability, her ability to see acts as liberation unveils for her an entirely new world, whereby the relationship with space is changed through one’s sharpened vision. During that process textures and surface qualities of surrounding materials are defamiliarised and re-discovered with a strengthened, cautious, and analytical gaze: Dugotrajna nepomiþnost izoštrila je njene promatraþke sposobnosti. ýinilo joj se kao da gleda svijet kroz poveüalo, da više ništa oko nje nije ni jednostavno ni plošno. Otkrivala je jedva vidljive znakove na naoko glatkim površinama, na predmetima oko sebe, u sobi. Primjeüivala je detalje na koje prije nije obraüala pažnju: deblje i tanje niti i naþin na koji 45

Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto, Ont; London: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p. 139.

20

Textuality of Maps, Photographs and Images se isprepleüu i tvore neravnine u tkanju lanene plahte na tepihu. [...] Kao da je ležeüi u krevetu opažala više, sve više, te je svijet postupno poprimao drugaþije, zanimljivije dimenzije (FB HR 27). [Such a long period of immobility had heightened her powers of observation. Nothing seemed simple or small anymore; it was like seeing the world through a magnifying glass. She distinguished almost invisible markings on the seemingly smooth surfaces of the objects in her room. She noticed details she had never paid attention to before: the interweaving of thin and thick threads that unevenly coursed the bed linen; [...] As if being bedridden somehow made her notice things more and gradually lent the world new, intriguing dimensions.] (FB EN 27)46

The journey enabled by these new optical abilities leads to an estranged self-recognition, a psychological blow caused by a distorted image in the mirror, which represented her differently and clearly revealed the physical consequence of pain. The shock gradually evolved into a long process of reconciliation with her own condition through refocusing on herself, and the discovery of a possibility of longitudinal exploration of identity through the act of painting: ‘A kad je otac došao na ideju da uþvrsti zrcalo iznad kreveta, kako bi mogla vidjeti svoje lice, poþela je slikati najbliži objekt – sebe’ (FB HR 25-26) [‘And when her father came up with the idea of fixing a mirror above her bed so that she could see her own face, she began to paint what was closest at hand – herself’] (FB EN 22). The painting helped her to overcome the physical restrictions of immobility as it empowered her to mediate her new identity to others: ‘Kada je naslikala autoportret za Aleksa, bila je zadovoljna. Poslala ga je Aleksu. Iz oþaja, iz ljubavi, iz potrebe da ga približi sebi’ (FB HR 28) [‘She was pleased with the self-portrait she painted for Alex. She sent it to 46

The phenomenon of sharpened vision is present in other works by Drakuliü, especially in As if I Am Not There, where it represents an escape from the body traumatised by rape. While being gang-raped, S. suddenly re-focuses her attention on insignificant details in the room, which carry her away from reality, only to return instantly to the present moment: ‘Kad prvi od njih prodire u njeno tijelo S. osjeüa trenutaþnu bol. [...] Okreüe glavu prema zidu. Tamo jedna muha sa zelenim zatkom nervozno šeüe gore-dolje. Kao da je nešto izgubila. ...] S. je slijedi pogledom. U tom þasu vidi svoje noge podignute u zrak i izmeÿu njih mušku glavu. Muškarac ima zatvorene oþi i otvorena usta’ (Slavenka Drakuliü, Kao da me nema, 64) [‘When the first of the three men penetrates her, S. feels momentary pain [...] She turns her head to the wall. A greenbottle fly paces up and down the wall nervously, as if it has lost something. [...] S. follows her with her eyes. And at that moment she sees her own legs and a man’s head poking out between them’] (Drakuliü, As If I Am Not There, 66-67).

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him, out of despair, out of love, out of the need to feel him nearer’] (FB EN 28). Colours, those outside the picture frame, which form a crucial part of Frida’s memory, play an important role in creation of her artistic identity. Frida feels the pain, which she cannot describe, yet she sees how it affects and changes life around her. For her, to see means to remember, and to determine traumatic experience within the range of colours and their meanings. As seeing and remembering carries the quality of a colour, Frida’s imagination and reflection on the crucial events in her life, which marked alienation from and within her body, become ‘coloured’ or painted: Vidjela sam, zapamtila sam, da je crveno istodobno boja života i boja smrti. Kad god bih kasnije pokušala zamisliti svoje slomljeno tijelo, vidjela bih krv i zlato i pomislila kako je veü u tom þasu moj život bio šareno obojen i kiþast. Da sam ikada naslikala sliku same nesreüe, upotrijebila bih te dvije boje. Ali to je jedina slika koju nisam naslikala, iako sve moje slike proistjeþu upravo iz te, naslikane (FB HR 18-19). [ [I saw,]47 I remembered that red is both the color of life and the color of death. Later, whenever I tried to remember my crushed body, the blood and the gold dust, I would think how mine was a life of color and kitsch even then. Had I ever painted the accident itself I would have used those two colors. But that is the one picture I have never painted, however much it underlaid all my work] (FB EN 14).

She challenges the common representations of accidents as events burdened by emotions, and depicts them as a condition of nothingness, a distance from one’s own body which blends with the surroundings, forgetting for the moment about its own condition of sudden and abrupt dislocation and displacement: ‘Vidiš nebesko plavetnilo, i kao da si i sama dio zraka, vode, zelenila u obližnjem parku. Lebdiš u tišini u kojoj ne þuješ ni otkucaje svoga srca. Nije li to iskustvo ništavila?’ (FB HR 18) [‘You see the blue sky and you are a part of it, you are a part of the air, the water, the greenery in the park. You drift in a silence where you cannot even hear the beating of your own heart. Isn’t that the experience of nothingness?’] (FB EN 13). However, the disengagement from one’s own body brings a new quality to colours, as the accident unexpectedly becomes a part of an 47

For some reason the English translation omits the first part of the original sentence which starts with ‘vidjela sam’ [‘I saw’], which I add here as I find it crucial for the understanding of the link between seeing as witnessing and remembering.

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image: ‘Poslije je saznala da je u sudaru ostala bez odjeüe i da je ležala na ulici, gola, krvavog tijela posutog zlatnim prahom koji je neki majstor soboslikar vjerojatno bio nosio sa sobom’ (FB HR 19) [‘Later, she learned that the crash had left her lying naked in the street, her blood-streaked body dusted with gold powder which a house painter had probably been carrying’] (FB EN 14). Family photographs are included in the narrative as yet another visual means, and as such they play an important role in visual representation of the painter’s identity. Contrary to paintings, which act as intimate and fictionalised extensions of the painter’s personality and internal displacement, photographs represent an external perspective, in as much as they are not authored by the painter herself. Nevertheless, they form part of the overall visual performance, and they depict the painter’s dislocation from the official setting of the family album, which imposes on its participants strictly hierarchical roles, ‘the family’s primary instrument of self-knowledge and representation’.48 They also reinstate the distance she feels and consciously establishes with her own body, and reinforce a selfimposed visual transformation of her own gender. For instance, in one of them she resembles a boy and looks provocative, with a clear intention to represent herself as an uncanny portrait against a neutral background of the photographic genre: ‘A na jednoj obiteljskoj fotografiji koju je snimio njen otac, nosi muško odijelo. [...] Djeluje nekako kruto, možda þak arogantno. Svjesna da je na toj, ‘službenoj’, obiteljskoj fotografiji njena pojava provokacija’ (FB HR 15) [‘A family photograph taken by her father shows her dressed like a man. [...] She even comes across as a bit stiff, arrogant maybe, aware of how provocative her image is in this ‘official’ family photograph’] (FB EN 10-11). However, inclusion of photographs (no art) is also a counterpart to an intimate exploration of identity as presented through the paintings and the importance of visuality in the construction of life-writing. In the photograph of her last public appearance Kahlo’s face is depicted as ‘mršavo, oþi upale. Glave pokrivene rupcem, oþigledno se naprežuüi da se osmijehne, izgledala je kao da joj je šezdeset godina, a ne þetrdeset i sedam, koliko je za koji dan trebala navršiti’ (FB HR 135) [‘thin and her eyes sunken. She is wearing a scarf over her head and is clearly trying to smile. She looks like a woman of sixty, not someone who is about to turn forty-seven’] (FB EN 145). They reveal the factography of pain and represent an encounter with the physical and spiritual rupture the artist desperately tries to mask, overcome, and articulate through the artistic act. 48

Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 6.

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Photographic reality thus palpably subverts the importance visual performances have for the painter: she is performing because she deliberately wants to divert viewers’ attention, conceal her vulnerability, have a say in creation of her (visual) identity, and be seen in a way imposed by her. To be seen means to be alive. Imposition of her own visual appearance functions as a diversion and control over visual recognition imposed by others: ‘Izgled je za nju bio objava postojanja. Nije to bilo samo pitanje estetike, radilo se o taktici namjernog skretanja pažnje sa svojih mana. I još važnije, o želji da bude viÿena. Vikala je: Gledajte me, živa sam!’ (FB HR 136) [‘Appearance was a declaration of her own existence. It was not so much a matter of aesthetics as of tactics, of deliberately calling attention to her imperfections. And even more important, of wanting to feel noticed. She was screaming, Look at me, I’m alive!’] (FB EN 146).49 However, the neutrality of the photographic frame, as well as ‘the indexical nature’ of a photographic portrait as a ‘direct connection with the material presence of the photographed person,’50 is the medium where no concealment is possible. It reveals facial expressions as outcomes of their actual, physical and emotional history and a long-term medical condition, and positions itself against the semantic importance of frame in her images and the backgrounds surrounding her face and body in the self-portraits. As the description of the self-portrait ‘Frame’ illustrates, the frame itself becomes an integral part of the image. It acts as a performance of life whose function is to divert spectators’ gaze and comprehend the face, the central motif of the image, in an illusion of harmony with the exotic world of happiness: Njeno je ukrašavanje imalo isti smisao kao i okvir autoportreta na slici Okvir, koji je integralni dio slike. Bez ptica i cvijeüa koji uokviruju njeno lice, ne bi postigla vedrinu kojom slika odiše. Žarkocrvena, ružiþasta, naranþasta i plava boja odražavau se na njenom licu poput odsjaja sunca na vodenoj površini. Okvir zapravo dominira tom slikom, iako Frida pazi da se pogled gledatelja ne zaustavlja samo na okviru koji sugerira egzotiku. Okvir upuüuje na lice, na njen osmijeh’ [Drakuliü’s italics] (FB HR 136).

49

Drakuliü, Frida’s Bed, p. 146. Visual performances, such as masking one’s face, even if only by applying make-up, play a significant role in As if I Am Not There. S. uses make-up as this not only brings back memories of the past and of the person she used to be and helps combat humiliation, but also gives her an opportunity to imagine and lead somebody else’s life (pp. 91-92). 50 Hirsch, Family Frames, p. 19.

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Textuality of Maps, Photographs and Images [Her self-embellishment served the same purpose as the frame of her selfportrait The Frame, which is integral to the painting. The birds and the flowers that enframe her face give the painting its cheerful, bright quality.51 The scarlet, pink, orange and blue are reflected in her face like the sun against the water. The frame actually dominates the painting, though Frida is careful to maintain a balance so that the eye is not drawn only to the frame and its suggestion of the exotic. The frame directs the eye to the face] (FB EN 146).

The confinement of the disabled body, camouflage, exoticism, visual transformations and masking, both physical and emotional, become the main strategies for hiding the painter’s real condition, crucial for her mental survival: ‘bolesnu nogu skrivala je dugaþkim suknjama, korzet širokim košuljama, a pokvarene, nelijepe zube skrivala je osmijehom i – zlatnim navlakama. [...] Lakše je bilo kamuflirati se, smješkati se tako da se zubi ne vide’ (FB HR 67) [‘she concealed her withered leg under long skirts, her corset under wide shirts, and her bad teeth behind a smile – and golden crowns. [...] But it was easier to camouflage herself, to smile so that her teeth did not show’] (FB EN 69-70). The visual performance and camouflage help the painter to mask illness and alienation from the body as a matter of shame, which she becomes aware of when she witnesses her father’s unexpected epileptic fit on the street in front of strangers – the public participating in a theatrical expression of the loss of control: ‘Njegova je tajna izašla na vidjelo pred nepoznatim ljudima, pred djetetom. Dok se podizao s ploþnika na njenom je djeþjem licu opazio ne samo strah nego i sram. Znao je kakav je prizor moralo pružiti njegovo tijelo dok se grþilo, kao i poniženje koje je doživjela njegova djevojþica, ne samo on’ (FB HR 95) [‘His secret had been laid bare before a crowd of unknown people, and before his child. As he picked himself up off the ground he had seen not only fear on her face, but also shame. He knew what his convulsing body must have looked like, and the shame his little girl must have felt’] (FB EN 101). Hence the definition of disability as a visual condition exposed in its absolute nakedness and frailty, when the masquerade as ‘displacement from a traumatic childhood of the subject herself, ever-remembered, ever-repeated’, no longer helps.52 In other 51 The English translation of the second sentence changes the meaning of the original. The direct translation would be something like: ‘Without [emphasis mine] the birds and the flowers that enframe her face, the painting would not have its cheerful, bright quality’. 52 Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen, ‘Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti’, in Art in Modern Culture. An Anthology of Critical Texts, ed. by Francis Frascina and Jonathan Harris (New York: Phaidon Press, 1992), pp. 145-59.

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words, disability is a condition resulting from the moment when it is no longer possible to create fictitious identities through images, masks and performances: ‘Bila je invalid, sada se to više nije dalo prikriti dugaþkim suknjama ni glumom. Nedostajao joj je dio tijela i više nego ikada imala je osjeüaj da je izložena i potpuno nezaštiüena’ (FB HR 130) [‘She was an invalid, and there was no way she could hide it under long skirts or pretend otherwise now. A piece of her body was missing and more than ever she felt exposed and completely unprotected’] (FB EN 140). While performances are visual, disability, just like exile, is visible, and represents an ultimate displacement: it becomes obvious and factual on a naked, revealed and thus unprotected body. To sum up, Frida’s Bed goes beyond being a lyrical biography and the writer’s personal account of the life of the Mexican painter, and becomes an analysis of the phenomenon of internal displacement, caused by disability and physical pain, existing at the intersections between geographical, physical, narrative and visual. The narrator subverts the biographical genre in order to articulate intertextually and intermedially alienation from one’s own body in the context of permanent pain and physical decay, and searches for refuge in its artistic representations. She does so through the use of narrative exchanges, especially inclusion of the first-person narrator within the predominantly third-person narration. In this way, the third-person narrator not only authenticates her narration, but also becomes a witness, who takes the responsibility to unfold, mediate and alleviate the pain of the other. In order to do so, she has to explore the possible narrative means, especially references and inclusion of visual material, which, representing the original artistic creations, but also offering her the ground for her own interpretation, articulates that which seems to be inadequate and impossible to express verbally. However, in the process of witnessing, the interlocking of the two voices demonstrates the level of identification between the geographically and culturally distant narrators: by incorporating the first-person narration within her own discourse, the third-person narrator identifies herself with the painter. Finally, as the narrative strategies in Frida’s Bed and the rest of Drakuliü’s opus, dealing with the political, especially war-related impact of violence, pain and suffering are similar, if not almost identical, the story of internal displacement in the novel should be read as an attempt to restore a violated and fragile identity, whose existence challenges and subverts the dominating narrative and visual representations.

NARRATIVES OF RESISTANCE: LISTENING TO WOMEN SEEKING ASYLUM IN THE UNITED KINGDOM KATE SMITH

This chapter explores the in-depth narratives of six women asylum seekers1 and examines their accounts of resistance. In making sense and meaning of our lives, we all engage in telling and retelling stories. These stories are broadly social and relational accounts, located both historically and culturally.2 Central to my approach is the assumption that the world is social and relational, and that stories are selected through telling and listening, accommodating moments of uncertainty and discrepancy. I proceed on the basis that ‘social life is itself storied and that narrative is an ontological condition of social life’.3 The women asylum seekers whose experiences I consider for this chapter were selected from a larger Economic and Social Research Council funded qualitative narrative study, which I carried out with 17 women asylum seekers living in the UK. The women gave profound accounts of victimisation; atrocities committed against them as women and girls. Their fears of persecution had brought each of them to claim asylum in the UK and seek legal protection. All of the women identified their experiences of gender-based and gender specific persecution4 1

The term ‘asylum seeker’ used in this study includes all women who have made a claim in the UK for asylum under the UN Convention, regardless of the legal determination on their claim. 2 See Ken Plummer, Telling Sexual Stories: Power, Change and Social Worlds (London: Routledge, 1995); Margaret Somers, ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach,’ Theory and Society, 23, 5 (1994), 605–50; and Jo Woodiwiss, Contesting Stories of Childhood Sexual Abuse (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 3 Somers, ‘The Narrative Constitution of Identity’, p. 614. 4 Gender-based persecution refers to a woman who is persecuted because of her behaviour, identity and status as a woman (such as honour based violence or forced marriage), and gender-specific persecution refers to the form of persecution or

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whereby they had been violated and wounded. However, these persecutions were not the only topics of their stories, nor were their narratives just about their victimisation. There were also narratives of resistance.

Resistance Within this study the concept of resistance is set in the context of power relations, negotiable and relational, whereby alternative constructions are possible. A relational understanding of power means that resistance can disrupt, challenge, change and revolutionise power.5 Resistance, in this context, can open up possibilities of liberating and emancipating agendas6 and practices. Narratives of resistance, in themselves, suggest that power is negotiable and contestable in the telling and the listening. This approach to developing understandings of narratives of resistance supports fluid, dynamic and creative consideration of women’s resistance. Many of the women in this study told accounts of living with brutal, violating and at times overwhelmingly powerful constraints. Their narratives of resistance were an act of power, which gave meaning to their lives in situations of persecution. Their accounts had varying outcomes. A number of women found it important to identify that they had liberated themselves and transformed their situation. At other times, the story suggested that small-scale subordinate acts had served as resistance, altering power relations, even in the smallest of ways. For a number of women, their accounts suggested that resistance did not always result in actual changes in power relations. There are criticisms about focusing an analysis upon resistance. bell hooks7 raises particular questions for researchers about issues of colonisation, serious harms specific or predominantly experienced by a woman (such as female genital mutilation rape and sexual violence). See CSEL (Centre for the Study of Emotion and Law) Evidence in Practice: CSEL Research Dissemination Project for Women Toolkit (London: CSEL 2012); and Caroline Querton, ‘“I feel like as a woman I’m not welcome”: A Gender Analysis of UK Asylum Law, Policy and Practice’, Report (London: Asylum Aid, 2012). 5 Mary Bosworth, Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women's Prisons (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p. 129. 6 Henry Giroux, ‘Theories of Reproduction and Resistance in the New Sociology of Education: A Critical Analysis’, Harvard Educational Review 53, 3 (1983), 257. 7 bell hooks, ‘Marginality as a Site of Resistance’, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. by Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trin T.

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power and authority in relation to resistance theory. Conversely, Ramazanoglu8 argues that models of resistance enable academics and others to avoid addressing and altering social injustices, whilst simultaneously feeling better about minority or oppressed groups. Bosworth and Carrabine9 problematise several troubling aspects that underpin some concepts of resistance: the characterising of resistance as entirely reactive and assumptions that resistance should be visible to an outside audience. The concept of resistance as visible potentially omits to acknowledge more personal or intimate challenges to power. I am also concerned about constructing ‘others’ as heroic and romanticising resistance. Furthermore, a focus on narratives of resistance may be problematic when individuals do not see themselves as having resisted or say they felt unable to resist, including those who fear the persecution and victimisation of those they love, such as children, family and friends. For the women in this study, the ability to evaluate choices and act upon them, to construct oneself as resisting circumstances, was crucial to the women’s sense of self and the stories by which they live. Narratives of resistance became a useful term for understanding the women asylum seekers’ accounts in this study, highlighting their stories of practical struggles whilst presenting a sense of autonomy, independence and difference, particularly in situations where the women saw themselves as relatively powerless.

Asylum Narratives The context of asylum is taken from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 14: ‘Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy asylum from persecution in other countries’. As such, a concept of international protection has emerged. The significant obstacles involved with seeking protection in another country have meant that the vast majority of women seldom claim asylum in the UK. Women represent only one third of asylum applicants in the UK and account for about 7,000 asylum applications.10 Most applicants are men; women and children Minh-ha, and Cornel West (Cambridge, MA: Museum in Contemporary Art and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), pp. 241-43. 8 Caroline Ramazanoglu, Up Against Foucault (London: Routledge, 1993). 9 Mary Bosworth and Eamonn Carrabine, ‘Reassessing Resistance Race, Gender and Sexuality in Prison’, Punishment & Society 3, 4 (2001), 501-15. 10 See Querton, ‘A Gender Analysis of UK Asylum Law, Policy and Practice’; Caroline Querton, (Asylum Aid), Elodie Soulard (France terre d’asile), Gruša Matevžiþ (Hungarian Helsinki Committee), Daniela Di Rado (Consiglio Italiano

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feature only as dependents on asylum claims, their accounts remain untold in the asylum process, a footnote in the story. Until recently, asylum has predominantly been discussed in terms of male adults.11 The absence of the women asylum seekers’ voices in literature has allowed for male accounts, based on men’s perspectives, to be the dominant discourse of asylum seeker experiences.12 As such, women asylum seekers are largely undifferentiated, disregarding sociocultural and political differences such as ethnicity or sexuality13 or largely constructed in a binary notion of gender whereby women are perceived to be weaker, more passive and vulnerable. When women seeking asylum are represented or considered, they are frequently perceived as victims, particularly of war, sexual violence, rape and trafficking.14 This is per i Rifugiati), Daniela Di Rado and Anna Galosi (Consiglio Italiano per i Rifugiati), Bianca Albu and Luiza Burlibasa (Jesuit Refugee Service), Hana Cheikh Ali (Comisión Española de Ayuda al Refugiado), Maria Bexelius (Consultant for Asylum Aid), ‘Gender-related Asylum Claims in Europe: Comparative Analysis of Law, Policies and Practice Focusing on Women in Nine EU Member States’, Report (London: Asylum Aid, 2012); Jane Freedman, ‘Women’s Right to Asylum: Protecting the Rights of Female Asylum Seekers in Europe?’, Human Rights Review 9 (2008), 413-33. 11 United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. 2012. Day of General Discussion The Rights of All Children in the Context of International Migration. Background paper. Accessed October 26. http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/discussion2012/2012DGDBackgro undPaper.pdf. 12 Alice Bloch, Treasa Galvin., and Barbara Harrell-Bond, ‘Refugee Women in Europe: Some Aspects of the Legal and Policy Dimensions’, International Migration 38, 2 (2000), 169-88. 13 See Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color’ Stanford Law Review 43, 6 (1991), 1241–99 for a systematic study of the ways in which differences (such as race, class and sexuality) interrelate, how this interrelation is central in how subordination is lived and an overview of the formation of intersectionality. 14 See: Amnesty International UK, ‘Get It Right: How Home Office Decisionmaking Fails Refugees’, Report (London: Amnesty International, 2004); Vicky Canning, ‘Who's Human? Developing Sociological Understandings of the Rights of Women Raped in Conflict’, International Journal of Human Rights 14, 6 (2010), 849-64; Ellen Cole, Esther Rothblum., and Oliva Espin, Refugee Women and Their Mental Health: Shattered Societies, Shattered Lives (New York: The Howarth Press, 1992); Anders Johnsson, ‘The International Protection of Refugee Women: A Summary of Principal Problems and Issues’, International Journal of Refugee Law 1 (1989), 221-32; Liz Kelly, ‘Wars Against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics and the Militarised State’, in States of Conflict. Gender,

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reflected in statements like the often quoted Major General Patrick Cammaert, former UN Military Advisor and Deputy Force Commander (2008): ‘It is more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict’.15 Much of the literature on contemporary war and conflict explores the dangers of being a woman in conflict zones and serves to highlight the disproportion and sheer numbers of women being victimised in war. International organisations like WomenKind state: ‘Today close to 90 per cent of current war casualties are civilians, the majority of whom are women and children’;16 also, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women state: ‘There is international recognition that women bear the brunt of modern conflicts, including where rape is a weapon of war’;17 and the Refugee Council UK claims: ‘Up to 500,000 women were raped in Rwanda during the genocide. The New York Times described the Sudanese government turning the whole of Darfur into a rape camp. In some regions of Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), as many as 70 per cent of girls and women have been raped or sexually mutilated’.18 The increasing significance of acknowledging the harm inflicted on women by war and violence lays the foundations for women asylum seekers being constructed as victims. In the context of claiming asylum in the UK, the legal process requires the asylum applicant to provide an asylum story.19 A vital component of Violence and Resistance, ed. by Susie Jacobs, Ruth Jacobson, and Jennifer Marchback (London: Zed Books, 2000), pp. 46-65; Michael Peel, Rape as a Method of Torture (London: Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2004); and Ellie Smith, Jude Boyles, and Leanne MacMillan, ‘Justice Denied. The Experiences of 100 Torture Surviving Women of Seeking Justice and Rehabilitation’, Report (London, Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture, 2009). 15 WomenKind. ‘Women, Peace and Security’, 2012. http://www.womankind.org.uk/policy-and-resources/women-peace-and-security/. Accessed October 26. 16 Womenkind, ibid. 17 United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, ‘Violence against women’, 2011. http://www.unwomen.org/focus-areas. Accessed October 22. 18 Refugee Council Briefing, ‘The Experiences of Refugee Women in the UK (London: Refugee Council, 2012), p. 1. 19 An asylum narrative (presented in interviews, court hearings and in written statements) is central to an asylum claim and has to relate a coherent account of personal events and experiences which, the applicant claims, led them to fear persecution. See Jane Herlihy, and Stuart Turner, ‘Asylum Claims and Memory of

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being granted protection in the UK is the applicant’s ‘well-founded fear of persecution’20 based on their asylum story. With this backdrop, narratives that reinforce the passivity of the ‘victim’ and a lack of power (‘in fear of persecution’) become necessary for women seeking asylum to gain legal protection. A case has been made for the specific vulnerability of women seeking asylum to be recognised as a vulnerable group with special procedural needs.21 In part, this is reflected in the development of an ‘Asylum Instruction’22 on gender issues in the asylum claim, as well as the appointment of a Gender Champion.23 In addition, women asylum seekers are seen as different from other women and are constructed as being more affected by violence than any other group of women across the world.24 The underpinning principles of this approach are that women asylum seekers are persecuted victims in their country of origin; vulnerable to being victims and exploited on flight to asylum countries; and vulnerable to further exploitation and victimisation in resettled countries25. In other words, women seeking asylum have been, will be and are likely to be in multiple situations of vulnerability and victimisation. This is the kind of story that is told and re-told about women asylum seekers. Such narrative is articulated by international sources such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), an agency mandated for more than six decades to lead and coordinate international action to protect refugees, with the primary purpose of safeguarding the rights and well-being of refugees:

Trauma: Sharing our Knowledge’, The British Journal of Psychiatry 191 (2007), 3-4. 20 The concept of a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ is defined in the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. 21 Querton et al, ‘Gender-related Asylum Claims’, 2012. 22 UKBA (United Kingdom Border Agency), ‘Gender Issues in the Asylum Claim’, 2010. http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/sitecontent/documents/policyandlaw/asylump olicyinstructions/apis/gender-issue-in-the-asylum.pdf?view=Binary. Accessed October 24. 23 Deborah Singe, and Caroline Chandler, ‘The Charter of Rights of Women Seeking Asylum. 2 years on: Impacts and Actions’, Report (London: Asylum Aid, 2010). 24 Refugee Council, ‘The Experiences of Refugee Women’, 2012. 25 Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed, ‘A Dialogical Approach to Identity: Implications for Refugee Women’, in Not Born a Refugee Woman. Contesting Identities, Rethinking Practice, ed. by Maroussia Hajdukowski-Ahmed., Nazilla Khanlou, and Helene Mousa (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009), pp. 25-28.

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Stripped of the protection of their homes, their government and often their family structure, females are often particularly vulnerable. They face the rigours of long journeys into exile, official harassment or indifference and frequent sexual abuse - even after reaching an apparent place of safety.26

This story is echoed by the Refugee Council, a human rights organisation in the UK working to provide, amongst other things, specialist services for women in the asylum process: With limited opportunities to seek protection within their own countries and restrictions on international travel, many women survivors of violence are forced to subject themselves to further risks of violence in their quest for safety. Research shows cases of women being raped by smugglers, or forced to ‘exchange’ sex for passage to safety to the UK.27

Within this understanding, narratives are repeatedly constructed and reinforced to include and encompass all women seeking asylum, everywhere: Torture, rape, abduction, forced prostitution and domestic violence are common with all refugee women from all economic, racial and ethnic groups… violence follows women, even after they are resettled in a new country. Women who are raped during their journey to freedom, are more likely to be victims of domestic violence in their new homes’28 (emphasis mine).

The story that ‘violence follows women’ compounds the victimisation story in the past, the present and the anticipated future. Very few organisations explicitly note that a distinction can be made between a ‘state’ of vulnerability and a ‘situation’ of vulnerability.29 As Querton et al argue: ‘Women asylum seekers are not necessarily vulnerable per se but might find themselves in a situation of vulnerability through the asylum system where for example they are detained or are refused accommodation 26

UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees). 2001-2012. Refugee Women. http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c1d9.html. Accessed October 23. 27 Refugee Council, ‘The Experiences of Refugee Women’, 2012. 28 Theanvy Kuock, Sima Wali, and Mary Scully, ‘Foreward’, in Refugee Women and Their Mental Health, pp. xi-1 (p. xii). 29 Laurence Debauche-Discart, Asylum Seekers with Special Needs. Ministerial Conference ‘Quality and Efficiency in the Asylum Process’, 13-14 September 2010, p. 2. Available at: http://www.eutrio.be/files/bveu/media/source1854/documents/WS_I_-_Rapp orteur__Mrs__L___Debauche_-_Vulnerable_persons_with_special_needs__Final.pdf . Accessed October 23.

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and support’.30 Therefore, the power discourse fails to acknowledge the variety of ways in which women may experience persecution. With this dominant discourse, narratives of resistance become harder and harder to tell. Without this framework, women asylum seekers might tell very different narratives and very different narratives might be told about women asylum seekers. I want to caution that this study does not ignore or deny that women seeking asylum are too frequently victims as a wealth of testimony and empirical evidence testifies. It is not my intention to undermine agencies and organisations, which – with the aim to improve the lives of women seeking asylum – expose the undeniable poor treatments and abuses. Accounts of women, war and violence should be told, because war and violence affect women. However, the prioritisation to tell and listen to women asylum seekers’ stories of victimisation obliterates and silences other stories which remain dismissed or rendered invisible. This also raises questions about how women asylum seekers continue to live with or by those narratives at the cost of all other narratives which might have been or can be told.

The Study I conducted in-depth narrative interviews with women asylum seekers in the UK,31 which typically lasted two to three hours. Access to participants was gained at multiple points locally, regionally and nationally through the use of gatekeepers. Arrangements were made for participants to access support services if needed. Interviews were conducted at locations identified as being suitable by the women participants and myself to increase accessibility to the study. I transcribed the recorded interviews using a consistent style of transcription across all of the transcripts, including features of speech and other elements of the interview such as: laughing, stutters, noises, sighing; non-verbal communications such as pauses and silences; overlapping speech and incomprehensible speech; affirmative or non-affirmative noises.32 The transcription process sought to capture each interview’s ‘unique

30

Querton et al, ‘Gender-related Asylum Claims’, 2012, p. 118. The women asylum seekers whose data I consider for this chapter were selected from a larger Economic and Social Research Council funded qualitative narrative study which I carried out with 17 women seeking asylum in the UK. 32 Nigel King, and Chistine Horrocks, Interviews in Qualitative Research (London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2010). 31

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meaning’33 and this is reflected in the quotes from the women in this chapter. I analysed the data using the Listening Guide,34 a method of narrative analysis which places an emphasis on the complexity and multiplicity of meaning and voices within the cultural, social and relational structures. My selection of data comes from six women from different countries of origin. I use their self-selected pseudonyms: May (Nigeria), Baelli (Senegal), Shimmer (India), Lucy (Kenya), Zain (Pakistan) and Naomi (Malawi). The women were aged between twenty-two to forty-seven years old and had been living in the UK for different periods of time, ranging between two months to seven years.

Voices of Resistance Some of the interviewees felt that the UK asylum system silences women’s voices; thus, the women identified that their decision to take part in the interview was, in itself, a form of resistance. Many of the participants gave accounts of gender-based discrimination35 and of being treated with disbelief when they had told about their lives in their asylum claims. Therefore, by speaking about their lives and by shaping stories of their experiences, narrating became a form of resistance and the narratives themselves a site of resistance. ‘I like to take part in this research because want to improve the policy for women refugee. I like the voice of women to be heard and for women to be respected, and all necessary safety should be put out as well’ (May). So began my interview with May. She started by telling me why she wanted to take part in the research. She created a framework of resistance 33

Laura Spence, and Rene Schmidpeter, ‘SMEs, Social Capital and Common Good’, Journal of Business Ethics 45,1 (2003), 93-408 (97). 34 Natasha Mauthner, and Andrea Doucet, ‘Reflections on a Voice-Centred Relational Method: Analysing Maternal and Domestic Voices’, in Feminist Dilemmas in Qualitative Research, ed. by Jane Ribbens and Rosalind Edwards (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 110-46. 35 Gender-based discrimination in asylum claims has been widely documented. See Asylum Aid, ‘Unsustainable: The Quality of Initial Decision-Making in Women’s Asylum Claims’, Report (London: Asylum Aid, 2011); Heaven Crawley, Refugees and Gender: Law and Process (Bristol: Jordan Publishing, 2001), p. 5; and Heaven Crawley, ‘Engendering the State in Refugee Women’s Claim for Asylum’, in States of Conflict: Gender, Violence and Resistance, ed. by Susie Jacobs., Ruth Jacobson., and Jennifer Marchback. For a focus on credibility, see James Sweeney, ‘Credibility, Proof and Refugee Law’, International Journal of Refugee Law. 21, 2 (2009), 700-26.

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from the outset of her account, raising the issue that women’s voices have not been respected or heard. She started her narrative of resistance with a clear standpoint of improving respect for women. May described in detail how she was born into a wealthy, loving home and the memory of her father looms large in her story of childhood, which is full of safety, love and education. Whilst May’s initial constructs of her childhood are situated within a loving family, the death of her father meant the wealth the family had known was no longer available and living in acute poverty was a sharp contrast. May told me the family moved to a single room, eventually becoming homeless; she makes a stark statement: ‘poverty killed my brother’, who, she goes on to explain, died on the street because their mother and her could not buy him the medication that he needed. Her mother also fell ill and eventually died, leaving May alone without any family to protect her. May believes that because she was a girl, isolated, lacking family protection and living in poverty, at 17 years old she was trafficked36 from Nigeria and exploited, spending several years in economic and sexual servitude37 in the UK. Gender and poverty are prominent ideas in May’s narrative and it is these understandings which formed a critical influence on her meanings of broader power relations. However, May’s resistance lies in her account of overcoming the acute and extreme power constraints imposed on her life. In May’s narrative, the sexual violence and economic exploitation she experienced led her to live her life with determination and belief in herself, as well as to improve her own life and those of other women: ‘… no matter who you are, no matter where you are, all you have to do is have a view, walk towards it and be determined. The sky will be your starting point… I believe there is nothing you cannot do no matter what you go through in life’ (May). May assumes responsibility for witnessing and offering a testimony to the life of a woman seeking asylum that she feels is generally unrecognised 36

‘Human Trafficking involves an act of recruiting, transporting, transferring, harbouring or receiving a person through a use of force, coercion or other means, for the purpose of exploiting them’. See United Nations. 2012. Human Trafficking. http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/human-trafficking/what-is-human-trafficking. html. Accessed October 26. 37 ‘Sexual or economic exploitation is considered a contemporary form of slavery, and a serious violation of women’s human rights’. See United Nations Division for the advancement of women. 2005. Violence against women: Good practices in combating and eliminating violence against women. http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/egm/vaw-gp-2005/docs/experts/okojie. trafficking.pdf. Accessed October 25.

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or marginalised. Her statements are personal, but also political in that she derives a sense of being part of a narrative that is larger than her own account and brings her into relation with other women. May’s views are echoed by Naomi, who feels that there are lessons to be learned from her narrative: ‘I’m one of the women whom people should read my story … I thought I should contribute to this research so that my story can be part of a lesson… So what I want in my life, I want to keep fighting, speaking out and struggling for what is right for all women’ (Naomi). Both May and Naomi sought to use their stories in solidarity with other women and a commitment to improving the situation of women. Accounts of their experiences, their bodies and voices, position them as witnesses with a testimony. The purpose for telling the narrative comes from their persecution and resistance. In a similar way to Frank’s ‘quest narratives’,38 so narratives of resistance can be identified: ‘the teller has been given something by the experience, usually some insight that must be passed on to others’.39 Thus, these narratives are a quest for the participant and a call that the narrative itself is a form of resistance. My presence as the listener was also important as I was positioned as a witness. Frank asserts: ‘Witnessing always implies a relationship; I tell myself stories all the time, but I cannot testify to myself alone. Part of what turns stories into testimony is the call made upon another person to receive that testimony’.40 May challenges the listener to witness and to take action; her account was offered to be heard and responded to: ‘What I would just like to say is I would like you use me as a case study… to enlighten people about refugee and most especially about women refugee… I think use this opportunity now, maybe to pass the information’ (May). When these women speak about their resistance, it is clear that the narrative has become a core component of who they are and a source of meaning for life. Narratives of resistance are vital to survival, to finding meaning in atrocities and to sustaining commitment to improving the lives of women everywhere. What is important is that it is these women, seeking asylum, who are telling these stories, asking to be listened to and letting others know that resistance is possible.

38

Arthur Frank, The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics (Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 1995). 39 Frank, The Wounded Storyteller , p. 118. 40 Frank, The Wounded Storyteller , p. 143.

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Narratives of Resistance The narratives presented below attempt to explore a number of different aspects of resistance without presupposing any sort of hierarchy of significance. I found that the women did not have one homogenised story of resistance but rather provided versions of resistance, foregrounding women’s varied multiplicities of how they enact resistance in different forms. Locating narratives of resistance as a fundamentally social process, the women’s accounts seek to illuminate how resistance enabled survival; precarious and uncertain; encompassing the interplay of luck and measured calculation, agency and determination, the interdependence of human beings upon one another for resistance itself. Baelli Much of Baelli’s description of her life featured her childhood in Senegal; the acute poverty in which she and her father, mother and sister lived and her low status as a girl and young woman. Her interpretation of why things happened and how people behaved is linked to these central issues. Baelli told me that when she was 22 years old she was sold for money by her father to his friend and forced to marry a man much older than her. What was critical for Baelli was that her mother could not protect her. She indicated the deep importance of her mother, as well as her mother’s powerlessness and low status. Baelli too felt powerless. Baelli felt these issues were directly related to the subordinate positioning of women in poverty in Senegal. She felt she had been victimised and forced to endure female genital mutilation41 because her husband insisted she needed to be ‘cut’ to marry him, she was then repeatedly raped by her husband. Her physical and mental health quickly deteriorated and she tried to resist: ‘I fled three times and have been caught three times; my husband’s a very powerful man’ (Baelli).

41

‘Female genital mutilation (FGM) includes procedures that intentionally alter or cause injury to the female genital organs for non-medical reasons. The procedure has no health benefits for girls and women. About 140 million girls and women worldwide are currently living with the consequences of FGM. FGM is mostly carried out on young girls sometime between infancy and age 15. In Africa an estimated 92 million girls 10 years old and above have undergone FGM. FGM is a violation of the human rights of girls and women’. See World Health Organisation. 2012. Female Genital Mutilation. http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs241/en. Accessed October 19.

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Baelli identifies her positioning in the narrative as resisting the power of her husband. Fleeing her husband’s home was a huge act of resistance. She contravened the expectations of both her family and community. She resisted the religious and cultural expectations. She defied her husband, who she said ‘owned’ her. She tried to find shelter in villages but every time she was betrayed and forced to return to her husband; yet she resisted again and again. It was when a friend came to support her with medical assistance that she was smuggled out of the country and came to the UK. Unaware of her rights or the asylum system, Baelli was trafficked for sexual exploitation and frequently drugged when she arrived to the UK. Being drugged was a powerful reoccurring event which was highlighted in her narrative along with being threatened about her lack of immigration status. Baelli felt she could do very little to escape the traffickers, believing she was ‘illegal’ and feeling powerless. Despite the constraints imposed on her, Baelli attempted to resist: So one day he gives me this liquid and he told me to drink it, drink. I decided I wouldn’t drink it. I made out that I’d drank it but I stuck it by my foot so that I wouldn’t have this in me. I made out I’d drank it. He thought I’d drank it but I hadn’t. He went to his room and I took the cup and I hid it in my bra and I went to my room. (Baelli)

Baelli’s story suggests she subverted a powerfully oppressive situation. Whilst this act did not prevent her from being raped, Baelli’s narrative of resistance positioned her as someone with the power to suggest that even in the most severe and overpowering situations, power relations can be subverted, are negotiable and contestable. Shimmar Shimmar came to the UK when she was 17 years old, a child travelling on an adult passport for marriage. Central to Shimmar’s narrative was a moral code of honour that was closely linked to her arranged marriage. The moral code was a powerful way of perpetuating unequal structures of power within which Shimmar felt she had been married. She also felt her marriage was founded on the economic well-being of the family. Shimmar gave accounts of victimisation; violence and cruelty at the hands of her husband and in-laws who hit her, starved her and locked her in their house. One of the central concerns for Shimmar was the unequal power relations she had to her in-laws and husband, bound by the wider family which enforced the marriage. She represented these inequalities by sharp contrasts such as how she slept on the kitchen floor whilst her husband was out most evenings with his British girlfriends and how she

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was not allowed to even touch the telephone to call home, whilst her mother-in-law called Shimmar’s extended family to tell them Shimmar was happy and well. Despite victimisation, Shimmar gave a narrative of resistance in which she recounted her small acts to improve her situation such as verbal challenges to her husband about his girlfriends; challenging the ways in which the family held authority and power, and seeking to undermine how the family benefited from her subordination. She spoke of small unnoticed acts which helped her retain a sense of resistance: sitting down which she was forbidden to do; eating some spinach from the fridge; and putting her hand on the telephone. Shimmar was also concerned with distancing herself from the culture and traditions she perceived she had been born into. Shimmar repeatedly suggested that her narrative was very different from the narratives of her in-laws, husband and family: I really struggled in my life and it was in just 17 when I came in UK, was really small girl... I want to struggle in my life. I want to set my life. If there something wrong in your life then you have to die? My thinking not like that. If someone do wrong to you, if someone broken your life you have to again stand up you have to show him look you broke my life but I still good. (Shimmar).

Shimmar actively considered, rejected and resisted the narratives that were told to her in her married family and by her wider family who she says would not allow her to come back to India because she ‘broke’ her life by leaving her husband and in-laws. What is striking about Shimmar’s narrative is her resisting the imposed narrative of a ‘broken’ life and providing another account about herself as ‘still good’. Shimmar’s narrative values resistance and offers her a way of making meaning from her situation and her life. She sees the contradiction resistance holds for structures of inequality within families and where moral codes of honour and gender create a powerful narrative. Lucy Lucy identified herself as a human rights activist who had spent her whole life politically active. Her narrative of resistance manifested in many different ways, including accounts of covert activity which utilised her ‘low status’ as a woman who, as such, would be less likely to be searched, checked, stopped or questioned. This self-representation is particularly interesting because it explores an alternative account whereby the subordination of women is specifically exploited to take part in

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resistance activities. Lucy also provided specific examples of resistance activity which included hiding people to protect them, passing messages between groups and individuals, providing training and moving between different villages distributing leaflets and campaign information. However, Lucy feels the communities within which so much of her resistance activity took place have been a central cause of her seeking asylum in the UK: In my own community I’ve been forced out, by my own community, my family also, my extended family because they call me a traitor… There was some ethnic cleansing after the elections and my community they get targeted as a smaller community in our area and in two days they had killed about forty people, but I chose not to be on the other side of my community and I helped the policing of evacuating the trapped people, ahhh I stayed with them in the displaced people’s camps, and then after that, after a coalition government was established, they formed a tribunal that was collecting information on what really caused the violence and I testified to that tribunal. (Lucy).

Lucy was a witness as part of an international war crimes tribunal, but her name was revealed at the tribunal so she felt it was necessary for her to leave the country and claim asylum in the UK. Despite describing the acute loss she feels now living in the UK, longing for her homeland and the pain of living apart from her children, the importance she places on resistance and being someone who is active in resistance is present across her narrative. Lucy’s narrative indicates the profound sense of social responsibility that she feels in resistance which is located in her keen sense of a human rights discourse. Zain Zain’s whole story was replete with resistance and expressions of difference which were singularly important to her. She repeatedly talked about being subversive by wearing non-conformist dress-code in Pakistan, as well as smoking in public: ...I wear the pent shirt like a boy. So that’s why in my country they make issue for me as being a Muslim. Many men you know beaten me and they told me and insist me, you should change your get-up... I don’t accept their things on woman. I challenge also them. I will never change my mind because I am smoking on the street ... I say no. I will never follow. It’s my life and I want to follow my life my own style. (Zain).

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Zain positioned herself as actively engaged in negotiating power that she felt controlled women’s sexuality and dress code. Zain sought to bring awareness to the demands on women to be properly attired and chaste. She was critical of this type of power which she viewed as being asserted over women to control them and their sexuality. Zain’s construction of herself also offered an important significance of sexual difference, viewing this as a form of resistance itself. Zain showed me her injuries and spoke about these as the result of extreme violence and very little state protection: ‘They beaten me with rod, with cricket bat. My hand they also broken. My leg also broken by them, my feet also. … So very complicated life in Pakistan, but very bravely, if I may say bravely, I do fight with them...’ (Zain). Her narrative included accounts of persecution that directly related to how she was positioned as a woman who broke state-sanctioned rules and regulations. She was keen to identify that her behaviour did not conform to the imposed moral or ethical standards. Zain was defiant and told me she would have remained in Pakistan despite being sentenced to death by stoning, however, she felt that threats to her sister and her sister’s children meant that she eventually came to the UK to claim asylum. Naomi Naomi provided an account of her own persecution and the victimisation of her daughter. Her emphasis was on speaking out against and resisting the collective suffering of women in Malawi. Naomi constructs women’s situations as social, rather than individual. Her narrative resists the individualisation of women’s lives and seeks to highlight the role society has played in creating and compounding the abuse of women in Malawi. She locates her narrative of the collective suffering of women in relation to the power structures of family and society. She argues that family and society have control over women’s lives through a series of powerful narratives: I’m giving an example my country, there a lot of women who are suffering I can say… Even if we have a horrible husband, even if he beats you, even if you’re swollen, even your parents teach you not to say ‘my husband has beaten me’ but maybe ‘I bumped into the wall’. Even if he breaks your tooth, you can say ‘I was eating a sugar cane and it has broken my tooth’ and nobody should know what is happening inside your house, inside your family… the woman is not supposed to speak about it’ (Naomi).

Naomi sought to expose the narratives told within communities that sustain and perpetuate violence and persecution of women. She highlights

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how powerful family and community narratives mask the experiences of women in Malawi. In doing so, she elevates her own consciousness and understanding of how power operates for women in Malawi and the limitations of narratives available to women. Her own account is a direct challenge and act of resistance to these existing power systems and oppressive narratives.

Discussion and Conclusion The stories of the women in this study include accounts of victimisation, including fear of persecution which led these women to claim asylum in the UK. Yet May, Baelli, Shimmar, Lucy, Zain and Naomi’s narratives are also accounts of resistance; women and girls resisting the uniformity of family life; resisting community and ethnic expectations; resisting cultural and religious practices; and resisting gendered and sexual expectations. Embedded within these stories were the agentic capacities of resistance, drawn on from individual and collective wisdom and ingenuity, their will to survive, and at times the acute awareness of social injustices, constraints and complex power relations within which women live around the globe. The women did not just characterise their lives as victims or resistors, but represented a complex interplay between these subjective positions. As I listened to and analysed these women’s accounts, I was aware that their discourses did not fit easily within the powerful constructions of women seeking asylum. Women asylum seekers may live in seemingly unchangeable power relations and have been victimised, yet their narratives offer insights into resistance; personal and social, simultaneously. These narratives of resistance give accounts of thoughts, gestures, actions and events that challenged the power and structural constraints of the women’s lives, denying a simplistic victim story. This suggests that women seeking asylum produce and reproduce narratives about the social world. In doing so, narratives of resistance illuminate women’s abilities to evaluate, act, negotiate and at times subvert power relations despite persecution and victimisation. The narrators explicitly and implicitly ask us to consider how else stories about women seeking asylum could be and are told. As Hitchcock asserts: ‘their significance, however, does not reside in the fact of their victimisation, but in the possibility that their agency will transform their

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lived relations’.42 So in writing this chapter I want to offer a recognition of narratives and their potential to appreciate difference; to view the construction of power as relational rather than absolute and to see the possibility for alternative arrangements of power.43 Narratives of resistance open up possibilities for all the other accounts that might come from a ‘new’ narrative and for change in women’s own ways and on their own terms. What emerges is that women asylum seeker narratives can disrupt the status quo, preserving the ability to negotiate power, retaining some of the ‘practical and symbolic attitudes of resistance’.44 Central to this approach and belief is the uncontrollable capacity of women and girls to act, gesture, speak, think, dream and resist. As Aristizabal and Lefer assert: ‘If you have lived through physical or emotional violence and survived, you have resisted the attempt to extinguish your being’.45 The women all gave accounts of resisting their life being extinguished by eventually seeking protection in the UK and this study seeks to value and acknowledge their narratives.

42

Peter Hitchcock, Dialogics of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 8. 43 Bosworth, Engendering Resistance, 1999. 44 Bosworth, Engendering Resistance, p. 30. 45 Hector Aristizabal and Diane Lefer, The Blessing Next to the Wound: A Story of Art, Activism, and Transformation (New York: Lantern Books, 2010).

NARRATING IDENTITY IN NAJAT EL HACHMI’S L’ÚLTIM PATRIARCA H. ROSI SONG

With the publication of L’últim patriarca [‘The Last Patriarch’], a novel awarded in 2008 the prestigious Catalan Premi Ramon Llull, Moroccan-born writer Najat El Hachmi has become the face of a small new literary community slowly emerging in Catalonia and the rest of Spain.1 As part of a group of writers from an immigrant background, the work of El Hachmi moves beyond the traditionally perceived foreign writer in Spain who hails from Latin America and shares a similar (if not equal) linguistic and religious tradition. Breaking with this frame of reference, Spanish contemporary narrative has seen the publication of works by writers like Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, Victor Omgbá and Laila Karrouch.2 Ndongo-Bidyogo is the author of Las tinieblas de tu memoria negra (1987) [Shadows of Your Black Memory, 2007] and El metro (2007) [‘The Subway’], both written in Spanish. Omgbá is the author of Callela sen saída. O dilema dun inmigrante (2001) [‘Dead End. The Dilemma of an Immigrant’] written in Galician, and Karrouch produced the biographical text written in Catalan, De Nador a Vic (2004) [‘From Nador to Vic’].3 In the works of these writers, the experience of immigration comes alive and, in the case of L’últim patriarca , the reader witnesses a collision between 1 Najat El Hachmi, L’últim patriarca (Barcelona: Planeta, 2008). All quotations for this essay come from the English translation by Peter Bush, The Last Patriarch (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010). 2 El Hachmi has recently published a new novel, La caçadora de cossos [‘The Huntress of Bodies’] (Barcelona: Columna, 2011) which does not directly deal with immigration, but identifies in the narrative voice issues of difference and marginalisation from society. 3 Interestingly, Karrouch’s work was first published as part of a youth collection and has since been read by pupils in high schools in Spain. Similarly, Omgbá’s novel has been redesigned and published as part of a literary series for young readers. The pedagogical use of both works in schools to raise awareness about immigration reflects the ongoing negotiation with difference in Spanish society.

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Narrating Identity in Najat El Hachmi’s L’últim patriarca

two worlds and their respective cultures, and between two generations, that of a father and his daughter caught between them. In El Hachmi’s work, we read the story of Mimoun, the unlikely patriarch, narrated through the voice of his daughter, whose own journey from Morocco to a Catalonian town parallels her father’s passage from his childhood in his hometown through the Mediterranean strait to arrive in Spain and, eventually Catalonia. The daughter, whose name we never learn, serves as an assertive narrator who leads us through the history of her father and the eventual breakdown of a (corrupted) patriarchal model. She weaves a genealogy of family stories amid her own intimate narrative, one that becomes increasingly complicated, balancing her relationship with the father and her own sense of being trapped in a space where her only sense of order is brought by a methodical reading of a Catalan dictionary, from the letter A to the letter Z. Originally written in Catalan, the Spanish translation was published shortly after the Ramon Llull award, with the title El último patriarca , translated by Rosa Marías Prats, whose work was praised both by critics and by the author herself. Despite all the publicity she received with the publication of this novel, El Hachmi’s earlier book, a biographical text that narrates in the first person her experiences growing up as an immigrant in the Catalonian town Vic, has never been translated as it is considered too ‘catalanista’. 4 Curiously, however, another autobiographical text, De Nador a Vic (Premi Columna Jove 2004), by Laila Kerrouch, an AmazighMoroccan-Catalan author like El Hachmi, that also narrates the author’s experience growing up as an immigrant in Vic, has been translated into Spanish with the title Laila . According to Ricci, Kerrouch’s book, both in Spanish and Catalan, ‘se ha convertido en una referencia literaria para el profesorado (especialmente de secundaria) en la sección de lecturas dedicada a la multiculturalidad’ [‘has become a reference to high school teachers looking for reading material on multiculturalism’].5 The uneven response to the work of these authors reflects the relationship between Spanish and its peripheral languages in Spain, for the country still struggles with the reality of its own diversity. As a new literature gets forged by those who arrived as immigrants to the Peninsula or were born to immigrant parents, the concept of hybridity moves beyond the issue of migration and plural cultural identities, opening a new perspective into existing cultural contact zones complicated now by ethnicity, gender and 4

Cristián H. Ricci, ‘L’últim patriarca de Najat El Hachmi y el forjamiento de una identidad amazigh-catalana’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11, 1 (2010), 7191 (p. 90). 5 Ricci, ‘L’últim patriarca de Najat El Hachmi’, pp. 89-90.

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the perceived hierarchy between languages in the context of national identity in Spain. Thinking of this complexity, Azade Seyhan has correctly pointed out the possibilities of literary expressions as products of contemporary sociopolitical formations that ‘offer critical insights into the manifold meanings of history’.6 At the beginning of my essay, I identified Najat El Hachmi as belonging to a group of writers that do not fit the image of the foreign writer in Spain who hails from Latin America and shares a similar (if not equal) linguistic and religious tradition.7 This shift is important to consider as it provides an interesting point of departure for my reading of El Hachmi’s work.8 Non-Spanish writers who have previously published in Spain in Spanish have not challenged the cultural and linguistic commonality laid down by the country’s colonial history. However, as immigrants from non-Spanish-speaking countries have started participating in the country’s literary and cultural production, the existing criteria for understanding (or framing) such works provide room for much confusion. As evinced in an interview given in Spanish by El Hachmi in May 2008 to the radio programme ‘A vivir que son dos días’ (roughly translated as ‘Let’s enjoy life as it is very short’) with Montserrat Domínguez of Cadena SER, this lack of comprehension reveals the absence of a previous 6

Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 5. 7 Here I am thinking about the long list of Latin-American writers that have travelled and resided on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps the most famous group of writers with this experience is the one associated with the Latin American literary boom, writers like Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa who have spent time in Barcelona. Vargas Llosa later adopted Spanish citizenship and now resides in Madrid. A famous resident of Catalonia was the now deceased Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño. A younger generation of writers who are currently living in Spain includes, among many others, Juan Gabriel Vázquez, Carlos Franz and Ángela Becerra. This literary relationship between Latin-American writers and the publishing world in Spain has been analysed in Mario Santana, Foreigners in the Homeland: The Spanish American New Novel in Spain, 1962-1974 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000). 8 I am reacting here to the overwhelming attention paid to the linguistic diversity and choice of immigrant writers in Spain (and in the rest of Europe). Aitana Guia correctly criticises this emphasis, as it perpetuates the legacy or ‘migratory’ stigma of people who have been born, raised, educated and socialised in a European country. See ‘De lenguas y horizontes. Europa vista por sus escritores inmigrantes de cultural islámica’ in Extravío. Revista electrónica de literatura comparada , 5, Universitat de Valencia (http://www.uv.es/extravio), 31-48 (p. 34). [Accessed on 31 January 2013].

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literary reference capable of explaining this new cultural output. It also demonstrates the inexperience of professionals in media and culture when it comes to grasping issues regarding linguistic, cultural and ethnic differences.9 In this interview, which took place shortly after the publication of the Spanish translation of El Hachmi’s novel from Catalan, the presentation of the writer and the framing of her work exposed a few key misunderstandings. Before the author’s participation in the discussion during the programme, the presenter briefly introduced her work and invited panel participants to engage in conversation with El Hachmi on the publication of her novel in Spanish. While on the radio programme’s website the author is described as a Moroccan writer (‘escritora marroquí’) residing in Barcelona, in the radio programme itself Domínguez introduces her as a young Catalan (‘catalana’) writer. The presenter, after articulating this last thought, makes a brief pause to then emphatically affirm the use of such a qualifier, explaining that she does so, because the author is, after all, Catalan (‘porque lo es’). The incongruity between these two labels is meaningful, but the brief pause is also significant. The discussion becomes noteworthy when, before the author joins the conversation, Domínguez invites her two contributors, Manuel Berástegui and Oscar López, to provide the audience with a context for El Hachmi, hinting at a ‘phenomenon’, a singular situation in which writers choose to write in a language different from their first one. López quickly takes on the term ‘phenomenon’ and proceeds to explain that despite the fact that the mother tongue is the one that emotionally maps one’s identity, some writers make the choice to write in a different language. Such a decision is explained by immigration at an earlier age or as a choice later in life after having adapted to a new language. He mentions the case of Nabokov, for instance, who later in life, decided not to write in Russian any longer.10 He 9

This interview is still available online through the literary blog El Boomeran(g) at http://www.elboomeran.com/audio/55/najat-el-hachmi/. Historically speaking, however, this is not a new experience in Spanish history. Studies like Disorientations: Spanish Colonialism in Africa and the Performance of Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008) by Susan Martin-Márquez and The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigration (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008) by Daniela Flesler examine the connection between Spain and Africa and the way difference has been negotiated in the peninsula. The fact that this history has been mostly forgotten or is not present in today’s Spanish memory is testament to the ideological manipulation suffered by the country under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco and his effort to homogenise Spanish nationalism as a way to aspire to its imperial past. 10 We could observe here that Nabokov, in fact, grew up trilingual, even learning English before Russian. In his case, his use of English could be considered a

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even refers to the case of Junot Díaz who is presented as a writer who chooses to write in ‘Spanglish’. López seems baffled by this ‘choice’, and is sure that this decision is an important one that needs to be examined more closely. Not surprisingly, once El Hachmi is invited to respond to these comments about her decision to write in Catalan, she quickly and even categorically rejects the idea of a ‘choice’. She explains that writing in Catalan is normal, not a conscious decision or a question to be contemplated. What is significant about this exchange is the perception by the presenter and the audience of El Hachmi’s ‘foreignness’ and their reference to her linguistic ‘decision’. In this case, the use of Catalan points to a doubly estranging effect. She is, after all, someone born outside of Spain whose mother tongue is not Spanish. She is also a resident of Catalonia and a speaker of its language, which has its own literary tradition that sets it apart from Castilian literature and culture, even though they are both part of Spain.11 This latter fact means that every Catalan is also a fluent speaker of Spanish, as is the case with El Hachmi. In the interview with the author, conducted in Spanish, the writer’s use of Catalan ends up being presented (and explained) as a choice, rather than as part of her own identity. Unfortunately, the space between Catalan and Spanish cannot be mediated by her experience bridging both languages and cultures. Curiously, her ‘foreign’ bilingualism only serves to distance Catalan from Spanish and to present El Hachmi as a writer who does not belong to Spanish, or even Catalan literature, since her status of immigrant writer seems to trump any other category.12 The assumption about how and why one chooses to deploy a certain language presupposes an essentialist relationship between language and identity, a strong bond that permeates much of our understanding of difference, race and culture. In El Hachmi’s work, a discussion of language becomes relevant for the meaning it acquires: first, as a space of evasion and personal protection, and second, as a tool for social and choice, but more accurately, a testament to the languages in which he was educated. 11 The debate about the relationship between these literatures became public a few years ago when Catalonia was the guest of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2007. Newspaper columns before the event were filled with discussions about what qualified as Catalan or Spanish literature, or whether classification depended on the language used by the writers, given that some Catalan writers chose to publish in Spanish and others in Catalan. 12 The literary category she belongs to currently could be identified as that of an immigrant literature.

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cultural acceptance that in reality works as one of constant rejection. In this context, the often-strained relationship between Catalan (and the Catalonian government’s linguistic policies since the late 1970s) and Spanish functions on another level of rejection, or another challenge that immigrants to Spain need to face. Celaya-Carrillo, for instance, recalls the way Catalan linguistic policy affected domestic migration from Andalucia to the region and, in turn, blames Catalan nationalism as the reason why El Hachmi is refused the right to consider herself Catalan.13 In an article about immigration in Spain, the anthropologist MariaÀngels Roque explains that in the case of Catalonia, its socio-economic characteristics imply a model of integration based on the possibility of upward social mobility and a unifying cultural mark. In other words, the Catalan language has progressively become a symbol of the process of integration and Catalan continues to be an important factor of this region’s identity, because it represents the historical continuation of Catalonia.14 Before the publication of L’últim patriarca , El Hachmi published an autobiographical text entitled Jo també sóc catalana (2004) [‘I am also Catalan’], where she criticises the resistance to seeing and understanding the use of Catalan by immigrants as ‘normal’ and part of their natural process of intellectual and cultural formation, especially for those who arrived in the peninsula at a young age. 15 In her account, the author’s relationship with Catalan is a frustrating one, especially because of the assumption she encounters every day that she does not speak it. El Hachmi explains that this impression is based on her physical appearance, a situation that keeps turning her into a newcomer to Catalonia despite her arrival in the region sixteen years earlier, ‘sempre nouvinguda des de fa setze anys’ [‘always a newcomer since sixteen years ago’].16 She writes about her frustration and impatience, and narrates incidents in which she is unable to hold back: ‘Jo també el parlo, sap? I quasi tots el marroquins d’aquesta edat, si això es el que vol dir, parlen la seva llengua perfectament, és la llengua de l’escola, si no ho recordo malament’ [‘I also speak it, you know? And almost all of the Moroccans of this age, if that’s 13

Beatriz Celaya-Carrillo, ‘Pánicos racistas: refleciones sobre la inmigración en Cataluña y España a partir de un texto de Najat El Hachmi’, MLN, 126, 2 (March 2011), 344-65 (p. 353). 14 Maria-Àngels Roque, ‘Els reptes de la immigració. La interculturalitat com a repte i com a oportunitat’, in Marta Casas (ed.), Fills i fille de families immigrades a les escoles catalanes (Barcelona: IEA Med, 2004), pp. 33, 34. 15 Najat El Hachmi, Jo també sóc catalane (2004; Barcelona: Columna Edicions, 2008). Translations from Catalan to English are my own. 16 El Hachmi, Jo també sóc catalane, p. 61.

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how you want to say it, they speak your language perfectly, they teach it and speak it in the schools if I am not mistaken’].17 On another occasion, in an interview with the newspaper El País, El Hachmi explains that the title of her book, Jo també sóc catalana cannot, in fact, be considered ‘contundente, porque cuando llevas 20 años viviendo en un lugar, cansa mucho que todavía se te considere una extranjera’ [‘convincing, because when one has lived 20 years in a place, it is exhausting to still be considered a foreigner’].18 The challenges confronted by the writer provide a good perspective from which to examine some of the rhetoric that exists around the experience of immigrants in Catalonia, and by extension, Spain, where despite good intentions and sociological explanations about immigration, certain misconceptions and characterisations persist. In fact, the notion of foreignness in Catalonia represents an interesting twist for the immigrant as the bilingual reality challenges the perception around his or her adaptation into both cultures. If what gains general social and cultural acceptance in Spanish society is the immigrant’s capacity to master and function in Spanish (or, more specifically, Castilian), newcomers to the different regions of Spain face a special challenge to embrace the country’s linguistic and cultural plurality. In other words, to learn Catalan or Galician in Spain is seen, outside of these areas, as a type of rejection of Spanish culture in general. Even more frustrating, as the case of El Hachmi illustrates, speaking Catalan makes her into, on the one hand, an oddity from the perspective of Castilian-speaking Spaniards, and on the other, from the standpoint of a Catalonian, a constant suspect in her mastery of the language. The latter case is perfectly captured by the incident that El Hachmi refers to when she tries to correct a friend in her Catalan use of the word ‘encens’ [‘incense’]: ‘Sí home, m’ho diràs a mic que sóc catalana’ [‘Yeah, right, you’ll tell me that I’m Catalan’].19 Here the supposition is that an immigrant’s linguistic skill is always below that of the native. From this position, El Hachmi’s negotiation between Castilian, Catalan and Amazigh provides a good case from which to consider some of the rhetoric that exists around the linguistic and cultural experience of immigrants in their ‘host’ society. Montserrat Mallol argues that despite 17

El Hachmi, Jo també sóc catalane, p. 51. Najat El Hachmi, ‘He intentado alejarme de unos orígenes que duelen,’ El País, 2 February, 2008. (http://elpais.com/diario/2008/02/02/cultura/1201906804_850215.html). [Accessed on 3 May 2010]. 19 El Hachmi, Jo també sóc catalane, p. 53. 18

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good intentions and sociological explanations about immigration, the encounter between different people is always worded through implications of social alarm, aggression, conflict and invasion.20 In past years, under the rubric of negotiating diversity and even models of intervention, Spain has become fluent in terminology that seeks to capture the social change that is taking place in its regionally diverse societies. Terms like cultural diversity, multiculturalism, ‘integración pluricultural’ [‘pluricultural integration’] and, more recently, ‘interculturalitad’ [‘interculturality’] have been used as a recognition of the role of culture in the negotiation of difference. The last concept, explains Mallol, is also employed to promote the idea of taking advantage of the ‘proximity’ between cultures. 21 In Spain, the terminology regarding multiculturalism has been imported from, among others, the British post-colonial model of encounter among cultures inspired by a positive notion of hybrid or multicultural identities. As Barbara Schaff reminds us, all of these terms denote flexibility, movement, mix and they are regarded as positive values within this context of mixed societies; even formerly negative notions of ‘hybridity’ are presently accepted as progressive concepts.22 Homi Bhabha’s articulation of this new space of encounter has, without any doubt, inspired a positive reading of the migrant experience, even its metaphor, ‘something new and recognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation’.23 Culture, as ‘signifying or symbolic activity,’ has been firmly centred in this new view of the changing nature of the public sphere. 24 Yet this emphasis on culture in the setting of diversity has been questioned, and interrogating the practice of multiculturalism can be useful to understand

20 Montserrat Mallol, ‘Interacció 2002, curso general: Políticas para la interculturalidad. Algunas reflexiones a modo de síntesis’, Diputació de Barcelona, Políticas para la interculturalidad (Barcelona: Editorial Milenio, 2004), pp. 17-23 (p. 17). 21 Mallol, ‘Interacció 2002’, p. 22. 22 Barbara Schaff, ‘Trying to Escape, Longing to Belong – Roots, Genes and Performativity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Hari Kunzru’s The Impressionist’, in Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (eds.), Transcultural English Studies: Theories, Fictions, Realities (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009), pp. 281-92 (p. 282). 23 Jonathan Rutherford, ‘The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha’, in Jonathan Rutherford (ed.), Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), pp. 207-21 (p. 211). 24 Rutherford, ‘The Third Space’, p. 210.

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its contradictions and the tension, as identified by Laura Moss, between poetics and politics.25 Of the many literary references present in El Hachmi’s L’últim patriarca , her mention of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) is significant. This novel has been analysed as a text that challenges the notion of an untroubled multicultural society, where most of the characters, belonging to different generations and holding a diversity of cultural beliefs, find themselves unable to feel at ‘home’. In fact, as Molly Thompson argues, ‘[w]hether “in-between”, “hyphenated”, or in the “third space”, all of these identities challenge the existence of a “happy multicultural land” as they connote transience, indeterminacy and “homelessness”.’ 26 Moreover, for Moss, there is also fear, a fear of assimilation and loss of culture and even Bhabha, in his early work, is careful to talk about cultural diversity, as there is always an element of containment, one that despite creating or acknowledging cultural diversity, also works as a containment of cultural difference, a view that later resonates in Žižek’s view of multiculturalism as a liberal racism.27 Language, in this case, does not work as the ideal vehicle for integration or acceptance, but rather enables a very conscientious understanding of the characters’ alienation. Author Mike Phillips is a strong critic of multiculturalism as a practice where migrants need to produce (or trace) their identities in order to narrate a pre-colonial and autonomous ethnicity, forced into a ‘position by a framework of popular racism’ and obliged to play the ‘drama of race’.28 Perhaps another way to phrase this is the obligation to ‘translate’ one’s identity through language, in this case, through a conscientious choice of a language capable of legitimising the immigrant’s place and belonging in the ‘host’ society. And within this context, ‘there is always a demand that the ethnic minorities should be framed within this “moment of arrival” – a moment which appears to value and privilege the arrival but which also is a much more powerful argument that defines cultures as separate and alien 25

Laura Moss, ‘The Politics of Everyday Hybridity: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, Wasafari, 29 (2003-6), 11-17 (p. 12). 26 Molly Thompson, ‘ “Happy Multicultural Land”? The Implications of an “Excess of Belonging” in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, in Kadija Sesay (ed.), Write Black, Write British: From Post-Colonial to Black British Literature (London: Hansib, 2005), pp. 122-40 (p. 124). 27 Moss, ‘The Politics of Everyday Hybridity’, p. 14; Rutherford, ‘The Third Space’, p. 208. 28 Mike Phillips, ‘Broken Borders – Migration, Modernity, and English Writing – Transcultural Transformation in the Heart of Europe’, in Schulze-Engler and Helff (eds.), Transcultural English Studies, pp. 134-49 (pp. 134-35, 146).

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to each other and extends the definition into the past’. 29 However, as Phillips points out, the translation of this moment into a narrative is nothing but fiction, and there is a responsibility to discover that the history of ethnic communities is not located in this narrative of arrival, but within the ‘routine daily negotiation about crossing boundaries and barriers, about expanding limits’.30 The forcing of a story of origin, as Thompson observes, reveals the impossibility of talking about ‘multiculturalism’, ‘belonging’ or ‘home’ without thinking about familial origins and historical genealogies.31 This unfeasibility explains the divided self, which is, in a way, the core of El Hachmi’s novel. This subjectivity has a special relationship with language, and as discussed above, it is also an element of the politics of so-called ‘multiculturalism’. The female protagonist and narrator’s account of her father – the figure of a decaying patriarch in L’últim patriarca – resonates within the criticism of cultural production identified within the context of whichever label we use, that of interculturalidad or multiculturalism. Yet, in this narration that captures the formation of the conflicted identity of the young protagonist (along with that of the father, another character at odds with his social and cultural context once he moves away from his village to Catalonia), language plays a pivotal role not only by documenting this process, but also by reflecting on itself and translating the contradictory nature of this conflict. Mimoun, the father, is a character that is constantly expressing his dissatisfaction even before his departure from his hometown and behaves badly when he does not get what he desires. When his own father tells him that the family does not have money for his wedding or the dowry, he pretends to kill himself. When confronted by his family, he replies with what the narrator identifies as his common response to his own action and those of others: ‘Llavors va dir allò que ell diu tan sovint: és que és en mi que ningú no pensa mai, sóc jo la víctima de tot plegat. Ho deia tan convençut i amb la sang pertot arreu que semblava que fos veritat’ [‘Then he came out with what says so often: I’m the one nobody ever thinks about, I’m the victim, I’m the victim in all of this. He said it with such conviction and so covered in blood it seemed it must be true’]. 32 The lack of understanding that the father complains about becomes part of the story of his arrival in Spain and the difficulty of his adjustment: ‘Els primers temps van ser difícils, explica sempre Mimoun, no us penseu pas que tot era com ara, que vosaltres ho teniu tot fet.’ 29

Phillips, ‘Broken Borders’, p. 143. Phillips, ‘Broken Borders’, p.144. 31 Thompson, ‘ “Happy Multicultural Land”?’, p. 124. 32 El Hachmi, L’últim patriarca , p. 60; The Last Patriarch, pp. 48-49. 30

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[‘Those first weeks were difficult, Mimoun always tells us, don’t think it was like it is now, when it’s all sorted for you’]. 33 The narrator also chooses to focus on narrating the linguistic struggle of his father: ‘Fins que no va saber demanar cap altra cosa, havia passat setmanes menjant entrepans de truita. Un entrepà de truita, si us plau. El seu oncle li deia que semblava una d’aquelles serps que només mengen ous de gallina i que no sabia fins llavors que tingués aquella fal•lera pels ous.’ [‘Until he found out how to order other things, he spent weeks eating omelette sandwiches. Un entrepà de truita, si us plau. His uncle said he was like a snake that only eats hens’ eggs and he’d never have imagined he was so fond of them’].34 In the narrator’s case, learning Catalan is first part of the process of adjusting to a new place. She recounts her father’s teaching and her struggle to reconcile her father’s words with what she was learning in school: ‘Ens va anar ensenyant les botigues del barri per quan haguéssim d’anar-hi a comprar. […] La fruiteria era la que estava més lluny, al costat del forn de pa on el pare ens va dir: una de mig. Nosaltres devíem intentar memoritzar: una de mig, pensant que tot allò volia dir ‹‹pa››. Vam estar anys pensant que ‹‹una de mig›› era igual a ‹‹pa››, jo preguntant-meper què a l’escola ens deien que pa es deia pa i no pas ‹‹una de mig››’ [‘He went on showing us the local shops for when we had to go shopping. […] The fruit shop was farthest away, next to the bakery where father said “half one”. We had to try to memorise “half one”, thinking that it meant “bread”. For years we thought that “half one” was the same as “bread”, and I wondered why at school they said bread was bread and not “half one”’].35 But her methodical learning of the new language is caused by the crisis between her father and mother, who after a particularly serious fight with her husband, starts physically diminishing: ‘La mare em va dir allò que tenia els budells a punt de tancar-se i que el metge li havia dit que si no menjava ja no hi hauria marxa enrere i ja no se li tornarien a obrir mai més. Que a qui se li tanquen els budells ja no pot viure perquè no pot menjar. O això és el que ella va entendre de la traducció del pare. Jo, que no sabia quan s’acabaria tot allò, vaig començar a llegir el diccionari.’ [‘Mother told me her intestines were on the point of shutting down and the doctor said if she didn’t start eating there’d be no going back and they’d never open up again. That if your intestines close down, you can’t live because you can’t eat. Or at least that’s what she gleaned from father’s translation. I, who didn’t know when it would all end, started to read the 33

El Hachmi, L’últim patriarca , p. 84; The Last Patriarch, p. 71 Ibid., p. 85; ibid., p. 72. 35 Ibid., pp. 171-72; ibid., pp. 151-52. 34

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dictionary’].36 This coping mechanism results in a linguistic competency that allows her to do crosswords while she waits for her father playing the slot machine at the neighbourhood bar or to help her mother with her shopping: ‘L’amo del bar feia Manel, la teva filla està fent els passatemps del diari! Y ell devia dir i què o que no ho sabeu, que és most llesta, ella?’ [‘The boss of the bar said, Manel, your daughter’s doing all the word games in the newspaper! And he probably said so what, don’t you know she’s a very clever girl?’].37 But as this linguistic ability opens her world and changes her life, she is never sure about it: ‘Jo ho vaig explicar a l’escola: aquest any ja celebrem el Nadal, i tothom es devia pensar, mira ja són como d’aquí, aquests, quin pare més obert que tenen. Jo no sabia si aquella mena de festes eren com nosaltres les havíem organitzades.’ [‘I told them at school: we’re celebrating Christmas this year, and everybody must have thought, look, these people belong here now, what an openminded father they’ve got. I didn’t know if their type of party was what we organised’]. 38 What becomes apparent is that the narrator’s increasing fluency in Catalan does little to enhance her cultural comprehension or the understanding of her life (and that of her family) from the perspective of the townspeople. Jonathan Rutherford, writing about identity, observes that ‘[i]dentification, if it is to be productive, can never be with some static and unchanged object. It is an interchange between self and structure, a transforming process’.39 The idea of a process appears in El Hachmi’s novel through a specific deployment of language (and the ‘choice’ it represents politically in the character’s new home). As suggested above, when the female protagonist picks up a Catalan dictionary to start reading it from the first page, and along the way transforms the act of reading into a personal journey, she is ultimately changed. If the reason this exercise is useful is because it distracts her from the family crisis that she is suffering, Catalan and the process of learning it also provide what is lacking in her own everyday existence: a knowledge that can be measured materially, methodically and concisely. 40 During this time, the young protagonist dreams of being a ‘supermana’ [a female version of Superman] with a supernatural capacity to fix what is wrong with her life and in the lives of her loved ones. The fact that she finds Catalan at this time and uses it as a 36

Ibid., p. 180; ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 183; ibid., pp. 162-63. 38 Ibid., p. 201; ibid., p. 181. 39 John Rutherford, ‘A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference’, in Identity, pp. 9-27 (p. 14). 40 Even if this acquired knowledge is not perfect, as discussed before. 37

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shield and even a weapon to deal with her daily challenges imbues this language with almost mystical powers. In El Hachmi’s novel, language becomes a space of identity formation, and once the protagonist is able to narrate and translate into this new language what surrounds her, what is palpable and real, she attains a new understanding of the world. Speaking of buying yogurts at the supermarket for example, she says ‘Un dia en vam descobrir amb trossos de fruita, els que eren ‹‹amb›› i no pas ‹‹de››. El món s'obria davant nostre’ [‘One day we found they also made them with bits of real fruit, the ones that said “with” and not “flavoured”. The world was opening up before us.’]41 As transformative as language is, however, the fact is, sadly, that the protagonist’s change occurs within the unchanging structure of the dictionary, a configuration where language is organised, defined, catalogued and classified, in essence a static body despite its changes through new words or linguistic turns. As we learn of the narrator’s experience of learning to do crosswords and word games and following new customs with the accompanying traditional descriptions, there is a deep lack of understanding. It is in this space that we see reflected the current paradox of the Catalan language within the larger context of Spanish, the contradiction between its deployment for political reasons amid the rhetoric surrounding immigration, with the ultimate promise of ‘assimilation’, and the intimate identification of the language with a minority group that appears to be closed off to the possibility of difference, understanding, and ultimately, change. The personal experiences that Najat El Hachmi shares in her first biographical text echo this contradiction. Moreover, in her work of fiction, no matter how fruitful the process of linguistic acquisition appears to be, the ending of the novel demonstrates that once this new language, Catalan, is ‘possessed’, there is still the need to escape. While the final words of the protagonist – ‘Jo no era Mercè Rodoreda, però havia d’acabar amb l’ordre que ja feia temps que em perseguia.’ [‘I was no Mercè Rodoreda, but I had to put an end to the order of things that had been persecuting me for so long’] – refer to the patriarchy she is breaking with, this rejection could also be understood as a criticism of the paradox of her linguistic experience.42 Her journey through the Catalan dictionary might have given her the tools to make that break from her personal history, but it has also only made her painfully aware of the limitations of this new home. At the end, the final story of the rupture we witness in El Hachmi’s novel makes it very easy, even tempting I would say, to provide 41 42

El Hachmi, L’últim patriarca , p. 184; The Last Patriarch, p. 164. Ibid., p. 331; ibid., p. 310.

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a positive and empowering reading of her work. But, as Moss asks, how much of this poetic can really be translated into actual politics? What do we do next with the awareness of the limitation of the immigrant experience or the linguistic bind in which they are forced to perform? Considering some of the critical dialogue that exists about the reality of the ‘happy multicultural land’, the answers to these questions should not come too easily to us, and if so, we should be very suspicious of them.

INTERCULTURAL MEDIATIONS

TOWARDS THE LITERATURE OF TRANSCULTURAL IDIOMS: EWA/EVA STACHNIAK AND LISA APPIGNANESI ELWIRA M. GROSSMAN

Arjun Appadurai rightly warns that ‘postnational formations’ cannot be defined with the vocabulary of the existing political language.1 Summarising his comments, Dubravka Ugrešiü states that ‘[a] language which would include the overlapping interests of numerous groups, translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilisations and post-national identities does not exist yet.’2 Although Appadurai’s study focuses on the sociopolitical dimension of globalisation, his observation can also be applied to the language of literary criticism, which has embraced the challenge of ‘postnational writing’ for quite some time but has not produced a satisfying set of analytical tools which would enhance transcultural reading strategies when dealing with the works of various ‘displaced writers.’ I am painfully reminded of this lack of appropriate language every time I attempt to discuss multicultural writing created by ‘displaced women’, that is to say women who have lived in different countries, speak different languages and write in a language of their choice which is not necessarily what usually passes for a ‘native tongue.’ This kind of writing normally escapes the existing classification system based on clear-cut I would like to thank Joy Charnley for her excellent editorial suggestions in preparing the final draft of my essay. I am also indebted to the participants of the Glasgow conference ‘Displaced Women’ (28-30 March 2012) for their comments and views, which significantly enriched the version of my paper for publication. For a slightly different and much earlier version of this text in Polish, please see ‘Kategoria “polskoĞci” w formacie transkulturowym na przykáadzie prozy Evy Stachniak i Lisy Appignanesi,’ in Romuald Cudak, Literatura polska w Ğwiecie. Oblicza ĞwiatowoĞci (Katowice: Uniwersytet ĝląski-Wydawnictwo Gnome, 2012), pp. 361-71. 1 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005 [1996]). 2 Dubravka Ugrešiü, Nobody’s Home, trans. by Ellen Elias Bursaü (London; San Francisco; Beirut: Telegram, 2007), p. 174.

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nationalities and as such does not seem to feature in academic curricula of many universities’ programmes, including those that offer courses in Comparative Literature in the USA, Great Britain or the rest of Europe. Dubravka Ugrešiü has called this kind of writing ‘literature of the grey zone.’3 Others have labelled it ‘nonterritorial,’ ‘transnational,’ ‘intercultural,’ or ‘nomadic’ as this specific literary phenomenon defies an easy definition.4 It does not quite fit the paradigms of ‘diaspora writing’ or ‘minor literature,’ as defined by Deleuze and Guattari.5 Other interesting relevant terms refer to the notion of a ‘third value’ (as coined by Danuta Mostwin),6 ‘third space’ (Homi Bhabha)7 as well as ‘third scenario’ (Stuart Hall).8 Richard Bromley has proposed another interesting term: the ‘narrative for a new belonging’ (diasporic cultural fiction), while Azade Seyhan’s study has promoted the term ‘writing outside the nation.’ 3

Dubravka Ugrešiü, ‘What is European about European Literature?’, in Nobody’s Home, pp. 163-201. 4 This type of writing has been the subject of various studies and discussions, of which the most pertinent include: Homi K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation’; Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London and New York: Routledge, 2007 [1990]), pp. 291-322; Anne Brewster, Literary Formations. Post-Colonialism, Nationalism, Globalism (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995); Richard Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2000); Isabelle de Courtivron, Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Theo D’haen and Iannis Goerlandt (eds.), Literature for Europe? (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2009); Wai Chee Dimock. ‘Literature for the Planet,’ PMLA, 116/1 (2001), 173-188; Eva Hoffman, ‘The New Nomads’, Andre Aciman (ed.), Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss (New York: New Press, 1999), pp. 35-64; Jopi Nyman (ed.), Home, Identity and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2009); Sten Pultz Moslund, Migration Literature and Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001). 5 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. by Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 6 Danuta Mostwin, Trzecia wartoĞü (Lublin: Katolicki Uniwersytet Lubelski, 1995). 7 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,’ Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin (eds.), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 206-09. 8 Stuart Hall, ‘Third Scenario Theory & the Politics of Location,’ The Journal of Cinema and Media, 36 (1989), 2-28. ‘The third scenario is the scene where this new thing [cultural positionality] is worked out, and the difficulty we are having is the difficulty of that discourse emerging.’ (p. 4).

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Since it is often written by bi- or multi-lingual writers and as such is nourished by two or more cultural spheres of influence, combining (minor) languages, traditions and conventions, I suggest – for the purposes of this essay – calling it the ‘literature of transcultural idioms’. I propose this term to indicate that idiomatic local knowledge – represented by such writers – enters the sphere of the transcultural, where it is reformulated and recirculated in order to generate a different postnational knowledge. It is often rooted or related to ‘local idioms’ (or ‘local mythologised alphabets’ as Seyhan puts it), but it transgresses this framework by virtue of creating new literary inter-spaces of unique cognitive values. I intend to elaborate more on these values by concentrating on two examples that have a clear Eastern European dimension in the form of mixed Polish roots: Necessary Lies (2000) by Eva Stachniak9 and The Memory Man (2004) by Lisa Appignanesi.10 While both texts offer an interesting paradigm of engaging with the globalisation momentum and take advantage of the post-1989 political opening-up which followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall, they differ significantly in the way they shape this engagement. Still, both imaginary worlds create a rich platform for debating such issues as the effects of dislocation and extensive travelling, identity politics, the negotiation of communal and individual memory as well as the mixing of many ‘mythologised alphabets’ which often belong to more than just two cultures. Thus, my comparative reading will be framed by the following questions inspired by Azade Seyhan’s study referred to above: What can be gained from these texts by detecting a variety of ‘cultural accents’? How does the nexus of ‘local’ versus ‘global’ contribute to the explored ‘imagiNations’ (in the words of Halina Filipowicz)?11 What is revealed through the Polish roots that nourished such visions? And finally, what can be offered to a model transcultural reader (if we assume one exists), when a comparative approach taking into account the complex nexus between the ‘local’ and the ‘global’ is applied? Although the novels I have selected do not occupy a central position on any bestsellers lists, they have won prizes and been recognised for their 9

Eva Stachniak, Necessary Lies (Toronto-Oxford: Simon & Pierre, 2000). The Polish translation by Katarzyna Bogucka-Krenz appeared in 2004 with the author’s name spelled as Ewa Stachniak. 10 Lisa Appignanesi, The Memory Man (London: Arcadia Books, 2004). 11 Filipowicz coined the phrase while discussing the future of Polish Studies in the United States and proposing a course entitled ‘American ImagiNations.’ See Halina Filipowicz, ‘What Good are Polish Literary Studies in the United States?’ Slavonic and East European Journal, 50/1 (2006), pp. 117-34.

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artistic merit: Necessary Lies received the award for the best Canadian debut of 2000, while The Memory Man was named the best Holocaust novel of 2004 and a second edition appeared in 2008. Both texts have predominant third-person narrative and two parallel plots: one takes place during the Second World War and the other in the twenty-first century, involving some of the war witnesses, survivors and fighters. This kind of structure indicates the significance of memory in an identity-formation process as well as the vitality of its politics. Eva Stachniak, who has lived in Canada since 1981, has noted on various occasions that the immediate impulse for writing the novel came from the question, ‘Where are you from?’ which she repeatedly heard after she arrived in Montreal. She admitted in an interview with Agata TuszyĔska that Moje wrocáawskie dzieciĔstwo nie miaáo wiele wspólnego z wielokulturową przeszáoĞcią. NieczĊsto mówiáo siĊ o niemieckim obliczu Wrocáawia, choc Ğladów Breslau trudno byáo nie zauwaĪaü. Dla nas, urodzonych po wojnie, Wrocáaw nie miaá przeszáoĞci, zacząá siĊ wraz z pionierami i polskoĞcią tych terenów. Odkryáam go i zrozumiaáam w Montrealu. To fascynujące miejsce, którego nie potrafiáam dostrzec, bĊdąc jego mieszkanką. A jak juĪ odkryáam, musiaáam siĊ tym odkryciem podzieliü z innymi. [My childhood had nothing to do with a multicultural past – not much was said about the German past of Wroclaw although the traces of Breslau were everywhere. For us, the post-war generation, Wroclaw didn’t have a past. I discovered the city when I was in Montreal. Only then did I realise how fascinating it was and how little I knew about it. I was so overwhelmed by the discoveries I made that I had to share them with others.]12

It is of crucial importance to realise that Stachniak wrote the original novel in English, the target language which she had studied since she was seven years old. In yet another interview, she confessed: ‘To byá dla mnie pierwszy znak, Īe jĊzyk angielski mnie “zaadoptowaá”. Wybraáam go na narzĊdzie swej twórczoĞci, poniewaĪ daje poczucie kulturowego dystansu, pozwala na “metaspojrzenie”.’ [‘At some point English has adopted me, and I have decided to write in the acquired tongue. It helped me to gain the

12 Ewa Stachniak, ‘Odnaleziona w przekáadzie’, Odra, 4 (2009), 91-93 (p. 92). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from Polish sources are mine.

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necessary cultural distance, it allowed me to utilise a meta-perception; a perspective on the perspective’].13 The protagonist of the novel, Anna Cywinska, whose married name was Nowicka, is the leading consciousness of the novel. In 1980 she leaves Poland for Montreal to study Polish émigré writing there and it is clear from the first lines of the novel that she is about to betray both her home country and her husband at the same time. It is quite significant that Anna perceives the world through the eyes of her successive husbands: in Poland Piotr Nowicki and in Canada William Herzman who was born in Breslau during the war. Paradoxically, Anna regains her subjectivity after William’s unexpected death. Only then is she capable of reaching a certain level of self-awareness and cognition. This new perception leads to a painful confrontation with her first husband Piotr when she visits Poland eleven years later: ‘ “My god, how you’ve changed,” he says. On his lips, this is an accusation – as if only remaining constant mattered. Would she think like that if she had stayed here? Somehow this doesn’t seem possible, but she may be deluding herself’. (199) This confrontation on a personal level is mirrored by Anna’s change in historical awareness as she becomes exposed to personal stories that subvert her deeply rooted polonocentric views, acquired while still living in Poland. When Anna returns to Wrocáaw she in fact visits two places at once: her hometown and William’s birthplace: Breslau. Wrocáaw of 1991 irritates her, makes her feel fearful and foreign. She enjoys meeting her friends and family but what is supposed to be the comfort zone brings instead apprehension and distance she had not experienced before. Breslau (more than Wrocáaw) fascinates and inspires her but the ‘German’ stories are of no interest to her family. Yet, it is Anna’s return which allows the two diverse narratives to create a kind of new wholeness, a new ‘third space’ marked by many contradictions and paradoxes that lead to a deeper understanding of her own self and her country’s past. Frau Strauss, who lives in Berlin and is a friend of Anna’s ‘Canadian’ mother-in-law, recalls the trauma of the Second World War in a way that has never been recorded by Polish history textbooks published before 1989. The story centres on war rapes committed by Polish and Russian soldiers on German women: Later, only later, I learned that before these soldiers have been let loose in this village, they have been taken to a concentration camp, to see piles of 13

Quoted from Maria Jentys, ‘Fikcja i pamiĊü: O Ewie Stachniak, pisarce z Toronto,’ TwórczoĞü, 1 (2006), 123-28 (p. 124). The term used here in Polish, ‘metaspojrzenie’, has been coined by Stachniak.

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Towards the Literature of Transcultural Idioms bodies, heaps of glasses, of hair. That they have been reminded by big white signs on wooden scaffolds. Soldiers! Auschwitz does not forgive. Take revenge without mercy! (237)

The description of brutality that follows is gruesome. The recollections of Frau Strauss subvert the mythologised version of Polish history by contesting its polonocentric character; they call for an inclusive rather than exclusive version of the region’s past and its collectively concocted memory. Anna’s reflection – which is born out of this experience – results in creating the community ‘imagined differently’ – to borrow Anderson’s famous phrase from a different context.14 It is a brave attempt to bring together two contradictory micro-narratives that often exclude each other. There is no aggression or political correctness in this audacious gesture, which appears to be simply an act of willing exposure. It does not assess, it only reveals certain taboos and unwelcome narratives which are difficult to accept. It subverts the notion of monolithic Polishness by proving its mongrelised and highly diverse nature. It suspends the privileged point of view by introducing a different perspective. This cognitive transgression disturbs rather than heals readers and characters alike, but its existence is unquestionable. In Anna’s case it conditions a kind of personal and national liberation. To what extent such ‘liberation’ should be sought or even recommended to others remains unclear, but the novel offers one such vision. The intercultural landscape of Lisa Appignanesi’s novel resembles that of Stachniak’s in many respects but the story of Appignanesi’s life differs a great deal from that of Stachniak. She was born ElĪbieta Borensztejn (or Borensztajn) in Poland in 1946, but her parents left the country when she was two years old and she was brought up in France and Canada before the family settled in Great Britain. She never considered Polish to be her native tongue; moreover, she suppressed all knowledge of it until much later in her life, when she decided to revisit the country of her parents’ birth in order to search for her family roots and in the hope of piecing together various puzzles foreshadowing her family’s history. Thus, her relationship to Poland and Polish is quite traumatic but paradoxically it is the trauma buried in her subconscious self that stages her return to all things Polish in such a fascinating and revealing way.15

14

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London-New York: Verso, 2003 [1983]). 15 For more on her difficult engagements with Poland and Polish, see Lisa Appignanesi, Losing the Dead: A Family Memoir (London: Vintage, 2000 [1999]),

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Just as in Necessary Lies, the key events of The Memory Man also return to the Second World War, although its modern plot spins through such countries as the United States, England, Austria and Poland. There is a theme of return but Poland’s history and her current affairs are filtered through the ‘memory regained’ rather than narrated by the third party. Professor Bruno Lind – son of an Austrian Jew and a Polish Jewess – lives in the USA but visits Vienna to deliver a keynote address at a conference devoted to Memory. On the day of his arrival Bruno meets Irena Davies, a Polish journalist, who used to be married to an Englishman but now lives in Kraków and looks after her elderly mother, who is introduced later in the narrative as Pani Marta. At the conference, Bruno also meets Professor Aleksander Tarski, a scholar from the Jagiellonian University who specialises in the neurological aspects of memory. As a result of various complications and an accident that befalls Lind, his foster daughter Amelia arrives from the States to assist him. All of them decide to visit Poland where Bruno survived the war but lost his closest family. This unexpected trip turns into an exploration of memory which, as a result, affects the lives of all the characters and reveals the complex personal relationship between Bruno and Pani Marta. ‘Polishness’ and ‘Jewishness’ are intertwined and integrated in such a way that neither is exoticised or privileged, they create a specific osmosis that tends to be ignored by both the polonocentric and Judeo-centric discourses. In her family memoir, Appignanesi provides a perfect illustration of how often the integration is so close that it simply escapes us. The linguistic example here is very telling: I tell Monica I have always thought the word cham was Yiddish, not Polish. No, she says, her parents used it all the time and they spoke no Yiddish. Later, when we ask various Poles, they confirm her view. I am not convinced and when I get back to London, I check it out. The word does indeed come from Yiddish and is used to designate a pleb or common man, unlearned, uncultured. In its plural, chamoyn, it means crowd or mass. This slippage between the languages is yet another instance of the osmosis between Polish and Polish-Jewish cultures, something that purists or nationalists on both sides would rather not acknowledge. (LTD 107)

It is clear that Appignanesi’s plot in The Memory Man has a complex structure, bringing the past into the present by revealing that Irena is the biological daughter of Bruno Lind, who suppressed his memory of war events to such an extent that his wartime nurse and lover, Pani Marta especially the chapters ‘Excavations’ and ‘Ghost Language,’ pp. 69-232. All subsequent quotations from this source are referred to in the text as LTD.

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(Irena’s mother), was totally erased from his memory. Suffering from Alzheimer’s, Pani Marta could not recall this meaningful episode of her past either, but Bruno’s unexpected visit to Kraków triggered this memory for both of them. So, the plot mixes American, Austrian, Polish and Jewish identity elements so skilfully that any attempt to separate them appears fruitless. The novel makes it clear that in many cases we are a mixture of memories, traditions, roots and languages; that identity-shaping experiences are homogenised and often impossible to decipher as they fall victim to the manipulations of identity politics. In her memoir, Appignanesi observes: Memory is a form of negotiation. […] In a sense it is more like an archaeological excavation. The objects sought for, alluded to in a story, even documented in the formality of ‘survivor interviews’ or archives, may or may not be there, or they may be so written over by tales and memory and the passage of history, that one can only guess from the traces at their original use and shape. (LTD 8)

Appignanesi and Stachniak contest the politics of collective memory, revealing its complexity and the mechanisms of its conception. They both seem to support the view that individual oral history is just as important as the imposed macro-narratives and that both contribute to our cognitive (and self-cognitive) processes in a vital way. Their fictional worlds challenge the ‘mythologised alphabet’ which is often fossilised in each cultural set-up. They alert their readers to the fact that individual narratives are often incompatible with collective ones and yet through juxtaposing the two, a new value emerges, enriching both perspectives. The question that appears crucial here is: could such a perspective be achieved if it were not for the multicultural life experiences that happened to be a part of both writers’ biographies? Appignanesi’s complex engagement with Poland is unique in many respects and for years has been affected by her parents’ war experiences. As she recalls, ‘“Poland is a cemetery!” my father would say, his eyes narrowing into fierce hatred. “A desecrated cemetery. Mud and shit and bones and ash and scavenged graves. You don’t play tourist in shit. You don’t grow sentimental over shit”’ (LTD 72). Yet, Appignanesi returns to the sites of memory in order to make sense ‘of her parents’ war and her sudden interest in Poland’ – as she puts it. On the same page, she notes: ‘Perhaps the journey is simply a devious way of putting some distance between myself and the Lady Macbeth of Highgate’ (LTD 84).

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The Memory Man is partly a result of her Polish sojourn, clearly inspired by her difficult and troublesome engagement with Poland. And her example brings me back to the notion of how idiomatic individual experiences can be and how vital the acknowledgement of the biographical data here is if we want to fully appreciate and comprehend this kind of fiction. I would go as far as to argue that it may be necessary to resurrect the author yet again and challenge the dictum of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault16 when the experience of displacement, travelling and multilingual research offers the crucial stamp of authenticity behind creating transcultural fiction. Without this biographical authenticity stamp, both visions can be easily contested and their authors could have been accused of creating offensive narratives for purely political purposes. Thus, it is important to reveal that these unusual perceptions do not result from hypothetical speculations or political manipulations but have been triggered by real-life experience ensnared in writers’ biographies. In conclusion, I would be tempted to argue that Anna and Bruno, two travelling protagonists from two different novels, embody a kind of transcultural ‘Polishness’ which is experienced by readers in the process of becoming. Its novelty defies the fixity and rigidity of a monolithic identity, replacing it with a liquid form made of various impulses, changes and ‘third space’ negotiations. Both novels utilise the concept of the ‘third geography’ as the events they recall often take place in a location that does not have a territorial equivalent in today’s world, its borders have either shifted or disappeared altogether. The location of this ‘liquid’ and hybridised Polishness is the land ‘in-between,’ often suspended between different spaces and different times. The characters can reach this land by the combination of mental and physical travelling, by accessing a community which is ‘imagined differently,’ by being familiarised with oral histories that contest and challenge both official and unofficial macronarratives. And isn’t it the authenticity of the writers’ experiences that renders these fictional visions so true and honest? Regardless of what our answer to this question is, both novels’ imagiNations (to recall yet again Filipowicz’s phrase) can spark a fascinating debate pertinent to the global world in which we live today.

16

I am referring here to the two foundational texts utilised in literary discourse announcing and proclaiming the death of the author and published respectively in 1968 and 1969: Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh (eds.), Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (London: Edward Arnold, 1989), pp. 114-16; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 101-20.



I, CHRISTINE, AN ITALIAN WOMAN THÉRÈSE MOREAU

‘Et en tant te plaise me estre favourable que je puis estre aucunement consonnante a la nacion dont tu fus en ce que comme adonc fust nommee la grant Grece, le pays d’oultre les Alpes qui ores est dit Puille et Calabre en Ytallie ou tu nasquis; et je suis comme toy femme ytallienne.’ (BnF, fr. 603, f. 2d).1

Born in Venice in 1364, Christine de Pizan lived all her life as a foreigner, a stranger.2 She was taken to Paris at the age of four and died in France around 1430, but the places where she was born and lived are not the only signs of her strangeness, for she was also an immigrant, an interloper in the ‘République des lettres’ [‘Republic of Letters’]. Widowed at the age of twenty-five, she took to writing as a means of providing for her family, but she remains a second-class citizen as a French writer and only her poems on widowhood are well-known and recognised, indeed generations of pupils in France have learned her poem ‘Seulette suis’: ‘Seulette suis et seulette veux être’ [‘Alone am I and alone would I be’].3 But in France, most of her prose works are still ignored. For instance, when suggested as a subject for the Agrégation, a highly competitive university examination in France, or for a volume in the prestigious



1 ‘I hope you will be benevolent towards me as I am in some way related to the country of your origin, the land called Great Greece, a country across the Alps which is also named Pouille and Calabre in Italy where you were born and I am as you are an Italian woman’. My translation. BNF fr 603 is a manuscript of Le Livre des Faits d’Armes et de Chevalerie (1410). 2 Jacqueline Cerquilini, ‘L’Etrangère’, Revue des Langues romanes, 92 (1988), 239-51. 3 Christine de Pizan, Ballades, Rondeaux and Virelais, edited by Kenneth Varty (Welwyn Garden City: Leicester Press, 1965), p. 7. Subsequently referred to as Ballades. See also Cent Ballades in Œuvres poétiques de Christine de Pizan edited by Maurice Roy (Paris: Firmin Didot et Cie, 1886), I, p. 12. This is ballade XI. For a translation of ‘Seulette suis’ and other writings, see Charity Cannon Willard, The Writings of Christine de Pizan (New York: Persea Books, 1984), p. 41. Subsequently referred to in the text as WCP .



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Gallimard collection ‘La Pléïade’, she was turned down for not being important or famous enough.4

In Search of a Better Life Like many migrant families, the Pizzanos left their birthland (to talk of ‘homeland’ would be anachronistic) in the hope of better living conditions. It was, as is said nowadays in France, a migration that had been chosen. Chosen on both sides, as Tomasso di Benvenuto di Pizzano was a wellknown astrologer and physician who taught at the University of Bologna. Previously, he had been hired as the head of the first health service in Venice, where he married the daughter of a civil servant (salaried counsellor) and had three children. Christine5 was born in Venice at a time of great misfortunes: in 1364 there was a major earthquake followed by outbreaks of bubonic plague and great unrest in Italy, with several skirmishes between Bologna and Ferrara. Christine did not live through those events, but she wrote of the ruin caused by civil wars in Italy.6 The Black Plague was at its height a few months before her birth. Petrarch wrote in 1363 that in Venice ‘undique aures fletus et querele, undique oculos tepentia funera urneque feriunt patentes.’7 [‘Everywhere you hear weeping and lamentations; everywhere you see corpses that are still warm; everywhere you see the carrying of corpses’]. So Christine tells us that:

 4

There are still no critical editions of many of her prose works and while there are numerous English translations of her books, few of her works have been ‘translated’ into modern French. The International Christine de Pizan Society is also much more active in the United States than in France. For a complete bibliography of Christine’s published works and for studies, see the important work of Angus J. Kennedy, Christine de Pizan, a Bibliographical Guide (London: Grant and Cutler Ltd, 1984; 1994). 5 The use of the first name for both sexes is usual for the medieval time in France. 6 ‘Item, celui meismes chappitre IIII puet segeifier comment Cristine, au temps de son enfance, fu avec ses parens transportee en France du païs de Lombardie dont elle estoit nee – ouquel dit païs elle vid les beautez que elle devise a la lettre, et aussi des ruines qui par les guerres estoient venues’ in Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de l’Avision Christine (1405), critical edition by Christine Reno and Liliane Dulac (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001), p. 6. 7 Petrarch, letter sent from Venice to Father Benventura Bafro, on 6 December 1363, in Selines III.8. In English see Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan. Her Life and Works (New York: Persea, 1984), p. 18. Subsequently referred to as CCW.



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Ne fut-ce pas fortune qui poussa mon père, à cette époque, peu après ma naissance, à se rendre dans la ville de Bologne la Grasse pour certaines raisons et pour visiter les terres qu’il possédait? Et c’est là qu’il reçut peu après, au même moment, des lettres et certains messages de deux excellents rois, qui l’invitaient en raison de la grande réputation d’autorité de sa science, le priant et lui promettant salaires et revenus importants.8 [Quite soon after my birth my father returned to the said city of Bologna the Fat to conduct business and visit his land where invitations reached him simultaneously from two excellent kings who, because of the great renown and prestige of his knowledge, both wanted him to come to their realms and promised a good salary and other generous gifts.] (CV, p. 108).

Her father chose the King of France over the King of Hungary and stayed three years alone in Paris. After that time, Thomas wanted to return to his family and his teaching position in Bologna, but the king felt otherwise and decided to bring the whole family together (what is now called a ‘regroupement familial’, an object of debate in the French presidential elections of 2012): ‘Le roi voulut à tout prix qu’il envoyât chercher à grands frais, à sa charge, sa femme, ses enfants et sa famille, pour qu’ils passent toute leur vie en France’ (Voix, p. 495) [‘Offering to pay all expenses the king urged my father to send for his wife, children and family, so they could spend the rest of their life near him in France’] (CV, p. 109). They crossed the High Alps in December 1368, went through strange countries, wild lands, deep forests, foaming rivers. They journeyed for many days to take up residence in Paris and be presented to the king: La femme et les enfants de ton bien-aimé philosophe maître Thomas, mon père, furent très bien reçus à leur arrivée à Paris et le bon et sage roi voulut les voir et les recevoir joyeusement. Ce qui fut fait peu de temps après leur arrivée, dans leurs habits lombards avec les riches toilettes et parures qui étaient d’usage pour les femmes et les enfants de noble condition. Le roi se trouvait à Paris dans le château du Louvre, au mois de décembre. (Voix, p. 496). [The good and wise King was eager to welcome in a joyous ceremony the wife and children of your beloved philosopher, Master Thomas. And thus it was brought about in the month of December, soon after our arrival. Dressed in richly decorated Lombard costume befitting women and



8 Christine de Pizan, La Vision Christine, translated by Anne Paupert in Voix de Femmes au Moyen Age, edited by Danielle Régnier-Bohler (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2006), p. 495. Subsequently referred to as Voix. For the English translation, see Glenda K. McLeod, Christine’s Vision (New York: Garland, 1993); subsequently in the text CV.



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I, Christine, an Italian Woman children of high estate, our family, accompanied by honourable relatives, was presented to the king in the palace the Louvre] (CV, p. 109).

While remembering with some pride her arrival in her new country, Christine, although still a very young child who only spoke Italian, understood that their attire was exotic for the French court and that the courtiers made fun of them. Living in France and being employed by the king, Tomasso di Benvenuto di Pizzano had to change his name.9 He became Thomas de Pizan and Cristina became Christine. All her life, she was grateful to Charles the Fifth and became his ‘obligée’. She felt she had to write his biography in The Book of Deeds and Good Character of King Charles V, the Wise, ‘car, lors de mon enfance, je fus avec mes parents, nourrie de son pain’ [‘for in my childhood I was fed, as my parents, with his bread’].10 The king had, in fact, made Thomas a member of his personal council and in addition provided the family with an annual stipend of twenty Parisian pounds, a property at Orsonville in the Forest of Fontainebleau, the Castle of Mémorant and the Barbeau Tower in Paris. When Christine turned fifteen, it was time for her to marry. She had many suitors, but her father chose a young nobleman, Etienne Castel. Etienne was a royal secretary in the chancellery and a colleague of the proJean de Meun and the Rose ‘humanists’ that Christine was later to take to task in the ‘Querelle’ [‘Quarrel’].11 Christine and Etienne lived happily

 9

It is still customary to encourage new French citizens to change their original family name so it will sound more French. 10 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Faits et Bonnes Mœurs du roi Charles V le Sage (1404), translated and introduced by Eric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau (Paris: Stock, 1997), pp. 317-8. My translation. Subsequently referred in the text as Charles V. 11 In 1401, Jean de Montreuil, a royal secretary, wrote a treaty, now lost, in favour of Le Roman de la Rose [The Romance of the Rose], especially the part written by Jean de Meun. Christine de Pizan wrote and made public a letter against Jean de Meun’s work, that she found vile, misogynistic and crude. Gonthier and Pierre Col, colleagues of Montreuil, wrote back in defence of the Romance while Jean Gerson, chancellor of Paris, took Christine’s side. The letters were read in several circles and contributed to Christine’s fame. See Eric Hicks (ed.), Le Débat sur Le Roman de la Rose (Paris: Champion, 1977; 1996) and ‘Situation de la Querelle de la Rose’, in Une Femme de Lettres au Moyen Age: études autour de Christine de Pizan, edited by L. Dulac and B. Ribémond (Orléans: Paradigme, 1995), pp. 5167. For a Modern French translation, see Le Débat sur le Roman de la Rose, translated by Virginie Greene (Paris: Champion 2006). Subsequently referred in the text as Le Débat. For an English translation of the debate see Baird and Kane, La Querelle de la Rose: Letters and Documents (Chapel Hill: University of North



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together for ten years but he died from the plague at the age of thirty-four, and she ‘qui en avai[t] vingt-cinq, demeur[a] avec à [s]a charge trois petits enfants et une maisonnée importante’ (Voix, p. 498) [‘at twenty-five remained behind, burdened with three small children and a large household’] (CV, p. 111). Thomas had died a few years earlier and her two brothers, Paolo and Aghinolfo, had gone back to Italy to claim their inheritance, as they were ‘fortuneless’ in France. She was now at the head of a household of six with no family in France, as her husband had been an orphan. She felt that fate was pursuing her with a vengeance: Toujours à propos des blessures de mes douloureuses pensées, qui s’ajoutent à mes autres malheurs, crois-tu que je ne puisse pas me considérer comme malheureuse au regard de Fortune, quand je vois ces autres dames accompagnées de leur lignage, frères et parents, vivant dans un bien-être et se réjouissant ensemble, et quand je pense que je suis loin de mes proches dans un pays étranger? Je pense également à deux frères que j’ai, des hommes de valeur, sages et menant une noble vie; comme ils n’étaient pas pourvus dans ce pays, il a fallu qu’ils aillent vivre là-bas dans l’autre pays, sur des possessions héritées de notre père. Et moi qui ai le cœur tendre et qui suis bienveillante envers ceux que j’aime, je me plains à Dieu quand je vois la mère sans ses fils, qu’elle désire, et moi sans mes frères. (Voix, p. 513). [Again in regard to the pricks of my sad meditations, do you think that I consider myself blessed before the face of Fortune when, along with my other troubles, I see others, contented and merry, accompanied by their wealthy families, brothers, and relatives, and I think I am in a foreign country far away from my relatives, and above all my two younger brothers, wise, worthy and moral men who had to go live on father’s legacies in Italy because they weren’t provided for here? When I see a mother without her sons whom she longs for and myself deprived of my brothers.] (CV, pp. 123-4).

In the Vision she laments once more: ‘Il me fallut donc mettre la main à l’ouvrage, ce que je n’avais pas appris à faire, moi qui avais été élevée tendrement et dans les délices’ (Voix, p. 499) [‘Thus it behoved me to set to work, I who had been indulged and pampered as a child and had no experience in such matters’] (CV, p. 112). She had to ‘être la conductrice de la nef demeurée dans l’orage et sans capitaine’ (Voix, p. 499) [‘pilot the ship remaining without master or captain on a stormy sea, that is, the desolate household misplaced and in a foreign land’] (CV, p. 112). With no

 Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 1978). Christine made these letters public in 1401/2.



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close family to help defend her heritage, she lost in court cases almost all her father’s and husband’s wealth: ‘et comme ce sont les mets habituels des veuves, je fus entourée de tous côtés par les poursuites judiciaires et les procès’ (Voix, p. 499) [‘since this is widow’s fare, lawsuits and legal actions surrounded me. My debtors attacked me so I would not come forward to demand anything from them’] (CV, p. 112). In a foreign country there is nobody to help you in dire circumstances; she could count only on herself and had to find a way to earn money. Later, much of her poetry and writings concerned the defence of widows, and this reflects her own experience: ‘Hélas! Où donc trouveront réconfort/Les pauvres veuves de leurs biens dépouillées/ Puisqu’en France, où se trouvait le port /De leur salut, et où les exilées/Se réfugient, et les déconseillées,/Mais désormais, elles n’y ont plus amitié.’ (Voix, p. 503) [‘Alas, where will they find comfort,/ Poor widows, despoiled of their goods,/since in France, once their haven/of safety, where they exiled/and uncounselled once fled,/They no longer have friends?’] (CV, p. 115).12 Here ends the somewhat ordinary story of a(ny) migrant family.

Minerva’s Sister She felt as if she was in a foreign country in many ways. Educated men surrounded her; many had been her husband’s colleagues and worked for the king as secretary. She often remarks in her works that her knowledge was very limited and her intellect even slighter, but she nonetheless came from Italy, from Bologna the Fat, a town where girls were educated, and some even taught at the same university as her father.13 She complains in her writings that her mother felt studying was too tiring for a girl and preferred to teach her weaving or for her to play with the other children, but she was nevertheless able to gather ‘crumbs’ of her father’s knowledge including some Latin, Italian literature and philosophy. She was a Lady-inwaiting to Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria and had several noble friends close to the King and we also know that as the daughter of Thomas she was given access to the Royal Library. There is a ten-year gap between Etienne’s death and Christine’s recognition as a court writer and the most probable explanation is that she worked as a copyist in a workshop,

 12

The same poem appears in Ballades, p. 9. See La Cité des Dames, translated by Eric Hicks and Thérèse Moreau (Paris: Stock/Moyen Age, 1986), pp. 95-6, subsequently referred in the text as La Cité and The Book of the City of Ladies, translated by Rosalind Brown-Grant (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 60-1, subsequently referred to in the text as The City. 13



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preparing manuscripts, a trade she must have learned with her husband, in fact they might even have had a small workshop next to their residence. After the death of Etienne, she shunned court life and worldly pleasures but still wrote poems and participated in poetry festivals at the royal court of the Duke of Orleans. A ‘daughter of learning’, she says she stayed alone in a room of her own for ‘une vie solitaire et tranquille’ (Voix, p. 503) [‘a solitary and tranquil life’] (CV, p. 117).14 She studied the Italian humanists and was familiar with Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch as well as with Latin poets and writers or translations of Greek philosophers: ‘Alors, dans cette solitude se présentèrent à moi, dans la rumination de ma mémoire, des éléments de latin et des beaux langages des sciences, de diverses maximes et d’élégante rhétorique, que j’avais entendus dans le passé, du vivant de mes chers disparus, mon père et mon mari’ (Voix, p. 503) [‘Because of this solitude, there came back to me from the earlier days memorized passages of Latin and the languages of the noble sciences – various sentential and polished rhetoric that I had heard in the past when my dear, dead husband and father had been alive’] (CV, p. 117). Her culture was that of any good male scholar; she does not cite Héloïse and her Letters or Hildegard von Bingen for example, and even in The Book of the City of Ladies her only female sources are classical ones such as Sappho.15 She introduced The Divine Comedy into French literature,

 14

Virginia Woolf, author of A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, has many points in common with Christine de Pizan. 15 Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was born in Germany of noble parents. She started having visions at the age of three and entered a Benedictine convent at eight. She was a composer, theologian and scientist. During her life she became a famous and respected abbess and today many of her musical pieces have been recorded. Héloïse (1101-1164) is famous for her torrid love affair with Abélard (1079-1142). They had a child, Astralabius, and married secretly so Abélard could continue teaching. Feeling humiliated, Héloïse’s uncle took revenge on Abélard by having him castrated. Abélard wrote a history of his misfortunes (Historia calamitatum) which Héloïse answered, hence a correspondence ensued, which deals mostly with rules for women’s convents. See Katharina M. Wilson and Nadia Margolis (eds.), Women in the Middle Ages; an Encyclopedia (London: Greenwood Press, 2004). Born on the island of Lesbos towards the end of the seventh century BCE, Sappho was a Greek lyric poet. Not much is known about her but despite the lack of evidence, her poetry, approximately 650 lines of which have been recovered, has been seen as autobiographical. She celebrated sexual love for both sexes and ‘Sapphic’ became a synonym for lesbian until the XIXth century. Christine de Pizan cited her in several of her works as ‘une femme de haut génie, poétesse et philosophe’ (La Cité, p. 95) [‘an extremely fine poet and philosopher’] (The City, p. 60).



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rewrote Boccaccio, quoted Saint Augustine, borrowed structures from Boethius as well as from Dante and was familiar with texts such as On the Genealogy of the Gods and The Metamorphoses. She had started writing small things, ‘chosettes’ she calls them, but even in her poetry, her different culture is apparent. She was a critic of courtly love, as lovers often deceived women and she dwells on the end of the affair and of love rather than on the beginning. For her, disillusionment and shame are the consequences of any amorous involvement outside marriage.16 As indicated above, she engaged in the first literary quarrel concerning the Roman de la Rose [Romance of the Rose] with intellectual men who were discovering Italian humanism.17 She is praised by Droiture for publicly attacking what would today be called male chauvinism: ‘Ma chère enfant, je ne sais plus quoi te répondre sur les accusations d’infidélité, car tu les as toi-même suffisamment réfutées dans ton Epitre au Dieu D’amours et tes Epitres sur le Roman de la Rose (La Cité, p. 211) [‘My dear Christine, as for what they say about women being underhanded, I am not sure what more I can tell you. You yourself have tackled this issue at length, when you refuted Ovid, along with all the others, in your Letter to the God of Love and the Letters on the Romance of the Rose’] (The City, pp. 171-2). She always claimed that she wrote as a woman: ‘S’il est possible que du vice naisse la vertu, alors je suis heureuse d’être ici passionnée comme une femme’18 [‘If it is possible for vice to give birth to virtue, it pleases me in this part to be as passionate as a woman’]. One day, she picked up Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae and after reading it, went to bed and had a dream. This became Le Chemin de Longue Étude [The Long Road to Learning] and is clearly influenced by Dante as far as the theme is concerned, even if Boethius inspired her thoughts. Dante started his journey guided by Virgil, whereas it is the Sybil Cumaean who is leading Christine and at the end of her journey, Christine is given a message to bring back to the French princes, reminding them of their responsibilities. Both as a humanist and an Italian,

 16

We should remember that adultery by women was often punished by death and they could, for example, be walled into their bedroom or beheaded. 17 See Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women, Reading beyond Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).  18 My translation. The original text is ‘Se il est possible que ce vice puit naistre vertu, bien me plaist en ceste partie estre passionnee comme femme’. Christine de Pizan, Le Livre du Corps de Policie (1406-1407), edited by Angus J. Kennedy (Paris: Champion,1998), p. 1. In English see Christine de Pizan, The Book of Body Politics, translated by Kate Landon Forman (Cambridge: Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1996), p. 3.



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Christine believed that study was the best way to prepare oneself to give advice to the powerful.19 This is her first work, which was concerned with the misfortunes of France and the deteriorating political situation. She now felt like a sister to Minerva: ‘Oh Minerve, déesse des armes et de la chevalerie, je suis comme toi femme italienne’ [‘O Minerva, goddess of arms and chivalry! I am as you an Italian woman’].20 Even her name (‘Christ’ plus the feminine ending ‘ine’) points to her mission, and she used to sign ‘Xine’.21 She felt that her wisdom allowed her to write in the public interest. Christine’s Vision, while very autobiographical, should be seen as one of Christine’s first political writings, in line with Le Livre des Faits d’Armes et de Chevalerie (1410) [The Book of Deeds and Chivalry], Le Livre des Faits et Bonnes mœurs du roi Charles V le Sage [The Good Character of King Charles V the Wise], Le Livre de la Paix (1412-1423) [The Book of Peace], Le Livre du Corps de Policie (1406-1407) [The Book of Body Policy], Le Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc (1429) [The Poem of Joan of Arc], Epistre à la Reine (1405) [The Letter to The Queen of France, Isabella of Bavaria ], and La Lamentacion sur les Maux de la France (1410) [The Lamentation on the Woes of France].22 Many of these are ‘mirrors of princes’ or of princesses, that is to say examples of how one should conduct oneself. Her last station on her long road to learning is Le livre de la Mutation de Fortune (1403) [The Book of The Mutation of Fortune]. She explained the change she had to undergo in order to be able to feed and take care of her family: ‘Vous le voyez je suis toujours mâle, il le faut. Fortune m’a gentiment appris à me conduire ainsi, et depuis les hommes sont mes égaux, ils le sont depuis plus de treize ans’.23 [‘Fortune kindly taught me the way/ To do manly deeds, to this day,/ as you can tell,

 19

Margaret Brabant (ed.), Politics, Gender and Genre (Oxford: Westview Press, 1992). 20 Christine de Pizan, Le Livre des Faits et de Chevalery, Bibl. Nat. ms.fr.603, fol.2 vo 21 On feminine endings and rhymes in Christine de Pizan see Liliane Dulac, ‘The Representation and Functions of Feminine Speech in Christine de Pizan’s Livre des Trois Vertus’, in Reinterpreting Christine de Pizan, edited by Earl Jeffrey Richards et al (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992), pp. 13-22. 22 On Christine de Pizan and politics see Berenice A. Carroll, ‘The Causes of War and the Quest for Peace’ in Au champs des escriptures; IIIe Colloque international sur Christine de Pizan (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000), pp. 337-58. Subsequently referred in the text as Au champ des escriptures. 23 My translation. The original text is ‘Fortune ce mestier m’apprist/ Et ainsi de ce fait me prist./ Comme vous ouëz, encore suis home/ Et ay esté ja bien la somme/de plus de XIII ans tous entiers’. Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune, edited by Suzanne Solente, 4 vols (Paris: Picard, 1959-1966) vol. 1, p. 53.



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men are my peers/ as they have been for thirteen years’] (WCP , p. 127). If the first book remains quite autobiographical, the second describes the Castle of Fortune, the guardians of the gates (Wealth, Poverty, Hope and Antropos) and the third is devoted to the inhabitants of the castle and gives Christine the opportunity to expand on events of her time. She writes on the civil wars in Italy, the state of chivalry, the troubles in France; she blames the nobles for their dissipated life, fearing they won’t be able to wage war effectively, a fact that was demonstrated at Agincourt, and she goes on to describe French society class by class. Book four is dedicated to a discussion of the liberal arts; books six and seven are a survey of universal history from the Amazons right up to the fifteenth century. She then, as Charity Cannon Willard writes, ‘had reached the end of her intellectual apprenticeship […] In her review of universal history, she was able to relate her own troubles to the natural order of the universe. Her study of history would dominate much of the rest of her literary career’ (CCW, p. 113). Christine had become the new Pallas, the one who ‘connaît l’art de faire des armures […] et dispense la sagesse’ (Othéa ) [‘dispenses arms to the warriors and learning to the scholars’]24 (Letter of Othea, p. 96). She was able to become a woman of influence, her sex no longer a detrimental oddity. I say ‘sex’, for even if Christine in the Mutation of Fortune explains how she became a man, writing of physical changes as well as moral ones, she goes on to say she is still a woman, and the word ‘gender’ may well be an anachronism.

Christine, a Woman in a Man’s World Christine de Pizan became the first professional writer that we know of. She was able to support her family with her earnings, even if she complains that her former patrons as well as her brothers were, as a result, less inclined to help her. One may be of the opinion, as is Charity Cannon Willard, that she copied manuscripts for wealthy nobles at the beginning of her career, but in any case by the time she was successful it seems certain she had a scriptorium of her own where her works were copied and

 24

The English does not seem to follow the original text which is: ‘Minerve fut une dame de moult grant savoir, et treouva l’art de faire armeures […] La deesse Minerve et la deesse Pallas ensemble [...] Et si comme Pallas, qui notte sagesse, doit estre adjoustee avec chevalerie’ (p. 222) and ‘Othea, selon grec, peut estre pris pour sagece de femme’ (p. 199). Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea (1400-1401), edited by Gabriella Parussa (Genève: Droz, 1999). Subsequently in the text Othea.



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illustrated by lay copyists and painters she supervised.25 There is the now famous ‘X hand’ that corrects or gives directions in the margins.26 She was still an oddity and attributed part of her success to the fact that she was a woman. Her works were offered to would-be patrons and important rulers and she explains how she was chosen to write a biography of Charles V: she had offered the Duke of Burgundy a manuscript of La Mutation de Fortune as a New Year’s gift on the first of January 1403. A few days later, the Duke summoned her to the Louvre27 and presented her with a commission: ‘Pour la Demoiselle Christine de Pizan, veuve du défunt Maître Etienne Castel, le don de 100 écus pour la remercier des deux manuscrits offerts à notre Duc, l’un de ces ouvrages ayant été commandité par notre défunt comte’ [‘To Damoiselle Christine de Pizan, widow of the late Master Etienne de Castel, for a gift made by my lord, 100 écus, in recompense of two books which she presented to my lord, one of which she was asked to do by our late lord’].28 For authors did not yet publish their books, they made manuscripts and offered them to the rich and mighty. The more beautiful the manuscript, the richer the intended owner and the bigger the gift, usually in the form of a purse. Christine de Pizan was convinced that multiplying her books would make her famous and promote her ideas: J’eus l’idée de diffuser plusieurs copies de ce bel ouvrage à travers le monde, quel qu’en fût le coût: il serait présenté en plusieurs endroits à des reines, des princesses et des grandes dames, afin qu’il soit mieux honoré et célèbre, ainsi qu’il le mérite, et que grâce à ces dames il puisse être répandu parmi les autres femmes. Cette idée et cette volonté une fois mises en œuvre – ce qui est déjà commencé – l’ouvrage sera distribué, répandu et publié dans tous les pays, bien qu’il soit écrit en langue française. [Therefore, I thought I would multiply this work throughout the world in various copies, whatever the cost might be and present it in particular places to queens, princesses, and noble ladies. Through their efforts, it will be the more honoured and praised, as it is fitting, and better circulated among other women. I have already started this process; so that this book

 25

Charity Cannon Willard, Christine de Pizan; her Life and Works (New York: Persea, 1984), p. 45. See also The City, pp. 76-7. 26 See Eric Hicks, ‘The “second autograph” Edition of Christine de Pizan’s lesser Poetical Works’, Manuscripta , 20 (1976), 14-15; James C. Laidlaw, ‘Christine de Pizan: A Publisher’s Progress’, Modern Language Review, 82 (1987), 35-75. 27 See Charles V, pp. 42-3. 28 Archives du Nord, Lille, B1878,fol.124. Damoiselle here means, as it did until Napoleonic times, that she belonged to the lesser nobility. My translation.



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I, Christine, an Italian Woman will be examined, read, and published in all countries, although it is written in the French language].29

 Christine de Pizan introduced into literature themes that are still full of meaning today: the status of women in society, the fact that rape was seen as the victim’s (that is woman’s) fault, the fate of women in times of war, the hardship experienced by married women and widows who knew nothing about their family’s financial status, domestic violence within the couple… Even if her poetry was applauded, many disapproved of her incursions into more ‘serious’ works and of her criticism of the misogynistic portrait of women both by ancient and contemporary authors. She wrote against the grain and deconstructed the misogynistic ideology of her time. All her works are original, in the sense that they always defended women. Be it in her attack against courtly love, which was often lust in disguise which left the woman alone and dishonoured, or in her defence of widows and women responsible for young children. Her role in the Debate of the Rose is well-known and she was not afraid to attack the most learned clerics. She, ‘une femme à l’esprit peu cultivé et au jugement léger’ (Le Débat, p. 58) [‘an unlearned woman of small understanding and penetration’]30 wished to ‘dire, affirmer, proclamer publiquement avec tout le respect que je vous dois, que vous avez grand tort de porter aux nues un livre qu’il vaut mieux appeler pure sottise qu’œuvre utile, à mon avis’ (Le Débat, p. 58) [‘hold, proclaim, and sustain publicly that, with all due respect, you are entirely in error and without justification in giving such accomplished praise to the aforesaid work The Romance of the Rose, which were better called utter frivolity than any profitable book, in my opinion’] (WCP , p. 151). She argues that Jean de Meun’s description of women is inaccurate and, as in many of her writings, she not so much defends women as identifies men as the aggressors, the guilty party:

 29

Christine de Pizan, A Medieval Women’s Mirror of Honor; The Treasure of the City of Ladies, translated by Charity Cannon Willard (New York: Persea, 1989), p. 224. Subsequently referred to in the text as MWMH. The translator’s emphasis reminds us that, as Cannon Willard says, ‘Christine died well before William Caxton, the first English printer, published one of her books in 1475-6, one of the first from his printing press at Westminster and Bruges. However, publication during Christine’s lifetime had two efficient forms: hand-copying manuscripts by scribes in writing factories called “scriptoria,” and public readings in the form of entertainment instruction, and mealtime accompaniment’ (p. 248). Le Livre des Trois Vertus, translated by Liliane Dulac in Voix, p. 697. Subsequently Les Trois Vertus. 30 Lesser Treatise on the Romance of the Rose (June-July 1401) in WCP , p. 151.



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Mais la lecture de ce livre, quoiqu’il ne fasse aucunement autorité, me plongea dans une rêverie qui me bouleversa au plus profond de mon être. Je me demandais quelles pouvaient être les causes et les raisons qui poussaient tant d’hommes, clercs et autres, à médire des femmes et à vitupérer leur conduite soit en paroles, soit dans leurs traits. Il n’y va pas seulement d’un ou deux hommes, ni même de ce Mathéole, qui ne saurait prendre rang parmi les savants, car son livre n’est que raillerie; mais au contraire aucun texte n’en est entièrement exempt. Philosophes, poètes et moralistes — et la liste en serait bien longue — tous semblent parler d’une même voix pour conclure que la femme est foncièrement mauvaise et portée au vice. (La Cité, p. 36). [Yet, having looked at this book, which I considered to be of no authority, an extraordinary thought became planted in my mind which made me wonder why on earth it was that so many men, both clerks and others, have said and continue to say and write such awful damning things about women and their ways: I was at a loss as to how to explain it. It is not just a handful of writers who do this, nor only this Matheolus whose book is neither regarded as authoritative nor intended to be taken seriously. It is all manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention, who all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given to vice.] (The City, p. 6).

In The Letter of the God of Love she complains that boys are taught to scorn and distrust women: Toutes ces femmes que je viens de mentionner se plaignent/ de ces nombreux clercs qui rejettent la faute sur elles/ Ils font des récits en chanson, en prose ou en vers/ Où ils attaquent les mœurs des femmes de diverses façons/Et ils donnent ces textes aux jeunes gens/Aux jeunes écoliers sans expérience/Pour les endoctriner avec ces récits/ Et faire qu’ils gardent ces préjugés leur vie durant.31 [The ladies mentioned here above complain/ Of many clerks who lay much blame to them/ Composing tales in rhyme, in prose, in verse/ In which they scorn their ways with words diverse,/They give these texts out to their youngest lads,/To schoolboys who are young and new in class,/Examples



31 My translation. The original text is: ‘Si se plaignent les dessusdites dames/ De plusieurs clercs qui leur surmettent blames,/Dictiez en font, rimes, proses et vers,/En diffamant leurs meurs par moz divers./Si les baillent en matiere aux premiers,/à leurs nouveaulx et jeunes escoliers,/En maniere d’exemple et de doctrine/ Pour retenir en aage en doctrine.’ Poems of Cupid, God of Love, edited and translated by Thelma S. Fenster and Mary Carpenter Erler (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), p. 46; subsequently in the text Letter to the God of Love.



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I, Christine, an Italian Woman given to indoctrinate/So they’ll retain such doctrine when they are grown] (Letter to the God of love, p. 47).

She accuses Ovid, who ‘attribue aux femmes tant de mauvaises moeurs/ elles seraient sordides, vicieuses et pleines de vilainies/ Je m’insurge contre cette vision/ et suis prête à prendre les armes pour les défendre/ Contre tous ceux qui relèveront le défi’32 [‘lays to women in nasty ways/Repulsive, sordid, filled with wickedness. /That women have such vice I deny, / I take my arms up in defence of them/Against all those who throw the challenge down’] (The Letter of The God of Love, p. 49). She argues that Si c’était des femmes qui avaient écrit ces livres/ ils diraient tout autre chose, je le sais/ Je sais avec certitude que la vérité est ailleurs;/Car je sais bien qu’elles sont accusées injustement/ Si les torts ne sont pas bien distribués/Car c’est au plus fort que revient la plus grosse part/ Et celui qui découpe se réserve la meilleure.33 [If women, though, had written all those books, / I know they would read quite differently, / For well do women know the blame is wrong; / The parts are not apportioned equally,/ Because the strongest take the largest cut/And he who slices it can keep the best] (Letter of The God of Love, p. 55).

She emphasised this again in the City of Ladies: ‘Ainsi les hommes veulent avoir à tout propos le droit pour eux et tirer à eux toute la couverture. Mais cela, tu l’as bien dit dans ton Epitre au Dieu d’amours’ (La Cité, p. 191) [‘So, whatever the argument is, men have it both ways and always turn out to be in the right. You yourself have discussed this at length in your Letter to the God of Love’] (The City, p. 151). She goes even further, calling those men liars and wanting to take them out of the canon:34 ‘Qu’ils aillent se coucher et qu’ils se taisent enfin!…’ (La Cité, p. 155) [‘they should keep their mouths shut and go back to sleep!’] (The City, p. 117).

 32

Once again my translation as there is none in print. The original text is: ‘Ou leur met sus de moult villaines mours,/ Ordes, laides, plaines de villennie./ Que tieulx vices ayent je lui nie; /Au deffendre par bataille je gage/ Contre tous ceulx qui getter vouldront gage.’ Letter to the God of Love, p. 48. 33 Original text: ‘Mais se femmes eussent li livre fait, /Je scay de vray qu’aultrement fust du fait./Car bien scevent qu’à tort sont encoulpees/Si ne sont pas les pars a droit coppees,/Car les plus fors prennent la plus grant part,/Et le meilleur pour soi qui pieces part.’ (Letter to the God of Love, p. 54). 34 We are reminded once more of Virginia Woolf and the Three Guineas when Christine says such books should be burned.



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Like every erudite medieval scholar, she drew on previous secular and religious texts and was able to find in those texts counter-examples of the feebleness and weakness of women. She denied that the Bible condemns women to being inferior to men, quoting the early fathers, who said that Eve was made out of Adam’s rib to signify that she was not to be his slave or follower, but an equal helpmate: ‘Là il l’endormit et forma le corps de la femme d’une de ses côtes, signifiant par là qu’elle devait être à ses côtés comme une compagne. Et non à ses pieds comme une esclave — et qu’il devait l’aimer comme sa propre chair’ (La Cité, p. 55) [‘There he put Adam to sleep and created the body of woman from one of his ribs. This was a sign that she was meant to be his companion standing at his side, whom he would love as if they were one flesh, and not as a servant lying at his feet.’] (The City, p. 22). She argued the equality of both sexes, even in sin, as it is human and not female to tend to sin, and found comfort in Augustine, who said that men and women were equal in rationality. Female allegories guide Christine through her many literary travels and after the Mutation of Fortune it is always a female voice or persona, all mother figures, that guide men and women in her works. In the Vision she addresses Philosophy with these words: [...] mais qui m’as au contraire appelée à toi, comme une maîtresse bien aimable; et le fait que tu te sois abaissée, m’assure que tu ne me refuseras pas à moi qui suis ta suivante, des petites miettes de restes de table qui seront suffisantes pour me nourrir. Comme tu as nourri du lait de tes mamelles et de tes précieux mets ton fils très aimé dont nous avons parlé, qui t’honora et t’aima tant, tu ne l’oublias pas quand vint le temps où il eut un très grand besoin, et tu en fis de même pour plusieurs de tes enfants; de la même façon, je suppose que tu ne m’oublieras pas, moi, ton humble servant… (Voix, p. 494). [Indeed, you have summoned me like a most loving mistress, a courtesy that assures me you will not refuse your handmaiden the small scraps of your comfort that are sufficient for her nourishment. For since you fed your said beloved son Boethius, who so loved and honoured you, with the milk of your breasts and your own precious dishes, and since you forgot him not in the time of his great need nor likewise several of your other children, I believe you similarly will not forget me…] (CV, p. 107) 35



35 See also Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, ‘Le goût de l’étude: saveur et savoir chez Christine de Pizan’, Au champ des escriptures, pp. 597-608.



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It was to be Lady Opinion, Philosophy who would be with her during her vision and a Sibyl, not Virgil, who would be at her side on the long road of learning.36 She was to defeat the ‘misogynistic voice’ of the Land of Letters and be the champion of women.37

The Letter of Othea to Hector argues: ‘Othea, en grec, peut être compris comme sagesse féminine’ (Othea , p. 199) [‘Othea in Greek can be taken to mean “woman’s Wisdom”’] (WCP , p. 96), and goes on to say that in pagan times real men and women who were famous and very worthy became legends and were made gods. This is a way of claiming a female heritage, weaving a chain of women, all of them Christine’s foremothers. She thus gained authorial authority and was able to change her status from that of a foreigner to that of a citizen in this Land of Letters. The Sibyl, Sappho, Minerva, Thamaris and many others once again guide her. In the Book of the City of Ladies she was then able to rewrite ancient histories from a female and pro-women (feminist) point of view. Cassandra’s story, for example, is taken from Boccaccio, but Christine considered it misogynistic to claim that it was Apollo who gave her the gift of prophecy in exchange for sexual favours, but then, when she went back on her word, cursed her so that nobody would ever believe her. Cassandra was to be one of the inhabitants of the City of Ladies, as was Medea, victim of her foolish love for a man who betrayed her. Christine purged from her female examples most signs of wickedness in order to build for herself and all other women from the present to the future an ideal city where women would be the rightful inhabitants and citizens: The City of Ladies, a new land and Utopia. But she knew that a utopia called for the contrary and her next work was thus Le Livre des Trois Vertus (1405) [The Book of the Three Virtues] or Le Trésor de la Cité des Dames [The Treasure of the City of Ladies] also known in English as A Medieval Woman’s Mirror of Honour . In this book she forfeits her hopes of an ideal city and life to help real women survive in the real world of her time. She addresses all classes from queens to prostitutes and admonishes the good princess not only to feel sorrow [...] au spectacle de ceux qui sont frappés par le malheur, et elle mettra ellemême la main à la pâte pour les aider de toutes ses forces. Et comme le dit un savant docteur, la charité peut s’entendre de plusieurs manières; elle ne

 36

In ancient times, the Sibyls were of course women who gave voice to the prophecies of the Gods. 37 For a full description of Christine’s struggle with the misogynistic voice see Rosalind Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan and the Moral Defence of Women.



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réside pas seulement dans l’obligation de secourir les autres de sa bourse, mais elle consiste aussi à les assister et à les réconforter par des paroles ou des conseils quand c’est nécessaire, en leur faisant tout le bien possible. Aussi cette dame, pleine d’une bienveillante et sainte charité, jouera le rôle d’avocate ou de médiatrice entre le prince son mari — ou son enfant si elle est veuve — et ses sujets, ou tous ceux qu’elle pourra aider de ses bonnes actions, si elle est en mesure d’intervenir (Les Trois Vertus, pp. 575-6). [when she sees people in affliction, but oblige her to roll up her sleeves and help them as much as she can. And as a wise doctor of the Church says, charity exists in many modes and is not to be understood as helping another person only with money from your purse but also with help and comfort by your speech and advice wherever the need arises and with all the good you can do. And this lady will be, by pure, mild and holy charity, an advocate and mediator between the prince her husband (or her child if she is a widow) and her people, or all people whom she may be able to help by doing good, depending on the situation] (The Three Virtues, pp. 489).

As for prostitutes, ‘de même que le soleil brille pour les bons, pour les méchants, nous n’éprouverons pas de honte à communiquer notre enseignement également aux femmes dissolues, libertines et menant une vie de désordres, bien que rien ne soit plus abominable’ (Les Trois Vertus, p. 689) [‘just as the sun shines on the just and the unjust, we have no shame in extending our instruction even to the women who are foolish and loose and lead disorderly lives, although there is nothing more abominable’] (The Three Virtues, p. 171). Worldly Prudence is the spokeswoman in this work; she is the only one who can prevent dishonour and poverty, for Christine knows that the wheel of fortune brings happiness in order to make the fall even worse. But she also criticises the ways and means used by the current Queen Isabella of Bavaria, as well as the mores of her time. Unable to live only in books or in a world of injustice and civil wars, Christine de Pizan had gone to the exile of a convent. Civil wars were ravaging France, for Duke Louis of Orleans had been assassinated in 1407, setting off the war between the Burgundians and the Armagnac. John the Fearless took Paris and claimed to have killed Louis for the sake of the kingdom. In the spring of 1413 the Cabochian revolt brought bloody slaughters in the capital and encouraged Henry V, King of England, to renew hostilities. The battle of Agincourt was a disaster for the French, seven thousand soldiers were killed and since Henry V decided that no prisoners would be taken, only a thousand survived, including the poet Charles of Orleans. During that time Christine de Pizan wrote La Lamentacion sur les maux de la France (1410) [Lamentation on the Woes



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of France] and Epistre de la Prison de vie humaine (1414-18) [A Letter concerning the Prison of Human Life], the first to call for peace, the second to console and help the widows of Agincourt. In May 1418 the Parisian people opened their city to John the Fearless, and Charles VII was taken away from Paris by his supporters: ‘Charles (c’est chose étrange) le fils du roi — si j’ose le dire — s’enfuit en toute hâte de Paris’ [‘Charles (how strange this is!) the king’s son — dare I say it?— fled in haste from Paris’].38 In Paris the executioner Capeluche was spreading terror, killing mostly women, including pregnant women. It was at that time that Christine fled Paris for the safety of the convent of Poissy, where her daughter and the royal princess Marie de France lived. In 1420, the Treaty of Troyes was signed, stating that Charles VII was the illegitimate son of Isabella of Bavaria and Louis of Orleans and as such could not be heir to the throne. This made Henry V the official pretender to the kingdom of France, the English were victorious and the Valois family seemed doomed. In 1420 Christine wrote Les Heures de Contemplacion sur la Passion de Nostre Seigneur,39 then stayed silent until ‘en l’an 1429 le soleil se remit à briller’ (Le Ditié, p. 711) [‘in 1429 the sun started to shine again’] (KV, p. 41]. Her joy comes from the fact that ‘l’enfant légitime rejeté du roi de France qui a souffert si longtemps de tant de grands malheurs, et qui s’approche maintenant, se leva à l’heure des primes, se présentant comme un roi couronné, puissant et majestueux…’(Le Ditié, p. 712) [‘the rejected child of the rightful King of France, who has long suffered many a great misfortune and who now approaches, rose up as if towards prime, coming as a crowned King in might and majesty…’] (KV, p. 41). This victory was even sweeter as it was due to a woman: ‘Et toi, Charles, roi de France, le septième de ce noble nom qui a dû faire la guerre avant que tout ne s’arrange pour toi, maintenant grâce à Dieu, vois ta renommée portée aux nues par la Pucelle qui a soumis à ton drapeau tes ennemis (c’est une chose nouvelle!’ (Le Ditié, p. 713). [‘And you, Charles, King of France, seventh of that noble name, who have been involved in such a great war before things turned out at all well for you, now, thanks be to God, see our honour exalted by the Maid who has laid low your enemies beneath your standard (and this is new!)’] (KV p. 42). Christine managed to include all her favourite themes in Le Ditié: the wheel of fortune, the education of

 38

Christine de Pizan, Le Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc, translated by Margaret Switten in Voix, p. 711. Subsequently in the text Le Ditié. Critical edition and translation by Angus Kennedy and Kenneth Varty (Oxford: Medium Aevum Monographs, 1977), p. 41. Subsequently in the text KV. 39 Liliane Dulac is working on an edition, which, hopefully, should come out soon.



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princes, war and peace, the behaviour of men in society, the role of women, the authority of the woman writer. For the critic Julia M. Walker, Christine de Pizan ‘used her writing first to appeal to, then to reprove the Queen. Finally, Christine de Pizan’s idealized vision of a powerful female ruler – a role Isabella singularly failed to fulfil – and her increasing identification of herself as not only a French writer, but as a voice of and for France, lead her to seize upon the phenomenon of Joan of Arc as the realization of all her political and social arguments and constructed female authority.’40 Joan of Arc appearing on the political and military scene was for Christine the sign that God loves women: Et quel honneur pour le sexe féminin! Il est évident que Dieu l’aime, puisque tout ce peuple misérable qui a détruit tout le royaume — maintenant recouvré et sauvé par une femme, ce que cinq mille hommes n’auraient pu faire — ainsi que les traîtres ont été exterminés […] Une fillette de seize ans (n’est-ce pas chose hors nature?) à qui les armes ne sont pas pesantes, […] Et elle est la principale capitaine de nos hommes vaillants et capables. Ni Hector ni Achille n’eurent une telle force! (Le Ditié, p. 718).41 [Oh! What an honour for the female sex! It is perfectly obvious that God has special regard for it when all these wretched people who destroyed the whole Kingdom — now recovered and made safe by a woman, something 5000 men could not have done — and the traitors exterminated […] A little girl of sixteen (isn’t this something quite supernatural?) who does not even notice the weight of the arms she bears […] And she is the supreme captain of our brave and able men. Neither Hector nor Achilles had such strength!] (KV, p. 46).

But more than praise of Joan of Arc, this work resembles a prophecy, a piece of propaganda, with Christine as the new Sybil, the good princess of the kingdom of Letters. She tells us what she foresees42 for the kingdom of



40 Julia M. Walker, ‘Repoliticizing The Three Virtues’, in Au champ des escriptures, pp. 535-548. On her appeal to the Queen, see Epistre à la Reine [Letter to the Queen]. 41 If we remember that Christine was married at fifteen, which was normal for young women of that time, being a soldier at sixteen does not seem such a miracle and it is also surprising to see a young woman of that age described as ‘une fillette’. 42 See Liliane Dulac, ‘Un poème de combat, Le Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc’, in Synergies, Revue du Gerflint (2007), 81-95. See also Deborah A. Fraioli, Joan of Arc, the Early Debate (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000).



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France and for world peace and defines her political theories, which, while ignored by politicians of all sides, gave rise to many debates and arguments in the academic circles that were to fulfil her prophecies. .



MIGRANT WOMEN ACTING AS INTERCULTURAL MEDIATORS: THERESE ALBERTINE LUISE VON JAKOB-ROBINSON AND WILHELMINA KARADŽIû-VUKOMANOVIû JULIANA JOVIýIû

The strongest and most fruitful intercultural relations between Serbs and Germans were established at the beginning of the nineteenth century during the period of Romanticism, and indeed many twentieth-century researchers in this field call this era the ‘golden decade’ of GermanSerbian relations.1 At the beginning of this very complex intercultural process that lasted several decades, many individuals from Germany, Austria and Serbia played an important role, including men such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vuk Stefanoviü Karadžiü, Jernej Kopitar, Jakob Grimm and Johann Severin Vater. But at the same time two women – Therese Albertine Luise von Jakob-Robinson (17971870) and Wilhelmina Karadžiü Vukomanoviü (1818-1894) – also had a significant role. When we talk today about the significance of women writers, we no longer evaluate them simply through traditional research approaches. A new transnational and multilinguistic approach can do justice to women’s participation in European literary history and help to overcome the 1

For example Miljan Mojaševiü, Srbi u nemaþkom mnjenju Vukovog doba (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 2006); Zoran Konstantinoviü, Deutsch-serbische Begegnungen. Überlegungen zur Geschichte der gegenseitigen Beziehungen zweier Völker (Berlin: Edition Neue Wege, 1997); Jevto M. Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar (Leipzig: Slavistisches Institut der Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität, 1941), pp. 36-103; Gabriella Schubert, ‘Kada se Gete sreo sa Vukom’, speech at the Serbian Academy of Science and Art, Belgrade, 25 May 2009. http://www.sanu.ac.rs/Inicijative/2009GabrijelaSubert.pdf [accessed 28 February 2011].

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problem of women’s invisibility in historiography. In fact, women played significant roles as intermediaries between national literatures and as de facto members of transnational networks. They often chose translation as a literary and cultural practice, as a way of entering the public literary sphere. However, the way in which these early women authors worked, especially those active in between languages – hence by definition on the margins of national literary fields – is often difficult for literary historians to study. These new approaches also open up quantities of ‘new’ source material, so that the lack of relevant information about the contemporary response to women’s writing is no longer an insurmountable obstacle and periodicals, translations and private correspondences (among others) provide us with valuable information.2 In this chapter, I will focus on the role of Theresa and Mina as crosscultural mediators and translators and will analyse these two women comparatively from the point of view of their contribution to building intercultural relations and bringing Serbian literature into the European cultural heritage. To reach their goals and do their work, these two women faced difficulties, mainly because they were women and particularly because they chose the challenging field of transnational and multilingual activities. I will point out some of these difficulties and show how they coped with them. In this way, I will underline the originality and novelty of their work, qualities which were not sufficiently valued in their time and even today. The one thing they had in common was that they won recognition for themselves in the mediating literary field, in translating from one language (from one culture) to another, and both worked with Serbian folk poems. I will not base my considerations on information from their literary works, but rather new and unexplored source material from their private correspondence, which I have analysed elsewhere.3 I interpret these sources using theories and methods from interdisciplinary gender studies and critical discourse analysis.4 This analysis is a combination of several methods: the biographical method, critical discourse analysis (textual analysis) and content analysis. We also have to bear in mind that private 2

Memorandum of Understanding for COST Action IS0901 (European Cooperation in Science and Technology), ‘Women Writers in History’ (2009), pp. 4, 6. http://w3.cost.eu/fileadmin/domain_files/ISCH/Action_IS0901/mou/IS0901e.pdf [accessed 31 October 2012]. 3 Juliana Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike uspešnih žena 19.veka. Na tragu zlatne decenije srpsko-nemaþkih interkulturnih veza: Mina i Talfj u privatnoj prepisci (Novi Sad: Futura publikacije, 2012). 4 Svenka Saviü, Diskurs analiza (Novi Sad: Filozofski fakultet, 1993).

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letters are a specific discourse genre in which we have concrete rules and characteristic parts.5 The aim is to show the presence of Theresa and Mina in nineteenthcentury literature and in the cultures of their time in Germany/Austria and Serbia and assess why their contributions to intercultural German-Serbian relations have not so far been properly valued. To study the mechanisms of Theresa’s and Mina’s success, a short overview of the lives of these two women is essential. To be so successful, they used special skills, knowledge and advantages they had at their disposal by belonging to a special social formation we define as migrants and the Diaspora. Theresa was born as a German in 1797 in Halle. After spending her childhood there, at the age of ten, she moved with her family to Russia, where she lived for ten years. There she had the opportunity to become familiar with the Russian language and Slavic culture. The next fourteen years she spent once again in Germany, and in 1830, she finally moved to America with her husband, an American Protestant theologian and scholar. Mina was born in the Serbian Diaspora in 1828 in Vienna, centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and her mother was Austrian, her father Serbian. She lived in Vienna most of her life, but she learned the Serbian language, visited Serbia several times and married a Serbian scholar with whom she lived in Belgrade for some time. From this short summary, we conclude that Theresa and Mina lived and worked in different places and in different cultural contexts but both learned Slavic languages. In addition, they both had contact with individuals from the German and Slavic/Serbian culture and both were Diaspora women. As I have argued elsewhere, this special group of people is characterised by transnationalism.6 They live constantly in two or more places and speak constantly two or more languages, between which there is a continuous exchange.7 Steven Vertovec, a 21st-century scholar, points out that transnationalism refers to a type of ‘diaspora consciousness’ marked by

5

Svenka Saviü, ‘Diskursne osobine privatnih pisama Mileve i Alberta Ajnštajn’, Flogiston, þasopis za nauku i tehniku, 1 (1995), 63-78. 6 Juliana Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje doprinosa Tereze Albertine Luize fon Jakob-Robinson (Talfj, 1797-1870) i Vilhelmine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü (Mina, 1828-1894) slovenskoj i srpskoj književnosti i kulturi’, 1st Conference for Young Slavists in Budapest, 1 (2012), 101-104. http://szlavintezet.elte.hu/szlavanyagok/youngslavist/1st%20Conference%20for%2 0Young%20Slavists%20in%20Budapest.pdf [accessed 31 October 2012]. 7 R.D., ‘Transnationalism’, Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, 27 (2006), p. 676.

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dual or multiple identifications.8 As Diaspora women, Theresa (German Diaspora in Russia and the USA) and Mina (Serbian Diaspora in Austria) used this specific situation and their bi- and multilingualism to translate, publish and act as intercultural mediators. They had this special starting position, which they both used to launch and develop their careers and become cross-cultural mediators and translators. In the patriarchal society of that time, it was not enough for women to have special skills and be talented. They also had to use the mechanisms of patriarchal society to reach men with influence in their surroundings in order to get out of the private into the public sphere. Their starting position was that they knew how to benefit from the advantage of being daughters of well-established and well-known academics. Theresa’s father was a professor in Germany and Russia, and later president of Halle University. Mina’s father was the famous language reformer and collector of Serbian folk poems Vuk Stefanoviü Karadžiü. Therefore, both women had to use the specific patriarchal system, an approach that was necessary at that time to prosper and to become recognised and both started their careers under the influence and with the support of their fathers and later of their husbands.9 Talent and male support were not enough to reach the public sphere though, and Theresa and Mina adopted a range of strategies for doing so. Some female authors of that time chose to present themselves under a pseudonym, and at the beginning of her career Theresa also used a male pseudonym (Ernst Berthold), changing it later (1824) to Talvj, which is an acronym of the first letters of her full name and surname. With her first strategy, she misled readers by presenting herself as a male, not revealing her female identity until she had won their attention. The second pseudonym, which she used for most of her career, is not transparent in gender terms and despite this, it is very unusual and mysterious, which is intriguing for readers. On the other hand, in her private correspondence, we see that when communicating with people she cared for or was familiar with, she chose the name Theresa, which clearly identified her as female.10 In the marriage contract between the Austrian Catholic Ana and the Serbian Orthodox Vuk, it was agreed that the female children would be baptised in the Roman Catholic church and given Roman Catholic names, 8

Steven Vertovec, ‘Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22/2 (1999), 1-26. http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk/working%20papers/conceiving.PDF [accessed 31 October 2012]. 9 Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, p. 102. 10 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 50.

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while the male children would be baptised in the Serbian Orthodox church and be given Serbian Orthodox names. So Mina’s first name was Wilhelmina but she rarely used her real name and was rarely addressed this way by people. Her father gave her the nickname Mina, which was ‘neutral’ from the cultural point of view and did not betray any national or religious identity, whilst of course not being gender-neutral. This indicates that Vuk was aware of the difficulties of being an alien with a foreign name in one culture, both in Austria (Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) and Serbia (Ottoman Empire) and chose to hide his daughter’s cultural and religious identity under a neutral name. Mina seems to have been aware of this and used the name in both the private and public spheres.11 Thus, Theresa chose ‘invisible’ visibility because she hid under a pseudonym, and Wilhelmina normally used a nickname, which provided her with good and safe representation in both cultures. When Theresa was asked to translate Serbian folk poems from Vuk’s anthology of Serbian folk poems,12 she was young and inexperienced, with only a few anonymous published reviews13 and translations from English into German of two of Walter Scott’s books (under a male pseudonym).14 Her two advantages were her knowledge of the Russian language and Slavic culture and the fact that she had an influential father, who gave her the chance to enter the literary world, using his connections to get her talents fostered. Under his supervision, she started corresponding with some of the best-known contemporaries of her time, such as Goethe, Jakob Grimm, Jernej Kopitar and Vuk Karadžiü, all influential males in powerful positions and all important for her translation project. How she managed to handle all these authoritative figures, knowing that her career depended on them, we will see through some of the conclusions of my critical discourse analysis of her letters to Jernej Kopitar and Vuk Stefanoviü Karadžiü, in which Theresa used different communication strategies and tactics. 11

Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 48. Vuk Stefanoviü Karadžiü, Narodne srpske pjesme (Leipzig: Härtel und Breitkopf, 1824). 13 Talvj, ‘Briefe eines Frauenzimmers über einige Erscheinungen in der Literatur. Über Wilhelm Meisters Tagebuch vom Verfasser der Wanderjahre’, Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 17 (1822); Talvj, ‘Briefe eines Frauenzimmers über einige Erscheinungen in der Literatur. Das goldene Vließ. Ein dramatisches Gedicht in drei Abtheilungen von Franz Grillparzer’, Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 203 (1822); Talvj, ‘Schreiben einer Dame’, Literarisches Conversations-Blatt, 26 (1823). 14 Walter Scott, Der schwarze Zwerg (Zwickau: Schumann, 1822); Walter Scott, Die Presbyterianer (Zwickau: Schumann, 1823). 12

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She was aware that it would be impossible to translate the poems without the help of experts who were of Slavic origin and geographically close to Serbia. It was essential to get the support of Kopitar and Karadžiü, and Theresa’s main goal was to win them over to her translation project. These letters prove the diplomatic tactics she used in her efforts to publish the folk poems, tactics that at that time were not unusual for women, for they did not occupy powerful positions in society and had to work with these authoritative figures in order to succeed. When Theresa sent her first letters to Kopitar, they did not know each other, which is why she refers to all the well-known people who have supported her (Goethe, her father, Vuk) to try to convince Kopitar to also do so. Analysing this correspondence with Kopitar, we can observe that Theresa used numerous suggestions and corrections she received from Kopitar concerning her translations and when she decided not to do so, she backed up her arguments by referring to Goethe: Das Manuscript [mit Talvjs Übersetzungen der Volkslieder] hat er [Goethe] mir mit einigen wenigen Bemerkungen und einigen Beylagen zurückgeschickt, die ich hier anfüge. […] Er versichert zwar wiederholt, mich nicht geniren zu wollen usw. Indessen ich ehre und liebe ihn so, daß ich ihm gern in Allem willfahren möchte.15 [He [Goethe] returned my draft version [of the poems] with only a few remarks and attachments which I send to you attached to this letter. […] Several times he assured me that he didn’t want to embarrass me. But, I admire and love him so much, that I would like to act in all matters as he desires.]16

This was also a diplomatic tactic employed by women: quoting or paraphrasing the words of another person, not confronting their own opinions with those of a man, but presenting him with arguments from a male authority with more influence. In this case, Talvj points out that Goethe made only ‘a few remarks’, implying that Kopitar was not right to criticise Talvj’s translations so much. Where Theresa gives her own opinion, she points out who supported her: ‘Auch Goethe ist hier ganz meiner Meinung.’17 [‘Goethe fully agrees with me.’] She knew that it was important in patriarchal society that the opinion or decision of a woman be

15

Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, pp. 44-45. All translations of quotations are mine unless otherwise stated. 17 Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, p. 47. 16

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confirmed by a male authority. Talvj used this strategy of ‘the indirect approach of achieving goals’ for building up her career.18 Later on, however, as she became stronger and more secure, and when she published her first edition of Serbian Folk Poems19 and became a wellknown translator, we observe that she stopped using different strategies and tactics. With huge self-confidence she ventured her own opinion, without hiding behind some authority, and argued on equal terms with Kopitar about academic and other cultural and historical topics of her time. In one letter she writes to him about the preparation of the anniversary of one well-known writer of her time: Hier ist man jetzt viel beschäftigt mit den Vorbereitungen zu dem Jubiläum Niemeyers,20 deßen vielfältige und wahrhaft achtungswerthe Wirksamkeit laut und glänzend anerkannt werden soll. […] Unter den Tausenden seiner Schüler rüsten sich viele fern und nah zur würdigsten Feyer. […] Haben Sie seine Reisen gelesen? Ich gestehe, daß ich sie ziemlich langweilig finde – mäßig bis zur Nüchternheit; deutlich bis zur Breite ohne einen originellen, ohne einen piquanten Zug – und doch giebt es weit und breit in Deutschland kein beliebteres Lesebuch.21 [Everybody is occupied with preparing Niemeyer’s anniversary which will serve to glorify the whole of his considerable and indeed honourable opus. […] Thousands of his students will come from all over to glorify him. […] Did you read his travel writings? I admit finding them boring; they are modest, almost prosaic. Everything is so clear, without one original, spicy element. Still, the whole of Germany adores his books.]

Theresa’s open declaration that she finds the books boring is an indication that she is now prepared to criticise the books of very wellknown and established authorities. By this time she had become an authority herself and did not hide it any more, giving her opinion directly rather than relying on the support of authorities like her father, Goethe, Vuk, Grimm and Kopitar.22 The twelve letters from Theresa to Kopitar analysed in my book23 show that she took the translation very seriously and was guided by her own intuition and talent for translation and poetry. She managed to defend 18

Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, p. 102. Talvj, Volkslieder der Serben (Halle u. Leipzig: Renger, 1825). 20 August Hermann Niemeyer (1754-1828), a well-known Evangelic theologian and pedagogue. 21 Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, p. 69. 22 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 86. 23 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 57-95. 19

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her own translation technique, persuade male authorities like Goethe and Kopitar and conquer the public sphere. She was fully equal to the task and succeeded as we have seen by employing different strategies and tactics. It is also clear that Theresa believed in her qualities, but she also knew that she could develop and show her talent only with the help of influential men, on whom her future depended. She was one of those gifted women in a patriarchal society, who only needed some support and protection from influential men to develop their skills and apply their knowledge.24 As in the letter to Kopitar, in her letters to Vuk, Theresa refers to male authorities, to her father. Her first letter to Vuk is attached to her father’s letter, in which he informs Vuk that his daughter has studiously started translating the poems from Vuk’s Serbian Folk Poem Anthology (1824). Analysing Theresa’s six letters to Vuk, we observe another important characteristic.25 She was not only talented for translating poetry, she also had the ability to include others who could support her translation work – native speakers like Vuk and very well-educated linguists like Kopitar.26 Despite the fact that she knew the Russian language, translating from Serbian into German was full of difficulties; for example, she faced problems with proverbs and idioms and the translation of traditional habits because she was not familiar with Serbian culture and tradition and sought Vuk’s help. She also asked him for literal translations of the poems, which she later put into verse form. Here we gain an insight into the different stages of translating poems from literal translations into well-formulated verses. Also, as her knowledge of the Serbian language grew and she was able to understand the poems as a whole, it was important to her to have literal translations to check and correct her own translations into verse. Thanks to Theresa’s explanations concerning her translation, we get an insight into her intercultural development and understand the difficulties she faced while trying to bring Serbian folk poems closer to the German readership.27 In addition, Theresa was sending letters simultaneously to Kopitar (who was living in Vienna) and Vuk (who also lived in Vienna, but was spending most of his time in Serbia). She gave permission to Kopitar to read the letters she wrote to Vuk and vice versa. Thus, thanks to Theresa, all three of them were linked up and well organised around one mutual task.28 24

Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, p. 102. Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 86-95. 26 Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, p. 102. 27 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 48-95. 28 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 89. 25

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In her letters to him from the USA, we read that things turned out well for her professionally. Again, thanks to her talents, reputation and her American husband with his excellent network and reputation, she managed to reach well-known, powerful and strong publishing houses, just as she did in Germany, and continued publishing her works. Theresa’s choice of translation as a literary and cultural practice that enabled her to enter the public, literary sphere was in her case successful, but like in all her other fields of interest, she had to cope with male competition and her letters show how she did so. For example, soon after publishing her ‘German Anthology of Serbian Folk Poems’, a male German translator, P. F. Goetze, published an almost identical anthology.29 Theresa, by giving examples in a letter to Kopitar, proved that his translations were almost always identical to hers and that he had almost the same choice of poems. In dem nemlichen Stück heißt auch malo vreme nicht wenig Zeit, wie viel natürlicher, sondern wie bey mir: wenig Monden. Warum ich dieß so übersetzte begreife ich jetzt selbst nicht. Meine Sünde: Dva se draga vrlo milovala durch ‘Herzlich liebten sich ein Knab’ und ein Mädchen’ zu übersetzen, muß ihm beßer gefallen haben, als mir, denn hier heißt es ebenfalls: Knab’ und Mädchen liebten sich von Herzen. Überhaupt hab’ ich mir keine Freiheit genommen, die er nicht zehnfach überboten hätte, und ich müßte wirklich, da er schon 1819 übersetzt haben will, eine geheime Sympathie zwischen uns fürchten, wenn ich nicht zum Glück wüßte, wie diese wunderbare Sache mit natürlichen Sachen zusammenhieng. Ein Freund, der auch ein genauer Bekannter von Götze ist, schrieb mir schon vorlängst: „Ihre Uebersetzung hat mir G. schon vor einem halben Jahr abgeborgt, und trotz alles Mahnens kann ich sie nicht wieder bekommen. Er versichert, daß Ihre beyden Arbeiten bewundernswürdig zusammentreffen.’ – Der Freund versäumt nicht, diese letzten Worte mit Unterstreichungen und Ausrufungen zu versehen, und deutet dadurch genugsam an, was er von dieser bewundernswürdigen Uebereinstimmung denkt.30 [In his work [anthology] he didn’t translate ‘malo vremena’ [‘little time’] with ‘wenig Zeit’ [‘little time’] which would be more natural, but as I did, with ‘wenig Monden’ [‘little moon’]. Why I translated it like this, I today cannot understand. I made a big mistake when I translated ‘Dva se draga vrlo milovala’[‘Two lovers caressed each other very much’] with ‘herzlich liebten sich ein Knab und ein Madchen’[‘a boy and a girl dearly loved each other’]. It seems that he liked this translation more than I did, because he also translated it with ‘Knab und Madchen liebten sich von Herzen’ [‘a boy and a girl heartily loved each other’]. Besides, every little freedom I gave 29 30

Peter von Goetze, Serbische Volkslieder (St. Petersburg: W. Gräff, 1827). Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, p. 79.

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Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators myself while translating he overtopped ten times. He says that he translated these poems in 1819, so I should be afraid that there was something going on between the two of us, but as one of Goetze’s friends, who at the same time is my friend too, wrote to me, this secret has very natural reasons: ‘Goetze asked me to send him your translations of the poems half a year ago and he never returned them to me. He is trying to convince me that his and your translations match in a miraculous way.’ This friend underlined the last words and marked them with exclamation marks, showing me in this way what he thinks about this ‘miraculous match’.]

She called it shameless plagiarism. At the same time she was afraid of a scandal, because Goetze claimed that he had started to translate the poems in 1819 (while she started in 1824), so Theresa could be accused of plagiarism, or even worse, of having an affair with Goetze. We can see from her desperation just how dangerous it was for a woman’s reputation to compete with men. Another example of plagiarism of her work is the translation of Serbian poems into English by the Englishman Sir John Bowring.31 Theresa again compared these translations to hers in a letter to Kopitar and found proof that Bowring’s translation was based on her German translation, not on the original Serbian poems. Daß er mehr aus dem Deutschen übersetzt als aus dem Serbischen ist wohl ganz unzweifelhaft, auch gesteht er dieß in seinen Briefen ganz unumwunden ein, und verschweigt es nur im Buche wohlweislich. Ich finde, die Lieder lesen sich recht hübsch – übrigens mißfallen uns unsre Fehler erst recht, wenn sie ein Andrer nachahmt, und daran fehlt es nicht. Manche Stellen z.B. wo er: ‘Oj snašice, rumena ružice!’ was ich, um den Reim nachzuahmen übersetzte: ‘Brudersweibchen, süßes schönes Täubchen!’ ganz treuherzig wiedergiebt ‘Brother’s wife! Thou sweet and lovely dovelet!’ machten mich wirklich zu lachen. Hier, und an tausend andern Stellen scheint er das Original gar nicht einmal angesehen zu haben.32 [That he is translating from German and not from Serbian into English, that’s obvious. He admitted it to me without hesitation in his letter, but in his book he bravely conceals it. The poems are lovely, but if you see your own mistakes copied by someone else, you dislike them even more. And there are a lot of them. For example, the verse ‘Oj snašice, rumena ružice!’[‘Oh little sister-in-law, little red rose’] which I translated as ‘Brudersweibchen, süßes schönes Täubchen!’ [‘Little brother’s wife, sweet 31

John Bowring, Serbian Popular Poetry (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1827). 32 Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, p. 78.

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and beautiful little dove’], to stick to the rhyme, he literally translates with ‘Brother’s wife! Thou sweet and lovely dovelet!’, which made me laugh a lot. Like here, there are thousands of other verses where it is obvious that he didn’t take a look at the original poems.]

Bowring admits this in his letters to her, but not in his anthology nor in public. We might ask if these men, Goetze and Bowring, would have acted in this way if the original translator had been a man and I suggest not; it seems much more likely that this behaviour can be explained solely by the fact that at that time in academic circles there was very little respect for female authors and translators.33 Theresa didn’t do anything about all this, in fact , she drew back and commented on these circumstances with the following words to Kopitar: Ueberhaupt ist doch das Unwesen in unserer Literatur jetzt entsetzlich! nicht leicht hat mich etwas mehr empört, als des erbärmlichen Herloßsohn Unverschämtheit gegen Frl. Tiek. Wenn ein vollkommen unbescholtnes, gebildetes Frauenzimmer, das noch dazu nie öffentlich aufgetreten ist, wenigstens nie unter ihrem Namen, nicht einmal mehr sicher ist, öffentlich angegriffen, oder gar verhöhnt zu werden, welches sollte es denn seyn? schützt davor bey uns nur entschiedne Unbedeutendheit?34 [Altogether, what is going on in our literary world today is a big evil and harshness. I am outraged about the mean behaviour of Mr. Herloson concerning Mrs. Tieck.35 If a totally pure and educated woman, who never made a public appearance – at least not under her own name – is not secure from public offence and mockery, then who can be safe? Can it be that we are secure only if we choose to stay totally insignificant?]

Comparing her situation with that of Mrs. Tieck, Theresa decided to take appropriate steps and in order to protect herself from disgrace, chose not to write any more reviews: Ich fürchte immer, ich könnte noch einmal Verdruß davon [vom Rezensiren] haben, denn die Männer vergeben es uns allenfalls ein Paar Verschen zu machen, allein die Kritik ist nun einmal ‘unweiblich’ ‘mit den Grazien unverträglich’ und weiß der Himmel was alles! wahrscheinlich weil dazu mehr klarer Verstand gehört, als dunkles Gefühl! – Theils weil 33

Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, pp. 101-2. Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, p. 80. 35 Dorothea Tieck (1799-1841) was the daughter of the famous German poet, writer, publisher and translator Ludwig Tieck. She anonymously translated for her father several works of Shakespeare and other authors. It seems that Dorothea was attacked concerning her translations. 34

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Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators ich von Natur etwas furchtsam bin, und vor dem Gedanken erschrecke, etwa hämische Antikritiken zu erfahren, worin vieleicht gar mein Name öffentlich genannt würde, theils aus anderen Gründen beschränk’ ich mich auf die Kritiken am Theetisch, und so gewinn’ ich, während niemand verliert. Uebrigens muß ich hinzufügen, daß meine enge literarische Laufbahn bis jetzt vollkommen dornenlos war.]36 [I am always afraid that one day I will have big problems because of writing reviews. Men can forgive us a few verses, but criticism is too ‘unwomanly’ and ‘inconsistent with the Graces’ and who knows what else. Probably because one needs a sharp mind to write reviews, instead of being deeply emotional! – Because I am by nature timid and afraid of wicked comments about my reviews, partly because of other reasons, I will limit myself to criticism at tea parties. This way I win and nobody loses anything. But I have to say that my modest literary career up to now was without any ugly spot.]

This quotation, in which Theresa writes about her experience in a literary world dominated by men which she wants to enter, speaks for itself. She is highly aware of how vulnerable a female reviewer is, for if she criticises men’s work, lies could end up being told about her work and her personality, and that could ruin her reputation. Theresa is not ready to take that risk at the beginning of her career, but she does not give up and once again chooses a diplomatic way, giving her opinion within a small circle of literary experts who gathered together at so-called tea parties in salons. In contrast to reviews in magazines, which can be accessed by a large audience, in this small circle she can control the audience, only they will hear her, and she can adapt her critical opinion to this small number of people she is familiar with. By getting some insight into the literary market of that time through Theresa’s letters, we can observe that not one single translated verse was forgiven her and that she suffered insults of an intimate nature because she dared to defend her opinions against different authorities. Theresa knows that she possesses a sharp mind, an attribute reserved to men, but patriarchal society of her time didn’t allow her to show her qualities and skills. Indeed, after these events, she didn’t publish a single review for six years, until 1834, and she remained in the relatively safe area of translation.37 My analysis of Mina’s life and letters to her father and brother shows that she lived an intercultural life, like so many people in Europe today. 36 37

Miloviü, Talvjs erste Uebertragungen und ihre Briefe an Kopitar, pp. 78-79. Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 92-94.

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The letters emphasise the difficulties of everyday life for people who decide to live in two cultures, in this case Serbian and German, from childhood on. They show the difficulty of intercultural life, always on the margins of economic, but also emotional existence.38 Due to his professional obligations as a linguist, Serbian language reformer and collector and publisher of Serbian and Slavic folk poems, Mina’s father Vuk was usually away from his family, back in Ottomanoccupied Serbia. Meanwhile, his wife Ana gave birth and buried eleven of their thirteen children, mostly while Vuk was not in Vienna. Only Mina and her younger brother Dimitrije survived. Since Vuk and Ana came from poor peasant and worker families, they never had enough means to support financially their family, so most of the time their family suffered economic poverty, one of the reasons why so many infants died. This was and is today the destiny of many migrant families, whose fathers or mothers work in welfare states to support their families back home. This situation affected Ana’s and Mina’s emotional and mental welfare, and so Ana was often sick and devastated and Mina suffered from adolescence onwards from ‘nervous illness’. In one of the many letters Mina writes to her father about her and her mother being alone, desperate and sick while Vuk is not with them, we can observe how difficult it was for the two of them to survive without the support and protection of their father and husband. Here Mina writes right after the death of her husband, showing her and her mother’s suffering: Idem, bolje reüi puzim, kao nekada, a veüi deo dana provodim u postelji. [...] posle tvoga odlaska imala sam veliku groznicu i jake bolove u vratu, pa sam 6 dana neprekidno morala da ležim u postelji. [...] Jedva se držala [majka Ana] na nogama. Veoma je i potresena, duboko je boli što si ti odmah posle njenog dolaska otputovao. Praznici su pred vratima. Svi se raduju – pa kad veü za mene postoji samo žalost, zašto da za sirotu majku ne bude nikakve radosti? Lakše bi mi bilo da sama snosim svoj bol nego što moram gledati kako se majka kida u duši.39 [I am up again, or better to say, crawling on all fours, like once, and I spend most of my days in bed. [...] After you left I had fever and strong pain in my neck, so I had to stay in bed for six days. [...] she [her mother, Vuk’s wife Ana] can barely walk. She is very upset and hurt because you had to leave immediately after her arriving. The holidays are coming.

38

Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 100-141. Vuk Stefanoviü-Karadžiü, Prepiska, XII (1859-1862) in Sabrana dela Vuka Stefanoviüa Karadžiüa, Golub Dobrašinoviü et al (eds.), (Beograd: Prosveta, 19871998), p. 277. 39

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Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators Everybody is looking forward to it – Since for me there is only sadness, why can’t she have joy in her life? It would be easier for me to suffer alone than to watch mother’s soul tearing apart.]

At the same time, since Vuk had an international reputation in his field of research, Mina had the privilege of belonging to the highest intellectual and political circles, both in Austria and Serbia, to which she would never have belonged solely because of her economic status. Vuk provided her with the means of entering these circles by granting her a high-level private education. Through the letters, we can observe that Mina was highly involved in Vuk’s business affairs and provided him with different services: translation of Serbian folk literature and business correspondence, secretarial help, editing and proof-reading, transcription of texts, revision of manuscripts, publishing services, distribution and sending of books and letters. She knew all of his friends and business partners and in Vuk’s absence often spent time with them. She did the bookkeeping and checked the income and expenses and took care of family matters. Mina dedicated her time to her father’s work and developed skills and knowledge she maybe never even knew she possessed. Thanks to her father, she also developed the artistic side of her personality (she was educated to become a painter and pianist), but she neglected these talents in order to support her father’s mission. Based on the dissatisfaction she showed in her letters, I conclude that she was giving more than she received in return.40 Therefore, under the supervision of her father, Mina became an intercultural mediator between Austrian and Serbian culture. Her first translations of Serbian folk poetry were given by Vuk to the Austrian poet Ludwig August Frankl, who shaped them into verses and published them in Vienna.41 Vuk also recommended Mina’s translations of Serbian fairytales and proverbs to Jakob Grimm. These translations were published in Germany referring to Mina as their translator42 and according to the twentieth-century scholar Miljan Mojaševiü, in the history of the reception of Serbian folk treasures in Germany, this event is considered highly significant.43 40

Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 120. Ludwig August Frankl, Gusle. Serbisch Nationallieder (Wien: Verlag von Albert A. Venedikt, 1852). 42 Vuk Stefanoviü Karadžiü, Volksmärchen der Serben: nebst einem Anhange von mehr als tausend serbischen Sprichwörtern (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1854). 43 Miljan Mojaševiü, Srbi u nemaþkom mnjenju Vukovog doba (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 2006), p. 205. 41

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It was after Vuk’s death in 1864, when cultural differences arose between her brother and her concerning Vuk’s legacy, that Mina fully developed and applied her intercultural skills. In Serbian tradition and culture a brother had a special position in the family and society, especially for female siblings, who were brought up to worship and love a brother, perceived to be a gift from heaven. From a letter Mina wrote in her younger years to her brother we can see that she also was raised in this spirit because she says: Još jedna noü i ponovo üemo se radovati jednom danu, koji je za nas oboje od istog znaþaja, ali za mene još od posebne vrednosti. Jer me je toga dana Svemoguüi obdario najdragocenijim, na þemu nikad ne mogu dovoljno da mu zahvalim: dao mi je brata.44 [One more night and we will again celebrate a day which for both of us is significant, but for me even more, because that day the almighty God gave me the most precious gift for which I will be grateful to him forever: he gave me a brother.]

Dimitrije was brought up in this spirit of Serbian patriarchal society and took Mina’s obedience for granted. He thus claimed his right to all that Vuk left, mostly referring to his written legacy, which was extremely valuable both to Serbia (and to Dimitrije) and to Mina and Ana. Vuk left a large number of unpublished works and manuscripts in Vienna, which had to be edited and published. For Mina it was important that this written legacy stayed in Vienna for two reasons. First, and most importantly, she identified with her father’s work and was concerned with its well-being in Belgrade. Secondly, the economic welfare of her family (she had to support her son and mother) depended on it. Mina managed to overcome these differences in a hard struggle with her brother (who was an army officer in the Serbian army and lived in Belgrade) and the Serbian authorities, because she was well-acquainted with the cultural differences in the business worlds in Serbian and Austrian society at that time. In one letter, when the struggle concerning Vuk’s legacy was at its peak, she writes to Dimitrije: Ako Vlada i knez u tome vide neko zlo što želim oþevu volju da ispunim, ako knez misli da ima prava ženi njegovog brata, Vukovoj üerki, umesto da je uzme sa njenim siroþetom u zaštitu i potpomogne, još i penziju da joj oduzme, neka to uþini. To mi neüe zadati brige i ni za dlaku promeniti moje mišljenje. Bog me neüe ostaviti! Ja sam ubeÿena u moje pravo – 44

Golub Dobrašinoviü, Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü (Beograd: Rad, KPZ Srbije, 1997), p. 35.

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Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators (moraüu se klonuti sile, ali me onda niko neüe moüi spreþiti da apelujem na javnost – ona neka sudi i proklinje. Iz oþevih usta znam stvari, koje su za javnost tajna. Bilo bi neoprezno izazivati me, jer kad bih ja to objavila, dotiþnom bi to malo slave donelo). Nikog nemam uza me ko bi se za moje pravo zauzeo, ali oseüam u sebi snagu našeg oca.45 [If the government and the prince [prince Mihailo Obrenoviü of Serbia] think it’s evil that I want to preserve our father’s legacy, and if the prince thinks that he has the right to cut the pension of the wife of his cousin46 [Mina], Vuk’s daughter, instead of protecting and caring for her and her little orphan, then he shall do so. I will not worry and not change my opinion. God is with me! I am convinced that I am right. (I will have to withdraw since I don’t have enough power, but I will make an appeal in public – and the public will judge and damn them. I heard things from our fathers which are not for public ears. It would be incautious to challenge me, because if I tell things I’ve heard about a particular person,47 it wouldn’t serve for the glory of him). I am all alone and don’t have anybody who would fight for my rights, but I feel the power of our father in me.]

Here we can also observe that something that is in the interest of one nation is always in the interest of politics and that we cannot measure Mina’s contribution without putting it in the political context of the Serbia of her time. In addition we see that personal means political and that Mina was aware of her ability to face the situation. The letters show her significant role in preserving her father’s spiritual legacy. Thanks to her intercultural skills she managed to preserve her father’s legacy, editing and publishing it throughout Europe, to the significant extent we know today. Mina was the true keeper of his legacy!48 Although some twentieth-century scholars have written on Mina’s life and work,49 to date nothing has been written about Mina’s crucial role and significance in saving and preserving her father’s legacy 45

Dobrašinoviü, Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü, p. 63. Mina’s late husband Aleksa Vukomanoviü was the cousin of Serbian prince Mihailo Obrenoviü. The pension she is talking about is the family pension from Serbia she was granted after the death of her husband. 47 We do not know what Mina means but she doubtless refers to a high-ranking politician, maybe even the prince himself. 48 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, p. 137. 49 Golub Dobrašinoviü, Mina Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü (Beograd: Vukov i Dositejev muzej, 1974); Spomenar Mine Karadžiü (Gornji Milanovac: Deþje novine. 1983); Mina Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü. Život i delo ( Beograd: Rad, KPZ Srbije, 1995); Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü (Beograd: Rad, KPZ Srbije, 1997); Jelena Šauliü, Vuk i porodica. (Beograd: Jugoslovenska revija, 1978). 46

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and important intercultural work. Nobody has shown Mina’s contribution in editing texts and manuscripts, which implied selection and understanding of facts, and awareness of the meaning of important academic work. Mina is capable of putting her father’s legacy in different contexts in which it could lose its values, she understands the difference between recasting facts and treating them as what they really are and is familiar with the different stages of working with the manuscripts. She thus has serious plans for working with the manuscripts and this task will be her life project, leading her to write to her brother: [...] njeno sreÿivanje je neuporedivo teže, nego sreÿivanje knjiga i ono zahteva mnogo vremena. Još nisam s tim zapoþela, jer je to sistematiþan posao, koji üe biti raÿen strpljivo i sa velikom pažnjom i sa kojim se ne sme prenagliti. [...] ozbiljno üu i vredno priüi tome.50 [[...] Editing them [the manuscripts] cannot be compared with editing books because it’s more difficult and takes a lot of time. I haven’t started yet, because systematic work has to be done with great patience and care and without rush. [...] It has to be done with great devotion and skill.]

In another letter she writes: To je, uzgred reþeno, posao koji traje godinama, za koji niko nije pozvaniji od mene koja sam od oca primila sva potrebna uputstva i koja bi ovaj zadatak sa pijetetom i ljubavlju izvršila. Ti kao oficir ne možeš ni garantovati za oþuvanje rukopisa: neka sutra izbije rat, šta üeš uraditi sa njima? Uruþiti ih stranim rukama, bilo bi isto kao i poništiti ih, nešto dodati ili oduzeti bila bi neoprostiva profanacija, zato još jednom - ostavi ih u rukama u koje ih je otac stavio, tu su sigurni, ostavi ih meni, ja üu ti zato uruþiti oružje, koje bih u krajnjem sluþaju upotrebila protiv tebe, ukoliko ti sve moje prestavke zanemariš i ostaneš pri svom neosnovanom neprijateljstvu.51 [This is a task to be fulfilled in the next few years. I am the only one who got all the necessary instructions from our father and who can finish this job with dedication and love. You, an army officer, cannot protect the manuscripts. What will you do with them if there is a war tomorrow? To hand them over into foreign hands would be equivalent to destroying them. To add or leave something out would be an unforgivable profanation. Therefore, I tell you once again: leave the manuscripts in the hands in which our father put them, here they are safe. Leave them with me and I will deliver you weapons [meaning arguments] which I would eventually 50 51

Dobrašinoviü, Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü, p. 71. Dobrašinoviü, Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü, p. 64.

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Migrant Women Acting as Intercultural Mediators use against you, if you disregard all my suggestions and still show unfounded animosity against me.]

Then she writes something that, in Serbian culture, we would never expect a sister to write to her brother: ‘Ako si mi brat, ne moram imati spram tebe nikakvog obzira.’52 [‘Although you are my brother, I don’t need to have consideration for you.’] Mina is fighting for her own existence and the existence of her son through fighting for the existence of Vuk’s legacy! If they take the manuscripts away from her, she will lose her life’s mission, something she lived and worked for all her life. She will also lose privileges, reputation and financial security because the publication of successive books would provide the means to survive. Still, the sentence ‘Although you are my brother, I don’t need to have consideration for you’ isn’t in the spirit of Christianity or in the spirit of patriarchal relations between sister and brother, clearly showing that she is radically changing her position towards her brother. In these letters, we gain insight into the details of how she fulfilled this obligation with affection and skill and full of understanding for the legacy. Following my analyses of Mina’s correspondence, we can conclude that Mina was Vuk’s competent business partner, for just as Mileva Mariü Einstein supported her husband Albert Einstein in his scientific work,53 Mina helped her father unselfishly and affectionately and with a strong belief that his vision of Serbian culture was her vision, too. In this sense, we can consider Mina Vuk’s coauthor in some of his works which were published in Europe and Serbia.54 It is clear therefore that Mina’s contribution to German-Serbian intercultural relations has not been shown the due recognition and respect it deserved and has so far been unjustly minimised.55 Going into detail about how Theresa and Mina achieved their goals and how they developed their careers demonstrates that they used all the advantages they had, which was necessary because of the marginalised situation of women in patriarchal nineteenth-century society. As women, it was not enough to be well-educated and talented to reach the public sphere. They had to take advantage of their starting position, being daughters of fathers of influence in the world of literature which was dominated by men. They also had to use different strategies and tactics to 52

Dobrašinoviü, Pisma Mine Karadžiü-Vukomanoviü, p. 64. Saviü, ‘Diskursne osobine privatnih pisama’. 54 Joviþiü, ‘Ponovno preispitivanje’, p. 103. 55 Joviþiü, Strategije i taktike, pp. 36, 40, 153. 53

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reach their goals. They used their knowledge of two (and more) cultures and languages, given to them through origin (Mina) or lived experience (Talvj) to become cross-cultural mediators and translators. With all these advantages together, they were both able to launch their careers. Theresa later on became very productive as a cross-cultural mediator and translator. She expressed her cross-cultural role and contribution as a writer in her novels Heloise,56 The Exiles57 (which she published both in English and German) and others, then as a scholar in her critical reviews and academic books. She was familiar with Slavic, German, Oriental and American cultures and published around fifty reviews, critical articles, novels and scholarly works in well-known journals and publishing houses both in America (in English) and Germany (in German).58 Throughout all her works she refers to different cultures and nations and by writing in so many languages and mediating between so many cultures, Theresa became a true example of a transnational woman. She was unsurpassed as a translator of Serbian folk poems and figured among the most famous Slavists in Europe. In the USA she was the founder of American Slavonic Studies and introduced the American public to Slavic culture and literature. She was also the first German woman to write a bio-bibliographical compilation about German Women Writers under the title Deutschlands Schriftstellerinnen bis vor hundert Jahren.59 She thus acted as an intercultural mediator between three parts of the world: Western Europe and the Balkans (at that time part of the Ottoman Empire, including Serbia, an exotic and undiscovered area of Europe); Germany/Europe and America; Germany and the Russian Empire. Despite this, as a female pioneer, she suffered discrimination and marginalisation both in Germany and America, both countries she wanted to belong to. Mina was less fortunate with writing and publishing her own works because she followed her father’s lifelong work and helped him with it. She was a talented painter and left around fifty paintings, but she was also a talented writer, which we can see from the small number of her own works, which were published posthumously, mostly in the twentieth 56

Talvj, Heloise or The Unrevealed Secret. A Tale (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1850); Heloise. Eine Erzählung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1852). translated by herself into English. 57 Talvj, Die Auswanderer. Eine Erzählung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1852); Talvj, The Exiles. A Tale (New York: P. Putnam, 1853), translated into English by her daughter Mary Robinson. 58 http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors/show/3452 [accessed 12 December 2012]. 59 Talvj, ‘Deutschlands Schriftstellerinnen bis vor hundert Jahren’, Historisches Taschenbuch (1861), 1-141.

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century.60 In her lifetime, she was well-known as the daughter of Vuk Karadžiü and she managed to translate Serbian folk poems and tales and over 1000 Serbian proverbs into German. Mina’s efforts were not well recognised in Serbia and Austria though, and although there are a number of works in the twentieth century referring to her and her written works were published in the twentieth century, there is still a lack of recognition of her significant role.61 In her book Twice Removed. The Experience of German-American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century, Dorothea Diver Stuecher refers to German-American women writers Therese Robinson, Mathilde Anneke and Kathinka Sutro-Schücking. She bases her book on the […] growing interest in the voices of those authors who stand on the periphery of the normative literary scene. […] Among these writers […] there exist women who, like the German-American women writers who form the focus of this work, are ‘twice removed’ from the dominant culture in which they work and live. They are separated from the mainstream of literary opportunity and taste in America both on the basis of their cultural affiliation and their gender status.62

I would in fact like to go a step further than Stuecher, for these transnational women were not only marginalised by their host countries and by being women, but also by their home countries. I would say therefore that they have been triply marginalised/removed: by the native country, by the adopted country and as women. Based on these two case studies, we can conclude that a number of women throughout the centuries were not only doubly, but triply marginalised because of their transnational background as Diaspora/ migrant/minority women. Within the group of earlier marginalised women writers, we talk about a subgroup which is active in between languages and cultures and which is by definition on the margins of the national literary fields – both in their home countries and their host countries. That is why in this chapter I have sought to show that analysing and reevaluating alternative sources like private correspondence is essential in exploring the shadow world of women’s creative work and their cultural contribution. Analysing such sources can provide significant evidence of women’s participation in European literary history and help to overcome 60

http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors/show/3477 [accessed 12 December 2012]. http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors/show/3477 [accessed 12 December 2012]. 62 Dorothea Diver Stuecher, ‘Introduction’, Twice Removed. The Experience of German-American Women Writers in the 19th Century (New York; Bern; Frankfurt am Main; Paris: Peter Lang, 1990), pp. xi-xx. 61

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the problem of women’s invisibility in historiography, also showing the difficulties they had to combat in order to establish themselves as authorities in the public sphere. These sources can also show us the strategies and tactics these intelligent, talented and capable women had to acquire and use, to fulfill their goals. We see that they had to make themselves smaller and less important than they really were, hiding their talents and skills and slipping into the role of little, helpless children, submissive to those who had more power and influence simply because they were of another gender. We see that these women adapted to the patriarchal societies of their time, in which women were not allowed to give their opinion in public or speak in front of a broader audience, or even worse, criticise men’s literary work. In this essay I have given some examples of strategies which women used to overcome the difficulties of being visible in the public sphere. We have seen that women of the nineteenth century, even when they chose to work in secret (Mrs. Tieck), hide their female identity under a pseudonym (Talvj) or their national identity under a nickname (Mina), were subject to insult and public mockery. This was of course a widespread phenomenon and we also have examples from Great Britain of women using pseudonyms; the Brontë sisters for example kept their own initials and became Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell.63 There are also examples from that time concerning Slavic women, who hid their identity, using initials instead of full names: Eliška Pešková (1833-1895, Czech Republic) became B. Novotný, Eliška Krásnohorská (1847-1926) wrote as ý. Arnoštka, J. Zlonický or T. Dvorská. They also used other female names instead of their own, like for example Elvira Dolinar (1870-1961, Slovenia) who used the pseudonym Danica; Dora Hanušová (1840-1920, Czech Republic) who used the pseudonyms Bohdana Ivanovna and Marie Litavská; Milica Stojadinoviü (1828-1878, Serbia) who used the pseudonym Srpkinja; Rajská Bohuslava (1817-1852, Czech Republic) who used the pseudonym Reisova Antonie.64 It seems that women were aware of the risks and dangers of writing in their own names. But choosing pseudonyms was not the only tactic women used, as I have demonstrated here. Bearing in mind what happened to Talvj, Mrs. Tieck or Mina in the nineteenth century, we observe that even today, almost two centuries later, women are targets of misogynistic attacks. Only recently the Cambridge professor Mary Beard suffered online attacks after giving her opinion 63 64

http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors [accessed 29 March 2013]. http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/authors [accessed 29 March 2013].

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about migration issues on a TV show in Britain. She expressed the unpopular view that Britain’s social services would not be overburdened when restrictions on Bulgarian and Romanian movement around Europe were lifted in 2014, pointing out that immigrants are mostly fit young people who take small amounts of public money, and only 1% of public housing.65 On the online forum ‘Don’t Start Me Off’ she was labelled ‘twat of the week’ and was the victim of public mockery and offensive comments mostly concerning her appearance. There were several reactions from feminist groups and activist women concerning this affair. Feminist groups warned that comments designed to ‘hurt and wound’ could put women off contributing to political debate and the End Violence Against Women Coalition told The Week it was time for male and female commentators to speak out against such ‘silencing’. Their spokesperson Sarah Green commented that ‘abuse of women online is too often met with the reply that we should take it as a joke or just ignore it. In fact it is part of a spectrum of behaviour aimed at silencing women in public life, as Mary herself picks up on.’ Feminist Jane Fae, writing in the New Statesman, said the ‘disturbingly misogynistic’ targeting of women in the public eye made her and some of her activist friends feel silenced ‘simply for having an opinion’ and that ‘I’ve opted out of contributing online for periods ranging from hours to a couple of weeks after being subjected to this sort of online nastiness.’66 Contrary to the situation of Mrs. Tieck, Talvj, Mina and other women in the nineteenth century who were progressive in their work and expressed their unpopular modern opinions (criticising societies and governments, men’s work and the position of women), but who also chose to withdraw and not to fight back, afraid of their reputation being ruined, in the 21st century Mary Beard is fighting back in public with the support of many feminist organisations and activist women and men. It seems that having this kind of public support is the only thing that has changed over the centuries and that even today women are not safe from public offence and mockery when they dare to speak out and give their opinion, especially when it is not a popular one in any given society. As a member of a still marginalised and discriminated social formation (women), Beard stood up for another marginalised and discriminated social formation (immigrants), the Talvjs and Minas of today, defending their right as citizens of the EU to live in different parts of Europe, and as 65

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/world/europe/mary-beard-classics-profess or-battles-internet-attacks.html?_r=0 [accessed 29 March 2013]. 66 http://www.theweek.co.uk/uk-news/51123/women-shocked-vile-online-abusesuffered-mary-beard#ixzz2NQEYG5vt [accessed 15 March 2013].

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a result found herself punished by a broad audience. Such events lead us to ask ourselves if free expression and equal opportunities for all people are really guaranteed in today’s modern societies or if we still have a long way to go concerning equal human rights.

MEMORY, TRAUMA, TESTIMONY

IN THE LAND OF THE PERPETRATORS: KRYSTYNA ĩYWULSKA’S HOLOCAUST MEMOIR AND HER MIGRATION FROM POLAND TO WEST GERMANY PETER DAVIES

Krystyna ĩywulska, born Sonia Landau in 1918 in àódĨ, was a popular Polish songwriter and satirist in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, and was the author of a number of autobiographical texts arising from her experiences in the Warsaw underground during the German occupation and her two years in Auschwitz after her arrest in 1943. In 1941, she had been deported with her parents to the Warsaw Ghetto, from which she had escaped with the help of the Polish Home Army; until her arrest, she lived and worked for the resistance under assumed identities as a non-Jewish Pole, and it was as a non-Jew that she was able to survive her time in Auschwitz. In postwar Poland, she worked as a journalist, satirist and songwriter until 1968, when she left the country with her two sons during the intensely antiSemitic campaign launched by the Polish communist party in response to the Prague Spring and a series of protests in support of it in Poland. She settled in West Germany, where she stayed until her death in Düsseldorf in 1992. In Germany, she published her own German versions of a number of her satirical stories, and of her two most substantial literary memoirs, PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim (I Survived Auschwitz), which appeared in German in 1979) and Pusta Woda (‘Empty Water’, 1980), which made little impact. However, just before her death, the German novelist Liane Dirks wrote a lightly fictionalised account of her own encounter with ĩywulska, who had retold her story, supposedly finally entrusting Dirks with some details of her experiences in Auschwitz that she had been unwilling to discuss before. In this chapter, I will discuss some of the issues that arise in the multiple textual mediation of ĩywulska’s identity as Holocaust survivor, and explore how a migration of a few hundred kilometres from Poland to West Germany entailed the refashioning of her autobiographical identity

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in the light of very different assumptions about the Holocaust, Jewish identity, and the nature of female victimhood. The text that I will focus on here is her Auschwitz memoir, PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim, which was first published in Poland in 1946,1 and went through several editions, as well as being translated into English by Krystyna Cenkalska in 1951 as I Came Back and into German by the author in 1979 as Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau (‘Where Once There Were Birch Trees: A Young Woman’s Report of Survival from Auschwitz-Birkenau’). The Polish text is now published through the state museum at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as is the English version, now entitled I Survived Auschwitz and adapted and edited by Max Bojarski and Katherine Craddy, despite some substantial differences between the texts.2 Pusta Woda, first published in 1962, and which has only recently been translated into English, is an account of her family, her escape from the Warsaw ghetto under an assumed identity, resistance activities in Warsaw, arrest and interrogation, and PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim, which was written first, recounts the story from her transport to Auschwitz to the moment of liberation. If we were to sum up the autobiographical structure of the two texts, we could say that Pusta Woda is a narrative of the rejection and assumption of identities, while PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim concerns the defence at all costs of the narrator’s assumed identity: that the former was written second, and some time after the first, demonstrates a need to explore the archaeology of ĩywulska’s authorial identity at a moment in postwar Polish history when Jewish Poles were coming under suspicion of lack of patriotism and even treason, and the Polish communist party was seeking to assert control over the definition of heroism and victimhood during the German occupation. There are one or two slightly differing versions of the story of her adoption of the name Krystyna ĩywulska: the most prominent version in

 1

Krystyna ĩywulska, PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim (Warsaw: Spóádzielnia Wydawnicza ‘Wiedza’, 1946). The publication history of the Polish text is complex, but all references are to the most recent edition unless otherwise stated: Krystyna ĩywulska, PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim (Warsaw: tCHu / PaĔstwowe Muzeum AuschwitzBirkenau, 2008). This version will be subsequently referred to as PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 2008. 2 Krystyna ĩywulska, I Survived Auschwitz, translated by Krystyna Cenkalska (Warsaw: tCHu / PaĔstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2004). The translations of the Polish text are my own, as there are too many differences between the published Polish and English versions to make the English translation useful for the purposes of this essay.

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her work suggests that she had been living under a variety of assumed names until her arrest, and that she came up with the name that would become her authorial identity in order to protect herself while under interrogation by the Gestapo. This dramatic story is told in the later text, Pusta Woda, rather than in I Survived Auschwitz, which it is possible to read without knowing about her Jewish origins. Pusta Woda is labelled a novel, however, there are questions of genre that we need to be careful of, even though we have no real reason to doubt her story: we should note that this is also a literary, authorial identity created and defended as a trophy of resistance and defiance rather than of victimhood. There would be more to say about the identity questions that ĩywulska’s texts raise, but for the purposes of this chapter, I am interested in the shifts that occur in translation and in the new opportunities and problems that arose on her migration to West Germany. Although sixteen years separate the publication of the two autobiographical texts in Polish, ĩywulska made the German translations of the two texts at around the same time, with the result that they interfere with each other in ways that the Polish texts do not: in particular, an extra layer of commentary is added to Wo vorher Birken waren that complicates the text’s identity discourse by bringing to the surface contradictions and tensions that the Polish text of 1946 had concealed. The translation shifts enable us to ask questions about different views of what constitutes victimhood and victim testimony in different cultural contexts, and what is expected of texts by victims, looking in particular at the textual constitution of identity. We can ask to what extent the configuration of identity in the texts is a response to explicit external pressures and expectations, and how the author positions herself within and against those expectations. ĩywulska is operating between two quite incompatible ‘victim cultures’ that bring with them different conceptions of identity: a postwar Polish Stalinist culture that stressed the martyrdom of the nation as a whole, often rejecting the notion that Jews were singled out for special treatment beyond that which other Poles suffered and preferring stories of active resistance to passive victimhood, and a West German society that, when ĩywulska arrived there, was in the process of renegotiating its relationship with National Socialism through openness to, and often identification with, the Nazis’ Jewish victims. The difficulty that ĩywulska has posed for critics arises from her refusal to conform to Western expectations of a clear postwar victim identity: she never reverted to her birth name, either as an author or in everyday life, an attitude that has been seen as an unwillingness to

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acknowledge her Jewish background. Henryk Grynberg interprets this as a tragic psychological after-effect of the experience of anti-Semitism: ‘There were many cases of Jews who after the war were afraid to admit their Jewishness, especially after such experiences as those ĩywulska lived through. But this is perhaps the only known case in which a writer narrating her profoundest personal experiences and the tragedy of her people in the first person conceals her true identity from her readers. This must be considered yet another of the unprecedented tragedies of the Holocaust.’3 Grynberg himself went through a similar set of experiences before leaving Poland for the USA in 1967, but his surprise at ĩywulska’s stance displays an attitude schooled on particular post-Holocaust narratives of trauma and identity: ĩywulska’s work does not lend itself to reading in this way. Grynberg’s view depends on the idea that the autobiographical writer has an obligation to reveal her ‘true’ identity to the reader, and that ĩywulska’s attitude should therefore be seen as an act of deception perpetrated on the reader, who is placed in the same position as the Gestapo agents whom she fools: ‘She conceals this fact, not only from the Germans, which could be quite understandable, and not only from her fellow-prisoners, which could be also comprehensible, but also from the reader.’4 What Grynberg does not acknowledge is the corollary of this, namely that a reading that aims to bring to light the hidden identity in this text positions the reader in an analogous inquisitorial role, equating the ‘hidden’ with the ‘true’. This seems to me to downplay her agency and desire to defend an identity based on authorship, on authority over her own life story, and on resistance to the imposition of identities, including that of the victim. After all, her professional, authorial identity was drawn from her identity as a resister, which was fought for and maintained at extraordinary personal risk. She refuses to adopt the social persona of victim, which would entail a particular account of Jewish identity prioritised over Polishness, and rejects an autobiographical reading of her work in favour of defending the autonomy of her literary-political identity. ĩywulska does not take the opportunity offered by her migration to adopt a confessional, autobiographical narrative that ‘reveals’ a true identity. She resists the temptation to make a gesture of rejecting the conventions of Eastern Bloc antifascist narratives in favour of the

 3

Henryk Grynberg, ‘The Holocaust in Polish Literature’, Notre Dame English Journal, 11, 2 (1979), 115–39 (p. 126). 4 Ibid.

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revelation of a ‘true’ textual identity; after all, this would also entail accepting another set of identity narrative conventions in the new context, which would create the identity in the gesture of its ‘revelation’. I would suggest that ĩywulska’s attitude displays a refusal to conform to imposed identities of any kind, while at the same time recognising that her move to West Germany offers her particular opportunities that were not open to her in Poland. The publication of Pusta Woda explores processes of identity formation that show the complex origins of her authorial identity: her Jewish origins are acknowledged in the process of showing how they were disguised. Her refusal in the West to accept the offer of the clear label of the passive and helpless Jewish Holocaust victim could only be interpreted by Western readers as a sign of the repression of trauma: ĩywulska’s significant investment in the maintenance of her hard-won self-authorship conflicts with the equally hard-won image of the Jewish Holocaust victim, that had only been established at the centre of West German Holocaust remembrance after years of intense struggle since the 1960s. Liane Dirks’s novelistic account of her relationship with ĩywulska in the years before her death demonstrates a desire to construct an identity for ĩywulska through the narrative device of coaxing repressed experiences and a ‘true’ self from the victim. Dirks’s narrator plays the role of sympathetic listener trying to reach beneath the surface, bringing to light memories that ĩywulska had supposedly been unwilling to discuss before: the novel concludes with a rather voyeuristic ‘revelation’ about sexual experiences in Auschwitz, that ĩywulska had supposedly entrusted to Dirks shortly before her death: ‘Es gab eine Nacht. Ich habe es noch nie erzählt, und ich mache es nur einmal’ [‘There was one night. I have never told the story before, and I will only do it once’], as the ‘ĩywulska’ character in the story says to the narrator. Dirks’s narration of the scene in which a group of male and female prisoners sleep together accompanied by the violin playing of a Hungarian Jew, is of an extraordinary crassness, sentimentalising and depoliticising ĩywulska’s story through the gesture of revelation of untold memories: ‘Es gab nur noch das Lied und sechs nackte Menschen in einer Baracke in Auschwitz in einer Nacht voll Glück. In der sie alles vergaßen, nur die Liebe nicht’ [‘There were only the song and six naked people in a hut in Auschwitz in a night full of happiness. In which they forgot everything, except for love’].5 Here, the gaze of the confessor that brings to light the inmost secrets of identity, coded here in

 5

Liane Dirks, Und die Liebe? frage ich sie: Die ungeschriebene Geschichte der Krystyna Zywulska (Zurich: Ammann, 1998), pp. 169, 173.

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terms of a sexuality that is considered to be universal and beyond politics, creates that identity in the text through the mechanisms of sympathetic listening and the claim to solidarity. The textual ‘ĩywulska’ on display here is an exculpatory creation designed to efface the specificity of the victim experience and ĩywulska’s own stubborn individuality in order to create common ground with the representative descendant of the perpetrators. Both this and Greenberg’s rather different account of ‘repression’, which pull ĩywulska in different directions, show a desire to depoliticise ĩywulska’s carefully nurtured identity, in the sense of denying her agency and assuming that her refusal to conform to particular expectations about victimhood can only be explained through processes of repression, rather than by choice. ĩywulska’s authorial identity is an explicitly political one, formed under very different circumstances during and after the German occupation of Poland. It was by no means unusual for Eastern Bloc Jewish antifascists to prefer an identity based on their active, political role in the resistance rather than their passive victimhood. There was a complex of reasons for this, including the experience of a wave of anti-Semitic persecution in the early 1950s once the Soviet Party had swung away from its early support for the state of Israel, and during which Jews could be accused of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, Zionism and lack of patriotism; other reasons were the higher status (and financial compensation) granted to antifascist fighters in the postwar East as opposed to victims defined by their Jewishness, and genuine pride in active, patriotic resistance, and a feeling on the part of committed Marxists that cultural and religious identities were a thing of the past. Despite the pressures, there is an aspect of deliberate choice of a community of solidarity with which individuals wish to be identified: a deliberate choice, though not a free one. An active, patriotic resister identity was not denied to Jewish Poles, but the conditions of Stalinism required that they reject their Jewishness, not just by concealing it, but often by explicitly and publicly repudiating it: a dangerous process that entailed drawing attention to what must be rejected. ĩywulska was obliged to produce a revised version of PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim in 1951 with a new preface reflecting the political concerns of the time by equating the Nazis with the imperialist enemies of the Soviet Union, emphasising her loyalty and engaging in some self-criticism.6

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Krystyna ĩywulska, PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim (Kraków: PaĔstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1951), 3rd ed., pp. 7-8. This version will subsequently be referred to as PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 1951.

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There are also passages in the text that demonstrate the tightrope walk necessary for a Jewish writer to create and sustain a patriotic Polish identity. In one particularly striking moment, she introduces a new character, a female Polish Jew, who uses language consonant with the Stalinist view of Jews as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’: ‘I po co mam Īyü, dla kogo? Nie mam rodziny. nie mam przyjacióá, nie mam ojczyzny’ [‘And for what should I live, for whom? I have no family, no friends, I have no native land’]. ĩywulska’s narrator replies: ‘Jak tu nie masz ojczyzny? Twoją ojczyzną jest Polska’ [‘What do you mean you have no native land? Your land is Poland’].7 This is followed by a discussion about the possibility of eliminating anti-Semitism in Poland. Directly after this exchange, we learn that despair has got the better of this ‘homeless’ Jew, and that she has run into the electric wire: her rootlessness means she lacks the patriotic strength needed for resistance, and her suicide indicates that she belongs to the past and has no right to life in the text’s terms. ĩywulska must kill the Jew in the text in order to establish her right to and identity as resister and writer: other identities cannot survive. It is worth acknowledging that ĩywulska may have felt that any imposition of an identity of any kind was an act of violence: this might help explain why she was resistant to taking on the role of Jewish victim that was on offer in the West.

ĩywulska’s German Translation When looking at the German text, we are of course dealing with an author-translated text in which choices are made that reflect the conditions of ĩywulska’s migration and the need to situate the text within the new context. The new German version of her Auschwitz memoir was published in 1980 with the title Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau.8 The title-change is striking, referring to one of the poems that appear in the German text, and which play a significant role in the formation of the autobiographical personality out of political and literary defiance. In this case, the poem is introduced as an act of defiance also against her fellow prisoners, who are dismissive of the value of poetry. A Polish Jew has brought in a poem by Stanysáaw Wygodzki, a well-known Polish-

 7

ĩywulska 1951, p. 221; ĩywulska 2008, p. 212 Krystyna ĩywulska, Wo vorher Birken waren: Überlebensbericht einer jungen Frau aus Auschwitz-Birkenau (Darmstädter Blätter; Auflage: 2, 1980). This version will be subsequently referred to as Wo vorher Birken waren.

8

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Jewish poet who survived Auschwitz and other camps, and, significantly, left Poland at the same time as ĩywulska, in his case for Israel. Wygodzki’s poem describes the transport of wood for burning the bodies of the dead, providing an aesthetic means of approaching the reality of the camp, rather than an escape from it. This section of the Polish text — which concludes a chapter — ends with the objections of ĩywulska’s friend Czesia, who considers that poetry and music are false in a place where people are burnt: A ja nie chcĊ tego sáuchaü, ja chcĊ Īyü… na wolnoĞci bĊdĊ czytaáa poezje… tu jest taka straszna proza! Jak bĊdĊ wolna. przeczytam o miáoĞci, posáucham muzyki. Tu nie chcĊ […] sentymentalnych tang pod kominami ani poezji o drzewie, w którym páoną ludzie.9 [But I don’t want to listen to you [reading the poem], I want to live… I’ll read poetry in freedom… Here it’s such terrible prose! When I’m free, I’ll read about love, I’ll listen to music. Here I don’t want […] sentimental tangos under the chimneys or poetry about wood that is used to burn people.]

Her statement that the conditions in the camp are prose, rather than poetry, suggests an aesthetic programme of prose realism as opposed to the poetic resistance represented by Wygodzki, whose works are dismissed here. Wygodzki’s Jewishness is not mentioned here, though he was known as a Jewish writer, but the poem is smuggled in by a Jewish prisoner and dismissed, along with ĩywulska’s objections, by the non-Jew Czesia, who is given the last word. The German edition reverses this dynamic. Czesia’s words are similar, except that the statement about prose is missing: Ich will das aber nicht hören, ich will leben. Wenn ich wieder frei bin, werde ich Gedichte lesen. Hier will ich weder […] den sentimentalen Tango unter den Schornsteinen noch Gedichte über Holz hören, mit dem Menschen verbrannt werden!10 [But I don’t want to hear that, I want to live. When I’m free again, I’ll read poems. Here I don’t want to hear […] the sentimental tango under the chimneys or poems about wood that’s used to burn people.]

Following this, she writes: ‘Trotzdem schrieb ich damals folgende Verse’ [‘Despite this, I wrote the following verses’], and cites the poem

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PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 2008, p. 244. Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 227.

10

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‘Birkenau’, from which the text’s title is taken: ‘Vorher waren hier Birken, | und wahrscheinlich deswegen | einfach — Birkenau | heißt jetzt diese Gegend’ [‘There were birch trees here before and probably just for that reason, this place is called Birkenau’].11 Her ‘trotzdem’ is the key here: she writes in defiance not just of oppression and violence, but also of her fellow prisoners, for whom poetry is pointless. Taking the poem’s opening for the title of her text puts the emphasis clearly on the defence of the authorial personality ‘Krystyna ĩywulska’, as well as on the author’s physical survival; at the same time, however, ĩywulska ‘smuggles in’ a validation of the work of the Jewish writer Wygodzki, reflected textually in the way that his poem is smuggled in by a Jewish prisoner, as a coded way of talking about her own complex identity as a Polish-Jewish writer. Since none of the published Polish editions, including the earliest, include this poem, it is clear that we are dealing with a new insertion for the German publication. As I will show, this change of emphasis in the way the German text encodes identity reflects the strategies that ĩywulska adopts in order to place her autobiographical text within the new German context. The German title does, however, downplay the literary ambitions of the text. The word ‘Bericht’ suggests an objective, evidence-based account rather than a literary autobiography, which replaces the active process of survival suggested by the original title: the title suggests that the text is now about survival, rather than resistance. The opening-up of West German society to the experiences and voices of the victims of genocide and occupation has had the seemingly paradoxical effect that texts dealing with victimhood, persecution and survival are easier to sell than those that deal with resistance to the German occupation. It was easier for the West German left-liberal political culture to constitute its own reflection on the Holocaust around identification with passive victims of a monstrous SS than with those who offered violent resistance to one’s own father or grandfather as part of an occupying army. It also seems easier to confront and identify with the suffering of a victim stripped of all individuality and dignity than to deal with the sometimes uncomfortable motivations of individuals who resisted in various ways: nationalism, communism, strong religious faith, desire for vengeance, bloodlust, etc. ĩywulska migrates from a culture where patriotic resistance is validated to one where naked survival is the key image — she has to make certain compromises, but remains remarkably stubborn in her own insistence on defending her identity against those who would make

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Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 228.

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different claims for it. I am going to explore some of the strategies that ĩywulska employs in Wo vorher Birken waren to position the text for her new intended readership, showing how they complicate the identity that the text projects, while intervening in some German controversies over the interpretation of the Holocaust; the text gains extra layers of commentary, reflecting the new situation, but also begins to speak against itself in telling ways. The collective with which the narrator identifies in ĩywulska’s memoir is the group of non-Jewish Polish women with whom she is captured, and whose support is vital for her survival, despite their occasional political differences. This group of named individuals is differentiated from the mass of women prisoners amongst whom they live through their shared solidarity, defiance and gallows humour; the prisoners who do not belong to this group are for the most part an anonymous mass of hungry, demanding bodies. The female guards are also given names and personalities, but ĩywulska tends to refer to Jewish prisoners that they encounter as ‘eine Jüdin’, stressing their difference. It is as if the text is still repeating the act of distancing and concealment that ĩywulska’s survival depended on. ĩywulska presents herself as the moral and emotional centre of the collective, which is characterised by a series of points of defiance: they are determined to preserve a sense of their femininity against the ‘unfeminine’ behaviour of the guards and the temptation to let oneself go and become like the most downtrodden prisoners. Gallows humour is used to hit back at those moments when their identity is under threat; and possibly to cut against reader expectations of the language of victimhood and suffering. ĩywulska takes comfort within the collective in prayer and communal singing, and the ‘outside world’ is associated in a telling sequence with the sound of the Catholic evening prayer heard through the walls of Pawiak prison in Warsaw.12 There is nothing in the Polish text that disrupts this collective identity: it is tested to destruction in Auschwitz, but survives. ĩywulska shows herself able to mediate between her Polish fellow-prisoners and the guards, since she understands German: this marks her out as a member of the intelligentsia, for which she is abused by the more bestial guards, who are clearly resentful of her status. An understanding of her background, which the text does not offer us, might suggest that this is an encoded reference to her knowledge of Yiddish, which would allow her to communicate with German-speakers.

 12

PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 2008, p. 12; Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 12.

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The German text, however, is disrupted by a footnote near the beginning, which throws everything into confusion by importing information from her later text into the earlier narrative. Beginning as the kind of informative footnote that explains an aspect of the working of the camp for the uninitiated reader — a very common device in the editing of victim testimonies — it goes on to introduce a piece of key biographical information that is so striking and unlike anything else in the text that it alters the experience of reading abruptly. When discussing the system of coloured triangles that define the category of prisoner that an individual belongs to, ĩywulska writes: Auch ich trug einen roten Winkel, denn ich war als politische Gefangene vom Pawiak nach Auschwitz gekommen […] Daß ich Jüdin war, war der Gestapo nicht bekannt — und nur das hätte genügt, um liquidiert zu werden. Den Namen Krystyna Zywulska [sic] habe ich übrigens mir erst beim Verhör ausgedacht.13 [Even I wore a red triangle, as I had come to Auschwitz from Pawiak as a political prisoner […]. The Gestapo didn’t know that I was Jewish — and that would have been enough for me to be liquidated. Incidentally, I only came up with the name Krystyna ĩywulska at my interrogation.]

This is an extraordinarily dramatic moment, made all the more striking by the fact that it is confined to a footnote and subsequently never mentioned again: the mock casualness of the word ‘übrigens’ suggests that ĩywulska is well aware of the shock effect of her words. What this footnote indicates is that we should read the identity presented to us in the text, and which is defended tenaciously as a form of collective identification and as a foundation for self-assertion as a human being against an all-out assault on her humanity, as an elaborate deception or mimicry, a performance that fools the guards, her companions, and the reader of the original Polish text. The footnote brings this level of mimicry to our attention, but keeps the text intact, allowing us to admire the performance without providing space for a different form of identity to be proposed. Despite the disruption of the text’s identity narrative, ĩywulska has too much invested in her literary identity to abandon it. This can lead to strange textual effects: a few pages on from the footnote, ĩywulska describes the moment at which she received the tattoo with her prisoner number, an experience that is usually figured in survivor accounts as an attack on individuality and humanity. So it is here: ‘Von diesem Augenblick an hatte ich aufgehört, ein Mensch zu sein. Ich hörte

 13

Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 15.

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auf zu fühlen, zu denken. Ich besaß keinen Namen, keine Adresse mehr. Ich war Häftling Nr. 55908’ [‘From this moment on I had ceased to be a human being. I ceased feeling, thinking. I possessed no name, no address any more. I was prisoner number 55908’].14 In effect, the process of becoming a number effaces the name that has already effaced her Jewish identity: figuring the tattooing of prisoners as an attack on their common humanity seems to conceal a much more specific act of disappearance on the part of the Jewish victim. The German text exposes the act of effacement without taking it back; it acknowledges the different reception context without becoming assimilated to it. Later in the text, ĩywulska recounts a moment of crisis when she has been detailed to work at Auschwitz-Birkenau and witnesses the operation of the gas chambers at first hand. In order to preserve her sanity, she repeats her name to herself, anchoring her identity, individuality and humanity: ‘ “Nur jetzt nicht verrückt werden,” sagte ich laut zu mir selbst, “Mir geht es gut, ich habe das Fleckfieber hinter mir, heiße Krystyna ĩywulska, meine Nummer…” widerholte ich immerfort’ [‘ “Don’t go mad, not now,” I said out loud to myself, “I’m doing well, I’ve recovered from typhus, my name is Krystyna ĩywulska, my number…” I repeated over and over again’].15 This is interesting if one is aware that it is a name designed to disguise her Jewish background: insisting on this name comes to seem less like a defiant assertion of her individuality than a desperate defence of her assumed identity. On a textual level, it serves to distance her thoroughly from the Jewish victims that she has seen going to their death. This is a moment in which the act of mimicry becomes very troubling, and the German version, with its early revelation about the politics of naming in the text, begins to show some telling tension; these small moments when the text speaks against itself and holes appear in her identity performance tell us a lot about the situation in which ĩywulska found herself between incompatible views of victimhood and identity. Other textual features indicate a level of engagement with the West German context, and a desire to use her text to intervene in particular debates and controversies, in parallel with the main narrative. In some instances, passages are omitted, such as the discussion about the nationality of the Jewish prisoner and Polish anti-Semitism that I cited above: the passage may have allowed German readers to direct their attention away from the text’s attack on Nazi brutality by suggesting that

 14 15

Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 17. Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 128.

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Poles also bore responsibility. The German reader is given no space for self-exculpation. I will discuss two further footnotes, which engage with particular aspects of the West German discussion, in particular with aspects of camp nomenclature. In the first, ĩywulska comments on the mention of the word ‘Krematorium’ in this sentence: ‘Ja, die Schwerkranken werden genauso ins Krematorium eingewiesen’ [‘Yes, the seriously ill are taken to the crematorium just like the others’]. Her note says this: Gaskammer und Krematorium waren in einem Gebäudekomplex untergebracht. Auf ihrem Weg ins Gas mußten sich die Häftlinge vor dem Krematorium aufstellen. Für die Lagerinsassen selbst bedeutete der Begriff Krematorium lediglich der Ort, wo man den Tod fand, nicht ausschließlich Verbrennungsanlage.16 [Gas chamber and crematorium were located in one complex of buildings. On their way to the gas, the prisoners had to line up in front of the crematorium. For the camp inmates themselves the term crematorium meant simply the place where one met death, not just a place for burning bodies.]

This is an intervention against Holocaust denial, specifically against the view of deniers like Robert Faurisson, who niggle away at terminological inexactitude in order to try to show that there were no gas chambers. Inmates often referred simply to crematoria rather than gas chambers, meaning the location where the mass killing took place: on occasion, translators of texts have replaced ‘crematorium’ with ‘gas chamber’, in order to clarify the terminology for the readers, a decision that deniers have interpreted as deliberate falsification. Here, ĩywulska intervenes implicitly on behalf of fellow-translators and of the truthfulness of the text. The second note appears in a complex situation in which ĩywulska composes poetry as a way of passing the time and of holding on to some human feeling in a desperate situation; the poems are passed around orally by her fellow prisoners, until they reach the ear of a prisoner called Wala, with the power to help her. ĩywulska writes: ‘[Wala] begann sich dafür zu interessieren und fragte nach dem Verfasser. Sie fand mich — einen wehmütigen, kahlen “Muselman” ’ [‘Wala began to be interested [in the poetry] and asked about the author. She found me — a melancholy, shaven-headed “Muselman” ’]. Her footnote at this point states: ‘In der Lagersprache wurde der abgehärmteste und dreckigste Häftling

 16

Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 34.

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“Muselman” genannt. Im Lager machte man sich keine Gedanken über die Herkunft dieses Wortes [‘In the camp language the most wasted away and filthiest prisoner was called a “Muselman”. In the camp, nobody gave a thought to the origin of the word’]17. The earlier Polish texts do not work with footnotes, and so the term ‘muzuáman’ is left unexplained.18 The 2008 edition, which includes a footnote apparatus explaining camp terminology, has a much briefer note on ‘muzuáman’: ‘WiĊzieĔ skrajnie wyniszczony pod wzglĊdem fizycznym i psychicznym, bezwolny i nastawiony fatalistycznie’ [‘A prisoner extremely wasted away in both a physical and psychological sense, fatalistic and lacking willpower’].19 It is clear, therefore, that the note has been added to the German edition as a means to help position the text in its new context. The term ‘Muselman’, which was Auschwitz camp slang for a prisoner who was so worn down that he or she had lost any willpower or desire beyond the stilling of hunger, is potentially sensitive due to its racial overtones. There is no compelling explanation as to the origin of the term at Auschwitz — different slang terms came into use in other camps — but ĩywulska’s note demonstrates sensitivity to the political context of the new version of her text, and acts here to anticipate and neutralise potential criticism. What is really unusual about this moment is that it is the only time that I can recall when the narrator of a survivor text refers to him/herself as a ‘Muselman’: normally this term is used to refer to those who have given up and are doomed to die, and the survivor account will emphasise a positive decision not to become like that. By contrast, ĩywulska’s story recounts a rescue from this state by an outsider’s intervention brought about by her literary talent. Wala represents the text’s construction of a desired reader: one who ensures that ĩywulska survives because of her talent, and who thus secures the primacy of the active, resisting, authorial identity over the passive, suffering Jewish victim identity. The parallel story of the text’s positioning in the German context, which is told in the footnotes, adds an extra layer of complexity to the text: the plentiful notes in the 2008 Polish edition are there to support understanding of the text itself, rather than to provide a different view of it or to construct a parallel story, as do the German notes. In particular, they explain the many German terms and phrases used by the inmates and

 17

Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 65. The 1946 edition has ‘muzuámanin’ (PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 1946, p. 54), reflecting the German feminine ending; this has been altered to ‘muzuáman’ in the later editions. 19 PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 2008, p. 63. 18

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guards, and which ĩywulska quotes directly in her text in order to demonstrate the particular linguistic situation that she found herself in, and to demonstrate her skill in negotiating her way through it as part of her survival strategy. ĩywulska’s German version makes no effort to signal the alienness of these German phrases in the text: they are simply assimilated into the flow of the German narrative, whereas in the Polish text they are markers within the text itself of foreign occupation, linguistic violence, and concepts that are imposed from outside. The result is a text that reads more smoothly, without a sense of the way that the prisoners’ language has been colonised by that of the oppressors. ĩywulska describes being hit by a female Kapo for asking too many questions. On asking the Kapo why she hit her, ĩywulska receives the reply: ‘Because you are impertinent’. ĩywulska’s Polish text uses the German word ‘frech’ — ‘Bu jesteĞ frech’ — drawing attention to the foreign word.20 The German text cannot indicate this linguistic situation easily and simply naturalises the sentence: ‘Weil du frech bist’.21 Something important has gone missing here: the Polish Kapo’s use of the German word is significant, since the idea of ‘Jewish impertinence’ (jüdische Frechheit) was a standard cliché of anti-Semitic discourse, and the Kapo’s words make it clear that her language and attitudes have been infected or colonised by those of the SS. The fact that the Kapo is not aware that ĩywulska is Jewish simply indicates that, for her, all the prisoners fall into the category ‘sub-human’; for the reader, it is more complex. However, the German shows different kinds of linguistic sensitivity. For example, the word ‘aryjka’ (‘Aryan’ in the feminine form) is used casually by the Polish prisoners — Jewish and non-Jewish alike — to refer to non-Jews as a group that is treated differently from the Jewish prisoners: the prisoner have here taken on the language of Nazi racial categories, using it uncritically because it reflects the way they experience how the camp is organised. The German text places the German equivalent, ‘Arierin’, in scare quotes (ĩywulska, Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 35), reflecting the sensitivity over such language in the German context: this feature of ĩywulska’s German text displays a self-consciousness about the effects of language that is not shown by the original.

 20 21

PrzeĪyáam OĞwiĊcim 2008, p. 38. Wo vorher Birken waren, p. 39.

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Conclusion The text works at the level of defence of identity, indicating that it is about an authorial identity fought for and preserved not only during the occupation but also after: salvation from the worst moments tends to depend on the effects of her poetry on others, that is, on making a name as a writer under conditions that aim to destroy the individuality of prisoners. But the identity that is being defended here is not a ‘true’, ‘inner’ identity constituted by the victim-defining gaze of others, but is a complex textual performance that she calls ‘Krystyna Zywulska’, a political and public identity based on the unity of literary production and resistance to tyranny: the text now reveals some of the archaeology of that identity, but refuses to abandon it. The authorial identity in her German text draws attention to its own constructedness while still refusing to abandon it and accept the offer of an identity based on inevitable victimhood rather than resistance. Rather than rewriting her story using the generic markers of trauma or repression, ĩywulska makes a conscious decision to engage with the new cultural situation, without abandoning the political authorial identity that she had fought for. The stresses and contradictions in the coding of identity in the German text are a reflection of the difficulty of the task: if it is read with an eye for the conditions of the text’s translation and mediation, it can be seen to reflect the conditions, possibilities and tensions of her migration to the land of the perpetrators.

DISPLACED KNOWLEDGE: THE BORDERS OF LANGUAGE IN LEONORA CARRINGTON’S DOWN BELOW CHARLOTTE LATHAM

Often migration and displacement, whether caused by nature, war or economic need, have negative consequences for those forcefully moved, but displacement can also reveal unknown qualities of the self. Down Below is the short memoir of Leonora Carrington’s loss of sanity as she fled across Southern Europe to avoid Hitler’s rule.1 Though the story registers the tremendous pain and confusion of that time, she also insists on integrating insanity into her experience. As a painter and writer, she values the freedom of madness’s discord. As France was invaded by Germany, she walked across the ‘initial border of Knowledge’ (DB 163), liberating her mind from the constraints of syntax and meaning. A return from madness requires her to return to language, because and despite the fact that it is bound by rules and expectations. The memoir, however, reveals her intention to move clearly and confidently between so-called madness and sanity, sharing with her reader the value of crossing borders – its importance in understanding and accepting herself as a true surrealist artist.

Surrealist Desire The daughter of a successful English textile family, Carrington showed a rebellious streak from an early age, rejecting the social conformity demanded of her. Her family’s stature required that she be shown at the court of George V, an experience she derides in her short story ‘The Debutante’.2 She attended many schools because she was inevitably 1

Leonora Carrington, ‘Down Below’, in The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, trans. by Katherine Talbot and Marina Warner (New York: E. P Dutton, 1988), pp. 163-214 . Subsequently referred to in the text as DB. 2 Leonora Carrington, ‘The Debutante’, in The House of Fear , pp. 44-48.

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expelled for her outlandish behaviour. She had always excelled at art and eventually focused on it. Her family denigrated her creative pursuits but she persevered, finding encouragement to create as she desired at the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts. The Frenchman, Amedée Ozenfant, had ties to Dada and Surrealist proponents, encouraging his students, therefore, to use the precision of their training to attempt new styles. With this background and practice in place, Carrington found a natural community among the surrealists during their 1936 London exhibition. The New Burlington Galleries’ International Surrealist Exhibition offered a panoply of modalities that ignored traditional art rules. Maurice Nadeau in his History of Surrealism wrote that surrealism ‘embodies an insight into the impossibility of life as we have created it for ourselves and the beginning of a worthwhile criticism of that life’.3 Struggling against her family’s expectations, Carrington was sympathetic to such sentiments and ideals. Many of the surrealist methods such as automatic writing and collage were attempted corrections to the forced manners of society. If the mind could escape what it had been told in school, at home, and by the government, then it could create a new and better order. Automatic writing freed the writer from the impositions of grammar and logic, and similar freedoms were being applied to art. Carrington saw the work of Max Ernst in that major exhibition, and then in his one-person exhibit at the Meyer Gallery during the same year. She knew she had found a kindred spirit and the two fell in love.4 She joined him in Paris ready to begin a life together, even as he was negotiating a complicated divorce from his second wife, Marie-Berthe Aurence, a confirmed Catholic. In 1938, Ernst and Carrington settled in Provence, away from the socio-political and aesthetic squabbles among the surrealists. There, they pursued their mutual interest in myth and the magic of writing and painting.5 But they could not escape the political times. Though warned of the imminent Nazi invasion, Ernst and Carrington decided to remain in their town and Ernst was arrested by the Vichy Regime as a German Jew.6 Carrington begins the story of her madness 3

Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 23. 4 Clare Kunny, ‘Leonora Carrington’s Mexican Vision’, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 22:2 (1996), 166-79 (p. 166). 5 Kunny, ‘Leonora Carrington’s Mexican Vision’, p. 168; Whitney Chadwick, ‘Leonora Carrington: Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness’, Women’s Art Journal, 7.1 (1986), 37-42 (p. 37). 6 Stephen Bates, ‘Debutante Turned Surrealist: Leonora Carrington Dies at 94’, The Guardian, 26 May 2011.

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‘with the moment when Max was taken away to a concentration camp for the second time’ in the spring of 1940 (DB 164), an acknowledgement that this event sparked the disintegration that followed.

Mad/rid (of) Meaning Observing the rapid German approach, friends persuade her to escape from France into Spain. Barely eating or sleeping after Ernst’s internment, Carrington hesitates to leave. When she departs, she explains: ‘in my evolution, Spain represented for me Discovery’ (DB 166). She does not clarify what she expected to uncover or learn but since she had never been to Spain, its very newness offered an opportunity for discovery. Spain becomes indicative of Knowledge to be gained, rather than simply a neutral nation.7 Such declarations lead her two travel companions to insist she remain silent lest she frighten the Andorrans leading them across the mountains into Spain. Her crisis escalates as she invests words and places with personally conceived, universal significance. As she is altering the meaning of language, so she begins to interpret new depths to written language. Papers, in the form of passports, visas, newspapers, even notes, become forms of assimilation used for control by political systems. She is determined to remain free of such social constraints. This begins when she is still in France and imbues Max’s passport with his presence: ‘This document, which bore his image, became an entity, as if I was taking Max with me’ (DB 166). The papers have become a symbolic representation of him. Once in Spain, she sees how such papers are reflective of a relation to power. She and her friends received visas only because an ‘agent of my father’s business connection’ provides them with a ‘very dirty piece of paper’ (DB 170). She rejects the possible socio-political manipulations inherent in such favouritism, possibly as an extension of her earlier resistance to her family’s expectations. Ridding herself ‘of all social constraints’ she rejects her state-recognised identity: ‘I made a present of my papers to an unknown person’ (DB 171). The identification papers, first of Max and then her http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/may/27/leonora-carringtonsurrealist-dies [Accessed 11 July 2012]. 7 The election of Franco in 1936 as Generalísimo led to his becoming head of state with unlimited powers in 1938. As Carrington was escaping into Spain, the Nationalist government’s persecution of any supporters of the Republic led many Spaniards to flee to France where they joined the resistance against the Nazis. Spain adopted a non-belligerent stance but remained pro-Axis by offering naval facilities to German ships and returning escaped Allied prisoners.

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own, are representative of each person’s being in the world. They declare the person’s political ties to nation and, in the midst of the war, cultural clout. Her clinging to Max’s papers and then discarding her own shows the importance that words on paper have. The rejection of her own papers becomes an active dismissal of the constitutive terms that language imposes. The written word directs meaning but her disdain for such control permits words to become evil messengers. She tears up newspapers in the streets because she believes they are a hypnotic device of a recent Dutch acquaintance. Van Ghent has possible Nazi affiliations and his son works for Imperial Chemicals, an associate company of her father’s, which makes Van Ghent ‘My father, my enemy, and the enemy of mankind’ (DB 173). Her opposition to her family’s dominance includes all connected with her family, and gets tied to the larger authoritarian threat of fascism. She informs the British Embassy Consul that World War II is being ‘waged hypnotically by a group of people – Hitler and Co. – who are represented in Spain by Van Ghent’ and how the Consul must understand this hypnotic power: ‘We would then stop the war and liberate the world...it was essential to believe in our metaphysical force and divide it among all human beings, who would thus be liberated’ (DB 173, her ellipsis). This physical realm is no longer relevant to her, as the war must be fought on a higher plane. The fascist imprisonment of Jews and others during Hitler’s nationalist expansion certainly does confuse whether the war being fought was about physical borders of nation states, or ideological values that protect human life. Her personal fears dissolve into global political anxieties and the two can no longer be distinguished. Carrington describes coded meaning in public posters as well. A simple advertisement becomes a part of the conspiracy Carrington has conceived and that she must vanquish, because only she can read the true meaning of the signs. When I gazed at the posters in the streets, I saw not only the commercial and beneficent qualities of Mr. X’s canned good but hermetic answers to my queries as well–when I read Amazon Company or Imperial Chemicals, I also read Chemistry and alchemy, a secret telegram addressed to myself in the guise of a manufacturer of agricultural machinery. (DB 175-76)

She does not, and perhaps cannot, explain how she makes the leap from ‘Amazon Company’ and ‘Imperial Chemicals’ to the concepts of chemistry and alchemy delivering secret messages, though her father’s association with Imperial Chemicals may play some part in her decision that these companies project hidden meanings that only she can understand.

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She imagines a linguistic system of signs happening around her that has no accord with a world that others recognise. Because she is not fluent in Spanish, she can easily misconstrue language: ‘I was not hindered by a preconceived idea of the words, and I but half understood their modern meaning. This made it possible for me to invest the most ordinary phrases with a hermetic significance’ (DB 170). She reads and hears words as having hidden intentions only she understands, in part due to the language difference. The language boundary permits her to seek meaning, analyse content, from which she creates new meanings unrecognisable to others. This disjuncture between the superficial meaning and her interpreted meaning of the words permits the psychic split to deepen between herself and the other, so-called sane world.8 She does not understand the boundary that exists between her mind and another’s, human or animal. One of the first signs of a change in her mental state was her ability to communicate with animals, though in her memoir she can no longer explain the ‘touch language’ she used then (DB 169). She feels vibrations that indicate others’ presence and she is attuned to another aspect of reality. During her madness, she believes that her mind comprehends what is happening in the consciousness of others, even those with whom she has no relationship, like Hitler. When seated in her hotel lobby, she hears vibrations and interprets from ‘each particular vibration the attitude of each towards life, the degree of power, and his kindness or malevolence’; she does not need to translate ‘noises, physical contacts, or sensations into rational terms or words’ (DB 176). She communicates in layers of meaning, including the invisible and unspoken. As Carrington’s conspiracy theories produce increasingly extreme behaviour, a physician confirms that she should be interned.

Displaced In/Sanity Carrington describes her unsuccessful efforts at communication in the sanatorium, where her language remains filled with incomprehensible meaning. She sends her psychiatrist a triangle drawn on a piece of paper that according to her ‘way of thinking, explained everything’ (DB 185). During this period of time, the wardens have her hands tied to control her 8

It is difficult to argue for the sanity of the world around Carrington in 1941, as nations escalated their animosities in a war that culminated in the atomic bomb. We might even see a certain irony in Carrington’s lexical dissolution with a world that manipulated language and meaning to encourage its youth to fight.

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violent outbursts, and they must be untied in order to produce this revelatory triangle. The movement of her hands alone expresses and signifies when we consider that she is writing only because she has been unbound. The writing represents a freedom. She imagines that her thoughts are imparted merely with the movement of pen on paper, which becomes the triangle. She begins to distinguish herself from the rest of the world when her psychiatrist works with her to sketch the journey from France to Spain. She is unable to produce a drawing of her trip, not even capable of marking the starting and end points on the page. Don Luis takes the pencil from her and begins to draw. He places an M to mark Madrid and she begins to unravel the dissolution of that time. The M was ‘Me’ and not the whole world; this affair concerned me alone, and if I could make the journey all over again, I would, by the time I reached Madrid, get hold of myself, would establish contact between my mind and my self. (DB 200)

The simple statement, ‘the M was me and not the whole world’ shifts her debilitating global empathy onto a path towards self-identification that can withstand multiple physical and linguistic moves. The letter ‘M’ grounds her thinking. These occurrences are happening to her, and not the whole world. Her thoughts are not the machinations of manipulating agents but the madness of her own mind. Still, however, she shifts responsibility for her mental health onto a city, Madrid. She similarly identifies a place in the sanatorium where she will improve. Down Below is a housing quarter where the inmates are permitted greater freedoms than she experiences. If she gets there, she will improve, she reasons, rather than thinking that she must show signs of increasing sanity in order to be placed there. She seeks an alternate place where things will be better, a sentiment common not only to neurotics but also among many refugees. As both a neurotic and a refugee, Carrington’s disorientation about a place of safety is recognisable. She can resolve her mental strain no matter where she is, but she must also arrive at a safe harbour and sail to the United States if she is to escape the fascist rise. Only within herself can she manage the madness, but only elsewhere can she be safe from the European war. The dangers around her suggest some place beyond lies shelter, while her doctors insist her own stability lies within by altering her mental state. Within and without chaos rules. There is some boundary to be crossed, some place to go, where peace will reign.

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Where before she sought to merge metaphysically with all creation, now she is willing to recognise some value to differentiating herself. Separating herself from the whole world begins the process of limiting her total engagement with others. She can recognise the difference between safe places and those that trap, to begin considering how sanity might allow her more freedoms than the madness she currently experiences. Seeing herself as separate introduces a boundary that allows her to distinguish between outside and inside, between others and herself, between behaviours labelled as socially acceptable, thus sane, and not. She must cross back into the world of sanity, even as insane as the world seems during World War II. Words have been a part of her journey into madness. Books are an opportunity for a crisis of self-definition that can push her towards sanity.

Booking Reality After a period of some improvement, her psychiatrist suggests that she begin to read and sends her to a shop with a list of recommended books. Though sent by Don Luis, Carrington wishes to pick her own readings. She becomes convinced that the nurse is controlling her selections since everything she picks is on Don Luis’ list. She cannot enjoy browsing the shelves for feeling that the nurse is coercing her mind and thus, her choices. Carrington is not allowed the pleasure of freely selecting books, whether manipulated by the nurse or simply because of the list. Required reading limits the expanse that curious minds can take by rejecting and selecting on our behalf. Selecting books permits us to wander and explore possibilities; it allows a freedom of thought. Back in her room, when Don Luis appears, she yells at him in rage: ‘I am not the public property of your house. I, too, have private thoughts and a private value. I don’t belong to you’ (DB 207). As with previous authorities – her parents, the world of art rules, the Vichy regime, her passport identity, the hypnotising powers of Van Ghent, or her doctors – she wants the ability to reject their ‘force’. She desires self-control: ‘I want my freedom to act and think’ (DB 207). She demands her freedom to choose books and her life path in general, but such freedom is an anarchic desire that the sanatorium must subjugate in favour of sanctified social conduct. Carrington is given her third and last dose of Cardiazol, an analeptic drug used to induce seizures.9 It is strong enough to stop the heart and 9

Ann Hoff, ‘ “I Was Convulsed, Pitiably Hideous”: Convulsive Shock Treatment in Leonora Carrington’s Down Below’, Journal of Modern Literature, 32.3 (2008), 83-98.

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from Carrington’s description was given to her on three occasions, which she describes as horrifying experiences. She resists the injections not only because of the pain but because she believes the doctors are attempting to hypnotise her (DB 208). Her resistance requires that they strap her down, which only reinforces her fears around what they are doing. After the last injection, she understands that the drug had no relation to her conspiracy theories, but was an attempt to sedate her into sanity. The drug is no longer used because of its violent effect on the body. Fortunately, when she awakens from the third injection, she has regained lucidity and can begin understanding her circumstances. A kind inmate, Etchevarria, offers her a book. In the clarity after the last Cardiazol injection, she is capable of accepting a book without interpreting it as a coercive act. The gift of the book introduces her to a ‘reasonable man who inspired no fear, who took me seriously and sympathetically’ (DB 207). Throughout Carrington’s madness, she saw no boundary between her and another’s mental state. After the Cardiazol shot, her globalising empathy diminishes. If we read letters as a kind of metaphor for her state of mind, only once she is lucid can she receive a book. This, however, seems a forced literary analysis for a story that mentions the anguish of remembrance regularly. Instead, let us permit Etchevarria’s book as a means of building a relationship. The book, after all, is the basis for the conversation between herself and this other patient who provides her with background information on her experience while also validating her disorientation. Through the information it provides, a book – generally recognised as a fount of information, and one that may lead the reader to new thoughts – also builds connections for the reader to the author, the text, and other readers. Etchevarria recommends other books and provides her with information about her experience. Through their friendship, she learns that conversations with another person are not controlled by her or the other’s manipulative mental powers. Words are no longer hypnotic devices, as they were in newspapers that she tore in the city streets of Madrid. She has delineated the borders of her mind through the desire to select what she reads, what crosses and influences her mind, and what does not. She can select not only what she reads, but how she receives it, and from whom and whom she trusts. The book that she gets and the wisdom of Etchevarria are the last moments in her experience at the hospital. Until the 1987 Postscript is added, the account concludes after another paragraph, which leaves these moments around books as notable elements in the journey towards Knowledge that Carrington describes retrospectively. Books, with the formality of the printed word, can represent law and truth.

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They force a confrontation with her paranoia about control and obligation. After the conflict in the bookshop, she begins to accept a certain level of discipline, the regulations of nation and community, the boundaries of behaviour, the grammar of a sane life.

Journey beyond Borders The 1987 Postscript explains that en route to a sanatorium in South Africa, where her family have determined she must remain to limit any future embarrassment from her, Carrington escapes and flees to a friend at the Mexican Embassy. They marry so she can sail with him to New York City. From there she travels to Mexico City where she remained even after their divorce, forgotten by her English family but welcomed by a new community.10 Mexico has long been seen as a magical place; Breton called it the ‘surrealist place par excellence’ and Rousseau claimed it inspired his flora and fauna.11 Carrington’s disintegration is made all the more potent in that she does not reject her delusional state once her life settles in Mexico. Rather, she remains committed to accepting and sharing the Knowledge she uncovered during that difficult time. Telling the story is key to incorporating it. She does so to unify her disparate experiences but also to help her reader grow in understanding. The contrast between her inability to communicate during her madness and her account of this time highlights Carrington’s mobility between her ‘cured’ narrative voice and the voice of her madness. To be able to recount her previous inexpressibility is remarkable. She admits that writing the memoir is painful. How can I write this when I’m afraid to think about it? I am in terrible anguish, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory...I know that once I have written it down, I shall be delivered. But shall I be able to express with mere words the horror of that day? (DB 191)

‘Mere words’ says Carrington, and indeed her descriptions of the Cardiazol shock injection therapy that she experiences, along with her mental delusions, do suggest that words only begin to offer the horror of 10 Matthew Gale in an interview with Joanna Moorehead said that Britain ignored her just as her family had, ‘but all the time she’s been building up a massive international reputation, so suddenly we’re scrambling around to catch up’. Joanna Moorehead, ‘Leonora and Me,’ The Guardian, 1 January 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2007/jan/02/art?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3 487 [Accessed 11 July 2012]. 11 Kunny, ‘Leonora Carrington’s Mexican Vision’, p. 170.

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that time. That she can use words to offer a small sketch, however, allows words to be presented as a window onto that world for the reader. She will not be trapped, alone, with the memory, but will have found a place for it that others can also visit and understand. Though she is only halfway through describing her madness when she makes this statement, the interjection in her storytelling emphasises the importance of words in her healing. The words she writes do permit her to revisit a difficult time in her life and incorporate it rather than reject it. She shares it with the reader, but also with herself as we witness in her honest descriptions of the pain it causes her to recount the experience. Her memoir’s vivid descriptions of her mental illusions bring the reader to engage with a story that she tells years later at a distance from her arresting experience. More than the content of her experience, however, her pain and suffering are revealed in the style of her writing. Ellipses occur and show the space of her mental struggle. In the quotation above, they allow space for the pain of what she remembers before finding the strength to believe that she will feel better. When she tries to convince the British Consul that Van Ghent has hypnotic powers, she hopes to ‘stop the war and liberate the world...it was essential to believe in [our] metaphysical force’ (DB 173). Again, there is a lapse in her ability to explicitly connect the madness of war with the spirituality that she believes everyone must embody for peace to occur. The organisation of the text also reveals the difficulties Carrington experienced in describing her time. She writes over three consecutive days, because it was too painful to recount at one time. The memoir is divided by the three dates labelling each new section. Her attempts to contain the information through a chronological narrative are replicated in her managing the information on the page with a chronology of her writing. But the memoir itself becomes a shaky representation of her experience. She wrote the original text in English which was then dictated into French. The dictation was translated into English for the New Yorkbased Surrealist journal VVV in February 1944. The original English text, which was the basis for the transcription and translation, was lost. Down Below, re-published with a selection of her other writings in The House of Fear in 1987, is derived from the translation published in VVV and the French dictation eventually published in 1946. The memoir is a retrospective rendering of her experience and an approximation of her initial account. As the story itself is moved across languages, so of course within the story are several languages at play. She begins in France where she speaks the language. Once in Spain, however, she recognises that she is barely

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conversant, but never explains what language she spoke to the nurses or doctors in the sanatorium. When the doctor points at the letter M to help her distinguish the events in her life, the letter becomes loaded across languages. The letter M delivers her meaning ‘the M was me’ in English as well as it does in French: ‘le M était moi’. It can work ungrammatically in Spanish too. Formally, the Spanish requires: ‘La M era yo’. But in her broken Spanish with the doctor, she might have used ‘el Mio’ or ‘mi,’ the personal possessive pronouns for ‘my’. How well can her madness be understood by doctors speaking another language, or by readers at such a remove? She wishes to bring the wisdom gained from this accepted reality into the realm of her madness, but also to share with readers the Knowledge gained in her madness: ‘By doing so, I believe I may be of use to you, just as I believe that you will be of help in my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid’ (DB 163). She can write this story in the hope that it will prove useful to her reader, without knowing whether it will. She is conscious, however, of potential influence in both directions. A relationship is generated across her text but is not controlled by her. Through narrating her experience for her readers, they become a support to her. Her readers are responsible for their journey across her words, as she is responsible for finding her way through them in her description of her path into madness and back to sanity. A memoir of madness offers a glimpse of a world whose borders are crossed at great cost. She tells the story to continue ‘across the initial border of Knowledge,’ asking that her reader ‘be of help on my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid’ (DB 163). We can sustain her as she travels back in time, into the recesses of her mind. Rather than the forced convulsions of Cardiazol, the reader becomes a hand to hold into the light of lucidity. We may not know her experience but perhaps madness is not the only important facet of this narrative.

The Unmasked Self She is clear from the opening that she intends to cross the borders of Knowledge, to negotiate the frontier beyond a prescribed way of life. Her reader learns with her how important is an awareness of negotiating both landscapes. Carrington will not eliminate this time in her life in part because of the way she sees that this rejected aspect of consciousness also participates in Knowledge. Having embraced a surrealist ethos, she would be familiar with the founders’ perception that it was not ‘a new artistic

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school, but a means of knowledge’.12 With their paeans to madness, the surrealists often glorified it, whereas Carrington finds a path that can accept both the wild conceits of insanity as well as the guideposts of social reality. Others may wish to confine madness to the asylum but she is unwilling to seclude it as a negative experience to be denied. She shares this story to learn how to cross the border between the two, when she chooses, while remaining lucid to both ways of being. Telling the story enables her to acknowledge and reveal the inherent falsity of a sane, conforming, normal way of life. The account of her insanity allows her ‘to put on and to take off at will the mask which will be [a] shield against the hostility of Conformism’ (DB 163). Her narrative provides her with a greater flexibility of being in the world by combining ‘the actual facts of [her] experience’ with the distortions of her unstable mind. To participate in the world requires presenting a degree of conformity, the illusion of sanity. That sanity, however, does not necessarily illuminate her creative impulse as a painter and writer. She recognises the necessity of playing by the rules of this world, but suggests doing so is simply a masquerade. An inner life must be masked in order to participate in the public world. If this world is a masquerade, then she additionally blurs the border between reality and illusion, where the real world becomes one of dissembling. Only by crossing beyond that border of Knowledge into the terrain of her unmasked life does she enter a ‘true’ reality, though incomprehensible to another – a seeming madness. Identifying the border, permits her to regain sanity, but blurring the border allows her to recognise the complexities of her experience. Words give her the strength to remember, to cross the boundary of memory. As in psychotherapy, where sessions are intended to give voice to the source of neurosis, which allows the conscious individual to negotiate the role of the neurosis in daily life, telling the story allows Carrington to negotiate the boundary between medically defined sanity or madness, on her own terms. Her creative impulse can heal the pain by incorporating that past experience of madness into her present experiential options. The words present her rejection of the customary distinction between sanity as good, and madness as bad and to be avoided. By dismissing the duality of sanity and madness, her memoir manages the border of the self precisely by recognising what a weak border it is. Her story is an initiation into a way of being that accepts the displacements of life as the uncomfortable landscape of the complex self. In this blurring of

12

Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, p. 80.

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borders, Leonora Carrington affirms herself and her work, and defines the very essence of surrealism.

MIGRATION AND SOCIAL ISSUES

VISITING FRENCH INTERNEES IN SWITZERLAND DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR: WOMEN IN THE CONSTRUCTION OF NATIONAL STATES (1915-1918) STEPHANIE LEU

Invisible Women in the Bilateral Relationship? Among the bilateral and reciprocal migrations which occurred between France and Switzerland in the 19th and 20th centuries, there were many women. Most of them worked as maids in cities like Geneva or Paris, but some of them were industrial workers, while others helped their husbands on farms, for example in the south-west of France, where the federal government encouraged people to settle in the 1920s and the 1930s with the support of the French authorities and private associations.1 Even though there were many women, they were, with a few exceptions, rarely at the heart of political and diplomatic discussions about the migration process. First of all in Switzerland there was a way to get round the consequences of the French nationality laws of 1882 and especially of 1927. For example, the law of 1927 led to automatic naturalisation of the children of mixed couples in France, as French women could keep their nationality of birth when they married foreigners. Thus the Swiss authorities had to accept and change under duress the interpretation of their own nationality law to avoid a mass ‘denaturalisation’ of Swiss living in France and, in 1927, they abandoned part of the Heiratsregel.2 Indeed, 1

Stéphanie Leu, ‘Les petits et les grands arrangements. L’Etat bilatéral; une réponse au défi quotidien de l’échange de populations (France - Suisse. Milieu du XIXe siècle - 1939)’, unpublished doctoral thesis, EHESS - University of Bern (2012), chapters VI and VIII. 2 According to this, a women who married a foreigner automatically lost her nationality of birth and had to adopt her husband’s.

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although dual citizenship had been prohibited since the Federal Law of 1874, the ‘French’ woman who married a Swiss in France could now both keep her nationality of birth – according to the new French law – and obtain Swiss nationality when she requested it. This was made possible by a new interpretation of Swiss law given by Heinrich Rothmund, who ran the Federal Department of Justice, a ruling which meant that these women could transmit Swiss nationality to their children. This liberality did not concern all women however. Indeed the Swiss authorities here made a clear distinction between French women who married a Swiss and Swiss women who married a Frenchman in France.3 Because these women were regarded both as traitors and as inferior beings, the Federal Department headed by Heinrich Rothmund denied them on several occasions the right to transmit Swiss citizenship, even if this strict interpretation of the Heiratsregel led very possibly to new cases of statelessness. For instance, in 1929 and 1939, several Swiss women married non-Europeans in Algeria and French West Africa (FWA). However, as the French Empire only accorded diminutio jure citizenship to these men, just as was the case for women in Switzerland, and they could not transmit French nationality, the future couple’s children could in theory obtain neither the father’s nor the mother’s nationality. But faced with the refusal of the Federal Department of Justice to give these white, Christian women the right to transmit Swiss nationality indirectly, the French Ministry finally decided that the future children would get French nationality optime jure, just like any other French citizen born in France of non-native, European parents. In the late 1920s, it seemed that racial inequalities were easier to overcome in France than gender inequalities in Switzerland.4 The next two occurrences in which women played a central role in the bilateral relationship took place before this episode, during wartime, between 1914 and 1918. At first, although their spokesman Edgard Milhaud was a man, a socialist and professor at Geneva University, women were active during the war.5 Indeed they contributed in 1917 and 1918 to creating associations such as L’Union des femmes et mères de mobilisés and put pressure on the French government. For instance they 3

See Brigitte Studer, ‘ “Die Ehefrau, die den Ausländer heiratet, soll sich die Geschichte klar überlegen” – Geschlecht, Ehe und nationale Zugehörigkeit im 20. Jahrhundert in der Schweiz’, Tstantsa, 9 (2004), 49-60. 4 Federal Archives (AF), E 2400, 1000/717, vol. 179, Gestion Report of the Swiss Legation in Paris, 1927, 1928, 1929 & 1930. 5 See Justinien Raymond, ‘Edgard Milhaud’, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français, partie III, t. XIV (Paris: Les Éditions ouvrières, 1976), pp. 92–6.

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attempted to convince Georges Clemenceau and Philippe Pétain to open up the borders between France and Switzerland in order to allow the ‘Poilus’, who had lived in Switzerland before the war and who were mobilised at the front, to legally spend their leave at home in Switzerland, and not in Annemasse, in Savoy, where the military trains stopped. Unfortunately their action was most often unsuccessful, which meant that many soldiers crossed the borders illegally in 1917 and 1918, and they were not the only ones: there were women too.6 Indeed, women played a major but indirect role in the wartime years as far as influxes of immigrants went, a fact which has often been overlooked by historiography. Let us here focus on one instance of this particular and temporary migration, which concerned French women, and especially the poorest ones, during the last three years of the First World War. This migration was a direct outcome of Swiss humanitarian policy. In fact, at the suggestion of the International Committee of the Red Cross, from March 1915 for soldiers and from February 1916 for civilians, the Confederation agreed to look after the severely injured and prisoners of war (PoWs) from all warring countries in various internment camps. The French internees who arrived successively (figure 1), were also civilians from the occupied regions of the North of France who were of military age. There were also businessmen who were working or living in Germany when the war began. All of them were at first prisoners in German camps before being chosen by travelling commissions of Swiss doctors and being sent to the Confederation according to interstate agreements.7 Most of them lived in ‘camps’, that is, hostels or youth hostels in alpine villages or barracks in the vicinity of towns, but many civilians were also allowed to live in town centres. In July 1916, there were already 11,823 French internees.8 Even if they were granted a small state allowance (3 francs a day), many also obtained the right to work in Switzerland under 6

Archives of Geneva (AEG), 22.4.209, fonds Milhaud. See also Richard B. Speed, Prisoners, Diplomats and the Great War. A Study in the Diplomacy of Captivity (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), p. 244; Annette Becker, Oubliés de la grande guerre. Humanitaire et culture de guerre. 19141918. Populations occupées, déportés civils, prisonniers de guerre (Paris: Hachette Littératures, 2003); ‘Marginaux, marginalité, marginalisation’, 14/18. Aujourd’hui, Today, Heute, 4 (Péronne: Noesis, 2001); Jochen Oltmer (ed.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006); Giovanna Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella grande guerra (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000). 8 This represents 62% of the entire number of internees at that time; of these, 8% were civilians. 7

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Figure 1: Num mber of French internees in Sw witzerland durinng WWI9

certain condditions and wiith the agreem ment of the Sw wiss unions. Their T jobs ranged from m working forr a private Sw wiss firm in the internee’ss pre-war profession too learning a new n trade, if the t internee coould no longeer take up his previous profession because of his h war injurries or handiicap.10 In February 19916, the Swisss Armed Forcees staff under the High Com mmand of Colonel Hauuser, who wass responsible for the internm ment policy, published p the regulatiions of the internment. i According A to these, the internees’ i families werre free to visiit them in Switzerland withh a passport and a a visa that Swiss consulates werre allowed to issue i in all thee countries at war.11 9

Édouard Faavre, L’internem ment en Suisse des prisonnierrs de guerre malades m ou blessés. Rappports faits par p ordre du u colonel Haauser (Genèvee; Berne: Georg/Bureauu du service de l’internement, 1917-1919), vool.1, p. VII. 10 Leu, ‘Les ppetits et les grannds arrangemen nts’, chapter IV.. 11 Cited in Faavre, L’internem ment en Suisse, p. p 11.

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Yet, a considerable number of women decided to cross the border illegally or to stay in Switzerland for longer than the period initially allowed by their visas. We use the phrase ‘a considerable number’ because, due to the multiplicity of cases and the lack of reliable sources, it is now quite impossible to estimate how many there were of them. But as most of them quickly obtained a temporary residence permit from cantonal administrations and became legal residents, the federal humanitarian action turned into both a financial and strategic problem for France and an indirect diplomatic conflict between the two states erupted from the end of 1916. Moreover the miserable situation of French women became a threat to the reputation of France and forced the French administration to agree to rethink how to distribute welfare to national residents abroad. At the same time, the attempt to stop the migration of the poorest contributed to the construction of new legislation on circulation policy, which was implemented in 1917 in France as well as in Switzerland. By describing this short and unknown episode of interstate discussions in wartime and by studying an example of a process of political construction and use of populations, we shall also analyse the elaboration and deformation process of the national State.12 Indeed this is not strictly a question of gender construction as in the question of nationality for instance. Women are here at the core of the debate, not because they were women but because as women and as nationals abroad, both social and territorial ‘margins’ of the National State were under construction. Although the changes that these women were to bring about could appear minimal, the margins play a significant role in this process, since the capacity of a National State to adapt to the international framework is here being called into question. Therefore this example is yet another good illustration of the ‘legislative exhuberance’ of the two States in wartime.13 However this episode should also help us to realise how necessary it is to rethink ‘national history’ in its daily and empirical confrontation with other states, their legislations and their interests, even if these events come within the context of what historians could have called the ‘tyranny of the national’, which might have limited the capacity of the margins, on a local and an international scale, to have an impact on ‘national’ construction.14

12

Paul-André Rosental, ‘Pour une histoire politique des populations’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 1 (Paris, Editions de l’EHESS, 2006), pp. 7-29. 13 Fabienne Bock, ‘L’exubérance de l’État en France, 1914-1918’, Vingtième Siècle, Revue d'histoire, 3 (1984), 41-52. 14 See in particular Gérard Noiriel, La tyrannie du national: le droit d'asile en Europe. 1793-1993 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1991) and Population, immigration et

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Civilians and Military Wives on the Way to Switzerland As soon as Switzerland published internment regulations in February 1916, charities decided to help the families to organise visits. Indeed they contributed to the scale of the migration. For instance, the Œuvre de la colonie suisse en France (or L’Œuvre) was immediately founded under the aegis of the Swiss Legation in Paris, especially the Ambassador Charles Lardy, and a few members of the most important Swiss associations of the French capital. Its aim was to provide the poorest PoWs’ wives, who wanted to visit their husbands in Switzerland or in villages close to the Swiss border like Le Bouveret, with financial and administrative help. In fact organisations such as Le Bonheur familial could host internees in France for five days with the authorisation of the Swiss authorities, as Swiss women flowed through the region on their way to the South of France, where they could be evacuated to. L’Œuvre had to be financed by Swiss companies, private donations and contributions from Swiss patriotic associations in Paris but also in the provinces, where consuls promoted its activity.15 Moreover, the association worked hand in hand with Swiss charities like L’Œuvre du Revoir in Lausanne. Its foundation was also encouraged by the federal government as a part of the humanitarian action of the Confederation, since the Œuvre would contribute in France to a positive image of Switzerland, whose political neutrality was at the same time being heavily contested. The French authorities also welcomed the charity and the new association was registered in May 1916 at the Parisian Prefecture without any difficulty. From the summer of 1916, members of the Œuvre put up advertising posters in all Parisian railway stations and in many French prefectures and city halls, where women had to go in order to organise their trip to Switzerland (figure 2). Furthermore the Œuvre gave financial help to all poor PoWs’ wives, provided they could produce a certificate of destitution, a passport with a visa and, from 1917, a clean criminal record. By the end of the war, the charity had helped 10,265 people, even if new difficulties emerged hindering its action. The frequent closures of borders in 1915 and then in 1917/1918 prevented families from undertaking the journey. Moreover the price of train tickets increased so steeply that the amount of the allowance granted to families proved more and more inadequate over the years. In these cases, financial help from the Œuvre was often insufficient and identité nationale en France, XIXe – XXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, collection Carré Histoire, 1992), chapter 2. 15 For instance AF, E 2200.106, 1000/140, vol. 27, Letter from the Swiss Consul in Nancy to the Swiss Consul in Besançon, 10 June 1916.

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many PoWss’ wives askeed French con nsulates for m money to finaance their stay in Switzzerland. But thhey were not the only ones .

Figure 2: Poster of the Œuvrre (1916)16

Indeed, tthe other solddiers’ wives as a well as thee civilians’ wiives, who may not havve had access to the servicees of charitiess like the Œuvre, were also likely tto seek help from f the French diplomaticc network. Th he case of civilians’ w wives is particcularly complex: some weere ‘refugees’, that is civilian inteernees’ wives,, who came from f the Nortth of France and were being progreessively evacuuated by the German G army,, while others were the wives of thoose internees who were arrrested in Germ many as the war w began and who deecided to settlle in Switzerland.17 Yet, inn all cases, the consuls lacked the nnecessary funnds to help wo omen; indeedd, despite the incessant demands off the French citizens who lived in Hellvetia before the war, many bilateeral discussioons since 18 887 and the appointmen nt of the Protestant H Henri Monod, a friend of th he Swiss Am mbassador in France, F to the newly-fo founded Direcction de l’assiistance publiqque by the Ministry of the Interior, assistance waas provided by b the Swiss ccharity networrk and by French patriiotic associatiions for a long g time. The F French Republlic in fact refused to trransfer any offficial funds to o help Frenchh residing abro oad. Until 16

French Nattional Archives (AN), F23, vol. 8. At the begginning of 19177, 20,000 womeen and childrenn were driven away a from the occupied regions. 17

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the last French assistance law of 1905,18 the lack of a national operative system of assistance for all destitute categories of population in France could explain the governmental hesitations, even if the principal explanation lay in the negative image that successive French governments had of their expatriates and emigrants. They were often considered traitors, deserters, even socialists. But the final assistance law of 1905 then came on top of a whole system which was characterised by a strict territorial conception of the assistance framework, because the link was made between state construction and welfare benefits. This point of view then prevented any possible discussion about the fate of the French colony, so that a lawyer, founder of La Société française de bienfaisance de Lausanne and a legal adviser to the French Embassy since the end of the 19th century, concluded that nationals abroad were always regarded by the Republic as ‘second class’ citizens.19 As they had no lasting administrative solutions and lacked money, at the end of 1916 consuls could do nothing but criticise the French prefectural authorities, who were said to issue passports to destitute women and civilians’ wives too easily.20

French Women in Switzerland: A Financial, Military, Political and Moral Issue as well as an Administrative Challenge Concern within French diplomatic circles was growing at the end of 1916, as it was becoming clear that many civilians’ wives, regardless of their wealth, were deciding to settle with their husbands in Switzerland for weeks or months rather than staying for just a few days. Many of them did not even want to return to France until the war was over. This entailed various consequences for France. These women easily obtained a temporary residence permit in the Swiss cantons and most of the time the authorisation of the Swiss service of internment to live outside the internment camps with their husbands, which often enabled their sons or nephews to escape recruitment by the

18

See in particular Colette Bec, L’assistance en démocratie. Les politiques assistantielles dans la France des XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: Belin-Socio histoires, 1998). 19 Archives of the French Foreign Office (MAE), Légation de Berne, vol. 480, Report of Ernest Lehr to French Embassy in Bern, 14 January 1906. 20 AN, F23, vol.8, Internal Report of the French Ministry of Interior , 25 September 1916.

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French for a long time.21 Moreover, because they are supposedly more gossipy and many spoke German, women were also suspected of being the first targets of the Second Reich’s spies, so that their presence in Swiss towns was regarded as a danger for national security. Above all, many women asked for regular national social help and not only for occasional assistance.22 Thus, little by little, the checking of internees and their wives required Departments to adapt policies which had been thought out within a French territorial framework and for typically French categories of population. But the presence of nationals abroad, even temporarily, made the national social measures unworkable. Furthermore, the situation required ministries to seek solutions in which Switzerland would not have to intervene directly in order to protect its neutrality. There were different ways of managing these challenges: one was to find the means of helping women financially without putting the national budget in danger; another was to attempt to change circulation policies and to stop, or at least weaken, the influx of internees’ wives that was nevertheless always regarded as necessary in order to maintain peace in the internment camps.

Rethinking the Borders of the Acceptable ‘national’: A Financial Influx behind the Human Influx In December 1916, a letter from a civilian internee in Engelberg, Charles Baudron, to the French consul in Geneva and the French Ambassador Jean-Baptiste-Paul Beau, sent sparks flying in Bern and then at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris and in all French ministries. Baudron lived in Hamburg before the war. In his letter, he announced that his wife had come to join him in Switzerland and he therefore requested for her the same allowance of 1.25 francs a day as was paid by the French government to the PoWs’ wives in France and in foreign countries. His request was rejected by Beau because it was unthinkable for him to equate the situation of military wives with civilians’ wives, given that Baudron had lived in Germany. As far as Beau was concerned, only the private assistance network could pay for women like Madame Baudron. However the Ambassador and the Foreign Office felt it necessary to quickly rethink the question of allowances for all women in order to counter German

21

AN, F23, vol. 23, Journal des internés, article ‘Aux femmes d’internés’, 31 March 1917. 22 AN, F23, vol. 8, Internal Note of the Ministry of Interior , 2 December 1916 & Report of the Ministry of War to the Ministry of the Interior , 27 June 1917.

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propaganda, which might say that the French government was abandoning women to their fate.23 The debate was then open in Bern and in Paris. Baudron’s case was at first disregarded, so the Foreign Office spoke up with the rest of the government in order to extend to the refugees living in Switzerland the allowance that military families in France received.24 But the different ministerial administrations did not agree with each other. On the one hand, the Direction du contrôle et de la comptabilité at the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Finance refused to create a financial commitment which might weaken the French currency in the near future. Moreover they did not want to encourage civilians’ wives to emigrate to Switzerland because they were not eligible for any welfare payments in France. Furthermore the Direction wanted to grant the authorisation to settle in the Confederation according to the financial situation of the applicants and their husbands; thus, the internee could work and earn two francs a day. However this solution was doomed to fail because settlement in Switerland did not depend on a French decision but depended exclusively on a cantonal decision; to impose it would presuppose negotiating with the federal government, which was unthinkable at that time. On the other hand, the Direction du Personnel at the same Ministry of the Interior pleaded in favour of extending to all internees’ wives the allowance paid since 5 April 1915 by the Ministry of War to all families whose main breadwinner was already at the front. The Minister finally accepted this latter solution in December 1916: consuls were immediately put in charge of listing the potential recipients and delivering the money, which was provided by the War Cabinet and the municipalities where the internees lived before the war.25 However as the allowance of 1.25 francs a day plus 0.5 per child was not enough for the poorest families, financial help could also be taken from the emergency funds of the Embassy and diplomatic networks. In fact, to some extent, France gave up its strict territorial conception of the national for the first time ever and was forced to recognise its duty to help its citizens’ wives, even if their loyalty to France might be questionable. In the context of this war of propaganda, respect for equality was a necessity. Thus we have here an example of marginal categories which were able, in such a heated context, to provide a new conception of national borders 23

AN, F23, vol. 8, Letter of the French Ambassador to the Foreign Office, 28 October 1916. 24 AN, F23, vol. 8, Internal Note of the Ministry of Interior , 8 November 1916. 25 AN, F23, vol. 8, Response of the Ministry of Interior to a Deputy, Braibant, December 1916.

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and of the national state, since the new practice and the new interpretation, decided by the Ministries, aimed to compensate for nationals’ ‘international unthought’. But the difficulties continued to grow during 1917. They were above all financial, because women decided to extend their stay. In Bern, from January 1917 on, Jean-Baptiste-Paul Beau started to complain about his growing difficulties in assisting the poorest families.26 In Paris, the Ministry of Finance also sounded the alarm. Indeed, the payment of allowances to women aggravated the alarming devaluation of the French franc on the foreign exchange markets and fed capital transfers to Switzerland, which was already common practice since the inception of income tax in 1914 in France.27 Moreover, at the same time this immigration influx gave Switzerland arguments for limiting the number of internees because of its supply difficulties. For all these reasons, in April 1917, the newly-founded Inter-ministerial Conference for Immigration Questions, the CIPI, decided to follow Beau’s opinion and the recent example of Great Britain, which was actually facing the same problem. It limited the payment of welfare benefits to women to fifteen consecutive days and to a maximum of four times a year, and increased the subsidies to the charities who looked after refugees, such as those based in Evian who were in charge of preventing women from ‘disappearing’ and crossing the border.28

Reshaping Circulation Policies: When Switzerland indirectly came to France’s Rescue Meanwhile, the French Ministry of the Interior tried to slow down the pace at which passports were issued in Prefectures and to thwart a level of emigration that would contribute to an impoverishment of the French labour market to the benefit of a foreign country.29 On 26 December 1916, it reinforced administrative checks by imposing an enquiry into the morality of all potential applicants. From then on women and children had 26

AN, F23, vol. 8, Report of the French Embassy to the Foreign Office, 24 January 1917. 27 Archives of the French Land forces (SHAT), 5 N 2884, Report of the French military attaché, 9 January 1917; Ronen Palen, ‘Paradis fiscaux et commercialisation de la souveraineté de l’Etat’, L’Economie Politique, 15 (2002/3), p. 84. 28 AN, F23, vol. 8, Internal Note of The Ministry of Interior , 4 April 1917. 29 AN, F23, vol. 8, Report of the Ministry of War to the Ministry of Interior , 27 June 1917.

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to produce new papers: families had to sign a personal affirmation stipulating that they could afford the trip and the stay, and had to obtain from the mayor an official attestation that certified the degree of the family ties between the internees and the applicants. Moreover, the authorisation of a passport had to be validated by the central Ministry in Paris and not by the departmental Prefectures as used to be the case.30 But the new procedure was not operational31 until 21 November 1917 and then in April and May 1918 when Switzerland changed its own circulation policy and border control organisation under pressure from the unions through fear of growing revolutionary movements and because they were aware of the ongoing difficulties faced by the combative nations in controlling their citizens and their wives. However no international discussions had preceded this new restrictive direction of the federal host state policy. Indeed, according to Gérard and Silvia Arlettaz, the First World War led to ‘un renversement du système de représentation de la société nationale’ [‘a complete reversal of the representation system of national society’] and resulted in reinforced border checks.32 According to the new legislation, foreigners who wanted to enter the federal territory, especially women, were subjected to a triple checking process. First from the home state that delivered the passport; second in the Swiss consulates, where the applicants now had to produce evidence that they had no criminal record and, in order to obtain a visa (valid for a maximum of fifteen days), had to justify their means and the reasons why they wanted to go on the trip. The third check took place at the Swiss border station, where the immigrants were interviewed and had to prove that they had enough money to finance their temporary stay. Once in Switzerland, the newcomer had to register with the cantonal authorities within two days. This federal procedure was providential for the French Ministry of the Interior, which enforced its own regulations from December 1916. In an internal note of December 1917, the Direction de la sûreté générale explained that it had to take advantage of the federal law given that the Swiss consulates, especially in Lyons, were complaining that they were overworked and the cantons were paying scant attention to the new law.33 Therefore, French Ministries wanted to appropriate the Swiss law and thus 30 AN, F23, vol. 8, Circular of the Ministry of Interior to Prefects, 28 December 1916. 31 Archives of the Société Helvétique de Bienfaisance de Paris (SHB), Report on the Œuvre suisse en faveur des militaires internés en Suisse, 1916-1919, pp. 22-3. 32 Gérard and Silvia Arlettaz, La Suisse et les étrangers (Lausanne: Antipodes, 2004), p. 71. 33 AN, F23, vol. 8, Internal Note of The Ministry of Interior, 26 December 1917.

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impose their own objectives, while they left the federal government with the impression that France only provided administrative help and support in welcoming people.34 It was a question of prestige and influence. Thus the Ministry of the Interior offered the federal Departments its services while a Swiss ‘personality’ would be in charge of the issuing of visas in Evian instead of the consul in Lyons. Some civil servants from the French Department were then sent to Evian but they had been ordered to help the Swiss representative, that is, to deal with the women who wanted to cross the borders. However, as the number of interned civilians quickly decreased in Switzerland at that time (figure 1) and influenza was already spreading across Europe, the number of women coming to settle rapidly fell in the next few months.35

Conclusion: Migration, Social State and International Integration Even if France did not find any lasting solutions and looked for the appropriate means of avoiding increasing the scale of this migration, it experimented with a way of solving problems in wartime, which were at the same time ‘national’ and ‘international’. It led France temporarily to rethink and to accept the ‘National State’ not as a simple territory but as a space which was impacted on by its citizens and non-citizens, like women, and as a space where the administration had to intervene, even if problems took place outside its administrative territory. It is difficult to sketch the long-term consequences of this experience. But in the following years, we find comparable discussions with comparable attempts to transfer funds and comparable results, with the difference that women disappeared from the centre of the political scene. For instance, in the following years, the French government faced the same problem helping the poorest citizens abroad, and in particular, the jobless, but this time with an extra difficulty. Indeed, French workers who lived in Switzerland before 1914, previously considered to be traitors, had become heroes in the trenches and there was now a moral duty to help them.36 Thus in the 1920s, the delicate question emerged of finding the right way of helping these families, who were finding it increasingly 34

AN, F23, vol. 8, Internal Note of The Ministry of Interior , 20 February 1918. AN, F23, vol. 8, Letter of the Foreign Office to the Ministry of Interior, 11 March 1918. 36 Archives of the French Foreign Office (MAE), Correspondance politique et commerciale, vol. 157, Report of the French Consul in Geneva, 30 October 1919. 35

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difficult to resettle in Switzerland because of the new federal regulations of 1917 and the restrictive policy of the newly-founded Federal Police for Foreigners (police fédérale des étrangers). The fact that the Swiss economy was in crisis at the beginning of the 1920s and Swiss law had changed introduced further complications. The federal authorities decided in October 1919 to help jobless foreigners, on condition that the country of origin of these unemployed workers granted jobless Swiss living within their borders financial assistance which was strictly equivalent to that of the Swiss.37 For France, where national unemployment insurance did not yet exist and for whom the exchange rate was still unfavourable, this was unthinkable. Institutional and monetary questions were thus to wreck a bilateral treaty over the extension of welfare benefits to jobless French workers in Switzerland and jobless Swiss workers in France until 1933. But, under duress and until the end of the economic crisis in 1924, the French government accepted an infra-state solution and annually released several tens of thousands of francs to help in some small measure both the French charities in Switzerland and the poorest citizens via the Foreign Office, the consulates but also the Swiss municipalities, who managed the insurance funds.38 We reach here the conclusion that these practical arrangements show how difficult it is to move towards legal international integration when national systems are in conflict and the international financial framework is dominant. Nevertheless these practical solutions, which are both infranational and transnational, both temporary and unofficial, can also be considered as precursors and as the most effective way of advancing the internationalisation process at that time. Thus, as the Social State was being created, migrations and, more often, those migrants who were socially marginalised, called into question the concept of sovereignty. And they may also have prepared national States to rethink progressively their borders and accept, directly or indirectly, that foreign States may on occasion intervene in their administrative territory.

37

Sébastien Guex and Brigitte Studer, ‘L’Etat social en Suisse aux XIXe et XXe siècles. Notes sur quelques pistes de recherches’, in Hans-Jörg Gilomen, Sébastien Guex and Brigitte Studer (eds.), Von der Barmherzigkeit zur Sozialversicherung. Umbrüche und Kontinuäten vom Spätmittelalter bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2002), pp. 201-11 (p. 208). 38 AF, E 7169, 1000/1068, vol.11; MAE, Unions, vol. 1589, Report of the French Embassy to the Foreign Office, 22 January 1924.

CLIMATE VARIABILITY AND CHANGE: MIGRATION AND THE CHANGING CONCEPTS OF IDENTITY AND HOME IN THE POETRY OF EUROPEAN WOMEN RACHEL E. MCCARTHY*

Introduction The evidence that the Earth’s climate is changing is unequivocal. Observations of global average temperature show the world has warmed by around 0.8°C since records began in the 1850s.1 Other indicators too, such as Arctic sea ice extent, humidity and sea level show long-term changes consistent with global warming. It is very likely – of 90% probability or more – that most of the observed increase in global average temperature over this period is due to the increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.2 Having established these facts, the question for climate science now concerns the potential impacts of climate change on human and ecological systems such as, for example, water availability in a given region. Climate-impact research contextualises the need for global mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions and suggests what adaptation may be needed at a regional and local level. Migration as an adaptation strategy to climate variability and change has received much attention in the past few years as the potential severity of unmitigated climate change became an object of political focus. *The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, the UK Met Office. 1 Met Office, Our Changing Climate (Exeter: 2012), p. 4. 2 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ‘Summary for Policymakers’ in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group 1 to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, ed. by Susan Solomon et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 3-12 (p. 10).

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Debates continue in the realm of the social sciences, particularly in the disciplines of human geography, international relations and political science, as to the role of the environment in driving migration and the political status and rights of migrants. Although the humanities have, for a long time, considered the impact of migration on the human condition through the study of migrant writings, there has been no attempt to look at the effects climate change will have on migrants’ sense of identity and home in their writings. Linking the expertise in the ‘discipline arena’ of physical climate science, social science, languages and literature, this chapter seeks precisely to explore this field by studying the ways in which climate change affects migrants’ narratives. This chapter looks at poetry by several women writers in Europe. These choices have been made for many reasons. Firstly, there is a long history of poetry interpreting the environment. The rise of New Nature Writing, and to a certain extent Ecopoetics can be traced back to a rising awareness of climate change. Secondly, much research has been done into the different ways in which women and men cope with periods of environmental stress and we know that climate variability has a gender dimension in its impact. Finally, it is important to consider a geographical context where migration has taken place and where the influence of a different landscape has been recorded. Thus, the poetry of European women moving within and out of Europe in the run-up to and during the Second World War offers an opportunity to analyse this relationship. It should be made clear at this point that there is no analogy of climate change to the impact of the Second World War. What concerns us is purely the movement of people, women in this case, and their responses to different landscapes. The war drove people-movement while also changing the soundscape of European poetry. The wave of modernism that came in the tide of the First World War had given permission for poetry to be brutal and ugly, to not be constrained to deal with the environment in a beautiful way. The experiments of the Imagists and Symbolists in breaking up the traditional aspects of poetic register had a profound influence in Europe and America, moving poetry ever closer to direct speech. By the 1930s poetry was equipped to engage, reflect and echo the vast, dark sweep of war. The effect of this influence on translation is now also apparent. Poets moving from one country to another began to engage more deeply with poetry of place and translations became more flexible and responsive. The premise that a forward projection can be made of the effect climate change will have on female migrants’ sense of identity and home requires four top-level questions to be tackled sequentially. Firstly, how do

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female poets who have migrated, particularly to or within the European region, connect with the landscape of their new and former location in their work? Secondly, how is contemporary poetry connecting with the issue of climate variability and change? Thirdly, how do we expect climate change to alter existing landscapes in Europe or influence the migration patterns of women within Europe? And finally what do these answers mean for the concepts of identity and home in future writings by European women? Obviously these questions are so vast and complex that they easily comprise whole research areas in their own right. This chapter should therefore be treated as a brief introduction to this multi-disciplinary research area.

Landscape and Poetic Identity in the Poetry of Migrants Migration arises primarily as a consequence of political and economic drivers nuanced by societal and familial circumstances and history (including the roles of different genders in that society). The writings of migrants need to be traced to these drivers to ensure the contextual development of their work is understood. Much of the work on migrant writing has hence considered areas where the links between migration and primary drivers are clearest; for example, the impact of movement from a former colony to the former coloniser, or to more affluent countries within a region. It is in the writings of migrants moving to, or influenced by poetic models of former colonisers, that the role of landscape and home in poetic identity has been most studied. In her paper ‘Landscape and Poetic Identity in Contemporary Caribbean poetry’ Denise DeCaires Narain paraphrases a 1988 lecture by Edward Kamau Braithwaite (who moved to Cambridge, England on winning a scholarship to the University there in 1949), by saying that, in Braithwaite’s opinion, European literary models, such as the use of the iambic pentameter, cannot ‘give voice to the volatile geography of the Caribbean’.3 The renowned Caribbean poet Louise Bennett affirmed this statement in an interview a year later when talking about the role of dialect in poetry: ‘I began to wonder why more of our poets and writers were not taking more of an interest in [...] writing in the medium of dialect instead of writing in the same old English way about

3

Denise DeCaires Narain, ‘Landscape and Poetic Identity in Contemporary Caribbean women’s poetry’, Ariel, 38 (2007) 41-64 (p. 42).

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Autumn and things like that’.4 The disparaging culmination of this sentence underlines the important point that where one moves to is not necessarily ‘better’ than where one left in terms of its physical nature – even if the climate is in many ways more pleasing, for example, of higher average temperature. This adds credence to the notion that the native pastoral may indeed form a core part of our identity. The genderisation of aspects of a country, the land, the landscape and the language, are particularly clear in the writings of migrants from former colonies. Landscape and language are referred to in the feminine, with the invasive presence, the coloniser, often referred to as male. The Oxford English Dictionary records the first use of ‘mother country’ in the 16th century, meaning ‘one’s native land’, with ‘fatherland’ emerging in the 17th century meaning ‘the country of one’s birth’. Although the difference in the definitions appears slight at first, it has important connotations for how landscape is currently treated in the writing of migrants and how that treatment may change in future writings on climate (Mother Nature) under anthropogenic influence (invasive change). Within Europe, the region of focus for this chapter, the divide between fatherland and mother country in the poetry of female migrants is most pronounced in the work of women who left Central Europe after the National Socialist German Workers’ party gained power in the 1930s. The work of Nelly Sachs, who moved from Germany to Sweden, and that of Rose Ausländer, who moved between Germany and America, have been chosen as the subjects for this chapter. It should be noted however that these are only two examples. The work of Rachel Korn, who changed from writing in Polish to Yiddish and lived out her life in Canada, and that of Chava Rosenberg too, for example, could and indeed should, be studied in a similar way. 49-year-old Nelly Sachs fled Germany with her elderly mother on the last aeroplane from Germany to Sweden in 1940, a week before she was due to report to a concentration camp. Exile saved her life and work; translating the new wave of modernist poets started her on a path that led to the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. Sachs remained in Sweden until her death and although she learnt Swedish, she wrote exclusively in German, her first language. Rose Ausländer, ten years younger than Sachs, was born in the city of Chernovtsy. Originally part of Austria-Hungary, the city became part of Romania after World War I and part of the Ukraine after World War II. Ausländer returned to Chervotsky periodically throughout her life after an initial emigration to America in 1921 and was 4

Dennis Scott (interview), Hinterland: Caribbean Poetry from the West Indies and Britain, ed. by Edward Archie Markham (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1989), pp. 45–50.

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in Chervotsky caring for her ailing mother in 1941 when the Nazis occupied the city. Liberated from a Jewish Ghetto by the Russians in 1944, Rose left for America again. She suffered a breakdown when her mother, who she had been trying to obtain a visa for, died the following year. At this point Ausländer turned her back on her first language, writing poetry exclusively in English. It took ten years, interspersed with visits to Europe, before she wrote again in German. Place, for a child, is composed of the language of parents and the physical building that constitutes home. Growing up, the boundaries of home spread to include nursery and school, then the homes of friends and then the geographical limits of town, city, region, country. The linguistic ‘unit’ of place however, often remains a constant within this expansion. So on moving beyond the physical boundary of birth-city or country, language becomes the sole constant in the individual’s relationship to place. Katharine Bower notes of Nelly Sachs that ‘language was all she had left after her forced departure from a home she would never return to and which could never be recovered’.5 Language became a refuge for Sachs, she herself called ‘Asyl meiner Atemzüge’ [‘the asylum of my breath’].6 Ausländer followed a similar trajectory, moving from questioning language as a surrogate home in her early work to embrace it in her poem ‘Mutterland’: ‘Ich lebe /in meinem Mutterland / Wort’ [‘I live / in my homeland / word’].7 The internalisation of language as place does not mean that the physical home is forgotten. ‘Die Zeit rauscht von unserem Heimweh / wie eine Muschel’ [‘Time roars with our longing for home / like a seashell’], Sachs says.8 Sachs came to adopt physical exile from her childhood home as a state of being, allowing her poetry to escape the confines of nationality or geography: ‘An Stelle von Heimat/halte ich die Verwandlungen der Welt’ [‘I hold instead of a homeland / the metamorphoses of the world’].9 Ein Fremder hat immer seine Heimat in Arm wie eine Waise 5

Kathrin M. Bower, Ethics and Remembrance in the Poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer (New York: Camden House, 2000), p. 11. 6 Nelly Sachs, Fahrt ins Staublose (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), p. 157. 7 Rose Ausländer, Mutterland (Cologne: Braun, 1978). 8 Nelly Sachs, Collected poems: 1944-1949 (Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2011), p. 246. 9 Nelly Sachs, O The Chimneys. Selected Poems, Including the Verse Play, Eli, trans. by Michael Hamburger, Christopher Holme, Ruth and Maxwell Mean and Michael Roloff (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1967), p. 147.

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While Sachs never returned to her homeland, Ausländer returned to hers intermittently, even after her mother’s death in the mid-1940s. She returned too to her first language after writing extensively in English. Migration had a lasting effect on her use of her first language though and she did not return to her earlier relatively strict style. It is Sachs however who most clearly elicits the role of migration in her relationship with language in her poem ‘Chorus of the Wanderers’ from her 1947 collection In the Habitations of Death: Unsere Wege ziehen wir als Gepäck hinter uns her/ Mit einem Fetzen des landes darin wir Rast hielten/ Sind wir bekleidet - / Aus fem Kochtopf der Sprache, die wir unter Tränen erlernten, Ernähren wir uns. [We drag the ways we have come like burdens behind us – We are clad in the rags of the land In which we rested – we feed ourselves from the cooking pot of the language that we learned with tears].11

Engagement with Climate Variability and Change in Contemporary Poetry Both Sachs and Ausländer connected strongly with their change in environment, both the linguistic change and the physical one. The relationship between humans and their physical environment has always been a strong theme in poetry, most marked in English by the poetry of 10

Sachs, Fahrt ins Staublose. Translation taken from A comparative History of Literatures in European Languages: Modernism, ed. by Astradur Eysteinsson and Vivian Liska (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2007), p. 747. 11 Sachs, Collected poems, p. 104.

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William Wordsworth. Over time, poetic appreciation of beauty and perfection in the natural world gradually developed into a device through which other themes, particularly the concept of ‘enduring love’ could be ventriloquised. The relationship between the human and the pastoral vision of landscape has grown more complex, partly as science unravelled an ever-greater number of intricacies and processes within nature and as industrialisation took place. Over the last five to ten years, new poetic movements have emerged which reassess the connection with nature, all of which have links to the rising awareness of climate change.12 The change in approach has not been linear, as Harriet Tarlo notes in her insightful introduction to ‘The Ground Aslant’ where she writes that ‘there were several decades where the urban was seen as providing more appropriate material for the experimental poet’.13 One could observe that this is partly because at the root of the pastoral is the idea of nature as a ‘stable enduring counterpoint’ to the development and activity of the human world.14 The recognition of climate change has disrupted this notion of stability in nature, making it fertile ground for both the experimental poet and those interested in the interplay between the political and pastoral. Given the importance of climate change at a global political level and the fact that the impacts of climate change will continue to emerge over time (indeed, due to the inertia of the climate system we are committed to some level of change even if greenhouse gas emissions were drastically and instantaneously reduced to zero), one would expect greater levels of public media coverage of climate change. This would be likely to lead to an increasing interest and participation in the movements of radical landscape poetry, new nature writing and ecopoetics. These movements are predominantly driven by the developed world and therefore any work by migrants moving under a strong environmental driver within the developed world would be likely to emerge first in specialised publications related to these movements. Where though would we expect these writers to emerge from geographically?

12

‘The New Nature Writing’, ed. by Jason Cowley, Granta 102 (2008). Harriet Tarlo, The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Exeter: Shearsman Books, 2011), p. 8. 14 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 56. 13

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The Movement of Women in Response to Environmental Stress Temporary migration is a well-established response in the developing world to periods of adverse climatic conditions such as an extreme season (for example, failure of a rainy season) or an extreme event (for example landfall of a tropical cyclone). For this reason, research on the gender dimensions of environmental impacts and responses focuses on these regions of the world; also because it is here that traditional roles are often the most ingrained and inequality between genders, particularly their access to assets and resources, the most marked.15 Women in the developing world are known to be more vulnerable to environmental stress, but less likely to migrate, having different responsibilities and fewer options than asset-rich, educated males. Independent observers of the East African drought of 2011 found that men had most often moved on from affected areas, either to find work or to migrate with their livestock, while women stayed behind as provider for the family.16 There is evidence to suggest that this genderisation of impacts holds true in the developed world. Social science research in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (the costliest natural disaster of all time and one of the five deadliest hurricanes in American history)17 suggested that it was the poor, and the women and girls amongst them, who were the most severely and immediately affected.18 These two examples of recent environmental stress show a commonality in that women, although from different cultural backgrounds, were the worst affected and the least likely to move. It should be noted however, that ‘staying behind’ in some cases was not always the preferred response but a consequence of external threats outweighing those prompting migration. For example, in some areas the East African drought was so 15

The Government Office for Science, Migration and Global Environmental Change Final Project Report (London: 2011). 16 Voice of America (VOA), Drought Brings Extreme Hardship to Kenyan Women (2011). http://www.voanews.com/english/news/africa/east/Drought-BringsExtreme-Hardship-to-Kenyan-Women-126329823.html [accessed 17 March 2012]. 17 Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown (eds), Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Katrina: 23–30 August 2005 (USA: National Hurricane Center, 2006). 18 Beth Willinger et al., Katrina and the Women of New Orleans, Executive Report and Summary of Findings (Tulane University, 2008). http://www.womenscolleges.org/files/pdfs/NCCROWreport08.pdf [accessed 17 March 2012].

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severe and extensive as to encourage movement of entire communities including women and children. However, the conflict between Islamist militia groups rendered movement away from drought too dangerous to be considered a viable option by refugees.19 Also, whereas the developing world has an entrenched history of temporary migration in response to environmental threats, the developed world, being less vulnerable to extremes of current climate variability, does not. The less history there is of permanent or temporary migration away from threat, the more people resist moving. When they do move, they will move short distances within their national bounds with a small number moving internationally.20 I believe this lack of precedent for moving was partly to blame for the death toll of the European heat wave of 2003 (the other factors being immobility amongst the elderly, along with poor understanding of the risk to health and lack of economic capital in some areas). Large excess mortality, totalling 45,000 to 50,000 people depending on the method of estimation, was reported as a consequence of the anomalously hot and dry period between July and August 2003. In France, Portugal and Italy, the three countries that considered the deaths by gender, rates were higher in females. Epidemiological studies by the World Health Organisation indicate the risk posed by heat waves does not differ significantly between men and women,21 highlighting a social, rather than physiological, cause of the gender discrepancy in increased mortality. There is a high probability (over 90%) that hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation events worldwide will become more frequent.22 The extreme summer of 2003 was found to have been made more than twice as likely to occur as a consequence of anthropogenic emissions.23 One climate model study projects that by 2040 the temperatures experienced during the 2003 heat wave could constitute a normal summer 19 Humanitarian news and analysis, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Thousands trapped between conflict and drought in Galgadud (2012). http://www.irinnews.org/Report/92593/SOMALIA-Thousandstrapped-between-conflict-and-drought-in-Galgadud [Accessed 17 March 2012]. 20 Graeme Hugo, ‘Environmental concerns and international migration’, International Migration Review, 30 (1996), 105–31; Alan Findlay and Alistair Geddes, ‘Critical views on the relationship between climate change and migration: some insights from the experience of Bangladesh’, ed. by Antoine Pecoud and Etienne Piguet, Migration and Climate Change (Paris: UNESCO, 2011). 21 WHO, Health and Global Environmental Change, Series No 2, heat waves; risks and responses (2004). 22 IPCC, 2007 – see note 2 23 Peter A. Stott, D. A. Stone and M. R. Allen, ‘Human contribution to the European Heatwave of 2003’, Nature, 432 (2004) p. 610.

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for northern Europe and by 2060 comprise typically the coolest summer of the decade.24 An increase in the number of unprecedented extreme events is likely to be the catalyst for increased temporary migration (of the order of days to weeks). The changes in extremes, particularly seasonal extremes, as a consequence of multi-decadal variability in the climate on top of the longterm warming trend, are the most likely to eventually lead to repeated temporary migration becoming permanent. Projected climate change in Southern Europe and the European Mediterranean makes this region a candidate for increased rural to urban movement. Both these regions are projected to be negatively affected by climate change with warmer, drier conditions and a decrease in mean annual precipitation, leading to more frequent and prolonged droughts. A study suggests that today’s 100-year droughts could return every fifty years or less by the 2070s in Southern and south-eastern Europe, including all Mediterranean countries.25 Although the effects of climate change and increased atmospheric carbon dioxide are expected to lead to an overall increase in European crop productivity, decreases are expected for the south, with the largest reductions in crop yield likely in the Mediterranean.26 Estimates of the economic costs of agricultural decline in Southern Europe as a consequence amount to 1% of GDP by 2080.27 The interaction of environmental drivers with economic ones suggests that it will be the poorest in the agrarian sector who will be most affected by future climate change. Evidence from Hurricane Katrina and the European heat wave of 2003 suggest that it will be women and girls in this group who will be the most immediately affected. Migration or temporary displacement to diversify in response to drought or reduced crop productivity would most likely be within national bounds or to neighbouring countries. The legislation protecting free movement of EU citizens between member countries would suggest that movement would be more likely to occur from member state to member 24 J. F. B. Mitchell, J. Lowe, R. A. Wood, and M. Vellinga, ‘Extreme events due to human-induced climate change’, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 364 (2006), 2117-33. 25 Bernhard Lehner, ‘Estimating the Impact of Global Change on Flood and Drought Risk in Europe: A Continental, Integrated Analysis’, Climatic Change, 75 (2006), 273-99. 26 G. Maracchi, O. Sirotenko and M. Bindi, ‘Impacts of Present and Future Climate Variability on Agriculture and Forestry in the Temperate Regions: Europe’, Climatic Change, 70 (2005), 117-35. 27 The Government Office for Science, Migration and Global Environmental Change Final Project Report (London: 2011), p. 102.

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state, than from a member state to a non-member state, or vice-versa. In the case of intra-European mobility, the economic dimension looks to continue to be the most important driver of location, with prosperity being a key constituent of what attracts migrants to an area.28

Combining Concepts: Climate Change, Landscape and Poetics As the first step in a cross-disciplinary study combining physical and social science with poetics, this chapter introduces more questions than it answers. It does however open up a debate into a fruitful and useful area for further study. As this chapter has sought to demonstrate, increasing public understanding and media coverage of climate variability and change in all likelihood will propel continued development of radical landscape poetry, new nature writing and ecopoetics over the medium-term. Although migration will be influenced by periods of environmental stress and longterm change, political and economic drivers are set to continue to be the most dominant factors in the migrant’s decision-making. Strong climaterelated components in migrant poetry will potentially come in two forms: responses to extreme events that have prompted temporary migration (such as a flood) and/or responses to long-term changes in the physical landscape of home. In both cases, the dimension that climate variability and change will most often bring is one of loss or mourning. Whereas the discrete nature of an extreme event provides an enclosed, poem-sized challenge of interpretation, the long timescale evolution of the climate in response to anthropogenic emissions will not. In an attempt to engage with the landscape, poets may return more frequently to the often-used method of journeys or routes through landscape. The journey is already a key feature of migrant writings, so it may be that climate change will amplify this effect and bring the journey of the migrant and the physical evolution of the landscape closer together. A new facet may be that the changing landscape is used to explore the personal change migrants undergo on moving. Consideration of the poetry of Nelly Sachs and Rose Ausländer for example points to a potential retreat of the female migrant writer into language as a home, and of exile as a suitable state of being in the world. Southern Europe and the European Mediterranean, with their changing climates, are candidates for permanent migration from rural to urban areas. 28

Alan Findlay, ‘Destination Choices of Environmental Migrants’, Global Environmental Change, 215 (2011), 550-58.

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It is not the only possibility however, as study of the inter-linkages between political drivers of migration, economic ones and climatic ones have shown. Poets engaging in discourse on the environment and environmentally-driven movement are at least equally likely to emerge from countries which share the language of an affected area; the eco-aware Spanish-speaking Mexican poets Angélica Tornero and Verónica Volkow could be thought of as potential examples perhaps. Much more research needs to be done in looking at climate impacts on a regional scale in tandem with understanding of the psychology of population movement. In particular, the interpretation of the landscape in relation to the self and home in the writings of women who have moved for predominantly economic reasons from Southern to Northern Europe should receive more study. What is needed to make use of any extra work however is a truly multidisciplinary community, as the areas of overlap between climate variability and change, migration and poetics are complex, and exceed even those definitions, ruled strongly by politics and economics. Such overlap can only be sensibly discussed by experts in each area working together. If they do so, there may be no limit to the discoveries that could feed back into these areas and potentially influence thinking and research-design across a range of multidisciplinary research.

THE WRITER’S PERSPECTIVE

WRITING IN TWO LANGUAGES: AN EXISTENTIAL CHALLENGE SILVIA RICCI LEMPEN1

Is it possible to write literary works in two different languages? Not at two different times in one’s life, closing the door on one language and definitively adopting another, but at the same time, alternately? Is it possible to become so deeply immersed in a second language that it is genuinely transformed into a literary tool, then return to the first language to do likewise, and so on? In these pages, which deal with a vast, difficult subject, I will write from the perspective of a writer (which I am trying to be) and not that of a literary historian (which I am not), so I hope I will be forgiven for basing my reflections on my own modest experience rather than on the work of many great bilingual writers of the past and present. To start with, I would like to recount my personal history in terms of language. I was born in Rome into a family that was 100% Italian and at home we spoke Italian. However, my parents decided, as soon as we were old enough for nursery school, to sign my brother and myself up for the French School in Rome, and consequently by the age of six or seven we were equally confident in both languages. Right up to the end of our schooling, we studied in French. My mother spoke the language well (much better than my father) and could follow our school work, but at home we continued to speak Italian. Our school friends were of many different nationalities, not just Italian or French, and with them we sometimes spoke Italian, sometimes French and sometimes a strange sort of mumbo-jumbo, where we would mix up the two languages within the same sentence. We were perfectly capable of distinguishing between them and speaking them both, but we thought it was very amusing to mix them 1

Silvia Ricci Lempen has so far published the following novels: Un homme tragique (Lausanne: L’Aire, 1991), translated into Italian as Una famiglia perfetta (Rome: Iacobelli, 2010); Le Sentier des éléphants (Vevey: L’Aire, 1996); Avant (Vevey: L’Aire, 2000); Une Croisière sur le Lac Nasser (Vevey: L’Aire, 2012); Cara Clarissa (Rome: Iacobelli, 2012). See http://www.silviariccilempen.ch for more details on her life and work.

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up, using the first word we could think of (Italian or French) to express ourselves. At that time, the two languages were so bound up together in my daily life that I was not really aware of using one rather than the other in specific circumstances. Like a lot of teenage girls, I kept a diary and I accumulated dozens of notebooks in my drawers. When I was seventeen, I decided it was time to grow up and I destroyed them all, but somehow one notebook escaped the ritual burning. I came across it twenty years later and was stupefied to discover that I had written it in Italian, having been convinced up until then that I had written it in French. Subsequently, the course of my life led me to give more importance to French. I married a Francophone Swiss and we lived in France for a few years before moving to French-speaking Switzerland, where I still live (now with a different husband, but who is also French-speaking). I studied in Italian at the University of Rome, then did a doctorate (in French) at the University of Geneva before starting work as a journalist (again in French) and hence when I started writing novels, it seemed entirely natural to do so in French. I tried to speak Italian to my daughters but it didn’t really work, even though they do now speak the language quite well. The only people with whom I continued to speak Italian were thus my family in Rome, who were far away, which meant I only saw them three or four times a year. Alongside this linguistic detachment there was also a cultural detachment: I no longer read Italian newspapers, I hardly ever read books in Italian, and in some fields (for example computing, which didn’t even exist when I was young), I had difficulty expressing myself. Then, a few years ago, things changed. My first novel was translated into Italian and published in Italy in 2010. It happened to be an autobiographical novel about my family, particularly my father, and although I had recounted them in French, the events concerned had all taken place in Italian. I was fortunate enough to be in close contact with the translator throughout the translation process, which fascinated me, giving me in a sense the opportunity to help her refine the book’s original language, even if this original text had never been written. It was precisely at that time that I started to think that I had been wrong to turn my back on Italian, my true mother tongue, and not see it as a language in which I might write. A fellow writer who is Italian-speaking got a reaction from me by suggesting that in choosing French, I had been seeking to reject the language of my father, who was a tyrant and caused me great suffering. If his theory is correct, it would mean that I felt that Italian was my father tongue rather than my mother tongue. We generally speak about a mother tongue because, due to the traditional family

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structure, young children mainly start to acquire a language with their mother. But in my case, even if my family was indeed extremely traditional, right from when I was very small, Italian had always been the language through which my father’s absolute power over my life manifested itself and that was possibly why I had wanted to distance myself from it. French on the other hand was a language which my father did not speak well and it represented freedom for me. Just as this first autobiographical novel was being translated into Italian, I was trying to write a novel in French which was not autobiographical but which took place in Rome during the 1960s. I had written over half of it but I wasn’t happy with it, I couldn’t adequately capture the atmosphere of those years. Suddenly I made up my mind to start all over again, this time in Italian. It was very difficult because for me French was like a comfortable old piece of clothing or an instrument whose every secret and every possibility were known to me, whereas over time Italian, especially in a written form, had become an instrument which I found it hard to use, because I was out of practice. I had in a way lost the instructions. But in the end I managed to write a novel which, it seemed to me, sounded right, and it has just been published. At the same time, I began to get closer to Italy: I started to follow a bit more closely the country’s political and cultural ups and downs, I met a few people in the media and literary worlds in Italy, whilst also writing another novel in French (which appeared in May 2012). In a word, I now once again feel fully bicultural, just as I did when I was a teenager. So much so that I have started working on a completely mad idea: I would like to write a novel consisting of several overlapping stories, some written in Italian and others in French! To try and get it published, I will probably have to translate it myself into one langauge or the other, but for the moment I am enjoying writing in French the parts that ‘must’ be in French and in Italian those that ‘must’ be in Italian… Ever since I’ve been writing in two languages, I’ve experienced something which is, I think, familiar to most bilingual people, particularly those who work closely with language. Knowing two languages very well makes it possible to have a deeper knowledge of them and use both better than if you just have one language, and when it comes to literary writing, it is possible to express things that you might not have been able to say if you only had one language. That can seem paradoxical, since it’s generally thought to be the other way round, that it’s only by being completely immersed in a language that you can write good literature, but in fact knowing another language from the one you’re writing in gives you a feeling of permanent strangeness which stimulates creativity.

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This feeling of strangeness is well described by Nancy Huston, who was born in English-speaking Canada and whose mother tongue is thus English, but who has lived in France since the age of about twenty and writes novels in French. In Lettres parisiennes. Histoires d’Exil, which consists of an exchange of letters between Huston and Leïla Sebbar, a Franco-Algerian writer who also lives outside her native land, Huston writes: ‘Ce n’est qu’à partir du moment où plus rien n’allait de soi – ni le vocabulaire, ni la syntaxe, ni surtout le style – à partir du moment où était aboli le faux naturel de la langue maternelle, que j’ai trouvé des choses à dire’ [‘It was only once nothing could be taken for granted – neither vocabulary, nor syntax, nor (above all) style and the false naturalness of the mother tongue had been done away with, that I found things to say.’]2 In her case, the disappearance of what she calls ‘false naturalness’ came about when she chose to write in a language other than her mother tongue. For me, it’s a bit more complicated and the elimination of ‘false naturalness’ occurs in both languages; whichever one I write in, there is another one in the background. But the thing we have in common is the sense that nothing can be taken for granted and the written word must constantly be invented. When you write, you aren’t trying to put into words a meaning that already exists and that you just have to express in the most accurate way possible. Meaning is never given before being expressed and in a sense it’s language that constitutes meaning. But in this very complex process, where meaning and words are bound up together, bilingualism can play a fundamental role and the other language (the one you aren’t using) can indeed play a role, as if it were a third party, a mediator, giving you the option of a roundabout route that will bring forth a meaning that is richer and subtler than if the writer were monolingual. For example, in French the word ‘vert’ indicates both the colour green and the state of a fruit that is not ripe, even in the case of a fruit like grapes, which can be green even when they are ripe, as in La Fontaine’s well known fable: ‘Ils sont trop verts, dit-il, et bons pour les goujats’ [‘They’re too sour, he said and only boors can eat them’]. On the other hand, in Italian, the word ‘verde’ is rarely used to express the idea of a fruit’s unripeness and in fact this is only the case when the greenness of the fruit (which is normally red or yellow when ripe) betrays its unripe state. Italian has another word that indicates that a fruit is not ripe, ‘acerbo’. But in French, the word ‘acerbe’ (‘acerbic’) only has a figurative sense and according to the Robert Dictionary means acrimonious, aggressive, caustic, biting, sarcastic, 2

Lettres parisiennes. Histoires d’Exil (Barrault, 1986), p.14.

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virulent. This figurative meaning also exists in Italian but it is secondary to the concrete meaning of ‘unripe’. Knowing all these nuances means that when necessary, in Italian as well as in French, I can use the words vert/verde and acerbe/acerbo in a way that doesn’t quite correspond to the usual usage and which may be interesting from a literary point of view. Introducing a nuance borrowed from the other language leads to the words saying more and something different from what they normally say. This is not just the case for isolated words, it’s by bringing together the distinctive characteristics of two languages that I am often stimulated to try to write something that has a greater meaning than what I would have written if I only wrote in one language. In Lettres parisiennes Nancy Huston explains how she was struck by the way a young French farmer’s wife spoke, constantly using the possessive adjective to talk about the household tasks she had to do: ‘I have to shell my beans’, ‘I haven’t done my ironing yet’. This characteristic of the French language exists above all amongst people from modest backgrounds who work in manual jobs. For example, in Hugo’s Les Misérables there is a scene where Jean Valjean climbs over a convent wall in the middle of the night to escape from Inspector Javert and in a most unexpected way meets a man whose life he saved years earlier and who is a gardener there. The two men recognise each other and the following dialogue ensues: - Et que faites-vous ici? reprit Jean Valjean - Tiens! je couvre mes melons donc! [‘And what are you doing here? continued Jean Valjean. Oh… I’m covering up the melons of course!’]

I don’t know how this dialogue has been translated into Italian, but I do know that in Italian it would be odd for the gardener to talk about ‘my melons’ and I believe the same would be true of English (in any case Nancy Huston says that an English-speaking housewife would never talk about her beans or her ironing). In French, this use of the possessive designates not so much the material possession of the objects in question (the gardener doesn’t own the melons) as the responsibility for looking after them. If I’m writing in French and I create a housewife who is going to the market, I will say that she ‘va faire son marché’. In Italian there will be no possessive, she will simply be going to the market, but with my knowledge of French in the background, I may be encouraged to use other linguistic means of suggesting that, for this housewife, going to the market is her everyday responsibility and that it is part of the daily life of a housewife that justifies her existence. In this way, bilingualism can create

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a sense of frustration but can also, in a complementary way, stimulate a writer to be more inventive. But the question I asked at the start of this text nevertheless remains: in the literary sphere, is bilingualism sustainable in the long term? One thing is certain and that is that moving from writing in one language to writing in another requires time and you can’t write in one language on Monday and in another on Tuesday. Each time you have to move into a different universe and even change your identity. Writing throws into question your entire existence and it’s language that nourishes our existence, it’s the place where we set down roots in the world and where our perception of reality develops. I am however convinced that it is possible to inhabit two universes at different times without losing any of the intimate detail of either of them, but only so long as you take the time to patiently relearn how to feel at home in each of them. That’s what I’m trying to do, whilst accepting the difficulties and the slowness of these alternating processes of reappropriation.

Translated by Joy Charnley

NARRATIVES OF SOLIDARITY

DISPLACED WOMEN: NARRATIVES OF MIGRATION IN EUROPE 28-30 MARCH 2012, GLASGOW WOMEN’S LIBRARY ROUND TABLE DISCUSSION This is the transcript of the round table closing the three-day conference held on 20-23 March in the Glasgow Women’s Library. The participants to the round table are Mariangela Palladino (conference coorganiser and member of the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network [GRAMNet]), Linda Delgado (member of the Women’s Committee at the Scotland's Trade Union Centre [STUC]), Sanaa Alsabag (West of Scotland Regional Equality Council), Nina Murray (Scottish Refugee Council), and Syma Ahmed (Glasgow Women’s Library). The conference organisers would like to take this opportunity to thank all the participants and the Glasgow Women’s Library for their kind hospitality and assistance. Mariangela Palladino: Today we have an opportunity to shift our focus, still on migration but looked at from another perspective, because we have invited different representatives of various organisations working here in Scotland at grassroots level. So we can really look at change from a scholarly, academic perspective and also from a grassroots one: what happens on the ground, what it’s really like to work with migrant women, what are the challenges, what are the stories. Before introducing each speaker and hearing what they have to say, I’d just like to give a short introduction to the Scottish situation. Here we have Devolution so we have a parliament; however, the parliament is not 100% in control of what happens in the country. So issues that have to do with migration are still a ‘reserved matter’, and Westminster, London, makes decisions. However, Scotland has many other areas of intervention, which are housing, health, education, and in many things that indirectly have to do with migration, there has been a little bit of a change. Basically, what I’m saying is that since Glasgow is one of the main dispersal areas for migrants who are sent here from the south, this has been a great opportunity to change the attitude to migration, away from the main

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approach that Westminster has, and there have for example been successful stories of preventing children’s detention or stopping dawn raids on migrants. This is just to give you an idea of the kind of things that are happening, but I’m sure our practitioners and those in the audience who have experience can say more. A lot of exciting things happen here in Scotland, specifically in Glasgow, because it’s got such a large migrant community. The grassroots work is really amazing and our practitioners from London have also had experience of the success stories here in Glasgow. Today we’ll hear from our speakers then open to the floor for questions, debate, discussion to hopefully have a fluid dialogue between academia and those working on the ground. Linda Delgado is a biomedical scientist in the NHS, where she acts as a senior workplace and equality representative. She’s been a trade union member for thirty-seven years and joined the women’s committee at the STUC (Scottish Trade Union Congress) in 2009. Sanaa Alsabag is from the West of Scotland Regional Equality Council. She’s leading a project called ‘Finding Our Feet’, a new EU-funded initiative which aims to support third-country nationals. Sanaa’s work is about making positive changes to international women, supporting their integration, settlement and participation in local communities here in Scotland. Nina Murray is from the Scottish Refugee Council, where she’s the Women’s Policy Development Officer. Since February 2011 she’s been leading a Comic Relief-funded women’s project called ‘Raising Refugee Women’s Voices’. Finally Syma Ahmed is from the Glasgow Women’s Library, where she is a Development Officer and works with minority ethnic women. Linda Delgado: I’d like to thank you for allowing me to speak today. Looking through your programme, it has a more academic feel to it but I think that academia and trade unionism have a lot to offer to each other and hopefully we will work together a lot more. I’ll tell you a little bit about the STUC to start with. We represent over 650,000 workers in Scotland from thirty-seven different unions. It has equality structures within it, which have committees dedicated to addressing the issues of disabled workers, young workers, black and ethnic minorities and women. I’ve been on the Women’s Committee since 2009 and basically we attempt to influence policy or campaign on issues that have anything to do with women. So you can imagine the range; it takes in everything, because women are in everything. Specifically to do with migrants: all the affiliated unions signpost migrants to places where they can get more advice on specific issues, such

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as Citizens Advice Bureaux or legal advice. But some unions also have dedicated migrant networks which are dedicated to supporting migrants in the workforce and understanding their particular problems. I’d like to stress that it is the premise of the STUC that migrant workers contribute a huge amount to Scotland’s economy, they provide a wealth of experience and knowledge and really a lot of our public services couldn’t run without them. But very few of them actually manage to access work that is relevant to their skill set. An example of this being the number of well qualified nurses who are working in Scotland as care assistants in private care homes and ward assistants rather than as registered nurses. The exploitation of migrant workers is most likely to occur in the areas where indigenous workers are also very at risk, such as the agricultural sector or fisheries, things like that. It’s the STUC’s belief that the best way to protect migrant workers is simply to protect everyone, we treat everyone the same. Enforcing core statutory employment rights for all workers is the best way forward and employment rights should not be dependent on your immigration status or your length of employment. The way the STUC tries to do this is to influence government policy. They lobby MPs and MSPs, they respond to and inform the equalities committees at the Scottish Government. Specifically, in the past year we’ve responded to the enquiry into migration and trafficking in Scotland and the enquiry into the effect of migration on public service provision. We set up migrant projects, establish migrant networks, and try to raise awareness about any issues we feel are unjust. What I’m going to do is try to give you a practical example of each of those things, because if you’re like me I sometimes need things just put out as simply as possible. One of the projects that’s currently in progress is the ‘Highlands and Islands Migrant Worker Project’. It’s based in Inverness and is funded by the European Social Fund. This project has run for two years now and it has at least another year to go. It is run by a Polish woman and involves all the major trade unions and employers in the Inverness region. The major employers tend to be public service providers, where the employees tend to be women. It’s specifically tasked with identifying the needs of migrant workers and arranging bespoke training solutions for them. To do this, the project workers speak with workers to identify a learning outcome that they find desirable and the union then organises training specifically for this. In 2010, 120 migrant workers took part in thirteen trade union learning courses within this project. These courses included digital photography (which proved the most popular), first aid at work, English as a second language, presentation skills, letter-writing, CV-writing, introduction to management and advanced

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information technology. The next stage of this project is to develop a mentoring system to help migrant workers progress through the system better. A very good network that we’ve had working in Glasgow for quite a few years now is the Overseas Nurses Network. It’s an informal group that meets at the Southern General Hospital and is notionally funded by the trade union UNISON but it is essentially self-organised. It’s open to any nurse who is from overseas and whilst it encourages membership of a trade union, it isn’t necessary to be a trade union member to join it. It again signposts people to where they can receive specific help because I think it’s important that trade unions accept that we’re not experts on asylum or legal advice or any of these issues. We have to move people over to where they can get the best advice. But it signposts them and their friends and families and otherwise it provides a place where they can meet, eat, talk about their lives, discuss their issues at work and their problems. Glasgow itself has a very high number of nurses from the Philippines, China and Indonesia and for many of these women it is simply a place to meet people and talk in their own mother tongue. I have personal experience of working in Saudi Arabia and sometimes just speaking to someone that you don’t have to modify your language with and who understands you is so relaxing; it’s like therapy in itself. Moving on to trying to influence policy. STUC recognises trafficking as a major concern in Scotland for both sexual exploitation and forced labour, especially with the upcoming Commonwealth Games. There’s been a lot of research that has shown that every large sporting event, from the Olympics to the World Cup, is accompanied by a huge increase in human trafficking for sexual exploitation and whilst it’s difficult to quantify the exact size of this, it is estimated that 2000 women were trafficked into Greece for their last Olympic Games. Regardless of personal beliefs on prostitution’s place in society, this is an abuse of human rights and has a seriously traumatising effect on the women concerned. After the sporting event, these women are often just abandoned wherever they are and left helpless because they’re no longer considered profitable by the traffickers that brought them in. Trade unions in Scotland have started campaigning to try to ensure that this isn’t a legacy that Glasgow has from the Commonwealth Games. We’ve been lobbying MSPs and promoting legislation to try and eliminate the sex industry within Scotland; we’ve informed the government enquiry into human trafficking and we’re hosting a conference on 4 May on the subject. Lastly, a particular campaign that the unions are running at the moment is ‘Justice for Domestic Workers’. The women affected are primarily in

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London but there are some in Scotland. The Westminster government plans to remove the domestic workers visa as of the 6 April, which will result in domestic workers who apply to accompany their employers to the UK being tied to that employer. If they experience abuse or exploitation, they will no longer have the choice of leaving that employer. They will have to continue to suffer or flee and become illegal. In the UK, between 1980 and 1997, over 4000 migrant domestic workers escaped from abusive employers; many suffered physical and sexual abuse, nonpayment of wages, long hours and sleep deprivation. If this domestic workers visa is abolished, these workers would have no leave to remain in the UK and seek new employment if they left abusive employers. So, what we’re campaigning for is the retention of this visa, to maintain the right to change your employer, which seems a basic human right for anyone, to have the right of settlement and to have the same statutory employment rights as other workers. To this end, I’ve brought some postcards, which I would ask everyone to sign and give back to me and I will make sure they get to the Right Honourable David Cameron by 1 April, when they’re needed. As a last point, David Cameron himself recruited his nanny from the organisation, which helps these women, so we’re asking him to rethink the policy and to allow these women to stay. Sanaa Alsabag: Thank you for having me today. I’m going to talk about my organisation, WOSREC. We have different projects and we are working generally with immigrants, sometimes women in particular. We have a project called ‘Good Community Relations’ which works to tackle religiously-motivated crime amongst young people and provide advice and information to Central and Eastern-European migrant workers. It increased local civic participation among minority ethnic communities. We also have a project called the ‘Roma Youth Project’ which works to challenge misconceptions about the Roma community and to support positive life changes for young people from Central and Eastern Europe and from a European Roma background across the West of Scotland. The project works through information-provision (through roaming surgeries) and local activities, signposting to appropriate agencies. We also have a project called ‘Connecting to Communities’ which bridges the gap between service-users and community planning partners. It works with partners such as the NHS, the police and local authorities to identify how minority ethnic communities can access their services better and also to work with the partners on cultural barriers that the communities may have in using services. We have a project called ‘Bigos’ which is a course on preparing healthy food organised by WOSREC in partnership with Queen’s Cross

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Housing Association in Glasgow. It is named after a traditional Polish dish, cabbage and meat stew and the service-users are the Polish community. We have a project called ‘Glasgow’s Built Heritage’ and the main aim was to raise awareness of the built heritage amongst minority ethnic communities, in particular the Chinese and South Asian communities and to guide individuals further in the grant-application process offered by the Glasgow Heritage Trust. We also have ‘Finding Our Feet’, which is the main project I’m working on. It supports thirdcountry national women who live in the West of Scotland. The definition of a third-country national according to the EU is a woman who came to the UK on her spouse’s visa but not as a refugee or asylum-seeker and not from the EU or EEA. We help them with their integration into society through different kinds of services, including a welcome pack on services like health, education, employment and participation opportunities. We also hold multilingual cultural events for women and we have sessional workers who speak different languages to help with the language problems that some have. We also provide guidance on how to translate non-UK qualifications to UK-standard and offer a life-skills training course which covers CV-writing, filling in application forms, confidence-building, leisure and sport opportunities in Glasgow, and volunteering. We have a mentoring programme, and provide information on how to be more involved in local civic activities and join civic structures in Glasgow. Nina Murray: It’s a pleasure to be here and I hope I can give you a brief outline of the work we do at the Scottish Refugee Council (SRC), in particular with women. As some of you probably already know, SRC is an independent charity working with refugees and people seeking asylum in Scotland. Our team provides information and advice on everything, from how to make an application for asylum, to how to access support and then integration in Scotland. But we also campaign for political change, raise awareness about the issues that affect refugees in Scotland and work closely with local communities and organisations here in Scotland as well. There are about forty staff members based in Glasgow in two offices here in the city and we’re supported by at least fifty volunteers. I work with women in particular and since February 2011 we’ve had dedicated funding from Comic Relief to work specifically with refugee and asylum-seeking women on our project called ‘Raising Refugee Women’s Voices’. The over-arching aim of the project is to empower refugee women and asylum-seeking women in Scotland to influence the policy and practices that impact on their daily lives. So, it’s really about involving refugee women in the process of policy-change. The project has

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enabled us to bring work in the community together with our own advocacy and influencing work, which is unique and it’s been really successful so far. Two staff members: myself (Women’s Policy development Officer) and my colleague (Women’s Community Development Worker), and three volunteers collaborate on this project, working within the Policy and Communications Team. Our community development worker provides intensive support to a group called the ‘Refugee Women’s Strategy Group’ (RWSG), which is an umbrella group of refugee and asylum-seeking women who all represent women-led groups in Scotland. They’ve come together specifically to work on policy so it’s not a support group or dropin, they come because they want to affect change. The group was formed in 2007 by women representatives of different groups and integration networks in the city and is itself represented on the Scottish Refugee Policy Forum, which is a forum of refugee community organisations in the city. The RWSG elect a Women’s Officer to that forum every year. My role is really to support the work of the community development worker and the women themselves, and also advocate alongside them, and on behalf of them on issues such as access to mainstream services, healthcare, gender-based violence and the asylum-determination process and gendersensitivity within it. Why are we doing this work? Basically, because recent research has highlighted the need to ensure that not only the asylum process but also mainstream services and the voluntary sector really identify gender and make their policies more gender-sensitive overall. We did some research in 2009 with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, which found that around 70% of women asylum-seekers in Scotland had experienced physical and/or sexual violence in their lifetimes, which is a really shocking figure. It was a fairly small sample of forty to fifty women in Scotland but the study was replicated in Belgium and Italy with partner organisations there, and they found very similar statistics. In addition, more than half the women in the study were deemed above the cut-off point for post-traumatic stress disorder and 20% (this I find particularly hard to deal with) had thought about committing suicide in the seven days before being interviewed for the research. So obviously, there are issues specific to women in relation to women’s particular experiences that need to be addressed. Our own ongoing longitudinal integration study that our Research Officer at SRC is doing at the moment also showed that women in Scotland are waiting longer than men for a decision on their asylum claim, which obviously has implications in terms of integration, employment, education, settling into the community. A well-publicised 2011 report by

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the London-based organisation ‘Asylum Aid’ found that the quality of decision-making in women’s cases was in their view ‘unsustainable’ and that initial decisions on women’s claims were being overturned in the tribunal on appeal in almost twice as many cases as the average. So, almost 50% of cases were being overturned later on down the line, which really indicates the need for more work on gender-sensitivity and addressing some of these issues. In Scotland, some progress has been made in addressing the support needs of asylum-seekers. We’re limited in the control we have over immigration policy, but in areas that are devolved, such as health, education, policing and legal aid, things have improved. There are still gaps in provision though. What this project is doing is trying to work with other stakeholders to really channel work that’s already going on, develop it and ensure that women aren’t falling through the gaps. We work very closely with partner organisations, some of whom are also funded by Comic Relief, which is really strategically and effectively funding this area. We work with other organisations in different parts of the UK who are doing similar but slightly different things in this area and we also work closely with stakeholders such as the UK Border Agency, the NHS and Glasgow City Council. I want to share just a couple of achievements we’ve had over the first year to give you an idea of some of the things we’ve been doing: the capacity and representativeness of the Refugee Women’s Strategy Group have really increased over a year of having intensive support. They’ve identified their key priorities in an action plan and engaged at quite high levels with the UK Border Agency; they’ve had meetings with MSPs and have been quoted in the Equal Opportunities Committee debate on women and employment in Scotland. The group is a member of the multi-agency Glasgow Violence Against Women Partnership working group on refugees and asylum-seekers and group members have participated in several conferences UK-wide (Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow). So it’s been quite effective to date. In terms of our advocacy work with stakeholders and serviceproviders, we held a round table event last June to which we invited refugee women and stakeholders to sit round the table, discuss and map a women’s journey through the asylum process to identify issues where women were falling through the gaps, not accessing services. We got them to raise actions to address those issues, we created an integrated action plan and everybody that took part has been consulted and agreed to that. We’re taking forward quite a lot of actions through that so that’s been really successful. Our SRC annual conference in Glasgow was a really useful platform to raise awareness and for refugee women to take part.

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Over thirty of them did so and UNHCR, the Border Agency, Scottish government and Comic Relief were also represented. In the area of health, we’ve developed our relationships with the local health board and we work quite closely with them and with practitioners. We’ve done quite a bit of work engaging with agencies such as the British Medical Association and the Health-protection Agency to ensure that entitlements around accessing healthcare in Scotland are clear because that’s a really grey area. Scotland has different entitlements for asylumseekers from England and it’s something that’s not that well publicised. The only criteria you need to access healthcare on the same basis as a UK resident is to have made an application for asylum; it doesn’t matter if it’s been refused or granted. Until you leave Scotland you have the same access as anybody else and that’s not the case in England; agencies like the BMA were actually getting that wrong in their guidance, so we had to correct them on that and make sure that people are aware of it. We’re also doing a small research project on refused women asylum-seekers’ experiences of maternity care in Glasgow at the moment, with Strathclyde University, the findings of which we hope to have by the end of the summer, so that will be quite interesting. We’ve worked with the Health Board to design the project and hope to find examples of best practice to share with other parts of the country, as we recognise Glasgow has built up some good practice from their years of experience working with asylumseekers. Finally, we also engaged with the UK Border Agency at a strategic level trying to ensure along with our partner organisations, such as Asylum Aid, Refugee Council, Maternity Action and other organisations in England and Wales, that gender stays on the agenda at a high level in the asylum process. Syma Ahmed: I’ve worked here at Glasgow Women’s library since 2007 as a Development Officer within the Lifelong Learning team here. A lot of learning takes place in the library and I wanted to get the learning out to minority ethnic women. In the projects I work on there are a lot of different types of women coming through the door, from new migrants, to women who have been settled here for a number of years and who often consider themselves to be British rather than migrants. So it’s quite a mix of ladies that I work with. A lot of my work is around creative learning opportunities and I’d like to give you some examples of them. One main project I’ve worked on is called ‘She Settles in the Shields’ which aimed to document women’s history here in Glasgow. That was quite a big project so I thought it might be a good idea to focus on one area in Glasgow and take it from there. I chose Pollokshields, which is a highly

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diverse part of Glasgow and a lot of the migrants who have settled there are from a South Asian background. We interviewed thirty women about their story of coming here to Scotland: why they chose to leave their home country, their feelings on arrival, work, education, family life and their lives today. A lot of the women interviewed came in the 1950s and 1960s and their story is very different from that of the women who came in the 1980s and 1990s and that comes through in the book we published following the project. The book is a kind of oral history, written in the women’s own words with their own experiences. The first woman I interviewed was my grandmother and her photograph is on the cover. We launched the book in October 2011 and sadly, before the launch, my gran passed away, so that was a big lesson for me because it was great to have managed to document my gran’s story in this way. Obviously, you may be close to your grandparents but to have their experiences in their own words, with all the challenges they faced, is great. It made me think ‘these women are role models for me’. So this book has documented part of the history of women in Glasgow, which was one of the things we felt was missing. A lot of what women have done is already neglected as it is, and when it comes to migrant women they are even further marginalised. I’ve also worked with women in the Govanhill area to look at housing and see what a home meant to them, both here and in their home countries. When they came here, life was very different for them and they were put up in tenements so it was very different from what they were used to (an open environment, fresh air). Once we’d had that discussion, we got in a community artist to actually build the house which is now an exhibition item here at the library. A lot of work went into it, capturing their stories and testimonies, how they felt growing up in their home countries. Another aspect of my work is film screenings, which take place once a month. A lot of the women I was coming across would meet in their own localities, within their own groups and not much integration took place. I wanted to encourage it more, so I decided to bring together women from different communities to talk and share. We have a book club at the library but I realised that with the women I’m working with, not everyone is reading; they can speak a community language but don’t necessarily read, so I started putting on films about women and issues relating to them. The screenings are good fun, with popcorn for example and after the film we have a discussion about the issues that have come up and that is a good way to engage the women because everyone comes from somewhere different. Depending on the audience, I have to make sure that if the film is in Hindi or Mandarin for example, we have subtitles so that everyone can benefit from it. It is good to learn about each other’s culture and talk

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about the feelings that come up. The SRC have also contacted me and we’re hoping to have a film on as well as part of Scottish Refugee Week. The women I come across are from different walks of life, some of them may be refugees or asylum-seekers and when they come to the library, where so many things are going on, they are looking for different things. They might want to brush up their literacy skills, they might want to attend ESOL classes because they’re learning English as a second language. As I deal with each woman, they will share their issues, whether there are difficulties with obtaining the right to remain in the country, domestic violence and so on. I’ve been a community worker so what I’ve done over the years is to signpost women on to different agencies because we don’t have the expertise here. There are a lot of other creative projects, but I’ll talk about one of the courses I’ve run, it’s called ‘Life Books’. Migrant women felt they had nothing to say about their lives. Although they may have studied in their home country before they came here, because they weren’t able to progress, for whatever reason, they felt it all came to nothing. So when we talked about their lives, they would say, ‘what do you want me to say about my life?’ which meant I had to think of a creative way to document it. ‘Life Books’ is a scrapbook project which runs over eight sessions. Each page has a theme, starting with their name, who named them and what it means and it goes on to tease out various aspects of their lives (childhood, growing up, becoming a young woman, marriage, children, education, migration, their challenges, skills, aspirations and qualifications). They decorate each page with flowers, images or photos and by the third or fourth session they are all sharing their reminiscences and you can see the confidence coming back again. At the end of the project, we bind the book for them and give it to them. The work helps to give them a sense of self and enables them to feel they have contributed and achieved things in their lives. So I do various things here at GWL; depending on what’s needed by the women and the funding we get, I’ll run these projects, working with different themes or fitting in with campaigns such as ‘Sixteen Days of Action’, Scottish Refugee Week or International Women’s Day. That’s me at my library in a nutshell. Mariangela Palladino: Thanks for these insightful interventions. We enjoyed the picture of a Glasgow and Scotland where there is a very vibrant community that offers great support in response to displacement and migration. Although of course the support we can provide is never enough. These presentations opened up positive stories but also painful

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subchapters on these experiences of displacement. I’ll ask some questions first and then we’ll open the floor to everyone else for contributions. My first question to the panel is about the experience of displacement: What are the actual challenges faced by women, especially those that come through the doors of your organisations? Sanaa Alsabag: From my experience, the main problem faced by migrant women is language and lack of information. Women don’t know where to go to get the right information, there is nobody that can signpost them when they arrive. Nina Murray: I would agree with Sanaa, it’s the knowledge of the system, especially if women are coming through the asylum system; it is such a complex system and process, and there is almost an assumption by the authorities that everyone that goes through will understand it from the moment they arrive. That’s just not the case, there are so many barriers to even accessing the asylum system at the moment. We often see women arriving who have either been smuggled or dropped at our doorstep here in Glasgow and they don’t know what country they are in, let alone what asylum means or how to claim it. All we can do at that stage is tell them ‘I’m really sorry but you are going to have to go to Croydon, south of London, to lodge your application for asylum’, and that’s about 450 miles away. They may have already travelled across continents to get here and so you can imagine that that’s a huge barrier for women. Obviously, as I was mentioning before, their experiences pre-migration, particularly for asylum-seeking women, can really impact on their feelings when they arrive as well as their health and their ability to really engage with the process that is so complex at that point. I think there are so many barriers. Linda Delgado: I don’t come in contact much with asylum-seeking women that are migrants, I come in contact with people who are actually professionals arriving and looking for work. The major problem they have is negotiating the structures of the professional bodies, which is actually difficult enough when it’s your own professional body in your own language! A professional body by its very nature is exclusive because they are trying to keep their profession protected and trying to get your qualification recognised is hard – what do you have to do? will you have to do another qualification? I think there is a lot that professional bodies can do to help all migrants, not just women. It tends to be women that I see because I work in the health service, with nurses coming in and as I said earlier as they are often not able to get their qualifications recognised, they

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are happy to take work far below their skills. Syma Ahmed: There are women coming through the door from all backgrounds and circumstances but for asylum-seeking women it’s really difficult. There are a lot of loopholes to go through, it’s very confusing for them just to understand the system; they get through one loophole and then they are up against another ten barriers, it’s disheartening. They come for something else, but then they will tell us that they are really fed-up, disheartened and tired, it has an impact on their self-esteem. For those that have been here for some time, it’s about work, they have a qualification in their own country and when they come here they have nothing to do, they are not given the opportunity. It is disheartening and it’s a shame to see that happening because they have got a lot to offer and a lot to contribute and it just complicates the issue. Nina Murray: The Refugee Women’s Strategy Group have actually done a report, which is accessible electronically, entitled ‘The Struggle to Contribute’ and it was forty refugee women coming together and discussing the barriers that exist throughout the process. If you are granted refugee status and Leave to Remain, those barriers don’t stop, because for that transition from being an asylum seeker to being a refugee and effectively a citizen of the UK you have twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight days to navigate that changeover from asylum support to mainstream benefits, housing, work, employment… I don’t understand the benefit system, let alone someone who has just arrived in the country, so it’s a very short period of time and most people will go through a period of homelessness and destitution, 90% at least will become destitute at some point because the waiting lists for housing are too long, there are so many barriers right the way through, it doesn’t stop when you get your legal status to remain. The women we worked with came together and talked about that, the struggle to contribute, find work, navigate all the different systems, because once you are out of one there is a new one, such as going to the job centre and working out how to write a CV to get into work here. So there are so many barriers, and they do impact on women disproportionally because women have childcare responsibilities most of the time or a lot of the time and there is discrimination for the indigenous female population, let alone women with additional discriminatory factors. Mariangela Palladino: I recently read about the termination of asylum support after twenty-eight days; this is a critical point when destitution is a high risk, but also about a higher rate of suicide, because

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after those twenty-eight days you are left alone and you are in between and somehow you have the papers but you are not there quite yet.. Kate Smith: I just wanted to add that it isn’t simply an experience for individual women, this inability to navigate systems and being confused and dislocated because of culture. Whilst all those things may be true, there is an ideology behind the system and I don’t think that these problems occur by accident, there is a design behind the system to create this chaos. I thought it was very pertinent when you talked about workers protecting their profession by protecting national orders, protecting their identity whatever that is. Whilst the individual response might be suicide or people finding themselves in destitute situations, those things happen by design. I’ve been doing this work for twelve years and there is no other area of law that changes so quickly and confuses people so much. It constantly contradicts itself, it works against all other policies around equality and gender equality, that’s what we are actually dealing with. I’ve lots of respect for all of you who speak so beautifully, such respect, but we do work against a backdrop of political ideology that is driving this agenda. Mariangela Palladino: Thanks, I think there is an opportunity now to open the debate to the floor, so if you have any questions or things that you want to address… Elwira Grossman: One of the points that you have made is the lack of information and a few days ago I came across a very interesting initiative that has to do with Vitalis Healthcare Limited located in Bearsden. They are actually opening a clinic there now in which there will be medical support including services such as counselling offered in foreign languages. I know that Punjabi and Polish are two of the languages on the list. GRAMNet has just sent a letter of support, but maybe other organisations will wish to support it. Carolina Albuerne: Vitalis is a private company? I personally would have a big issue with supporting this kind of initiative. We’ve been talking about reacting to the current climate and the Scots have had an amazing drive towards saying that everyone should have equal access to healthcare, which means access to counselling in your own language. By supporting projects like that, saying that a private company can come in and provide services, we may take away from what you are achieving in Scotland. There should be accessible primary healthcare for all asylum seekers,

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which happens here but not in England. England should be learning from Scotland, but if we are getting all these companies coming in, when we have other primary healthcare professionals available, we risk missing our objectives. Lucia Aiello: Because we have talked quite a lot about narratives of resistance and the strategies women enact in order to overcome their sense of displacement and turn their victimhood into a moment of resistance, I wonder if you could give us some examples from your experience where this sense of displacement, which is often lived in isolation and risks becoming a problem for the individual, turns into a desire to join forces with others. Is there a stage in which the recognition of each other’s displacement turns the individual situation into a political struggle? Nina Murray: I think the Refugee Women’s Strategy Group is a very good example of that, because they are such an inspiring group of women, every time I go to one of their meetings I am blown over by their strength and resilience. Each and every one of them has come through the process we’ve just described and they have come out the other end and come back to relive those experiences for the sake of helping others and making it better for others. That in itself is something that is very difficult to do, it must be, I have not been through the process and I cannot possibly imagine and I wouldn’t dare to try, but they are incredible. They come from completely different backgrounds, there are Pakistani women, women from different parts of Africa, from all over the place; they all come together and they learn from each other’s experiences and try and help others going through it, so I think that’s a very good example of what you are talking about. They have been really effective and they make people in government agencies and other organisations think about what they are doing. Their voices used in that way are very powerful voices for change; they do have an impact, and you can really see it. They’ve done a second report which has been sent out to lots of different agencies and within a few months we have had responses from job centres, from the department of pensions, from the Scottish government. Actually the Scottish government has asked them to help review the whole of Scotland’s integration strategy going forward this year. Syma Ahmed: There are different groups that have come together so they can influence policy, take it to the Scottish Parliament. Or come together and speak about issues, about what’s happening, what problems are there and how they are getting together and have a collective voice.

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Nina Murray: I think it’s quite a therapeutic thing as well for some people. I can think of one member of our group who when I met her a year ago was very quiet and not very confident to participate in group discussions, and after nine or ten months of being part of the group and having its support she is now running her own group. Jana Buresova: One of the objectives of this conference was to bridge the gap between academia and people dealing with these problems. How do members of the panel feel that they can help or academia can help in the longer term to bridge that gap beyond today? Linda Delgado: One of the problems when we are mounting any campaigns or when we see something socially unjust that we are trying to get changed is that we don’t have solid facts and figures to back us up and I think that there could be a huge bridge between academia and trade unions. You giving us the ammunition and we’ll fire it. Sometimes people feel that something isn’t right, but you are never going to get policy changed just by saying it’s not right, we have to back it up with facts and figures and show what could be changed, how it could be changed and show people what difference it is likely to make. In response to Lucia’s question, I think this is work that has been done by our Ethnic Minority Committee, they go out to community groups and faith groups. Unions have been very slow at actually engaging with these groups but they are starting to do it now. Sanaa Alsabag: It is for us from organisations to share our experience with academia and for academics to put together resolutions and prospects for the integration of immigrants. Nina Murray: Glasgow has a very good model of how that can work really well in GRAMNet, which brings together the third sector and academia, professionals and everyone working with migration and asylum, not just in Glasgow and Scotland. It has been really useful because I think there can sometimes be a disconnect between academia and people working on the frontline, and it’s not that the research is not out there, it’s maybe that the bridge has not been connected. I know that we get requests, particularly the Women’s Strategy Group, to take part in research but we don’t always see the results, so I think what would be really useful – and GRAMNet had a conference a couple of weeks ago and that issue came up – is that if people are participating in research, they circulate the end

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result. That way we will be able to use the results for our work on the ground. We’ve come to the conclusion that there must be a lot of research work done on women refugees in Glasgow because we’ve taken part so often, but we haven’t come across it yet and it would be really good to be able to use it. In times when funding is very tight, we have to be able to justify everything we are saying with figures, nobody will listen to you, as Linda said, unless you have figures to back it up. Mariangela Palladino: Elwira and I have been members of GRAMNet since its early days in 2009. GRAMNet has done lots of work with grassroots organisations, asking them ‘what can academia do?’ Also, given that universities for a number of awkward reasons plan funding on the basis of impact, this is an opportunity to give our research a specific direction and to ask what the real impact is. We can ask the organisations on the ground what’s needed and shape our research in response to the issues. A lot of us here are from the Humanities and it seems that maybe the Humanities are unable to provide statistics, but statistics are not always the response to migration. There is a lot out there about how we can use narrative in order to respond to displacement, to inform policy from another perspective; it’s not just about survey monkey research. Qualitative studies done from a literary perspective are also extremely valuable. It’s not just up to the social scientists, we also can make a difference. Elwira Grossman: One point related to what you were saying about facts and figures. Humanities researchers don’t work with facts and figures, social scientists do, but yesterday during our conversation at the seminar one of the topics that came up was precisely the idea of sharing something that goes beyond facts and figures and has a lot to do with how people think, especially how policymakers think. Influencing their frame of mind, their way of thinking takes a long time and it’s very difficult to identify specific channels that we could use in order to have an impact when we analyse narratives of refugees, or displaced women, or research oral history from various parts of the world. So, if we could come up with some different forms of exchange when it comes to the humanities outcome it would be fantastic, but because this is a field that really requires a lot of time for reading or listening, I feel sometimes very helpless. Linda Delgado: Even if it is not providing facts and figures, if you have a narrative of fifty years ago which is the same as the narrative from

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this year then it shows that what we have been doing in the past fifty years isn’t working and therefore it is useful. Elwira Grossman: That’s the point that was made yesterday, but how can we convey this to people who should really hear this? Nina Murray: One of the things that has been very successful here has been Refugee Week, using it as a chance for cultural, artistic and creative expression of refugee people, particularly refugee and asylum-seeking experiences. The model in Scotland has been a very successful one. Elwira Grossman: Absolutely, lots of our students were involved in reading events and plays and contributed to the programme of Refugee Week. We are trying! Rachel McCarthy: I spent two years working next to policymakers in Whitehall albeit for different reasons, as a scientific advisor. Across departments there are very specific ways of communicating that work best with policymakers. Working from a narrative viewpoint the best way for academia to become involved is to disprove things that have been said rather than putting evidence out there for the government to listen to. Really, they probably won’t because unless it is an issue that is on the parliamentary questions of the day, there is very limited impact. But when things appear in newspapers and when ministers are starting to be questioned, the academic community stepping in and saying ‘we don’t think your point is valid because the narrative research that we have done is telling us this’, is good way to get involved. Of course, parliamentary questions themselves are a very powerful way of quizzing the government on strategies, because they really get the civil service working on an issue. Answering a parliamentary question in the UK is the top-most priority of the civil service and they take it very seriously; so if there’s dissatisfaction about a policy, that is the best way to go with the UK government. Mariangela Palladino: We can also add that our universities are becoming more corporate and this means that each university has a media and press office, which we can put to use. We can approach press officers and ask how to speak to the media, and to make our work – a publication, a conference, an article, a book – more public. Our conference is coming to a close and we hoped you have enjoyed it. These three days have highlighted that a lot of research has been done on displacement and women, but also the fact that there is a lot more work to

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be done. So the dialogue between universities and the third sector continues.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Peter Davies is Professor of Modern German Studies and Convenor for German at the University of Edinburgh. His research specialisms include Holocaust writing and translation, myth, modernity and literature, myths of matriarchy in German culture, gender and the body, and Germanlanguage, literature and culture 1880-1945. His publications include Myth, Matriarchy and Modernity: Johann Jakob Bachofen in German Culture, 1860-1945 (2010) and Divided Loyalties: East German Writers and the Politics of German Division, 1945-1953 (2000). Elwira Grossman is Stepek Lecturer in Polish Studies and Director of the Comparative Literature programme in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests include contemporary Polish drama, theatre and cinema, gender studies, intercultural communication, the Polish/Jewish relationship and teaching Polish as a foreign language. She edited and contributed to the collection of essays Studies in Language, Literature, and Cultural Mythology in Poland. Investigating ‘The Other’ (2002). Together with colleagues from Central and East European Studies and Russian, she is currently involved in an international AHRC-funded project on ‘Translating Russian and East European Cultures: Exchange and Communication within a Multidisciplinary and Multicultural Area Studies Context’. Juliana Joviþiü studied German language and literature in Novi Sad, Serbia. Currently her research focuses on female exile/migrant/diaspora literature, cultural contacts between Serbia and Germany/Austria and women mediating between cultures and literatures, especially in the field of German-Slavic relationships. She has worked for German and international development organisations such as the Red Cross, the Bank for Reconstruction, the Organisation for International Cooperation, the Political Foundation Hanns Seidel, World Expats, Diasporas and Minorities Organisation. She is also an official court translator and court mediator. Since 2010, she has collaborated with the European COSTAction Women Writers in History project and is co-editor of the project’s NEWWs letter.

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Charlotte Latham is completing her PhD in the Comparative Literature Department at CUNY Graduate Centre. Her work studies the intersections between art and literature, focusing on the use of poetry and fiction in the contemporary gallery setting. Through Script and Type, she works with artists to produce documents about their art, and helps writers describe what they see. Disciplinary boundaries have made rivals of the sister arts and she hopes her work will dispel some of those tensions and lead to a better appreciation of both. Stéphanie Leu has a doctorate in History (Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris and the University of Bern) and currently teaches history in secondary schools and classes préparatoires. Her research interests include Swiss migration, particularly to Paris and Eastern France in the 19th and 20th centuries, bilateral relationships between France and Switzerland and the influence of international and interstate disputes on the development of the ‘national state’. She is the author of Comme un petit air de Suisse (2003). Rachel E. McCarthy is a Senior Scientist at the Met Office, the UK's National Meteorological Service, and Chief Executive of ExCite Poetry, the largest regional offshoot of the UK Poetry Society. A poet, critic and radio presenter, her work has been published widely, including on BBC radio and Sky television. Thérèse Moreau has spent most her adult life outside her homeland of France: in USA from 1964 to 1977 and in Switzerland from 1981 until now. She is the author of critical works (Le Sang de l’histoire ou Michelet et l’idée de la femme au XIXe, 1982; Le Nouveau Dictionnaire fémininmasculin des professions, des titres et des fonctions,1999), a novel (Amanda ou ce fruit maudit, 1988) and a collection of short stories (Le Grand Livre des Recettes Secrètes, 1997; translated as The Great Book of Secrete Recipes, 2005). With Eric Hicks she translated several of Christine de Pizan's works, including La Cité des Dames (1986) and Le Livre des Faits et Bonnes Mœurs du Roi Charles V Le Sage (1997). A feminist and pacifist, she has created and participated in women's groups, such as The Columbia's taskforce for Battered Women and 'Les Femmes de la Palud' during the war in the former Yugoslavia. She is currently a member of 'Art et Politique', which is fighting the new immigration laws in Switzerland.

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Silvia Ricci Lempen is a committed feminist and lives in Lausanne. She is a journalist, holds a PhD in Philosophy and now devotes most of her time to literary writing in French and Italian. She has recently published (in Italian) Cara Clarissa (2012), in French Ne neige-t-il pas aussi blanc chaque hiver? (2013) and on Feminism Tu vois le genre? Débats féministes contemporains (2012, with Martine Chaponnière). Kate Smith is a doctoral researcher at the University of Huddersfield and is currently working on the narratives of women refugees. She leads asylum research and practice within the Centre for Applied Childhood Studies and is one of the core members of the Listening Guide Study Group, which supports researchers in this particular method of analysis. She is the author of publications on various issues affecting women and children worldwide such as immigration detention, seeking asylum in the UK, resistance and narrative methodologies. She also works for a third sector organisation (Women Centre, Kirklees, UK) as an adviser and is regional trainer for the Women in Exile service, which she set up in 2001. Mirna Šoliü is Lecturer in Czech at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests lie in the field of Czech and Croatian literary and cultural studies, particularly 19th- and 20th-century Czech literature and its connection with visual arts and film, especially during the interwar period. She is also interested in the theory of literature, theory of narrative, especially the Prague school heritage and its reverberations in contemporary literary theory. In the field of South-Slavic literatures, she works on the literatures of Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, especially contemporary literary production, the recent émigré writings of that region, its cultural aspects, and representation of history and trauma in the narrative. H. Rosi Song is Associate Professor of Spanish at Bryn Mawr College (USA). She specialises in the contemporary literature and culture of Spain, and has published on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship, and the cultural transformations during the country’s transition to democracy. Her research also includes recent political and cultural developments such as immigration and its visual and literary representation in Spanish society. She is the co-editor of Traces of Contamination: Unearthing the Francois Legacy in Contemporary Spain (2005), and is currently finishing a collected volume on La Movida, the underground cultural movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s in Spain.