American Migrant Fictions: Space, Narrative, Identity [1 ed.] 9789004364011, 9789004364004

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American Migrant Fictions

Costerus New Series Editors C.C. Barfoot (Leiden University) Michael Boyden (Uppsala University) Theo D’haen (Leiden University, and Leuven University) Raphaël Ingelbien (Leuven University) Birgit Neumann (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf )

volume 224

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

American Migrant Fictions Space, Narrative, Identity By

Sonia Weiner

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: “Beyond.” Photograph by Sonia Weiner. lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2018008865

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0165-9618 isbn 978-90-04-36400-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-36401-1 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

For Lia & Iddo

∵

Contents Acknowledgements ix Copyright Acknowledgements x List of Figures xii Introduction: The Spatial Aesthetics of Transnationalism and Translingualism 1 1 Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory: Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Project 38 2 Cohesive Fragments: GB Tran’s Graphic Memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey 71 3 Shape Shifting and the Shifting of Shapes: Migration and Transformation in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 116 4 “Weathering the Divide between There and Here”: In-between Spaces in Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life 150 5 Translation and Transcreation in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain 184 Bibliography 217 Index 231

Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Department of English and American Studies at Tel Aviv University, with special thanks to my colleagues Milette Shamir, Amy ­Garnai and Roi Tartakovsky. Additional heartfelt thanks go to the following individuals for their unique contribution to my work: Reuven Stein, Nicolette Stein Boasson, Iddo, Bar, Boaz & Ellie Weiner, Lia Weiner, David Weiner, Anita Weiner, Karin Gavish, Seline Maoz, Peter Stein, Shawn Stein, Masja Horn, Keren Omry, Vered Reznik, Dor Miller, Davi Barell, Yaara Gur-Arie, Agastya Sharma, Omer Friedman, Sigalit Shual, Hana Wirth-Nesher, Su Schachter, Nili Maman, Premji, Mukund Lath, R.S. Bhatnagar, the anonymous readers, Gert Jager, Sharon Rhodes, Richard Schottenfeld, Tanina Rostain, Sasha Hemon, Veba Božović, Boris Fishman, Vikram Chandra, Junot Díaz, GB Tran and especially Daniel Raveh. This research was supported by the israel science foundation (grant number 194/13).

Copyright Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank the following authors and publishers for their permission to use copyrighted materials: Excerpts from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, copyright 2007 by Junot Diaz. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpts from The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz, copyright 2007 by Junot Diaz. Used by permission of Faber and Faber. Excerpts from False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory by Andre Aciman. Copyright 2000 by Andre Aciman. The essay “Shadow Cities” was originally published in Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Excerpts from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, copyright 2008 by Aleksandar Hemon. Used by permission of Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Excerpts from The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon, copyright 2008 by Aleksandar Hemon. Used by permission of Pan Macmillan. Excerpts from A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman. Copyright 2014 by Boris Fishman. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman. Copyright 2014 by Boris Fishman. Reprinted with permission by Pushkin Press. Graphic Novel Excerpts from Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey by GB Tran, copyright 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Images from Chicago Daily News Negative Collection DN-0005941 and DN005898. Used with permission of Chicago History Museum. Special thanks to Velibor Božović for images from The Lazarus Project, 2003 © Velibor Božović. A version of “Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory in Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Project” was first published in Studies in the Novel 46.2 (2014), 215–235. Copyright 2014. Johns Hopkins University Press and the University of North Texas. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press. Excerpts from Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity by Martha Cutter. Copyright 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher: www.uncpress.org.

Copyright Acknowledgements

xi

Excerpts from Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, by Bakhtin, Mikhail, Edited and Translated by Caryl Emerson. Copyright 1984. Used with permission of University of Minnesota Press. Excerpts from Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-­ Imagined Places by Edward Soja Copyright 1996. Used with permission by John Wiley and Sons. Excerpts from Understanding Henri Lefebvre by Stuart Elden. Copyright 2004 Continuum Publishing, used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. Excerpts from Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud. Copyright 1993 Scott McCloud. Reprinted with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from Wanderwords: Language Migration in American Literature by Maria Lauret Copyright 2014. Used with permission of Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

List of Figures 1.1 Living room and bottom of a stairway inside the residence of Police Chief George M. Shippy; Chicago (Ill.); March 16, 1908. Chicago History Museum. Glass Negative, dn-005941  53 1.2 Corpse of Lazarus Averbuch held up in a chair by Captain Evans of the police department, front view; Chicago (Ill.); 1908. Chicago History Museum. Glass negative, dn-005898  56 1.3 Untitled (Car passing), from The Lazarus Project, 2003. © Velibor Božović 65 1.4 Untitled (Sunflower fields), from The Lazarus Project, 2003. © Velibor Božović 66 2.1  Vietnamerica, page 205 81 2.2  Vietnamerica, page 244 82 2.3  Vietnamerica, page 228 86 2.4  Vietnamerica, page 243 87 2.5  Vietnamerica, page 97 89 2.6  Vietnamerica, page 141 90 2.7  Vietnamerica, pages 108–09 95 2.8  Vietnamerica, page 57 101 2.9  Vietnamerica, page 58 103 2.10  Vietnamerica, page 61 106 2.11  Vietnamerica, page 78 108 2.12  Vietnamerica, page 79 109 2.13  Vietnamerica, page 190 111 2.14  Vietnamerica, page 198 113 All images in Chapter 2 are from: Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey by GB Tran, copyright © 2011 by Gia-Bao Tran. Used by permission of Villard Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House llc. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The Spatial Aesthetics of Transnationalism and Translingualism Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world. It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. salman rushdie 1

…

…I am here on these shores, in this strange town, weighed down by … the creative dangers of thinking in an imposed language… ben okri 2

⸪ When the newly elected American President, Donald Trump, echoing a deepseated xenophobia, declared a travel ban from seven Muslim countries and announced the suspension of the us’s refugee system for a period of 120 days (January 2017), the New York Times literary section responded by issuing a piece titled: “25 Great Books by Refugees in America.”3 Among the various authors mentioned are Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, Nuruddin Farrah and Ishmael Beah. The authors left Nazi occupied Germany, Soviet controlled Russia, the war torn zones of Cambodia and Vietnam, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sierra Leone, and the dictatorships Chile and Cuba. While the list represents but a fraction of the literature produced by migrants4 to the u.s., the work by these authors, who hail from diverse 1 2 3 4

Rushdie, “In Good Faith,” Imaginary Homelands, 394. Ben Okri, Dangerous Love, 390. 30 January, 2017. Paul Tabori provides in-depth definitions of the terms exile, expatriate, refugee, immigrant and emigrant in his book, The Anatomy of Exile, in an attempt to navigate “an almost impenetrable jungle, a kind of super-maze” of definitions (26). While an exile is one who has been

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_002

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Introduction

l­ocations and religious persuasions, suggests that inter-cultural encounters can be fruitful and insightful, broadening vantage points and endorsing tolerance and kinship. This book aims to show that cultural encounters informed by migrants can shape not only experience, but also the way it is represented. Writers who write across cultural divides express the tensions and possibilities of these exchanges in innovative ways, as Salman Rushdie has suggested in his seminal essay “Imaginary Homelands”: this “shifting ground … is not an infertile territory for a writer to occupy” for it can provide “new angles” from which to examine a situation, enabling new literary perspectives to emerge (15). This study focuses on the literature created by migrants who arrived in the United States after the Hart-Cellar Immigration Act of 1965, which abolished the discriminatory national origins quotas that had been in place since the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924.5 Historian Paul Spickard emphasizes that while “Late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century u.s. immigration, legal and illegal, was quite large in absolute numbers,” it was in fact “much smaller” than the great migration during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries “in terms of its relative impact on the existing u.s. population” (341).6 The main difference, historians of migration point out, was the origin of the migrants.7 Rather than predominantly European, the majority of the recent migrants to the United States arrived from Latin America (approximately one half), and Asia (one third). Only the remainder of the migrants came from ­Europe (the majority from the former Soviet Bloc), and more recently also from Africa. banished from the land of their birth, an expatriate suggests a voluntary leaving; both these terms are political and ethical. A refugee, by way of contrast, is a legal term for a person who has had to flee or escape their country of origin. Unlike these three terms, the terms immigrant or emigrant describe a person who has made a choice to move (their source in Latin is migrare, to transport, move, depart, remove). (“The Semantics of Exile,” 23–38). In What is Migration History, Harzig and Hoerder point to the mono-directionality inherent in the terms immigration and emigration, and prefer, as I do, the term “migrant,” which “implies multiple options: mobility may be many-directional and multiple, temporary or long-term, voluntary or forced” (3). 5 Spickard, Almost All Aliens, “Racial Fairness and the Immigration Act of 1965” (337–39). The Act was not merely non-discriminatory, it was also deemed beneficiary for the American economy, and benefited “Members of the professions and scientists and artists of exceptional ability,” as well as “skilled and unskilled workers in occupations for which labor is in short supply in u.s.” (“Guiding principles of Immigration Act,” Spickard 338). 6 Spickard adds that, “in the first decade of the twentieth century, 11.6 immigrants came to the country for every 100 people already here. For the last decade of the same century, the number was only 3.7 per 100” (341). 7 Spickard, Chapter 8, 341–89. See also Alejandro Portes and Ruben G. Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait.

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The current cultural atmosphere differs significantly from that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as do the migrants. The early twentieth century migrants were typically working-class Europeans who settled on the East Coast (a considerably smaller number of Chinese and Japanese migrants arrived on the West Coast),8 mainly in large urban centers. The migrants provided cheap labor, while their cramped and often impoverished living conditions prompted well-meaning progressive-era liberal Americans to create reform programs to assist in their process of assimilation into American culture. The utopian vision of the era was the ‘Melting Pot,’ a term popularized by the Jewish immigrant Israel Zangwill through his 1908 play by the same name,9 which implied a process of mutual adjustment between newcomers and natives that would fuse to create a new culture. However, the term is largely understood to imply the assimilation of immigrants into an established Anglo-American identity.10 With the escalating hostility toward the foreign contingent within American society, ‘foreign’ being synonymous with ‘inferior,’ and the rising tides of nativist anti-immigrant sentiment surrounding World War i, immigrants were increasingly expected to conform to American etiquette and ideals, and most importantly, to speak correct English.11 8

9

10

11

In the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, migration from Asia was 2.0 and 3.7 percent of the total migration compared to 96.7 and 91.6 percent migrants of European descent (Spickard 487). David Quixano, a Jewish immigrant in love with a Gentile woman, sings the praises of America: “America is God’s crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming! Here you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries. But you won’t be long like that, brothers, for these are the fires of God you’ve come to – these are the fires of God … into the Crucible with you all! God is making an American” (37). For a history of the use of the term before Zangwill, see Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, 94–101. Historian Will Herberg corroborates this idea: “Our cultural assimilation has taken place not in a ‘melting pot,’ but rather in a ‘transmuting pot’ in which all ingredients have been transformed and assimilated to an idealized ‘Anglo-Saxon’ model” (Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 33–34). Philip Gleason similarly writes that assimilation was “a process of purging away the inherited culture of the immigrant and remolding him into an old-line, AngloSaxon American with all the approved habits, attitudes, and benefits” (16). This idea is epitomized the graduation ritual practiced at Ford’s English School, where workers of various national origins jump into a melting pot and emerge transformed into homogenous model Americans, as described by Sollors in Beyond Ethnicity. The degree to which newcomers were required to adapt varies, as historians Otis L. Graham and Elizabeth Koed summarize: “Liberal Americanizers tended to promote a minimalist core, a blend of skills [proficiency in English], behavior [punctuality, hygiene and a healthy diet and regimen], and values [commitment to democratic political habits and

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Introduction

Southern European (Italian), Eastern European (Jewish) and Irish migrants were often discriminated against on the basis of their ethnicity,12 yet were considered white enough to become American citizens. Alternately, ethnic ­migrants from Asia (Chinese and Japanese) were denied citizenship due to discriminatory laws (originating in racist attitudes towards African Americans).13 The anti-immigration tide swelled during the Red Scare of 1919–20 and the xenophobic frenzy culminated in the National Origins Act of 1924, which limited immigration to a trickle, and after which nativist movements declined.14 Immigrants were largely eager to shed their birth culture in favor of what was considered a superior American culture, along with the economic possibilities it offered. However, the process of assimilation into mainstream American culture was not without severe tensions and emotional turmoil over loss of values and traditions.15 A paradigmatic example of literature from the early twentieth century is Mary Antin’s autobiography The Promised Land (1912). While Antin casts the progression from foreign immigrant to American citizen as transformative, her text suggests that the process of Americanization was fraught with anxieties and hardships. Antin articulates the division between the “Old World” of Russia and the “New World” of America throughout her

12 13

14

15

the rule of law]” (44). Beyond these “non-negotiable” issues, liberals “were increasingly tolerant of immigrant gifts” such as cuisine, old-time customs and religion (44). The “100%-ers” demanded a more complete “agenda” “thrift and sobriety … respect for the capitalist system … perhaps conversion to Christianity [and] certainly the repudiation of radical/terrorist political doctrines” (44). See Spickard, “Whiteness of Several Colors” (246–50); “Legal Whiteness” (258–62). For an extended discussion on Asian migration to the u.s., including legal exclusions, political disenfranchisement, labor exploitation, and internment, as well as the contradictions of such immigration, see Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts, “Immigration, Citizenship, Racialization: Asian American Critique,” 1–36. Additionallly, see Spicakrd, 157–65 for ­Chinese exclusion and 171–72 & 273–75 for Anti-Japanese Movement. Mexicans were also discriminated against, although many were granted citizenship after the lands they lived on were seized by the United States following the Spanish American War (Spickard 148–50). Racial segregation against African Americans was institutionalized in 1896 in the Plessey vs. ­Fergusson ruling, known as ‘separate-but-equal,’ the ‘one-drop rule.’ Although it continued to shape language policies well into the twentieth century – the linguistic pluralism typical of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was replaced by a strict adherence to English only, causing immigrants to cast off their foreign languages, be ashamed to speak them, and endorse English even in the home (see Lauret 22). In his essay, “Assimilation and It’s Discontents,” Ruben G. Rumbaut writes that assimilation is most commonly regarded as a process in which “the foreign element is to ­‘Americanize,’ dissolving into ‘it,’ becoming, in a word, ‘American’” (924). This type of assimilation, prevalent in the early twentieth century, is also known as “Anglo-Conformity” (926).

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a­ utobiography, as for example when she writes, “It is painful to be consciously of two worlds … A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run” (Introduction). As Werner Sollors has written in his introduction to Antin’s work, the autobiography is a meditation on twoness and division, “in which the conflict between worlds is experienced as an inner tension within one person” (xvii). Antin celebrates her passage from a “mediaeval” oppressed Russian past, to a modern, democratic liberal America, yet also experiences this passage as a threat to her inner self, or as she terms it, “inner man” (Chapter 12).16 The expectation to eradicate a past self fueled the inner struggle for early twentieth century migrants; this is no longer the case for contemporary migrants. Post 1965 migrants arrived to an altered America. The struggles of the Civil Rights era, which sought to eliminate racist and discriminatory practices, set the tone for a more tolerant approach toward difference. While on the ground migrants still faced racism and discrimination, the cultural atmosphere was one that aspired to accommodate cultural diversity, ushering in a multicultural era that affected both civic and cultural arenas. I will not rehearse the tenets of multiculturalism and identity politics, but merely emphasize the ways the cultural climate in the United States at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty first centuries was one of relative openness to difference, diversity and otherness.17 The large-scale arrival of non-white migrants contributed to the multicultural climate and undermined the perception of America as an Anglo-­ European entity. While English remained the dominant language throughout the Civil Rights period, acting as a standardizing mechanism, its authority was ­eventually undermined by the altered demography, when in the 1990’s Spanish became sufficiently prominent to be seen as a ‘threat’ to the monolingual dominance of English.18 The pervasiveness of Spanish diversified American culture, and paved the way for the (re)emergence of other languages and ­cultures. As Maria Lauret points out in her study Wanderwords, the American ‘linguascape’ at the turn of the twenty first century is one of diversity, where 16 17

18

The word ‘mediaeval’ appears in the context numerous times within the text. For a discussion of the politics of multiculturalism see: Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism and ‘The Politics of Recognition,’ with commentary by K. Anthony Appiah, Jurgen Habermas, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf. Edited and introduced by Amy Gutman. Princeton up, 1995. Spanish is spoken by numerous populations: American citizens from Puerto Rico, Cuban refugees, Mexican workers in California, and native born Americans in the South West who retained their original Spanish. Additionally, the more recent arrival of migrants from Central America and the Caribbean has further increased the number of Spanish speakers in the u.s.

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Introduction

English coexists alongside a plethora of non-English languages (24).19 While Multiculturalism has its critics on all sides of the political spectrum,20 there is no denying that the cultural climate in the United States has undergone major changes in the last decades. The late twentieth century saw the celebration of one’s minority status as a legitimate identity position within a multicultural America. However over the last several years a subtle shift in emphasis has occurred, as migrant writers seem to be less concerned with what makes them American, ethnic American, or hyphenated American, and more with the possibilities their complex identities offer personally, culturally and ideologically. Bharati Mukherjee has referred to the literature produced by new migrants as “Literature of New Arrival,” written by those for whom “English is not the mother tongue and who have no intention of willfully erasing their premigration linguistic and ­historical inheritance” (683, 681). According to Mukherjee, this new literature “embraces broken narratives of disrupted lives, proliferating plots, outsize characters and overcrowded casts”; it exposes “the fierce urgency of obscure history,” celebrates a “language fusion” and reveals “the challenging shapelessness” of a new existence (683–84). On a similar note, another famous migrant, Salman Rushdie, asks whether it is possible “to be – to become good at being – not rootless, but multiply rooted? Not to suffer from a loss of roots but to benefit from an excess of them?” (Joseph Anton 54). Rushdie’s words echo those of Homi Bhabha, who considers how “subjects [are] formed ‘in-between,’ or in excess of, the sum of the ‘parts’ of difference” (“Intro,” Location, 2). The present book explores these questions, as it focuses on the work of five authors and one photographer from diverse locations, cultures and circumstances, who each in their own way benefit from an excess of roots and p ­ ropose 19

20

Lauret introduces the term ‘linguascape’ (based on Arjun Appadurai theorization of ‘scapes’), to describe the changing linguistic landscape of the twentieth and early twentieth-­first century, which she sees as “made up on the one hand, of people’s multilingual behavior and on the other of the nation’s monolingual official voice and hegemonic culture, with literature at its heart” (20). Lauret reminds us that the linguascape at the beginning of the twentieth century, before the nativist legislation, was also diverse. While the political right understands non-white cultures to be inferior, threatening to balkanize national culture, the political left has criticized the tendency to celebrate diversity while failing to rectify social conditions for minorities, or as Homi Bhabha put it, “in societies where multiculturalism is encouraged racism is still rampant” (“Third Space” 208). Bharati Mukherjee has similarly critiqued multiculturalism for being a mosaic in which cultures touch but fail to mingle, in which one culture is central while others are marginal, resulting in cultural ghettos rather than cross-cultural exchanges. She additionally embraces racial and cultural mongrelization and critiques both migrants and host countries who hold on to the idea of cultural purity.

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new visions of American selfhood: Aleksandar Hemon, Velibor Božović. GB Tran, Junot Díaz, Boris Fishman and Vikram Chandra. These migrant writers engage in what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have broadly called “life writing.” Life writing is “a general term for writing of diverse kinds that takes a life as its subject. Such writing can be biographical, novelistic, historical or an explicit self-reference to the writer” (3). Smith and Watson define “life narrative” “as a somewhat narrower term that includes many kinds of self-referential writing, including autobiography” (3). While Smith and Watson distinguish between life narratives and the novel, they point out that contemporary writers increasingly blur the boundaries between “life narrative and narration in the first person novel” (7). That is, autobiographies and memoirs contain fictional elements, as will be seen in the case of GB Tran’s family memoir, while fiction often has strong autobiographical dimensions, as is apparent in the four novels discussed here. Hemon, Díaz, Fishman and Chandra have created narrators with whom they share some biographical affinities, such as place of birth, circumstance of migration or occupation. However, the novels are not easily mistaken for autobiographical works. The author’s name and that of the protagonist differ, and while their “vital statistics” reveal occasional similarities to that of the protagonist, they do not bear enough resemblance a to assume an “autobiographical pact,” as defined by Philippe Lejeune.21 Yet, the blurring of the boundary between the authors and their narrators entails an additional blurring of fact and fiction throughout the novels, which is apparent especially when relating to actual historical events, historical figures or geographical places. Furthermore, the inclination of migrant authors to create protagonists who resemble them biographically can be related to the project of identity; through their novels the authors discursively create the self, carve out a space for a nascent identity through writing. Identities, once thought to be essential, natural and fixed, are currently understood, as Stuart Hall (among many others) has suggested, to be actively constructed in an ongoing process of formation.22 Authors who engage in life writing construct their identities discursively, in and through language. Autobiographical narrators, Smith and Watson suggest, as well as authors who are invested in life writing, develop an understanding of their identities through 21

22

Philippe Lejeune, “What defines autobiography for the one who is reading is above all a contract of identity that is sealed by the proper name,” securing what he has called a “pact” between author and publisher, and author and reader (19, 21). In his seminal “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Hall regards identity as “a ‘production’ that is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, ­representation” (392).

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Introduction

the social and cultural discourses they encounter and write in. Incidentally, when the surrounding discourses are multiple, as in the case of migrants who have crossed linguistic boundaries, the profusion of languages, cultures and meanings are brought into discursive dialogue to negotiate, in an ongoing process, a renewal of self, of identity, of consciousness. The novel can be seen as an arena in which such dialogue takes place, in which the migrant writer discursively explores questions of self-identity. Aleksandar Hemon, who has mixed Ukrainian and Serbian ancestry, was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia (formerly Yugoslavia). He studied at the University of Sarajevo and embarked on a career in journalism, which led, at the age of 27, to a tour in the United States sponsored by the u.s. government. Hemon remained in the United States as the war in former Yugoslavia unfolded and Sarajevo fell under siege (1992). Hemon told Larry Rother of The New York Times that he felt “cut off from his previous life” and “had this horrible pressing need to write because things were happening. I needed to do it the way I needed to eat, but I just had no language to write in. I couldn’t do it, and so I thought I should enable myself to do it” (“Twice Told”). By reading voraciously, attending graduate school at Northwestern, and honing his English in odd jobs, Hemon was able to publish his first story within three years of his arrival. He has since published three novels, two short story collections, and one work of non-fiction, while continuing to write a bi-weekly column in a Sarajevo based magazine (in Bosnian). Hemon, who lives in Chicago, was at the forefront of a larger wave of migration from war-raged former Yugoslavia; Hemon’s photographer friend, Velibor Božović was among these migrants. Božović spent the difficult war years in Sarajevo, and migrated to Montreal, Canada, in 1998, where he abandoned his engineering job to pursue a career in photography. The two collaborated in producing The Lazarus Project (2008), a narrative in words and images. GB Tran is a second generation Vietnamese, born in the United States one year after his refugee parents and siblings fled Saigon. The Vietnamese migration to the United States was a direct result of the u.s. war in Vietnam, which ended in a hasty withdrawal of the American military before the advancing army of the communist north (April 1975). In the rush and chaos of the withdrawal, the American troops were able to evacuate only a small number of their Vietnamese allies (125,000), creating the ‘first wave’ of Vietnamese refugees to the u.s.23 With the assistance of an American friend, Tran’s family boarded one of the last airlifts from Saigon to Guam. From there they were flown to 23

From the fall of Saigon in April 1975 until 2000, nearly three-quarters of a million Vietnamese migrated to the United States (Spickard 349).

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the United States, processed at a military base in San Diego, and resettled with government aid in South Carolina,24 later to relocate to Arizona. Roughly five years after their arrival, they were naturalized as American citizens. Tran’s family experiences what Lisa Lowe conceives as complications arising from their origin in a country disrupted by u.s. imperialism. Vietnamese migrants to the United States, she asserts, “are determined by the history of u.s. involvements in Asia and the historical racialization of Asians in the United States” (16; italics in original). The expectation that they identify as u.s. national subjects often generates alienation, rising from the inherent contradiction in their situation, and exacerbated by the history of racial discrimination. Growing up, Tran distanced himself from such conflicts, and was generally disinterested in his background. Interest came later, resulting in the graphic memoir, which is based on hundreds of hours interviewing older family members and friends, in a process that helped Tran “[gain] a deeper respect and understanding for [his] parents” (Soo Hoo). Tran, who received his bfa from the University of Arizona, falls into the statistics of children of Asian migrants, who, as Viet Thanh Nguyen points out, attend college in proportionately larger numbers than their percentage in the u.s. population (“Pacific Rim” 191).25 Tran recollects his family’s Vietnamese and American experiences in words and images in Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2011). He has written, alongside other short comic strips, Fatherhood Survival Guide. Junot Díaz and his family form part of a large migration from the Caribbean, which in the last four decades of the twentieth century has seen 2.3 million people (not including Cuba) migrate to the United States. The large number of migrants can be ascribed to the political and economic plight in the region: many countries featured oppressive right wing dictatorships (often backed by the United States), while others were struggling with the aftermaths of such dictatorships or with the upheaval of post-colonialism. Díaz left the politically tumultuous Dominican Republic, still recuperating from the three-decade regime of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo (1930–1961),26 with his mother and siblings 24

25

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Government policy advocated scattering the Vietnamese refugees across the country to minimize possible backlash as a result of their ethnic visibility; consequently many families faced extreme cultural isolation. However, migrants who left Vietnam during the communist regime, who had been targeted by the government in one way or another, often arrived illegally, after countless hardships, and were not always incorporated into the refugee resettlement plan, which made it considerably more difficult for them to advance economically and otherwise (Spickard 347–52). Following Trujillo’s assassination, Joaquin Balaguer, who had been Trujillo’s puppetpresident, ruled (initially with Ramfis, Trujillo’s son), until Juan Bosch was ­democratically

10

Introduction

in 1974 (aged six), to join his father who had moved to the u.s. in advance to find work.27 Díaz grew up in what he calls a “contemporary u.s. ghetto” in New Jersey (Parlin) (bw 22), attended college at Rutgers, and gained his mfa from Cornell. Díaz, who has a high profile presence in the media, has said: “I may be a success story as an individual. But if you adjust the knob and just take it back one setting to the family unit, I would say my family tells a much more complicated story. It tells the story of two kids in prison. It tells the story of enormous poverty, of tremendous difficulty.”28 The difficulties Díaz’s family experienced stem largely from the history of u.s. imperialism in their native country and racial discrimination in America. The Dominican diaspora typically maintains strong networks of connectedness across national borders, characterized by a constant movement back and forth between the United States and the Caribbean.29 This dynamic is apparent in Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize winning work, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), which shifts between Trujillo and post-Trujillo Dominican Republic, and New Jersey. Díaz has additionally published two short story collections. The European entity that experienced the largest surge in migration following the 1965 immigration act is the territory that comprised the former Soviet Union, and foremost Russia. Under the Soviet regime, Jews were considered a non-Russian ethnic group and suffered from systematic and institutional discrimination. While migration was strictly prohibited during the c­ ommunist

27

28 29

elected to office in 1963, only to be overthrown as the country erupted into civil war (1965). The American government intervened, occupying the country until they saw Balaguer reelected as president (1966–78). Díaz’s narrator relates to Balaguer as “the Election Thief,” who was “one of El Jefe’s more efficient ringwraiths,” and labels his second term of presidency as “the Twelve Years,” condemning him for “unleash[ing] a wave of violence against the Dominican left, death-squading hundreds and driving thousands more out of the country. It was he who oversaw/initiated the thing we call Diaspora” (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao 90). The Díaz family is part of what migration historians term “labor migrants” as opposed to “professional immigrants” (Portes and Rumbaut 24–28), “entrepreneurial immigrants” (28–31) and “refugees and asylees” (31–34). Interview with Hao Ying, “Writing Wrongs,” Global Times, April 14, 2010. Dominican migrants are further renowned for sending remunerations back ‘home’ to support family members. In her book, The Transnational Villagers, Peggy Levitt suggests that national borders do not bind migrants social and economic lives; they “do not shift their loyalties and participatory energies from one country to another. Instead, they are integrated, to varying degrees, into the countries that receive them, at the same time that they remain connected to the countries they leave behind” (5). Seen through this vantage point, states play a role in “creating and reinforcing lasting transnational involvements.”

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11

regime (1917–1991), with the easing of Cold War tensions in the 1970’s, and prompted by Western diplomatic efforts, the Soviet government relaxed its migration restrictions to enable a trickle of Jews to sporadically leave the country. Those who left the Soviet Union were destined for Israel although they increasingly “dropped out,” applied for refugee status and headed to the United States instead, where they settled in enclaves of major metro areas and integrated relatively quickly.30 Boris Fishman’s family (grandparents, parents and Boris, age nine) was at the tail end of this migration, leaving Minsk for New York in 1988. After the fall of communism in 1991, an economically motivated exodus from the former Soviet Union occurred, bringing roughly half a million new arrivals to the u.s. Fishman, who studied at Princeton and received his mfa from New York University, sets his first novel, A Replacement Life (2014), in between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He has since published a second novel. Vikram Chandra was born in Delhi to an affluent Hindi family, well connected­to the Bollywood film industry (his mother, Kamna Chandra, is the writer of several Hindi films, his sister, Tanuja Chandra, is a director and screen writer and his other sister, Anupama Chandra, is a film critic). Chandra moved to the United States to study, and received his ba from Pomona College, California. He continued his studies at the Film School at Columbia University, and later received an ma at Johns Hopkins and an mfa at the University of Houston. Chandra can be seen as part of a larger Indian migration to the United States from the 1970’s onward, which attracted professionals seeking job or educational opportunities, making Indian immigrants “the group with the highest proportion of university graduates and professionals” (Portes and Rumbaut 51).31 These migrants typically came from backgrounds of modest privilege, and traveled back and forth between the u.s. and India.32 Indeed, Chandra divides his time between the u.s. (Berkeley) and India. His novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995) is similarly divided and linked. Chandra has 30

31

32

Roughly a quarter million arrived in the u.s. between 1970–85. “Russian-Jewish Immigrants in the u.s.: Social Portrait, Challenges, and ajc Involvement,” By Sam Kliger, Director, Russian Affairs, ajc. http://www.ajcrussian.org/site/apps/nlnet/content2.aspx?c=chL MK3PKLsF&b=7718799&ct=11713359. During the same time period, less educated Indians of the lower classes arrived in the u.s. and found jobs as cab drivers, convenience store managers or motel operators, often supporting extended families back in India. All in all, close to one million Indian migrants arrived in the country between 1970 and the end of the century (Spickard 363). Chandra can be considered, according to Harzig and Hoerder, who examine the act of migration on a spectrum ranging from “relatively free, via different forms of constraints and coercion, to forced,” as a “free migrant” whose decision to migrate is based on his “own desires and life-projects” (67).

12

Introduction

additionally written a short story collection, a second novel (Sacred Games, now featured as a series on Netflix), and a non-fiction work. He also co-wrote the scripts for two Hindi films, Mission Kashmir (2000) and Wazir (2016). Not only have the works of these authors gained recognition from the literary community in the United States and around the globe,33 but the authors also hold teaching positions in American academic institutions. Hemon, Díaz, Fishman and Chandra teach creative writing at Columbia College (Chicago), mit, Princeton and Berkeley respectively. Tran teaches and serves as a mentor for cartoonists at the California College of the Arts. The words, thoughts, images and ideas of these migrant writers are communicated to a broad audience of Americans, suggesting that the presence of the migrant contingent is, as Mieke Bal has pointed out in her work on migration, “an incontestable source of cultural transformation” (23). It is not only the migrant who encounters a new culture; the ‘dominant’ culture also encounters the ethnic, racial, linguistic and cultural other. Confronting difference has the potential to modify mainstream beliefs, assumptions and behavior.34 To this growing list, one could add such authors, for example, as: Marlon James (Jamaica), whose Booker award winning epic novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014), is multilingually narrated by dozens of characters and spans both decades and continents; Viet Thanh Nguyen (Vietnam), whose novel The Sympathizer (2015), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, highlights the consciousness of the migrant narrator who is characterized as “a man of two minds”; Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua), whose work articulates the gaps between the colonial past and postcolonial present; Edwidge Danticat (Haiti), who sutures Haitian folklore with the contemporary through multiple perspectives; Column McCann (Ireland), who subtlety weaves transnational connections between people, places and times; Rabih Alameddine (Lebanon), who experiments widely with shifting vantage points, while permeating the boundary between past and present, fact and fiction, the u.s. and Beirut; 33

34

Díaz’s novel received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008, as well as National Book Critics Circle Award; Hemon’s novel was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award; Tran’s graphic novel was awarded a Gold Medal in Sequential Art by the Society of Illustrators (2011); Fishman’s novel won the vcu Cabell First Novelist Award and the American Library Association’s Sophie Brody Medal; Chandra’s novel won the 1996 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best First Book (1996). On a more practical level, Díaz’s critique of predominantly white mfa programs has had an impact on academic institutions, which seek to actively include people of color in their staff. Díaz is also a co-founder of the “Voices of Our Nation,” a workshop for poc. Additionally, Díaz, who is the fiction editor of Boston Review, was also a Pulitzer Prize board member in 2011–12.

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13

or Teju Cole (Nigeria), writer, journalist, photographer and art historian, who implements photography in his writing in various ways. Experiencing cultural difference in an increasingly globalized world has shaped the consciousness of these migrant writers,35 which in turn shapes the form and content of their works: their migrant perspective is apparent in the translingual, transnational and multi-perspectival dimension of their novels, and is echoed in the blurring of generic boundaries, of fact and fiction and of past and present. The five texts under examination were chosen for their heightened attention to form and for their spatial sensitivity. A close reading of the novels will be instrumental in articulating a tentative poetics of migrant writing. The most central and complex ingredient of migrant writing relates to space. The migrant authors discussed here inhabit a space located in between cultures, languages and national borders, a space characterized by fluidity, mobility and dislocation; they experience a shared conception of space-time as being nonhomogeneous, nonlinear and non-chronological. The authors translate the disjunctions of time and space wrought by migration onto the form and structure of the novel, introducing spatial constructs into their work, both visually and structurally, suggesting that form, or the spatial layout, itself is a theme or key feature of the novel. By implementing a narrative technique that both disrupts temporal linearity and introduces spatiality, they enable in-between-ness to enter. The migrant authors discussed here weave visual techniques and motifs into their narratives, such as photography (Hemon), comics (Tran and Díaz), graphic art (Tran), cartography (Fishman), and Bollywood film (Chandra), to convey both a surplus of perspectives, and to designate the in-between-ness of space, and the possibilities offered by alternative spaces. The inclusion of visual modes enhances experimentation with temporal and spatial dimensions, as the reader simultaneously grapples with linguistic as well as visual registers, which occur on different ontological levels and are governed by distinctive codes. This visual-verbal dialogue is both an occurrence in the world of the novel, while it also constructs the form the novel assumes, a form that represents, or possibly becomes, a spatial structure. 35

Whether globalization is seen as a “dramatically new phenomenon” that creates a dramatic rupture from the past, in which “the flow of economic and cultural forces have swamped the borders of nation-states,” and “the development of electronic media forms in particular have changed entirely the nature of social, cultural, economic, and political relations”; or whether it is seen as having a long history, in which “forces that have been in play since at least the sixteenth century and that are not simply Western in origin” have now accelerated – in its ‘lowest’ common denominator, globalization implies a cross-­ cultural exchange that encompasses the globe (Jay 33).

14

Introduction

The verbal-visual dialogue challenges not only the generic boundaries of the novel, which expand beyond its linguistic and linear unfolding, but also has the power to contest the boundaries of self, and of the cultures and contexts in which this self evolves. In crafting alternative spatial and temporal conceptions, the authors express an amalgam of different ideas, cultures and contexts, without attempting to ‘resolve’ the dualism or multiplicity of identity. Rather, they live in the excess of the possibilities it extends, possibilities articulated textually, which enable the creation of new and unique narrative structures, and challenge conventional employment of time and space.

Space, Representation and Migration

Migrant writing has pushed the conception of space to a new level, and as such, is in dialogue with a more general reconceptualization of space over the last few decades. Arguably, the reconfiguration of the spatial is a direct result of the movement of peoples across the globe, which has altered – and is continuing to alter – our understanding and comprehension of space and its relation to place and geography.36 Paul Jay has recently stressed the importance of connecting “histories of mobility, migration, and displacement … with a study of how cultures and identities and the politics that shape them develop across formerly fixed and overly narrow national geographies” (31). Homi Bhabha, a migrant himself, theorized the connection between migration and space nearly three decades ago. In his now classic essay, “DissemiNation,” Bhabha alludes to the space experienced by migrant imagined communities as “never simply horizontal” (202). Writing this condition, he claims, “requires a kind of ‘doubleness’ … ; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a centered causal logic” (202). 36

The term place, Tim Cresswell points out, is no less complicated than that of space and clearly in dialogue with it. Some would even say they overlap at times. Let us revert to the most basic definition of place, which is to understand it as a meaningful location: “When humans invest meaning in a portion of space and then become attached to it in some way … it becomes a place” (Cresswell 10). Yi-Fu Tuan’s ideas about space and place are also useful. He reads space as fluid and place as stationary: “From the security and stability of place we are aware of the openness, freedom, and threat of space, and vice versa. Furthermore, if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (6). Doreen Massey’s notion of place as open and hybrid, as interconnecting routes, has many parallels with the notion of space, as does Lefebre’s notion of social space, to be discussed below.

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15

Bhabha posits that the ‘in-between’ spaces, or the “interstices – the overlap and displacement of domains of difference” – are the spaces where “culture and value are negotiated” (“Intro” 2). He anticipates an art that “renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent ‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present,” in which the “‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living” (“Intro” 10). Bhabha termed these spaces “where new subject positions emerge and merge, which displace the histories that constitute them, and set up new structures of authority,” as third spaces (Bhabha, “Third” 211). Bhabha’s discourse on in-between and third spaces is in dialogue with earlier theorists, who as Robert Tally suggests, “have had to overcome … the older bias against spatiality in favour of temporality” (113). Spatial theory since the nineteen sixties has emphasized the power relations that govern the production of space, and has reexamined geography and its relation to conceptions and representations of space. Henri Lefebvre’s influential The Production of Space (1991, originally published in French in 1974) was a landmark in spatial discourse, foregrounding space as a social product and revealing possibilities for individual agency within spatial practices. Primarily, he challenges prior conceptions of homogenous space: “To criticize and reject absolute space is simply to refuse a particular representation, that of a container waiting to be filled by a content – i.e. matter, or bodies” (170). The production of space, according to Lefebvre, takes place on two levels, as a social formation and as a mental construction. By introducing space as both “a mental and material ­construct,” a third term, which lies “between the poles of conception and perception” is born, namely, “the notion of the lived” (Elden 190). It is from this idea, Stuart Elden observes, that Lefebvre articulated his conceptual triad: the perceived space of materialized spatial practice; the conceived space of representations of space; and the lived spaces of representation.37 Elden summarizes the conceptual triad as follows: The first of these takes space as physical form, real space, space that is generated and used. The second is the space of savoir (knowledge) and logic, of maps, mathematics, of space as the instrumental space of social engineers and urban planners, of navigators and explorers. Space as a mental construct, imagined space. The third sees space as produced and modified over time and through its use, spaces invested with symbolism and meaning, the space of connaissance (less formal or more local forms of knowledge), space as real-and-imagined (190). 37

As articulated in The Production of Space, pp. 33, 38–39.

16

Introduction

To illustrate how Lefebvre’s theory is useful in practice, Elden gives the example of the urban park, which is “conceived, designed and produced through labour, technology and institutions,” yet, over time, the space of the park “is adapted and transformed as it is perceived and lived by social actors and groups” (191). The park is a microcosm, and this paradigm can be applied on a larger scale, with a variety of ‘actors,’ to reveal the way space can be redefined by those who occupy it, or the way it can expand, contract and change its function in accordance with those who perceive it. In his Thirdspace, Edward W. Soja38 puts Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” under a magnifying lens, to better understand the “simultaneity and interwoven complexity of the social, the historical, and the spatial, their inseparability and interdependence” (3). Soja articulates his own “trialectics of spatiality,” in which Thirdspace emerges as the product of an extended meditation on the radical possibilities of Lefebvre’s lived spaces of representation. Drawing upon ­“material and mental spaces,” Soja highlights Lefebvre’s notion of “thirding-as-­ Othering” as a tool for subversion of binary thinking, illustrating that there is always an-Other term or possibility (‫״‬il y a toujours l’Autre,‫ ״‬7, 10).39 The exploration of Thirdspace becomes “Simultaneously real and imagined and more (both and also…)” and “can be described and inscribed in journeys to ‘realand-imagined’ (or perhaps ‘realandimagined’?) places” (11, ellipsis in original). Thirdspace, then, where the real and the imagined comingle becomes “the terrain for the generation of ‘counterspaces,’ spaces of resistance to the dominant order” (68). The migrant authors discussed here use imagination to subvert perceived and conceived space, and their novels, with their comingling of real and imagined, are counterspaces that create a thirdspace – in which their authors may dwell, and possibly their readers as well. Soja implements into his notion of Thirdspace several conceptions of “alternative envisioning of spatiality” which share the characteristic of directly challenging conventional modes of spatial thinking, opening spaces of resistance. Such conceptualizations of spatiality include Foucault’s heterotopologies and heterotopias, bell hooks’s margins as spaces of radical openness, and Homi Bhabha’s notion of hybridity as a third space. These “are not just ‘other spaces’ to be added on to the geographical imagination … they are meant to detonate, to deconstruct,” to disorder and disrupt hegemonic space (Soja 163). Soja aims 38 39

Edward W. Soja was a child of Polish migrants, and grew up in the urban mosaic of the Bronx. “This choice of an-Other alternative is strategically … privileged as a means of resisting binary closures. It is a thirding that invites further expansion and extension, beyond not just the binary but beyond the third term as well” (65).

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to show that the traditional spaces around which we have organized our inquiry have shifted radically, while the spaces that are “in-between” cultures, or that transgress social and geographical borders have become sites in which identities are most challenged by the need to negotiate a new and arbitrary set of identifications. The new spaces conceived by new states of consciousness, foster new possibilities of expression, and can produce new social (and political) positions. Writers face the question of representation: how can space be represented in words and texts?40 How can the three-dimensional world be represented on a two-dimensional surface? Jorge Luis Borges addresses this problem of representation in his work “The Aleph”41 when the narrator attempts to put into words his observation of the sum total of the spatial universe, as seen within a tiny shining sphere: “In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them amazed me more than the fact that all of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive” (Collected Fictions 282–83). Soja suggests that thirdspace is compatible with “The Aleph” in its simultaneous spatiality, and goes on to illustrate the ways in which Lefebvre’s aesthetic representation of it goes beyond the “string of eclectic recollections in Borges’s Aleph” (58). Soja suggests that Lefebvre defied “discursive inhibitions” in his narration of The Production of Space, by composing it in the form of a fugue (58), by not developing ideas in a sequential or linear mode, by re-articulating concepts time and again, by going off on “spontaneous riffs on a range of subjects” and finally, by “‘recollecting’ a dizzying array of different kinds of spaces” within his text (59). These techniques aid Lefebvre in creating a spatial text, or one that can contain the multitude of thirdspace, and serve as a key to spatial reading of narrative. Migrant writers are confronted with perceived and conceived spaces that exclude them or from which they feel alienated or not-at-home, and are 40

41

The spatial aspect of narrative that unfolds in time was addressed by Mikhail Bakhtin, in his essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics” originally published in Russian, 1937. The term chronotope, which underlines the connections between historical time and geographical space, is a literary time-space configuration that binds time inextricably to space (“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” Bakhtin, 84). Time, space and genre are integrated, although not in any definitive way, so that a chronotope can refer to a spatio-temporal trope, or it can be defined by a particular genre. I have chosen to explore spatial conceptions from a different angle. For issues of cartographic representation see his short piece, “On Exactitude in Science.”

18

Introduction

c­ hallenged by the task of representing their experience of the simultaneity of past/present and of here/there. As a result, they are compelled to reshape their world by conceiving new, alternative literary spaces, or thirdspaces, which are represented in their novels both verbally and visually, drawing on techniques similar to those used by Lefebvre. The breakdown of a coherent world picture experienced by contemporary migrants has a potential to inspire the creation of alternative worlds or spaces in which one’s own existence can be both possible and meaningful. The American author Andre Aciman, a native of Alexandria, creatively captures the overlap between past, present and space in his “Shadow Cities,” a meditation on his process of situating himself within the complex coordinates of a new space by means of the specific location of Straus Park. Returning time and again to the park, which is located on a four-way Broadway intersection, Aciman maps his spatial and metaphoric conception of New York, a city that encompasses other cities and memories.42 To illustrate the multilayered or superimposed sense of place, he evokes guidebooks of Rome, which feature photographs of the ruins along with a “series of colored transparencies” (31). When placing “a transparency over the picture of the ruin, the missing or fallen parts suddenly reappear, showing you how the Forum and the Coliseum must have looked in their heyday” (31). However, he adds: “when you lift all the plastic sheets, all you see are today’s ruins” (31). The language – “ruin,” “missing,” “fallen” – hints at the irretrievable loss of the past, yet a past that is present as “today’s ruins.” The “plastic sheets” that (imaginatively) restore the glorious past, can easily be removed to reveal the broken structure at the core. The ruins are represented in the guidebook by a photograph; while embodying a trace of the real, the photograph always represents the past, what has been. Yet the “colored transparencies” suggest an imaginative and creative construction of that past, which has the power to alter the present. Aciman beautifully illustrates how actual ruins, their photographic representation, and the colorful plastic transparencies fluctuate to suggest the complexity of past, memory and space in the consciousness of the migrant. He further captures the sense of overlapping spaces within an undefined and ongoing segment of time in this passage at the closing of his essay:

42

Coincidentally, Aciman later discovers that the statue decking the park’s fountain is of Mnemosyne, or memory (mistress of Zeus and mother of the Muses). He further discovers that the park is named after the affluent German-Jewish-Americans, Isidor and Ida Straus, who died in the sinking of the Titanic.

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I come to Straus Park to remember Alexandria, albeit an unreal Alexandria, an Alexandria that does not exist, that I’ve invented, or learned to cultivate … I retrieve here … the shadow of the shadow of Alexandria, versions of Alexandria, the remanence of Alexandria, infusing Straus Park itself now, reminding me of something that is not just elsewhere but that is perhaps more in me than it was ever out there… (34) While he acknowledges that his New York is uniquely subjective, Aciman crucially needs his memories and associations in order to create a New York in which he can feel at home. Starting with a specific physical location, Aciman recreates the city around him and on the page. The migrant writers to be discussed here also construct their spaces by idiosyncratically re-imagining them in ways that break “the time-barrier of a culturally collusive ‘present’” and enable a spatial simultaneity to emerge (Bhabha “Intro: Locations,” 12). In creating new perspectives which do not attempt to ‘overcome’ or ‘resolve’ the migrant duality or plurality, the authors employ their multi-perspectival position to articulate both “experiences of transition, as well as the transition of experience into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being” (Durrant and Lord 11). The authors translate or transform their spatial perceptions and experiences into the form of the novel, which takes on new shapes and contours. The relation between ‘the migratory’ and aesthetics is not, Durrant and Lord tell us, merely one of representation, rather, the relation seeks to draw “attention to the ways in which aesthetic practice might be constituted by and through acts of migration” (11). As such, the migrant condition is reciprocally and doubly expressed in both content and form of the art work, whose merit lies in “the degree to which the art work itself becomes migratory, the degree to which it mimics – at the level of form rather than content – that which it sets out to represent” (13). In order to represent the migratory through form, “the disjunctions of both time and space to which migration gives rise,” are woven into the narrative, introducing a spatial mentality into a more overtly chronological discipline (12–13). That is, form represents or even becomes space, and expresses the specific spatial-conceptions of each writer, indicating a freedom to roam freely across boundaries. The in-between-ness of the migrant artists and writers instigates a new mode of organizing and structuring their experience, creating a “migratory aesthetics.” Mieke Bal, who coined the term, sees the modifier, ‘migrant,’ as part “of an aesthetics that does not leave the viewer, spectator, or user of art aloof, shielded, autonomous and in charge of the aesthetic experience” (23). Bal ­locates the precondition for the emergence and practice of migratory aesthetics in an engaged encounter between the subject (artist/author and

20

Introduction

v­ iewer/reader) and the work of art; for it to be migratory, this encounter must take place in the realm of mobility present in the globalized world.43 The work of art/literature provides an arena for an encounter in which the space of the artist/author coalesces momentarily with that of the viewer/reader. In this bilateral encounter, or sharing of space, the migrant artwork has the power to hail the viewers, to impact them by shattering their protective shielding, to take them out of their comfort zone into a space where they can engage with the other, the alien, the different.

Transnational Consciousness and Space

The unmooring of space from geography has thrown the field of American studies into what Paul Jay has called “a complicated web of transnational histories” (26). The term ‘transnational’ has a long history, going back to the mass migration to America at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the wake of Horace Kallen’s essay, “Democracy Versus the Melting-Pot,” in The Nation (1915), which advocated cultural pluralism, Randolph Bourne coined the term ‘trans-national America’ in an essay by the same name (1916), and critiqued the ideology of the Melting Pot paradigm. Bourne articulated the idea of a cosmopolitan America comprised of diverse ethnic nationalities, assumed a positive attitude toward diversity in an age of growing xenophobia, and embraced the impact of new cultures of migration on America, which he envisioned as a culture of international identities. With the Immigration Act of 1924, the great depression and wwii, the term fell out of use. It reemerged again in the late twentieth century as a category of analysis (in American Studies and social sciences more generally) for a combination of reasons mainly related to accelerated migration, which engendered the emergence of cultural identifications that exceed the geographical boundaries of the nation; this in turn destabilized connections between identity, culture, geography and nation. The 1965 Immigration Act, as discussed above, brought unprecedented numbers of legal migrants to the United States (while many others entered illegally). In their introduction to the volume Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, social scientists Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen noted that new modes and growing rates of “transport, electronic communication, trade, investment and cultural interdependence,” enabled many of these migrants to 43

Mieke Bal adds that the migratory is increasingly becoming “a feature, or a quality of the world in which mobility is not the exception but on its way to becoming the standard” (23).

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21

cultivate manifold identities which span multiple localities, and facilitate the maintenance of kinship ties across national borders to the extent that “‘home’ and ‘host’ societies dissolve into one another” (xvi). Through these practices migrants create deterritorialized social, cultural and economic networks that cross national borders to create transnational or diasporic communities (terms that are often used interchangeably).44 However, if in the past a diasporic or transnational consciousness referred to an awareness of duality steeped in the negative sensations of discrimination and exclusion, Vertovec and Cohen emphasize that currently, the term is used as “a positive way of constituting a ‘hybrid’ cultural and political identity” based on decentered attachments (xvii).45 Decentered attachments govern Paul Gilroy’s essay “Diaspora,” which articulates ways in which diaspora disrupts space, contributing to the understanding of transnational as practiced by migrant writers. For Gilroy, diaspora is an “outer-national term” that utilizes the power of “space, spatiality, distance, travel and itinerancy” to challenge the “temporality, fixity, rootedness and the sedentary” typically endorsed by the nation state (“Diaspora” 293). He finds that the term carries within it a fruitful tension between “here and there, then and now,” disrupting an ordered sense of political and cultural identity (294– 95). Disorder and spatial dislocation frees dispersed people from teleological narratives and linear journeys, enabling them to create alternative links between themselves, their histories and their present. In so doing, they “move into the contested spaces between the poles that we can identify roughly as the local and the global” (297). Gilroy’s articulation resonates with Bhabha’s Third Space and Soja’s Thirdspace, and sheds further light on the migrant writers’ spatial engagement.

44

45

While the term Diaspora initially emerged in relation to the Jewish dispersal and exile from their historic homeland in 70 ce, it was later expanded to include forced displacement of ethnic groups more generally speaking. Currently, Vertovoc observes, “‘Diaspora’ is the term often used today to describe practically any population which is considered ‘deterritorialised’ or ‘transnational’ – that is, which has originated in a land other than which it currently resides, and whose social, economic and political networks cross the borders of nation-states, or indeed, span the globe” (xvi). In their 1992 essay, “Transnationalism: A New Analytic framework for Understanding Migration,” Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch and Cristina Blanc-Szanton recognized the need to articulate “a new conceptualization” for “coming to terms with the experience and consciousness of this new migrant population,” whose “lives cut across national boundaries and bring two societies into a single field” (1). They emphasize how ties, which are often economic, between migrants and the countries from which they migrate continue to shape their identities and work to create transnational kinship.

22

Introduction

Decentered attachments are also at the heart of Stuart Hall’s now classic meditation on “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Hall rebukes the old “imperializing” and “hegemonizing” use of the term diaspora, which suggests that “identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which [exiles] must at all costs return” (235). Alternately, “the diaspora experience,” he suggests, is defined “by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference” (235). Hall enshrines the idea that the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the migrant/transnational/diasporic is not an ailment, but rather a source of strength and possibility, and that it is constantly in process. Transnationalism therefore emerges as a form of critique of a national agenda that seeks to make the national space synonymous with identity. In the academy this has translated into a shift in focus from “an aestheticized, ahistorical, liberal-humanist set of assumptions about the nature and value of culture” which are rooted in the notion of “sameness”(Jay 17), towards a rubric based on difference, where “meaning is not inherent,” where words have the potential to introduce difference and defer meaning simultaneously, and where it is understood that the world and its practices have “been constructed historically, discursively and ideologically in specific cultures at specific times” (Jay 18–19).46 Transnationalism was officially ushered into the discipline of American Studies in 2004, by Shelley Fisher Fishkin, in her presidential address, “The Transnational Turn in American Studies,” igniting a debate over meanings. In her timely introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, Yogita Goyal undergirds the fact that there is no agreement on the “scope, method, or value of transnationalism” (1). The term itself is contested on every level: the signifier ‘America’ has no clear signifiers (the United States, the American hemisphere, places linked to America through migration, culture or economics). There is no consensus as to whether transnational writing includes writing beyond the geographic boundaries of the United States or whether it is another name for ethnic or multicultural writing. Critics argue whether transnational writing destabilizes the nation or re-centers it, reinstating the very exceptionalism many of its proponents sought to dispel. Additionally, the genealogy of the phenomenon is disputed, and has been estimated to begin as early as Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, and as late as the 1960’s, 46 Or – “the deconstruction and strategic reconstitution of conventional modernist epistemologies – in other words, the radical restructuring of long-established modes of ­knowledge formation …” (Soja 3).

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when civil rights movements and major new migrations altered the American cultural landscape. Winfried Fluck, for example, has argued against the use of transnationalism as rhetoric utilized to “rejuvenate” the field of American Studies, its practitioners, as well as America itself. The inclination toward what Fluck has termed “aesthetic transnationalism,”47 works to recover “a world of cultural cross-­fertilization,” that had earlier been denied in favor of heady nationalism (“New” 368). Yet accessing this plenitude of material under the guise of transnationalism has the result of rejuvenating not only the discipline, but America itself. By shedding the narrow-minded nationalism in order to become inclusive of the world beyond its borders, American culture appears to be “more creative and aesthetically much more interesting than the white wasp culture canonized by American exceptionalism” (“New” 369). However, this kind of agenda does not only cause transnationalism to lose its subversive edge, but as Fluck discerns, it is a new form of American exceptionalism. By advancing a reconceptualization of America that celebrates itself as a transnational entity with “a quasi in-built cosmopolitan dimension” (“New” 369),48 America is suggesting that to be transnational is to be American: “America becomes a world leader again, but paradoxically enough, no longer as the America of American exceptionalism, but as ‘Transnational America’” (“Theories” 70).49 Fluck’s critique of aesthetic transnationalism raises important questions about the agendas of its practitioners; even when they do not aim to regenerate America, but to transcend it, this objective is not necessarily achieved.50 47 48

49

50

Aesthetic transnationalism “describes transnational phenomena in terms of an enriching, revitalizing, sometimes almost intoxicating experience” (“A New B” 368). Fluck criticizes the proximity of transnationalism to “a neoliberalism celebration of free flow,” which overlooks interactions with “economic globalization”(371). Jay similarly recognizes the proximity between the phenomena: “… it is nearly impossible to figure out where economic globalization stops and cultural globalization begins” (23). In an earlier essay Fluck argued that transnational texts “seem best suited to put an exceptionalist idea of ‘America’ into a critical perspective and teach us about a need for mutual recognition” (“Inside” 27). The only way that a focus on “stories of dislocation by and about people … in transnational borderlands,” can be important for American studies, Fluck argues, is if they continue to serve as “models for a search for intercultural connections” which can “project new visions of equality,” and “reconstitute American ideals” (“Inside” 27). In this context, Fluck refers to Wai Chi Dimock, who reads American literature as a subset of world literature, particularly in her book, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time (2006). The concept “subset” refers to a paradigm that divides the world into modular units that are “domain-specific” and “binding” only “at one register” (“Set and Subset” 4).

24

Introduction

The ways in which transnational conceptions have altered space was noted across the social sciences and humanities; critics share in common the idea that space is constructed socially and ideologically and has consequences for identity and culture. Many have sought to understand how these spaces work. Arjun Appadurai offers a paradigm of five “global flows” using the metaphor of landscapes, designating “the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe,” and which consist of: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes (33). Mary Louise Pratt introduces “contact zones,” to delineate a “space of colonial encounters,” positioning ‘space’ in both the physical and psychological location of the encounter (6). Gloria Anzaldua focuses on the “borderlands” between Mexico and the United States, which straddle both a specific local geography and an internal state of mind. In his Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy provides a new map with which to navigate the cross-currents of African presence across the Atlantic, articulating and privileging the fluid, porous and multidirectional space between national borders, and destabilizing the concept of national culture. The perception of American literature, and of America itself, as an amalgam of voices, spaces and places that are not necessarily contingent with the geographical and political boundaries of the United States, plays out in various ways. In his discussion of the deterritorialization of American literature, Paul Giles observes that the period during which it was possible to associate America and its literature with its current geographical boundaries is limited to the period between the end of the Civil War and the rise of an aggressive global capitalism beginning in the post Carter era following 1981. In her recent study, Where is American Literature?, Caroline Levander illustrates that “American literature is not ‘in’ or reducible to any one particular location” (7). Rather, she explores the ways in which it partakes in “an unwieldy network that spreads over multiple places – some within current u.s. territory, some not” (7). Ameri­ can literature, Levander claims, has never existed as a “pure, unadulterated form,” and “is always refracted, diluted and dispersed through the perspective of its world neighbors” (7). Dimock has similarly noted that there is no correspondence between the “boundaries of the field” of American studies and the “boundaries of the nation” (“Set and Subset” 9), and views American literature as a modular unit within a larger scheme, bent on exploring “the interplay between encapsulation and its undoing: between the modularity of the subset and an infinite number of larger aggregates that might count as its e­ mbedding ‘set’” (“Set and Subset” 5). Recent changes in communications technologies (as Appadurai has similarly noted and Levander has explored) have further altered the relationship between geographical location and cultural identity.

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Spatial proximity is circumvented through telecommunication and transportation, creating new “imagined worlds” (Appadurai 330). The work of these critics suggests that space has been reconceived and detached from geography and territory; new conceptions of space accommodate additional subject positions and challenge the typical geographically bound nation-space and the confining identities they impose. Given this excess of approaches, Goyal considers whether the term transnational may be “redundant or an oxymoron, alternately too celebratory of a crossroads of cultures or too dystopian in its attack on u.s. empire” (2–3), yet she ultimately believes it has much to offer as a category of analysis of the “shifting configurations of power” that constitute what can be regarded as the United States (4). While ultimately, Goyal’s volume endorses a variety of approaches, hoping to “stretch the boundaries of the field” (5), she underscores the potential of transnationalism to “unsettle national myths of cultural purity, reveal through comparison the interconnectedness of various parts of the world and its people, and map the increasing awareness of cross cultural dialogue” (6). Goyal understands the term to be an occasion for questioning the structure of the nation as well as world systems which reach beyond nations; she urges writers to examine flows (of culture, goods, people), while revealing their histories and various overlaps, and to scrutinize internal and external borders which are often perceived as natural and immune to change (7). American Migrant Fictions partakes of this potential, as it explores how movement across physical, linguistic and cultural borders affects formal and aesthetic innovations in the novel. By envisioning ways in which spatiality becomes an expression of identity, migrant fictions create, as Goyal suggests, “another ground or another world, maybe an ocean or two, and spaces in between” (5). Furthermore, the authors do not aim to regenerate America, rather they challenge and criticize national narratives and histories both overtly and by participating in multi-cultures that are practiced and experienced across geographies. The authors, by necessity and choice, have cultivated complex identities that have the ability to affect change (social, political, aesthetic). Their individual works conceive of singular spaces that can expand in multiple directions; within this space they creatively negotiate and carve out their particular identities.

Translated Men: Linguistic Homes, Metafiction & Storytelling

In his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” Rushdie writes, “Having been borne across the world, we are translated men,” with the understanding that “something can

26

Introduction

also be gained” in translation (17). Given their inclination to span narratives across time, space and place, the narrators under discussion, as the authors who create them (and who resemble them in many ways), function as translators between cultures, as mediators and interpreters of historical and cultural data, and as shapers of perception and narrative. These narrators and writers gain their role as translators-in-between-cultures not only by their ability to straddle multiple positions simultaneously, but also by actively engaging with linguistic difference in their storytelling/writing. In her book, Lost and Found in Translation: Contemporary Ethnic Writing and the Politics of Language Diversity,51 Martha Cutter examines the diverse acts of translation experienced and undertaken by ethnic American writers. The role that translation plays in ethnic encounters between host and source texts/cultures has parallels with similar encounters experienced and explored by migrant writers, who are also ethnic. Cutter raises commonalities shared by ethnic writers-translators, which can be applied to the way the migrant writers under discussion negotiate not only between languages, but also cultures. Cutter shares my understanding that translation does not occur exclusively between languages, but holds a larger role in mediating between cultural gaps and clashes.52 She further emphasizes the ability of the translator to capture the “connotative meanings” of a text, as well as its “intertextual and extratextual worlds” (17), which can only occur when one has an intimate understanding of both the text under translation and the audience for whom it is translated. The migrant writers discussed here not only show this proficiency, but also “value writerly, active, resistant translation” (14), translation that affects change in both directions, translation that negotiates between cultures, impacting and altering all cultures in the process. Her observation that this mutual impacting “may achieve more than synthesis between cultures,” and “enable the emergence of new and unique cultural and linguistic formulations,” is relevant for the migrant writers not only linguistically and culturally, but also aesthetically, as their unique novelistic spatial formats indicate (2). Cutter elaborates upon this, suggesting that, “something new is created” by the active linguistic encounter, resulting in “a mode of language [or text] that can no longer be viewed 51

52

Cutter notes that, “the most prescient translation theorists emphasize the multiple cultural and linguistic roles of loss and gain that translation can actually perform c­ oncurrently” (15). “In the current moment,” Cutter adds, “translation is seen as a creative and interpretive act” (17). Cutter’s book offers insightful readings and analyses of twenty works of ­fiction and autobiography by ethnic writers. Translation, Cutter affirms, “is not exclusively about words – it is also a telling example of the way words and worlds can intersect, clash, and be remade” (19).

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as a ‘source’ or a ‘target’ but must be viewed as both, simultaneously” (15). This kind of “remodeling” can only take place, Cutter intimates, when both “texts,” or both cultures/audiences, are deemed valuable and are appreciated by the writers (14). Cutter further relates to linguistic diversity, implying, the more languages, codes, or dialects one has in one’s linguistic reservoir, the more effective an individual will be as a translator and storyteller and the more agency he or she will wield as a subject. Codes dialects, and tongues are amassed, blended, and transformed; the aural or oral is mingled with the written; new kinds of words are formed through fusion between different languages; and new dialects are created through commingling of tongues … multiple discursive identities are not sutured over in favor of ‘one’ voice, of a homogenous tongue (14) This point is specifically relevant for the migrant writers, whose abilities as storytellers­are enhanced by their linguistic and cultural fluency. Their texts speak in multiple voices, encompassing within them multiple subject positions and revealing suppressed histories and stories (to be further discussed below). Not unrelated then to these acts of translation, is the second seminal feature contributing to a poetics of migration, namely, the authors’ intense preoccupation with language. This preoccupation, expressed through the various narrators, mirrors the condition of the migrant author, and is threefold: the narrators (to differing extents) are self-conscious of their use of English and/ or of non-English languages; the narrators express a self-reflexive obsession with the process and act of writing and more particularly, writing well (meaning different things for different writers); the narrators are all extraordinary storytellers, and are metafictionally concerned with the multiple functions of storytelling. These three aspects of language, as they are manifested in the novels, have obvious overlaps yet will be discussed below in isolation to enhance their specificities. In fact, none of the authors gathered here have written fiction in any language other than English, and could largely be termed, in Steven Kellman’s articulation, “monolingual translinguals” (15).53 However, writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue raises numerous possibilities and questions. 53

“A taxonomy of literary translingualism would begin by differentiating between authors who have written important works in more than one language, the ambilinguals, and those who have written in only a single language but one other than their native one, the monolingual translinguals” (Kellman 15).

28

Introduction

Paying attention to linguistic incursions in languages other than English in the works of migrant writers and trying to understand what action they are performing can yield interesting results. Such incursions can occur as actual words in other languages, as unconventional or ‘clumsy’ syntax and grammar, or as word puns that may not make sense to those who are outside the specific language game. Maria Lauret has wittily called the presence of non-English words in bi- and multilingual writing “wanderwords.” In her book similarly titled, she understands such words to be “fragments of other languages [that] have wandered into American English texts,” where they “disrupt, enchant, occlude or highlight the taken-for-granted English of American literature” (1–2). These words and phrases, used by individuals who have migrated across both national and linguistic borders, are packed with cultural meanings and have the potential to perform both cultural critique as well as “wonders of poetic signification” (2). The appearance of such words in American literature, Lauret suggests, occurs when ‘other’ languages refuse to fully submit to the hegemony of the English host language, while their “spectral presence” indicates a hidden language suppressed by the national enforcement of English (3).54 While Kellman has read these words as “calques” which “betray the traces of incomplete translingualism” (10–11),55 like Lauret, I understand wanderwords to be a deliberate means with which to “import” cultural difference into migrant texts.56 It is precisely their illegibility or indeterminacy that endows them with the power to yield 54

55

56

While Lauret does not assume that English is the natural language of American literature, she writes “because English has been dominant for the past century in the United States, it is the language to beat or displace in public and particularly in literary written discourse, and in this sense any other language looks alien in its presence” (7). Furthermore, the native language “breaking through an American English overlay,” does not, Lauret posits, aim to “recover some ‘ethnic’ authenticity,” rather the words and phrases are markers of wandering, “betoken[ing] routes more than roots” (7). Lauret takes issue with the word translingual, which she regards as problematic, as it lacks the both/and of bi- or multilingualism, and implies a unidirectional transition from one language to another rather than coexistence (14). She further regards bi-and multilingualism to indicate “the ability to use two or more separate systems (lexical, grammatical, phonological, semantic) and to be able to violate, invigorate, manipulate or expurgate their difference, according to one’s will or wish, consciously or unconsciously” (p. 39 Italics in original). Werner Sollors has similarly noted “how easy it may be, especially in working with ‘mixed’ languages, to confuse language incompetence, resulting in errors that editors have to correct, and sophistication in the conscious and nuanced employment of ‘impure’ language elements for aesthetic or other purposes” (‘The Many Languages’ 79). Cutter similarly points out that ethnic writers often refuse to “make translation invisible” by creating texts

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intricate meanings, both poetic and critical. Indeed, Lauret postulates that bi- and multilingual writers, who are “interested in the poetic possibilities of language” and in the permeability of linguistic borders, aspire to take language “to its limits and beyond” and to see “its borders crossed and re-crossed” (42). In Bilingual Aesthetics and the introduction to the edited companion volume, Bilingual Games, Doris Sommer addresses the creativity57 and playfulness58 that a bilingual awareness facilitates. Tapping into a creativity that is typically stifled by the monolingual condition carries with it “aesthetic advantages of uneasiness and estrangement” (Games 6), a statement that draws attention to Sommer’s more urgent political project of bilingualism. Sommer, like Lauret, believes that bilingualism presents a counter perspective to the prevalence of standard American English and the cultural and national uniformity that it fosters, or in her words, it is “medicine for a monolithic condition.”59 Cutter, who understands translation between languages as “a form of radical bilingualism,” also stresses that it “can encourage the reader to think/speak/ read in more than one voice” (24). Bi- and Multilingualism further clarify the fact that a “one-to-one identity between language and people” no longer exists (Aesthetics xv, Games 4), and destabilizes the connection between people, language and place. Languages cross national boundaries, and connect communities across borders, while one single neighborhood can nurture several languages, defying linguistic uniformity often found in specific geographical locations. Embracing multilingualism additionally works toward establishing “a politics of reciprocal rights and responsibilities” (Games 11–12), and the authors who practice it invite their readers to participate in this larger game, as the chapters on Díaz and Fishman, in particular, will demonstrate.

57

58

59

that retain difference as a form of resistance to complete absorption into the host language (23). Bilingualism, according to Sommer, sets free a creativity stifled by monolingualism. However, Anatoliy Kharkhurin, who has researched the connections between multilingualism and creativity, is not so sure all the credit for creativity can go to language; it could, he suggests, be ascribed to the broad array of cultural settings that the multilingual has experienced. It is not the languages themselves, but the cultures where those languages have been acquired that can explain creativity (27–31). Gustavo Pérez -Firmat, a Cuban exile and poet, is critical of Doris Sommer’s concept of language games. “[T]here is no bilingualism without pain,” he writes. “For every merry bilingualist who feasts on wordplay – all roads lead to roam – there is a somber bilingual who bites his tongues …” (Tongue Ties 6). Sommer adds, the bi-and-multilingual condition functions as “an antidote for the singleminded utopian desire for fullness,” a fullness that “wishes away struggle, and with it, politics and desire, along with creativity that discomfort demands” (Games 11).

30

Introduction

In addition to wanderwords, migrant writing can also include clunky syntax and faulty grammar, as well as word puns, all of which are derivatives of translation. In his discussion on translation from a foreign language into a native one (the reverse of a migrant writing in acquired English), Walter Benjamin underscores the “natural” or “vital” connections between all languages, hypothesizing that translation has the power to express linguistic reciprocity,­which stems from the fact that languages are “interrelated in what they want to express” (“Translator” 72, 73). The translatability between languages has the potential to reveal these deep-seated connections, or “kinship,” which is not to be mistaken, however, for “likeness” (73). Significantly, such translations are a way “to expand and deepen” the native language by means of the foreign one (81). However, to understand the linguistic translations of migrant writers, translating from a native into a foreign language, it is useful to examine Benjamin’s paradigm in reverse, and to look at ways in which the acquired English language is expanded and deepened by that of the migrant languages. The writers collected here also allow their English to be affected by their native tongue, and in the process, liberate or renew the English language, making it sound different, perhaps awkward to the native ear, by retaining its foreign traces. Yet this awkwardness is an aesthetic stance, as Lauret points out in reference to migrant writing, for “grammar and syntax on occasion … can sound and look awkward … but can equally easily morph into a new and quite poetic English” (54), if one is willing to hear it with receptive ears. That is, the work the ‘awkward’ text seeks to perform is the chiseling of holes in the monolingual aesthetic. Self-consciousness towards the written word also plays out in the narrators’ obsession with the act of writing; writing well becomes a theme within the novels, and functions as a metafictional strand through which the writers grapple with the challenges and difficulties of writing – either in English as a non-native language, or in an English that endeavors to be inclusive of other linguistic and cultural presences. Hemon’s Brik strives to prove his value to his bread-winning American wife by becoming an acclaimed American writer and the novel is occupied with how he might achieve this feat; for Díaz’s Oscar, writing is a destiny; he writes frantically, proclaiming to become “the Dominican Tolkien,” yet his manuscripts are withheld, lost, inaccessible, and his story is “dictated” by Yunior, the narrator (192); Fishman’s Slava, eager to shed his Russian style, labors to unravel the secret ingredients that go into articles published in an acclaimed journal, only to revert to his old style of writing; Chandra’s narrator Sanjay argues for the legitimacy of Indian narrative aesthetics within a colonial worldview which privileges Aristotelian logic; while Tran reverts to the graphic medium suggesting a partial failure of words.

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The third linguistic feature common to the migrant writers discussed here, is their creation of narrators who double as storytellers, drawing attention to the very art of storytelling as they struggle with the responsibilities, limitations and ethics that storytelling entails. Stories, or in Ernest Renan’s formulation, “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” have been understood to be the cohesive glue uniting communities and nations. The telling of stories creates a communal or national narrative, yet as Renan has shown, these narratives are also acts of erasure, for nations are generally founded on acts of violence that are then forgotten or ‘suppressed’ by the national narrative: “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation” (N/A). Indeed, research into the historical past often threatens to endanger national consensus by the revelation of suppressed stories, or ‘truths.’ In his book, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, MichelRolph Trouillot examines historical production in an attempt to understand “how history works” (25).60 He points to “the overlap between history as a social process and history as knowledge,” insofar as people are both part of the sociohistorical process as well as engaged in constructing narratives about it (24). Therefore, even facts are never neutral: “First, facts are never meaningless; indeed they become facts only because they matter in some sense, however minimal. Second, facts are not created equal; the production of traces is always also the creation of silences” (29). Silences, or erasure, are part of the historical production not only at the moment of fact creation, but also at the moment of their assembly (creating the archive), their retrieval (making narratives) and in the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance) (25). Unearthing these silences results in the creation of new, often counter, narratives, which represent the past from the vantage point of their current context. “The crux of the matter,” Trouillot says, “is the here and now, the relations between the events described and their public representation in a specific historical context. These relations debunk the myth of The Past as a fixed reality and the related view of knowledge as a fixed content” (147). ­Trouillot therefore does not locate historical authenticity in fact, but in the nature of our present relation to the past. Alongside professional historians, Trouillot identifies artisans, including fiction writers, as participators in the historical process, whose role is to “augment, deflect, or reorganize the work of the professionals” (25). The writers considered here can be seen as part of this process, as they often challenge the silences inscribed within past historical narratives, with the assistance of 60

He focuses on the Haitian revolution, 1791–1804.

32

Introduction

narrators who are avid storytellers. Storytelling therefore functions as a tool employed to undermine national myths and hegemonic narratives, to critique American imperialism, xenophobia and discriminatory practices, alongside those of their birth cultures. The narrators raise questions concerning the function and power of stories and storytelling more generally, treading a fine line between fact and fiction, leaving it to their audiences to determine the veracity, virtue or value of their stories vis-à-vis official histories (of the war in Vietnam, of Trujillo’s dr, of Holocaust testimonials, of the war in Sarajevo, of the colonial history in India). The presence of a storyteller, a figure that challenges hegemony and power within the novel, tells us something about the role novels and their authors play in current culture. In his essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov” (1936), Walter Benjamin lamented the decline of storytelling (“the art of storytelling is coming to an end”), wrought according to him by the decrease in the communicability of experience on the one hand (“experience has fallen in value,” while “information” is on the rise),61 and the ascent of the novel, on the other. Storytelling is conceived as a communal activity, which draws on “experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth,” and later communicated in the form of a counsel for the listener, whose “interest in retaining what he has been told” provides sustenance for the storyteller (84, 86, 96). The novel, on the other hand, is a product of the “solitary individual,” who “is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others” (87). The crowning deficiency of the novel with regard to storytelling lies in the fact that it was jealously consumed and devoured by the bourgeois reader in isolation and privacy (99). Benjamin found other distinctions between storytelling and the novel,62 yet ultimately he claims that what “distinguishes [the novel] from storytelling 61

62

Benjamin identifies a new form of communication, namely information, “which is incompatible with storytelling,” for a story “does not expend itself” like information, “[i] t preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time … free from explanation” (88, 90, 89). The novel also faced a “crisis” in the age of information. Benjamin ultimately regarded the novel not only as an essentially different mode of communication, but also as having a different recourse to memory: “the perpetuating remembrance of the novelist” is “contrasted with the short-lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is dedicated to one hero, one odyssey, one battle; the second to many diffuse ­occurrences” (97 italics in the original). He also discusses the grand center around which the novel gravitates, which is the “meaning of life,” versus that of the story, which is the “moral of the story,” revealing thereby their “totally different historical co-ordinates,” which also demonstrates the centrality of the ‘one-ness’ or self-centeredness he alluded to (98).

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in particular,” and “differentiates [it] from all other forms of prose literature – the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella – is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it” (87). In short, the novel and storytelling are, according to Benjamin, mutually exclusive. Around the same time that Benjamin was lamenting the death of storytelling, Mikhail Bakhtin was discovering the voice of the storyteller within novels (Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 1929). He introduced the terms ‘polyphony’ and ‘dialogism,’ which he later expanded into his well-known formulation ‘heteroglossia.’ Polyphony designates a “plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses,” which are not “illuminated by a single authorial consciousness” (6). Since the characters are not bound by authorial discourse, but are “also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse,” they escape the fate of “the usual objectified image of a hero in the traditional novel” that Benjamin alluded to (7). Furthermore, these instances of individual consciousness interact with each other, independent of an overarching single consciousness (that of the author), creating a built in “dialogical opposition” – between voices, ideologies, world views – an opposition that cannot be reconciled, for no single position is privileged over the other, hinting at the problem of the notion of a single ‘truth,’ suggesting rather a plurality of competing truths (18). Heteroglossia combines the two previous terms, additionally emphasizing that other perspectives, languages and voices always inform even the single perspective; any one voice always encompasses multiple voices, for the language we use is always influenced by external encounters with other languages (as suggested above), traditions and persons. Having established the plurality of voices, Bakhtin addresses the narrator’s “orientation towards oral speech,” or “oral form of narration,” namely “skaz” (191). Skaz is introduced, he suggests, “for the sake of someone else’s voice, a voice socially distinct, carrying with it precisely those points of view and evaluations necessary to the author. What is introduced here, in fact, is a storyteller” (192). Bakhtin emphasizes that “a storyteller, after all, is not a literary person; he belongs in most cases to the lower social strata, to the common people … and he brings with him oral speech” (192). Skaz is undertaken therefore not merely for the sake of “orientation toward oral speech,” but also and in particular for “an orientation towards another person’s discourse,” that is, it enables the emergence of other voices and points of view. Bakhtin clearly identifies a role and a possibility for storytelling within the polyphonic dialogic novel, of which these migrant novels partake. The novels implement the fractured and multi-perspectival point of view; the storyteller plays a major role in introducing an alternate point of view, which seeks to undermine solitary truths and displace overarching national narratives.

34

Introduction

In Hemon’s novel, for example, Brik retells the story of an early twentieth century migrant to America, critiquing discourses of xenophobia and nationalism, as he ponders the inner logic of storytelling, while simultaneously being duped by his photographer friend’s fervent storytelling. Díaz’s narrator, Yunior, is wary of the power that comes with storytelling, which he likens to that of a dictator, as he tells alternative stories that aim to undermine the national narrative established by Trujillo. Through the precarious storytelling of his narrator, Slava, Fishman raises ethical conundrums as he considers the interplay between fact, fiction and historical justice. Tran’s storytelling sutures deep family ruptures while challenging hegemonic narratives wielded by nations. Chandra’s novel recasts colonial Indian history, while simultaneously dealing with questions of originality and storytelling vis-à-vis the great Indian epics. The alternative stories and the stories-within-stories encountered in the novels serve to probe connections and disruptions between past and present, truth and truthfulness, fact and fiction, originality and repetition, while ultimately questioning the power of language – and of those who wield it – to shape and distort, to form and transform. The novels additionally explore the relationship between storytellers and their audiences. Primarily, the narrators imagine an implied reader, or implied readers: sometimes explicitly as in the case of Vikram Chandra’s monkey narrator who frets over how to keep his mixed audience entertained, or in the case of Junot Díaz’s narrator who admonishes potential readers for not being acquainted with the history of the American occupation of the Dominican Republic; and other times implicitly insofar as narrators provide or fail to provide literal or cultural translation for words, stories or actions, often leaving readers in the lurch, or sending them to online reading companions, dictionaries or encyclopedias. This attention to audience stems from the writers’ awareness of its diverse nature, of the varied readers who will engage with their words.

Chapters: Rationale and Preview

The progression of chapters follows a visual and spatial logic, moving from the concrete to the abstract while analyzing the ways in which the visual and spatial aesthetic influence the form and stance of each novel. The book opens with Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008), which incorporates actual photographs into the text. As tangible configurations of space they endorse an ontological status that differs from that of words. In this capacity, photographs create alternative spaces within the narrative that reflect upon spaces of consciousness that open within the verbal text. The photographs initiate a

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double storyline, in which the verbal and the visual intertwine, reflect upon and undercut one another, suggestive of the dual or multiple perspectives of the migrant. The doubleness apparent in the text-image interplay is echoed throughout the structure of the novel, which portrays a dual time frame, divided between early twentieth century and post 9/11 twenty first century. Subsumed within the fractured time frame is the traversing of the boundaries of fact and fiction, explored through the alternate storylines, which blend historical anecdote with fictional accounts, creating further parallels and doubles between narrator and subject. The doubleness threaded throughout the novel exposes uncomfortable similarities between racist attitudes in the past and present, which prevail in the United States as well as in Europe. This awareness comes with a responsibility to ascertain that history, and the history of xenophobia in particular, does not repeat itself indefinitely. The second chapter engages with GB Tran’s graphic memoir, Vietnamerica (2011), which, like Hemon’s novel, utilizes images to bring the past and present into dialogue. The images, arranged within the highly complex structure of comics, work to reunite a family disrupted by war. Comics eschew linearity and two-dimensionality by employing techniques that have the effect of conflating, bridging, expanding, condensing and intensifying space and time, which is in dialogue with the ways in which Hemon weaves photographic images into his narrative. Tran employs the inherent spatial and temporal features of the genre, as well as its visual and verbal interplay, tampering with time (past and present) and space (historical, geographical, material), to convey not merely his family’s dispersal, but also its cohesion. He further creates a multi-vocal tale by incorporating the voices of his extended family into the tale, facilitating the difficult task of recalling a traumatic, suppressed past. In the third chapter, the graphic novel is taken to a more abstract realm in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Using the metaphor of the ‘shape-shifter’ (“baká”) as a guiding theme, the chapter illustrates the ways in which Díaz implements the format of comics specifically, and of the speculative genres of sci-fi and fantasy more generally, to interrogate the troubled spaces between the United States and the Dominican Republic. Characterized by time travel, transformation and the supernatural, the genres facilitate the correspondence between the ‘shifting shapes’ of its characters, and the ‘shifting of the shape’ of the novel, which mimics both temporal and spatial elements typical of comics, to play havoc with time, space and the notion of historical truth. In ways both similar to and different from Tran’s Vietnamerica, Díaz’s novel relies upon other voices to recall a traumatic past, which challenges the Dominican national narrative by confronting silences and erasures. Díaz creates not only an alternative story, but also an alternate and empowering space.

36

Introduction

If Díaz explores the porous boundaries between the United States and the Dominican Republic, the fourth chapter examines alternative and empowering spaces that open up between the New York boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn in Boris Fishman’s novel, A Replacement Life (2014). Complicating the dichotomous rift between the place of origin (“there”) and the place of arrival (“here”), the narrator’s American present is split into the immigrant neighborhood he abandons for the promise of the American metropolis. The divide is replicated in the mta subway map evoked in the novel, which indicates the novel’s underlying cartographic awareness. As the protagonist yields to the labyrinthine underground of the subway, he undermines the spatial hegemony of the map, to establish a more intricate spatial awareness, which is related to the complicated process of storytelling and its tenuous connections to language, memory, past and truth. The fifth and final chapter picks up on the idea of the labyrinth, which is not located in the physical world, but rather, in the maze-like narrative technique employed by Vikram Chandra in his novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995). Chandra introduces spatiality into the novel by implementing the narrative technique of embedded and nested stories within stories, which evokes the great Indian epics. His elaborate across-borders Indian American story is derived thematically and structurally from the Mahabharata and the Ramayana and weaves a multilayered narrative web. Notably, the epics also form a major intertext for classic Hindi cinema; Chandra’s retelling of the epics becomes filmic by exuding a glossy aura and by evoking Bollywood spectacle with the effect of blurring the boundary between the real and the reel. Chandra participates in the ritual of retelling the classic epics in a transnational way by interweaving classic themes and strategies with contemporary concerns and genres, while evoking the flamboyance of Bollywood film through words, style and technique. The novel is an act of translation and mediation between India and the West, past and present, texts and contexts, narrative and film. Beyond their concern with space, their metafictional preoccupation with storytelling, and their playfulness with language, the novels all end with the promise of a beginning: Hemon’s narrator sits down at the end of the novel to write the very text we have just finished reading; Tran’s memoir of family archeology ends at the moment his discovery of his family history, which we have just read, begins; Díaz’s narrator prepares for the day Oscar’s niece will inquire about him, and take his story onward, rather than repeat it; Fishman’s novel ends in the narrator’s coming to terms with his grandmother’s death, which occurs in the opening of the novel; Chandra’s novel ends with the initiation of a new narrator, whose storytelling promises the ongoing cycle of life

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itself. The circular dimension of these narratives illuminates the idea that storytelling is an ongoing process and that there is no final version to any story. Speaking of literary renewal and his determination to create literature that would fully express the experience of the migrant condition, Salman Rushdie prioritizes the novel as a harbinger of innovation and change: “I do not believe that novels are trivial matters. The ones I care most about are those which attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas, those that attempt to do what the word novel seems to insist upon: to see the world anew” (“In Good Faith” 393). Splicing traditions and cultures, the novels discussed here encompass a variety of mediums, techniques, forms, voices, languages and spaces. Presenting “a migrant’s-eye view of the world,” they live up to Rushdie’s notion of newness.

Chapter 1

Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory: Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Project One wants to break free of the past: rightly because nothing at all can live in its shadow, and because there will be no end to the terror as long as guilt and violence are repaid with guilt and violence; wrongly, because the past that one would like to evade is still very much alive theodor adorno 1

…

With their memories permanently on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double. andre aciman 2

⸪ As Vladimir Brik, narrator of Aleksandar Hemon’s novel, The Lazarus Project (2008),3 and his photographer friend, Ahmed Rora Halilbašić, embark on a journey to post-Soviet East Europe to find the “concrete-past” (22)4 of an early twentieth century Jewish immigrant from Kishinev (now Chisinau), Brik reflects that “It was never in my nature to take a straight path anywhere” (65). Their journey begins therefore in Lviv (formerly Lvov), where, sitting in the back of a cab, Brik observes that they “progressed and then regressed through the city,” their indirect path corresponding with “a gray swirl around [the driver’s] bald spot, not unlike a satellite picture of a hurricane” (67). The “gray swirl,” a representation of a spiral, is a two-directional kinetic image that can be read either from outside inward, or alternately from inside o­ utward, and 1 “The Meaning of Working Through the Past,” 89. 2 Letters of Transit, “Permanent Transients,” 13. 3 Henceforth lp. 4 This phrase refers to fake relics of concrete marketed by Rora as “replicas” of the Berlin wall, in a story he relates to Brik, and is indicative of Hemon’s linguistic wordplay in the novel. See pages 21–22. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_003

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e­ ncapsulates the rhythm of the novel: constant movement that is not only surface (back-and-forth) but is also inward/outward, suggestive of a spatial depth and consciousness opened up by the visual dimension (which is evoked here verbally). The stormy inward/outward potential of the “grey swirl” initially threatens to become a hazardous vortex, drawing Brik into a state of vertiginous confusion, but eventually leads outward, back to an altered sense of coherence. The labyrinthine-like ‘grey swirl’ connects Brik’s wanderings with those of Boris Fishman’s Slava in the New York subway, and is in dialogue with Vikram Chandra’s maze-like narrative technique, in which characters and readers alike get lost. Brik expresses a “wish” that Rora photograph the swirl. Yet, claiming that “there was not enough light,” the image remains un-photographed (67). While this could be attributed to technical considerations, it is also suggestive of a tension between the verbal and the visual realms; the visual swirl is created verbally, paralleling actual photographic images that will have no exact verbal echo in the narrative.5 The verbal-visual tension is explored in great detail in the novel, which includes twenty-three photographic reproductions. An interpretive imperative towards photography is inscribed into the fabric of the novel: when on their flight from Chicago to Europe Brik and Rora observe a group of American soldiers en-route to Iraq, Brik says, “Rora took a picture of a row of soldiers sleeping with their blankets over their heads. They looked like ghosts to me, like hostages to Rora” (66). The reader can only imagine this image, which is not reproduced in the novel, and corroborates Brik’s reflection on the fluidity and subjectivity of meaning. The evoked image also introduces the figure of the ghost, who will, as ghosts do, appear and reappear throughout the novel. The inclusion of photography within the narrative structure initiates a dual – verbal and visual – storyline and is indicative of a consciousness that embodies multiple perspectives, typical to the migrant. Photographs, interspersed into the narrative, can rupture its flow, insofar as rupture, or the “punctum” as Roland Barthes has termed it, is an inherent quality of the medium.6 Distinct from narrative, photographs rupture the narrative by means of their unique ontological status: they embody time past not only in their subject matter (as a memory overload, as Aciman puts it), but also inherently, as a confined

5 Some photographs reproduced in the work are verbally described in the narrative, while ­others are not, just as some of the photographic images verbally described are not visually represented within its pages. 6 Roland Barthes defines the punctum as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Camera Lucida 27). This will be discussed in further detail below.

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s­ egment of space. As such, they have the power to introduce into the linearity of the narrative entirely ‘other’ spatial and temporal dimensions. The inclusion of photographs within the narrative therefore partakes of its aesthetic project of doubleness, illustrating the central feature of a “migratory aesthetics,” as Sam Durrant and Catherine M. Lord articulate, namely, the “experiences of transition as well as the transition of experience itself into new modalities, new art work, new ways of being” (12).7 The experience of doubleness informs the aesthetic project of the novel, in which the verbal-visual doubleness is but one feature. Hemon further explores the doubleness of the migratory consciousness and aesthetics through the creation of a dual time frame, divided between the early twentieth century (the historical story of Lazarus Averbuch as imagined and narrated by Vladimir Brik) and the post-9/11 moment (the fictional story of Vladimir Brik, as he researches Lazarus Averbuch’s history). The split time frame is echoed in the structure of the novel, which is divided into alternating chapters, ‘historical’ chapters relating Lazarus’s life, death, and its aftermath, and contemporary chapters, narrating Brik’s experiences traveling in East ­Europe while researching Lazarus’s past. The history of Lazarus’s death, which has been explored in detail by Walter Roth and Joe Kraus in The Accidental Anarchist, is full of lacunas. Lazarus was a nineteen year-old Jewish man who migrated from Europe to Chicago in 1907, in the aftermath of the Kishinev Pogrom (1903). On March 2, 1908, for reasons unknown till this day, Lazarus went to the home of George Shippy, the Chief of Police of Chicago, where he was fatally shot seven times. In a report given on the same day, Shippy labels Lazarus as a dangerous anarchist, claiming to have been stabbed by him. He further testified that after the stabbing Lazarus pulled out a revolver and shot his son and bodyguard who arrived on the scene. Consequently, Shippy drew his own revolver and shot Lazarus. The local media largely accepted the police version and portrayed Lazarus as a vicious criminal.8 However, the Jewish press disputed the veracity of this version, unearthing discrepancies in Shippy’s account and raising the 7 For a fuller discussion of the aesthetics, see introduction. 8 The harsh response to anarchists in early twentieth century is influenced by the Haymarket Massacre (1886), in which anarchists were held responsible for a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration in which seven police officers were killed as well as at least four civilians. While eight anarchists were accused of the events and received death penalties, in 1893, the new governor of Illinois pardoned the four remaining prisoners (four were hanged and one committed suicide), and criticized the trial. Public fear was also fueled by the anarchist Emma Goldman’s plans for a speaking tour in Chicago.

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possibility that Lazarus was the innocent victim of a deep-seated xenophobia.9 The obscurity of the incident is conveyed by the opening lines of the novel: “Time and place are the only things I am certain of: March 2, 1908. Beyond that is the haze of history and pain, and now I plunge: …” (1). Hemon, and his narrator Brik, attempt to resurrect Lazarus by reimagining his life and the scene of his death, and by regarding him as the beloved brother of Olga, who is devastated by his death.10 Brik’s journey in search of Lazarus’s origins forms the contemporary narrative. Brik, a native of Sarajevo who has lived in the United States since the outbreak of war in former Yugoslavia, receives a grant (by playing his migrant identity to the satisfaction of his American donors) to write a novel about Lazarus Averbuch. Trying to locate traces of the historical Chicago of Lazarus’s time, Brik and Rora discover that “Nothing from the days of Lazarus survived” (44). The Jewish ghetto gave way to modern development, while Shippy’s former address vanished, as the neighborhood is taken over by “old ladies with blown-dry remnants of hair walk[ing] toy dogs” and “slim blondes [striding] in pursuit of physiological happiness” (45). Brik realizes that in order to flesh out Lazrus’s story, to make it more than “a costumed parade of paper cutouts” (41), he must “follow Lazarus all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, to the time before America” (46). As different as Lazarus’s Chicago is from that of Brik, they are united by the persistence of xenophobia, whether of the nativist stream that dominated the early twentieth century, or the Islamophobia that permeates Brik’s post-9/11 9

10

For media coverage see Chapters 2 and 4 in Roth and Kraus. Chapter 4 shows that the left-wing papers succeeded in putting “a dent in the official story,” yet, “It would require more time before anyone thought to question the firmament of the official story: to suggest that Lazarus Averbuch might have been an accidental victim rather than someone killed through the culmination of his own psychotic or social fury” (57). Further critique came from Emma Goldman four days after Lazarus’s death, in the form of “A Letter to the Public of Chicago,” in the name of the anarchist federation, challenging many of the police reports, and revealing inconsistencies and contradictions (Goldman 281–83). The coincidence of the name is fortunate, evoking the resurrection of Lazarus by Christ, The Gospel of John, 11 (1–44): “And when he thus had spoken, he cried with a loud voice, Lazarus, come forth. And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with rags, and his face was covered with a cloth. Jesus saith unto them, Loose him and let him go.” Like his namesake, Lazarus Averbuch also refuses to remain buried, as Hemon has his body disappear from Potter’s Field, to resurface with parts missing (218–21). However, there is controversy about the name. According to Roth and Kraus, his sister Olga insisted that his name in English was Jeremiah or Harry, however the media largely referred to him as Lazarus (193).

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Chicago. Brik perceives that “[t]he war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror” (42). Significantly, the photographer Rora, who is a central character, is a descendant of an old merchant Muslim family from the Baš Čaršija (the old city of Sarajevo); his presence alongside Lazarus (Jewish) and Brik (Christian) creates a mosaic of backgrounds and works as a counterbalance to the implied xenophobic and nationalist atmosphere, which serves as a catalyst for Brik’s investigation into the life of Lazarus. The double time frame initiates a traversing of the boundaries of fact and fiction explored through the alternate storylines, which blend historical anecdote (Lazarus Averbuch’s reimagined history) with fictional accounts (Brik’s journey), which parallels Hemon’s actual journey in research of Lazarus. The author, Hemon, shares many biographical details with his narrator, Brik, blurring the clear boundaries between fiction and life narrative, as articulated by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. This obscurity is in accord with and contributes to the overall blurring of fact and fiction in the novel. Both are natives of Sarajevo and of Ukrainian Christian origin (yet agnostic); both were stranded in America when war broke out in former Yugoslavia and work as teachers of English to foreign students; both write a column in a local paper, marry American women, and live in Chicago.11 Yet most pertinently, in a meta-fictional twist, both author and narrator are researching and writing a story about the historical figure Lazarus Averbuch. Brik receives a grant to write his book, which parallels Hemon’s reception of the MacArthur fellowship in support of writing The Lazarus Project. Yet, while the bulk of the novel deals with Brik’s travels and research, we are in fact already reading the very novel that he allegedly aspires to write. This creates an Escher effect: what appears at first glance to be a coherent picture, when looked at closely, proves to be askew – spatially illogical, irrational, and impossible to fully comprehend. This cyclic and often labyrinth-like dynamic resonates with the migratory, transient aspect of the novel. Subsumed within the fractured author/narrator position is a meta-­ fictional query, the story-about-writing-a-story, which goes to the very heart of 11

Another way in which Hemon weaves the stories together is by naming characters in the two storylines with similar names. Schuettler is the name for the Assistant Chief of Police investigating Lazarus’s case, as well as the name of the donors of Brik’s grant; Miller is the name of the investigative reporter for the Chicago Tribune, as well as the American reporter in Sarajevo in the stories of Rora; Brik is the name of Lazarus’s English teacher, and Brik in the contemporary story is an English teacher. Additionally, Brik constantly attempts to embody Lazarus’s perspective and imagine his thoughts, as for example here: “Everybody knew the name of their crossing ship. Lazarus’s was Francesca; he imagined her long and wide and graceful, smelling of salt, sun, and gulls” (176).

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s­ torytelling, representation, and their relation to ‘truth.’ Striving to get to the core of what constitutes a good story, Brik’s narrative is an ongoing discourse on the nature of storytelling. Unlike Americans, whom he perceives as craving truthfulness in a story, Brik adheres to the Bosnian way of storytelling, valuing a story based on its ability to fascinate and on its loyalty to its own inner logic, regardless of its claim to verisimilitude; when Sarajevans told stories, “Disbelief was permanently suspended, for nobody expected truth or information, just the pleasure of being in the story” (102–03). Brik’s reflection on the different attitudes toward storytelling alludes to the seductive power of stories, to the possibility of being ensnared by them, and to the different attitudes toward truth they seek to convey. He lets himself be mesmerized by the many stories Rora tells him, mostly about the war in Sarajevo, while he is fully aware that taking Rora’s words at face value meant he “could be featured as a dupe in one of his future stories” (29). In the closing pages of the novel, Brik is confronted with the idea that Rora’s stories are elaborately woven fictions, albeit based on real characters and events. This in turn reflects on the credibility of Hemon’s novel. Despite its reliance on historical anecdote, factual truth is not a priority within The Lazarus Project. Truth, insofar as it is to be found, exists between the lines, just as it does in Rora’s stories, which reveal a truth about war-torn Sarajevo and about human nature in war zones more generally. Andrew Wachtel has shown that Hemon’s approach to storytelling is influenced by Yugoslavian author Danilo Kiš and is most apparent in their joint “attitude to history in general and historical truth in particular” (137).12 Like Kiš, Hemon deliberately weaves fact and fiction, “as if he were a historian relating the events of actual lives rather than a novelist” (Wachtel 137); like Kiš, he attempts to capture “historical truth … not in traditional historical narratives” but rather in “fictional mystifications” often involving “imagined intermediaries and the narrator’s meta-literary commentary” (Wachtel 139). Whether the facts of Lazarus’s story are entirely accurate seems inconsequential for the main point, namely, that racist attitudes underlie his death, and that those attitudes persist into the twenty-first century. Finally, underlying all the doubles in Hemon’s novel is a linguistic doubleness, which is notable in what Andre Aciman has called “an accent” 12

Hemon readily acknowledges Kiš’s influence: “I am not the only one who sees Kiš as my teacher – an entire generation of young writers … saw in Kiš an example of how morality could overcome the darkness of nationalist cultures. But even so, whenever I am asked whose writer Kiš is, the only legitimate, intelligent answer is, mine” (Wachtel 145; italics in original). As cited in Wachtel, who quotes from “Čiji je pisac Danilo Kiš,” Sarajevske sveske 8–9 [2005]: 11.

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­(“Permanent Transients” 11). Aciman defines this accent, as “a particular cadence in a language that is never quite just English but not anything else either,” and is born from “the lag between two cultures, two languages” (11). This lag or gap becomes for Aciman a “space where you let go of one identity, [and] invent another,” in an act of doubling which has the effect of making you “more than one person though never quite two” (11; emphasis added). Notably, Aciman evokes space when articulating the linguistic lag, a space of duplication or multiplication, which is manifested in Hemon’s novel through the many doubles. Hemon echoes the idea of doubleness when he describes, in conversation with Jenifer Berman, how the “ontological crisis” he faced when coming to the United States, manifested in “a gap between what [he] wanted to say and what [he] was saying” (Bomb). Ultimately Hemon felt liberated by the gap, which unmoored him from a “unified, monolithic self,” altering his encounter with the world (Bomb). He elaborates this point in conversation with Rebekah Murrell, saying that “being a bilingual and bicultural writer is related to a particular state of mind … when language or thought or literature is produced in the overlapping space between two languages or two cultures or two frames of mind, it is not unlike having an extra dimension in your head” (pen Atlas, emphasis added). More recently, in his essay titled, “Pathologically Bilingual,” Hemon relates to the “space” of language in a bi- or multilingual mind as being “doubly and thickly populated, with at least twice as much as there can be in a monolingual mind … where all the present languages overlap and interact.” The “extra dimension” or “overlapping space” is most apparent in Hemon’s often astonishing employment of figurative language, which, as Sophie Harrison has noted, “animat[es] the inanimate” and “reimagin[es] the commonplace” (Guardian). Hemon harnesses discrepant objects, images and ideas that startle the reader in to seeing the world differently. In conversation with Farhad Mirza, Hemon states that, “What writing and literature can and ought to do is release dormant possibilities of language, revive dead (or un-dead) metaphors and dismantle and reassemble clichés, expose lazy thinking and attack the comforts of treating the world as a familiar place” (Dawn). Hemon’s similes and metaphors achieve this work admirably, as is apparent for example in Brik’s reimagining of Lazarus’s feelings after the pogrom in Kishinev: “The down from torn pillows floating, like souls, through the fog of what had just happened. The air reeking of sweat and blood, of smashed furniture and shards of glass, of spilled food and fear” (lp 244). The unimaginable dimension of the events is denoted through the word ‘fog’; violence and death materialize through the slow downward motion of the feathers; the air smells not only of olfactory things, but also of those that are not, causing the “shards of glass” to pierce us.

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Hemon further creates puns and witticisms, as for example when fake bricks become “concrete history” (22), when he mistakes a can of sardines for a can of SADNESS (73), when a Ford Focus becomes a Ford Feces (102). These word puns or witticisms are indicative of a consciousness that does not take the word at face value, but rather thoroughly dismantles it. In his meditation on The Writer as Migrant, the Chinese American novelist Ha Jin examines similar “verbal feats” suggesting they are “unique to a nonnative speaker who has an alien perspective on English” (51). The word games of migrant writers “are of a different order, more exciting and more original” than other words games; they take “the most common features of [the writer’s] adopted language” and through “misuse and distortion of words and grammar,” create it anew (51–52). Maria Lauret is in agreement that “writing with a foreign accent … twist[s] the familiar into new shapes” (122). In light of his use of figurative language, linguistic witticisms and puns, Hemon has often been compared to the most famous multilingual writer in the American canon of the twentieth century, Vladimir Nabokov, who started to write in English one year before he migrated to America, at the age of 41.13 Although one of his “guiding light[s],” Hemon has suggested that such a comparison is “unfair to Nabokov” primarily due to Nabokov’s vast literary achievements, but also because Nabokov was fluent in English from childhood (pen Atlas). While Nabokov was “bilingual as a baby” (Strong Opinions 11), nonetheless his “complete switch from Russian prose to English prose,” he later recalled, “was exceedingly painful – like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion” (Strong Opinions 75). He laments, “My private tragedy … is that I had to abandon my natural language, my natural idiom, my rich, infinitely rich and docile Russian tongue, for a second-rate brand of English” (Strong Opinions 23). Even though Nabokov mastered English and surpassed native speakers in his linguistic creativity, he claims that English was but “a wistful standby for Russian” (Strong Opinions 118). Hemon, as suggested above, feels no such lament. Beyond gaining another dimension, Hemon also regards English as the language most suitable for the expression of his new thoughts and experiences; Bosnian which “was being rapidly reshaped by violent history” and was being used by people “under circumstances and conditions entirely different from what I was going through” (“Pathologically”) could no longer serve as a sufficient expressive tool for Hemon.

13

After writing eight novels in Russian, Nabokov wrote his first novel in English in 1939 (The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). He migrated to America in 1940, after which he wrote four more novels in English, as well as an autobiography and scientific papers on the taxonomy of butterflies (Strong Opinions 12).

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Hemon however does import occasional words from his native Bosnian into the English text (as well as words in Yiddish, German and Russian), or grafts what Maria Lauret has termed “wanderwords” into his text,14 since, he claims, some words cannot be translated or even approximated. In a conversation with Ena Selimović, he suggests that this strategy has a political purpose of keeping the concept of language in “constant circulation,” and works to contest the purity of “national language” (Balkanist). In this Hemon recalls Doris Sommer’s argument in Bilingual Games, that bilingualism is “medicine for a monolithic condition” (11), and Lauret’s claim that, “accented English can be seen as an act of creative nonconformity intended to reflect a difference” (12). Hemon implements Yiddish words to make the Chicago in which Lazarus and Olga lived more vivid. A Yiddish word that appears multiple times in the novel is politsyant, or in another form, politsey. The police enforce laws that discriminate against Jews, which harm rather than protect, making the word sound particularly condemning. The word is used in reference to the policemen in America and Kishinev alike, suggesting their similar anti-Semitic attitudes and deflating the idea of a more pluralistic America. Additional ­Yiddish words such as Shvants (171), Rebbe (171), Shmegege (171), Khaloymes (172), ­Monkalb (223) and Shiva (223) resurrect the multilingual America of the early twentieth century, however their sound also brings the discriminated against Jewish otherness to the surface. Rora and Brik evoke the Bosnian language through their recollections, and also speak Bosnian or a combination of Serbo-Croatian, and once even Russian, to locals they encounter on their journey. For example, Hemon prefers the word “kafana” to ‘bistro,’ which evokes a New York establishment rather than a local Bosnian joint; turning to a speeding driver with the epithet “jarane” illustrates a familiarity that the word ‘dude’ would have eradicated (262); Rora says “Bjezi” to a young woman just saved from the clutches of a pimp, which translated to ‘scram,’ would have sounded offensive and inappropriate. Bosnian is most strongly evoked through a children’s nursery rhyme (about a duck swimming across a river with a letter on his head) that Rora recollects having sung in Medjugorje, under cover as a Catholic Croat, to a group of tourists from Indianapolis (37). He passed the song off as a prayer by inserting “Isus Krist” into the lyrics twice (38). This anecdote is critical of the monolingual ear (echoed in the strange words on the page), and makes a parody of tourists and religion alike (Rora’s motivation is a tip). The song also evokes childhood memories for Brik, who recalls its perplexing lyrics, which raise the question of the perplexity of language in general, and of storytelling more specifically. 14

For a more comprehensive discussion of wanderwords, see introduction.

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Photographic Spaces

Photography, as Roland Barthes has shown, is a medium and aesthetic subsuming within it loss and rupture. By recognizing the photographic reference as the founding order of photography, Barthes finds that every photograph inevitably represents something “that-has-been” (Camera 77), a moment that has already been deferred, and hence, is by definition an articulation of loss. Moreover, Barthes famously defines the punctum as “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)” (Camera 27).15 However, in his “palinode” Barthes redefines the punctum, emphasizing its temporal impact: “I know that there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the ‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time” (Camera 96). Barthes’s new punctum is a function of the simultaneity of ‘that-has-been’ with the present moment, of the superimposition of “the here and the formerly,” which inevitably distorts and condenses time. As a result, the viewer experiences a “vertigo of time defeated,” in which the present moment becomes a “temporal anteriority,” already saturated with loss (Camera 97, “Rhetoric” 278). Insofar as photography embodies loss and conflates time and space, it is an apt device with which to represent the migrant consciousness. While Barthes focuses on the temporal complexities of photographic images as experienced in space, Walter Benjamin focuses on the spatial qualities of the image as presented in time. Conceived as a pure timeless instant, the photograph represents the concept of eternity more adequately than the actual flow of time from which it was wrenched. As such, the timeless instant has the capacity to open spatial dimensions not accessible in the regular temporal sequence. The photograph, a space containing an eternal instant, enfolds within its “optical unconscious” both the now and its recollection.16 At the same time, “a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye,” pointing to a saturated visual excess beyond normal perception, which becomes accessible through contemplation of the image (“Work of Art” 230). Shawn Michelle Smith points out that the optical unconscious “also underscores the sense that we inhabit a world only ever partially perceived,” and that while “photography shows us more, it also shows us how much we don’t see, how much of ordinary seeing is blind” (Edge of Sight 4). Photographs therefore become doubly important for revealing the underside of so-called ‘reality’ – of 15 16

The punctum is also described as a “sting, speck, cut, little hole – and also a cast of the dice” (Barthes, Camera 27). Benjamin regarded this nature as “a space held together unconsciously,” terming it an “optical unconscious” (“Short History” 203).

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what is lurking, but can only, or more readily, be seen in an image. The photographic space can reveal veiled attitudes, in our case towards migrant others, while distorted spatial perceptions complement a migratory consciousness, making the photograph a unique tool with which to address its complexities. Hemon employs photography as an investigative tool towards understanding the complex ties between fact and fiction. Photography, with its concrete yet questionable relation to ‘the real,’ partakes of and touches upon the various doubles in the novel, and is initially introduced through an image on the frontispiece portraying a man with his back turned, whose gaze meets that of the viewer through a mirror reflection, entrapped within concentric rectangles. The centrally located image establishes the importance of photography to the work as a whole, placing it as an alternative point-of-view to that of narrative. By articulating ideas, events, and emotions by different means, photography not only partakes in the framework of doubles present in the work, but also contributes to Hemon’s meta-fictional query into the nature of storytelling, embracing the possibilities inherent in each medium. The presence of the mirror further introduces the idea of reflection, both in the sense of thought (to reflect) as well as in the sense of ‘a reflection.’ The reflected figure in the mirror is a double of the man standing in front of it, who is a representation of the actual man who stood with his back to the camera. Questions of distance and distortion arise, as well as the complexity of distinguishing between the ‘copy’ and the ‘real’ or ‘original.’ Taken together, these concepts complicate the fact/ fiction paradigm and destabilize notions of authenticity and identity. The introduction of the mirror image recalls Salman Rushdie’s musings on migrant writers, who are “obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. But there is a paradox here. The broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (11). It is precisely this fractured mirror – or perspective – that can become “a useful tool with which to work in the present” (12). The fragmented consciousness of the migrant, a function of dislocation, has the potential, Rushdie believes, to provide a more inclusive perspective on the world, for it is not limited by a single point of view. Rushdie’s formulation turns the possible liability of the fragmented consciousness into an asset, one that offers a more comprehensive view of a given experience or situation by enabling the perceiver to regard experience from multiple perspectives simultaneously. The fragmentation or multiplicity inherent in the migrant condition may therefore fuel creativity. In evoking the mirror as his central metaphor, Rushdie conjures a sense of reflection, doubling, and fracturing, themes taken up by Hemon in his work, and most fully exemplified in his use of photography, itself a form of fractured, incomplete, and partial vision.

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In addition to the frontispiece, the novel includes twenty-two images, one heading each chapter of the novel. The photographs (old and new) alternate in accordance with the dual story lines (past and present). The chapters that narrate the life and death of Lazarus feature photographs from the Chicago Historical Society, taken circa 1908. Many of the photographs in Hemon’s novel were taken by photographers working for the Chicago Daily News and apparently appeared in the press immediately following the shooting at the Shippy residence.17 The chapters narrating Brik’s story feature contemporary photographs taken by Rora, who ‘documents’ their journey through Eastern Europe. In a dynamic that echoes the author-narrator duality, these images were in fact photographed by Hemon’s friend, Velibor Božović, himself a former Bosnian (although he does not share biographical similarities with Rora). All of the photographs are black-and-white, with shadowy margins where they are inserted into (or emerge from) an ink-black page, a technique that deliberately blurs the distinctions between old and new. Using two sets of photographs to accompany the text plays on the aforementioned doubleness, questioning how perception influences narration and vice versa. For example, based on the narrative, the reader forms an image of Olga (haggard, vulnerable) that is eroded when her image is introduced in chapter eleven (crisp, composed).18 The images additionally explore the connection between representation and reality, insofar as the historical images serve as authentication of the historical events; their presence is proof of L­ azarus’s life and death. However the contemporary photographs cannot validate Brik and Rora’s fictional journey, which has the effect of destabilizing the alleged documentary power of all the images. Some of the photographs are only very loosely connected to the text, and the reader is left to conjecture their role within the verbal-visual doubleness. Furthermore, the presence of a selection of photographs bespeaks the absence of others, shedding light upon that which has not been represented, which partakes in the ongoing commentary on absences and erasures, on the incompleteness of representation, and on the subjectivity of any given narrative. Absent from the visual repertoire of images are photographs that Brik describes Rora shooting, which we are left to visualize on the basis of their 17

18

According to the Chicago Historical Society, the Chicago Daily News is the source for the majority of the historical images. Roth and Kraus affirm that photographers of the Chicago Daily News took pictures of the event; however, there is no evidence that the images of dead Lazarus that appear in the novel had been circulated in the press. Following her brother’s death, Olga returned to Europe where she is thought to have perished in the Holocaust (Roth and Kraus 189).

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prose descriptions. Hemon and Božović launched an official website19 for The Lazarus­ Project, where many of the prose photos can be viewed, as well as a host of others not referred to in the text. The creation of a website, a kind of virtual supplement of the novel, extends it beyond the boundaries of its pages, and is another manifestation of migratory aesthetics. The internet provides another perspective, another expressive device, another spatial dimension, another arena of encounter within the multiplicity already presented in the work. By utilizing the complex spatial-temporal dimension of photographs to explore themes of loss and past presence, and to comment on the intricate dynamics of fact/fiction, and historical-cultural space in the novel, Hemon’s text evokes the landmark work of W.G. Sebald, whose books, as Lynne Sharon Schwartz has noted in her introduction to The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with Sebald, “are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-andwhite photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of [the narrator’s] passage” (14). Hemon’s work recalls that of Sebald in other ways as well. Schwartz suggests that Sebald “invented a new form of prose writing that makes tangible the contemporary blurring of borders between fiction and nonfiction” (15); Hemon, as indicated above, intertwines fact with fiction. Schwartz has observed that Sebald wrote a “mélange” of genres, among them “fictionalized memoir [and] travel journals,” genres that Hemon also favors. Furthermore, The Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through. He spends sleepless, despairing nights in bleak hotel rooms, frequently in a state of emotional or physical collapse. Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around. He sees apparitions, figures from history gliding by. He visits deserted museums, ‘collections of oddities’; he photographs landscapes, streets, monuments, ticket stubs. schwartz 13

In The Lazarus Project, Brik and Rora travel relentlessly through post-Soviet landscapes by foot, car and train, in an attempt to retrieve Lazarus’s past. They spend sleepless nights in sleazy hotel rooms in which “the air stank of lead-based paint and suicide” (69), in which “everything was familiar and incomprehensible,” raising the “frightening possibility of a parallel universe” (68). Walking 19

The Lazarus Project Website: http://aleksandarhemon.com/lazarus/.

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down vacant streets, Brik senses that the “darkness was overtaking everything,” and that “[e]ven the lit streets seemed abandoned under the pressure of the advancing murk” (69). Together with Rora, Brik visits the “Museum of Regional History,” with its own haphazard and absurd ‘collection of oddities’ (162; more on this below). Rora meanwhile photographs relentlessly (162). ­Evidently, the physical and mental are intertwined in Hemon’s novel, and in this too his work resembles that of Sebald, which, as Carsten Strathausen points out in his analysis of Sebald’s aimlessly wandering texts, reveal a “seamless merging of psychic and physical, internal and external space,” as they “trace the ever-shifting connections” between truth, death, melancholy, and memory (476). However, while Hemon’s characters, like those of Sebald, are victims of displacement and violence, they are not melancholic in the way Sebald’s are. Sebald’s characters more often than not choose death over life, and as Ruth Franklin suggests, “They are destroyed souls, fractured under the burden of the pain that they bear” (122); they can never escape their predicament of placeless wandering. Therefore, while clearly informed by Sebald’s oeuvre, and preoccupied with similar themes of loss, erasure and dislocation, Hemon’s work differs fundamentally from that of Sebald in so far as his characters are ultimately stimulated by their migratory perspective and find possibilities where Sebald’s characters, bound by the limits of their perception, cannot. The return to Europe in search of origins has been featured in American literature recently, in both fiction and memoir.20 Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir, The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million (2008), features a return to Europe in search of the lost and often erased past of his Jewish ancestors intertwined with meditations on biblical narratives. Mendelsohn, like the fictional Brik, is “interested in the life of the Old Country,” and wants to see “What kind of place my family had come from” (110). He embarks on a ‘road trip’ beginning in Krakow and ending in Lviv, stopping on the way in Bolechow, his ancestral town. As in Hemon’s work, the Jewish past has been erased. However, Mendelsohn’s sheer persistence, in a search that took him across the globe, eventually enables him to uncover some traces of the past, as he finds first the cellar his uncle and cousin had hid in before they were discovered and killed, and then crucially, the woman who witnessed their killing and could authenticate the facts. Mendelsohn has closure: “They had been here, hiding for weeks, months, 20

Another example in contemporary American literature of a search for origins in Eastern Europe is Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated (2002). Interweaving past and present, the protagonist narrates the history of a Jewish ghetto in Poland/ Ukraine, while simultaneously goes in search for remnants of the ghetto as well as for woman who sheltered his father during its liquidation.

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nobody knew. But it had been here. I had always wanted specifics. Now I had found them” (483). Like Sebald and Hemon, Mendelsohn inserts photographic images into the text, which include both old family pictures, as well as photographs taken on his travels, all of which are in black-and-white. The images authenticate the story, but also open alternative spaces, as the trapdoor to the hiding place suggests. Unlike Sebald’s characters, Mendelsohn emerges optimistic from his experience, as he finds that “to search for a while in the debris of the past” not only enables us to see “what was lost but what there is to be still found” (487). For Brik, who is searching for more distant traces, the past remains a wreckage from which no solid facts can be salvaged. Yet Brik will nonetheless come away with insights.

Past Exposures in the Present

Reading the photographs alongside the text opens up spaces that are both in dialogue with the text and take us far beyond it. The elements of rupture and loss inherent to photographs, as well as their complex relation to time and space, are enhanced by the content of the photographs in the novel. The photograph heading the first chapter depicts the Shippy residence from the outside (0). The photo is taken from across the street, and the viewer, similar to the character Lazarus from whose perspective this section is (imaginatively) narrated, is separated from the residence by several barriers: a street, a grassy patch, a sidewalk, an iron fence and gate. The image emphasizes that the space of the Shippy residence was off limits for migrants: the two-story house is unyielding, with tall and narrow windows, and our gaze is drawn toward its firmly shut door. In the photograph heading the third chapter (Image 1.1, 24), our desire to enter the house is fulfilled, like that of Lazarus. As we cross the threshold we are led into the interior of the residence, and simultaneously, descend into the thick of the story and into its dark and mysterious spaces. At first glance, the home’s ornamental wallpaper, framed pictures, decorative rugs, and inviting armchair lend it a comfortable and even luxurious ambience. Despite its appealing comforts, we do not linger, for our gaze is drawn through an open door, which leads into a foreboding vestibule containing a staircase to the next floor. Upon closer scrutiny the photograph reveals three white ‘X’ marks in the vestibule; two on the floor between the open door and the banister; one on the wall behind the staircase. The ‘X’ marks presumably indicate elements in a crime scene: gunshots and bloodstains. As formal ‘details,’ they are the unexpected shock, or punctum, within this peaceful living room. The ‘X’ marks establish the realization that this photograph is a crime scene, depicting the

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Figure 1.1 Living room and bottom of a stairway inside the residence of Police Chief George M. Shippy.

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place/space of Lazarus’s death. The photograph becomes ominous, menacing and intimidating, due to the tension between the perceived bourgeois decency and the violent death that took place within its confines. The door/threshold, separating the vestibule and the living room suggests a deeper separation between inner and outer, between comfort and danger, between order and anarchy. In this very vestibule the ‘outer,’ in the shape and form of Lazarus, the alleged immigrant-anarchist-other, ‘threatened’ and penetrated the inner sanctity of the American home, and the security, privilege and decency it symbolizes. Within the context of the novel, the photograph works to erode such homebred notions of American decency. The ‘X’ marks inscribed on the surface of the image draw attention to its surface quality, establishing a tension between surface and depth, between now and then; there is an accordion like effect in which the temporal moments are conflated and detached in an ongoing dynamic. The ‘has been’ temporality of the image corresponds with the inaccessibility of the past: despite the evidence the image portrays, the facts of Lazarus’s death remain unknown. Yet, the surface quality, which resonates with the ‘the now’ of our viewing, bespeaks a present in which the ‘X’ marks are still relevant. The vividness of the past crime leaps out of the image to comment on similar events occurring in the present. The image conveys these multiple meanings both through dialogue with the narrative, which portrays Lazarus as a poor immigrant who came to Shippy’s home with no malicious intent, and also through its own aesthetic. Rendering a ‘pure instant,’ it embodies within its optical depths the multiplicity of horrors spelling out tragedy. While the photograph indicates a scene of a crime, its specific nature and its underlying social-historical context are entirely dependent on the details supplied by the narrative regarding the tragic death of Lazarus at the hands of Shippy. Insofar as Hemon’s narrative underscores the likelihood that Lazarus Averbuch was the innocent victim of a nationwide wave of xenophobia, the viewer, perceiving the parallels between the photographic past and the present moment, experiences a growing sense of foreboding. The unease becomes concrete when images conveying people are portrayed, such as the image heading the next historical chapter. The image heading the fifth chapter (Image 1.2, 52) portrays two men posing before the camera in frontal positions, one standing, the other sitting. The setting is a dark and bleak room; some figures can dimly be made out in the background. The standing man is wearing a black hat, a black overcoat, and a bow tie. He has a Vandyke beard; his eyes are penetrating the camera’s gaze; his look is triumphant. His right hand is clasping the chin of the second man, who is seated in a chair before him; his left hand is resting on the sitting man’s head

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in what may initially be perceived as a gesture of endearment. The sitting man is wearing a suit but, we realize, no shirt. His hands are folded in his lap, his right hand placed on his left wrist, but we notice they are limp. He is seated in a chair, but in fact he is rather slouching. His hair is fair and short, and his features pleasant, but we notice that his eyes are half-shut and have a glazed look to them. Gazing at this still image for several moments, we discover with a sudden punctum-like shudder – recalling Olga’s response to her inert brother21 – that the sitting man is dead. The photograph as a pure instant demarcates a spatial segment and detaches a slice of time from its sequence. As a result, the photograph transcends its temporal and spatial moment and becomes eternal, perpetual and endless. The corpse of Lazarus, suspended in this spatial and temporal eternity, becomes the ‘living-dead,’ and opens the image to the workings of Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious.’ It is within this space that Hemon (via Brik) narrates Lazarus’s life, granting it social and historical context. This casts Hemon, in accordance with Lisa Diedrich, as a “ghost writer.” Referring to Sebald, Diedrich suggests that a ghost writer is one who “investigates the ghost as a social and historical figure,” who intentionally problematizes “the mode of production of historical knowledge and confronts the ghostly aspects of history,” and more specifically, those “absences that are covered over but still felt and transmitted in the historical unconscious” (Diedrich 257). In his attempt to put flesh and bones on to the ghost of Lazarus, Hemon can be considered as a ghost writer who further problematizes Lazarus’s circumstances of death. Hemon resurrects the ghost of Lazarus within the pages of his novel, along with an American past that has been willfully repressed, yet remains ghostly-present. Madelyn Detloff explores the continuing influence of the past on the present, and identifies “the persistence of modernism in contemporary responses to war, terror and trauma” (3), imagining the twentieth century as a parabolashaped curve, with World War ii at its vortex. The fringes of the curve, she claims, reveal “uncannily symmetrical constellations of troubling social formations, from xenophobic nationalism, to state-sponsored homophobia, to interethnic violence” (3). Detloff suggests that “[t]racing modernist articulations of loss, violence, and their attendants – trauma, consolation, and retribution” illuminates contemporary encounters that bear residues of these events, such as “the deadly ethnic strife that plagued Europe at the century’s close” (10, 119). The often unrevealed connections between past and present, referred to by Detloff as ‘uncanny,’ evoke the return of the repressed: the haunting, lurking and menacing presence of something once familiar that had been stifled, now 21

Chapter 5, page 57.

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Figure 1.2 Corpse of Lazarus Averbuch held up in a chair by Captain Evans of the police department, front view.

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resurfaces, making its menacing presence felt.22 The image of Lazarus, revived by Brik (and Hemon), enacts this dynamic by linking, and even collapsing, two poles of European racial and ethnic conflict in the twentieth century (Kishinev Pogrom and war in former Yugoslavia), and examining them in the xenophobic atmosphere of the early twenty-first century and the post-9/11 “sumptuous palette of American fears” (LP 47). In portraying the corpse of Lazarus (of which another side-view is presented in Chapter 19), the connection between photography and death is concretized, forcing the realization that photographs are “agents of Death” (Barthes, Camera 92). Written on the photograph in white letters (not readily deciphered) are the words “Capt. Evans Police Dept” (next to the standing man) and “Lazarus Averbuch” (next to the sitting man), confirming the identity of he who is no longer Lazarus. The viewer is shocked not only by the sight of death made literal, but by the fragility and vulnerability of the dead man and the corresponding triumphant pose of Captain Evans. While the police force employed photography as early as the mid-nineteenth century, it was used mainly as a tool for identification of criminals (mug shot), or towards establishing evidence of a crime. Neither applies in this case.23 Captain Evans’s triumphant pose24 with his dead victim however, evokes a genre popular at the turn of the twentieth century – that of lynching, and more specifically, white lynching of black men. A harrowing iconography of 22

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24

Freud’s definition of the uncanny hinges on a semantic analysis of the interconnected terms heimlich and unheimlich, which overlap in meaning to create the notion of the uncanny, namely, the revelation of what is private and concealed, of what is hidden (also from the self) (“The Uncanny” 219–32). Other types of photographs of the dead that were popular in United States at the turn of the century were domestic postmortem images of loved ones, or photographs of war casualties (greatly censored after World War i). The presence of the image within the context of the novel also allows for a reconsideration of its posed aspect, recalling Roland Barthes’s thoughts on the artificiality of the pose. “In front of the lens,” he says, “I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares)” (Camera 13). In reconsidering the photograph of dead-Lazarus, the question of authenticity has the potential to shift the dynamics of power. Captain Evans assumes his posture only for the moment photographed, engaging in ‘imposture,’ and becoming a pretense. Alternately, Lazarus, photographed in the permanence of his ‘un-posed’ death, remains authentic. Despite the compromised position into which Captain Evans has manipulated him, the dead Lazarus is more authentic, more ‘real,’ than the posturing man holding him up. In this reading, Lazarus has the power to subvert the Captain’s authority – so brazenly yet so inauthentically represented.

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lynching existed in which it was commonplace for the perpetrators to pose with their victims.25 As Shawn Michelle Smith has illustrated in excruciating detail in Photography on the Color Line,26 this practice, which developed in the post-reconstruction era, stems from white anxiety over loss of power and is suggestive of the white man’s desperate need to reassert control over the black body. Photographs, which were integral to the spectacle of lynching, “make brutally direct the theoretical premise that whiteness is predicated on the violent repression of a black other” as “one sees, in photograph after photograph, the framing of white subjectivity against a black corpse, of whiteness founded in the spectacle of the dead black other” (Smith 138).27 The photo of Lazarus fits in to the discourse of white supremacy, as the white police officer subdues the threat of the alien, dark other. The photograph of dead Lazarus, taken by a photographer of the Chicago Daily News, plainly grants the perspective of the perpetrator, framing Lazarus as a dangerous anarchist. The triumphant pose of the ‘dignified’ police officer, holding the victim like his trophy for the world to see, was meant, like images of lynching, to humiliate, degrade, and violate the privacy of his victim and to demonize him in the eyes of the viewers.28 By inserting this image into his narrative, Hemon enacts a rearticulation of the event, subverting its initial and intended meaning by capitalizing on the “elasticity of photographic meaning” and on “the importance of the context of circulation or display, and the related opportunities for reframing” (Reinhardt 20). In a similar move, Ida B. Wells was the first to use lynching images in anti-lynching propaganda, proving that the same image in a different context could signify differently, even subvert its initial and intended meaning. By reframing the image, removing it from its original context, and placing it into the context of a fictional novel, Hemon changes its possible significations, and reexamines the public sentiment that

25 26 27

28

The images are collected in the archive Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photographs in America. In Chapter 4, “Spectacles of Whiteness: The Photography of Lynching,” 113–45. Photographic images were broadly circulated for viewing (often in the form of postcards), for those who were not there, and worked to establish white solidarity across broad social and geographical locations. Roth and Kraus write about the “hostility many officers felt toward Averbuch,” which was “made clear during the evening Averbuch’s body was left open at the morgue. The body lay naked on a viewing table and anyone was free to look at it for purposes of making an identification or simply out of curiosity. Scheuttler [the investigating officer], apparently, encouraged his officers to view the body.” According to witnesses, “many police officers insulted the corpse or made hostile gestures toward it” (33).

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led not only to the killing of Lazarus, but also to the endorsement of the killing by the public at large. Reusing images of suffering or horror in new contexts raises several ethical questions. Use of an image, or in Lazarus’s case, resurrecting the dead, threatens to revive or prolong the suffering and humiliation of the victim and/or of his community. It borders on voyeuristic pleasure, providing the thrill of glimpsing the other’s disgrace and pain, a scenario conveyed in Hemon’s narrative description of “the onlookers” who “stand lined up in the long morgue hall, anticipating Olga’s shock and pain [upon seeing her dead brother], watching her with gloating curiosity” (57). Furthermore, as Susan Sontag has compellingly argued, there is no guarantee that the use (or reuse) of images of suffering will cause the viewer to feel empathy for the victim or outrage for the perpetrator. In fact, one is more likely to encounter apathy in the face of abuse and pain: “To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them … Images anesthetize” (On Photography 20). Yet even if such images do arouse empathy toward the victim, Sontag argues in Regarding the Pain of Others,29 they radically fail to create understanding (which remains indeterminate), and when understanding does occur, it is rarely translated into moral action. Given all this, how can one justify the reuse of an image of horror? In the case of Lazarus, the problematic visual representation of his death is also his resurrection: the historical Lazarus Averbuch, lost in oblivion, returns to contemporary consciousness through his literary resurrection and photographic reexposure to the light of the twenty-first century, challenging his persecutors across time. Hemon is not unaware of the moral complications of reusing this image. His resurrection of Lazarus Averbuch causes him to ponder the ethics of the biblical resurrection of Lazarus by Jesus, raising speculation that Lazarus was resurrected to aggrandize Christ, not to save Lazarus. Perhaps, Hemon suggests, Lazarus was merely “the white rabbit in Mr. Christ’s magic show”(76). Hemon appears to self-reflexively question his own motives in the resurrection of Lazarus, critiquing the omnipotence inherent in authorship. Hemon’s interest in, and resurrection of, the Lazarus photograph(s) is further explored in the novel in the contemporary context of post 9/11. Brik recalls an argument between himself and his wife, Mary, over the widely circulated

29

The war in the former Yugoslavia, central to Susan Sontag’s argument in Regarding the Pain of Others, figures as a prime example of the ongoing indifference to photographs of atrocity.

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Abu Ghraib photographs (made public in May 2004).30 By evoking the images of Abu Ghraib in his fictional narrative, Hemon draws upon a charged event stored in the collective memory of his readers, relying on it to connect the past and the present, to make a clear and direct connection between the dynamics that produced both the demeaning photograph of Lazarus, and those of the Abu Ghraib inmates and their abusive guards. The similarities between the photographic events are glaring. Mark Reinhardt exposes the way in which the cameras in Abu Gharib “did not merely record what happened: they were instruments used to abuse and humiliate prisoners” (Reinhardt 16). Taking the pictures, he reveals, was just the first step, “Viewing and disseminating these pictures … complete[d] the rituals of degradation” (Reinhardt 16). Reinhardt underscores that “those guards who took, posed in, and circulated the pictures among friends evidently had no idea how shameful they would appear in the eyes of most viewers when the pictures became public” (16–17), much like the image of the triumphant Captain Evans appears to us today. Shawn Michelle Smith has recently observed that the “photographs of Private First Class Lynndie England torturing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison conjured hidden visions of violence in the United States” (Edge 195). Referring to images of racial and ethnic violence in general, yet more specifically to images of lynching, Smith claims that the images of Abu Ghraib “showed many viewers what they had refused to see, challenging a long legacy of willful blindness” (Edge 197). Hemon’s linking of the violent acts against Lazarus and the inmates of the Abu Ghraib prison repudiates this blindness and serves as a critique of the discourse of racial violence. Mary, Brik’s American wife, suffers from such blindness. In their heated discussion, Mary understands the events at Abu Ghraib to be a case of “essentially decent American kids acting upon a misguided belief they were protecting freedom, their good intentions going astray” (188), while Brik’s liminality enables him to regard them as “young Americans expressing their unlimited joy of the unlimited power over someone else’s life and death. They loved being alive and righteous by virtue of having good American intentions; indeed, it turned them on” (188). Brik’s double perspective facilitates his comprehension of the abuse of power, while Mary’s myopic American arrogance is a barrier to communication and understanding and underscores the handicaps of her limited vision.

30

The abuse of power is a recurring theme in the novel. It is apparent in reference to the trigger happy Bosnian Rambo who surfaces in stories told by Rora. Drunk with power, Rambo loved to have Rora photograph him with enemy corpses.

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Visually echoing the image of Lazarus is the image of his ‘anarchist’ friend, Isadore Maron. Like the portrait of Olga mentioned earlier, the image of ­Isadore frustrates our expectations. Hemon purposefully allows his narrative to clash with the image, a strategy consistent with his belief in the plurality of truths and in his understanding of the ways in which representation (verbal and visual) can distort. In the narrative Isador (the spelling Hemon uses) is on the run from the police, and following a tortuous night in Olga’s outhouse, takes refuge in her closet. Isador is eventually ‘resurrected,’ as he is smuggled in a coffin to a safe place.31 The portrait however reveals a young man wearing a suit and tie, sitting with his legs crossed, gripping the armrests of the chair and returning a defiant gaze to the camera. The historical narrative corroborates the image: Isadore Maron, as Roth and Kraus unearth in The Accidental Anarchist, was questioned by the police immediately following the events, and was released within days for lack of evidence (38). As a visual echo of the image of Lazarus, in which both are seated and wearing suits, Isadore’s alert and vibrant aliveness throws the finality of Lazarus’s deadness into stark relief. Hemon employs other images from Lazarus’s Chicago, creating a sense of a life lived: a photograph of a dance class taking place on a Chicago rooftop, said to be found in Lazarus’s home perhaps suggesting his hope for a happier future; the street-market in the Jewish ghetto in Chicago where Lazarus and Olga lived, validating the fact of an American ghetto; a broken-into house alluding to the xenophobic atmosphere prevailing in America; an elusive nighttime image of a light/fire in the darkness, perhaps a harbinger of more contemporary images of warfare. These images re-create a sense of the Chicago Lazarus lived in, a space and place that existed physically, yet is lost in the mists of time.

Present Absence

While the historical photographs capture life in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, the contemporary photographs taken by Velibor Božović feature Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first century.32 The contemporary photographs, like those taken in 1908, are black-and-white, which has the effect of blurring clear distinctions between the two types of photographs, which corresponds with the slippage between the two time frames. This is clearly evident in photographs depicting actors in nineteenth-century 31 32

In another parallel, the Bosnian Rambo of Rora’s stories is also conveyed out of Sarajevo and to safety in a coffin. With the exception of the photograph of the Chicago skyline, heading the second chapter.

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garb (202), which recall the image of Isadore, or decaying tombstones in a Jewish cemetery in Moldova (226), which elicit the Jewish cemeteries in Chicago that refused to bury Lazarus within their confines.33 These are examples of the ways images resonate with other images and textual moments, creating connections that defy linearity and that link spaces across time and place. The similarity between the two sets of images augments the similarity between the events (ethnic strife), the characters (migrants), and the conditions they experience (xenophobia). Velibor Božović photographed the contemporary images during his journey with Hemon, yet in the context of the discussion, when relating to the story, they will be attributed to Rora, the fictional character who ‘created’ them. In an interview, Božović alludes to his ‘connections’ with Rora: Aleksandar and I discussed these characters … We were trying to imagine what they would do, what they would talk about and what Rora would photograph. After my return home, I developed the film … only to discover images and moments that I had a hard time recalling. It was as if someone else borrowed my camera and took some of these images. I was obviously influenced, sometimes, by the ‘presence’ of Rora. (“Visual Resurrections”) This implies that narrative influenced the visuals, insofar as Božović embodied Rora’s perspective to the extent that it altered his vantage point. The photographs ‘document’ the journey of Brik and Rora through Eastern Europe, as they seek traces of Lazarus and the life he may have led before he migrated to the United States. Yet Lazarus’s past has been obliterated, and what remains is a post-Soviet wasteland. The images Rora creates only document Lazarus’s absence, which corresponds with Brik’s encounter with a blank past and with histories narrated by people who are removed from the events. For example, at the Jewish Center in Chernvitsi, Brik asks the administrator Chaim, if “any of the elderly Jews perhaps remembered stories of the Kishinev refugees, stories their parents or grandparents bequeathed them” (156). Chaim answers, saying, “They are old, sick people, dying slowly. Their lives are filling up with death, they remember nothing” (156). At the Chisinau Jewish Community Center, Brik encounters the beautiful Iuliana, who sleep-talks him through the history of the Jewish community, rehearsing her lines mechanically by rote, using a series of clichés to refer to the pain and trauma of the past: 33

The tombstones are inscribed with Hebrew letters, another text within the text.

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‘The hundred years since the pogrom that devastated Kishinev have done little to heal our wounds or assuage our grief,’ Iuliana said. ‘The Kishinev pogrom, far from the first or the last attack on a helpless community, is indelibly stamped upon our consciousness.’ She clearly knew these lines by heart … I wanted to enter deep into the history she was telling, even though I had read plenty about it. But the room was overlit; her face was too pale; the photos too perfectly restored… (230–31)34 The past, lost behind the too smoothly polished surface of its representation, is inaccessible to Brik. It cannot be located in the Museum of Regional History either, where a haphazard collection moving from the sacred to the profane, from the tragic to the comic, through pictures of war heroes, “locally produced screws and metal thingamajigs” (159), single shoes, religious icons, “insects neatly pinned in rows” (160), and “an eagle with a rabbit in his talons” (161), becomes not a meaningful historical narrative, but a mockery of it, a “coffin” for history, located in a space strictly policed by a horde of “menaceful” babas, who, Brik and Rora imagine, will be embalmed and added to the collection upon their death (159, 162). The landscapes captured by Rora represent an aesthetic of absence and transience, which reflects a nomad-like sensibility. Unlike the sharply focused historical photographs, many of Rora’s images have a hazy, blurry, vague look to them, emphasizing their artificiality. They are not transparent renditions of ‘the real,’ but rather serve to raise awareness of the intervention of the ­photographic medium. Laura Wexler underlines the manner in which “the institutions of production, circulation, and reception of photographs effectively discourage inquiry into how things got to be the way that they appear” (5). The photograph, she suggests, must reveal its transparency, so one can look beyond its surface. By calling attention to technique, Rora’s images do just that, fulfilling the conditions of what Judith Butler terms a “critical image,” which “must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing” (146). Failure to fully capture the referent is the objective of such images, which attempt to shatter the illusion of ‘reality,’ enabling the images to overtly function as critical tools. Looking at images critically, according to Wexler, “expose[s] cracks in the mirror of history” and establishes a critical “democratic counter-memory” in the 34

Later, having coffee with Iuliana, Brik asks her how she feels about the pogrom. After an initial silence, all she can do is reproduce one of the phrases she has learnt by heart: “That outburst of bestial anti-Semitism is indelibly stamped upon our national consciousness” (250).

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beholders of photographs (6), reminiscent of the enhanced vision of Rushdie’s fractured mirror. By making apparent the failure to capture the referent, Rora’s images facilitate our engagement with absence and transience, reiterating in the visual what Brik discloses in words: the unstable landscape of reality, the inability to access the past, the unreliability of the physical, the uncanny dimension of a landscape scarred by an inaccessible past on which time barely leaves traces as it moves relentlessly onward. Rora photographs a dark and narrow street illuminated by a single light; a car-not-car hovering in an empty street; fields rushing past in a blur under a pale sky with a shadow of hills in the distance. The vagueness and haunting emptiness apparent in the photographs support Božović’s observation stating that, “what interests and attracts me is what is not in the photograph – the absence that the photograph signifies” (N/A).35 To achieve the sense of absence and transience, Božović uses techniques such as long exposure and motion. Long exposure has the effect of erasing objects, leaving only a ghostly trace of their presence, suggesting a hauntinglingering-hovering sense of a past presence that cannot be attained or located (Image 1.3, 248). The punctum is apparent in the embodiment of the past-­present paradigm made literal, insofar as the image visually reveals both what had-been there (the car), as well as what no-longer-is there (the car). At the same time, the notion of the ‘pure instant’ seems to have disappeared, for the image freezes a moment while simultaneously showing that moment to be part of the sequence of time. The viewer is made aware of the perpetual motion and of the new dimensions of experience, which is articulated in the spatial configuration of the image. The ghostly objects represented in the photographs are in dialogue with the ghostly presence of the living-dead Lazarus, condensing narrative temporality to form thematic and spatial connections and suspensions that work ‘beneath’ and beyond the narrative. The photographs taken in motion result in blurry images conveying a fervent sense of movement and action, confounding the concept of a still, frozen, eternal or past moment (Image 1.4, 174). Movement, we learn from the narrative, has a catalyzing effect on the fictional photographer, Rora, who not only photographs while in motion, but also exhibits a proclivity for narration that surfaces while traveling, exemplifying the idea that Rora’s aesthetic practices “gain their force” through what Sam Durrant and Katharine Lord have termed,

35

He adds that while the photographs “are intimately and deeply connected with the book … they also speak of something that is beyond its limits” (n.p.).

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Figure 1.3 Untitled (Car passing), from The Lazarus Project, 2003. © Velibor Božović.

“contestation of constraint and the assertion of a certain freedom of movement” (11). The fluidity of movement and creativity translates into a larger categorical fluidity, which is apparent when Rora confronts a racist driver with the false information that he is a Mujahidin and Brik is a homosexual (111), suggesting the arbitrariness of these denominations. Rora tells Brik that “Borders can’t be photographed” (181) allegedly for security reasons, yet their un-photographability can be ascribed to their artificiality and arbitrariness; photographing them would either be an exercise in futility, or an attempt to make them more substantial. These smudged, distorted, and blurry land-or-city -scapes parallel Brik’s sense of disorientation in Eastern Europe, and his lack of direction, experienced by him as an “ontological warp” (lp 68). One photograph taken in a hotel room captures an image flashing on a tv screen. This representation of a representation is suggestive of the alienation the characters feel from their surroundings. Similarly, hearing Madonna’s voice emerging from the body of a Ukrainian singer on tv, Brik senses that he has entered a parallel universe, and likens himself to the “confused character” of his dreams, who is caught within a “narrative that has gone completely haywire” and from which he is “unable to escape” (126–27).

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Figure 1.4 Untitled (Sunflower fields), from The Lazarus Project, 2003. © Velibor Božović.



“Nowhere is the world”

Brik returns to the ‘old world’ in pursuit of Lazarus’s past,36 yet his journey compels him to face the fact that physical and material evidence of the past no longer exists, nor can it be retrieved by direct witnesses. The failure to locate historical origins suggests that the story of a person cannot be refracted through the story of place in any direct or immediate way. In this Hemon’s outlook differs from that of Sebald, for whom, as Christopher C. GregoryGuider suggests, place “evoke[s] the qualities of those who once occupied and traversed” it (516). Yet the landscapes have been abused by war, and traces of the past have been distorted and erased. Furthermore, Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope point out that Sebald’s texts yield the idea that history “cannot be consigned to documents of record alone,” that “it is not enough to read the documents; one must also talk with people” (177). It is the narrators’ “contact with people that gives the places historical significance and gives [the narrator] perspective on the value of the related documents” (178). The people Brik

36

He also hunts for some clues of his own past, as he travels first to his ancestral home in Krotkiy, Ukraine, and finally to Sarajevo.

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encounters, such as Chaim and Iulia, are too far removed from the events to act as witnesses. Brik is therefore left adrift in a vacant dislocated present. The inaccessibility of the past along with its continuing influence on the present is a source of growing anxiety and disorientation for Brik, who tries to orient himself by shifting the center of his gravity, or “the seat of [his] soul,” from its intangible location within his body, to his American passport located in the pocket of his shirt (176–77). This proves to be unsatisfactory, leaving him “unsettled”: “Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?” (178). The severed link with the past leaves Brik adrift in an empty, vacuum-like space and he relinquishes himself to the power of movement: “I didn’t care what would happen, what had happened, because I was present as it was happening … we moved mindlessly from one place to another; we didn’t even know where exactly we might be going” (228). Brik initially interprets this mindlessness as freedom: he felt as though he “had achieved the freedom of being comfortable with the constant vanishing of the world” (lp 229). At this point, Brik risks falling into what Eva Hoffman, in conceptualizing the connections between exile and home, terms as the “new nomadism” which emerges in a “decentered world,” devoid of “any one symbolic locus of meaning” (57). This world “of traveling light and sliding among places and meanings without alighting on any of them for long” creates a risk of “dispersion of internal focus and perhaps even of certain strengths that come from … the ­accumulation of understanding” (57). Hoffman is concerned that living “in liminal spaces, or conceiving of experience as movement between discrete dots on a horizontal map,” could cause shallowness and superficiality (57). While this nomadic condition neutralizes the charge of exile, “since there is no place from which one can be expelled, no powerful notion of home,” in the long run, “continual dislocation, or dispersion,” she suggests, “is both facile” and “arid” (58–59). Brik’s pointless drifting seems to coincide with Hoffman’s observations on the nomadic condition. He senses the void, thinking, “if you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world – indeed, nowhere is the world” (182). However, ultimately it is Brik’s nomadism that will finally enable him to relocate his integrity in an immoral world. The problem is not constant movement or liminality; it is one’s ability and willingness to engage with the other, to imagine the self-as-other, to inhabit more than one over-arching perspective. Sebald’s narrators, striving “to ‘escape the increasing emptiness’ of their lives,” also encounter this ‘nowhere.’ Strathausen illustrates that they “are destined to rediscover it at every turn of the way,” and are relegated to a purgatorylike realm, which “yields ‘nothing’ but the sensation of ‘the end, a venture into

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a void’” (475). Their failure to move on stems, according to Strathausen, from their “pursuit of a total vision … a divine, omniscient view from above” (473). At this point, Hemon’s migrant vision departs from that of Sebald. Rather than attempting to achieve ‘total vision,’ Brik embraces instead the Rushdian ­fractured perspective. At home nowhere – or alternately, everywhere, experiencing both “here and there” simultaneously – Brik cultivates a “stereoscopic vision” rather than “whole sight” (Rushdie, “Imaginary” 19). In a cemetery in Chisinau, surrounded by “a herd of mausoleums,” with “the cavernous darkness gaping through a broken wall” (234), acutely aware of the tentative, temporary, and transient nature of existence itself, Brik experiences an epiphany, after which he begins to identify with multiple others: “[Iuliana] was me, Rora was me, and then we came upon the man on the bench, drooling asleep, his mouth open enough for us to see a graveyard of teeth, his hand wedged inside his pants’ waist – and he was me, too” (235). Brik has yet to put this understanding into action, which is why he initially feels that “The only one who was not me was myself” (235). However, with his gradual internalization of the multiple perspectives of others, Brik’s exhilarating passivity (258), which is construed as unethical as he and Rora unwittingly become accomplices to human trafficking, is replaced by action as he and Rora rescue the young woman being ferried in their taxi, from the village to the brothel, from a life of prostitution. Brik, who injures his hand in the process (by punching the pimp/taxi driver), experiences the pain as “thrilling” (264); the physical discomfort extracts him from his apathy and restores his sense of self, which is ultimately a moral self. It is significant that Rora and Brik are the cover under which the driver conveys the young woman across the state border between Moldova and Romania. Borders in the novel are construed as arbitrary and meant to be crossed (as seen in their journey across multiple borders and through the story of the Berlin wall and the rabbits), just as nationality, if it need exist at all, ought to be a flexible and perhaps situational category.37 However, the permeability of national boundaries is not to be confused with a parallel loss of ethical ones. On the contrary, nationalism is critiqued as a conduit for moral deterioration, as shown in multiple cases in which nationalism ensues an erosion of morality and abuse of power: American nationalism fosters xenophobia and permits heinous crimes (death of Lazarus, torture in Abu Ghraib); Serbian and Bosnian 37

Brik’s practice of his American identity is provisional and situational, something he puts on and easily discards, as described when Brik and his fellow Bosnian-Americans happily shed “whatever meager Americanness [that] has been accrued” as they celebrate (rather inauthentically) the Bosnian Independence Day (12).

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nationalism created the war in Yugoslavia and the horrors of ethnic cleansing (and the moral misconduct described by Rora in his war stories). The crossing of the Moldova-Romanian border with the young woman reflects upon an ethical border that cannot be crossed, as the injured hand becomes the tool with which Brik writes Lazarus’s story: the novel closes with Azra’s words (sister of Rora and doctor): “Let’s take care of your hand now. You will need it for writing” (292). In Sarajevo, Brik initially feels “uncanny”; “Everything was as I remembered it, yet entirely different; I felt like a ghost” (278). The ghost links him to Lazarus Averbuch, a hovering presence of a forgone past, alluding to the idea that once you leave, you can never return home, for home has changed while your memory of it has not, a feeling typical to migrants on return visits to their birth cultures. Later, he relishes the pavement beneath his feet, where “the asphalt felt softer than on any other street in the world” (282–83), and blends in when “Nobody asked me where I was from nor expressed their admiration for my exotic accent and alien culture” (283). Despite Brik’s understanding that his heart would always be in Sarajevo (283) and despite his claim in the imaginary missive he composes for his American wife that he “never wanted to go back to America” (287), the closing of the novel leaves the reader with a sense that he will not, or can not, remain in Sarajevo permanently. “I can’t leave just yet,” he says, but eventually he will (292). Once you leave, you can never return. Rora fares differently in Sarajevo. He is shot seven times (like Lazarus), while sitting in a cafe. Azra, Rora’s sister, clarifies that he was not killed by the mafia, as his stories would imply, but by a junkie who coveted his expensive camera. Her version suggests that while Rora’s stories have some basis in historical facts, they ultimately are not true, which perhaps does not really surprise Brik, who earlier calls his friend a “wannabe war veteran” (177). What then are we to believe, Rora’s stories or Azra’s refutation of them? While Rora’s stories may be partial fabrications, insofar as they attach deeds to specific people who may not have committed them, they may reflect the climate of the war in Sarajevo more accurately than not. Hemon’s novel, similar to Kiš’s fiction, implies that the literary work embodies a truthfulness that transcends any of its details, and it is up to the reader to locate that truth. Like Kiš, Hemon’s elaborate weaving of fact and fiction seems as if “might serve to obfuscate rather than clarify,” yet, as Wachtel suggests, “a careful reader … can recognize historical truth hiding behind a confusing array of sources” (139). Therefore, despite its imaginative quality, storytelling can narrate historical truths, as even Azra admits that, “Something is always true” (291). Wachtel suggests that in Kiš’s works the “knowledge” of the truth

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does not necessarily have the power to “set the characters free” (140); Hemon ­however seems more optimistic. By ending the novel with a beginning, with Brik engaged in the act of writing, Hemon insinuates that Brik is committed to end the cycles of violence driven by an inaccessible yet omnipresent past, or at the very least, he refuses to participate in them. By embracing multiple perspectives and inhabiting a space in between, he evades the clutches of the past. By sharing his vision, he offers us the possibility to free ourselves “from the need to repeat endlessly the crimes of history” (Wachtel 140). Structured around a framework of doubles, The Lazarus Project amplifies space by introducing photography and by instigating dual time frames and story lines, enhances perspective by advocating multiple vantage points, and enriches representation by endorsing proliferation of meaning. Different spaces are experienced simultaneously as they brush against each other, to create a third space, which is dynamic and without boundaries. The space, created by experience, facilitates creativity, which also sustains it. Wandering throughout Chicago and Eastern Europe, Brik draws on and commingles his American and Bosnian experiences, practices, spaces and languages, to eventually merge them into a spatial home, which is neither here nor there, but in between. Brik’s sense of spatiality endows him with a meaningful moral stance, in which the resurrection of Lazarus Averbuch from oblivion has the effect of demystifying the prevalence of xenophobia in post 9/11 u.s. by revealing its deep cultural and international roots, and entails an endeavor to prevent future violence, which is expressed in writing. A violent past is also uncovered in GB Tran’s exploration of his family’s ­Vietnamese roots, which is discussed in the next chapter. Tran’s confrontation of family history through comics, both compliments and expands Hemon’s explorations with photographic space.

Chapter 2

Cohesive Fragments: GB Tran’s Graphic Memoir Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey Unlike other media, in comics, the past is more than just memories for the audience and the future is more than just possibilities! Both past and future are real and visible all around us! Wherever your eyes are focused, that’s now. But at the same time your eyes take in the surrounding landscape of past and future. scott mccloud 1

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GB Tran’s graphic memoir, Vietnamerica: A Family’s Journey (2011), is a tale of war, dislocation and migration, which places the disrupted, fragmented family at its center. Tran translates this fragmentation into a graphic narrative, utilizing the inherent spatial and temporal features of the form to convey the multiple disruptions experienced by the family, as well as its tenuous yet durable connections. Spanning a period of 50 years, from his parents’ childhood in Vietnam, through the turbulent war years and their forced migration to the United States, to his own travels to Vietnam as an adult, Tran’s multi-vocal and multi-perspectival graphic narrative pieces turbulent histories into a complex yet fragile picture, affirming Thierry Groensteen’s observation that “comics is not only an art of fragments, of scattering, of distribution; it is also an art of conjunction, of repetition, of linking together” (22). This fragile complexity, as well as the plurality of perspectives, is embodied in the cover image depicting a hybrid face puzzled together from fragments of various family members, gesturing towards Tran’s role as ‘translator’ of his family’s multiple stories into an integrated narrative. The graphic memoir, like the genre of comics more generally, is, in Hillary Chute’s formulation, “a hybrid word-and-image form in which two ­narrative tracks, one verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially” (“Comics” 452). When relating to memoir or autobiography, Julia Watson adds, the form employs words and images to narrate a true story that is “different from both 1 Understanding Comics, 104.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_004

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written life narrative and visual or photographic self-portraiture,” requiring the reader to “adopt a reflexive and recursive reading practice” (Watson, “Autographic Disclosures” 28). In light of their uniqueness, Gillian Whitlock has termed autobiographical texts represented in graphic art as “autographics,” alluding to “the tensions between ‘auto’ and ‘graph’ in the rapidly changing visual and textual cultures of autobiography” (Whitlock and Poletti v), while highlighting “the potential of comics to open up new and troubled spaces of representation” (Whitlock 976).2 By creating a memoir through graphic art and words, Tran opens up a space in between America and Vietnam, one that, as the title Vietnamerica suggests, weaves the two nations, and family members within them, together. By disassembling linear sequence and interweaving spaces, Tran engenders an interconnected familial narrative across generations, geographies, borders and narratives, paralleling transnational ideas of border-and-boundary-crossing and the creation of alternative or third-spaces. As a result, Tran’s work inevitably challenges hegemonic and national narratives on both sides of the Vietnamese-American conflict. By constructing his family memoir in the graphic form, Tran evokes Art Spiegelman’s iconic graphic memoir Maus (1991).3 While Tran, Like Spiegelman, recounts a traumatic past in graphic form, his memoir differs significantly from that of Spiegelman, although it remains in dialogue with the latter in various ways. Primarily, Spiegelman famously casts the traumatic Holocaust past into an animal fable (featuring Jews as mice, Poles as pigs, Germans as cats), both literalizing and undermining the implied racist propaganda through this act of defamiliarization. Tran’s memoir is rendered realistically, yet resists racist stereotyping as well. Caroline Kyungah Hong has observed that more often than not, Asian American characters in comics have been rendered stereotypically, the salient stereotypes being the yellow peril, the perpetual foreigner and 2 Whitlock writes, “By coining the term ‘autographics’ for graphic memoir I mean to draw attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography, and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate in and through comics” (966). 3 Maus was initially classified as fiction (on The New York Times bestseller list), but following Spiegelman’s request, it was moved to the non-fiction section. Maus has since been classified as memoir, biography, history, autobiography, graphic memoir, or a combination of the above. I chose to call it a memoir, based on the definition of memoir offered Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson: “A mode of life narrative that historically situates the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant; the memoir directs attention more toward the lives and actions of others than to the narrator” (198). However, Smith and Watson refer to Maus as “doubly autobiographical” (22), since it narrates the story of Vladek, as well as the story of Art as he dramatizes his own struggles with the legacies of his parents, and the representation of them.

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the model minority.4 Hong reads Tran’s graphic memoir as part of “an emergent, alternative tradition of Asian American comics and graphic narratives” (11) working to re-appropriate such racist depictions. Furthermore, as Derek Parker Royal has suggested, graphic narratives can be extremely effective in disassembling stereotypes of the ethnic other.5 Each character is individuated through the specificities of visual depiction, he explains, “undermining any attempts at subjective erasure through universalization” (9). Although resorting to more realistic visualization than Spiegelman, Tran is similarly concerned with dispersing stereotypes and uses a variety of different styles and aesthetic conventions in order to do so. However, artistically, the two creators could not be more unalike, as Tran creates colorful glossy images, with ample land-andcityscapes, while Spiegelman creates black and white images that privilege the figures.6 In Maus, Spiegelman casts himself as his father’s interlocutor and witness. Their intimate tape-recorded sessions form the frame story for the emergence of the narrative of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek. Therefore while Maus narrates Vladek’s story beginning in Poland in the 1930s until his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, on another level, it is also the story of Vladek’s testifying to Art in their home in New York during the 1980s, as well as Art’s “attempt to transmit that testimony in the comics genre” (Hirsch, Family Frames 26).7 While Tran casts his father, Tri, as one of the main figures within the memoir (alongside his mother and several others), he does not present a similar context in which he serves as a witness to his father’s traumatic past. The character GB8 often asks his extended family questions about the past (including his father), yet the information is largely conveyed by his mother, his main interlocutor, leaving the reader to guess whether or how Tran accessed the insights he provides into his 4 These stereotypes derive from the discriminating attitude toward Asian migrants that has dominated American discourse and practice. Lisa Lowe writes that “In the last century and a half, the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian immigrant, legally, economically, and culturally. These definitions have cast Asian immigrants both as persons and populations to be integrated into the national political sphere and as the contradictory, confusing, unintelligible elements to be margianalized and returned to their alien origins” (4; italics in original). 5 Royal: “comics are well suited to dismantle those very assumptions that problematize ethnic representation,” due to their “foundational reliance on character iconography” (9). 6 For a discussion of Art Spiegelman’s drawing style, see Joseph Witek, “History and Talking Animal: Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” in Comic Books as History, 96–120. 7 Chapter 2 of Family Frames, “Mourning and Postmemory” (17–42), focuses on Maus. 8 I use Tran when referring to the author of the text, and GB when referring to the character within the text.

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father’s emotional world. This indeterminacy blurs the boundaries between memoir and fiction, boundaries that are “exceedingly hard to fix,” as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson point out (9). The strongest link between the two memoirs lies in their intergenerational acts of recalling a traumatic and difficult-to-access familial past. While Spiegelman represents his struggles to transform his father’s past into art in a metafictional query, Tran’s presentation does not address his creative process. Yet both authors reflect on the complications of representing memories that haunt their forbearers and have left traces on them as well. This can be understood, to differing degrees, as manifestations of what Marianne Hirsch has termed, “postmemory,” which “is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection” (Family Frames 22). Hirsch emphasizes that the connections established by postmemory do not occur through recollection, but are fostered by acts of creative imagination. Both Tran and Spiegelman resort to imagination to present the past, however, while Art Spiegelman grew up “dominated by narratives that preceded [his] birth,” Tran grew up in the shadow of silences about such preceding narratives (Family Frames 22). Yet both constitute a form of postmemory, for as Hirsch posits, postmemory can affect “those whose parents talked readily about their experiences” as well as “those whose parents were silent” (Generation 15). ­Furthermore, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest that in life writing involving trauma, “narrators struggle to find ways of telling about suffering that defies language and understanding” (22), while traumatic memory often manifests itself “in fits and fragments” (22). The graphic form resorts to the visual to convey the ineffable; it is inherently fragmented, and therefore uniquely equipped to aid in the telling of traumatic postmemory.9 The process of excavating the past is made apparent by Tran’s multiple returns to events, each time unearthing more information, in a process mimicking his own gradual unraveling of the family history, yet also indicative of its traumatic dimension and of the difficulty involved in accessing and narrating it. The novel consists of a prelude, twelve chapters and a finale. The chapters are alternately focalized by GB and his mother, Dzung, while incorporating voices and dialogues of other family members and friends. The chapters narrated by Dzung begin with an image of her cooking Vietnamese food in their American kitchen, as she relates to an adult GB, her interlocutor, parts of her and her husband’s biographies. Dzung’s narration is addressed to GB, even though GB is physically absent from the stories. This way, the past is always 9 Boris Fishman’s Slava (Chapter 4) also experiences the effects of postmemory in the form of silences and trauma, and confronts them with the use of unique methods.

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framed by the present, always embedded in it, similar to Art’s sessions with Vladek; this suggests the past’s lingering and long-reaching influence on the here and now. Dzung begins by saying, “Your father was born in Mytho…” (28), or “Your father and I married in 1973 …” (118). The ellipsis inscribed into the text suggests, on the one hand, the many gaps and absences in the story, and on the other, the role of imaginary, as Dzung’s first person narration is often substituted by fictionalized dialogue of characters in the past (as conceived by Tran). Dzung’s voice/narration is specified by cursive, difficult to decipher femininelike script, alluding to an accent, additionally signifying the difficulty inherent in both the act of telling and of comprehending. The chapters narrated by GB place him as a character within the unfolding events: an uninterested teenager in Arizona, an adult visiting Vietnam, or asking his mother questions about the family. The various chapters tend to span great chunks of time, traversing the past and the present, so that events separated by time and space are harnessed together, privileging experience over chronology. To add to the complexity, while the chapters narrated by Dzung follow a chronological order – from her and her husband’s childhood, through their tragedies and trials in war-torn Vietnam, to their eventual meeting, marriage, and final escape to the United States – the chapters focalized by GB are not chronological in any respect: his life is not presented linearly (for example his second trip to Vietnam is narrated in the novel prior to his first trip), and the past events he focalizes occur out of chronological order (for example, GB’s grandfather’s death is introduced prior to his life).10 As such, the chapters are conceptually challenging, and the reader, who struggles to decipher the various threads of the story and to comprehend the significance of their appearance at a specific stage of the memoir, has a crucial role in creating meaning. Finally, each chapter ends with a full-page illustration, often more abstract or symbolic than the other images in the novel. To create an enduring familial history, one that challenges national boundaries and hegemonic hierarchies, and holds together over time in spite of over-arching threats to its existence, Tran depends upon the readers’ effort and willingness to “derive movement from stillness,” to put his “acts of writing and drawing … into motion … in a complex act of reading,” and to “participate imaginatively in [the narrative’s] genesis” (Gunning 37, 40). This becomes doubly significant when we imagine an American reader, who may likely hold different conceptions of Vietnam than those that emerge from the text.

10

Only the chapters focalized by GB address his parents’ American experience. Dzung’s narration ends when the family leaves Vietnam.

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In her introduction to My Viet: Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1962-Present (2011), Michele Janette has noted that American narratives about Vietnam focus on the American perspective, which portrays the country as “a surreal hellscape” often recounting experiences through the vantage point of war veterans (ix). These narratives, she observes, “have almost entirely ignored the autonomous nation, people, and culture of Vietnam” (ix). Vietnamese Americans, on the other hand, have created narratives that vacillate between what Janette has called “Tales of Witness” – which are narratives driven by the need to inform, to educate, to correct the record, narratives that seek to rectify the status of the Vietnamese refugees who were seen “not as refugeed allies but as invasive enemies” (xix) – and “Tales of Imagination,” which refer to “the exceptional, the idiosyncratic, the deconstructive” and are more experimental than sociological (xxii). Tran’s memoir falls somewhere between these two poles, as it is informative as well as experimental and imaginative.11 Along the same lines, Helen Grice observes that contemporary Vietnamese American writers present “the ‘reverse angle’ on the Vietnam conflict” (948). The emergent literature attempts to move beyond “u.s.-centric representations” of the conflict, “to explore the effects of the conflict upon family and community dynamic and damage wreaked on an individual, psychological level; in an attempt to unpack an aggressor/victim binary by figuring all those involved in the conflict as victims” (947). Tran’s Vietnamerica is unique in that it works to dismantle the aggressor/victim binary in the graphic form, utilizing the breakdown of the word/image binary to collapse other dichotomies. Viet Thanh Nguyen takes Grice’s idea of dismantling binaries one-step further and argues for “a doubled ethical memory,” which he defines as “memory work that recalls both one’s own and well as others” (144). This type of ethics works on a spectrum of opposing memories, with each end of the spectrum “looking suspicious and even unethical to its competitor” (151). While each singular position is valid, the acknowledgment of both is necessary for ethical work to take place, causing the act of remembering to be “always aware of itself as being open-ended and in flux, rather than being satisfied with fixity and conclusiveness” (151). This open-endedness subsumes within it an “awareness of forgetting,” and a necessary reflex for “constantly try[ing] to recall what might be overlooked” (154). Vietnamerica can be read within the paradigms of such an ethical memory, as Tran incorporates disparate vantage points on Vietnamese politics and culture into his narrative. By leaving his narrative 11

Caroline Kyungah Hong suggests that, “GB Tran’s Vietnamerica works to bridge these two modes of representation, spanning Vietnamese American literary and cultural history” (13).

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­open-ended, Tran subscribes to the idea that his narrative is not the final version, but that the past is in flux and constantly interpreted by the present. Tran’s ethical stance recalls that of Aleksandar Hemon’s Brik in The Lazarus Project, who tries to place himself in the position of the other, seeks for the overlooked and forgotten, and leaves the narrative open-ended. Tran’s graphic memoir shares certain similarities with other visual narratives about Vietnam, as for example Doan Hoang’s documentary, Oh, Saigon. Both are narratives of self-discovery, in which the consciousness of the secondgeneration narrator/storyteller shapes, informs and reconciles the stories of others. While each story is unique in its details, both are typical to displaced Vietnamese in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, and resonate with difficulties confronting collective and individual memory. In this regard, both Hoang and Tran depend on their parents for the information necessary to dispel the secrets of the past. In her analysis of Oh, Saigon, Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz points out that it has “very little to do with the iconography that has prevailed in the American memorialization of the Vietnam War,” the focus being “on the anonymous lives of the refugees, revolutionaries, renegades, children, and other victims of the conflict” (60). This perspective, which holds true for Tran’s work as well, enables both artists to go beyond binding narratives of nation and identity, and to rearticulate the historical narrative from a personal vantage point. Furthermore, both creators juxtapose idyllic Vietnamese settings with more typical war images, perhaps to “humanize a conflict-ridden context,” and both build a contrast between the American suburb and the chaotic urban spaces of Vietnam (Ibarrola-Armendariz 63). However, while both narratives are an attempt at healing a family fracture and filling a lacuna in memory, the graphic novel, with its multiple levels and layers of signification facilitates the creation of a fluid, alternative space in which this on-going healing process can occur, rather than fixing it in a prescribed place and time, emphasizing process over event.

Braided Strands i: Alternative History

Visual images of people, objects and places re-emerge and recur throughout the pages of Tran’s novel, producing a sense of continuity. Even though some of the people are no longer alive, some of the objects no longer exist and some of the places have changed beyond recognition, the sheer fact of their recurrence creates a network, granting them an ongoing presence. Thierry Groensteen sees the graphic novel as a complex system, in which “Every panel exists in relation with each of the other panels – potentially if not actually. Not as

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strip or chain, but as network” (146). This network sustains the operation of “bridging” (146), or what Groenstein has termed “braiding” (145–49). Braiding, he explains, “deploys itself simultaneously in two dimensions, requiring them to collaborate with each other: synchronically, that of the co-presence of panels on the surface of the same page; and diachronically, that of the reading, which recognizes in each new term of a series a recollection or an echo of an anterior term” (147). Braiding is an ongoing process, in which connections constantly materialize between panels the reader is currently reading/viewing and panels the reader has read/viewed previously, keeping meaning fluid at all times. While tension can be experienced between the synchronic and diachronic readings of the text, Groensteen emphasizes that such tension yields “semantic enrichment” and “densification” (147). Charles Hatfield identifies this networking as a characteristic of comic art, in which “visual recurrences potentially echo across the structure of a work” (“How to…” 135). He additionally points out that utilizing the ambiguity between the linear and the global, between “reading through the page as a series of images and taking it all in as one image … can generate fascinating effects” (“How to…” 135).12 These “echoes,” he suggests, can be those of gesture, of style, of location, of characters or of object. Tran’s novel is framed by one such recurring echo: an image of a book that appears several times throughout its pages. The flyleaf of said book appears as the ‘header’ for Chapter One, and includes an inscription written by GB’s father, Tri,13 which bears a clear message that sets the tone for the novel: “to my son, gia-bao tran. ‘a man without history is a tree without roots’ – confucius” (8). This chapter, focalized by GB, relates to his second trip to Vietnam with his parents, where he further acquaints himself with the family history. The image opposite the inscription suggestively portrays a sacred Buddhist tree, a descendent of “the very tree the Buddha meditated under” (9), and is deeply rooted in the soil of the temple where GB’s maternal grandparents are interred, just as GB’s quest for identity is interminably connected with his dead ancestors. The image of the book appears a second time as the ‘header’ for Chapter Nine, this time revealing only its red and yellow cover and title, The Vietnam War (180), making it impossible to discern that it is the same book inscribed by Tri. At the end of the chapter GB receives the book as a graduation gift from 12

13

Hatfield touches on braiding in his discussion of the given tension between sequence and surface, between the moment-in-sequence and the moment as a design element on a page. Tri sounds like ‘tree,’ and links him to the inscription he writes.

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his father, again only its cover visible, and says, “Thank you (I guess)” (206). Eventually the book gets tossed into a storage box alongside old comic books, Play Station games and controllers, where it lies neglected for years. In the finale of the novel, an adult GB discovers the red-and-yellow-­covered book while unpacking his belongings in his new Brooklyn apartment and reads his father’s inscription (276). The reader is finally able to establish the link between the earlier representations of the book. The rediscovery of the book serves as an incentive for GB’s first trip to Vietnam; he immediately reaches for the phone to ask his mother if he can still join his parents on their upcoming trip to their homeland (2000/1 – not the first trip for the parents). The book on the Vietnam War with the father’s inscription functions cyclically as the novel closes with GB’s budding interest in his family’s uprooted-ness and his upcoming journey to Vietnam. The novel therefore ends where GB’s journey of discovery begins, even as the last page is a culmination of the previous ones, in a gesture recalling the ending of The Lazarus Project discussed in the previous chapter. The inherent suggestion is that the journey of discovery does not end, that it is ongoing and cyclical, and while each cycle may reveal more information and foster a deeper appreciation, ultimately, it will never be exhausted. The braiding technique assists Tran in achieving this understanding of constant motion, of no definite closure. While Tran, an American-born second-generation Vietnamese views identity from a somewhat different angle than his father, it would be erroneous to read the memoir as an act of “uprooting” his father’s Vietnamese roots, as Maureen Shay suggests: “It is not … Tri’s Vietnamese roots that nourish his son’s identity tree, but rather their uprooting … that allows him to grow” (432).14 Tran may not initially heed his father’s appeal; however, finding the book inscribed by Tri is the incentive for Tran’s inquiry into the past. By reaching out to his son, Tri need not be seen as imposing a specific conception of identity upon him; he seems to be acting on an anxiety typical to migrants, namely, that their children will grow up to be Americans, and as such, strangers. 14

My reading of Tri’s gesture and of Tran’s response negates that of Maureen Shay. In her essay, “Uprooting Genealogy in GB Tran’s Vietnamerica,” Shay builds a generational fatherson gap around the image that bookends the memoir, regarding Tri as a victim of colonial oppression, who aspires towards a cohesive monolithic pre-colonial authentic identity (yet what such an identity would imply for Tri, or how he would ‘access’ it remains vague) (433). Shay further argues that Tri offers GB a vision of an authentic Vietnamese identity, symbolized by the metaphor of the tree, which conceives “history as chronological, vertical and progressive” (430). Tran, in Shay’s reading, rejects Tri’s offer, which does not fit his rhizomatic notion of identity. The essay neglects to mention that the book triggers Tran’s interest in ‘roots’ and ‘routes.’

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Tri hopes to create some common ground between them by having his son understand the complex family background. Given to GB after Tri meets his own estranged father for the first time in fifty years, the gift of the book seems more like an appeal for connection than an injunction toward a specific way of being Vietnamese. Tran’s approach to identity, as discerned through his comics, embraces Lisa Lowe’s trinity, “heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity,” and is sufficiently inclusive and dynamic to incorporate Tri’s ‘roots’ (66). The image of the tree is braided into the novel in two more instances, illustrating the importance of both roots and branches. In its second appearance, it hovers on the page above the heads of the extended family during a celebration (62). The exposed roots are inscribed with the names of members from both sides of Tran’s family, explaining their ties and sometimes their fates, drawing them together on the page more tangibly than they were connected in life. The stories of many of those named will fill the pages of Tran’s memoir, endorsing the importance of roots as he simultaneously endeavors to branch out by creating a more fluid sense of a transnational identity. The image of the tree appears a third time with its branches bifurcated by a comics grid, in which each panel depicts a scene of a family member in Vietnam engulfed by the encroaching war (218). The tree appears to be threatened by the war, as well as a force that holds the family together in spite of the war. By braiding the tree into his memoir, Tran embraces its significance as he reconstructs the family narrative, helping it spread new branches, while simultaneously tending to its roots. The macrocosmic book-cycle that frames the memoir is mirrored in Chapter Nine, which can be read as a microcosm for central themes explored throughout. Like the memoir, Chapter Nine both begins and ends with an image of the book The Vietnam War (180, 207). The chapter is framed by the departure and return of Dzung and Tri from their trip to Vietnam, just as the memoir begins and ends with GB’s journey to Vietnam. The bulk of the chapter depicts Tri, who is silent about his past, in the process of coming to terms with it, which can be read as a direct parallel to the route of self-discovery that GB undergoes, from lack of interest to engagement. Before their trip, when Dzung asked Tri to convince GB to join them, Tri replied, “he doesn’t want to go, he doesn’t want to go. No one’s forcing him” (182). Upon their return, Tri refrains from telling his son anything about his experience in Vietnam beyond saying it was “Fine,” yet, he now agrees with Dzung that GB should visit Vietnam, saying that he “might learn something” (205, Figure 2.1). This comment from his father provokes a response from GB, who, based on the visuals, seems not to have budged from the Play Station for the duration of his parents’ trip.15 His father’s words, ­however, 15

The chapter dealing with GB’s parents’ first visit to Vietnam begins with GB’s refusal to join his parents on their journey back to Vietnam in 1994. His declared reason is

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Figure 2.1 Vietnamerica, page 205.

have the power to make GB turn away from the screen and look at him in surprise. The mystery suggested by his father’s change of opinion does not unravel for GB until years later, when he finally shows interest in his past, yet the reader knows that on this trip to Vietnam, Tri met his long-lost father, Huu Nghiep. Listening to his father’s troubled narrative reveals to Tri the complexity of his life and choices, just as Tran’s gaining knowledge of his father’s life story will enhance his understanding of Tri’s life.16 Knowledge of their fathers’ stories may not foster forgiveness in the sons toward their fathers for the pain they caused them; however, it enables them to gain a deeper comprehension of the elements that shaped their fathers’ reality and impacted their sons. The memoir that Tran writes, therefore, seems to be an alternative history to the officially titled book The Vietnam War given to him by his father, one that speaks of roots and routes. Tran’s memoir creates an alternative discourse about the war and its aftermath

16

that high school graduation is just four months off and he cannot afford to miss three weeks of school. Off the ‘verbal’ record, the images reveal that his real interest lies in his ­Play-Station (181). We ‘see’ GB and his father talking occasionally on their joint trips to Vietnam, an indication of the exchange of memories and information.

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Figure 2.2 Vietnamerica, page 244.

Chapter 2

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by telling a personal story that subverts authoritative accounts of war, that tells a counter-hegemonic tale, and that puts the conflict into a new perspective. Additionally enhancing the cyclic aspect of the memoir are the multiple journeys back and forth between America and Vietnam, and the numerous representations of airplanes within the work. This is primarily underscored in the preface, where Tri and Dzung’s frantic departure from Vietnam in 1975 merges with their return journey to Vietnam with GB in 2001 through a double-page spread that bridges the gap between the events in a kind of inverse mirroring. This confusion seems deliberate on the part of Tran, who appears to be stressing the continuity between the events by traversing and encapsulating the twenty-one year gap between them. Another image of an airplane, which appears at the end of Chapter Eleven, shows it both connecting and separating between harsh memories, on the left hand side of the page, and brighter ones, on the right (244, Figure 2.2). By intermingling images from the u.s. and Vietnam within each representation, Tran blurs spatial distinctions in favor of emotion. The two sides are designed as opposite curve-shapes, leaving an empty space between them in the shape of an hourglass with the airplane functioning as the ‘neck’ between the upper and lower bulbs. The hourglass enables time to flow through it in both directions; when the sand runs out in one bulb and fills the other, the hourglass can be turned over, and the process begins again, marking time in the reverse direction. This image metafictionally alludes to comics, a genre that collapses time and challenges chronology and linearity. Representation of the multiple and mirroring journeys through the image of the hourglass and airplane becomes an apt metaphor for the way comics represent travels within and through time.

Braided Strands ii: Re-constructing the Family Album

Tran’s memoir upholds the connections between knowledge of the past and understanding of the self, but also bespeaks the importance of re-writing history, of re-ordering it, rearranging it and interpreting it from one’s own perspective. This re-interpretive act enables Tran to reconcile past and present and to suture the rifts that tore the family apart. In this respect, it is possible to regard Tran’s graphic memoir as a kind of family album, in which he creates a sense of togetherness, yet one that only emerges in retrospect, one that was not apparent during the unfolding of the events themselves. To achieve this, Tran introduces photography into his family narrative, recalling Susan Sontag’s statement that, “Through photographs, each family constructs a ­portrait-chronicle of itself – a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness” (8). Sontag observed that photography became a central tenet

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of family memory and togetherness precisely at the moment when the institution of the extended family in Europe and America was disintegrating.17 In Tran’s case, the family album is reconstructed ‘in reverse,’ or after the fact, collecting fictional, semi-fictional and actual photographs of a family that was never connected in life. It is not an act of memorialization in as much as it is one of creation. If Sontag suggests that “A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family – and, often, is all that remains of it” (9), in the case of Tran, the construction of the album creates a family togetherness that has the power to physically unite them. Photographs occur in Vietnamerica on three levels: actual photographic images, drawn reproductions of actual photographs, and drawn reproductions of imagined fictional photographs. Roy T. Cook suggests that the practice of rendering photographs in fictional comics, using “a drawing style that is strikingly more realistic than the style adopted for the remainder of the surrounding comic” (129), cannot augment their “objectivity, accuracy, or authority as records of the fictional object and events they depict” (129).18 While the realistic style of the images tells us something of the ontological role they play within the fictional world of the particular comics, they nonetheless remain in the realm of the fictional and cannot signify a reality beyond its contours. However, when used in non-fictional comics (auto/biography), the realistically drawn reproductions of photographs can evoke an objective reality. Yet since they are drawn, like the rest of the images, they bear no indexical relation to the referent, eroding both the objectivity of drawn reproductions of photographs and of photographs in general.19 Julia Watson underscores the realistic rendering of the illustrated photographs in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home as “evidence of the material reality”; however she emphasizes their role as “evocations of memory” and “occasions for introspection,” used as tools to reveal hidden family stories (37, 38). In a similar understanding, Nancy Pedri undergirds the role photographic images play in the construction of narrative in comics, highlighting their storytelling aspect 17

18

19

Sontag: “the nuclear family was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life” (9). While the objectivity of the photographic image has been challenged: the photographer chooses the perspective and vantage point as well as the many technical aspects that go into creating an image, making it highly subjective; additionally photographic images can be manipulated to distort ‘reality.’ Benjamin Woo adds that, “non-fiction comics are inescapably hyperreal, for, although they maintain a truth claim, they do not provide an access to the referent outside of the system of simulacra contained on the page” (175).

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over their function as tools to reference an external reality. This, in turn, destabilizes the boundary between their documentary nature and their drawn or fictional one. (8). Tran’s use of photographic imagery operates within the parameters of these concerns. Unlike many comic artists working in the genre of life writing, such as Alison Bechdel, Tran does not render the drawn photographs in a more realistic style than other panels in his memoir. How then do we distinguish them as photographs, and what is their ontological status vis-à-vis the rest of the images? The imagined, fictional, photographs are identifiable through their largely sepia or steely color and their serrated edges. When drawn in this style, Tran is alluding to absent images, either lost due to dislocation or never taken due to circumstance (war, absent parents). Such images include various scenes from Tri’s childhood in Vietnam, or scenes from the imprisonment of his friend, Do, in a labor camp (148–49).20 By creating these images as stand-ins for photographs, Tran enfolds them into the real, insisting on their evidentiary nature. At the same time, their fictional status as drawings indicates not only to their lack of credibility as documentary representations, but also the incredible and implausible reality that they represent, that of labor camps, war, terror and grief. The second type of drawn photographic image consists of actual, existing family photos, although due to the drawing style, which does not differ from the rest of the panels, it is difficult to ascertain their unique ontological status. However, when Tran draws his grandmother’s hand clasping a photograph of Dzung and baby GB, he is quoting a gesture similar to that of Alison holding a realistically drawn photographic image of her father in Fun Home,21 which is itself an echo of a cartoon image of Art holding his mother’s actual photograph in “Prisoner on the Hell Planet” from Maus i. We can therefore assume that despite the lack of distinction between the style of the grandmother’s hand and that of the figures in the image she is grasping, that it is indeed a photograph. On the same page, however, there are eight other images of the Tran family during their first years in the United States, yet we have no means with which to discern their veracity as tangible existing images; in fact, given the empty frame GB finds (discussed below), we suspect they may not ­actually  ­exist. 20

21

Tran also uses this style to depict the mass exodus of northern Vietnamese to the south, a journey his mother undertook in her youth (124–25). The style may suggest a dearth of documentation of this difficult event. The drawn photographic images in Bechdel’s memoir are rendered in a different style than the other images; they are more realistically drawn in crosshatch technique and are more clearly distinguishable as photographs.

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Figure 2.3 Vietnamerica, page 228.

Tran therefore destabilizes clear boundaries between fact and fiction, to comment on the one hand on the un-believability of lives so disrupted and dispersed, and on the other, on the reality of their experiences, as they are collected in his alternative family album. Before turning to discuss Tran’s rendering of actual photographs, I will linger further on a drawn family portrait that is based on a photographic image and braided three times within the memoir, to further explore Tran’s use of this aesthetic. The family portrait is most vividly represented in Chapter Eleven, and frames the naturalization process Tran’s family underwent in the u.s. The image appears on the last page (243, Figure 2.4), and is in dialogue with an earlier image of the family portrayed in the opening of the chapter (228, Figure 2.3), where we see the Tran family – Tri, Dzung, Le Nhi (Tri’s mother), Lisa, Manny and baby Vy (siblings) – as young, bright-eyed and hopeful new immigrants beginning their process of naturalization. The family portrait at the end of the chapter, taken five years later by an anonymous photographer at the tail-end of the process, shows an altered family. The members have not only aged, and added a new member, GB, to their ranks, but their facial expressions have shifted dramatically. The faces of the parents and of the adolescent children (Lisa and Manny) are taut, bitter and downcast, while only those of the younger kids, Vy and GB, are smiling and ­naïve. Tri has replaced his glasses with his hallmark dark shades, which conceal and shield his eyes, and Le Nhi is inexplicably absent from the photo. What transpired to create these changes in the family? The chapters ­focalized by GB often focus on the difficulties of migration, yet the personal toll ­migration exacts upon Tri is made most pertinently clear in this chapter through the words of his friend, Do. Remaining in Vietnam after the war, Do spent six years in a communist labor camp, suffering abuse and starvation.

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Figure 2.4 Vietnamerica, page 243.

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Yet, Do tells GB, “I don’t regret any of it … I just dug ditches for six years. But I can’t even imagine what your father went through. Trying to start a new life with strange rules and foreign customs while trying to preserve his own. Busy trying to keep the family he sacrificed everything for together” (239). Forced labor and i­ mprisonment, Do suggests, are on some levels easier to cope with than cultural dislocation. Tri’s face seems to embody the inherent contradictions Vietnamese-Americans confront, having been displaced from Vietnam by u.s. imperialism, yet being citizens of the United States, which also has a legacy of regarding Asians as ultimate aliens.22 Achieving the American Dream, Tran implies, is laced with the tragedy of being culturally unhinged and, as the dynamic within the image suggests, becoming alienated from your Americanized children. The farce of the American dream is made concrete through the panel directly above the family portrait, which grants an over-the-shoulder glimpse of a government official stamping Tri’s “Certificate of Citizenship,” while saying, “You’ve been waiting for this day for over five years? Bet they’ve flown by getting to live the American dream and all. Let me be the first to officially congratulate you” (243). The contrast between the words of the official and the image of the family is blatant, the visual undermining the verbal. In an instance of braiding, we discover that this very same family portrait initially (though not chronologically) appears in Chapter Five, a chapter in which the family, on a rare occasion (Le Nhi’s death), comes together (­Figure 2.5).23 Leaving Vietnam may have saved the family members from possible death and probable poverty and hardship, yet it also caused, as is often the case in migrant families, the disintegration of the family unit, dispersing its alienated members across the continent.24 This is rendered through a geographical map of the u.s., depicting the disparate homes of the dispersed family members; at the same time, the map legend suggests that it doubles as a metaphorical map of “generational divide” and “cultural loss” (97). Tran’s representation of the gap between the first and second generation through the use of a geographical map, in which the topography of the continental divide corresponds with that of the generational divide, shows how geography and cultural loss coalesce. The family photo, with its estranged family members, appears immediately above this map, exemplifying the way the 22 23 24

See Lia Lowe, Immigrant Acts, 1–17. Traditionally, the Vietnamese family consisted of several generations of the extended family living together under one roof. The breakdown of the family and the intergenerational tensions are apparent also in the novels of Junot Díaz and Boris Fishman discussed in Chapters three and four, and has been a staple of migrant fiction from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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Figure 2.5 Vietnamerica, Page 97.

tensions inherent in migration wreck havoc on the family. The image here is faded, and like the fictional images discussed above, is drawn with serrated edges, suggesting that at this point, even the tangible past togetherness of the nuclear family appears fictional. Chapter Seven features this family portrait one more time. As a college student helping his mother clean house for the Vietnamese New Year, GB and Dzung encounter a photo frame constructed of several differently shaped panels (141, figure 2.6). Only one panel contains a photo, that of the family at the end of the naturalization process. The rest of the panels in the frame are blank, ­suggesting the absence of a family album and narrative. The Vietnamese past is a blank slate, and the American present has yet to yield a narrative worth commemorating. Tran, through his graphic memoir, endeavors to create the neverbefore-constructed family album, in which the panels of the graphic memoir mimic the empty picture frame, filling them in with lost, or recreated, images.

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Figure 2.6 Vietnamerica, Page 141.

The image of Tran’s unhappy family does not reflect the dominant ideology of the ideal family typically displayed in photos. By braiding the image into the narrative, Tran exposes the complications within the family as he takes us beyond the picture itself, and into the elements that constructed it. In Family Frames, Marianne Hirsch analyzes the role photography plays in ­constructing the parameters of the ideal family, and explores how the family, in turn, is framed by the ideology that photography perpetuates. Hirsch observes that photographs “locate themselves precisely in the space of contradiction between the myth of the ideal family and the lived reality of family life” (11). ­Images can reveal tensions that exist between family members, as well as tensions that arise from the “familial gaze,” the dominant cultural construct of the family in a given time.25 The image of the Tran family displays tensions within the family (Manny’s folded arms, Tri’s shades, the downcast eyes), as well as a failure to live up to the photographic convention of the happy family. By introducing the image into the graphic narrative as a drawing, Tran appropriates it and accepts its failure to represent the ideal. The failure is re-inscribed as a critique, not of the family, but of the ideology of the American Dream and the corresponding happy family, an ideology from which, as Vietnamese migrants, they were excluded. Alongside the near-empty frame, GB finds a stash of photos from his parents’ Vietnamese past stored in boxes in the garage, which emerge as a kind of return of the repressed. GB cannot recognize the photographed subjects, nor is he aware of the role they played in his parents’ lives. The photographs serve as a trigger for storytelling as Dzung fills in some gaps while leaving ­others vague. Several of the photographs found in the boxes make a vivid, lifelike 25

Jo Spence and Annette Kuhn have also deconstructed the ideal family in their works (Kuhn, Annette. Family secrets: Acts of memory and Imagination. London and New York: Verso, 1995; Spence, Jo. Putting Myself in the Picture: A Political, Personal and Photographic Autobiography. Seattle: The Real Comet Press, 1988).

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a­ ppearance at the formal center of the memoir at the end of Chapter Six, a chapter illustrated entirely in black and white, which serves as a foil to the bright colors of the ensuing photographic images (136). Tran devotes one singular page to reproductions of actual photographic images. The images are scattered across the page, superimposed one on another, to suggest a surplus of life lived. They represent his parents when they were young, Tri’s young children, Lisa and Manny (from his previous marriage to a French woman), a younger Le Nhi. The images show the smiling young faces of Tri and Dzung in bathing suits at the seaside, of Dzung seated on a scooter and of a carefree, shirtless Tri painting a canvas, a cigarette between his lips (having been forbidden to attend art school by his mother, Tri finally began painting in the early seventies, yet was forced to stop when he fled Vietnam). The photographic images convey a stark contrast between these smiling and happy faces, and the haggard and strained faces of the family portrait taken just a few years later. They additionally undermine a common perception of Vietnam as a war zone. The photographs authenticate and verify the factual element that underscores the narrative and actively defy stereotypes of life in Vietnam. Yet, photographs raise questions about the relation between documentary and fiction, suggesting, as Marianne Hirsch observes in relation to Maus, that they “[lay] bare the levels of mediation that underlie all visual representational forms” (Family Frames 25). Photographs are constructed no less than drawn images, and meaning is read on to them, not inherent in them. The image of Lazarus Averbuch in Aleksandar Hemon’s novel, The Lazarus Project, functions similarly in several ways. The image resurfaces to evoke a repressed past, in this case one of violence and xenophobia. Hemon also takes us beyond the photograph itself to explore the forces that went into its construction, revealing the iconography of violence in American culture, especially in reference to its minority populations. Furthermore, the image, which is reproduced visually in two instances, is also evoked verbally through various references to photography and violence, most prominently the reference to the Abu Ghraib images, which connect between instances of racial violence in different times enacted by similar forces. Finally, Hemon blurs fact and fiction both in narrative and in photography, and in the relations between the two. Most relevant for the discussion here is the fact that the photographs taken by the photographer Velibor Božović cannot authenticate the fictional journey of Rora and Brik, eroding the evidentiary power of photographic images within the work. The photographs that GB discovers emerge alongside what Dzung terms “old junk and clutter,” which are in fact objects that Tri has salvaged, or restored, from his past: a Tintin comic book, a coat, and empty canvases (142). These objects are braided into the narrative as well, and reveal the recesses of Tri’s deeply repressed emotions, represented in a three-tiered thought bubble

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(showing distinct temporal moments) emerging from Tri’s head as he works in the garden. Tran’s knowledge of the history of these objects and their specific meaning for his father indicates that Tri has shared his memories with GB in the interim between then and now. The coat, given to Tri by his first wife, was one of the only items salvaged by Huu Nghiep from Tri’s former residence after the war, and was given to him by his father when they first met, hence it is a doubly emotional object. Tintin ties Tran’s art with his father’s childhood passion for comics, and will feature in our discussion further on. The empty canvases reveal Tri’s thwarted attempt to return to his painting. The canvases also recall the one remaining canvas painted by Tri in the seventies, also salvaged by his father after the war. Done in a French impressionist style, the image is braided countless times into the memoir, primarily as a splash of color in the otherwise stark home of Huu Nghiep’s widow in the first chapter of the book. By inserting the painting into the memoir, Tran appropriates his father’s art in an act of homage, which climaxes in a full-page grid portraying slices of the painting reassembled in panels, a gesture combining Tri’s art with Tran’s technique of cartooning (211). The braided images, in particular of the history book, the tree and the family photographs, contribute to the idea that Tran is writing an alternative history that doubles as a family album. The recurring images have the effect of binding together the dispersed people and the diverse times, places and spaces in which they reside.

Transgressing Boundaries: Words, Images, Identities

Comics directly confront the hierarchy of word over image. Conventionally, the logocentric tradition privileges words over images, as Scott McCloud explains: “Traditional thinking has long held that truly great works of art and literature are only possible when the two are kept at arm’s length. Words and pictures together are considered, at best, a diversion for the masses, at worst, a product of crass commercialism” (140). More particularly, Hatfield identifies “a long-lived tradition of professional writing” in the United States “that links comics with illiteracy and the abdication of reading as a civilized and (civilizing) skill” (ac 33). The Post wwii surge in comics for children caused the critic Fredric Wertham to assert a causal connection between consumption of comics and delinquency as well as reading disabilities.26 The visuals were “held to be a detriment because they encourage a ‘lazy’ or passive approach to reading” 26

For a full exposition of his critique, see Seduction of the Innocent (1954).

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(ac 34). Even following the rise, in the seventies and eighties, of alternative comics, an innovative and intellectually challenging medium (and an off-shoot of the subversive subculture of underground comix), comics, a­ ccording to ­Hatfield and Adam Gopnik, continue to be regarded as a “primitive and preliterate” form (ac 34).27 Hatfield argues that not only are comics conceptually and analytically complex and layered texts, more pertinently, they collapse the dichotomy between the written word and the drawn image. Indeed, the two media “approach” each other, as words can be visually inflected, reading as pictures, while pictures can become as abstract and symbolic as words. In brief, the written text can function like images, and images like written text … visible language has the potential to be quite elaborate in appearance, forcing recognition of pictorial and material qualities that can be freighted with meaning … conversely, images can be simplified and codified to function as a language. (ac 36–37) While Hatfield recognizes the crossover between words and images, he simultaneously underscores the importance of identifying word and image as “two ‘different’ types of sign, whose implications can be played against each other” (ac 37), for comics thrive on the tension between the two codes. Tran taps into the word-image crossover in order to address the crossing of other boundaries, which feeds into his larger project of yoking assorted moments in time and collapsing events in space. The image of the American official stamping Tri Huu Tran’s “Certificate of Citizenship” (Figure 2.4), offers three separate codes within which the written words operate: on one level, words denote and designate the certificate of citizenship. The words literally ‘create’ the picture, are the picture and partake of its diegetic world, the world of the story. We translate the words into an image of a certificate of citizenship. On another level, we experience the word, “stamp,” through a different act of translation, not as a word, but as a sound emanating from an ‘action’ taking place in the fictional world. The word is of a different size and shape from the words on the certificate, is replete with action lines and ends with a decorative exclamation point. This word does not represent a physical reality in the fictional world, nor does it express an utterance and exists therefore on a separate plane of meaning. On a third level, words are encountered within the convention of speech balloons, and represent the monologue spoken by the invisible official, whose presence is m ­ anifested 27

See Adam Gopnik, “Comics and Catastrophe” The New Republic.

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through his/her words (and hands), and whose shoulder we are presumably looking over. The words therefore are not part of the image per se, they are not ‘visible’ to the characters taking part in this interaction in the same way the words on the certificate are. Words in this image are seen to operate on different ontological levels and signify different registers of meaning, blurring the clear distinction between word and image. Chapter Five offers a fruitful arena in which to further explore Tran’s use of word/image interplay. Focalized by GB, the chapter narrates an ongoing encounter in an American hospital, where the family members are gathered to part from Le Nhi. Thematically, the chapter revolves around Scrabble, a classic board game in which the players depend upon one another for the creation of meaning. Scrabble underlines the need for cooperation in order to create words, while it also reveals an immigrant drive to improve linguistic skills. On the plane from New York (where GB and his half-sister Lisa live), to Arizona (where their grandmother is hospitalized), Lisa and GB play Scrabble and discuss their childhood, and in particular, their father’s harsh, and at times violent, treatment of his children. GB has a flashback to a family gathering, during which he, Lisa and his grandmother, Le Nhi, were playing Scrabble. The recollection reveals GB’s ignorance of his family history, which is so profound that he is unaware, as a teenager, that Lisa is his half sister (98). Connecting words on the Scrabble board together with his grandmother and sister does not help GB puzzle together the pieces of his family history. Later on in the chapter, we see the family members playing Scrabble in the hospital waiting room (112), as a way to interact and pass time without the need to necessarily be intimate. This third appearance of the Scrabble board endorses its centrality within the family ethos as a place to interact yet the words composed on the board reveal it to be an ambiguous vehicle of communication and an uncertain manifestation of togetherness. This is underlined by the central image in this chapter, a double page spread of a scrabble board (108–09, figure 2.7). The tiles on the board spell out the words “in a foreign culture threatening our own” – while the letters “h-o-m-e” lie cast asunder, literally unable to be assembled on the board, or figuratively within American culture. Despite their linguistic message, the Scrabble letter-tiles and the words they create clearly form an integral part of the pictorial element. Beyond their verbal meaning, the words visually construct the picture of the board, and as such, partake of the pictorial element, revealing the extent to which words can function as pictures. Inserted between these image-words, in the ‘empty’ spaces of the Scrabble board, are images depicting the difficulties the Tran family members experience in adjusting to their new home in America. These vignettes include

Figure 2.7 Vietnamerica, Pages 108–09.

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pictorial rendering of significant words that differ in substance from those that construct the ‘tile-words’ on the scrabble board, and are often culturally coded icons, conveying symbolic meaning. Most vividly, we are drawn to the ­McDonalds emblem on bags of food the children are consuming, while in the background, their father, clearly upset, is using chopsticks to eat traditional Vietnamese food. This vignette illustrates the growing gap between the children and their immigrant parent. Another vignette depicts Dzung naively selecting a Minnie Mouse T-shirt for her stepson, Manny, who is subsequently teased by his American classmates (“Nice shirt, fag!”), highlighting both Dzung’s ignorance of cultural codes, as well as the difficulties of being an Asian immigrant child. The Salvation Army outlet, where Dzung obtains the shirt, indicates the family’s economical plight, while the bottle of Mountain Dew soft drink in the loaded cart of the customer standing directly behind Dzung at the supermarket, comments in its fullness upon the single bottle of milk she is buying with a food coupon. The Blondie poster decorating Lisa’s room shows not only her rebelliousness towards the values her parents uphold but is also an indication of her desire to blend in by ascribing to the American ideal of beauty. Yet Lisa, with her Southeast Asian features, will never look like her blond role model. In addition to these culturally coded iconic words, the Scrabble board image contains sound-words (the “Blip, Blip” of the video game played by GB in one of the vignettes), speech balloons ‘belonging’ to the characters ‘within’ the vignettes (the fight between Lisa and her father, customers asking Dzung for more coffee, classmates mocking Manny), and to those ‘without’ (belonging to GB and Lisa, who are conversing). The word-image interplay encompasses words functioning as pictures, words operating as symbols, words acting as sounds and words performing dialogue, while also illustrating Hatfield’s point that “visible language has the potential to be quite elaborate in appearance, forcing recognition of pictorial and material qualities that can be freighted with meaning” (ac 37). The comics page therefore encompasses multiple time frames: on the one hand, the time of the Scrabble game on the plane, as well as those other instances of scrabble played throughout the chapter, and on the other hand, the various different moments represented in the vignettes. This composite image-text enables Tran to harness disparate time frames and moments into one composite image, connecting the present to the past and creating continuity rather than rupture. Hatfield underscores the occurrence of another slippage between words and images, insofar as “images can be simplified and codified to function as a language” (ac 37). Tran employs the art of comics to create tension between various modes of pictographic language by using symbols and icons within his

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comics panels, which represent words and concepts, fully exemplifying Hatfield’s point. Tran achieves this most clearly by appropriating, translating and implementing communist iconography at several junctions within the memoir, and most explicitly in Chapter Nine, where he inserts three bold posters into the narrative (186, 188, and 190, see figure 2.13). Using the primary colors, which also correspond with the colors of the 1975 transitional national flag, Tran’s posters feature jubilant Vietnamese citizens and fearless Vietnamese soldiers alongside design-like symbols and icons, which signify meanings that go beyond the world of the narrative. The reader translates these visual symbols into their respective words, which connote larger ideologies: the sickle & the hammer represent communism, the dove and olive branch symbolize peace, and the five-pointed red star represents communist revolution and regime. The symbols stand for words that the reader easily recognizes and adequately demonstrate the way in which images can approach words. Tran’s destabilization of the word-image dichotomy works to blur other boundaries, such as those between past and present, moment and sequence, and the representation of space (and time) on the two dimensional page.

Movements in Space, Place & Time

Tran translates temporality and spatiality onto the two dimensional page in ways that enhance his weaving together disparate times and distinct spaces and places, to achieve a continual family narrative. To understand this p ­ rocess more fully, I will explore in further detail the single image versus the imagein-series. Comics represent time, or temporal sequence, using a succession of panels. The narrative is broken down into visuals by the author, while the reader undergoes the reverse process, by inferring connections between them. These complementary terms, called ‘breakdown’ and ‘closure’ Hatfield explains, “describe the relationship between sequence and series” (ac 41).28 Otherwise stated, the reader must fill the space in-between the panels, namely the gutter, to create continuity between the moment depicted in the preceding panel and the moment appearing in the ensuing one. Tran plays with different types of closure and breakdown, and ultimately pushes the tension between the single image and the image-in-series to an 28

See Chapter 3 of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, where he describes the various types of closure that occur between panels – moment to moment, action to action, subject to subject, etc. To achieve closure, the reader moves between the visible and invisible, actively collaborating with the artist to attain coherence.

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­extreme, as he transitions from one specific moment in time and space, to another quite distinct and seemingly disconnected one, without cuing the reader as to where he is going. The length of time that has passed, and whether it has moved forward or backwards, is inconsistent and needs to be newly assessed for each panel. This radical approach to breakdown enables Tran to harness distinct temporalities and spatialities with relative ease. Tran’s technique recalls that of Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez, who, as Hatfield has observed in relation to their Love & Rockets comics, tend to “leap[ ] freely between story elements,” and to “manipulate time, space and point of view, collapsing hours or years into abrupt transitions … and discerning patterns in widely separated events” (ac 70). This type of radical breakdown demands more active participation of the reader in the process of creating meaning and coherence, and the reader becomes an agent in the unfolding events, and has a personal stake or responsibility in generating meaning.29 Junot Díaz also draws on this technique in his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, demanding his readers to take responsibility for actions. Another type of closure Tran employs frequently is what Scott McCloud has termed “aspect-to-aspect,” a technique that represents fragments of a location or situation, such as a building from different vantage points and distances, or different people assembled in a room. “Most often used to establish a mood or a sense of place,” McCloud points out, “time seems to stand still” in such frames. The role of the reader changes accordingly, and rather than bridging the gap between moments that are separate, “the reader here must assemble a single moment using scattered fragments” (79). This serves Tran well, as he attempts to assemble a familial whole out of fragments. This technique, McCloud observes, has been “an integral part of Japanese mainstream comics almost from the very beginning” (79), and is used very seldom in western comics; Tran’s employment of aspect-to-aspect is yet another way he destabilizes boundaries, in this case between the aesthetic approaches of western and Japanese comics. In Tran’s work, as well as in that of Junot Díaz we can additionally see that “a single image … typically functions in two ways at once: both as a moment in a sequence, and as a graphic element in an atemporal design” (Hatfield ­Alternative 48). Hatfield underlines the constant strife between these functions, which causes the single image to be grasped simultaneously as a singular 29

“Crucially, the gutter spaces of comics are, in a sense, unregulated spaces, interstices that are components of meaning for the reader to fill in (or choose to ignore). For this reason, comics … is a form that gestures at robust readerly involvement; it actively solicits through its constitutive grammar the participant’s role in generating meaning” (Chute and Jagoda 4).

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moment and as part of a sequence of moments, as both a linear and non-linear design element. The reader is constantly pulled between privileging the panel as part of a sequence and between perceiving its singularity as a graphic element. The two types of awareness towards the role of the panel are constantly at play, and comics build on these tensions to create meaning. Tran uses the complexity of the single image as both moment-in-sequence and as graphic ­element in an a-temporal page design to illustrate the tensions and connections between individual lives and the larger frameworks of family, community or nation that circumscribe them. On a grand scale, the alternating chapters between Dzung’s narration and GB’s focalization set the tone for smaller transitions that occur within and between chapters. More particularly, the prologue alternates, as we have seen, between leaving Vietnam and returning to Vietnam, in a nearly seamless transition, perhaps prompting the readers to expect abrupt, or un-cued transitions, which become more demanding as the narrative progresses. The first ­chapter, focalized by Tran, shifts between the dark, gloomy and sterile home of his ­paternal grandfather (where his widow is still living) and the bright, cheerful and crowded home of his mother’s family. While the reader is not cued to make the transitions, the shifts are made apparent by the straightforwardness of the contrasts between the two families, highlighting their separate storylines. Yet while Tran builds contrasts between the paternal home, dominated by dark colors and empty spaces, and the vibrantly colored crowded maternal home, he will eventually eradicate those differences, showing that the pain and suffering experienced by both families due to the war is similar. The second chapter, narrated by Dzung, intertwines the tale of her childhood with that of Tri using elusive transitions that are not immediately a­ pparent to the reader. Only by playing close attention to names, faces and ­locations can the reader piece the individual stories together (variation ­between the color palettes exists but is subtle). While Dzung and Tri grew up under different socio-economic circumstances and in different regions of Vietnam, the intertwining of their stories suggests a shared reality that derives from growing up in a war zone. As is the case with many transnational migrants who come from conflict-ridden areas, both Dzung and Tri experienced migration and dislocation within their native county, Vietnam (Dzung’s family moved from Langson in the north to Vungtau, Tri’s from Mytho to Saigon) and both suffered the d­ isruption of their family, and the loss of a father (Huu Nghiep went underground to fight occupation, while Dzung’s biological father, Than, was killed in French crossfire). The third chapter contains a variety of panel transitions, and requires the reader to engage more conceptually in the construction of the narrative.

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­Focalized by GB, the chapter relates to his first visit to Vietnam, during which he was exposed to stories narrating the fate of various family members after the communists came to power. Inspired by Do and coaxed by GB’s persistent questioning, Tri narrates the difficulties facing “[t]hose left behind who hadn’t fought the Americans,” who “were treated worse than second class citizens” (55). Although Tri himself was in America, he tells GB (in speech represented by authoritative, harsh and unyielding capital letters) how his widowed maternal grandmother was murdered in her sleep in Saigon in the mid 1970’s, most likely by a desperate and starving person. The murder scene is conveyed through a nearly classic 12-panel grid (the top tier is one oblong panel rather than three; 57, figure 2.8), suggesting the determined movement of the perpetrator through the relatively affluent home with the reader easily filling in the gaps between the panels. The reader views the scene from the vantage point of the perpetrator, and participates in the steady yet unwavering progression through the home, peering through half-open doors, and noticing a piano with musical score open on its stand, a comfortable sitting room, and a kitchen knife which is retrieved in anticipation of the encounter with the old lady (57).30 A tension exists between the determined pace, suggested by the monotonic square panels, which will end in death, and the moment of each panel, which tells a story of the house, of its inhabitants and the cultured world in which they had lived. We hesitate to progress, understanding the purpose of the perpetrator’s forward movement, wishing to prolong it and postpone the inevitable. The last panel on the page shows the hand with the knife raised to the grandmother’s neck, yet, perhaps in homage to Scott McCloud, the reader never actually ‘witnesses’ the murder of the grandmother.31 This visual feat is left to the reader’s imagination, while a superimposed speech bubble conveys GB’s words, “Whoa! Wait a sec! She was murdered? ” a fact corroborated by Tri’s narration. The grid design of the page determines the comprehension of the unfolding events, suggesting a privileging of the format/page design over any specific panel, with its implicit linearity, driving the narrative forward and placing the grandmother’s death within a larger social and political context. Yet, at the same time, the reader is summoned to delay, to focus on the specific panel, on the details of a life lived, on the singular moment.

30 31

Will Isner’s discussion in Comics and Sequential Art, on the connection between timing and rhythm is illustrative here (Chapter 3 pages 28–37). “I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example,” Scott McCloud writes, “but I’m not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why … That, dear reader, was your special crime…” (68).

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Figure 2.8 Vietnamerica, Page 57.

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The aesthetics of the grid, a technique Tran employs sparsely in his memoir,32  clashes with the style of the panels on the surrounding pages, making for abrupt temporal and aesthetic transitions. The following page (58, ­figure 2.9) is divided into two sections separated by a time gap of circa ­thirty years. The upper section depicts past events in shades of brown – the discovery of the grandmother’s death and the police corruption – while its three panels are formed out of smoke emanating from the bottom half of the page, and more specifically from Tri’s cigarette, creating both a sense of a recollection as well as of a past gone up in smoke.33 The smoke ‘constructs’ three non-­standard frames that challenge the canonical “western technographic … geometric rationality” most commonly used in comics, aligning them with other anti-­hegemonic inclinations employed in the memoir.34 The bottom half of the page relates to GB’s visit to Vietnam, and consists of two horizontal, oblong panels, the top one open-ended, not framed, creating space for the scene from the past to emerge, memory-like. The two bottom panels establish diverse vantage points for a single scene, urging the reader to create closure. The top panel gives us a view of GB, his smoking father and his old friend Do, sitting on a rooftop in present day Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon, with the city spread below them, while the bottom panel shows us the rooftop as it would appear from the busy, bustling, noisy street. The two vantage points give a sense of space and place, broadening the scope of the moment to encompass the city. While there are two parallel stories taking place on the same page, in two separate series using two separate color schemes, they are connected formally through the smoke and verbally through the narrating voice of Tri, aiding the reader in achieving closure. The division of the page as a whole grants equal weight to the past and the present with regard to the space they take up on the 32

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A few other occasions in which Tran employs the classic grid are: the funeral of Dzung’s biological father (here the top tier is also not bifurcated); in the hospital waiting for Le Nhi’s death (here the grid shows how time stretches out while waiting, as each moment is similar to the next); uncle Vinh’s army training (delineating the swift transition from civilian to soldier within nine, rather than the usual twelve months), and GB finding the book in his Brooklyn apartment (276). See also pages 24, 42, 90, 113, 200, and 210 (with the painting discussed above). Thierry Groensteen claims that, “when the format of the frame is different from the norm, then its structuring function tends to be confused with its expressive function” (49). Arguably, the structure and expressive function coalesce, as Tran is clearly utilizing the smoke shaped panels for affect as well. Guy Gauthier as quoted by Groensteen, page 46. (Gauthier – Vingt leçons sur l’image et les sens 14).

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Figure 2.9 Vietnamerica, Page 58.

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page, while the different panel design creates a dynamic tension between the two separate stories, times and situations. However, in representing the two events, past and present, in conjunction on the same page, Tran brings them closer to each other, intimating that the past penetrates the present, that it still consciously lives on in the lives of his parents and their generation, and less consciously affects his life as well. Furthermore, despite the obvious differences between the Saigon35 in which GB’s great-grandmother lived, and the bustling, contemporary Ho Chi Minh City, the scene reminds us that they are the same place physically and geographically, bridging the gap between the city of the past and that of the present. Yet there is also something eerie about the transformation of a war zone and a site of crime into a ‘regular,’ normal place. There is something entirely unsettling, which is exacerbated by the visual proximity of the two, as presented in Tran’s memoir. The city of the past is gone, lost, erased, destroyed, while the emergent city functions not only as the entity that has erased the past, but also speaks of renewal and rebirth.36 We may be reminded of Brik’s return to his native Sarajevo, which, although blighted by war, retained a sense of familiarity, as denoted by the soft asphalt under his feet. The opposite page addresses an entirely different scene, in a different location and at a different time. The reader is not cued to this abrupt transition, and does not know how much time has elapsed since the previous scene, or even whether it came prior or after. The sense of disorientation felt by the reader simulates the sense of disorientation experienced by the disrupted families. The reader eventually understands that GB and his parents, together with his uncle Vinh (Dzung’s half-brother) are on their way to visit Langson, their ancestral home. En-route, GB learns of the existence of an additional ­grandparent, when they stop at another cemetery to pay their respects to Dzung’s biological father. Thematically, this scene is connected to the previous one, as it por35

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Tri still calls the city Saigon, yet it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in April 1976. The communists captured Saigon in April 1975, days after Dzung and Tri fled to the u.s.; Tri’s maternal grandfather died several months after they fled, while his maternal grandmother was murdered shortly after. The ‘erased’ past is conveyed by means of GB’s parents, who return to Vietnam after a twenty year absence, and find an altered country, where their own personal histories have been obliterated, leaving them even more uprooted than before their return visit as they are now devoid of the illusion that they have a ‘home’ to return to. Tran addresses this sentiment in a page spread (202–03) depicting his parents during their first visit, standing bewildered in the crowded, bustling street, unable to locate their previous home. The next panel shows them isolated, hand in hand, eyes downcast, suggestive of their new existential predicament.

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trays the proliferation of the family and immediately also its contraction, as the newly discovered members are already dead. It also resonates with the fusion of past and present, especially potent in the panel depicting the family’s visit to the city of Langson, as told a few pages onward. The entire page is split vertically down the middle (61, figure 2.10). The left side is a polyptych,37 depicting an aerial view of Langson. A discerning gaze will reveal the four family members walking down the street in three places simultaneously, initially in the background, as tiny figurines, and becoming larger as they get closer to the foreground, pointing, peering and photographing the scene. The family’s progression through the town, depicted in three different moments, but only one frame, grants a sense of motion in time, while emphasizing the significance of the physical setting of the ‘ancestral home.’ Meanwhile, the right-hand side of the page is constructed of five tiers showing Dzung in the act of recollecting her past. As she does so, she is transformed from an aging woman, to a young woman and finally a child. Not only does this dynamic play havoc with the idea of time, it also forcefully conveys the emotional impact Dzung’s ancestral home has upon her. The final panel, mimicking the split of the page, shows a second fracture, that of the mother’s face, which is constructed out of a ‘then’ (child) and ‘now’ (aged adult). On the one hand, the past and present come together through this image, yet on the other, they are eternally separate. Dzung physically remains the same person, yet the experience of duality permeates her existence; she is both Vietnamese and American, while also neither. She is split between these two existences and identities. As the memoir progresses Tran continues to use un-cued transitions, ­compelling the reader to achieve closure by suturing rifts between past and present while attuned to the single image-in-series as a moment engulfed by the larger, overarching design of the page. Chapter Four, focalized by Dzung, vacillates between dark and morbid scenes in which Tri, as a young man, is imprisoned by the French (who mistakenly think he can give them information about his father), and scenes which depict in colorful naïve style Tri’s life in Saigon from schoolboy to fatherhood. The images depicting Tri’s childhood are drawn in the Linge Claire (Clear Line) associated with Herge’s The ­Adventures of ­Tintin, books Tri used to read as a child.38 The chapter is a recollection w ­ ithin 37 38

The polyptych depicts one or several figures imposed multiple times over a continuous background (McCloud 115). Charles Hatfield explains that the style “privileges smooth, continuous linework, simplified contours and bright, solid colors, while avoiding frayed lines, exploded forms, and expressionistic rendering” (60). Yet Linge Claire, Harriet E.H. Earle writes, “is more than

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Figure 2.10 Vietnamerica, Page 61.

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a r­ ecollection within a recollection – Tran’s narration of Dzung’s recollection of Tri’s imprisonment, and Tri’s recollection of his youth as he lies in prison (as conceived by Tran). The reader must make the transitions between the depiction of Tri in prison, and his recollection of his past, storylines that cleverly converge at the end, when Tri is released by the French, and is reunited with his family, although the cheerful colors never return. Within this sequence, Tran implements a technique that captures the ­essence of time standing still. Tran depicts his father’s incarceration by the French on a single page, coalescing place, space and time to represent the challenges of Tri’s confinement (78, figure 2.11). On the top tier, one oblong panel shows the door opening with a creak, and a voice bubble ‘asking’ Tri, who is ­lying on a plank beneath a barred window, if there is anything new he has to tell his captors. The identity of those we understand to be French soldiers is always obscured; we only hear their voices, and see body parts (arms), silhouettes, or a hat concealing their faces (as depicted in the second and third tiers, which have three panels each). They are not individualized, as opposed to Tri, whose face is clearly seen. The soldiers come in, slog him, light a cigarette, and leave. There is no clear indication how much time this takes, and the reader’s imagination is given full range to consider the fear and trepidation felt by Tri, and the possible abuse he underwent (on similar pages within the chapter the ­soldiers are bearing instruments of torture). The final panel on the page p ­ ortrays a ­panel within a panel, in which Tran has drawn another, nearly identical replica of the entire page (he alters a few details of gesture and dialogue), repeated on a smaller scale, ad infinitum, suggesting entrapment, frustration, repetitiveness and hopelessness.39 This spatially claustrophobic panel-within-a-panel subtly introduces an additional temporal dimension, as time both expands (the daily beatings) and contracts (the entrapment and similarity), brilliantly conveying Tri’s physical and mental condition.

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just an artistic style. It carries with it tremendous iconic weight” (2) through its association with The Adventures of Tintin, which has strong colonial overtones, and portrays the world as legible, and hence controllable (2). A similar framing instance occurs with images depicting Do in a Communist labor camp: the last panel as a miniature of the entire page, commenting upon time and entrapment, on hopelessness and the repetitiveness of camp life. Narrated by Dzung, it does not give any indication of the horrors of camp. In this instance, the words and images are entirely interdependent, as only together do they convey a potent, sarcastic commentary on the communist labor camps, as “plenty of exercise” means breaking stones at gunpoint, “plenty of privacy” means solitary confinement, and “food for everyone” means a grain of rice for each prisoner.

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Figure 2.11 Vietnamerica, Page 78.

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Cohesive Fragments

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Figure 2.12 Vietnamerica, Page 79.

This page is juxtaposed with Tri’s alleged childhood recollection on the opposite page (figure 2.12). Harriet E.H. Earle explores Tran’s use of the Linge Claire flashback during his portrayal of Tri’s imprisonment, which forms a strong contrast between the dark cell and the allegedly naïve and “clean cut” childhood recollection (3). Earle observes that Tran’s use of a trigger for the flashback “is not only an innovative method of moving the narrative back in time, but also a technique which mimics the triggering of memory and subsequent regression to memory that occurs in a traumatic rupture” (3). Tran’s use of the flashback within flashback in this chapter indeed suggests trauma; ­however, the juxtaposition on pages 78–79 suggests more than a traumatic r­ upture – it suggests an ironic instance of life imitating art. The adult Tri is tortured by French soldiers, while the adolescent Tri on the opposite page is playing the role of a man being beaten by the colonial police in a film being shot in Saigon, turning the clarity of the Linge Claire into something more obscure. By portraying his father’s childhood memories in the Linge Claire style, Tran critiques the colonial past (the French shooting the film use racist language), and reveals his father’s entrapment by its powers. However, the consciousness connecting the two moments is that of Tran; the reader does not know whether or to what ­extent Tri’s actual memory plays a role in this recollection. Therefore, while this scene

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conflates the two moments, it serves to obliterate another dichotomy, that of fact and fiction, revealing the fictional dimension of Tran’s life writing. Chapter Nine, which incorporates the abovementioned communist propaganda panels, presents an interesting case in the treatment of time transitions. The posters evoke the familiar yet by now defunct communist propaganda, but to underline the failure of the new regime, Tran depicts on the opposite pages, and in an entirely different style of representation (‘realistic’ drawings), the life of his paternal grandfather, Huu Nghiep Tran. The juxtaposition – in and of itself an abrupt visual, temporal and aesthetic transition – exposes the discrepancy between the ideal and the real through the life story of Huu Nghiep, a father who abandoned his family to fight colonialism and occupation, and who operated as a military doctor working to save lives while upholding a selfsacrificing, humane and moral work ethic, only to realize that communism did not deliver on its promises. The life of Huu Nghiep paints a picture that negates common American perceptions of the Vietcong as vicious and cunning murderers, while also painstakingly addressing the tragedy of an abandoned son’s bitterness and his estranged father’s loneliness. Framed by GB’s refusal to join his parents on their first trip to Vietnam, the chapter narrates their visit through the focalization of GB, who was not there, but who inserts himself into the events by narrating them. GB narrates Huu Nghiep’s story using third person, extra-diegetic narration mode; his text is represented in speech boxes superimposed upon the communist propaganda on the left-hand page, and on the realistic images of his grandfather on the ­right-hand page. The narrative voice-over explains that it was Huu Nghiep’s determination to fight – first the Japanese, then the French and finally the Americans – that caused him to forsake his wife and children, believing that he was bringing a new and better regime to his country, his fellow men and his family. Calling the grandfather he never met “Grandpa,” GB claims him and embraces him, while explaining the impossible choices he had to make, underlining his dedication to saving lives as the “Chief Doctor of the North’s medical training facility” (190, figure 2.13). The voice-over narration accompanies Huu Nghiep’s story in this extra-diegetic narration for the duration of five out of six of juxtaposed pages, creating a verbal link that sutures the visual discrepancy. On the sixth and last page of the juxtaposed images, the narration seamlessly moves from extra-diegetic third person voice-over to intra-diegetic first person, and we enter a moment in the life of Huu Nghiep during the war. GB’s voice dissolves into that of his grandfather, closing the gap between them. Huu Nghiep is portrayed in the chaos of a medical compound during the war against the French at the precise moment he is notified that his wife Le Nhi,

Cohesive Fragments

Figure 2.13 Vietnamerica, Page 190.

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with whom he has lost contact, has been seen in Saigon (his emotion is shown via the overturned water bowl in which he had been washing his bloodstained hands). From here, and over the next several pages, Huu is the first person narrator of the events. The inscribed listener – in another un-cued transition – is Tri during his first visit to his father in Vietnam (after a fifty year separation).40 While GB himself is physically absent from this encounter, his presence is manifested vicariously through his rendition of it, folding three generations, timeframes and places into one. Huu tells his son Tri of his futile attempts to locate the family (by now in the U.S.) after reunification. Tri’s dark glasses that conceal his eyes, and his arms tightly folded across his chest shield him from his father sitting opposite him, an aged, disillusioned and lonely man. The tension and distance between the father and son are poignantly conveyed on page 198 (figure 2.14), which is constructed horizontally of four oblong tiers. The top tier depicts the two men in profile, sitting across from each other, Tri on a bench, Huu in a rocking chair, encapsulated in a white void, signifying the deep abyss between them. Each of them is entombed in a silence, alienated from the other. The second tier is constructed of two panels, showing their two faces in close up, side by side. Huu’s face is old, tired, sorrowful, while Tri’s, concealed behind his glasses, is opaque and unyielding. As typical of the close-up, these portraits “capture intense emotions,” and magnify the distance b­ etween father and son (Hatfield ac 73). The blank background works to suspend time, underlining the continuing agony of the father and son. The third tier, ­constructed of three square-panels, shows the men in similar positions yet now there is a physical location, Huu’s home, bringing us back to a specific time and place. The space between them is bifurcated, with the middle panel showing a retreating hallway that contributes to the distance between them. Additionally, Huu’s second wife appears in the right hand frame to help him out of his chair, which emits a loud unpleasant creaking sound. In the fourth and last tier, Huu’s back is turned to the viewer as he walks away saying, “I have some things for you.” Huu’s word balloon literally wraps itself around Tri like a tentacle, as he says, “Come,” tugging him up. Huu gives Tri items that are later considered by Dzung to be junk, yet does not part with the painting Tri made in the early 1970s, which Tri is surprised to discover in his father’s home.

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There is a suggestion that Huu, who has remarried by now, has also fathered other children: “By then, she and you weren’t my only family I needed to protect” – showing a picture of Huu and a young woman holding a child (193). Huu’s other offspring are not mentioned beyond this, and we remain curious about their whereabouts and their relationship with their father.

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Figure 2.14 Vietnamerica, Page 198.

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GB visualizes the tragedy of these two men with great sensitivity, making this one of the most heart wrenching pages in the entire memoir. Given that Tran did not have direct access to the information provided in this story, we realize that he must have heard the details of this meeting from his father. Tran’s narration spans three generations, giving voice to his grandfather, his father and himself, in an intergenerational dialogue, orchestrated solely by himself. In this story about fathers and sons, Tran’s words fill in the ruptures to weave together familial and temporal rifts, not only between his ­father and grandfather, but also between himself and his father. Tran constructs a continuous line between himself and his grandfather, a line that must pass through his father as well, bringing the three men together as they never had been in life. Huu Nghiep’s negative image as an abandoning father and a radical Vietcong rebel is rectified; Tri’s visit engenders the healing, while Tran’s (verbal and visual) re-narration of the visit goes a long way in healing the wounds of abandonment and separation, and creates if not reconcilement, at least an understanding. In the one but penultimate chapter (Eleven), Tran brings the technique of the un-cued transition to a crescendo, as he weaves his narrative voice with the voices of Dzung, Tri, Le Nhi, Thi Mot, Uncle Vinh and Do. The chapter is framed by the family’s migration on the one hand, and naturalization on the other. In between, GB ‘interviews’ the various characters, his narrative voice functioning as a link piecing situations and events, patchwork style, to form a family narrative. Each page spread features, on the top left-hand side, a closeup portrait panel of the character being interviewed, while the question the character is addressing, has already been posed by GB on the bottom of the previous page. In this way, the story told by the preceding character is sutured with the ­story told by the ensuing character, which taken together, give a more complete story, as the vantage points of all the characters intersect. Within each page spread, the reader is also challenged by various temporal transitions, from GB’s ‘present’ interview with each character, to moments evoked from the remote past: from GB talking to his mother in the kitchen in Arizona, to Uncle Vinh begging on the streets of Vangtu; from GB in conversation with Thi Mot on the one occasion he met her, to Dzung studying accounting at 3 am after a full day waitressing; from GB riding on the back of Uncle Vinh’s scooter, to his mother receiving a postcard announcing her step-father’s death; from GB talking to his father who is working in his garden, to the reunion between Dzung and Thi Mot. The scope is large, the temporal and spatial transitions are dramatic, but GB’s voice, weaving in and out of the stories, ties them together, granting coherence, continuity and cohesion. Tran unites his family, filling

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many of the gaps, although some remain open,41 and signaling toward a future in which the story will continue to evolve on its ongoing journey. Using spatial techniques, Tran creates a transnational familial space that bypasses borders, transcends nations, and defies geographies. The spatial layout of comics enables Tran to create an alternative sense of space, not one that ­divides and separates, but one that splices and unites across boundaries. Destabilizing the word-image dichotomy, using unorthodox frames and transitions, mixing styles, and blurring fact and fiction, empowers Tran in his critique of hegemonic structures and in his negation of national narratives and myths. As a result, the memoir is not merely a record of transition, but also transitions experience into a new artistic shape; it is not only a spatial entity, but it also has the power to create a spatial reality in the world beyond its pages, a space where a family can come together against all odds. Junot Díaz, to whom we will turn in the following chapter, employs the techniques of comics in a unique way, using solely words to craft his tale. Like Tran, he engages the voices of friends and family to narrate a traumatic national, communal and familial past. 41

The most glaring gap or absence in the family narrative is the total disappearance of Tri’s full biological siblings and half brother after they leave Vietnam to study in France (late sixties and early seventies).

Chapter 3

Shape Shifting and the Shifting of Shapes: Migration and Transformation in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Junot Díaz posits baká, or shape shifting, as the “operating spirit” of his novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). “Baká,” he says, “is a shape-shifter with no original form …. You can’t define it, but you can describe it once you see it.”1 As a child migrant, Díaz necessarily experienced a major shifting of ‘shapes’ – spatial, temporal, cultural – when he relocated from the Dominican Republic to New Jersey, a sentiment echoed in the novel, where “a single green card shiftd[ed] not only worlds (from Third to First) but centuries (from almost no tv or electricity to plenty of both)” (bw 21–2).2 Brief Wondrous embodies not only thematic instances of shape-shifting, but also formal ones, and as such, is compatible with an aesthetics of the migratory, which represents the experience of transition in both theme and form of the work. Seeking to confront the silences and erasures in his ancestral island home and their lingering legacy in the Dominican Diaspora, Díaz turns the rift of migration into a complex text that sets out to explore the spaces in between past and present, the Dominican Republic and the United States. Shape shifting occurs in the novel on various levels. Primarily, Díaz shifts the shape of the national narrative of the Dominican Republic that was crafted by the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo “through a horrifying ritual of silence and blood, machete and perejil, darkness and denial,” a narrative that “inflicted a true border … carved directly into the histories and imaginaries of a people” (bw 225).3 Beyond this psychological border, this “Plátano Curtain,” this “Source Wall” (bw 225, 149), few have ventured. Díaz’s narrator, Yunior, in pursuit of Oscar’s story, dares to go beyond the boundaries, making audible the voices of “the brief, nameless lives,” silenced by the Trujillo regime (epigraph). 1 In the novel baká is encountered as follows: “… the country’s historically fluid border with Haiti – which was more baká than border …” (bw 224). I use Díaz’s spelling, baká, rather than the spelling used by Evelyn Ch’ien in the quoted interview, bacá (Granta). 2 Díaz’s attraction to the genres can be seen as a direct result of migration as they expound the extremes posed by migration, through descriptions of “endless genetic breeding; time travel; leaving one world and being miraculously teleported to another” (Interview with Maya Jaggi). 3 The reference to “perejil” refers to the 1937 massacre of the Haitians.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_005

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Yunior is very much aware of the problematic connections between authorship and its ensuing authoritarianism and authority, to use Jennifer Harford Vargas’s articulation,4 as is evident in footnote 11: “Dictators … just know competition when they see it. Same with Writers. Like, after all, recognizes like” (bw 97, italics in original). In order to prevent his narrative from being authoritarian, Yunior adopts, as Harford Vargas suggests, a variety of techniques that decenter his omniscience, such as depriving the dictator of a voice and of space within the narrative, centralizing the stories of marginalized characters and resorting to ‘underground’ storytelling modes, such as hearsay, footnotes and silences.5 The current discussion will focus on the way the speculative genres, namely, sci-fi, fantasy and comics, inform Yunior’s storytelling, and how their unique techniques keep the story fluid, plural, and incomplete.6 Yunior is cognizant not only of the dangers of writing a definitive story, but also of the impossibility of doing so: “What’s certain is that nothing is certain. We are trawling in silences here …. Which is to say if you’re looking for a full story, I don’t have it” (bw 243). Yunior is not frustrated by his inability to fill the blank pages of history (páginas en blanco), on the contrary, the notion that the definitive story can never be known, that he can only offer an incomplete, always evolving story, one that reflects on various others that remain untold, is the premise, perhaps even the condition, for his emergent narrative.7 4 Harford Vargas questions whether it is possible to write a counterspell that does not reproduce aspects of dictatorship within its own structure. She differentiates between the political dictator, for whom dictating is to command, and the narrative dictator, who is a form of a scribe, engaged in the act of ‘writing down’ the stories that have been repressed by the official narrative of the regime (202). A similar argument is made by Pamela J. Rader, in her essay “Trawling in Silences.” 5 Elena Machado Sáez finds Yunior quite dictatorial, arguing that he doubly silenced Oscar not only by narrating his story, but also by effectively erasing “Oscar’s points of queer Otherness” (524). 6 For a compelling discussion of how Díaz uses the artwork in the novel to undermine the authority of his narrative, see Lauren Jean Gantz’s essay, “Nothing Ever Ends.” The artwork, specifically selected by Díaz, consists of a missile/rocket, an atom, a clenched fist, a biohazard symbol (the frontispiece, and at the head of book i, ii and iii respectively), and the red-splattered winged head on the cover. Gantz links the images not only to the events in the novel, but also to characters from the genres who share in common one salient quality: that the evil can never be fully eradicated; it may temporarily recede, but the evil always returns. Díaz’s counter-narrative goes a long way in rectifying a deep-set cultural amnesia, yet his choice of artwork hints at the limits of art, for in the end, “Nothing ever ends” (bw 331, Yunior quoting Dr. Manhattan, Watchman). 7 Here I disagree with T.S. Miller, who finds Yunior to be “frustrated by his inability to resolve all of the gaps completely” (97).

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To aid him in his task of telling an incomplete story, Yunior implements comics within the narrative, both thematically and structurally. On a structural level, comics are an inherently fragmented, incomplete and indeterminate crossdisciplinary genre that confronts the very notion of discipline itself.8 The techniques of comics, to be discussed below, will reveal it to be an ideal medium for the purpose of shape shifting. Yunior draws liberally not only on comics, but also on the speculative genres of sci-fi and fantasy, in which character transformation is a common feature. The genres enable him to draw vivid analogies, for example, between the (sur) real regime of the cruel dictator, Trujillo, and fantasy worlds dominated by super villains such as Galactus and Sauron, which have the power to convey the horror of the regime more forcefully. The first epigraph of the novel, “of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus,” is a quote from the Fantastic Four, and suggests that Yunior based his cast of characters on the legacy of the mutant anti-heroes of the Fantastic Four team. Oscar, his mother, Belicia, and his sister, Lola, can be loosely affiliated with the members of the Fantastic Four: The Thing (due to size), Human Torch (due to the burn), and Invisible Woman (due to her concern for her younger brother and her disappearing act) respectively, who like the team of the Fantastic Four, undergo meaningful physical and symbolic transformation. Yunior, who self-identifies as “the Watcher” (more on this later), doubles in his role as the fourth member of the team, the mastermind Mister Fantastic, who can stretch his body into multiple shapes, just as Yunior stretches the shape and space of the narrative in a maneuver that deftly reveals the coalescence of theme and form in the novel, showing Brief Wondrous to be as speculative as the genres on which it draws, keeping the shape of the book fluid and shifting, as well as its possible meanings. Before we delve into the transgressive world of comics in Díaz’s novel, a few more thoughts on boundary crossing, transformation and magic. Díaz’s unusual use of footnotes within Brief Wondrous creates another instance of structural and thematic boundary crossing, underscoring his preoccupation with aesthetics and with surface of the page. The baká quality of the footnote is replicated on the surface of the page, which is physically bifurcated by the footnotes, which are also single spaced and printed in smaller font. As many scholars have noted, there is no consistency in the appearance of the footnotes, which do not conform to any single purpose (historical, mock-academic, personal). Additionally they complicate the persona of the narrator, and are one more way of suggesting that the story cannot be contained.9 8 See Charles Hatfield, Introduction, Alternative Comics xiii and “How to …” 129–30. 9 For an in-depth discussion of the footnote’s threshold quality as paratext (Gerard Genette’s definition of matter that surrounds the main text and influences its reception, namely book

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Díaz crosses another boundary with his animated use of Spanish within the novel, which has thematic and structural implications. On one level, many of Díaz’s readers encounter Spanish (and its variations) as a foreign language, an incomprehensible design element on the surface of the page, which brandishes its otherness, creating plurality in representation and undermining the dominance of English and Anglo-centricity. As Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien suggests, Díaz’s “assertive nontranslation” of Spanish has reformed “the idea of what constitutes American language” (234, 204). Ch’ien finds that Díaz’s combined use of Spanish and English “signifies an explosive agency” and extolls his use of Spanish for bringing “expression outside the American majority” (208). Rune Graulund similarly notes that Díaz’s linguistic plurality undermines “the very notion of a mainstream (singular)” (34–35). However his claim that Díaz’s movement between languages (English, street English, Spanish, Dominican Spanish, Spanglish, Elfish) eliminates “exclusionary practices” (41) since the text does not “operate in any one register for long” (39), is debatable. While it is possible to regard the interpenetration of English and Spanish in ­composite bilingual sentences, and often in Spanglish, as a form of destabilization of linguistic boundaries, nonetheless, Díaz masterfully and purposefully puts the monolingual reader in a place of discomfort. Díaz does not import a Spanish word here and there, but rather implements full un-translated sentences that permeate the text throughout, and in which the Spanish word carries a cultural significance that should not be ironed away. In her essay, “Your Own Goddam Idiom,” Maria Lauret commends Díaz’s “densely layered … original and obtrusive” idiom, which “shakes up hierarchies and forces you to look at words and worlds a different way” (498). She argues that the “retention of the ‘foreign’ word, its look, its sound, its feel in the mouth … is surely the point of Díaz’s multilingual, multicultural, omnivorous writing” (503). Additionally, what Lauret has called elsewhere “wanderwords,” work to import meaning into the text, as can be seen for example in Díaz’s use of the word “morena,” which references a shade of skin color, and recalls a brutal history of racism and hostility between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and is based in colonialism.10 Examples like this abound, and the ­non-Spanish

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covers, epigraphs, footnotes, layout, author interviews and publishers’ ads) see Ellen McCracken’s Paratexts and Performance in the Novels of Junot Díaz and Sandra Cisneros, especially Chapter 2, “Autographic Peritexts and Expanding Footnotes in Díaz’s Novel” (45–71) and Chapter 4, “Paritextual Thresholds of the Material Print Artifact” (101–26). McKracken devotes special attention to the paritexts that are materially attached to the book, such as book cover, as opposed to epitexts that surround the book, such as author interviews that Díaz creates online. See the introduction for a discussion of Lauret’s wanderwords in her book by the same title. In her essay, Lauret unpacks the first Spanish word in the text, “dique,” to uncover

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­speaking reader who fails to consult a dictionary will miss volumes of meaning.11 One can enjoy the pure rhythm and rhyme in the sentence, “from the richest jabao in Mao to the poorest güey in El Buey, from the oldest anciano sanmacorisano to the littlest carajito in San Francisco” (3), yet the significance and critique is only revealed if one has a deeper understanding not merely of the terms, but of the history, culture and often trauma that they “import” into the text.12 Glenda R. Carpio similarly suggests that the rhythms created by the odd syntax and composite words reveal Díaz’s “delight in playing with form … yet” she adds, “his play … is pointed” (Carpio 276).13 This linguistic playfulness, Carpio has noted, is also resonant of a creative displacement. By using various dialects, Díaz explores “the linguistic homelessness and creativity that are part of not belonging to English and yet belonging nowhere else” (Carpio 267). Díaz’s linguistic in-between-ness is therefore also an expression of his creativity. Díaz’s preoccupation with the transformative effect of the genres and his employment of footnotes and Spanish are not merely playful aesthetic tools. These features are used to combat the claustrophobic notion of One Story: Trujillo’s story but also Yunior’s story, the story of the Dominican Republic but, no less importantly, the story of its conquest and brutal colonialization. Díaz’s tale is a multilingual, multicultural, multigeneric tale, bent on disrupting the prevalence of one language, one culture, and one identity. Díaz therefore endorses multiplicity to combat what Doris Sommer terms “the meanness of one thought, one striving, one alchemical gold standard of value,” evoking W.E.B. Du Bois’s articulation of the double consciousness, which she upholds as “a vanguard for our best cultural defense of humane practices” (Bilingual Games 7). Díaz’s narrator frames his book within other magical, absent and potentially dangerous books, all of which are redolent of fantasy, and have a significant presence in the world the narrator creates. We begin to see an analogical

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its Haitian creole heritage, which shows, Lauret suggests, “his solidarity with Haiti and Haitian(s)” (497). For an analysis of words used to refer to race and to ‘racial characteristics’ in the dr, see Ashley Kunsa, “Hair, History, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” There is an online annotated reader’s guide that offers English translations of the Spanish text, as well as explanatory notes and references for comics, sci fi and fantasy. As Lauret argues, “reading Wao is not a simple exercise in decoding, but really one of interpretation” (502). Glenda R. Carpio explores the both the proximity as well as tensions that are refracted through Díaz’s fusion of African American language and rhythm with that of Latin American (260–66).

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r­ elationship between the text we are reading, a magical ‘zafa,’ and the texts we are reading about. Yunior is provoked by an otherworldly summons: Five years after Oscar’s death, he begins to have a dream that takes place “in some kind of ruined bailey that’s filled to the rim with old dusty books” (bw 325). Oscar appears as a character from a comic book, “wearing a wrathful mask that hides his face” and “is holding up a book, waving for me to take a closer look.” Yunior first says, “I want to run from him, and for a long time that’s what I do.” But then he notices that, “Oscar’s hands are seamless and the book’s pages are blank. And that behind his mask his eyes are smiling” (bw 325). From beyond the grave, Oscar and his story continue to intrigue Yunior, who is encouraged to fill in the blank pages (páginas en blanco) of the personal and national histories of the Dominican Republic and diaspora, histories that in the case of Oscar and his family are hopelessly and ruthlessly intertwined.14 Yunior undertakes the task of writing a book to provide a ‘zafa,’ a counter-spell, to the curse of the ‘fukú,’ the mythical vengeance that in modern times wreaked havoc on those who messed with the dictator, Trujillo, and more specifically, the vengeance that destroyed Oscar and the Cabral-de-León family: “Even now as I write these words I wonder if this book ain’t a zafa of sorts. My very own counterspell” (bw 7). Yunior’s book, like H.P. Lovecraft’s grimoire, the Necronomicon (of which Oscar was an avid reader), becomes as Ramón Saldívar points out, a “mystical book object … imbued with magical powers” (“Chiste,” 380).15 The implication is that Brief Wondrous, like the grimoire, can exert real influence, even though it is imaginary. The Necronomicon is evoked again in reference to Abelard, Oscar’s maternal grandfather. A well-to-do doctor, Abelard had the audacity to write a book about “the Dark Powers of the President, a book in which [he] argued that the tales the common people told about the president – that he was supernatural, that he was not human – may in some ways have been true” (bw 245). This book is referred to as a “grimoire” (bw 245) and as “some New Age Lovecraft shit” (bw 246). Abelard’s mysterious book, “conveniently destroyed after [he] was arrested” (bw 245, along with everything he had ever written and all of his books), was, Yunior suggests, the ‘real’ reason fukú pursued the family to its destruction, rather than the preferred myth “about The Girl Trujillo Wanted” 14

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Glenda R. Carpio writes that “[w]hat moves Yunior is the story of how and why Oscar, an unlikely hero, comes to have so much faith in love, so much so that he tries to defy death for it. And part of the story lies in his mother’s survival” (274). Ramón Saldívar explores the linguistic and cultural genealogy of the grimoire in his essay “Chiste Apocalyptus.” The grimoire arrived in the Caribbean with the colonial powers, introducing new belief systems into the culture (“Chiste Apocalyptus” 380).

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(bw 245), namely Abelard’s daughter. Abelard’s book ‘echoes’ the one Oscar wrote in the last days of his life in the Dominican Republic, containing, he tells his sister in a letter that arrives months after his death, “his investigations” and “everything I think you will need … the cure to what ails us …. The Cosmo dna” (bw 333). The book never arrives, and its mysterious “cure” is withheld. Brief Wondrous is driven by, and is an homage to, these absent books16 which leave no doubt that fantastical and absent books are at the center of Díaz’s creative endeavor, underlying the potential power, real and imagined, of books and of the imagination that fuels them. In framing his book within the trope of the absent book, Díaz aspires to address the themes of forbidden knowledge, alternative narratives, suppression of information and the role of imagination and storytelling. Brief Wondrous aims to perform some kind of magic.

Comics & Narrative Theory

Beyond the thematic and metaphoric dimension of the speculative genres of sci-fi, fantasy and comics, is their ability to alter the form and aesthetics of the novel, to challenge limiting readings of ‘reality,’ and address questions of memory and injustice.17 In his essay, “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction,” Ramón Saldívar advances the notion of a new “imaginary” that has the capacity to create a new postrace aesthetic.18 This aesthetic is characterized by what Saldívar has termed “speculative realism,” and one of its main tenets is the hybrid crossing 16

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Another potent book mentioned by Yunior is the dissertation of Jesús de Galíndez, a Basque nationalist who escaped to the Dominican Republic. During his seven-year stay there, he pursued a dissertation on the Trujillato. He eventually fled to New York to escape the dictator’s wrath, yet without success. While Galindez perished (under mysterious circumstance), the dissertation survived, and was published posthumously (in ­Argentina 1956, La era de Trujillo: un estudio casuístico de dictadura hispanoamericana), a few months after his mysterious disappearance. Galindez’s voice, in what is construed as magical survival of the book, could not be silenced after all, and sheds light on Trujillo’s regime. (It was translated into English in 1973, titled, The Era of Trujillo, Dominican Dictator.) As Charles Hatfield points out, “comics exploit format as a signifier in itself” insofar as they “involve a tension between the experience of reading in sequence and the format or shape of the object being read” (ac 52). It is precisely this effect that Díaz’s comicsinfluenced novel achieves. The term postrace is not to be understood as a chronological suspending of the continuing fact of racism, but rather an engagement with the consequences of its continuity.

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of generic forms between realism (in all its forms) and the speculative genres of popular culture such as fantasy, sci-fi and comics. These crossings reveal the chasm between illusion and reality in a perpetually revolving and irresoluble dynamic. Drawing on an eclectic and hybrid assortment of genres, the new imaginary requires its readers to stretch their imagination “by forging links between the fantasy of the imagination and the real of history,” while the staging of this imaginary necessitates new forms of representation (“Postrace” 592).19 The purpose of the new aesthetics and its radically transformative medium, is to shake the foundations of the familiar and enable new thought paradigms to enter the discourse: “the representation of social justice requires a formal medium incorporating states of fantasy that occupy and override previous attempts to represent the real” (“Postrace” 594). Díaz’s representation of the traumatic narratives of the Dominican Republic and its American diasporas is a hybrid text that mingles comics, sci fi and fantasy with more realistic genres to establish a new critical aesthetic that sets its sights on creating a discourse that will reveal the workings of European colonialism and American imperialism and assert an Afro-Caribbean-American transnational perspective. Díaz employs five main techniques from comics within his narrative aesthetic: intertextuality, sequence/moment, closure, rhythm/pace, and braiding, and one additional technique affiliated with sci-fi-fantasy films, the prequel. Dealing only in narrative, Díaz does not face the same challenges a graphic artist-writer such as GB Tran encounters when creating comics or a graphic narrative, nonetheless, his narrative strategy is informed by similar techniques, which when made transparent can facilitate our understanding of Díaz’s critical project. Comics veer the narrative toward its fractured incompleteness and engage the reader more fully in the reading process. Primarily, Díaz practices intertextuality to an extreme. While intertexts may occur in any work of literature, Charles Hatfield observes that in comics they are obligatory: “comics practice visual pastiche and detournement with a vengeance, incorporating bits from diverse centers of culture with a voracious, indiscriminate hunger” (“How to …” 138). Díaz implements intertexts mainly from the speculative genres, but also from a variety of cultural backgrounds, such as canonic Western literature, Latin literature and Japanese manga, 19

This form draws on “vernacular narrative, popular culture, and the literary avant-garde” in order “to show the parabasis of constant and complete rupture between the redemptive course of American history with its origins in conquest and the psychic facades that bar the way to memories of that traumatic past” (Saldívar, “Postrace Aesthetics” 593). Saldívar elaborates on this theory in his essay “The Second Elevation of the Novel: Race, Form, and the Postrace Aesthetic in Contemporary Narrative,” from which I have drawn as well.

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to create jarring juxtapositions which reflect his own transnational and transatlantic make-up. Hatfield further points out that the intertexual interplay in comics occurs on both the verbal and the visual level, and constitutes “a web, or … intersection of many texts” (“How to …” 138). While pertaining only to the verbal, Díaz’s use of intertexts more often than not also summons a visual counterpart that draws on our cultural reservoir of collective memory (who can fail to evoke the image of a Jedi with his light saber?). The intertext is not mere decoration, as Hatfield points out, for “In any given comic, that intersection [of many texts] may take the form of imitation, homage, parody, or critique” (“How to …” 138). Intertexts play a crucial, shape-shifting role in unraveling and enriching the potential meanings of the text; Díaz employs his intertexts with great skill, as the analysis below will illustrate. Not unrelated to the practice of intertextuality in Brief Wondrous is the second aspect of comics rehearsed by Díaz: the tension between sequence and moment, between surface and depth. The novel is composed of three books, and has 71 sub-sections unequally distributed between 8 chapters. Both the chapters and the sub-sections have highly evocative titles. The 71 sections function as comics panels and resemble them in several ways. Their titles are (nearly) all forms of intertextual allusion, which take the reader into their cultural, literary, or fantastic space (in a kind of ‘space travel’ or ‘time travel’). While titles are not the only instances of intertextuality in the work (intertexts occur within the narrated text as well), the intertextual titles play an additional structural role and function much like the frame of a comics panel: they ‘frame’ a moment, an episode, in the ongoing narrative sequence. The 71 sections establish a tension that is similar to the tension between the sequence of the narrative in comics and the moments (frames/panels) from which it is constructed. Charles Hatfield articulates the nature of this tension, suggesting that “a single image within a [constellation of discrete units] typically functions in two ways at once: as a ‘moment’ in an imagined sequence of events, and a graphic element in an a-temporal design” (Alternative 48). The sections delineated by Díaz capture a moment, an episode, an event, in the lives of his characters, albeit often an extended moment, and sometimes an undefined segment of time, which would conform with the characteristics of the comics panel as well. According to Donald Ault, this tension can be described by distinguishing between syntagmatic and paradigmatic approaches, the former describing the function of the image as a syntactic unit in a sequence, the latter describing its function as an a-temporal design element on the page, one that has presence and significance independent of the sequence. Ault emphasizes the continuity of the unfolding narrative on the page across the panels, which draws

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a­ ttention to the surface of the page and to its totality. Yet, the panels can also be read singularly, insofar as they “function as if they are windows on an ongoing world into which the reader is given only periodic glimpses” (para 11). Ault posits that these windows create the effect of depth and depend upon “visual cues that draw attention away from the surface gestalt of the page … and into a world constituted not by but through the drawings” (paragraph 11; italics in original). The reader, therefore, ‘enters’ the world of the panel to uncover additional layers of meaning. Brief Wondrous fulfills this paradigm. We can read it as a series of interrelated frames – denoted by Díaz through his highly suggestive section titles – combined to create a sequence; or, we can allow ourselves to be drawn away from the continuity, and into the worlds each section-cum-panel intertext open up. Looked at paradigmatically, then, many of the carefully and wittily titled sections, draw us away from the narrative sequence, and open up additional layers of reference (or intertext), through which we can access other worlds. By mimicking the techniques of comics, Díaz achieves a complex spatio-temporal effect, which not only moves forward, sequentially, from frame to frame, but also inward, into the spatial and temporal dimensions these frame references open up. We are transported beyond the page, beyond the here and now of the novel, to imagined, historical and speculative spaces. When returning to the narrative trajectory, we bring our insights with us, where they continue to inform our reading process as we attempt to reconcile the disparate pieces into a new coherence. Prominent narrative theorists, such as Gerard Genette, Mikhail Bakhtin and Boris Tomashevsky, have grappled with the dynamics of narrative time and space and their relation to the ‘real,’ offering approaches toward reading narrative, distinguishing between story (fabula) and discourse (syuzhet), examining the complexities inherent in the unfolding of plot, and exploring the interconnectedness of temporal and spatial relationships (as in Bakhtin’s chronotope).20 Contemporary narratologist Susan Stanford Friedman offers “A Strategy for Reading Narrative,” based in “Spatialization,” which calls attention to the “interplay of surface and depth,” evoking theoretical approaches more typical of comics.21 Friedman seeks to achieve greater depth of p ­ ossibility, in 20

21

The chronotope signifies the inseparability between time and space in any narrative. However, in comics, the very generic medium has time built into the visuality of the spatial layout; this is what makes them comics. To call it a chronotope, in my opinion, seems tautological, and does not have an additive value. Friedman’s work is grounded in Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, and more specifically, in his notion of “double chronotope,” which emphasizes “the event that is narrated

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which the horizontal and vertical axes represent “a movement through space and time–the one (horizontal) referring to the movement of characters within their fictional world; the other (vertical) referring to the ‘motions’ of the writer and the reader in relation to each other and to the texts’ intertexts” (219). The horizontal axis, which refers not only to the sequence of events, but also to the language that determines it, recalls the syntagmatic approach in comics, while the vertical axis, reminiscent of the paradigmatic approach, suggests reading “‘down into’ the text, as we move across it”(221). Friedman’s discussion of the vertical axis is of particular interest, as it offers a glimpse into the interpretive possibilities of the paradigmatic axis. She understands the vertical to contain “layered surfaces beneath and within the horizontal narrative” (221). In comics, these layers appear in the form of visual frames, or visual “quotations” (Hatfield, “How to …” 138), which in Díaz’s work are the deliberately intertextual names of title sections which ‘frame’ the ensuing narrative. The horizontal–or syntagmatic–axis “has an embedded vertical [paradigmatic] dimension, that is more or less visible and that must be traced by the reader” (Friedman 221). In Díaz’s text, it is also up to the reader to decipher these more or less visible components. Friedman’s designation of an active role for the reader in the reading process, particularly in accessing the vertical dimensions of the text, ties into the third aspect of comics employed by Díaz. As comics theorists from Scott McCloud onward have noted, the reader encounters the empty space between panels, known as “the gutter,” and must resort to imagination to achieve the “closure” necessary to move from one panel to the next. The reader is “a silent accomplice,” actively filling in the blank spaces each in one’s “own style” (McCloud 68). Hatfield’s analysis of closure and breakdown as complementary terms assists in understanding the inscribed gaps. Breakdown, he claims, is the process of dividing a narrative into images that form a series, while closure is achieved by reading through the images and inferring connections between them. ‘The author’s task is to evoke an imagined sequence by creating a visual series (breakdown), whereas the reader’s task is to translate the given series in the work and the event of narration itself” (Dialogic 255). It is further based on a reading of Julia Kristeva’s critique of formalism in Desire in Language, which aims to bring the social and historical dimensions back to the text. Kristeva introduces the notion of spatialization by introducing “three dimensions or coordinates of dialogue” which are the “writing subject, addressee, and exterior texts” (66). Given this triple dimension, Kristeva defines the status of the word both horizontally (writing subject and addressee) and vertically (“the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus”) (66). By reading intertextually along both vertical and horizontal axes, a dialogue takes place between writer and reader, text and context.

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into a narrative sequence by achieving closure” (Alternative 41).22 Yunior, who is dealing with his own páginas en blanco, and does not presume to be telling a complete story, uses breakdown, like GB Tran, to inscribe such gaps into the text, demanding that the reader fill them in the process of closure. The technique of closure carried over from comics might not be applicable in every instance of the physical blank space (gutter) between the sections as we saw in GB Tran’s work, while inscribed silences or blanks may also occur throughout the text. In Brief Wondrous, the blanks the reader is called to fill are not only those of time, space or action between the ‘panels,’ but in many cases are conceptual gaps that challenge the readers’ imagination. Díaz’s reliance upon the reader to work towards achieving closure seems to be part of his overall agenda; to face the silences inscribed in the past, as well as their lingering power in the present, the reader must engage imaginatively with the text, displacing conventional discourses.23 The fourth technique employed by Díaz in Brief Wondrous relates to timing and rhythm, which is established via the size of the panels, the amount of space they take on the page, and the tempo of their succession. A comics panel is a segment of time enclosed in space, and the size and shape this space takes is another expressive tool of the genre. Scott McCloud writes that in comics time is not controlled only by the content of the panels, or the spaces between them, but also “the panel shape can actually make a difference in our perception of time” (101). By extending the length of a panel, we can change the feeling of the duration, or amount of time conveyed, although, he adds, “there’s no conversion chart” (100). Will Eisner also notes that the size and amount of panels on a given page fluctuates to convey a mood or enhance a situation. 22

23

Winfried Fluck addresses inscribed blanks in conjunction with Wolfgang Iser’s reception theory, as he considers the way ‘the imaginary’ can influence reality and politics. Blanks, which are different from gaps, exist in every text: “A blank is thus not a mere gap, or an ideologically instructive omission. It is an intentional, often carefully crafted, suspension of relations in order to make us provide links for what is disconnected. The difference is significant: a mere gap allows readers to indulge in their own projections, a blank compels them to set up relations between their own imaginary constructs and the text” (“The Role of the Reader”258). The overlap between Fluck’s observations and the active role the reader plays in comics places comics within a literary tradition that challenges preconceived ideas. The reader is compelled to “‘provide links’ across the ‘blanks’ created by the intentional ‘suspension of relations’ between meaningful segments of the text” (“Chiste Apocalyptus” 384). The reader can “transcend the literal meanings of both history and fantasy, in the process creating something new, something we might call imaginary history or historical fantasy” (“Chiste Apocalyptus” 385).

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The creation of smaller and more condensed panels, for example, expresses haste, intensity or stress, causing us to sense “the ‘rate’ of elapsed time in its narrowest sense,” while evenly paced panels convey a consistent flow of time or alternately, stasis (30). As such, the “act of framing separates the scenes and acts as a punctuator. Once established and set in sequence the box or panel becomes the criterion by which to judge the illusion of time” (Eisner 28).24 The sections in Díaz’s novel are of dramatically different lengths; some are long and drawn out, while others take up less than a page. When looked at through the lens of comics, the length of these panels, the space they take on the page, and the pace with which they occur may shed light on the mood and the experience of time within and between these moments. The fifth technique Díaz appropriates from comics is what Thierry Goensteen has termed “braiding,” a technique discussed in-depth in the analysis of GB Tran’s Vietnamerica in the previous chapter.25 Braiding relates to the recurrence or repetition of an image within a comics sequence. When the reader reencounters the familiar image, there is, Groensteen suggests, “a recollection or an echo of an anterior term” (147). The image accumulates meaning in each of its repetitions, which reflects backward onto its first appearance, and has the power to disrupt the linearity of the sequence and to emphasize connections that are outside of the syntagmatic trajectory. Like Tran, Díaz uses braiding to link between moments that are separated by time, place and history, to achieve an alternative temporality and spatiality outside the parameters of normative space-time. The sixth and final technique carried over from the genres is that of the prequel, which will be discussed in detail in reference to Belicia. In Díaz’s narration, the techniques of intertext, closure and in-depth vertical reading are intertwined and work side by side to create a layered reading, which has the added affect of splicing time and space. At the same time, the frames move the story forward in a horizontal progression, creating tension between the paradigmatic and syntagmatic. Instances of rhythm and braiding occur less regularly in Díaz’s work, but are evoked at crucial moments. Díaz’s 24

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To create further nuances of time within and between frames, comics draw on additional techniques such as speech balloons, sound words and the visual content, which are of course not applicable here. While verbal narratives have their own set of techniques for playing with narrative time, such as the ellipsis, which builds gaps into the story, or stream-of-consciousness, in which story time stops while narrative time continues (or in which there is no clear correspondence between the two), Díaz’s radical splicing together of times, genres and techniques renders these categories inadequate to explain the complexities (the gaps are more than ellipses, as noted above). For a full-length discussion of braiding, see The System of Comics, Chapter 3, 144–58.

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use of these techniques causes the boundaries of the novel to shift, corresponding to a larger shift in the conception of space, historical narratives and identities. Oscar: Horizontally and Vertically Oscar Cabral-de León is affiliated with the genres from the outset and is derogatively labeled by Yunior as a ghetto Nerd who fails on all scales to live up to the high profile macho reputation of the Dominican male: “Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. Couldn’t have passed for Normal if he’d wanted to” (bw 21). Oscar’s failure to ‘pass’ for Normal suggests his radical sense of otherness, which permeates his New Jersey existence as well as the time he spends in the Dominican Republic, and is a ­function of his migration and subsequent sense of displacement and homelessness. Yunior suggests that for someone like Oscar, “abruptly wrenched” from one world into another,26 the genres are an ideal format, for their alternative worlds, where space travel and radical transformations are possible, made perfect sense to him (bw 21).27 As such, they offer not merely an escape and refuge, but also a home-away-from-home, where Oscar can experience a sense of possibility and scope, linking together his disparate worlds. We begin to see a connection between Oscar’s unsuitability to ‘reality’ and his infatuation with the genres, as he “gorg(es) himself on a steady stream” of sci-fi and fantasy, “moving hungrily from book to book, author to author, age to age” (bw 21). Oscar undergoes a transformation, as he begins to occupy more and more physical space: “sophomore year Oscar found himself weighing in at a whopping 245 (260 when he was depressed, which was often)” (bw 19). The conflation of Oscar’s obsession with the genres and his obsessive eating, suggests that there is a meaningful connection between Oscar’s shape, the space it takes up in the world and the alternative spaces it opens up for him, while on a more practical level, his obesity makes him even more of an outcast, solidifying 26

27

This remains a curious note, for Oscar was born in New Jersey, where he grew up, and was not ‘wrenched’ from one world to the other (as Díaz and his narrator were). In a private correspondence, Díaz commented on this apparent discrepancy, saying: “the plan was that our girl got pregnant with lola [sic] and then shot back to the dr and had her kids but god if it ever was as consistent as it needed to be.” Díaz is consistent only in his critique of consistency. This footnote can also suggest the extent to which he identifies with his characters. It is interesting to note that main actors in the comics industry were migrants, and many were Jewish, such as Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, who created Captain America, the Fantastic Four, and many others, for Marvel Comics. Also Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel, who created the dc Comics character Superman were from Jewish migrant families.

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his isolation from the social order and enforcing his total commitment to the genres.28 Being perceived as a nerd, Oscar becomes, physically and mentally, like one of the mutants he reads about. Yunior comments, “You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary u.s. ghetto” (bw 22), implying that the culture is unforgiving towards boys of color who aspire to literariness, suggesting that Oscar’s alienness in the u.s. is also a function of his race. Oscar’s trajectory is presented chronologically, and begins in Chapter 1 with, “GhettoNerd at the End of the World, 1974–1987” (which starts with the subsection titled, “The Golden Age,” a reference to that mythological state of pure innocence). It continues with Oscar’s college years in Chapter 4: “Sentimental Education: 1988–1992,” a direct reference to Gustave Flaubert’s novel of the same title, with clear resonances to the romantic aspirations of the hero who comes of age in a time of revolution. The next chapter dedicated to Oscar’s unfolding narrative is Chapter 6, titled “Land of the Lost, 1992–1995,” a reference to the 1970’s tv series exploring the adventures of a contemporary family thrown back to the time dinosaurs ruled the land, suggesting that Oscar, in returning to his ancestral home, encounters a similar time warp with equally dangerous and devouring entities, to whom he likewise responds courageously. Oscar’s story terminates in Chapter 7, “The Final Voyage,” which is not delimited by time, suggesting that perhaps, like Frodo, Bilbo and the Elves in the closing moments of the Lord of the Rings, he has voyaged to a land elsewhere, where he still resides. While the sections chronologically delineate Oscar’s childhood peak, subsequent decline, momentary rejuvenation and final demise, each chapter title opens a frame of reference that pauses the forward motion and adds layers to its understanding. A similar dynamic transpires within each chapter in a more detailed and in-depth way. I will focus on Chapter 6, “Land of the Lost: 1992–1995,” moving from frame to frame horizontally and vertically. The first section is titled, “The Dark Age,” and sets the stage for Oscar’s return to the Dominican Republic. In a long passage, we follow Oscar’s growing depression in his post-graduation years as he “Watched his horizons collapse” (bw 263), observing that “some things (like white supremacy and people-ofcolor self-hate) never change” (bw 264).29 Oscar gradually slipped into a deep, 28 29

In “The Search for Decolonial Love,” Díaz links between Oscar’s weight gain and his mother being a rape victim (397). Yunior engages in a harsh critique of racism throughout the novel, here focusing on the internalization of white supremacy by “kids of color” who “torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the Indian, the Arab, the immigrant, the strange, the feminine, the gay” (264).

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dark, depression, as even the role-playing games he loved were replaced by “straight unadorned mechanics,” implying that “his Age was coming to a close” (bw 270). The title however, suggests more: it may evoke for some readers the Dark Ages, a kind of science-fiction era in its own right, yet it would be more rewarding to link it to the eighth episode (season two) of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997). In this episode, Rupert Giles’s wild past catches up with him, in the form of a violent demon (Eyghon). The return of the past in the form of a demon has parallels in our tale as well. Oscar’s familial (and national) past has been repressed, and uncannily resurfaces upon Oscar’s return to the Dominican Republic, where he inadvertently triggers the demons of the past which re-emerge in the shape and form of the old-new regime and the horrors they inflict upon him in the “susurration” of the eternal cane-fields (bw 298). The intertext has more to offer. Giles, father figure to the vampire slayer, Buffy, is also her Watcher, which in this context refers to an individual from a lineage of Watchers, who is devoted to combating malicious supernatural entities. He does this by finding appropriate ‘slayers’ (girls with special talents who are able to fight these entities), and then watches over them. The reference to the Watcher takes us directly to Yunior, and indirectly also to Oscar. Yunior selfidentifies as the Watcher and refers to “Uatu the Watcher” from the Fantastic Four. As his name indicates, the Watcher is passive, observing from the margins, and while knowledgeable, is forbidden to share his knowledge with the team, a code Uatu often disregards, as does Yunior, who intervenes in the narrative as he fills in the gaps of history and actively takes part in as a friend and sometime-lover of Lola. Yunior’s retelling of the story hints at his guilt in failing in his role as Oscar’s Watcher, a role he promised Lola he would fulfill during Oscar’s college years (during which Oscar attempted to commit suicide). However, self-identifying as a Watcher also labels Yunior as a victim of trauma himself, as Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz suggests: “Yunior de las Casas’ position [as Watcher] would respond quite fittingly to the category of ‘onlooker’ of trauma, that is, one who observes – thus, the suitability of his self-assigned role as a “Watcher” – the effects of traumatic events or one who is a descendent of victims” (142).30 The text backs this up by linking the ‘Watcher’ symptom to colonial victimization. In footnote 10 Yunior says, “it’s hard as a Third Worlder 30

Ibarrola-Armendariz suggests that other narrative techniques used by Yunior also reflect traumatic behavior, such as his veiled identity, which could be seen as “his ability to construct a compelling framework of ‘cultural re-inscription’ in which trauma can be finally represented” (143). Díaz explains that the words Yunior could not say to Lola, words which would have saved him (bw 329), were, “I too have been molested,” suggesting that he was a victim of trauma as well (“Decolonial Love” 397).

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not to feel a certain amount of affinity for Uatu the Watcher; he resides in the hidden Blue Area of the Moon and we DarkZoners reside (to quote Glissant) on ‘la face cache de la Terre’ (Earth’s hidden face)” (bw 91). The reference to Édouard Glissant, acclaimed for challenging Western rhetoric that systematically suppressed the history of the Caribbean and in effect erased its indigenous peoples and their diverse culture, is meaningful. Yunior identifies with this violation, while Díaz seeks, like Glissant, to undermine this logos and its aesthetics by creating new modes of expression. While acting as his “Watcher,” Yunior also establishes Oscar himself as a kind of watcher when he refers to him as a parigüayo, a “party watcher,” which in Oscar’s case means, “The kid who don’t dance, who ain’t got game, who lets people clown him” (bw 20). Oscar is quintessentially the passive observer, who eventually transgresses this denomination, as we have seen both Uatu and Yunior do. But again, there is more going on. In a lengthy footnote, Yunior draws the etymology of the word to the first u.s. occupation of the Dominican Republic (1916–24) and to the Marines’ habit of watching from the sidelines as the natives danced (bw 19–20). Of course the marines were anything but passive watchers off the dance floor, while the mere reference to the Marines serves as a reminder that they were also responsible for Trujillo’s military training, which took place during the period of their occupation (“dude had bomber wings, for fuck’s sake,” bw 2). If Trujillo is also a marine, “a watcher” in his own right, then Yunior is bringing the question of watching, or witnessing, and its polar opposite, into collision. This brings to mind Frederick Douglass’s words upon watching his aunt being whipped by her master, “I was a witness and a participant” (Chapter 1). Lola articulates the issue clearly after Oscar’s death, “Ten Million Trujillos is all we are,” which means, that in not taking action we are all accomplices. (bw 324). In an inverse twist, by calling himself “Watcher,” Yunior is seen to actively intervene and revise the narrative. In a final twist of the term, Oscar is labeled parigüayo by Ybón’s wrathful and jealous boyfriend, “the capitán” (a representative of the post Trujillo regime who exemplifies its living legacy), precisely at the moment he stops being a passive bystander, and has acted on what Díaz has called “decolonial love,” a love that can liberate the characters from the colonial “rape culture” of the past.31 In “The Search for Decolonial Love,” Díaz explains that the “rape 31

In their comprehensive introduction to the edited collection, Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination, the authors identify their use of the term “decolonial” as a spinoff on the sociologist Anibal Quijano’s articulation of coloniality. Quijano delineates four interlinked domains of human experience that comprise the coloniality of power matrix in the New World Americas: “the appropriation of land, the exploitation of labor, and the control of finance by the Iberians; the control of authority; the control of gender,

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­culture” begins with “the European colonization of the New World – which becomes the rape culture of the Trujillato (Trujillo just took that very old record and remixed it) – is the rape culture that stops the family from achieving decolonial intimacy, from achieving decolonial love” (397). Decolonial love fosters an intimacy that discourages the abuse of power; this is what Oscar appears to be pursuing with Ybón. The capitán’s use of the term parigüayo at this juncture reflects his anxiety about Oscar’s lack of passivity, revealing once again the mutating meaning of the term. The following chapter, “Oscar Takes a Vacation,” evokes the 1962 film Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation. The blank spaces the reader must fill in are more conceptual than anything else, and are based on the intertexual framing-­ device. The film depicts a seaside family vacation that goes wrong on multiple levels, yet the dedicated father (played by Jimmie Stewart) eventually resolves all the problems to everyone’s satisfaction. In Oscar’s case, the father is absent, and he is left to cope with the mounting difficulties on his own. Oscar and Lola’s father is mentioned only very briefly in the novel, yet arguably his absence (related to Beli being a victim of abuse who is incapable of having a loving relationship, which reflects on the national trauma or what Díaz has called “rape culture”), underlies the entire novel. The film intertext makes the father’s absence poignantly manifest. Moreover, Oscar’s “vacation,” or return visit to the Dominican Republic is shrouded in sacrificial doom: “the evil planet Gordo was pulling him back, but his fifties-style rocket, the Hijo de Sacrificio, wouldn’t quit. Behold our cosmic explorer: eyes wide, lashed to his acceleration couch, hand over his mutant heart” (bw 271). Oscar is the sacrificial son; the implication is that he will sacrifice himself in order to expiate the sins of the fathers. He will break the spell, but also pay the price. The chapter also addresses the close ties between the Dominican Republic and the Diaspora: “Every summer Santo Domingo slaps the Diaspora engine into reverse, yanks back as many of its expelled children as it can” (bw 271). While Oscar vividly imagines himself “falling in love with an Island girl,” it is understood that this is another fantasy, for Dominican summers are denounced by Yunior as “one big party for everybody but the poor, the dark, the jobless, the sick, the Haitian, their children, the bateys, the kids that certain Canadian, American, German, and Italian tourists love to rape” (bw 272). The “rape culture” is still in full swing on the island, and Oscar, who is dark and jobless, is endangered by it.

ethnicity and race through the Iberian classification and reclassification of the planet’s population; and the control of subjectivity and knowledge through an epistemological perspective” (6–7).

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The third section of Chapter 6, titled “The Condensed Notebook of a ­Return to a Nativeland” is a clear reference to Aimé Césaire’s poem-length book, ­Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1947), written upon his return from France to Martinique. The section explores Oscar’s return to his ‘native land’ (he brings his notebooks, which he is constantly writing in, with him and Yunior is apparently ‘quoting’ from them): on the one hand to “the fecund tropical smell that he had never forgotten” and on the other, to “a whole new country … materializing atop the ruins of the old one” (bw 273). In referencing the Notebook, Díaz is signifying upon Césaire, who was one of the pioneers of the Negritude movement, which sought to reclaim African and Caribbean identity from its colonial defamation. His Notebook, a poem of epic scope that openly resists epic traditions, evokes a painful history, and attempts at times to “[explode] the present through the past” (Pope 541). Césaire explores identity by ‘trying on’ a series of masks, each representing a different identity; eventually he understands that one identity is insufficient to express the complexity of what it means to be Caribbean. The current cultural moment acknowledges the hybrid nature of identity, and of Caribbean identity in particular, which has, as Stuart Hall intimates, incorporated the African, European and American presences to create a complex and fluid entity.32 Díaz quotes Césaire, however, to illuminate the ongoing project of identity in the Caribbean, which is in constant flux. Like the original Notebook, the novel also portrays epic features (the prologue suggests an epic beginning to the curse), yet they are entirely undercut by the slangy rhetoric. Furthermore, while the act of return is itself epic in stature (as in The Odyssey), by likening Oscar’s return to the Dominican Republic to the anti-epic return of Césaire to Martinique, Díaz undercuts its epic potentials. The ‘notebook,’ a format conducive to revision and rewriting, is apt for both writers, whose return ‘home’ is never complete, never fulfilled.33 ­However, for each, the acts of imagination necessary to live in-between worlds, histories and trajectories, are different. Díaz’s affinities with Césaire incorporate not only theme, but also technique and style. Césaire laid the foundations for a new literary style, and has been commended for “the striking ways his writing handles, rends, and ignites 32

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Based on Stuart Hall’s classic essay, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Hall also feels that, “To return to the Caribbean after any long absence is to experience again the shock of the ‘doubleness’ of similarity and difference” (Hall 227). Gregson Davis writes, “the word Cahier … suggests a project that is incomplete if not sketchy. … Cahier portrays the homecoming of the poet as a recurrent event that is continually in the process of rehearsal” (21–22).

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l­anguage into regions of resonance that exceed or veer from the mundane” (Edwards 1).34 The “poetics of neologism,” highlight “his recourse to vertiginous lexicographical provocations, his predilection for combing the recesses of the dictionary to unearth the word-work that thickens his verse (homonyms, foreign language grafts, invented words, obscure idioms, rare and technical terms, especially botanical and biological designations)” (Edwards 1). While Díaz’s world of reference is quite different from that of Césaire, he nonetheless engages in techniques that reinvigorate language. He manipulates the language by creating bilingual puns, composite words and new rhythms, and by endorsing unusual juxtapositions using the genres. While both authors attempt to keep their readers out of their customary comfort zone, Césaire considered his unique style as fundamental in his attempt to penetrate the possibilities and meanings of black culture and identity, while Díaz adopts new techniques to enable him to shift the shape and break the form of the novel, to make it correspond to a deeper shift in the relation between the imaginary and the historical, one that will reveal a new way of thinking about race. Advancing to the next section, “Evidence of a Brother’s Past,” requires more of an imaginary effort on the part of the reader in the attempt to achieve ‘closure.’ The last lines of the previous section reveal Oscar writing in his journal, “I’m in heaven” (while his cousin, in what we could call foreshadowing, contradicts him, claiming it to be an “infierno,” bw 275). The current section begins, “In the pictures Lola brought home …” (bw 275), and is followed by a short paragraph of prose descriptions of a handful of photos of Oscar taken during that summer. What transpired between Oscar’s arrival in Santo Domingo and Lola’s return home with the pictures, is absent, and the gap is ominous. Adding to this is the brevity of the descriptions, suggesting that Oscar’s presence, even in the photographic evidence, is a ghostly absence-presence. This is one of the few places that Yunior refers to his sources, yet he withholds the actual evidence, as when he narrates Oscar’s last letter in third person rather than quoting him: “He wrote that he couldn’t believe he’d had to wait for this so goddamn long” (bw 335). To add to the menacing atmosphere, Yunior describes the photos using the words “shots,” “there are shots of Oscar in the back of the house reading Octavia Butler, shots of Oscar on the Malecón with a bottle of Presidente in his hand … shots of Oscar at the Columbus lighthouse, where half of Villa Duarte used to stand” (bw 275). The use of the word “shot” draws a clear connection between photography and death, and in Oscar’s case, his actual mode of death. Roland Barthes remains the critic who has written most evocatively, in 34

Brent Hayes Edwards, 1.

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Camera Lucida, about photography’s ability to transform the subject into object, so that the photograph represents “Death in person” (cl 13). Barthes later “observe[s] with horror” that every photograph is “an anterior future of which death is the state” and that every photograph is this catastrophe” (cl 96), confirming Oscar’s ghostliness in the image. The photograph therefore functions as a return of the repressed, similar to that of Lazrus Averbuch in Aleksandar Hemon’s novel. Oscar who is, as his photographic absence-presence suggests, dead, evoked the repressed past, which Yunior is attempting to confront as he sorts through the faded images of Oscar. Each of the photos addresses a meaningful cultural context, and operates as a frame within a frame, tapping into contexts and histories. For example, the lighthouse has a symbolic history, as Dixa Ramirez shows, connected to colonialism, hyper-masculinity and the supernatural.35 The photograph of the phallic lighthouse is a ghostly representation of a ghostly representation, for as Ramirez points out, “the colossal structure” which is said to house the remains of Columbus, signifies within the narrative “the ghostly remains of a diaspora subject” (391). The evidentiary nature of the photos, which are not reproduced but drawn with words, recall both the photographic images drawn by Tran, as well as the actual images of his parents in Vietnam, and raise similar questions about authenticity. In the following section the reader is brought back from the future, as “Oscar Goes Native,” and is ironically compared to a western foreigner who adopts native customs. While originally intended as a derogative colonial term, here it designates Oscar’s radical homelessness: even in his ancestral home he is alien. The section is vibrant and seductive, full of visual observations of the island, evoking sound and smell, while the quick succession of moments suggests Oscar’s shock as he acclimates to the island where he decides to remain for the duration of the summer. The final event in this catalogue is Oscar falling under the seductive power of a “semiretired puta” (bw 279), who is “La Beba” of the following section. In the next frame, “A Note From Your Author,” which creates another pause in the trajectory, Yunior justifies his ‘creation’ of the thirty-six year-old Ybón (rather than “your quintessential Caribbean puta”), claiming that he is merely sticking to the facts: “I know I’ve thrown a lot of fantasy and sci-fi into the mix but this is supposed to be a true account of the Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Can’t we believe that an Ybón can exist and that a brother like Oscar might be due a little luck after twenty-three years?” (bw 285; italics in the original). Yunior is criticizing our 35

For a discussion of the historical and cultural significance of the lighthouse, see Dixa Ramirz, “Great Men’s magic,” pp. 390–92.

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willingness to accept one type of fantasy (the “quintessential Caribbean puta”), while rejecting another (Ybón). Our imagination needs to stretch beyond the stereotype. The inverted reference to The Matrix, “If blue pill, continue. If red pill, return to the Matrix,” clinches this going beyond. In switching the denomination of the color scheme, Yunior signifies on the film, and suggests we go beyond its simplistic meaning. As Slavoy Žižek has notably pointed out, in the film illusion and reality are “fictions that already structure and regulate our reality”; what is required is an alternative perception that will enable us “to perceive not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself” (Žižek, “A Third Pill”). This alternative is what Yunior is aiming for in this metafictional disclosure, which is in sync with the larger transformative project of the book. Ybón is “The Girl From Sabana Iglesia,” in the next section, a reference to the classic Brazilian Bossa Nova song, “The Girl from Ipanema” by João Gilberto, Antônio Carlos Jobim and Stan Getz.36 “Tall and tan and young and lovely,” is what Ybón no longer is, but what she used to be in the photos she shows Oscar, “always in an early-eighties bikini … always with her arms around some middle-aged eighties yacoub” showing her “puta progress through Italy, Portugal, and Spain” (bw 286). The intertext reveals Yunior’s critique of the underlying “rape culture” of the Caribbean, reinforced by Ybón’s photographs, which suggest that the men did more than say “ahh” when she passed by. Oscar penetrates her puta façade, identifying her as another victim of the system, and “didn’t think she was any less fine now” (bw 286). The next two sections are very brief and include first person “testimony” by Oscar’s grandmother and Ybón. The sections indicate that Yunior has collected evidence, yet they underscore the indecisiveness of the testimony, and hence the incompleteness of the story. Furthermore, they shed light on why Ybón may have been a source of attraction for Oscar. The title, “La Inca Speaks,” implies that we are going to hear the voice of authority; her three line long testimony, which reveals her disdain towards Ybón, challenges Oscar’s version of the events: “He didn’t meet her on the street like he told you. His cousins, los idiotas, took him to a cabaret and that’s where he first saw her. And that’s where ella se metió por sus ojos” (bw 289); meaning, that’s where she caught his eye, or that’s where she entered his view. Meeting Ybón, who lived next door to La Inca, on the street outside her house sounds naïve, while La Inca’s version suggests that part of the attraction lay in her ‘puta’ status. We question

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The song was inspired by the 17 year old Heloisa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto. The English version was sung by Astrud Gilberto, Joao’s (German-Brazilian) wife, who later left him for Stan Getz.

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whether this makes Oscar the typical Dominican man, or whether his attraction lies in his identification with her as a victim of the rape culture. In the ensuing short section titled, “Ybón, as Recorded by Oscar,” the title is crucial in enabling the reader to identify Ybón as the first person narrator, yet also implies that Oscar is doing research himself. In the recording Ybón explains her ‘decision’ to return to the Dominican Republic, which solidifies her status as a victim of the ruthless sex industry. While Ybón’s story is disconnected from the sequence of events, its presence suggests that Oscar was actively researching the rape culture that he hoped to defy, lending veracity to the idea that Ybón’s role within it was part of her attraction for Oscar. What remains most poignant about the assumed recording (the staging of Ybón’s disembodied voice through Yunior’s narrative) is that Ybón’s recorded voice speaks from a moment in space and time shared with Oscar. It is not only what she says, but also to whom she said it that makes it meaningful. “What Never Changes,” is Oscar being in a platonic relationship, while “Oscar at the Rubicon,” signals that despite growing threats from the jealous boyfriend, he has reached–and will cross–the point of no return: “He’d seen her beautiful chest and knew now that it was far too late to pack up and go home like those little voices were telling him, far too late” (bw 292).37 Given the ‘evidence’ above, it would be superficial to understand as Oscar merely seeing Ybón, the aging puta, as his last chance to finally have intercourse; he identifies with her as a victim of the rape culture, and is in pursuit of an intimacy which lies beyond it. However, his attraction to Ybón is entangled with, as Lyn Di Iorio suggests, her being the mistress of a strong male patriarchal figure: “the Capitán’s violent persona is a near replica of Trujillo’s. Oscar’s selfdestructive desire for the mistress of a killer may show that what he is after is a confrontation with the archetype of violent Latino manhood” (80). Oscar’s interest in such a confrontation would be to vindicate his mother and other rape victims, lending his mission a heroic tinge (yet also threatening to draw him into the violence he sought to overcome). Oscar is given a violent warning in “Last Chance”; the brevity of this short section creates an acceleration of pace towards the climactic event, and illuminates Oscar’s determined mood to pursue Ybón in blatant defiance of all danger. Being a worthy rival grants Oscar his first severe beating in the very long section, titled, “Oscar Gets Beat.” The Capitán, an American citizen in his own right, sends his goons to the cane fields with Oscar. The section is long, and the events leading to the beating are comically drawn out when the goon squad .

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Caesar’s epic crossing is deflated or parodied by the reference to Ybón’s “chest,” which in turn, is glorified by the reference.

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has to retrace their steps to the nearest village to buy batteries for their flashlight, giving Oscar all the time in the world to think, if not to run. The section stretches the suspense to its maximum; the actual beating occurs after nearly six out of the seven pages of the section, and is described as endless, “like one of those nightmare eight-a.m. mla panels” (bw 299). The beating itself is referred to sketchily, with minimal graphic depiction (“All I know is, it was the beating to end all beatings ” bw 298), to avoid the voyeuristic fascination often apparent in such scenes. Also notable is Oscar’s sensation upon reaching the cane fields: “this world seemed strangely familiar to him; he had the overwhelming feeling that he’d been in this very place, a long time ago. It was worse than déjà vu …” (bw 298). The cane fields function like a braiding element in the system of comics, as they form a constant and recurring backdrop for an ongoing a scene of crime. We are thrown back to Belicia’s beating years before, which is an echo of the endless beatings that the cane fields harbored over the centuries. While the world that Oscar lives in is different from that of his mother, the scene in the cane field creates the sense that some things have nonetheless remained constant. This jarring revelation is facilitated through braiding the spatial element of the cane field into different temporal moments in the novel. The result is the conception that Oscar’s circumstances are inextricably tied to those of his mother, who in turn is implicated by the history of slavery and colonialism. It’s worse than déjà vu; it is the eternal return, which Díaz hopes to put an end to. Unlike Beli, who drags herself out of the cane by sheer determination and some mythical intervention, in “Clives to the Rescue,” Clives, “the evangelical taxista” [Oscar’s] family always used” (bw 288), emerges as the unlikely hero. Aided, like Beli, by some mysterious ancient singing in the cane (and “a couple of Haitian braceros,” bw 300), he drags Oscar out of the cane field and into his car at his own risk. Clive’s heroic act redefines the meaning of the word hero in the national discourse (he is no superman either). After his ‘close encounter’ in the cane fields, Oscar experiences a different kind of ‘close encounter’ in the back seat of Clive’s car, in a section aptly titled, “Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind” (bw 301). The title references Stephen Spielberg’s science fiction film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), best known for its closing scene, in which humans establish direct contact with aliens of a higher level of consciousness, who until then had only made their presence felt behind the scenes (through ufos and mysterious disappearances). In “Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind,” comatose from his encounter in the cane fields, Oscar faces an otherworldly alien life form: a golden mongoose, which puts in several appearances in the novel at crucial, life-or-death moments, intervening to resuscitate our heroes when all hope seems lost. Oscar had encountered­

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the mongoose previously, when he attempted suicide from the bridge in New Brunswick. What Oscar does not know, but the reader does, is that his mother also encountered the mongoose, who, years ago, came to her aid in the cane fields after her violent beating, drawing her back from death with the promise of future life (children), leading her out of the clawing cane with a song. While the mongoose materializes only at these crucial life-or-death moments, his spirit seems to be present in the background all along. In discussing Belicia’s will to life, Glenda R. Carpio convincingly argues that the mongoose serves as a strategy to explain the mystery of survival in a brutal environment: “How can survival, a force so life affirming, come forth from its opposite, death and destruction?” (281). To account for the inexplicable in the human spirit, the defiance against all odds, Díaz invokes “the imaginative act of fictive play,” Carpio suggests, in order to “leave open the mystery of survival without reducing it to sentimental renderings of heroism or limiting its power” (281, 282). So when asked by the mongoose, “What will it be, muchacho? … More or less?” we know Oscar will act according to the legacy his mother bequeathed him. The mongoose, which has a strong visual dimension, is also a braided feature; our developing understanding of the figure reflects backward onto events that have occurred previously, and carries forward onto our reading of the current event. The appearance of the mongoose predicts Oscar’s behavior, but also exemplifies the price Belicia’s silence exacts on him. Belicia never spoke of her beating in the cane fields, or of her initial trauma upon which her silence is predicated. Like many Dominicans, she embraces amnesia, and also imposes it on her children (including Lola, who is forced into silence after being molested by a neighbor).38 Oscar inevitably reenacts her traumas out of identification and with a desire to purge them for eternity. Díaz creates through the mongoose a creature so imaginary, that the reader cannot rely on any single system of signification to conceive it. While informed by conventions of magical realism, the mongoose’s appearance in the text cannot be fully accounted by it.39 It is part “Aslan-like” with intelligent 38

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“When that thing happened to me when I was eight and I finally told her what he had done, she told me to shut my mouth and stop crying, and I did exactly that, I shut my mouth and clenched my legs, and my mind and within a year I couldn’t have told you what that neighbor looked like, or even his name” (bw 56–7). Lola’s first person narration (a curious event within Yunior’s narrative) of this event suggests however that she has worked through it. Relating to the mongoose (as well as to fukú and La Inca), Monica Hanna suggests that, “magical realism is presented as a Caribbean mode of understanding and representing history,” which “does not act as a gimmick, but rather as an intervention against the trajectory of conventional national history” and is “a way to account for the reality and ­history

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“golden lion eyes” and a black pelt like the lion deity in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia tales (bw 302, 149), who is both a fantastic-deity as well as a Christian symbol of redemption, and part Neo-Assyrian (according to the reference to Ashurbanipal, bw 151). “The Mongoose” is a migrant, “one of the great unstable particles of the Universe and also one of its greatest travelers,” who “Accompanied humanity out of Africa and after a long furlough in India jumped ship to the other India, a.k.a. the Caribbean”; he is additionally “an enemy of kingly chariots, chains and hierarchies,” who champions the weak (bw 151). The addition of the Spielberg intertext injects a quantum of contemporaneity to the more mythical counterparts, mixing the ingredients to include elements of popular culture, making the figure of the mongoose a particularly challenging imaginary act. “Close Encounters of the Caribbean Kind” only takes up half a page, and is similarly followed by two other half page sections, which break the page into equal parts, and stress Oscar’s critical condition. Yet what all three sections have in common is a contradiction between the amount of space they take up on the page, and the amount of time they convey in story time. In “Dead or Alive,” barely eight lines of text, La Inca and Belicia pray over Oscar’s mutilated body for three days. This discrepancy between time and space gets considerably more complicated in the last title in this concise threesome, titled, “Briefing for a Descent into Hell,” referencing Doris Lessing’s experimental book by the same title (1971). The book reflects her interest in Sufism and in the work of psychologist R.D. Laing, who explores “the possibility that the radical consciousness of some forms of insanity might in fact be advanced stages in human mental evolution” (Brigg 29). The novel, depicting what seems on the surface to be a mental breakdown of Classics professor Charles Watkins, explores the possibility of moving “forward into a new evolutionary form, not primarily by bodily change but by mental evolution” (Brigg 29). The novel attempts “to express the reality of levels of consciousness beyond normal human recognition by a mixture of scientific projection, mythical reference, and mystical description” (Brigg 38). Lessing raises the possibility that what appears to those observing the professor from the outside as mental deterioration, is in fact his attaining a state of higher consciousness, realized through training and ­guidance by extraterrestrials, personifications of ancient Sufi gods. of Latin America” (509). Díaz’s use of the genre differs from traditional forms, Hanna suggests, by calling attention to these moments, rather than weaving them seamlessly into the narrative. Daniel Bautista calls the magic realism in the novel “comic book realism” which “flaunts its status as text, parody, and pastiche in a way that foregrounds the importance of cultural mediation” (50). While mr is definitely evoked (as seen through the reference to Macondo and McOndo, 7), it cannot fully explain the magical elements in the work.

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Drawing on the Lessing intertext, during his blackout, Oscar may appear to La Inca and Belicia to be on the brink of the beyond, yet he emerges from his plane of unconsciousness with a life-altering transformative epiphany.40 In a vision nearly identical to the one that inspired Yunior to write the book, Oscar grasps the message of the blank pages, namely, that history can be rewritten, that there is room for more than one narrative, that he has the power to tell the story. The Lessing reference forwards the possibility that the encounter with alternative and alien cultures or genres can shift the shape of our consciousness, enabling new perspectives, ideas and thoughts to emerge. Furthermore, it is a pivotal and transformative moment in the narrative, for it enables Oscar to realize that he can be an agent of history, not merely a victim of it. From here onwards, his path is altered. “Alive” evokes the 1993 film of the same title,41 the harsh story of the survivors of a plane crash in the Andes, several of whom survive by eating the flesh of their deceased traveling companions. Metaphorically speaking, Oscar must feed off the flesh of the deceased in order to get to the bottom of his story as well. However, while Oscar, like the survivors, struggles to emerge alive from his own accident, unlike them, he does not want to be ‘rescued,’ and taken home to New Jersey, which he is. He has discovered that he need not be determined by fukú, and is eager to break its chokehold upon him and his family. The following two line section, “Some Advice,” counsels, “Travel light. She extended her arms to embrace her house, maybe the whole world” (306). It is unclear who the imparter of this advice is, perhaps some mythical deity, as travel light, inverted, becomes ‘light travel,’ which is the kind of travel Oscar understands, and the kind of thinking which informs this novel. The message of embracing the whole world is tantamount with transgressing boundaries, and is made possible through the kind of ‘light travel’ the novel advances. The chapter ends with Oscar in “Paterson, Again,” recuperating until he can finally listen to, and understand, the cries of his mother and sister in the cane fields of his dreams. His subsequent return to the Dominican Republic in Chapter 7, and his unlikely romance with Ybón, are Oscar’s rebellions against colonial conditioning and the silences inscribed into the familial (and national) narrative.42 Oscar seeks to prove that love is possible, that the experiences his mother underwent 40 41 42

The mongoose figure appears again, yet the creature’s voice is symbolically drowned out by “the blare of the merengue coming from the neighbor’s house” (bw 302). Based on the book Alive: the Story of the Andes Survivors, by Piers Paul Read (1974). Yunoir writes that upon his return to the dr, Oscar had lost all his weight, and was thin and silent, that is, transformed (313). His loss of weight is a direct result of the epiphany he experienced, and exemplifies his transition from passive victim to active agent.

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were not the only options. As Ramón Saldívar points out, the three endings of the novel, characterized by their inherent lack of justice, both real and poetic, ultimately frustrate Oscar’s project (“Postrace Aesthetics” 590–91). Oscar finds love and intimacy with Ybon, yet is shot dead in the cane fields; Yunior’s fantasy that Oscar’s niece, Isis, will put an end to the fukú is undercut by Yunior’s recollection of Dr. Manhattan’s words, ‘Nothing ever ends’; and the words ending Oscar’s posthumous letter, “The beauty! The beauty!,” are undermined by their Conradian intertext (“The Horror! The Horror”); and by the fact that the book, with the key to understanding their past, never arrives. Díaz creates a fusion of realism, romance and fantasy, practiced through the complex mechanism of representation derived from comics and underwritten with humor and irony to critique the legacy of the colonial rape culture in the Dominican Republic. Belicia: The Prequel In Brief Wondrous, Oscar’s trajectory moves forward, following his joint pursuit of the source of the fukú and his quest for decolonial love. Alternately, his mother’s story moves backwards in time, to reveal her horrendous past which pursues Oscar into the present. In the retelling of Oscar’s story, Yunior employs what on the one hand can be seen as a classical, even epic, framework that begins in medias res, and can only proceed by simultaneously looking back. However, by glossing it with references to the speculative genres, he casts it as a classic prequel. The prequel, popularized by the second Star Wars trilogy (1999–2005), provides a past, a source, an origin for the main characters introduced in the first trilogy (1977–1983) and has become de rigueur in the genres.43 The prequel functions as one more strategy to reveal the inevitable links between the past and present. Yunior posits Belicia Cabral-de León (Beli) as a Caribbean shape shifter in her own right, saying that, “Stability was not in our girl’s stars, only Change” (bw 252). Beyond the initial encounter in Chapters 1 and 2 with contemporary Beli, the haggard and abusive mother of Lola and Oscar, the novel recounts her past, beginning with her stormy and traumatic adolescence in Chapter 3. It is only later, in Chapter 5 that her early childhood is brought into sharper focus and we learn about her horrific childhood. By starting in the middle and

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In Batman, The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade (2016), is a prequel film to the original film series of 1986. The film X-Men: First Class, released in 2011 is a prequel to the franchise that started in 2000 and is based on the comic book series created Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963. Legends of Dune is a prequel trilogy of novels that takes place over ten thousand years before the events of the 1965 novel Dune.

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going back, Yunior revaluates our comprehension of the stereotypic Dominican mother figure (Lola says, “I was her only daughter, which meant it was her duty to keep me crushed under her heel,” bw 55), and slowly reveals what is gnawing at Oscar’s soul. This is not dissimilar to Tran’s portrayal of his strict father, whom, we later learn, was tortured by the French, which goes a long way to explain (although not to justify) his behavior. Chapter 3, titled “The Three Heartbreaks of Belicia Cabral: 1955–1962,” begins by describing Beli’s ennui with her respectable life in Baní with La Inca, “her mother-aunt,” through a syntagmatic series of ironically titled sections, which provide frames that lend depth to Beli’s life. “Look at the Princess” refers to a title in the tv show Farscape. The series as a whole is preoccupied with the attempts of the cast of characters to escape from hostile entities called ‘peacekeepers,’ and more particularly, with one human finding ‘wormholes’ that will take him back home. This intertext is in dialogue with Beli’s “inextinguishable longing for elsewheres” (bw 77). Her desire to escape is further developed in the next section titled, “Under the Sea,” which relates to the Disney song from The Little Mermaid, in which Sebastian the (Caribbean) Crab implores Ariel to remain sea-bound and not to pursue her human lover, or in short, to be content with her limited options. Sung by the African American actor Samuel E. Wright in a Jamaican accent, the message of self-curtailment comes across as particularly ironic, alluding to the crab’s internalization of the racist rhetoric of ‘know your place,’ a rhetoric that Díaz and his characters reject. As Ariel’s double,44 Beli experiences Baní as confinement: “Everything about her present life irked her; she wanted with all her heart, something else … what she wanted, more than anything [was] to escape …. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean … But where she wanted to escape to she could not tell you … ” (bw 79–80, 81; italics in original). Beli, Yunior observes, is “suffering from the same suffocation that was asphyxiating a whole generation of young Dominicans,” who came of age under the Trujiallato and would eventually rebel against it (bw 80–1). The next title, “La Chica de Mi Escuela,” which translates into “The Girl from My School” (bw 82), relates to a song (1992) by a popular Puerto Rican band, Los Sabrosos del Merengue, merengue being a Caribbean music style popularized during the Trujillo era. The lyrics of the song, describing a boy in love with a beautiful girl whom he dare not approach, provide a stark contrast to Beli’s situation during her first two years at a private school, which found her “exiled beyond the bonewalls of the macroverse itself” (bw 84).45 44 45

Ariel’s tragic fate can also be read as a foreshadowing of events to come in Beli’s life. The Macroverse – a comic book series – contains many universes and is nearly infinite. At the furthest edges of the Macroverse there is ‘the door,’ after which the Macroverse simply

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Beli’s transformation from invisibility to desirability parallels a meaningful shifting of her physical self, and is announced in the following threelined, eight word section, conveying swift change by its very brevity, and titled ­“Kimota!” It reads: “So what happened?\A boy happened.\Her first” (bw 89). ‘Kimota’ is the code word Micky Moran utters in order to transform into Marvelman in the comics by the same title. When read phonetically from back to front, it becomes ‘atomik.’ Beli does not transform into a superhero, but into a sex bomb, which has direct atomic connections. In analyzing the connections between female sexuality and the atomic bomb, Elaine Tyler May o­ bserves that, “A photograph of Rita Hayworth was actually attached to the hydrogen bomb dropped on the Bikini Islands” (98). She adds that the swimsuit was named bikini just four days after the bomb was dropped, linking between the “female ‘bombshells’” and the suit’s “explosive potential” (98). Beli’s atomic quality also relates to her father’s tragic fall (more on this momentarily): she was the “daughter of the fall, recipient of its heaviest radiations,” and therefore also “loved atomically” (126). Beli is atomically doomed. Her newfound atomic powers are explored under the title, “Numero Uno,” and refer to Beli’s transformed self, which turned her into a number one babe, who ‘got’ the number one guy: “For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Beli. … was La Tetua Suprema …. She had the Breasts of Luba (35DDD)” (bw 91–2). The reference to Gilbert Hernando’s comics character Luba, not only underlines Beli’s comic-book affinities, but also brings in the context of alternative comics.46 Gilbert Hernandez, along with his brothers Jaime and Mario (‘Los Bros’), was instrumental in establishing the transgressive genre of alternative ­comics.47 Los Bros made a significant breakthrough in cultural representation, insofar as their alternative comics subverted ethnic conventions (of ‘authentic’ racial characters or ethnographic informants). Their series Love & Rockets presented an imaginary landscape brimming with diverse characters whose racial, ethnic, and sexual identities did not conform to stereotypes, and required new

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ends. To enter this termination means to be utterly annihilated, to no longer exist even as particle in the universe. Luba is mentioned again in the section, “A Note from Your Author,” when Yunior describes the kind of stereotypical puta the reader may have expected, and that he did not provide, as one “who’d gotten an enormous breast job when she was sixteen in Madrid, bigger almost than Luba from Love and Rockets (but not as big as Beli)” (bw 285). In 1981 the brothers self-published “a highly eclectic and off-beat comic book, Love & Rockets” (Royal 221). The series ran for sixteen years, and was revived in 2001. Their work helped birth the genre of alternative comics, jointly influenced by mainstream comics and the underground comix of the 1960’s and 70’s.

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forms of representation. GB Tran employs a narrative technique similar to that of the Hernandez brothers, who use a “drastic approach to narrative elision” as they shuffle the story elements to create patterns in events separated by time and space. Significantly, they also splice reality and fantasy, as can be seen in the mythical town of Palomar (Hatfield Alternative 70). Díaz’s reference to Beto Hernandez goes beyond his appropriation of Luba, and can be read as homage to the brothers’ style and technique, which Díaz employs liberally in order to celebrate the themes of diversity, instability, fluidity.48 While Love & Rockets is comprised of a plethora of stories, one of the most central, as Derek Parker Royal points out, “is Gilbert Hernandez’s novelistic series of tales that revolve around a mythic Latin American town, Palomar” (“Palomar” 221); and “Palomar’s most prominent resident is Luba, a sexually promiscuous and hard-edged member of the community who constantly wields a hammer” and eventually, like Beli, migrates to the u.s. (Royal 222). While Luba’s looks are ‘oversexed,’ her character is one of defiant independence as she undermines stereotypes to become the sheriff of Palomar. Luba is not without her own traumatic past (born out of wedlock and married to the mafia), yet together with her sisters, daughters and niece, forms “an empowering matriarchy,” which places American concerns over ethnicity and gender politics at the center of Hernandez’s discussion (Royal 222). Matriarchy is also at the forefront in Brief Wondrous, as Yunior portrays La Inca, Beli and Lola as powerful and dominant forces in Oscar’s life. Beto’s Luba, a beautiful strong-headed woman, with enormous breasts, is a clear inspiration for Díaz’s Beli. However, while Luba was a strong woman who was able to dominate the men in her life, Beli’s breasts are instruments of her emotional and physical downfall. They lure three abusive lovers, place her in conflict with the regime, propel her into exile, and turn her into a bitter and preternaturally cruel mother. We initially have little or no empathy for her at all, even when she is diagnosed with breast cancer, the final blow her breasts deal her. Our attitude towards Beli changes in Chapter 5, titled “Poor Abelard, 1944–46,” in which she undergoes another transformation, another shapeshifting. The chapter refers back to Beli’s early childhood, and serves to explain her complex psychological make-up. The section titled “Fallout,” referring to 48

Díaz’s admiration for the Hernandez Brothers has been reciprocated. Not only has Jamie illustrated his latest collection, This is How You Lose Her, as well as several stories when they were featured in The New Yorker, but he has recently made Díaz himself into a cartoon character, as he appears on the cover and flyleaf of the edited collection, Junot Díaz and the Decolonial Imagination. Díaz has truly entered the realm of the imaginary.

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a post-apocalyptic role-playing video game with a retro-futuristic story, discloses that Beli, conceived directly before her father’s arrest by the Trujillato (known as “The Fall”), was born after he had been sentenced to eighteen years in prison. The family’s downfall is epitomized by Beli’s being “born black” (bw 247–48),49 is followed by her mother’s suicide and by the subsequent mysterious deaths of her sisters. Left to her fate, Beli, an “underweight, sickly” baby, was nurtured by “a kindly dark skinned woman,” only to be “torn clean out of [her] arms” by some distant relatives, who later “passed the girl on to some even more distant relatives” (bw 252). They, in turn, sold her, “like a character in one of Oscar’s fantasy books (who may or may not have been the object of a supernatural vendetta) … to complete strangers in another part of Azua,” where she “became a criada, a restavek,” or otherwise stated, a slave (bw 253). As suggested by the quote, Beli’s early years evoke the stuff of fantasy; however in such genres the character eventually undergoes a reversal of fortunes when their noble heritage is disclosed. Although rescued by La Inca, her father’s cousin, and restored to the world, Beli’s reversal of fortunes never occurs. The section titled, “The Burning,” relating perhaps to the science fiction tv program Doctor Who, in which a ‘time lord’ explores the universe in a sentient telepathic time machine, tells of how La Inca, following a dream and a telepathic premonition of her own, finds the child Beli in “Outer Azua,” a ­nickname likened, in footnote 32, to a “wasteland” resembling the “irradiated terrains from those end-of-the-world scenarios that Oscar loved so much – Outer Azua was the Outland, the Badlands, the cursed Earth, the Forbidden Zone, the Great Wastes, the Desert of Glass, the Burning Lands, the ­Doben-al, it was Salusa Secundus, it was Ceti Alpha Six, it was Tatooine” (bw 256).50 All the references relate to uninhabitable and remote regions in various 49

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The text stipulates, “not just any kind of black. But black black – kongoblack, shangoblack, kaliblack, zapotecblack, rekhablack – and no amount of fancy Dominican racial legerdemain was going to obscure the fact” (bw 248). Glenda R. Carpio points out that these composite words, which show Díaz’s pleasure in playing with form, indicate not only African references, but also Indian (the goddess Kali & the Bollywood actress Rekha) and Mexican (the Zapotek, a pre-Colombian indigenous people) references, which make up the cultures of the Caribbean (276). Díaz has commented online on this particular section of his writing (https://genius .com/2004437). Aside from the content of his remarks, the very act serves to extend the novel beyond its pages, and is a shape-shifting act in-and-of-itself. For his expansion of the novel beyond the pages of the book and onto the internet, see Chapter 4, ­“Paritextual Thresholds of the Material Print Artifact” (101–26), in McCracken’s Paratexts and Performance.

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s­ cience fiction and fantasy epics, and reinforce the horror and bleak loneliness of Beli’s existence. The last on the list, Tatooine, is a reference to the home of Anakin Skywalker of the Star Wars prequel, who like Beli, was a child-slave. Anakin is a naïve but brilliant child, and the prequel trilogy explores his transformation into the preternaturally evil Darth Vadar known from the original trilogy. Outer Azua was Beli’s Tatoonie, and Beli in New Jersey is as different from her original self as Darth Vadar was from his. This section reveals the extent of Beli’s maltreatment by her host family and functions as a harsh criticism on the system of child labor (which has not been fully eradicated to date). Punishing her for attending school, Beli’s host family nearly kills her by pouring burning oil on her back, and leaving her to ‘recover’ in the chicken coop, where La Inca finds her. Her wound is described as a “monsterglove of festering ruination … A bomb crater, a world-scar like those of a hibakusha” (bw 257). Hibakusha, a reference to the Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb creates yet another link between Beli and the harmful influence of atomic power. La Inca has the power to physically heal her, but as the title section “Forget-me-Naut,” referring to an episode of The Zula Patrol dealing with amnesia, suggests, the healing only takes place on the surface, and Beli remains scarred for life (bw 257). Like Toni Morrison’s Sethe (Beloved), Beli’s scar is on her back, and hence easier to ignore, and as long as that past is ignored, its ghosts wreck havoc on both women. While Sethe eventually comes to terms with her past, and contemplates a possible future with Paul D, Beli embraces amnesia: “Of those nine years (and of the Burning) Beli did not speak. It seems that as soon as her days in Outer Azua were over, as soon as she reached Bani, that entire chapter of her life got slopped into those containers in which governments store nuclear waste, triple-sealed by industrial lasers and deposited in the dark, uncharted trenches of her soul” (bw 258). Beli’s amnesia, which extends to her more recent past as well, takes a heavy toll on her and her children. Beli’s life is one of bitterness and disease; Oscar’s attempt to confront the past ends tragically; Lola barely manages to escape by means of rebellion and it is her progeny that perpetuates the family line (although hopefully not legacy). Reading the text with the additional lens of the prequel, underscores the powerful and ongoing connections between past and present, repression and inquiry. The antipodal trajectories of the prequel intersect easily with the other techniques of comics examined here, which work to stretch our imaginary abilities to the extent that Yunior has stretched the story, and that Díaz has stretched the boundaries of the novel itself. Brief Wondrous employs the genres and their transgressive spatial and temporal dimensions to create a new context in which to talk about race, history and identity in an attempt to free them

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from national and historical discourses tainted with generic and linguistic and conventions that preclude real discussion. Díaz’s novel provides a deeply compelling attempt to create new ways to think about old problems. Díaz explores the repressed histories of the Dominican Republic from the vantage point of the American diaspora, using popular culture to dislodge fossilized memory, and destabilizes conventional thinking as well as ­physical and literary borders. Boris Fishman alternately attempts to locate the repressed ­Holocaust memories of his grandmother using unconventional methods devised by his particular imagination, while exploring the spaces between ­Manhattan and the immigrant world of Brooklyn.

Chapter 4

“Weathering the Divide between There and Here”: In-between Spaces in Boris Fishman’s A Replacement Life The map becomes a ‘juridical territory’: it facilitates surveillance and control. Maps are still used to control our lives in innumerable ways … We are prisoners in its spatial matrix. j.b. harley 1

⸪ Migrant writers in America have traditionally expressed a divide between their past life in their place of origin (“there”) and their present existence in their place of arrival (“here”).2 This is exemplified in the literature from Mary Antin, who presents Russia and America as oppositional parallels, to Junot Díaz’s Yunior, who regards the Dominican Republic and the United States as being centuries apart. In A Replacement Life (2014), Boris Fishman introduces additional spatial and temporal dimensions to this dichotomous rift. Slava Gelman’s childhood past in Minsk is eclipsed by the more distant past of his maternal grandparents, while his American present is split into the immigrant neighborhood he abandons for the promise of the American metropolis. In this paradigm, the country of origin becomes a distant, twice removed place, while the immigrant neighborhood is likened to the ‘Old World.’ Slava initially subscribes to the separation between the locales of Brooklyn and Manhattan, yet throughout the novel, their status as either ‘here’ (now) or ‘there’ (then), is undermined, complicating additional distinctions between past and present, fact and fiction. 1 “Deconstructing the Map,” The New Nature of Maps, 165, 166. 2 The phrasing hints at an elusive contingency between temporal and spatial dimensions – here/now, there/then – however the temporal and spatial are entangled so that multiple spatialities can coexist in one temporal moment and multiple temporalities within one space and/or place.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_006

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Slava, who moves from Brooklyn to Manhattan where he works in a highbrow magazine, is confronted in the opening pages of the novel with the death of his grandmother. Returning to Brooklyn for the funeral and customary mourning period, Slava is approached by his grandfather with a strange request, to forge a Holocaust testimony in his name, so that he can receive restitution from the German government in place of his deceased wife; his grandfather later recruits him to write letters for the entire community. The novel explores Slava’s response to this request over the summer of 2006 as he attempts to access the repressed Holocaust memories of his grandmother while maintaining personal integrity and struggling with his responsibility towards his grandfather and the community. As Slava wrests the stories out of their historical lacuna, he fashions his own narrative through an act of creative appropriation, which frees him from the stronghold of the past. While navigating the historical past and the immigrant present, Slava spends a great deal of time traveling on the ny subway between Manhattan and Brooklyn. In an illuminating passage, he evokes the map of the ny subway: Manhattan is the imperial seat from which the various subway lines sail toward Brooklyn like an armada. The Soviet armada is the color of yolk: The D, N, R, F, B, Q, heading to Bensonhurst, Bath Beach, Midwood, Gerritsen Beach, Mill Basin. The rest – the red 2, the green 5, the blues flirting with Queens, the browns making their excretive across Williamsburg and Bushwick – are the trains of other countries.” (286) The subway map as visualized by Slava emphasizes the boundaries between Manhattan and its boroughs, likening them to separate countries with Manhattan at the center. The colorful subway lines in between Manhattan and the boroughs are equated to ships, a joint symbol of imperialism and migration. Underlying Slava’s perception of the boroughs as countries to which he ascribes clear boundaries, are the inherent characteristics of the map itself. Denis Wood traces the emergence of the map to the creation of the state (32), and explains that maps “conjured up borders where none had existed” and “summoned unity from chaos” (33). J.B. Harley has pointed out that a map “creates and maintains boundaries” for “[i]t’s objective is to control” (165). Subsumed within the orderly map, Harley explains, is a system that communicates a social order, which is then experienced and reproduced by those who use it (45). When Slava looks at the map of New York, he is conditioned to adhere to its order and boundaries, which he sees almost naturally as separate countries. The map both creates and reinforces the separation between Manhattan and

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Brooklyn, between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ a separation that Slava will eventually question, challenging the map and its authority. The authority of the map is concealed within its mechanism so as to seem transparent. Often understood as an accurate, objective, factual and straightforward topographical reproduction, maps are in fact “authoritarian images” which “reinforce and legitimate the status quo … [w]ithout our being aware of it” (Harley 168). Harley reads maps, with a nod to Foucault, as texts with inbuilt “spatial panopticons,” whose seemingly natural and transparent appearance in fact conceals hidden and distorting mechanisms of power (22). The design of the map works to shape our mental perception of place and space in the world, while resisting the map and its power can change our understanding of the world. Resisting the map involves a process of counter-mapping, for as Wood points out, while the map may be injected into the culture, one may also resist it. The current practices of counter-mapping involve “all kinds of fusion, interbreeding and boundary crossing” while “the new attitudes, visions, and radical philosophies of the counter-mappers … are really taking maps and mapmaking in a whole new direction, a direction with the potential to free maps at last from the tyranny of the state” (111, italics in the original). While Slava does not draw an actual counter-map, he creates one through his movements and the influence they have on his perception of spatial hierarchies, socially constructed places, and the meanings attributed to them.3 Manhattan, which assembles all the diverse lines, is the center of the map’s universe, while its boroughs are like astronauts connected to the mother ship with colorful oxygen lines. The centrality and importance of Manhattan as “the imperial seat” is gradually eroded by Slava, who discovers a dissonance between the spatial hierarchies represented by the map, as arbiter of order and separation, and his lived experiences of ‘here’ and ‘there,’ recalling the productive tension between Henri Lefebvre’s perceived and conceived spaces and the lived ones. Slava’s lived space fails to coincide with the mapped geographical one, as his pasts and presents intermingle and coalesce. With the loss of its authority, the boundaries of the external map are destabilized and alter Slava’s perspective, which can perceive the porousness of boundaries in various other 3 The New York Subway Map has undergone various changes over the years. Most (in)famously, the iconic minimalist 1972 design by Massimo Vignelli, who sacrificed geographic accuracy for clarity of design (for example Central Park became square shaped). In 1979, ­following public complaints, the mta replaced the map with a more geographically inclined one, which has undergone minor changes over the years. For example Manhattan has become larger, to make the map clearer, yet this also has the affect of making Manhattan’s centrality even more compelling. While geographically based, the map cites only the bear necessities for navigating the city, erasing its details.

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areas of his life, in particular the clear lines between fact and fiction, truth and truthfulness. The growing dissonance between the map and Slava’s lived experience is accelerated by the subway itself, a tangible and metaphorical in-between space, which connects the ‘here’ and ‘there’ in his New York present. The in-between space of the subway facilitates Slava’s liberation from the binds of the historical narratives to which he was anchored. The emancipation of his imagination in the underground space, as we shall see, enables him to challenge the silences of the past and to create an alternative space for himself, as he reexamines his loyalties, aspirations and ambitions to career, family and community. Another form of in-between, related to the past-present relationship, is the multi-lingual aspect of writing in-between languages, which is apparent in Slava’s reference to Russian, as well as other languages he evokes. The linguistic in-between-ness will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. Beyond the creative release it offers, Slava’s self-reflexive obsession with the act and process of writing is problematized by it being an act of forgery. In having his protagonist forge Holocaust restitution letters, Fishman takes liberties with the porous boundaries between fact and fiction, as he acknowledges in his “Author’s Note” at the end of the book: “The line between fact and fiction, invention and theft, is as loose as the line between truth and justice” (319). Fishman deflates the authority of so-called ‘fact,’ suggesting, in ways that recall both Aleksandar Hemon and Junot Díaz’s work, that fiction can be a more truthful genre than non-fiction: “Sometimes we struggle to remember that fiction is often nonfiction warped by artifice, and nonfiction unavoidably a reinvention of what actually happened” (319). Using the image of the map as the prevailing conceptual metaphor that separates between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ and examining Slava’s counter-mapping as he destabilizes established hierarchical boundaries, this chapter will explore the multiple places and the in-between spaces in Slava’s world. The process of counter-mapping therefore occurs simultaneously on two levels: on the practical level Slava’s experiences create a lived space that re-charts the conception of space and place offered by the conventional map, while on the creative level, this translates into the remapping of memory and historical truth through storytelling.

Places and the Space In Between

Foucault observed that, “a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of

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which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by” (“Spaces” 3). Connecting between Manhattan and Brooklyn is the ny subway, on which Slava travels in between places. The subway as a connecting space between various places of arrest is contingent with Yi-Fu Tuan’s definition of space versus place: “if we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is pause; each pause in the movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place” (Space and Place 6). In his study, ­Topophilia, Tuan suggests that an “affective bond” exists between people and place (4), or as Tim Cresswell put it, places, on the most basic level are “spaces which people have made meaningful” (7). To invest place with meaning, according to David Harvey, suggests that places are socially constructed insofar as meaning is attached to a certain piece of materiality; as such, place is also subject to change. Cresswell suggests that while not natural (like gravity), place is nonetheless a necessary or inevitable human construction (33). The variable is how one goes about constructing it. Slava’s spatial travels in-between places, has the effect of deconstructing them, and can be seen as an act of remapping. Brooklyn and Manhattan are distinct socially constructed places in Slava’s universe, each denoting a different reality and expressing different values. Slava leaves the immigrant neighborhood, which is construed as the Old World, to try to ‘make it’ in the American metropolis, which is conceived as the New World. Brooklyn and Manhattan are presented as dichotomous opposites, which is corroborated by their locations on the subway map. Brooklyn/­ Midwood is a place of the past (‘there’), defined by the immigrant mentality of Slava’s grandfather, Yvgeny, who, “lived on the first floor of a tawny-bricked building tenanted by old Soviets” (6). Yvgeny buys his fish wholesale from the truck outside the store, arranges for his doctor to overprescribe medication so he can sell it to his neighbors for a profit, and fakes his medical condition to obtain a full time home attendant from welfare. Slava perceives that in his grandfather’s neighborhood, people only went “to America … for the dmv and Brodvei,” and that he should remain there only “if he wanted to have his arm gently broken by an ex-paratrooper so he could claim it happened on ice outside Key Food and get disability” (10–11). Slava therefore “abandon[s]” Midwood in order to “become an American, to strip from his writing the pollution that refilled it every time he returned to the swamp broth of Soviet Brooklyn” (46, 11). The word “pollution” suggests Slava’s rejection of his birth culture and is indicative of his internalization of the stigma of being a Russian migrant. However, the word “abandon” suggests his sense of betrayal, of desertion of family and culture, which underscore the responsibility he feels for his background. Slava is not unique in this regard, as the tension second-generation children experience between loyalty to f­amily

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and integration into mainstream society has been articulated in numerous novels, and is well documented in the literature on migration.4 Slava furthermore casts Brooklyn as a place from which to “flee,” or to escape (194), and more drastically perceives it as a place where day has become night: “You do not notice when day becomes night, but you notice night” (194). Given the context of the Holocaust, the reference to night evokes Elie Wiesel’s book Night, a meditation on the death of humanity from the perspective of an Auschwitz survivor. Seen in this dark-light, Midwood resembles a European exile and the threat of ghettoization. In Slava’s mind, staying in Midwood precludes participation in contemporary American culture, and hence epitomizes a form of non-existence. This is illustrated more prominently through the younger generation, and is best exemplified through Slava’s childhood friend Vera, who morphed from a thin, serious and studious child to a “bronco with long nails and wild hair, the eye of a hunter for a husband in the Russian classifieds (as Mama looked over her shoulder),” and whom Yvgeny would like to see Slava marry (24). Vera introduces Slava to her circle of friends, young Russian Americans whose identification with Russian culture surpasses their identification with American culture. Vera and her friends are characterized somewhat stereotypically as drinking excessive amounts of vodka, telling obscene jokes, and dressing garishly. These are Slava’s peers, and it is they who reflect what opting to stay in Brooklyn would imply for him. On the other hand, Upper East Side Manhattan, the place of the present (‘here’), is defined by the refinement and prestige of the “legendary, secretive Century,” where Slava works, which is “older than The New Yorker and … forever a paragon” (11). The Upper East Side further indicates gilded towers with neat foyers replete with doormen wishing you a good day. Lastly, Manhattan offers 4 In setting up a dichotomy between Brooklyn and Manhattan, A Replacement Life recalls Jewish American texts from the turn of the twentieth century, such as Abraham Cahan’s Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896), in which the migrant Yekl, or Jake, strives (largely unsuccessfully) to eradicate his migrant characteristics and to assimilate into American mainstream culture. In another example, the typical heroine in Yezierska’s fiction perceives the dominant culture as superior and glorifies it above her birth culture. In her novel Salome of the Tenements, the protagonist Sonya engages in self-hatred and in harsh criticism of her community. In order to participate in the “real” American life, the heroine fully embraces American values and culture, and attempts to pass as an Anglo-American. In the process, she denies her birth culture and heritage, her family and friends, and distances herself from them and from their values. She also seeks to escape the ghetto mentality through marriage to a gentile, although eventually fashions a composite identity through dressmaking (i.e. fashion).

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the allure of meeting and dating a native-born American woman. This has been the ultimate accomplishment for migrants from Abraham Cahan’s Jake and Anzia Yezierska’s Sonya to Gary Shteyngart’s Vladimir Grishkin. In Slava’s case it is Arianna Bock, a third generation Jew, who is New York savvy, and works as a fact checker in the cubicle adjacent to Slava. Slava relates to Manhattan in ways that resonate with the typical immigrant lexicon, where America, the New World, is perceived as a fluid world of potential opportunity, while Europe, or the Old World, is one of hostility and exclusion. Early twentieth century Jewish immigrants to America, David Biale claims, viewed America “in quasi-messianic terms as a land where they might escape their historic destiny and become part of the majority. The goldene medina was not only a state whose streets were paved with gold in the obvious economic sense but it was also a state that seemed to promise political ‘gold’: liberation and equality” (Biale 18). Jewish migrants who left the Soviet Union in the nineteen seventies and eighties, as was the case with Slava’s family, opted to go to America rather than Israel precisely because they perceived it could provide more opportunities for freedom. However, the dichotomy between Brooklyn and Manhattan begins to crumble when Slava experiences exilic resonances within the Promised Land. While Slava aspires to be integrated into the prestigious ranks of the Century, his promotion from scanning national newspapers for blunders (in “the Hoot”), to an actual writer does not occur. Manhattan appears inflexible and rigid, upholding a clear hierarchy between immigrants and natives, a hierarchy Slava tries to undermine by his own presence at Century. Despite his attempts, he is practically invisible to “Archibald Dyson (the senior editor),” who “thought he was spam” (56–7). Slava feels isolated from his Ivy League educated colleagues, whose concerns appear mundane in comparison to the difficulties his family experienced. Yet, isolation turns into exclusion as Slava feels “the familiar sensation of being in the presence of information obvious to all but himself” (63). He is firmly shut out, and appears to be the Century’s token immigrant; there is only a semblance of opportunity devoid of sincere intentions. The magazine thwarts rather than enhances Slava’s writing ambitions and aspirations for upward mobility. In this account, Manhattan appears as impenetrable and hostile as the old world the migrants left behind in search of opportunity, and fails to live up to its promise. Slava confronts the immigrant-native born hierarchy at numerous junctures in his daily routine, yet despite his aspirations to mingle, he refuses to adopt the customary insensitive approach to working class marginalized migrants, and makes an effort to acknowledge them individually. His neighbors have no qualms with elderly migrant doormen rushing to open the door for them. Slava

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however, complies with the tradition of respecting his elders, and prefers “to open the door for older men, not vice versa” (5). Slava also knows that Rich, Bart, and Irvin, are in fact Ryszard, from Poland, Bartos, from Hungary, and Ervin, from Albania (5). Similarly, Arianna “maintained the American attitude toward help: It was their job” (52), while Slava lends them an anonymous hand after his girlfriend goes home. Slava also seeks solidarity with his “immigrant brother,” Hamid Abdul, in the rearview mirror of the taxi, as he witnesses Slava “miscegenating with the natives” (83). When Slava allows himself to think about his sick grandmother whom he has ceased to visit since he moved to the city, his new home attains exilic resonances: “In his Manhattan exile … Slava would think about her. With his fork over a plate of kasha; staring at the river that separated Manhattan from Queens; as he drifted to sleep” (11). Here the Promised Land is transformed into exile, albeit a self-imposed exile. Furthermore, in Slava’s sparsely furnished studio apartment that “rang with echoes,” the only personal object is a blanket that had traveled with the Gelmans from Minsk, “frayed” from the numerous times his “Grandmother had scoured it in the wash” (2). Like a homesick child, Slava holds on to the Old World blanket. Slava returns to Brooklyn after an absence of almost a year, first for his grandmother’s funeral and then on a regular basis, to hear the stories of the elderly Jews petitioning for restitution. Slava establishes the intermediate role of the subway, as he enters the 6 train “inept for the crush of the Upper East Side” (5). As he “surge[s] above ground at Ditmas” (6), he perceives Midwood to be “still a world in the making,” where “the produce improved and the prices shook loose” where “a date tasted like chocolate, and it was a virtue to persuade the grocer … to have it for less than the cardboard placards wedged into the merchandise said” (6). Coursing into Brooklyn, Slava perceives a world in flux, where hierarchies are not fixed, where anything is possible. The ManhattanBrooklyn dichotomy is clearly destabilized. The subway map emphasizes and reinforces the separation between Manhattan and the four other boroughs, each defined by a differently colored line, as if a different country. Yet as Slava travels between the places, their clear distinctions begin to blur, as his lived experience of space undermines the conventional spatial hierarchies on the map, in what can be likened to an act of counter-mapping. The colorful lines that run between the boroughs and Manhattan become those of cross-pollination, not separation. The subway becomes an indeterminate space, a space defined by its movement, openness, freedom, which works as a destabilizer of the stationary constructs of place. Slava often finds himself in transit in the spaces in between ‘there’ and ‘here’ and it is in these spaces that he finds the greatest creativity. The subway

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space, separating and connecting Brooklyn and Manhattan, appears in the novel in association with Slava’s writing, and is a conduit for his creativity, his ­writing. The subway functions similarly to Homi Bhabha’s “Third Space,” an in-­ between space where new subject positions can merge and emerge, displacing the histories that constitute them, and setting up new structures of authority (Bhabha, “Third” 211). Slava will challenge the identities posed by Brooklyn and Manhattan to negotiate new, more fluid, identifications; through his creative acts he will challenge the narratives of the past to produce an alternative. It is in the space that is “in-between” these two places and cultures, namely the subway, that Slava can access new states of consciousness, and new possibilities of expression. Slava spends significant time in this underground, subterranean space, which as a concept also raises a variety of connotations. Primarily, one goes underground to be incognito, to pass undetected, to be anonymous – a literary theme perhaps most associated in American literature with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The protagonist’s subterranean existence is a mirror reflection of his social invisibility in the United States, and is a philosophical stance, as well as an act of social protest.5 In Fishman’s novel, there are resonances of this invisibility, insofar as the migrant is overlooked and excluded by the mechanisms of power. However the notion of anonymity can additionally be related to Slava’s ghost writing of Holocaust testimonies and to his fear (yet also desire) of being detected for committing fraud. Moreover, it is precisely through his incognito writing that his literary talent can finally blaze, and gain recognition, ironically, from its sole reader, Otto Barber, the German representative of the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany. Richard Wright’s “The Man Who Lived Underground,” with its grim outlook on human nature from the city sewers, could form another intertext, particularly vis-à-vis the questions of crime and pursuit of justice, as the protagonist, Fred Daniels, retreats underground to take refuge from the law for a crime he did not commit. Slava’s acts for forgery, on the other hand, constitute a criminal act for which he could be punished, however, the question of justice and truth, or truthfulness, as we shall see, undergirds his acts, alleviating the offense of his crime. Given the Russian context, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground offers another intertext. The self-reflexive misanthropic protagonist is caught between his desire to be part of society and his critique of the rational egoism that governs it, which parallels Slava’s aspirations toward assimilation into mainstream society despite his critique of its shallowness and 5 For an extended discussion on the multiple literary tropes of the underground in Western literature, see Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes, “Ralph Ellison’s New York, Invisible Man,” 85–107.

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­discriminatory practices. Furthermore, the protagonist’s aspiration to take revenge on society is raised alongside his understanding of the futility of such a desire. Revenge is a theme explored in A Replacement Life as well, as Fishman makes clear with the epigraph from Reinaldo Arenas, “All Writing is Revenge.” Questions of revenge are played out through and around petitioning claims for restitution from Germany, suggesting that restitution can be perceived as a form of revenge, a topic we will return to below. Another association linked to underground relates to resistance. Given the prevalent context of World War ii, resistance can be read as shorthand for the resistance movement. Slava can be seen as a an underground resistance fighter, contesting numerous things, such as his grandmother’s death, which he is trying to rectify by writing her back to life; the narrowly defined qualifications for being recognized by Germany as a survivor, which incites him to forge testimonies; and his exclusion from the highbrow magazine, where his first act of “modest rebellion,” as he terms it, was to stop suggesting rejoinders to the senior colleague who’s job it was to write them (93). His protest evolves as he invents “flubs” (inaccuracies, typos) rather than actually finding them in the national media. Finally, underground can be understood as beneath the surface, evoking the unconscious, and the processes that occur under the surface of Slava’s conscious awareness. In this reading, the subway is a metaphorical space where Slava’s unconscious memories, feelings and desires are unmoored, unleashed, unbound. The subway not only destabilizes boundaries between physical locations and identity positions, but also between the conscious and the unconscious. Slava’s underground experiences are then channeled through the act of writing. Slava becomes intimate with all aspects of the subway, and seems to feel more at home on the in-between spaces than he does anywhere else: after work, “he ran to the Brooklyn-bound subways. He became a connoisseur of dispatcher accents, the various types of train lurches and grunts, bodega banners, night skies, and Brooklyn’s regional humor” (158). Movement and fluidity facilitate the rhythm of Slava’s thoughts. “On the train home,” following a meeting with Israel, an elderly Jew for whom he is composing a testimonial restitution letter, Slava deliberates how to proceed (119). Going “over the details of their conversation” (119), Slava realizes that his former letter “had described Grandmother’s actions” but “hadn’t described her” (120). As the subway heads toward Manhattan, he understands that he needs to go deeper into his grandmother’s thoughts and personality in order to get closer to her. To achieve this, he must approach his grandfather, who appears to know more than he admits. Slava calls him from the subway, “three stations before he would go ­underground”

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(120), using the approaching underground space both as a force that empowers him, and as a manipulative time factor, urging Yvgeny to speak before he goes “into the tunnel” (121). The tactic works, and Yvgeny offers a sliver of information: “There were pogroms … In the ghetto. Thinning the herd, they called it” (121). Slava enters the tunnel, the underground, with these thoughts on his mind. The following day he produces a letter that captures the nature of his grandmother more successfully than in his previous attempts. Reading the letter to Israel, he immediately recognizes the figure of “Sonya” as that of Sofia: “It was her: staring at Shulamit, gulping the milk … Next time you see her, say hello from me” (139). Israel’s response suggests that Slava has resurrected his grandmother through words, in writing, similar to Aleksandar Hemon’s Lazarus Averbuch, who is resurrected through words (and images) by Brik, who is in pursuit of traces from his past. The underground space, and the movement in-between places, does not only destabilize physical boundaries, but it also liberates those imposed on memory, and enables his remapping of it through writing, in a process that will be fully explored below. The labyrinthine nature of the subway, apparent also in its visual representation in the map form, calls to mind other labyrinths, such as the infamous one built by Daedalus, to contain the Minotaur. Typically, the labyrinth is designed to spatially bewilder, and is a form of entrapment. It harbors an atmosphere of menace and threat.6 In the Greek myth, Theseus, on a mission to kill the devouring creature, is aided by the mythical Ariadne, daughter of Minos, King of Crete. She is renowned for helping Theseus escape the Minotaur’s labyrinth by giving him a thread that he could follow back out, and evade his fate. The name of Slava’s American girlfriend, Arianna, derives from that of Ariadne,7 and hints at the possibility that she could lead Slava out of the labyrinth of his complicated life “in-between,” embodied in the metaphor of the labyrinthine subway, and into the freedom of America. Yet, Slava ultimately chooses to let go of the thread, realizing that the labyrinth itself, or the labyrinthine condition, always twisting, turning, surprising, leading in unknown directions, neither here nor there, is precisely where freedom can truly be experienced. Vikram Chandra, who employs the metaphor of the labyrinth through his 6 Typical postmodern representations of New York as a labyrinth, such as Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, are tainted by the uncanny, and uphold the notion of entrapment and suffocation. Chronotopes of the Uncanny: Time and Space in Postmodern Novels, Petra Eckhard 73–4. 7 Alternately, Vera’s name is a derivative of Veritas (truth and virtue), and is in dialogue with the character Vera in Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, who is Russian yet, a gentile. This intertextual reference seem to suggest some irony as Vera is neither virtuous, nor does her character offer lend itself to the ideology of the melting pot.

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­literary technique of embedded stories within embedded stories, will also explore its liberating possibilities.

Testimony, Truthfulness and Storytelling

As Slava destabilizes the boundaries imposed by the map and releases himself from its tyranny, a parallel process takes place in his approach to the past, which seeks to determine him, and towards which he achieves a new understanding. Slava’s reference to his Soviet past can be summarized by his observation that he had “left Minsk too soon to have any feelings about it save for an unfocused dread of bodily harm due to his being a Jew and the magic scent of the lilac bushes that clotted the yard” (166). While his scant childhood memories reveal deep visceral experiences, they pale beside those of his grandparents, who lived through the horrors of World War ii. His memory of life in Minsk is eclipsed by their memories, recalling Marianne Hirsch’s observation that, “To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors” (“Generation” 107). While haunted by his grandparents’ past, Slava must learn to come to terms with it in order to find his own voice, to create his own memories. The Soviet past lives on vividly in the memories of Slava’s grandfather, Yvgeny Gelman, and cryptically, in those of his grandmother, Sofia Gelman. Each grandparent influences Slava’s relation to the past in a different way: Yvgeny through storytelling, Sofia by the lack thereof. Yvgeny loved to tell stories about the Soviet past: For every story that his grandmother refused to tell, Slava’s grandfather told three. He could talk until morning. The usual dinner talk … bored Grandfather … However, if the conversation touched something from their Soviet life, his eyes would quicken and he would launch into a ceaseless description. (48) Yvgeny’s storytelling initiates Slava into the world of narrative. Listening to his grandfather, Slava observes that his stories “were without beginning or end, without the context that would have helped his listeners to remember who was who, how things worked” (49). Losing the thread of the story, Slava was “free to observe how Grandfather told stories, like a rushing river … He was choking on everything he wanted to say” (49). Slava learns the intonations and methods of storytelling from his grandfather, who summons him to complete his stories,

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as for example during the ‘shiva,’ (the Jewish mourning period): “‘When we had to study for the citizenship … ’ He Turned to Slava. ‘Slavchik,8 tell it’” (25), after which Slava produces the story under grandfather’s approving eyes. Slava, as will be illustrated, continues to produce stories for his grandfather, while internalizing both his arguments as well as his method of storytelling. Alternately, his grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, is silent, suggesting another form of ‘there-ness.’ Sofia’s ontological absence is made literal through her physical demise, which is announced by Slava’s mother at the outset of the novel, “Slava … your grandmother isn’t” (2). This sentence with the missing adjective is ‘uttered’ in Russian, yet written in English; the compelling interand-multi-linguistic aspects of writing in-between languages will be discussed in the last section of this chapter. Sofia’s physical death is the concluding stage in a series of ontological gaps in her state of being, from her final years as a declining cirrhosis patient who suffered from long spells of unconsciousness, to her unshared or absent memories of her Holocaust experiences, about which she was unable (or unwilling) to speak: “ ‘Tell me about the war,’ [Slava] pressed cautiously. She smiled again and began. ‘Well ….’ The sentence ended there. Her tongue moved but no words emerged” (47). Sofia is the absence at the center of the novel, her silence the driving force of the narrative. Much has been written about the impossibility of testifying to the horror of the Holocaust, not only because of the inherent failure of words to represent the horror of the lived experience, but also due to the fact that the witness who survives the experience belies the testimony s/he gives: How can you know that the situation itself existed? That it is not the fruit of your informant’s imagination? Either the situation did not exist as such. Or else it did exist, in which case your informant’s testimony is false, either because he or she should have disappeared, or else because he or she should remain silent, or else because, if he or she does speak, he or she can bear witness only to the particular experience he had, it remaining to be established whether this experience was a component of the situation in question. lyotard 3

Lyotard argues that there is no logical way you can survive and still provide solid and objective testimony. The two are mutually exclusive. For Primo Levi, himself a survivor, survival and testimony are not an irresolvable c­ ontradiction, 8 The attachment of the suffix “chik” to Slava’s name is a diminutive term of endearment used when referring to children or to one younger than yourself.

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yet such testimony will always be partial, for only those who have survived, “those who, like myself, never fathomed [the Lagers] to the bottom” have written the history of the Lagers, since “Those who did so, those who saw the Gorgon, have not returned to tell about it or have returned mute” (6, 64).9 For Levi the ­witness/survivor is a testifying third party who can also speak from first person experience. As António Sousa Ribeiro phrases it, while testimony is possible, “the real witness, the one with the ultimate, most vivid knowledge, is that who, paradoxically, is unable to testify” (para 12). Ribeiro offers another complication for the testimony of survivors-victims; to survive, he writes, suggests, “if only to an infinitesimal degree, the ambiguity of having once been an accomplice” (para 13), a possibility Slava considers in reference to his grandmother as well.10 Levi stresses that while the testimony has a definite historical dimension, survivor eyewitnesses are not historians, and the average prisoner would have only a meager understanding of the larger Nazi destruction mechanism. The survivor’s testimony is subjective and fractional. However, he adds, testimony can have a liberating dimension, freeing the survivor from her/his status of victim, while simultaneously combating the silencing inscribed by the Nazi ideology. Holocaust testimony is therefore “something that is at once a lament, a curse, an expiation, and an attempt to justify and rehabilitate [oneself]. One should expect a liberating outburst instead of a Medusa-faced truth” (Levi 53). Sofia never testified. Her stories died with her. Slava sets out to rectify this; he will be the one to condemn the Nazis, he will be the one to experience a “liberating outburst,” never aiming for “a Medusa-faced truth.” Sofia’s death coincides with the arrival of restitution forms from the German government, addressed to her. Irritated at the unfortunate timing of the arrival of the forms, Yvgeny recruits his writer grandson to fabricate a testimony for him in her absence. As an evacuee to Uzbekistan, Yvgeny, according to the Germans, was not entitled to receive restitution, since he “has not suffered in the exact way [he] need[ed] to have suffered” (35). Therefore, he asks his grandson to construct a narrative with “ghettos and concentration camps,” which are, in his words, “a green path all the way” (34), suggestive of a deep irony apparent in the green dollars (the restitution money) and the mock-pastoral­ (diametrically opposed to the death-camps). 9

10

Ultimately, Levi remains skeptical about the ability to understand: “Have we - we who have returned - been able to understand and make others understand our experience? What we commonly mean by ‘understand’ coincides with ‘simplify’” (36). Given the tenuous nature of this kind of testimony, both Levi and Lyotard find it is not applicable in a court of law.

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The moral and ethical consequences of forging testimony pose an obstacle for the Americanized Slava, who initially refuses his grandfather’s request. Upset by his grandson’s unwillingness to cooperate, Yvgeny provokes him by saying, “You don’t know how to do it. Is that it?” and “What are you, Lenin’s grandson?” (34, 35). In the dynamic between grandson and grandfather, Slava upholds what he understands to be the American standard of truth. As a child, Slava understood that some lies were “a better kind of truth” (276). In Minsk, lying was the only way for truth – or justice – to prevail: The Gelmans managed to leave the Soviet Union only because all sides had agreed to pretend they were going to Israel … At every step, everyone had lied about everything so the one truth at the heart of it all – that abused people might flee the place of abuse – could be told. (276)11 Slava realizes that “it wasn’t until they’d come to America that the truth started to mean exactly what was and not something else” (276). He internalizes the American attitude that aligns facts with truth; his Jewish American girlfriend, Arianna, who works as a fact-checker for the highbrow Century magazine, embodies the very notion of factual truth. However, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out, facts themselves are not neutral; relations of power and domination determine what gets crystalized into a fact in a long process of creation, assembly, retrieval and retrospective. Given the significantly less documented history of the Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe, the facts surrounding their difficulties during the war did not enter the archives to the same extent as those of the meticulously documented ghettos and concentration camps. The narrative of the concentration camps also served other interests more than a narrative of evacuees to the East, as it generated more international empathy that was channeled into the establishment of the State of Israel. Additionally, the refugees in the east were not subjected to the horror of the systematic annihilation practiced in the camps; their suffering is seemingly categorized as being of a different quality. This discrepancy has privileged one historical narrative over another, nearly erasing it from the annals. Yvgeny, who survived the hardships through sheer resourcefulness and stamina, is in a prime position to know that ‘truth’ is both more elusive and complicated than facts, and therefore believes that his claims for restitution are no less just than those of a camp survivor. He is ultimately 11

This narrative exemplifies the “dropping out” process described in the introduction, in which Soviet Jews changed their destination from Israel to the u.s. once they had left the ussr.

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f­ ighting for the relevance of his narrative. Trouillot, who dissects the question of historical truth, suggests that, “in relation to The Past our authenticity resides in the struggles of our present. Only in that present can we be true or false to the past we choose to acknowledge” (151). It will therefore be left to Slava to determine whether Yvgeny’s relation to his past is authentic or not. While facing his grandfather, Slava remains adamantly opposed to the idea of forging letters, yet his attitude undergoes a transformation when discussing his grandfather’s proposition with Arianna. Her automatic reply, “You can’t do that” (79), adheres to American notions of truth. Her cautioning against fact distortion forms a direct incentive for Slava to adopt his grandfather’s positions on truthfulness. Slava slips into Yvgeny’s mode of argumentation, repeats his opinions verbatim, speaking with his voice: “The rehearsal of Grandfather’s arguments came with wondrous facility to Slava … He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them” (80, 79). Slava abandons truth and embraces truthfulness: he is willing to commit “a smaller sin for the sake of a big justice” (257). Slava’s attitude toward truth recalls that of Toni Morrison in “Site of Memory,” in which she distinguishes between facts and truth: “the crucial distinction for me is not the difference between fact and fiction, but the distinction between fact and truth. Because facts can exist without human intelligence, but truth cannot” (93). Morrison relies on “remains” (scraps of information) combined with imagination, to “yield up a kind of truth” (92), one that cannot be found in the verifiable facts. Slava embarks on a similar path as he reconstructs his grandmother’s memories. Slava is later told, by one of the Russian survivors, that his writing has “no beginning, no middle, no end,” echoing the exact words Slava used to describe Yvgeny’s storytelling (117). We are led to understand that Slava internalized his grandfather’s Russian method and style of storytelling; he purposely avoids facts to evade the suspicion of committing fraud, since, quoting Arianna, he says, “A fact can’t be wrong if it isn’t a fact” (118). And so, by adopting Yvgeny’s notion of truthfulness, Slava is able to find a middle ground, where he can write a Holocaust ‘testimony’ for his grandfather and maintain his moral integrity. Slava is not just fabricating, his writing demands a purpose that goes beyond the commercial; he writes to commemorate and resurrect, to restore justice and truthfulness: “[W]ithout intending it as a narrative for the restitution fund, without Grandfather providing the spark of a few truthful details, nothing would come. The story had no purpose, no framework” (110). On a practical level, Slava plans to write his grandmother’s stories (which he is keen to ‘discover’) to stand in for those of his grandfather (and later for those of other Brooklyn Russian ‘survivors’ who approach him). In breaking the silence

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about the past, Slava will be rectifying an error, restoring what the Nazis took away, and as such, will be acting truthfully (90). However, the task that Slava takes upon himself is complicated on various levels. Primarily, he faces the problem of Sofia’s silence. Can her ineffable experience, her ‘there-ness,’ be put into writing? Can her ontological absences be translated into a tangible presence through narrative? Can her experiences be known or authenticated? Can Slava’s letters attain the status of testimony or are they merely fiction? Both testimony and literature have been considered flawed attempts to represent the Holocaust, the former due to the impossibility of testifying, as discussed above, which in Slava’s case is even more complicated due to his absence from the historical moment, the latter due to the trivialization of the event by means of fictionalizing it. Berel Lang argues that recourse to literary and figurative speech creates additional dimensions to the representation of an event. These elements emphasize the individual style and perspective of the author, shifting the emphasis from the events to the author and his or her aesthetics, inevitably distorting them. Even historical discourse is problematic, for it has a plot that is governed by its own set of figurations; therefore Lang suggests “the possibility of representation that stands in direct relation to its object – in effect, if not in principle, immediate and unaltered” (156). Those who write about the Holocaust, he suggests, should adopt a position that is neither subjective nor objective, that is not scientific or poetic. He invokes Roland Barthes’s idea of ‘intransitive writing,’ as an ideal mode with which to approach the discourse of the Holocaust. Intransitive writing is appealing to Lang, for it “denies the distances among the writer, text, what is written about, and, finally, the reader” (xii).12 The kind of writing Lang calls for, is of the type in which there is no distance between the writer and the writing, in which writing becomes “the means of vision or comprehension, not a mirror of something independent, but an act and commitment – a doing or making rather than a reflection or description” (xii). Slava’s writing resonates with Lang’s notion of Barthes’ intransitive writing. Meditating on his grandmother and on the sparse details he knows about her life, Slava thinks, “Now his grandmother would talk to him. Now it was no imposition. Now he would follow the movements of her mouth. Now he would embrace her and not let go until he could speak as her, until they became the 12

In his essay, “To Write: An Intransitive Verb?” Barthes explores the question: when did the verb ‘to write’ become intransitive, in his attempt to delineate between modernist and realist writing. According to Barthes, “in the modern verb of middle voice to write, the subject is constituted as immediately contemporary with the writing, being effected and affected by it” (19; italics in original).

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same person” (86). Following these thoughts, Slava enters a trance-like state, a forty-five minute time warp in an attempt to “travel” with Sofia, and inhabit her consciousness: “time had stopped so that he could enter a void and talk with the old woman” (110). Slava closes the distance between himself and his grandmother. She speaks through him while he records it in writing; writing becoming his means of comprehension. There is a sense that Slava as writer is trying to accomplish what Gunnar Olsson has described as “minimize[ing] mistranslation by thinking-and-acting in such a way that what I am writing about is one with the language I am writing in” (7).13 Slava strives to find this convergence between the subject matter and the language of expression, so that his language will represent that of Sofia, or more pertinently, that his language will be Sofia herself. Another way to understand Slava’s testimonial-like writing is through the notion of “postmemory,” as articulated by Marianne Hirsch. As we saw with GB Tran, the phenomenon of postmemory relates to a situation in which “the descendants of survivors (of victims as well as of perpetrators) of massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation’s remembrances of the past that they need to call that connection memory” (“Generation” 105– 06). Postmemory is transmitted, or received, through others, and therefore differs from the kind of memory that witnesses or participants can actually recall, hence the qualifying adjective ‘post.’14 However, the experiences of those who lived through trauma, according to Hirsch, are “transmitted … so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right,” which explains why postmemory’s relation to the past often manifests itself through “imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (“Generation” 107). Hirsch goes on to suggest that “Second generation fiction, art, memoir, and testimony are shaped by the attempt to represent the long-term effects of living in close proximity to the pain, depression, and dissociation of persons who have witnessed and survived” trauma (“Generation” 112). Evoking Art Spiegelman’s Maus i: A Survivor’s 13

14

Gunnar Olsson defines “the action-space of imagination,” as “that particularly human faculty through which we can make the absent present and bring the unconscious into the open” (5). According to Olsson, this sanctuary, a kind of categorical abyss, lies beyond the limits of space, time and causality, and defies definition. In responding to critics such as Gary Weissman, who argues that “no degree of power or monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s” (17), Hirsch adds that “Postmemory is not identical to memory: it is ‘post,’ but at the same time, it approximates memory in its affective force” (109). Weissman alternately suggests that the second generation does not grapple with the trauma of the event of the Holocaust, but rather with the absence of trauma and of feeling. It is the need to fill that emotional gap that drives identification with those that experienced the event.

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Tale: My Father Bleeds History, Hirsch suggests that, “Loss of family, of home, of a feeling of belonging and safety in the world ‘bleed’ from one generation to the next” (112). Maus, which provides an intertext for GB Tran’s memoir, is also a relevant intertext for A Replacement Life, insofar as the artist documents his difficulties in finding an adequate way to represent his father’s testimony, similar to the way Slava struggles for his own unique mode of representation of Sofia’s narrative. Although third, and not second generation, Slava nonetheless qualifies as possessing postmemory. Slava’s mother makes minimal appearances in the novel, while his father is practically invisible: “He was present but unnoticeable, his favorite setting. He hadn’t even objected when Slava had been given the last name of Grandfather’s line instead of his own” (13). Yvgeny’s domineering personality easily overshadowed that of his insipid son-in-law; by claiming Slava as his own, Yvgeny displaces the father entirely. Additionally, they lived together as an extended family, and the duty of raising Slava was left to Sofia. Reading between the lines, it seems that Slava’s parents, the ‘second generation,’ may have been too distraught to confront the past.15 Hence, the task was left to Slava, who although more distant from the events, grew up haunted by them, and primarily by the untold stories of his grandmother; only three stories of Sofia’s past were known, the one most repeated told the story of how his grandparents fell in love (and hence is Yvgeny’s story as well). Silence about the past can be no less harmful than knowledge of it, Hirsch intimates, insofar as postmemory can affect “those whose parents talked readily about their experiences” as well as “those whose parents were silent” (Generation 15). The death of Sofia is a trigger for Slava’s postmemory, which he is compelled to expresses artistically, through narrative by using “imaginative investment, projection, and creation,” as suggested by Hirsch. While Hirsch emphasizes the role of familial intergenerational connections in the formation of postmemory, she also suggests “even the most intimate familial knowledge of the past is mediated by broadly available public images and narratives” (“Generation” 112). Family life, she adds, is always “entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public, generational structures of fantasy and projection, and by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the transmission of individual and familial remembrance” (“Generation” 114). ­Slava 15

Slava’s mother tells him that “the grandparents are the ones with the stories” and that “Maybe your children will come to us” (223), suggesting that distance is crucial for the utterance of difficult memories. As a young mother, she had “always thought telling less was the right way,” hoping, it would seem, to spare the new generation from the burden of the past.

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turns to “a shared archive of stories and images” in the form of history books at the Yorkville branch of the New York Public Library. The facts provided in the history books cannot be integrated into the narrative: “someone applying for restitution is not a historian. The people who wrote these books know how many inmates there were. The people in the ghetto didn’t get a fact sheet” (129). Yet, the books do enable him to augment his familial memories with “a collective imaginary,” as he integrates historical events into his grandmother’s story. A few weeks and several restitution letters later, Slava finds himself “out of ideas. Every single item that Slava had scratched into his notebook from the history books had a line through it” (205). Slava’s notebook is reconstructed in the novel, presenting history as-if erased, the words aggressively slashed through: 45 Jews roped together and ordered buried alive by 30 Russian prisoners. The Russians refuse. All 75 killed. . . Himmler nauseated by witnessing shooting of 100 Jews. Bach-Zelewski says it was ‘only a hundred.’ This has to be done more efficiently – more humanely, Himmler says. For the Germans, but also for the Jews. (!) Poison gas arises from this . . . (205) The visualization of the erasure is powerful and polysemic. Literally, it suggests that the history referenced has already been incorporated into Slava’s restitution narratives, hence is ticked off the list. Yet, more prominently, it questions the interplay between erasure and remembrance. History informs and ruptures the narrative, yet it is both fictionalized, and in this visualization, it is denied and suppressed. This dual gesture can be read as both a displacement of history, as well as a nod towards it; it suggests that history exists, yet should not be all pervasive; it allows that history is fictionalized, fiction historicized. Inevitably, not only Slava, but also his creator Fishman is drawing on a shared archive of Holocaust stories to create his narrative. He liberally reveals some of his ‘sources’ in the “Author’s Note” at the end of his novel, indicating more specifically David Guy’s book, Innocence in Hell: The Life, Struggle, and Death of the Minsk Ghetto (2004), as a source for one of Slava’s postmemory recollections, as well as other “valuable details” (320). Like Aleksandar Hemon, Fishman also blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction by using historical documents to corroborate a fictional narrative. Fishman goes further, suggesting that forgery is a legitimate tactic because it has moral overtones pertaining to truthfulness and justice. Fishman however gives himself a meta-fictional poke which relates to this boundary-blurring and to the current cultural moment: when Slava asks the librarian for historical books on the Holocaust, she

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asks whether he is working on a research project, to which Slava responds, “Fiction.” The librarian knowingly replies, “That’s all the fashion now” (129). This kind of “self-deprecating” laughter is undoubtedly, as Ruth Wisse clarifies, a characteristic of east European Jewish humor (12).16 Crossing off the horrific history as items on a checklist, however, causes Slava to feel like a monster, “the details of death merely the instruments of a story, kindling for a vocation he didn’t have the talent to practice another way” (205–06). This articulation hinges on the interplay between ‘kindling’ and ‘holocaust,’ which in Latin is derived from ‘holos’-whole and ‘caustos’-burned, and suggests the terrible way in which death fueled his creativity. This recalls Hirsch’s examination of her generation’s preoccupation with Holocaust memories, as she considers whether they were “appropriating” the stories of their parents, “over-identifying, perhaps – and this always in a whisper – envious of the drama of their lives that our lives could never match? Were we making a career out of their suffering? (Generation 15). The question is in place for Fishman as well, yet having his protagonist agonize over these ethical questions reveals Fishman’s authorial anxiety about his own appropriation of the material, his awareness alleviating his guilt. While circumscribed by his grandmother’s memories and by his grandfather’s style, the creative literary act of fusing language, memory and imagination, ultimately creates something new; it establishes an alternative in-between space, that results in a narrative presence, a ‘here,’ which is uniquely Slava’s. As Slava grapples with the past, it becomes apparent that his ‘testimony’ is a form of appropriation. In “bearing witness” for Sophia, he frees himself from the historical burden her history represents. The novel ends with Slava’s recognition that Sofia “will have to live on in the adulterated form in which he must imagine her. He cannot strip her out of the imagining” (315). As Imre Kertész suggests, the memory and meaning of Auschwitz is now in the hands of the ‘next’ generation, but only as long as they choose to claim it (145).17 The past remains meaningful insofar as it helps one confront and understand the present: Slava confronts the past so he can understand his connection with his grandmother, a connection that cannot exist without imagination, and therefore a connection which is also a separation. His imaginative process, expressed through 16

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In her introduction to No Joke: Making Jewish Humor, Ruth Wisse relates to the self-­ deprecating aspect of Jewish humor, of which Freud was, as she also mentions, a great aficionado. Wisse argues that, “the benefits of Jewish humor are reaped from the paradoxes of Jewish life, so that Jewish humor at its best carries the scars of the convulsions that brought it into being” (18). As quoted in António Sousa Ribeiro, paragraph 11.

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narrative, helps him carve out his own spaces: both the writing trance and the resulting narrative are in-between spaces, the first representing an active space, connected with the underground subway space, in which Slava engages with his memory and writes with abandon, and the latter, a tangible expression of this creative absorption. In this sense, the novel itself becomes not only Slava’s, but also Boris Fishman’s in-between space, which is also a countermapping of memory, of fact-and-fiction, facilitated by the counter-mapping of city space and place.

The Language of In-between: Writing Russian(ness)

Slava struggles with anxieties surrounding his literary voice, style and technique, as he attempts to give voice to his grandmother using the techniques and style of his Russian grandfather. His creativity comes into fruition in the restitution letters, as he both circumvents the American type of truth in favor of truthfulness and justice, and appropriates history, ultimately discovering his own unique voice. Slava’s preoccupation with writing can also be detected in his journalistic pursuit. Initially he attempts to purify his English from the contamination of Brooklyn, understanding that in order to achieve recognition from the editors of Century, he must emulate the magazine’s preferred writing style. He painstakingly deciphers the code of Century by examining “latitudinally” several back-copies of the journal, distilling the fundamental ­ingredients of journalistic writing. Once uncovered, however, Slava scorns the formula, thinking, “It was too easy” (58–9), therefore when he writes an article,18 he consciously discards the guidelines he has arduously “wrung” from the decoding process, engaging instead in “a far sea of essayistic remembrance,” blaming his reckless diversion on “the impulsive tyranny of the artistic heart” (66). Underlying this claim is a deeper statement: Slava is ultimately unwilling to conform, unwilling to reconcile himself to the sterile aesthetic and superficial ideological standard of the journal, which demands the full capitulation of his individuality and his creativity which, he discovers, is rife with Russian resonances. The novel’s preoccupation with writing has a metafictional edge, in which Fishman seems to be exploring the question, what constitutes good 18

Slava is sent on assignment twice during the summer of 2006, first to cover an urban explorer’s scaling of Ulysses S. Grant’s mausoleum in Morningside Heights and later to cover an event concerning Holocaust restitution funds taking place at the Museum of Jewish History. The parody with which this event is described bespeaks the ways in which the ‘shoa-business’ has become a ‘show-business,’ and constitutes a critique of it.

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writing? Yet, to what extent can we equate Slava’s anxieties with those of his creator, Boris Fishman, and for what purpose? In his book, Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora, Adrian Wanner notes that fiction written by migrant Russians tends to be autobiographical and “frequently feature[s] protagonists serving the role of the author’s alter ego who engage in self-reflective musings about their own Russian identity” (9). Furthermore, Wanner points out that migrant Russian writers often place their characters in Russian immigrant communities, or other Russian contexts, in order to heighten their exploration of identity, all of which holds true for Fishman’s Slava. Wanner explains the biographical inclination, a common feature of migrant literature more broadly, as the writers’ act of cultural self-creation, in which the plot forms a “literary self-representation or self-exploration” or a kind of ever evolving self (10). Wanner draws on Stuart Hall, who emphasizes that, individuals who experience multiple cultural encounters tend to “produce and reproduce themselves through transformation and difference” (235). The process of autobiographical self-fashioning is apparent in the writing of early twentieth century migrants as well, as for example in the work of Anzia Yezierska, whose biographically based novels engage with the process of self-fashioning, taking it to a literal plane through dressmaking.19 Slava’s fashioning of a literary voice and identity, therefore, is not to be divorced from that of Fishman (although it is not parallel either). This section will focus on Fishman’s use of language, using Wanner’s points of critique to flush out the wealth of linguistic in-between-ness contained in the novel. Wanner considers whether, or in what way, the new generation of “Russian” writers, who came of age far from the Russian literary traditions, and who write from outside its geographical borders, can be qualified as Russian. He points out that, “Russian identity does not automatically emerge as a result of a writer’s ancestry, language or country of birth” (8). Following Stuart Hall,20 Wanner argues that the ‘Russian’ component of the identity of writers who immigrated from Russia to the United States, as children or young adults during Perestroika or in the post Soviet era in general, is actively created in a process of mindful literary self-invention, not as an accomplished fact, but as 19

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Mary Antin is famously noted for opening her autobiography, The Promised Land, with the claim, “I was born, I have lived, and I have been made over” (1), the ultimate statement of self-fashioning. Stuart Hall suggests that the experience of diaspora is defined “not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity,’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities … produce and reproduce themselves through transformation and difference” (235).

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a production always in process (8). While this may describe identity construction more generally, and that of migrants in particular, Wanner emphasizes the heightened self-consciousness of the process in the case of Russian migrant writers who seek to partake in a grand literary tradition, and whose “Russianness, especially in light of their choice of a non-Russian linguistic medium, is always already self-conscious and constructed in and for a Western gaze” (9).21 Fishman may be ‘accused’ of appealing to an American audience by making Russian literature and culture more accessible, yet this cultural mediation will leave American readers questioning their assumptions. Russian writers of Jewish ancestry experience an additional complication with regard to their identity, since being Jewish in the Soviet era was mutually exclusive to being Russian.22 Paradoxically, Soviet Jews became Russian only after they left Russia; Russian identity was imposed upon them from the outside by the host countries to which they migrated, often as a stigma.23 On the other hand, for decades Russian Jews had been subjected to a process of ‘Sovietification,’ leaving many ignorant of ‘their’ Jewish heritage, causing American Jews to question the “Jewishness” of Soviet Jewry.24 Consequently, Soviet Jews in the United States often embraced their newly found Russianness over their tentative Jewishness, while migrant writers turned to the rich literary tradition, evoking the Russian language in which it is articulated as markers of their literary identity.25 Wanner identifies several markers of Russianness that recur 21

22 23

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There are, Wanner notes, a few exceptions to the case, yet “it is striking how many translingual Russian writers do emphasize their Russian identity in their writings and public personae” (8). The primary American writer discussed by Wanner is Gary Shteyngart: Chapter 4: “Gary Shteyngart: The New Immigrant Chic” (95–133). His fifth chapter is devoted to more marginal writers such as David Bezmozgis, Ellen Litman, Lara Vapnyar, Inina Reyn, Anya Ulinich, Sana Krasikov and Olga Grushin. See Chapter 5: “The Rise of the ‘Russian Debutantes’” (134–87). For in in-depth inquiry into Soviet policies against Jews, see Antonella Salomoni, “Statesponsored Anti-Semitism in Postwar ussr. Studies and Research Perspectives.” This derives from a combination of a carry-over from the Cold War, in which the Soviet Union was the archenemy, and from popular culture, which tends to portray Russian men as linked to the mafia, and Russian women as gorgeous femme fatals. In the novel, Arianna demonstrates this sentiment, as she relates the disregard shown by a Soviet family, who dared to sell the tickets her father had gone to great lengths to obtain for them for the high holidays. Another way to measure the difference between American and Russian Jews is manifested by the aesthetics of the headstones in the graveyard: “The American graves are enormous slabs,” and only state the name and the dates, while the Russian headstones are smaller, “but make up with ornament…” (312). The best-known contemporary Russian Jewish American writer is Gary Shteyngart, who constructs his Russian persona while simultaneously satirizing the commercial

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in the works of migrant Russians, and suggests that they are often used superficially to signify a superficial Russianness. Fishman’s work features many of these markers, yet his employment of them goes beyond the limits suggested by Wanner, to create a language that not only consciously looks back to the old realm and forward to the new one, but one that also is redolent of a linguistic in-between-ness. Wanner suggests that migrant writers seek to partake in the “cultural prestige associated with Russian literature,” by alluding to specific authors, ­characters, scenes or styles, and that such references are often no more than a parroting of the original (14). Fishman occasionally refers to Great Russian writers covertly, through quotes that are only referenced in the author’s note at the end (such as Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment);26 they are seamlessly integrated into the fabric of the novel, at times even as creative variations on the original. Such allusions achieve a linguistic in-between-ness par excellence, as they are both organic to the text while simultaneously reminiscent of another culture. At other times, Fishman overtly names Russian authors, drawing analogies between them and his protagonist’s life experiences. For example, after his rejoinders are ignored by the editor of Century, Slava proceeds to write them “‘for the drawer,’ as they used to say about the great suppressed writers during the Soviet period. He was Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Bulgakov” (93). Likening himself to the Great Russian writers is a humorous gesture, but is also a critique of the great American all-inclusive democracy, which has no tolerance for Slava’s talent. The reference accrues meaning and is not merely an exercise in namedropping. Another example occurs when Slava enters his grandfather’s immigrant apartment building, following the death of his grandmother. Slava finds the door to his grandfather’s apartment unbolted, and thinks, “Like Tolstoy’s villagers putting on the lights outside after dinner, he was asking for company” (7). The unlocked door of Yvgeny versus the light above an open village door signals a deeper difference having to do not only with custom, but also with trust and safety, with community and privacy, painting a grim picture of the immigrant, barricaded behind the locks and bolts of his door, out of fear of the new and often hostile environment. Later, Israel, who refers to Slava as Gogol (“We’re always behind you Gogol” 119), points to the “silence” at the center of his writing, “That terrible Russian silence that the Americans

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e­ xploitation of a manufactured ethnic identity. See Wanner, Chapter 4: “Gary Shteyngart: The New Immigrant Chic” (95–133). Fishman references mostly Russian writers but not exclusively so; his citations include a few writers from other cultural backgrounds (such as Chang-Rae Lee).

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don’t understand” (117). Israel is referring to the writing in the letters, which confronts the reader with both the explicit and with what remains unsaid, the endurance and resilience inherent in the culture. Arguably, these echoes of the Russian tradition in Fishman’s writing recall the centrality of multilingualism in Jewish culture, which, as Hana Wirth-Nesher points out, “means not only the literal presence of two languages but also the echoes of another language and culture detected in so-called monolingual prose” (6). Wanner goes on to state that the new generation of writers, fluent in Russian and in English, yet having never written in Russian, can be viewed as what Steven Kellman has termed “monolingual translinguals” (“those who have written in only a single language but one other than their native one”) rather than “ambilinguals” (“authors who have written important works in more than one language”) (Wanner 4, Kellman 15). Unlike ambilinguals such as Vladimir Nabokov, these writers do not experience a sense of betrayal of a former literary identity expressed in their native language. Furthermore, their use of English is “permanent and irreversible,” which makes them outsiders to their own ‘native’ language (Wanner 4). Slava claims to be eager to polish his English, to eradicate any traces of foreignness that may linger, however, we have seen that he is ultimately unwilling to abandon his native Russian language and aesthetic, retaining an echo of it in his multilingual prose. This foreign verbal echo, or these “wanderwords,” to use Maria Lauret’s term, can be traced as we have seen in reference to Aleksandar Hemon and Junot Díaz, to the actual presence of non-English words within a text, as well as to accents that can be perceived through the deliberate use of clumsy syntax, or rhythms that are not in sync with English intonation and pronunciation. Not only does the use of wanderwords challenge the hegemony of the English language and reveal the permeability of linguistic boundaries, the words also “import” cultural difference into the text. Each word or utterance carries within it a submerged meaning, which has the power to yield insights into a foreign world, to convey deep emotions or cultural critique. There are writers who celebrate language’s ability to conceal their origin, for whom writing is a passage into unaccented and untainted English, for writing, Lauret observes, “often liberates the speaker from the immigrant shame of the foreign accent” (80). Mary Antin, for example, expressed joy that she could at least write without an accent, even if she could not speak without one. Hana Wirth-Nesher points out that Jewish American writing has always negotiated between languages, usually Yiddish, Hebrew and English, and that traces of other languages can be found in writings of Jewish American authors whether they “strongly identified” with them or “kept their distance” (5). While Jewish migrants from the perestroika and post-Soviet era differ significantly from

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earlier Jewish migrants insofar as they are alienated from Hebraic traditions, some, like Fishman, have retained the need to create what Wirth-Nesher has called “American literature with a Jewish accent,” a deliberate accent that can “evade, repress, transgress, mourn, resist, deny, translate, romanticize, or reify” (Wirth-Nesher 3). The new generation of writers writing exclusively in English, Wanner suggests, are inclined to assert their so-called linguistic otherness by use of “faulty or accented language” (12–3). This can create a comical effect, rendering the migrant buffoonish, or enabling an empathetic yet condescending attitude of the reader towards the character. Some authors use “a Russianized ‘broken English,’” which “highlights the immigrant insecurity with English grammar,” which Wanner largely regards as “a conscious device to fake East European ‘authenticity’” (13). Wanner cites Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated as a “pseudo-Slavic” artificial kind of manufactured Russian (9). Fishman’s treatment of the Russian accent, however, is more complex. Slava, we are led to understand, converses in Russian with his mother, his grandfather, Vera and with the older generation of Russians that populate the novel. These conversations are written in Standard English, not broken English. The reader is made aware of the linguistic denomination through Slava’s interjections; for example, after asking his grandfather if his mother had called, he thinks to himself, “The Russian words sounded as if said by an other” (7). Experiencing himself as “an other” in Russian exposes the extent to which Slava has distanced himself from his native language. Only a few times is Russian denoted by incorrect syntax and different speech rhythms, to exemplify the presence of a foreign language, such as, “Your Grandmother isn’t” (2). Yet, Fishman dwells on this purposeful interjection of linguistic difference; it is not merely a ploy to sound Russian, it addresses an ontological difference embedded in the language itself: “Isn’t. Verbiage was missing. In Russian you didn’t need the adjective to complete the sentence, but in English, you did. In English, she could still be alive” (2). Yet lest we think that English is somehow a more complete mode of representation, Slava finds no preposition that suits the description of Sofia’s past: “Grandmother had been in the Holocaust – in the Holocaust? As in the army, the circus? The grammar seemed wrong. At the Holocaust? Of it, with it, from it, until it?” (4). This is no mere grammatical conundrum, but relates to the problem of representation, especially that of a traumatic past. Yvgeny is also shown to resist the linguistic limitations imposed by a foreign language. This can be seen through his deliberate mispronunciations of ‘foreign’ names, such as Century magazine or “Yad Vashem” (the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem), both words with loaded emotional content, the first alluding

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to his grandson’s desertion and the latter to his wife’s traumatic past. His unwillingness to pronounce them, to perform the speech act, seems to keep the ideas they embody, desertion, terror and violation, at bay; failure to pronounce them is his way of refusing them. A variety of other characters speak with Russian accents in ways that defy Wanner’s observations. Slava talks Russian to Israel, which is denoted in their first conversation, when Slava hears “Allo?” over the phone in “a hoarse voice in Russian” (97). During their subsequent meetings the two share profound thoughts on the nature of writing and on the disappointments of life, all in Russian, which is presented in Standard English. Yet on one occasion Slava, who follows Israel to synagogue, hears a sample of Israel’s English: “Havayoo, Ravin” (how are you rabbi), “Grensun” (Grandson) and “Nais, veree nais!” (Nice, very nice!), are some of the words he utters (201). Seen in isolation, such pronunciation may make Israel appear comical, yet being already acquainted more intimately with his personality, it does not render him pathetic, but rather reveals the limitations of a superficial perception of the other. In this regard, by providing more in-depth acquaintance with Israel, Fishman enables the reader to go beyond the stereotypes commonly linked with Russian migrants. Furthermore, Israel plays along with Slava’s lead (that Slava is his grandson), to deceive his American interlocutor, which renders him in control of the situation, and hence the opposite of powerless. Therefore, we can say that Fishman’s use of accents and faulty English is not superficially employed to fake authenticity, but rather enhances our understanding of the displacement experienced by migrants who live in between the languages. Wanner further suggests that the new Russian writers employ a smattering of Russian throughout their novels in an attempt to achieve a sense of linguistic prestige. Often used to create an exotic aura, Russian words, he claims, facilitate the marketing of Russianness as a valued commodity (12).27 Drawing on Lauret, these wanderwords can be seen to do much more than create an aura; as stated above, they are dense with cultural meaning and significance. Fishman’s interjection of Russian words into his novel is sparse yet purposeful, as he often has his character reflect on the significations of linguistic difference implied by the use of these words. Russian (as well as Yiddish and ­German) words in the novel are indicated by transliteration and written in italics. Transliteration, as Hana Wirth-Nesher points out, “joins together the sound 27

Wanner suggests that translingual Russian writers have the advantage of “authenticity of origin” – “Their Russianness might be staged but it is also ‘real’ in a way that their competitors’ is not” (9). This statement assumes an essential approach to identity, and threatens to undermine Wanner’s entire discussion.

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(voice) of one language with the sign (letters) of another” (174). In the case of Russian (and other languages using non-Roman alphabets), the resulting visual image appears alien to all readers. While it makes the sound of the foreign word accessible to non-Russians, its meaning remains hidden (even consulting a ­dictionary may not disperse the opacity of the word which often has deeper cultural connotations beyond the mere denotation). Concurrently, while Russian speakers will understand the word, they might find the transliteration “foreign and confusing” (Wirth-Nesher 174). The presence of the foreign word embodies the essence of linguistic in-between-ness. Fishman also plays with this confusion when Slava overhears one elderly Russian survivor say to another, “Poshli, Roza, my idyom!” (245). Although translated immediately afterward (Let’s go, Roza, we’re moving”), the word ‘idyom’ sounds to the nonRussian speaker as ‘idiom,’ which is what the Russian words in fact represent within the text. The transliterated Russian words in the novel often refer to memories of the past, which, as Eva Hoffman has suggested, necessitate a non-English vocabulary. Hoffman writes poignantly on being lost in between languages in her memoir Lost in Translation. As a new migrant, English, her adoptive language has yet to accrue meaning and signification; the words feel flat, have “no accumulated associations,” do not “give off the radiating haze of connotation,” and do not “evoke” (106): When I see a river now, it is not shaped, assimilated by the word that accommodates it to the psyche – a word that makes a body of water a river rather than an uncontained element. The river before me remains a thing, absolutely other, absolutely unbending to the grasp of my mind. (106) When Slava interjects Russian words, they have deeper personal or socio-­ historical connotations, and as Lauret indicates, import cultural difference into English. Russian words in the text include: World War ii dugouts (Zemlyankas, 89, 212), the memory of grandfather whispering hush in Lenin’s tomb (Tikho tikho tikho tikho 66), and food (Ponchiki; Kharcho and Solyanka, 20). Like many migrants Slava also “continued to swear in Russian and he continued to marvel in Russian” (Ukh ty. Suka. Booltykh. 7), that is, the spontaneous emotional reactions are reproduced in the native tongue. Linguist Mary Besemeres has explored the emotional layers embedded in language use. She undergirds “the interconnectedness” and “inseparability of language and culture” (“Different Languages” 145), illustrating that the meanings of emotional expressions in the mother tongue are not “readily translatable” to English (140). Their English

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translations evoke different emotional connotations, and therefore are often inadequate tools of expression.28 The Russian words evoked by Slava, to follow Lauret’s insight, “present themselves to the writer’s consciousness most likely in the form in which they were first learnt,” therefore drawing on “the cultural, social, emotional and political context with which that language is interwoven” (58). These references do more than give an old-world flavor to the novel; each word corresponds to a memory laden with emotion and connotation, which erupts to show the limits of the English language and culture. Slava experiences the dual sentiment of attraction-repulsion toward his native Russian. On the one hand, he is lured by the intimacy and elasticity of his mother tongue, which exhibits a playfulness not apparent in the “colder” and more precise English language: “Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense” (38). On the other hand, while the playfulness is an enabling feature, it is couched in language of decay, apparent in the flesh of the aging woman. Russian is also a responsibility that Slava finds hard to shed: he “had done nothing to earn [the Russian language], but it was his” nonetheless (280). Slava’s conflicted relation to Russian can be seen in a scene that takes place between him and Vera towards the end of the novel. While Vera’s Russian,29 directed to Slava, sounded “as elegant as a palace” to his ears, he also feels “overseen by it” (274), suggesting not only a protective element, but also a sense of supervision, control or suffocation. The language may seduce him, but it also contains the potential to control and dominate him. To illustrate this more fully, when Slava is confronted with, and encouraged to enter, “the dark collapse between Vera’s legs” (280), he responds by running for his life towards the monolingual Manhattan. The ending of the novel underscores the enduring emotional connection to Russian, as the mother (or in this case, grandmother) tongue. We find Slava visiting his grandmother’s gravesite a month and a half after the events have unfolded (Slava’s forgery culminates with his double ‘confession’ to the German investigator and to Arianna).30 Significantly, you can both hear and feel the 28

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For further discussion on the cultural assumptions and expectations embedded within language, see Anna Wierzbicka, “In Defense of Culture.” Theory and Psychology 15.4 (2007): 575–97. Vera seems to be more comfortable in Russian. She asks for the translation of “svoboda” in English, which is freedom (150). It seems significant that she cannot recall the name for ‘freedom’ in English, and remains, in Slava’s eyes, entrapped in Russianness. Using the technique of a singular unique detail, elucidated by none other than Otto Barber himself, Slava disentangles himself from his accusation of forgery, beating Otto by his own rules. Arianna, however, will not forgive him for withholding ‘the truth.’

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train, the conduit of creative space, from the cemetery: “Behind the noise, you can hear – after all – the train running its fingers across the ribs of the tracks. It comes through the pavement and into your feet” (314). Slava ‘speaks’ with his grandmother, understanding that he is maintaining both sides of the dialogue: “she will have to live on in the adulterated form in which he must imagine her … If she is to live, she will live as Slava+Grandmother, one person at last” (315). Slava has accepted the limitations and possibilities of imagination. The novel ends with Slava “scattering the down” of “a space helmet of white puff” over his grandmother’s gravesite (316). The flower evoked childhood memories of “every meadow outside Minsk” and Slava, who has no intention of looking up the flower’s name in English, refers to it in Russian, “Oduvanchik” – which is also the last word of the novel, sealing it with an affectionate linguistic kiss (316). Transliterated Russian words co-exist alongside appearances of other foreign languages such as Yiddish, German, Italian and French, as well as a ­two-word phrase written in Hebrew script, suggesting a multilingual consciousness, which ricochets languages one off the other for various effects. Italian surfaces in Slava and Vera’s recollections of the intermediate period they spent as children in Italy en-route from the Soviet Union to the u.s.: “Dove la fermata dell’ autobus?” (29). Italian evokes a temporary spatial setting, which is outside the reality of either ‘there’ or ‘here,’ an in-between place lost in the mists of the childhood past. Vera tells Slava that she returned to Italy for vacation, but that “You could fly to Vegas for, like, half the money and half the time” and have the same experience (29). Vegas, the great signifier of hyperreality, denotes the fantasy-like nature of the Italian in-between-ness, as a realm outside their range of possibilities. Otto Barber, the German investigator for the Conference on Material Claims Against Germany, who tracks Slava down as the possible forger, interjects a German linguistic presence into the novel. He acknowledges the particular force of Slava’s writing, saying, “Really, I take my hat off to the author … The sentence begins with a formal expression, and then, boom! Suddenly, it is something very–I don’t know the word. Umgangssprachlich. I love this maneuver … It makes you forget you are reading a story” (260). The praise for Slava’s writing by the German is highly ironic in the context of the testimonials: Otto calls the (fabricated) testimony “a story,” diminishing the verisimilitude of the events, of the Holocaust itself, yet he simultaneously praises the quality of Slava’s writing, suggesting that it transports the reader beyond the words and in to the moment, a great literary achievement. Slava receives recognition for his writing talent, yet is guilty of providing aesthetic pleasure for the German investigator, suggesting the dangers of turning the atrocities of the Holocaust into art, and ironically evoking Adorno’s imperative that, “There can

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be no ­poetry after Auschwitz.”31 Underlining this is the fact that the author, Fishman, brandishes the German language with great skill, migrating freely between languages and perspectives with cosmopolitan ease, challenging the mono-dimensional American English. The linguistic richness of the novel also includes the mainstream Jewish immigrant languages, Yiddish and Hebrew, albeit minimally. Fishman is in sync with the typical functions of Hebrew, which appears in connection with “scripture, liturgy, and a vast repertoire of hermeneutic texts,” and with Yiddish, which is typically associated with speech (Wirth-Nesher 8). Fishman falls in to the post-immigrant generation group of Jewish American writers whom WirthNesher identifies as never having been in possession of Hebrew and Yiddish as a “means of communication,” but for whom these languages nonetheless remain “sources of self-expression and identity” (Wirth-Nesher 5). Fishman’s protagonist, who grew up after the destruction of European Jewry during wwii and under the Soviet regime, finds Yiddishkeit alien to his Russian sensibilities, suggesting that he consciously implements Yiddish in his novel to give a nod to tradition while simultaneously revealing his generation’s distance from it. Yiddish is sampled only minimally by the older Soviet generation,32 who symbolically represent the collective memory of Eastern European ancestry. Yiddish is also uttered by Arianna, a third generation American Jew, quite distanced from her Eastern European ancestry. She intersperses her English with Yiddish words, such as “Forshpeis,” “Shpilkes,” and “Farkakte” (8, 50, 107), employing the words with the same facility with which she wields a French expression such as, “Pourquoi” (124). The Yiddish phrases are emptied of their Jewish distinction, and can perhaps be regarded as part of an urban American lexicon (which would include words like schlep, klutz and chutzpa). The familiarity of the words limits their designation as ethnic signifiers, and Arianna’s use of the words does not therefore necessarily indicate her ethnicity. Slava’s recollections of Soviet Russia do not resemble Arianna’s vision of ‘there,’ which is based on stories she heard from her grandmother. Several generations removed from the ‘old world’ and the immigrant experience, Arianna draws a blank about the family’s ethnic past. Fishman’s use of Yiddish suggests that he possesses an understanding of the significance of the language, yet implements it to reveal its meager role for contemporary migrant identity. Hebrew appears as a two-word phrase, written in Hebrew script, within one of the restitution letters written by Slava. The testimony includes a curse 31 32

The famous quote comes from “Cultural Criticism and Society,” 1951. Israel uses a few words like “Zhloby” and “Shvartzes,” arguably also words that have entered the English – and Hebrew – lexicon.

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d­ irected towards the Nazi persecutors: ‫( השם יקום‬hashem ykom), meaning, god will take revenge (on the perpetrators). The foreign rectangular letters are evocative signifiers of an alien presence, of an ‘otherness’ meant to purposefully exclude. There is no translation provided in the restitution letter that is eventually read by Otto Barber, who will remain oblivious to the meaning. This particular Hebrew phrase first appeared in the Jewish liturgical prayer, ‘Merciful Father,’ in the twelfth century following the massacre of Jewish communities in Europe by the Christian crusaders. It is a code word for a blood feud, upholding the responsibility of the survivors of massacred innocents to take revenge on the perpetrators. The appearance of the Hebrew is doubly startling, primarily in the reader’s encounter with an alien script that ruptures the linguistic flow, and additionally for the problematic meaning, available to those who understand it, of revenge. The restitution letters can be conceived as a way to take revenge upon ­Germany: “So now you want revenge,” Slava says to Yvgeny when he asks him to forge a letter (36). The novel however does not cohere with the notion of revenge construed as an act of unwarranted violence. David B. Hershenov explores “punishment as a debt the criminal pays his victim(s) as compensation” (79). His discussion sheds light on the therapeutic dimensions of exacting revenge, in the form of paying a debt, for both victim and perpetrator. Primarily, he challenges “the axiomatic assumption that justice and revenge are diametrically opposed,” therefore it follows that “there is a place for revenge in a restitutionist framework for punishment” (87, 86). Revenge as restitution not only calms the vindictiveness of the victim, but it also alleviates the guilt of the offender. This way, he suggests, equilibrium between offender and offended is restored, and social order can be maintained. The coded Hebrew words suggest that restitution would exact revenge, and would put hatred to rest. It is revenge for the purpose of reconciliation. Slava also takes reconciliatory revenge on his grandfather for compelling him to write the letters: he tells Otto Barber that the only fabricated restitution request was that of his grandfather. While this might on the face of it seem unkind toward Yvgeny, the opposite is true. Not only has Slava restored the equilibrium between himself and his grandfather, but by not receiving restitution, Yvgeny’s efforts on behalf of the community (petitioning them to apply for restitution) will appear selfless and ultimately gain him credence in their eyes, reestablish his reputation within the community and ease his loneliness. Fishman’s manipulation of the languages in the novel reveals his sensitivity to linguistic in-between-ness as a tool with which to negotiate Russian identity. Slava remaps his linguistic affinity as in-between English and Russian, creating a new linguistic space, which coincides with his overall spatial understanding

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as being in-between Manhattan and Brooklyn, in-between ‘there’ and ‘here.’ The act of writing in-between produces tangible alternative spaces, which defy migrant-native divisions that are (re)produced by the map. Slava’s writing is connected to and determined by movement in the underground in-between space, enabling him to remap the boundaries of space, language and truth, liberating him, in what can be construed as an act of reconciliatory revenge, from the overbearing history, and freeing him to write his own narrative, to create his own space. An act of revenge also triggers the unfolding events in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain, to be discussed in the following chapter. Revenge instigates a labyrinthine network of storytelling that takes place in-between America and India, in which storytelling performs a healing, life giving role.

Chapter 5

Translation and Transcreation in Vikram Chandra’s Red Earth and Pouring Rain I do not write, I rewrite. My memory produces my sentences. I have read so much and I have heard so much. I admit it: I repeat myself. I confirm it: I plagiarize. We are all heirs of millions of scribes who have already written down all that is essential a long time before us. We are all copyists, and all the stories we invent have already been told. There are no longer any original ideas. jorge luis borges 1

⸪ Vikram Chandra’s colossal novel, Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995),2 employs classic Indian narrative strategies of the great Indian epics to tell an elaborate, across-borders story, encompassing contemporary and colonial India as well as present day United States. Chandra, who divides his time between Berkeley and Bombay, brings spatial fluidity to his novel by crossing cultural boundaries and interweaving literary traditions, contributing in original ways to the d­ iscussion of the transnational and transcultural turn.3 Generic 1 In his Invisible Work: Borges and Translation, Efrain Kristal relates to Borges’s public dialogues, and cites this quote (p. 135), as it appears in Jorge Luis Borges: Radioscopie, by Jacques Chancel, pp. 74, 76. 2 Hereafter re. 3 In an interview with Dora Sales Salvador, Chandra places his work within a transnational framework: “Travel, journeys, and ‘multiculturalism’ have always been with us, I think. We tend to think of these trends as uniquely modern, and look with nostalgia at a past in which we imagine people to have stable cultural and psychological identities. We tend to exaggerate the Arcadian, unchanging stability of a medieval and ancient world that was actually very tumultuous, full of encounters that were at least analogous to ours” (“Listening” 209). Chandra aligns himself with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s perception that all cultures are products of “cosmopolitan contamination,” and that there is no such entity as an “authentic” culture (Appiah 101). Paul Jay similarly locates Chandra’s novel within an ongoing tradition of mutual influences that have always characterized cultural exchange, suggesting that in Chandra’s work, “cross-cultural conquest and the forms of hybridization it has facilitated” are a given (Jay 101). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004364011_007

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­boundary crossing takes place in re through its participation in Hindi film culture, which also draws on the great Indian epics in major ways. In re-telling the classic stories Chandra adheres not only to the complex structure and to the ­central themes of the great Indian epics upon which Bollywood similarly draws, but also adopts the glittery Bollywood aesthetic through which they are ­retold. Interweaving the epics with contemporary concerns and with an across-­border American-Indian story situates re within the tradition of ­retelling the ­classical narratives and within the flashy and traveling culture of contemporary Bollywood film. The protagonist of the novel, Abhay, is a young man recently returned to his native India after completing his studies in an American college (Pomona, California). At home, Abhay undergoes a journey of self-discovery while listening to tales spun by a monkey, Sanjay, whose consciousness from his previous life (as a poet during the colonial period) is restored (a development that will be discussed in detail below). Abhay is drawn into the storytelling process as he attempts to situate himself within and across cultures. On one level, the novel presents a story within a story: the story of Abhay’s exploration of his identity is the main story, while Sanjay’s narrative serves as a tool through which Abhay can achieve understanding. On another level, Sanjay’s much longer and more dominant tale is a series of stories ­embedded  within stories, in which Abhay’s narrative can be seen as one more story within the larger story. This tension, which is played to the hilt in the novel, echoes surface-depth tensions typical to comics, as discussed in Chapters  2 and 3, yet mainly draws on techniques from the epics, and on ­Bollywood aesthetics. What could be more Bollywood than a resurrected monkey typing his memories from his previous incarnation on a typewriter? The past and its influence on the present has a central concern for in all the texts discussed in the previous chapters. Each text exhibits a unique approach with which to address the past, and each author puts his narrator through major difficulties in order to access, resurrect and restore the past: Brik resurrects Lazarus through words and images, by tracing his life back to its European origins; Tran unearths his family’s traumatic memories of abuse and dislocation layer by layer, as he patiently questions those willing to share their stories; Yunior confronts the national amnesia of the dr by giving voice to the under-represented and through creatively reimagining the blank pages of Oscar’s life story; Slava unlocks the repressed Holocaust memories of Sofia through intuitive and intransitive writing. Chandra brings the past into the present through a literal act of resurrection. Not only is Sanjay, the monkey who is shot, restored to life, but also Sanjay’s memory of his former life during the colonial conquest of India is fully recovered. Through this ingenious, yet culturally viable maneuver, Chandra’s

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narrator achieves access to the problematic colonial past, which is interwoven into the present events through the act of storytelling. Like the protagonists in the novels discussed in previous chapters, storytelling is a means for Abhay and Sanjay to explore the discrepancies between American (or western) and non-American (or non-western) conceptions of space and truth as they find expression through aesthetic practices of storytelling. The question of truth and history, which is problematized by all the narrators, receives an additional twist in Chandra’s novel. The novel’s non-realistic features, which work to undermine dichotomies and destabilize boundaries to reveal the possibilities of transnationalism, show Chandra’s novel to be in dialogue with the postrace aesthetics wielded by Junot Díaz, who employs the non-realistic conventions of the genres to criticize the lingering legacies of American imperialism and European colonialism. The clash Sanjay experiences between Indian storytelling techniques and American ones place him side by side with Aleksandar Hemon’s Brik, who finds himself caught in between American modes of storytelling and Sarajevan ones, and with Boris Fishman’s Slava, who resists American storytelling in favor of Russian techniques. Like Hemon’s Brik and Boris Fishman’s Slava, Chandra’s narrator, Sanjay, is metafictionally preoccupied with the question of what qualifies as a good story, what strategy to use under the specific circumstance without losing cultural specificity, and how to keep an audience engaged. Intertextuality, which plays a major role for all the authors (Hemon’s main intertext is the image of Lazarus; Tran draws on Tintin and Maus and other visual intertexts; Díaz novel is a lush intertextual maze; and Fishman ‘quotes’ Russian classic writers and holocaust literature), is apparent in Chandra’s intrinsic familiarity with the epics, upon which he strongly draws. In using traditional literary contexts as well as a strong local visual culture, Chandra can be compared with GB Tran, who draws on a variety of visual cultures in his portrayal of his family history through comics. Finally, the spiral labyrinth of Brik’s ceaseless movement across eastern Europe and the underground labyrinth of the subway where Slava discovers freedom, find resonance in the intricate narrative labyrinth that Chandra creates, in which we, the readers, are meant to get temporarily lost. Yet more than any of the previous novels, Chadra’s re is a story about, and a celebration of, storytelling.

Transcreation: The Indian Epics in Narrative and Film

The great Indian epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (composed circa 400 bce to 400 ce) are the basis of a broad and nuanced ongoing tradition. They exist in many languages (Sanskrit alongside local Indian languages), have

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multiple versions, and occur in various forms: narrative, plays, poetry and visuals. James L. Fitzgerald describes this tradition in relation to the Mahabharata “as a generative matrix of themes, fixed in part, but very fluid and dynamic” with uncountable “realizations” (153–54). As such, the epics defy the very idea of originality and embody the notion of creative openness, fulfilling what Homi Bhabha terms the “originary”: “The ‘originary’ is always open to translation so it can never be said to have a totalized prior moment of being or m ­ eaning – an essence” (Bhabha, “Third” 210). In his essay “Repetition in the Mahabharata,” A.K. Ramanujan calls attention to the process of “repetition and elaboration and variation” that takes place in the retelling of the classical Indian epics (421). Such creative repetition frees the classic tale from its moorings, yet keeps it in circulation by enabling permutations that make it “entertaining, didactic and relevant to the listener’s present” (“Repetition” 419). In discussing the epics, and more specifically the Ramayana, in his essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” Ramanujan further suggests that “Every author … dips into [a common pool of signifiers] and brings out a unique crystallization, a new text with a unique texture and a fresh context” so that “no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling” (46). In retelling the epics, therefore, a process of creative repetition, or what Mukund Lath has termed, “transcreation” takes place, which is typical to the Indian literary tradition, whereby “the new is born through imaginatively restructuring the old” (17). Elliot Deutsch introduces the complimentary term “tradition text” (as opposed to traditional text), which refers to the process in which the “philosopher-commentator … seeks to remain faithful to his authoritative sources, but in his own creative terms … contributing something to it through his creative appropriation of its very life and being” (170). The tradition text is therefore “a kind of authorless truth” which simultaneously “becomes something new with each vital engagement with it” (170). Chandra’s novel is contingent with the notion of transcreation and tradition text, for it derives thematically and structurally from the epics and embodies their creative impulse, yet the story is enfolded with new creative elements, original to Chandra and his times. Another way to view Chandra’s acts of translation is through what Walter Benjamin has termed in his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” as the “afterlife” of the text, in which the ‘original’ is kept alive by ever-renewing it, by breathing life into it (71–2). Benjamin demonstrates “that no translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife – which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something living – the original undergoes a change” (73). A similar approach to translation and transformation can be found in the translations

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of Jorge Luis Borges, as illuminated (from the Spanish) by Efrain Kristal, who explores the ways in which “Borges’s translations, and his reflections on translation, are invariably at the core of his creative process” (xiv). Borges believed “that a translation could enrich or surpass an original,” and that the “original work does not harbor an advantage over a translation.”4 Significantly, Borges did not believe in definitive works of literature, and regarded an original work of fiction as “a collective enterprise that carries more weight than the input of any individual author, reader or translator” (xix); that is, every text is an ongoing opportunity for the reader as translator to engage with. While Borges took many liberties in his fiction, often using translation as “a means to enrich a literary work or a literary idea,” his “translations [into Spanish] remain identifiable reflections of the original” (xvi, xx). Translation, therefore, for Borges is twofold: translation from one language into another, a collective effort that will often improve upon the text; and translation of works of literature into his own fiction, which might also be called improvisation (not plagiarism). Kristal illuminates the way in which his fiction writing was “informed by his own approach to translation: a way of writing that willfully adopts, transforms, and adapts the works of others” (xix). Chandra’s translation of the great Indian epics into his novel is compatible with that of Borges, and can be regarded as a creative improvisation. Chandra therefore ultimately understands the work of art in terms of the creative impulse that lies behind it, which according to the philosopher Daya Krishna, implies that he is “Thinking Creatively About the Creative Act” (40). Daya Krishna stipulates that “the paradigmatic example” of the creative act “is exhibited in the arts,” and that the act of thinking with and about the work of art elevates our thinking action to “a first level of exercise of that creative activity” resulting in “the projection of what we call the ‘art object’” (40). The creative impulse therefore is at the core of Chandra’s creative improvisation. While some have regarded the spiraling and embedded narrative technique of the Mahabharata as an “unstructured monster,” Ramanujan reads the epic as highly structured, referencing its multiple replications, repetitions, symmetries, parallels and formulations (“Repetition” 421). He likens the form of the Mahabharata to that of a crystal, which has a “kind of order which can be described as a periodic repetition of [its] atomic chemical motif” (441). Like a crystal, there is also room for growth whenever there is a “dislocation,” creating an “open-ended system.” In this manner, “new incidents are added only in certain places where there seems to be a need for them” (441), which can 4 I quote from Efrian (2 and xix). The original essay, “Mis libros,” is in Spanish (La nación, April 28, 1985).

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explain the ongoing retellings of the epic which appropriate certain episodes as necessary for their new reality. In creating an elaborate, spiraling text, the great sages of the classic epics appear to weave a labyrinth for the reader to get lost in. The literary labyrinth reflects on the labyrinth of our actual human existence. The epics suggest a deep connection between the word and the world, and imply that trying to find the way out of the labyrinth rationally, by tying strings or leaving crumbs, is futile. The way out of the labyrinth is through a change of mental perception, in which the reader perceives the narrative essence of the world. To come to terms with this on the textual level is to come to terms with it on the existential level as well, and then the binding walls of the actual world come tumbling down, leaving one with infinite possibilities. The reader/listener undergoes an existential journey between the multiple layers of the text and his/her life experience, resulting in an inner transformation. Chandra evokes not only the themes and techniques of the Indian epics, but his spectacular mode of storytelling also conjures that of Hindi cinema.5 Perhaps not unsurprisingly, the Indian epics and Hindi cinema are interrelated. Most critics are unanimous in citing the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as the ur-texts for Hindi films.6 Sudhir Kakar writes that many of the myths found in Hindi films are based on mythological prototypes, which have “a continuity that can be traced back to ancient models.” Hindi films he adds, “are modern versions of certain old and familiar myths,” namely, the great Indian epics (20). Vijay Mishra regards the Mahabharata and the Ramayana as the “precursor text” to “Bombay Cinema” (“Towards” 33) and claims that the form of Bombay Film “is homologous with the narrative paradigm established over two millennia ago in the Sanskrit epics, namely the Mahabharata and the Ramayana” (32). The films are “transformations of the narrative structures” of the epics,

5 The terms Indian Popular Cinema, Hindi Cinema, Bombay Cinema and Bollywood are used interchangeably. The term Bollywood entered the lexicon in the 1970s, and was formally entered into the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003. Vijay Mishara notes that Bollywood has become the preferred term, suggesting that “The triumph of the term (over the others) is nothing less than spectacular and indicates, furthermore, the growing global sweep of this cinema not just as cinema qua cinema but as cinema qua social effects and national cultural coding” (Bollywood Cinema, 1). 6 Claims that the great Indian epics underlie Bombay Cinema are countered by the argument that such a claim is an ideological attempt to read tradition as an “unbroken continuity” (Prasad 15). Others have criticized such an approach for its “fetishization of tradition” (Kazmi 62), insofar as it implies an underlying Indian essence by assuming “the myth of the mythically minded Indian” (Prasad 17).

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Mishra stresses, which can only be meaningful through their adherence to “the major narrative syntagm of the epic” (32, 33).7 Gregory D. Booth also explores the ways in which “Indian drama and cinema has drawn extensively from the Mahabharata and Ramayana” (180), and observes that the three typical and often overlapping themes in the epics, namely martial, sacrificial and romantic, are employed voraciously in Hindi cinema, and work to enhance plot design and character analysis (173). M.K. Raghavendra holds that “Popular cinema refers persistently to pre-history and myth – the Ramayana and the Mahabharata” (37), and illustrates ways in which contemporary films reveal their dependence on and manipulation of mythological elements borrowed from epics. In his seminal essay, “The Popluar Hindi Film,” Ashis Nandy affirms that films “operate within a consensual system” which “aims at presenting a not-so-unique combination of themes that have been witnessed hundreds of times before” and work to initiate within the viewer a sense of déjà vu (91, 90). What elevates one film above another is not its uniqueness, but rather an “efficient combination of themes” which is often a question of “sheer luck” (91). However, not every written narrative that employs themes and textual conventions of the Indian epics can be seen as drawing on Hindi film. What makes re not only a literary retelling of the classic tales, but also a Bollywood influenced retelling, has to do with the glossy filmic aura of Chandra’s presentation. Perhaps this can be partially attributed to his background. Chandra grew up immersed in Bollywood film culture; his mother and two sisters work in the Bollywood film industry (as writer, director, critic respectively). Chandra’s familiarity with Bollywood is further apparent in his contribution, in the role of co-writer, to two Bollywood films, Mission Kashmir (2000) and Wazir (2016). Indeed, when asked about his literary influences, Chandra “named, first and above all, the great Indian epics” (Salvador 100). In delineating the basic principles of Hindi cinema, Nandy situates spectacle as its first element, and places overstatement and exaggeration as its main tenets; namely, realism has not been a value in Hindi films: “it does not even try to be a direct reflection of everyday reality” (90).8 In a Bollywood spectacle, “black is black and white is white,” therefore, when change occurs, 7 Both Kakar and Mishra illuminate ways in which contemporary films draw on character models from well-known myths, on which they are dependent for the creation of meaning and affect. 8 This has been changing in recent years, in which Bollywood has adopted a more realistic style, as seen in particular in the currently popular genre of the biopic. 2016 saw the release of several blockbuster biopics, such as, Neerja, M.S. Dhoni, Dangal, Azhar, and Aligarh.

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it is “­dramatic and total” (89). This relates to the central theme explored in the films, namely the question of self-identity, which often plays out through notions of good and evil. The story line may initially portray the hero ambiguously, as neither wholly good nor quite evil, however, the hero “must eventually be shown to be essentially good, whose badness is reduced to the status of a temporary aberration” (90; italics in original). The role of the evil-doer is to enable the hero to “rediscover[ ] his true self” (90).9 Nandy further notes that “the popular Hindi film is not concerned with the inner life of the characters on screen; it is concerned with the inner life of the viewer” (90). Therefore, unlike western cinema, “the characters do not develop through situations in these films, rather, the situations develop through the characters” (90). As a result, the films are episodic in nature, and the story unfolds somewhat artificially, through accidents, coincidences and song and dance sequences. Chandra’s novel participates in the spectacular in various ways. Primarily the novel eschews realism: the narrator is a monkey, supernatural phenomena o­ ccur throughout, historical figures are fictionalized, and Hindu gods frequently intervene in the action. The episodic structure enables swift changes in mood, taking the reader from the mundane to the marvelous and from the sublime to the crude. The tale is peopled with strange and outlandish characters: heroic warriors and court poets, diviners and enchantresses, villains and delusionary opportunists, avengers and redeemers, lovers and dissenters, dreamers and deserters. Chandra’s imagination leaps off the pages with writing that glitters in its sheer inventiveness and adopts a dazzling array of styles, tones and nuances. This is a novel of excess with the volume turned up high and the colors saturated to their utmost. Within all the glitter and panache, re explores questions of self-identity, especially through the character Abhay as part of Sanjay’s audience. Listening to Sanjay’s stories, Abhay undergoes a transformation that is apparent in his own storytelling as he negotiates his American college experience from the vantage point of his homecoming. Another feature central to Hindi films, according to Nandy, relates to time and historicity. Due to the fact that the films are in part modeled on the timeless tales of the epics, their story lines are synchronic and ahistorical. “The stress is not on a linear unfolding of the story. There is only a diachronic façade that is designed to be pierced by the viewer” (91). Since the film is based on a known script (i.e. the classic epics), the outcome is predictable, hence the importance lies not in the linear development of the plot, but in the unique

9 Nandy adds, “all shades of grey must be scrupulously avoided … because they detract from the logic and charm of a spectacle” (89).

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way the film will be seen to present the known elements.10 Unity of action, time and space are not a value, and the liberties the Hindi film takes with these constraints are, Nandy tells us, the product of “an alternate form of logic” (92). The locale of the story shifts with no warning, subplots branch off unexpectedly, characters change their appearance mid-scene. This results in the obfuscation of a particular time and place; the historical is left behind as the story transcends the particulars to narrate a timeless tale. Gerald Larson explains that history is “a category which has no demonstrable place within any South Asian indigenous conceptual system, at least prior to the middle of the nineteenth century” (305). History, he writes, is “a zero category” (305). Sheldon Pollock similarly views history as a European category that should not be imposed upon ancient Indian texts.11 Pollock goes on to list the various ways in which ancient Indian texts disallowed history (in which all personal and temporal features are abstracted from the text), suggesting that history “is denied in favor of a model of ‘truth’ that accorded history no epistemological value or social significance” (610). What then is the nature of this model of truth? According to J.N. Mohanty, “the consciousness which is supra-historical is the transparent, self-illuminating consciousness,” unchanging and unchangeable (310); history is not a relevant category because it is temporal and invested with intention. The fictional works discussed in the previous chapters also imply that there is some kind of truth that history on its own cannot divulge, and attempt to disclose it through various aesthetic techniques. Classic Indian thought, as suggested here, provides a metaphysical solution to this issue. Viewed from another angle, we could say that the story falls out of time because its creative impulse is more significant than causality. The story is eternal and the creative act of storytelling itself is beyond the here and the now. Sanjay’s story is a rehearsing not only of the narrative strategy of the epics, but also of their themes (as will be explored below), and thereby linked to the notion of timelessness. The reincarnation of Sanjay also gestures toward a conception of timelessness that carries over to the stories he tells. The colonial conquerors he evokes are based on historical figures, yet the fictional touches added by the narrator (and author) to their characters, and their insertion into a highly imaginative epic-based tale, have the effect of displacing them from their specific historical context; the battles they fight are ‘every-battle’ or the 10 11

Based on the epic prototypes (and on casting) the viewer identifies the villain and the hero from the start, regardless of their behavior. He further questions the objectivity of history, which “turns out to have unsettlingly close affinities with other types of story-telling” (604).

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prototypic battle, which has-been-and-will-be fought; the same holds in relation to their jealousies, hatreds and loves. Abhay’s story, intertwined with that of Sanjay, asks to be compared with it and incorporated into its epic ethos, and his journey of coming-of-age is similarly a timeless one. Chandra’s abundantly imaginary retelling of the epics therefore also taps into the ahistoric beyondness inherent in the storytelling act. Finally, Nandy identifies Bollywood films as playing a crucial role as “an ­interface between the tradition of the Indian society and the disturbing ­modern – or Western – intrusions into it” (95). Nandy finds that the cinema gives “cultural meaning to Western structures superimposed on society,” that it works to “[demystify] some of the culturally unacceptable modern structures” as they impact Indian culture, and that they “ritually [neutralize]” many foreign elements that are essential for social survival (95). Abhay’s American interludes, which puncture Sanjay’s story four times, provide such an interface, as they offer a window to Western cultural practices, some which have penetrated India, and others that raise curiosity yet may ultimately remain mystifying and misunderstood. In his book Bombay Travels, Rajinder Dudrah reads Bollywood through the “lenses of culture, diaspora and border crossings,” to show how Bollywood “works with and produces a sense of diaspora culture” both in its films, which incorporate locations outside India, and in the media culture which surrounds it.12 Dudrah observes that historically Hindi cinema juxtaposed India “alongside a general idea bout ‘the West’ as a signifier for all things vilayat or foreign, and often associated with white Western ways” (9–10). In such representations India is often seen to uphold conservative and moral values while the west is frequently construed as decadent and corrupt, but also as intriguing and titillating. Therefore, the attitude toward the west, as suggested by Nandy, is ambivalent. Furthermore, and perhaps given the growing Indian diaspora, cinema from the mid-1990s onward has expanded the way the west appears on the screen, to include it as a venue for personal exploration through travel or career opportunities. By interweaving Abhay’s American narrative into his novel, Chandra places himself within the Bollywood trend, yet he complicates easy dichotomies between India and the west and compels his readers to seek for parallels, similarities and connections. Film additionally plays a role within the novel at various junctures, which metafictionally draws attention to the medium itself. At one point during the storytelling sessions, Abhay looks out at the crowd gathered on the maidan, 12

See Ashish Rajadhyaksha, who views Bollywood as “a producer of cultural commodities of which film is only one” (69).

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and notes that a vendor under a tree “was playing film songs on a recorder” amidst the general tumult (165). This soundtrack accompanies the events throughout. Abhay additionally acknowledges several times that “this feeling of being in a film hung over me…” (53), blurring the boundary between real and reel. This blurring, or sense of hyperreal, is also apparent when Abhay’s college roommate stares hypnotically at an image of Mt. Baldy on the television screen, while Abhay opens the shades to reveal the view of the mountain outside their dorm window (64). Later on he blurs the boundaries again when he likens his surroundings to a film-set: “the rooms were as gleaming and brown and perfect as film-sets” (361). The ongoing reference to film establishes an association ­between narrative and film, while drawing attention to the links and disconnects between representation and reality, and heightening the sense of illusion. re is both a creative participation in the ritual of retelling the classic ­epics (which are evoked at every turn) as well as a Bollywood spectacle in many ways. The novel is an act of translation between India and the West, ­between past and present, between texts and contexts, and between written and visual genres. The joint storytelling which enacts the ritual of retelling the epics contributes to two salient points that re seems to be making, namely, that ­storytelling is a collective, transnational, effort, and that telling stories, which are by nature entangled re-imaginations, is tantamount to staying alive – physically, culturally and metaphorically.

Framing the Story

The novel opens with a frame story and offers a meditation on the power, nature and function of storytelling. In the nature of a frame, it also sets the scene for the ongoing storytelling sessions of which the novel is comprised: Abhay, recently returned to India from college in the u.s., sets the action into motion by shooting an old monkey who has been stealing the family’s laundry for years, and who has now stolen Abhay’s jeans, the symbol of his newly acquired Americanness. Severely wounded, the monkey, Sanjay, is nourished back to health by Abhay’s parents, who recognize Sanjay as a manifestation of Hanuman, the Monkey God. Alongside his physical restoration, Sanjay regains human consciousness, a remnant of his previous incarnation as a nineteenth century Indian poet. Although resurrected, Yama, Death, arrives to claim Sanjay’s soul. Unwilling to die at this point, Sanjay evokes his protector, Hanuman, who is conceived in popular culture as a super-hero and is also a well-known lover and supporter of stories. Therefore, when Hanuman negotiates a contract between Sanjay and Yama, storytelling becomes the medium through which

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Sanjay is granted an extension of life. The terms of the contract stipulate that Sanjay can deter death only by telling a story every evening for the duration of two hours. Telling or writing a story is driven by a will to live. As such, storytelling is intimately connected to life: to tell a story is to be alive and to sustain life. In his desperate attempt to convince Yama to agree, Sanjay promises to tell a good story, that is, not ‘what happened,’ but rather “a finely-coloured dream, a thing of passion and joy, a huge lie that will entertain and instruct and enlighten” (re 17).13 This formulation evokes the great epics, and delightedly suggests that instruction and enlightenment need not arise from facts, or from reality, but rather, that “a huge lie” possesses more power to instruct than facts. Moreover, the story must captivate Sanjay’s audience. If he fails to sufficiently entertain, his lease on life will be nullified. The audience consists not only of Yama, Hanuman and later also Ganesh, the Elephant God, but additionally involves a live, human audience, including Abhay’s family and friends, and more importantly, a growing crowd on the maidan outside the house – a diverse audience, one difficult to entertain and satisfy. Aware that he will have to adapt his story to suit the tastes of his listeners, Sanjay becomes anxious, and refers to the audience as a “monster” and a “fearful adversary” (re 17). The story must captivate the audience insofar as the word must represent the world, or the cinematic spectacle must engage the viewers. Additionally, Chandra may be addressing, meta-fictionally, his own predicament, as he pitches his story to an international audience. Sanjay, who cannot vocalize in English, a language he painfully acquired in his former life (nor in Hindi or any other human language), types his story on an old typewriter belonging to Abhay’s father.14 The story is then read out, much like songs are played-back in Hindi films, to the audience on the maidan. When Sanjay’s fingers cramp from excessive typing, Abhay, who is responsible for the entire situation, is persuaded to fill the allotted storytelling time with his stories. He does so by narrating his American experiences, which Hanuman promises, will pose “a tale of strange lands and foreign folk,” echoing the Bollywood attitude toward the west (re 45). This creates a ‘masala’ of stories and genres, and brings a strong global dimension into the narrative as Abhay’s ­stories about his college life and American friends intertwine with Sanjay’s stories of colonial India. 13

14

He says, “I’ll make The Big Indian Lie” (17), which could refer either to Orientalism, namely showing India as an exotic place from a ‘western’ perspective; or, he could be referring to heroic nationalism, suggesting a critique of Indian patriotism and nationalistic discourse. Both readings imply a critique of one of the prospective audiences. His muteness corresponds with his previous life, during which he tore his tongue out, giving it to Yama, as the ultimate sacrifice for gaining immortality.

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Sanjay receives storytelling instructions from Hanuman, which call for a meandering and indirect narrative approach: “Straight-forwardness is the curse of your age, Sanjay. Be wily, be twisty, be elaborate. Forsake grim shortness and hustle. Let us luxuriate in your curlicues. Besides, you need a good frame story for its peace, its quiet” (re 24). Hanuman’s directive clearly endorses the Indian epic tradition of storytelling, which includes frame stories and ornate writing techniques. It is contrasted in the text with Aristotle’s Poetics, prescribed as a corrective by a white British man for remedying Sanjay’s mode of (Indian) storytelling, in his former life, when he was a young boy: Keep [The Poetics of Aristotle] and read it again carefully … Study it well if you want to be any kind of writer … there is much here … we need to get rid of, much stuff we need to scoop out and throw away … I’ve read your great books, all the great wisdom of the East. And such a mass and morass of darkness, confusion, necromancy, stupidity, avarice, I’ve never seen. Plots meander, veering from grief to burlesque in a minute. Unrelated narratives entwine and break into each other … Metaphors that call attention to themselves, strings of similes that go from line to line … Beginnings are not really beginnings, middles are unendurably long and convoluted, nothing ever ends … (re 298) Holding his own culture to be supreme, the British colonial invader expresses his condescending attitude toward India’s narrative traditions, which he clearly believes need to be corrected. Chandra cites the Aristotelian poetics, yet goes on to write entirely within the Indian narrative tradition, totally rejecting Aristotle’s advice. Aristotle’s Poetics serves a meta-fictional purpose: while Chandra gives voice to the Poetics and to the rational perspective it endorses, its message is clearly undermined by the very text that introduces it. Chandra’s novel adheres to Hanuman’s advice, embracing the aesthetics and techniques of the Ramayana and Mahabharata as its ideal. For example, the frame story is followed by Sanjay’s narration, which immediately introduces another frame story, in which Sandeep, a wanderer, emerges from the forest to tell a story to a group of monks cohabiting in an ashram. The story Sandeep tells the monks, which is also the story Sanjay is narrating, is itself an embedded tale he had heard from a Sadvini (a woman renunciate) in the forest. Her story originates in an extended meditation on a drop of water she holds in the palms of her hands. This is just one instance of the embedded story within a story, which characterizes the novel in its entirety as it evolves to include both the tale of Sanjay’s birth and coming of age alongside his half-brothers, as well as the stories of various colonial invaders, whom they meet and fight with and against. This structure presents a complex spatial

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­ aneuvering, requiring the reader to fill in gaps in order to follow the events, m not unlike the reader in comics who has to fill in the gutter to achieve ­closure. When Sanjay’s story is supplemented to fill the time slot, the complexity peaks. The frame story focuses attention on the importance of storytelling: what makes a good story, what elements are necessary to produce a story, what tools and techniques may the storyteller use to enhance his telling/narrative. The frame situates the story’s relation to truth, questions the dynamic between the storyteller and her/his audience, and engages with the question of originality. These themes drive the narrative throughout, and are addressed explicitly (through structure) and implicitly (through intertextuality).

Epic Structures and Intertexts

Current analyses of the novel tend to place all non-western texts into one overarching category, as for example that of Andrew Teverson, who writes: “the narrative form of Red Earth is derived from narratives of non-western origins such as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Arabian Nights” (314).15 ­Indeed, given that Sanjay must tell a story to stay alive, most critics cite ­Arabian Nights as one of Chandra’s main intertexts for the novel.16 Yet, while Arabian Nights may seem to be the obvious intertext for a western reader, it is not necessarily the only one, nor is it the most significant one. The great Indian epics provide abundant material for themes of storytelling as lifepreserving and for ­continuous storytelling, as well as for many other thematic 15

16

While critics have indicated the Indian epics as a an inspiration for Chandra’s novel, they have done so only in a very superficial way, typified by broad and unsubstantiated statements about narrative structure without examining the complexity and inter-textuality of such influences: Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru writes that “[t]he novel relies on the Indian tradition of oral storytelling, therefore, the story develops along a cyclical rather than linear timeframe” (“Performance” 23), while Dora Sales Salvador observes that “[t] his type of spiraling narrative, full of juxtapositions and unexpected meetings, is an ancient traditional Indian form” that “consciously avoids linearity, and refuses a notion of straightforwardness” (“Swallowing” 105). Although attentive to the interweaving of stories from East and West, past and present, Salvador fails to explain the meaning of these forms beyond broadly stating that “the way the stories change and dive into each other, comes out from the flux of the traditional Indian epics, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana” (“Swallowing” 105). We remain ignorant of the particularities of the Indian epic techniques and how they specifically enrich Chandra’s text. Alexandru writes: “Like Scheherazade in Arabian Nights, [Sanjay] must entertain his executioner (in this case Yama himself) by telling him stories” (“Alternatives” 44). To call Yama an “executioner” is to miscomprehend his essence.

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strands that appear in Chandra’s text and which cannot be accounted for by Arabian Nights. Bringing to light the various epic underpinnings of re will illuminate the connections between the texts and reveal the extent to which the novel is an act of transcreation as it draws on the epics even as it remains open to Bollywood culture and to ‘western’ influences, introducing Chandra as a creative storyteller. Chandra primarily links Sanjay with the mythical authors of the great Indian epics, Vyasa and Valmiki. In the first sentence typed by Sanjay, the key narrator of the novel, he boldly asserts his identity: “i am parasher” (re 11). Parashara, a wandering ascetic with mystical powers, was the father of Vyasa, the mythical author of the Mahabharata, and significantly also the progenitor of its heroes and villains, the Pandavas and the Kauravas; as Ramanujan suggests, he was “a sage with supernatural powers (and a very human lust)” (“Repetition” 423). We are invited to comprehend the narrator Sanjay, whose mother was of the ­Parashar family, and whose uncle and father were poets of the court, as the very embodiment of the epic author, Vyasa. Furthermore, Hanuman, who is known as Rama’s loyal helper, refers (in conversation with Yama) to Sanjay as “a poet” (16), while Yama calls Sanjay “a sometime singer and poet, a lover, a fomenter of revolutions, a monkey” and also “a thief… a robber” (68). These references, as we shall see, clearly identify Sanjay with Valmiki, the poet of the Ramayana. The Ramayana is strongly evoked in the opening section of Chandra’s novel, primarily by introducing the figure of the monkey, a fact that in itself elicits the Valmiki Ramayana, where monkeys are “a real presence and a poetic necessity” (Ramanujan, “Three Hundred” 40). Yet more pertinently, the fact that the monkey Sanjay is a thief links him intimately with Valmiki, who is clearly designated in the opening of the Ramayana, prior to his authoring of the text, as a thief. Valmiki, a Brahmin by birth, was known by the name Ratnakar (precious stone), and held the profession of road robber. One day, he confronted a group of men, only to discover they were sadhus, who of course had nothing to steal. To enable the robber to fulfill his vocation, the sadhus told him to remain in the same spot while they traveled to the next village where they would receive alms, upon which they would return and give the robber his share. In the meanwhile, they suggested he engage in the repetition of the word “Mara,” the name of the tree under which he sat, until they return. As the story goes, by the time the sadhus returned, Ratnakar had fallen into a deep meditation on the word ‘mara’ during which he had been covered by a nest of termites, gaining him the name Valmiki (termite mound). During the meditation, the word ‘mara’ evolved into ‘Rama,’ and in the process, the entire story of the Ramayana took shape and composed itself in Valmiki’s mind. Whether the sadhus deliberately gave him this mantra, or whether Valmiki appropriated it, ‘stole’ it, making it his own, the Ramayana clearly emerged in conjunction with theft,

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illuminating the connection between theft and storytelling and underscoring the flexibility and transformative power of words. By evoking both the author (Vyasa) and the poet (Valmiki) of the great Indian epics, and weaving them into one text, Chandra, the poet-author of the novel, has created a modern day shlesha. The great Sanskrit scholars delighted in “boxing” the Ramayana and Mahabharata stories together, using a technique, Mukund Lath explains, where the “text is designed for one to be able to read different narratives in the same set of syllables.”17 In a similar gesture, Chandra evokes and intertwines the two epics, offering a tale that encompasses both. Additionally, in linking Vyasa and Valmiki to the narrating character of his epic novel, Sanjay, he shares in their gift and partakes of the tradition of storytelling. Furthermore, in summoning Vyasa and Valmiki as his muses, Chandra also situates himself within the tradition, and signals his work to be a retelling of the epics in a ‘novel’ way. The theme of theft could not be more relevant to the act of storytelling, for it addresses the question of the originality and newness of the text by introducing the question of plagiarism versus transcreation: is the story merely appropriated/plagiarized or is it creatively assimilated into a new work of art? It is fruitful to turn to Mukund Lath, who addresses this issue in his book, Transformation as Creation, through the example of Rajasekhara, an Indian literary theorist from the seventh-eighth century. In his work titled Kavyamimamsa, a kind of manual for poets, Rajasekhara differentiates between “plagiarism” (harana) and “recreation” (svikarana). The latter, “if creatively done … is a legitimate, indeed commendable poetic practice. Svikarana,” Lath points out, “operates through creatively transforming given material” (25). Chandra playfully evokes, through the theme of theft, questions of originality and newness in his creative retelling of the epics, and clearly aligns himself on the side of ‘svikarana,’ drawing creatively and originally on the classic epic tales to create his work. Questions of originality abound in Bollywood as well. The form and structure of Bollywood films as we have seen are clearly informed by the classical epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, which are part of an elaborate intertextual storytelling tradition. Yet additionally, Bollywood has generated self-perpetuating cinematic conventions in which “the single biggest influence on Indian popular cinema,” Philip Lutgendorf writes, “has long been Indian popular cinema” itself; Bollywood films are constantly quoting and ‘recreating’ other Bollywood films (230).18 17 18

Mukund Lath, private correspondence. More recently, Bollywood films have been quoting from foreign films; for example Christopher Nolan’s Mememnto (2000) informs A.R. Murugadoss’s Ghajini (2008). For an ­in-depth analysis of the Indian take on the American film, see Daniel Raveh, “Memory,

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The Ramayana of Valmiki is also a useful intertext with which to explore the possible connections between form and content, for it famously begins with an incident emphasizing the connections between the theme of the work and its form. As he prepares to peacefully bathe in the Ganges, Valmiki witnesses the shooting of a lovebird (kraunca) by a hunter, which leaves the bird’s mate bereft. Deeply disturbed by the hunter’s violent act, Valmiki, in his emotion, curses him. He immediately recognizes that “the utterance that [he] produced in this excess of shoka, grief, shall be called shloka, poetry, and nothing else” (128).19 As Ramanujan points out, He realizes that his curse has taken the form of a line of verse – in a famous play on words, the rhythm of this grief (soka) has given rise to a metrical form (sloka). He decides to write the whole epic of Rama’s adventures in this meter … This incident at the beginning of Valmiki gives the work an aesthetic self-awareness … [while] the separation of loved ones becomes a leitmotif for this telling of the Rama story. (“Three ­Hundred” 40)20 Ramanujan concludes that, “the opening sections of each major work set into motion the harmonics of the whole poem, presaging themes and a pattern of images” (40). The opening of Chandra’s novel also sets into motion the harmonics of the novel in its entirely. Primarily, he evokes the shooting scene in his introductory section, with Abhay shooting not a lovebird, but rather the monkey, Sanjay. This act of violence, although ultimately unexplained in the novel, seems to stem from the frustration Abhay experiences upon his return to his ancestral home after a long absence: his past waited, eager to confront him with old friends and half-forgotten sounds and smells. But Abhay hesitated, nagged by a feeling that he had been away for several centuries, not four years, afraid of what he might

19 20

Forgetting, Self-Identity: Philosophical Inscriptions in A.R. Murugadoss’ Ghajini,” 122–41, in Sutras, Stories and Yoga Philosophy: Narrative and Transfiguration. ny: Routlege, 2016. The western film industry has been less understanding of such ‘quotes,’ and tends to regard them as plagiarism, as a series of court cases indicates. The Ramayana of Valmiki. (trans. Robert Golden). Volume 1, Section 2, pp. 127–29. Ramanujan points out, “This incident becomes, in later poetics, the parable of all poetic utterance: out of the stress of natural feeling (bhava), an artistic form has to be found or fashioned, a form which will generalize and capture the essence (rasa) of that feeling” (40).

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find lurking in the shadows of bygone days, and suddenly he felt his soul drop away, felt it withdrawing, leaving him cold and abstracted. (re 6) It is in this mood that Abhay shoots the white-faced monkey. The violent act at the opening of the tale sets the tone for the poetics of violence that Chandra employs throughout the novel, which abounds with metal instruments of destruction, from the 0.22 caliber rifle Abhay uses to shoot Sanjay, to other paraphernalia of war wielded by British and French mercenaries and indigenous warriors which include a large array of swords, guns, shiny cannons and even metal typecasts, initially created by Sanjay to insert a subversive code into a manuscript, then swallowed by him, only to be spewed out later as weapons, suggesting that words can be used as weapons in more ways than one. Chandra continues to elaborate on the original insofar as Sanjay, who has been shot, does not die but rather experiences a restoration of his human consciousness and with it, a return to narrative, further affirming Sanjay’s affinities with Valmiki. Chandra’s retelling of the epic through the narrative voice of Sanjay often introduces violence instigated by outsiders – not least the various colonial figures and western mercenaries Chandra weaves into his novel, the main ­figures being Benoît de Boigne (French), George Thomas, (Irish) and Hercules Skinner (Scottish), which are narrated, in part, in first person, as stories within stories.21 Historically, these figures left a violent imprint on India, yet by incorporating their stories into the Indian epic form, they become epic-­heroictragic figures, who are an integral part of the fabric of India, and therefore also ahistoric. The epics themselves give precedent to this type of ambiguity, as the main characters within the epics have an “ineradicable mixture of good and evil,” as “the good guys” use deceit to kill their enemies, while the villains are “heroic and honest warriors despite everything” (Ramanujan, “Repetition” 435). The ­histories of the colonial invaders are creatively revised, reconceived, and appropriated by Chandra, who incorporates them into the epic tale of India, intertwining historical fact with myth. In doing so, Chandra draws once again on the classic epics, termed also ‘itihasa,’ literally “that’s the way it was” (­Ramanujan, “Repetition” 421), as he intertwines history and myth, which are indistinguishable in the classic Indian literary tradition. By freely mixing the two forms, Chandra maintains the narrative techniques and thematic designs of the epics, yet imaginatively changes the storyline to create an inclusive and hybridized contemporary narrative, revealing the brutality of colonial 21

Who lived, respectively in 1751–1830, 1756–1802 and 1778–1841. Hercules was the father of James Sikander, in the story, Sanjay’s half-brother.

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conquest, yet also incorporating the invaders into a modern Indian narrative. This also plays on the Bollywood movement from the real to the reel, in which any pretense to reality is abandoned once it is represented on the screen, blurring the boundary between fact and fiction, history and myth. Chandra further unpacks dichotomies by deliberately creating ambiguous origins for his characters. Although strongly identified with Indian-ness, Sanjay is not entirely of Indian descent. He is the biological son of his mother who is of Parashar ancestry and of a magic glowing ladoo (a ball-shaped sweet) she swallows (one of eight such ladoos). Various persons, none of whom are the child’s apparent father, branded the ladoo. The people who contribute to the make-up of the ladoo include two colonial figures: the Irish mercenary, George Thomas (Jahaj Jung), who gives a “shining black-red globule of blood” to each ladoo (re 157), and the French military adventurer, Benoît de Boigne, who adds liberally of his spit to each ladoo (re 160). The ladoos also receive imprints from a variety of Indian persons, such as the naked sadhu who concocted them, the legendary fighter, Uday Singh, who cries over them, Begum Samroo, the Begum of Sardhana (or Zeb-Ul-Nissa) who handles each of them, and Sanjay’s uncle, Ram Mohan, of direct lineage of the Parashar family, who finally passes the last ladoo to Sanjay’s mother to swallow.22 Sanjay is therefore by birth a conglomerate of East and West, a cross-cultural entity. Unsurprisingly, the story of the magical birth of Sanjay also derives from the epics. Ramanujan points out that mothers in the epics often have liaisons with supernatural figures: “for three generations, practically every major male character, from Bhishma to Sahadeva, has a human and a supernatural parent” (“Repetition” 423). J.A.B van Buitenen agrees stating that, “One of the striking features of the Mahabharata” is “the complexity of paternity” and the absence of actual biological fathers (xvii). As mentioned earlier, Vyasa himself is a child of a supernatural sage, as well a sage with supernatural powers, who authors the text of the Mahabharata and literally populates it with his offspring. Sanjay, we can see, is clearly situated within this ‘fatherless’ epic tradition. A heady blend of both Eastern and Western descent, of supernatural powers (magic ladoos and strange foreigners), of the sages who conceived and wrote the epics, and of the heroes who populate them, Sanjay appears to be the definitive narrator for a migratory tale of cultural translation and boundary crossings which strives to push the limits of genre, while drawing on, albeit revising, classical Indian literature. Such genealogical complications typify Bollywood 22

The remainder of the ladoos go to Janvi, wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Hercules Skinner, an officer in the East India Company Army of Scottish ancestry, who gives birth to Sikander, a.k.a. Colonel James Skinner.

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cinema as well. Vijay Mishra has pointed out that, “the whole issue of ‘fatherhood’ is constantly replayed in Bombay Cinema,” however, “the answers which are invariably put forward always confirm the orderly nature of the genealogical transmission” (36), unlike the epics where things are considerably more complicated. If the Ramayana has provided the connection between form and content, the Mahabharata is significantly tied into the idea of the continuous, on-­ going, story. This is derived from a legend which explains why “the style of the epic, which is generally simple,” is “occasionally peppered with a big word” (­Ramanujan, “Mirrors” 22). This story begins when Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, searches for a scribe to translate his narrative vision into words. The Elephant God, Ganesh, is harnessed by Brahma to the task, and says, “If my pen does not stop for an instant as I write, I shall be the scribe.” Vyasa replies, “But never write without having comprehended.”23 Ganesh, known as “conqueror of obstacles,” is often “called upon at the beginning of undertakings” to guarantee both “divine approval” as well as encouragement in the fulfillment of the task (Fitzgerald 151). His presence at Sanjay’s side is therefore to be seen as a form of encouragement, while prominently linking Chandra’s novel to the epic tale. Ramanujan suggests that Ganesh “was impatient and needed the dictation to be uninterrupted [that is, continuous]. So Vyasa would throw in a difficult word now and then to stall his scribe’s speedy writing, to gain time and think of the next thing to say” (“Mirrors” 22).24 In the time it took Ganesh to “puzzle out” the difficult word, the poet had a moment to collect his thoughts and determine the direction the story would take (“Mirrors” 22). While providing an explanation for the difficult words in the epic, on a deeper level the legend is a story about the significance of the continuity of the story. In this dynamic, the scribe requires a continuous movement of writing, while the author requires the scribe – not only to write the story, but also to hear it. It is a symbiotic relationship, which symbolically or metaphorically alludes to the continuity of “India” as an ideal, a feeling, an ethos, a narrative. The reference to India surfaces here because the Sanskrit name for “India” is Bharata, a name derived from the dynasty that is identified with the literary, 23 24

Apparatus to line 36 of passage 1 of Appendix i of the Adiparvan, vol. 1 884–85 (Poona translation of Mahabharata). Since Vyasa, “unlike his indefatigable scribe, was only mortal and had to go answer calls of nature, which interrupted his flow of words” he threw in “a hard word for Ganesa to puzzle out while he ran out to relive himself” (22). This self-reflexive story, this “story about the story,” explains “the way an oral text was converted into the written” (22).

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textual, cultural, geographical and metaphysical entity that is called India – and whose ‘ancestors’ are the protagonists of the Mahabharata (Maha-Bharata). Moreover, the feminine form of Bharata in Sanskrit, Bharati, provides further insight into the inevitability of ongoing storytelling; Bharati, which literally means speech, word and voice, is interwoven with the masculine Bharata. The two – Bharata and Bharati are interdependent, as the one requires, produces, necessitates, the other. The interdependency has cosmological overtones in Indian philosophy, where the cosmic copulation of the feminine and masculine elements is continuous, producing the world at every given moment. This interdependency of the opposite sexes endorses Chandra’s proclivity to cancel dichotomies. We might deduce that the continuation of storytelling and of life itself, in Chandra’s vision, is dependent on the fusion of stories from both the “East” and the “West.” The life-giving power of storytelling presented in the opening of the novel is apparent in another story element assimilated from a well-known tale in the Mahabharata surrounding the figures Savitri, Satyavan and Yama. The classic myth of Savitri, Vidyut Aklujkar writes, “is cherished by countless generations of Indians,” and has “won a perpetual place in the collective memory of the Indian audience” (325, 327).25 The story presents a unique instance of a “­conversation between Death and a mortal,” and bears the “special motif of regaining the life of someone already dead” (Aklujkar 325). This story serves to further clarify the role Chandra designated to storytelling in his novel. Savitri, named after the goddess who granted her life, grows to be flawlessly beautiful, wise and virtuous. Prospective suitors, “[a]wed by her radiance,” fail to pursue Savitri, so her father allows her to choose her own husband (Aklujkar 324). She chooses Satyavan despite the warning that he will die within a year. Indeed, one year after their marriage, he feels weak, and lays his head in Savitri’s lap. At this precise moment in the Mahabharata,26 Yama comes forth to claim him. While Satyavan does not initially escape the noose, his fate, like that of Sanjay, is brought about through a lengthy negotiation with Yama, and is tied to the power of words to delight. In the novel, as we saw, Hanuman intervenes on behalf of Sanjay, while in the Mahabharata, Savitri fights for her husband’s life. She follows Yama after he takes Satyavan’s soul with his noose, offering him supreme words of wisdom on the topics of friendship, law and ­human nature. Yama is deeply impressed by her words and after each sagacious expression offers her a boon: “The words that you speak are full of good 25 26

He attributes this both to its uniqueness and to its upholding of the role of the “devoted wife” (327). The “Book of the Forest,” 3 (42) 280–81.

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council/They are pleasing and add to the wisdom of sages./Again excepting this Satyavan’s life/Choose, radiant woman, another boon!” (Mahabharata 770). With her final argument, on the ‘rule of the strict,’ Savitri receives the ultimate boon, and asks Yama to bring Satyavan back from the dead. In granting her this boon, Yama sheds his ‘strictness,’ and reveals the reverse side of his character, that of Dharma. Yama, literally meaning ‘to set a limit,’ withdraws his limit, and in doing so, is transformed into Dharma, or ‘the rhythm of life.’ Savitri is able to draw out the gentler side of Yama, to transform him, by the power and art of words, illustrating the idea that words have the capacity to withhold death, as apparent in the case of Sanjay as well.27 Dominant in the representations of Yama from both the Mahabharata and re is the noose, which is Yama’s attribute, and serves to yoke these two representations together. From her vantage point, Savitri sees Yama as a magnificent and dramatic figure, “in a yellow robe and a turban, a handsome man resplendent like the sun, smoothly black and red-eyed. He had a noose in his hand and looked terrifying as he stood at Satyavan’s side and looked down on him …” (Mahabharata 768). Chandra similarly pays detailed attention to Yama’s appearance, dramatically depicting him in Bollywood style: “Yama, with the green skin and the jet black hair, with the unmoving flashing dark eyes and the curling moustache, he of the invincible strength and the fearsome aspect … a slim silver noose … appeared to arc and weave like a living thing” (re 13, 15). Chandra’s visual depiction of Yama draws on the Mahabharata yet stylistically recalls Bollywood rather than the epic. The intertext forms the precedent that Yama can be verbally convinced to postpone death, an idea Chandra transplants into his text, as Yama grants Sanjay his life on condition that he tell a good story, or as long as language can entertain and please. Chandra’s story becomes more than just a novel, for it partakes in the continuation of life on various registers. Primarily, while storytelling grants Sanjay an extension on life by telling a story, his story also creates a reality in the world, involving Abhay, his family and the crowds on the maidan. Additionally, the novel ends with another life at stake, held in balance by the act of ­storytelling. Abhay’s neighbor, the young Saira, befriended Sanjay during his storytelling evenings; he recognized her as “a superior judge of the masses and 27

Aklujkar mentions Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri as a unique poetic and imaginative retelling of her story (339–40). In Aurobindo’s work, Savitri has similar powers, as she detains Yama in “The Book of the Double Twilight,” by engaging him in linguistic feats. As a result, twilight does not turn into night. Additionally, in “The Book of Everlasting Day,” Savitri transforms Yama into Dharma. It is possible that Chandra is familiar with Aurobindo’s renditions of Savitri.

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leader of men” (re 46). Like Aleksandar Hemon’s characters, who are Christian, Jewish and Muslim, Chandra’s Saira is Muslim (and Abhay’s American friends are Christian), which does not prevent her from admiring the Hindu god, or being singled out by him. Beyond being instrumental in arranging for an audience, loudspeakers and ribbons of ink for the typewriter, Saira also proved to be compassionate, sensitive, resourceful, bright, perceptive and hopeful, and is an embodiment of the future. Saira is wounded by warring factions on the maidan representing the various contending groups in contemporary India as they strive to put an end to the storytelling due to its potent content (pertaining to boundary crossings, destabilization of dichotomies, innovation). The pathway to Saira’s recovery involves, of course, the continuation of storytelling. In the closing scene of the novel, Sanjay passes the responsibility and pleasure of storytelling to Abhay: “[Sanjay] put his hand in mine, and with a trembling, feathery finger he traced the words on my wrist, Help her. ‘How?’ I said. He said: ‘Tell a story’” (re 541).28 Abhay’s stories must play an instrumental role in nurturing the girl Saira back to life; her recovery is metaphorically linked with the wellbeing of the ideal of “India,” which can be expanded to include a more international ideal, and is made clear in Abhay’s appeal: Will you listen to me, will you stone me, will you imprison me? I cannot care, I must tell a story … I will tell you a story that will grow like a lotus vine, that will twist in on itself and expand ceaselessly, till all of you are a part of it, and the gods come to listen, till we are all talking in a musical hubbub that contains the past, every moment of the present, and all the future. And the great music of that primeval sound will reach Saira’s ears, and she will rise from her bed, she will shake off her bandages and she will jump down and stand with her hands on her hips, and she will say, laughing, what’s the matter yaar, why so long-face, want to play a game of cricket? And we will all walk to the maidan holding hands … (re 542) Abhay needs to tell the story as much as Saira needs to hear it; at the same time, Saira’s hearing the story will enable it to be told by Abhay, and to continue endlessly, as suggested by the words that end this passage and end the novel itself: “we will start all over again,” alluding to the ongoing process of ­storytelling, 28

Perhaps in a gesture towards the significant role of the scribe in maintaining the continuity of the story, Abhay also types his stories on the typewriter.

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and its connection to life itself (re 542). Abhay’s storytelling is intended to restore Saira to health; however, the description of her rising and shaking off her bandages evokes the iconography of the biblical resurrection, which takes us back to Lazarus Averbuch (Chapter 1), who is resurrected through Aleksandar Hemon’s act of storytelling. Sanjay’s choice of Abhay to continue the tradition is based on the fact that their fates become intertwined the moment Sanjay steals Abhay’s jeans (and one wonders whether he chose Abhay’s jeans for a reason). They are further linked when Abhay shoots Sanjay and then covers for him by telling his own stories when the monkey tires before the end of his two hour session, as established by the wager. Abhay is the obvious choice for all these reasons, yet even more so because he is, like Sanjay, an outsider. Abhay’s otherness is a function of having spent four years in America, which has made him worldlier, yet it has also distanced him from Indian culture. Both Abhay and Sanjay experience the effects of the encounter with a western globalizing power, each within a different context, yet this encounter brings them together.29 As Salman Rushdie writes, “it is only those who step outside ‘the frame’ who can see the whole picture” (Ground Beneath 43); seeing the whole picture, in Rushdie’s case, is necessarily someone with multiple perspectives, achieved by crossing boundaries, frames. Abhay in this regard, has something extra to offer as a storyteller, which Sanjay can recognize. As a storyteller, Abhay is in a position to influence and transform his audience, as he listened and was transformed by the stories of Sanjay. The incorporation of Abhay’s American experiences into the verbal cacophony of the story situates the narrative within a global transnational arena. Placing Abhay’s American stories (which include drugs, sex and a road trip) next to those of Sanjay, suggests that despite the gulf that separates them, the human passions that drive people, such as love and hate, sex and desire, competition and domination, are similar. More than anything, Chandra appears to be exploring the joint effort that goes into the project of storytelling, which calls for multiple storytellers, audiences and narratives. One of the tasks of the storyteller is to make the stories available and accessible to diverse audiences, without demeaning, romanticizing or glorifying them.

29

Paul Jay similarly observes that this structure of moving back and forth between stories and historical times “has the effect of linking Abhay’s diasporic experiences in the contemporary age of globalization with the history of British colonization and the effects it has on the identity of the book’s other central character, Sanjay Parasher” (102).

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The Author as Translator between Cultures

A translator between cultures, times, genres and languages, Chandra preserves the vital substance of the Indian epics by creating a text that essentially derives from them, while is also an imaginatively new creation incorporating new voices and ideas. Orchestrating the cacophony of voices from India and the west, from past and present, is Chandra, who assumes the role of cultural mediator, of translator. The role of the translator is most thoroughly explored by Chandra in one of the embedded stories in the novel, told by Ram Mohan to his young nephew Sanjay, as they ride on an elephant en-route to the Ganges. The story evokes an imaginary dialogue between Alexander the Great’s translator and a naked sadhu (an ascetic renouncer). Daniel Raveh opens his book, Exploring the Yogasutra, with this anecdote, removing it from the context of Chandra’s novel, as a means to explore “the far wider self-other encounter, which underlies every instance of translation” (xiii). Using his analysis as a rubric, I seek to redirect this embedded story back into the context of the novel, as a prism through which to read Chandra’s role as an author who is additionally a translator. The translator within the imaginary dialogue and with whom Chandra can be identified serves as an interface between the ‘West’ (Alexander, or Sikander as he is called in India) and the ‘East’ (the sadhu). Like the fictional translator, Chandra translates not only between languages, but also between cultures and between distinct ways of thinking and being, demonstrating his vision, which enables him to see both ‘East’ and ‘West’ from a dual vantage point of insider and outsider. The dialogue is based on a historical anecdote, relating to Alexander’s encounter with a group of naked sadhus during his invasion of the Indian subcontinent. Chandra’s fictional elaboration on this encounter both removes Alexander’s voice from the dialogue, which is fully appropriated by the translator, while it also relates to the historical muteness of the sadhu, whose alternative perspective is in fact absent from the annals of Western history – a point which is crystallized by the translator telling the sadhu, “[Sikander] is having his chroniclers strike this conversation from the record. Now history will state that Sikander the Great met some strange naked men under a tree, that’s all” (re 225). The sadhu’s words were deleted because he embodied an alien, obscure and cryptic perspective that was illegible to Sikander; rather than engage in dialogue in order to clarify, he preferred to erase it entirely, in a gesture typical to the conqueror. The “real dialogue,” Raveh posits, takes place between the sadhu and the translator and reveals both the translator’s crucial role in the interaction, as well as his shortcomings (xvii). In the novel, Sanjay’s muteness

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serves as a literal manifestation of this silencing. However, his typed story is read aloud by others, becoming multi-vocal, and broadening the spectrum of those engaged with and by it, creating opportunity for dialogue. The fictional dialogue begins with the translator putting Alexander’s questions to the sadhu who, rather than providing answers as customary, responds with questions of his own, demonstrating “the reversibility of the self-other dialectic” (Raveh xiv): “Translator: He [Sikander] wants to know why you’re naked. Sadhu: Ask him why he’s wearing clothes” (re 222). In responding with an alternative question, the Sadhu undermines the conqueror’s authority, reversing the dynamic of imperial self versus subjugated other, revealing Alexander to be just as ‘other’ to the sadhu as the sadhu is to him. In his novel, Chandra illuminates not only the otherness of India for the western reader, but also underlines the way Indians experience the otherness of the colonial invaders. This viewing and reverse viewing is made clear, for example, in an encounter between Sanjay, the child, and a female British missionary: Sanjay looked up blinking. The woman’s face was square, framed by brownish curls, her eyes were a clear, frightening blue, and her shirt buttoned all the way up her neck and at her wrists … ‘My word,’ the woman said … ‘Look at those little jammies, that top-knot, he is so delightfully quaint, I simply must sketch him.’ (re 248) The woman’s buttoned shirt, blue eyes and brown curls are as strange to Sanjay as are his clothing and hair to her. Yet while Sanjay experiences fright, the western woman seeks to objectify him in a sketch. Chandra addresses the question of otherness in the current moment through the tension experienced between Abhay and the various types he meets on his road trip. Abhay views American mores and social practices through his Indian perspective, while Americans who scrutinize him often regard him through a demeaning or exoticizing racial perspective. This is played out through his interaction with the parents of his girlfriend, Amanda, whose lack of interest in their daughter baffles him, while he remains a stereotype in their eyes. Amanda’s father, William James,30 is a judge, who “believed in god and the legal system” (re 369). However, cracks in the judge’s façade of decency reveal his inherent racism, as he upholds the superiority of the British Raj, wears a cap emblemed with a confederacy flag, and turns viciously cruel when losing 30

Most likely based on the eighteenth-century Sir William James, a British navel commander who fought in India and helped consolidate the British rule (and not on William James the American philosopher and psychologist).

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a cricket game to Abhay and his team, “a motley collection of Australians, ­Indians and Pakistanis, and a couple of West Indians” as well as one Brit who was born in Lucknow (515). Ramchandra Guha points out that cricket, which was introduced to India by the British Raj, can be linked to the colonizing mission, and was seen “as a vehicle for cementing relations between [the British colonizers] and their subjects” (165). It was a way to civilize by introducing qualities typical to good sportsmanship, such as self-restraint, courage and resilience. Guha, who explores the sport as a reflection of “the values, prejudices, divisions and unifying symbols of a society,” reveals how “race, caste, and religion” were involved in the game from the nineteenth century onward, while underlining the fact that Indians appropriated cricket to the extent that they outdid the British in their own game (157). Cricket as a link between sports and politics is a theme that is taken up in Bollywood, which implements cricket in numerous films, perhaps most famously in Lagaan (2001), where the natives, or subalterns, beat the colonizers in their own game. The cricket match takes up an hour and a half of the (nearly four hour) film, highlighting Ashis Nandy’s observation that “in the Indian popular culture of entertainment, cricket-as-spectacle is closer to film-as-spectacle than to cricket-as-sport” (Tao 46). Chandra draws on these representations of cricket when he pits an all white team against a team constituted of members of the former colonies who emerge victorious. Amada, bored by the game, disappears, anticipating American readers’ responses to Abhay’s elaborate descriptions of pitches, moves, dynamics and gear, which mimic the game as well as the Bollywood representations of it. Abhay’s ambition to win is kindled after William James insults Indians as weaklings and commends the British rule in India. Abhay and Swaminathan, the newly arrived graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, exchange pitching advice using names of former cricket idols, unnerving the American team with their words and moves. Chandra throws in some irony by having Abhay win the game with a convoluted pitching style that mimics that of Chandrasekhar, a pitcher crippled by polio as a child. While not a nationalist victory for India, it is nonetheless a victory for the formerly colonized. The lack of sportsmanship of the judge is condemned, and his behavior reflects on and harshly criticizes American notions of justice. Abhay recognizes Amanda’s mother, Candy, to be a former porn star, who amply fulfills the Indian fantasy and stereotype of the sexually promiscuous Western woman. Yet, despite her past, she fit the image of the kind of “woman [the judge] wanted on his ranch” (re 369). Given the judge’s character, this could be read as a kind of hypocrisy embedded in American culture, especially since as she aged Candy had to undergo every form of plastic surgery

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to ­maintain this image (re 367–68).31 However, it also counteracts the idea that sexuality taints a woman, and that sexuality beyond the confines of matrimony is destructive; Candy is still a suitable choice for the wife of a judge and has social standing within the community. While Abhay comes to terms with his girlfriend’s mother being a former playboy centerfold, Candy familiarizes herself with India by reading romantic and colonial literature (M.M. Kaye’s Far Pavilions, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim and E.M. Forester’s A Passage to India) and regards Abhay through a colonial prism, much like the missionary mentioned above. By inhabiting these varying perspectives, Chandra reveals his intimate understanding of both cultures, while he also exhibits his capacity for criticism of both. The sadhu “breaks yet another convention” as he challenges the idea that questions have answers (Raveh xiv): “Translator: He says he’s asking the questions here. Sadhu: Questions give birth only to other questions” (222). The sadhu’s response suggests that not only is there is no ‘right’ answer, no single answer, but rather, for a real dialogue to occur between equals, ideas should be open to discussion and debate, not imposed and one-sided. Moreover, assuming that every question has an answer implies a corresponding neat and tidy worldview, where order and rationalism prevail, while treating questions as open-ended invitations to speculation suggests an entirely different way of engaging with the world. Chandra’s novel, organized around storytelling and audience response, places cross-cultural questioning and dialogue at its center, ideally requiring the readers, who are challenged to engage beyond their comfort zone, to be in dialogue in order to make sense of the multifarious material. The novel therefore introduces dialogue and question-asking as crucial to cross-cultural understanding, recalling the works of GB Tran and Junot Díaz, whose practice of comics requires their readers to participate actively in achieving closure between frames. In Brief Wondrous, the reader is additionally encouraged, through Díaz’s hybrid crossing of generic forms, to go beyond the constraints of conventional thought. The conversation between the translator and the sadhu goes on to reveal the power clash between two ideals, as the sadhu challenges the logic behind Alexander’s violence: Translator: He says people who get funny with him get executed. Sadhu: Why? Translator: Because he is the King of Kings. And he wants you to stop asking questions. Sadhu: King of Kings? Translator: He came all the way from a place called Greece, killing other kings, so he’s King of Kings, 31

Abhay, who sees a pinpoint scar, is disturbed by this intervention.

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see. Sadhu: Fool of Fools. Master-Clown of Clowns. Maha-Idiot of idiots. Translator: You want me to tell him that?” (re 222–23) The sadhu “refus[es] to surrender or to accept the warped logic behind Sikander’s definition as ‘King of Kings,’” revealing “its futility” (Raveh xv). The dialogue brings into sharp relief the contrast between the principle of nonviolence, of ‘ahimsa,’ upheld by the sadhu as an ethical imperative and moral virtue, and the ‘Western’ practice of using violence as a legitimate means to gain power. The contrast between the two ideals is further emphasized through the sadhu’s referral to Alexander as a “Maha-Idiot,” a word play that reveals the distance between the way the different cultures perceive power, while also showing the translator’s (Chandra’s) fluidity in both cultures, as he jokingly distorts the well known term Maha-Raja. These two takes on power and violence are problematized in the novel. Achieving greatness by means of violence (whether indigenous, as in the case of the Rajput Rathors, or imported by colonizers), is ridiculed and condemned by the sadhu, and the events of the novel suggest its long-term ineffectuality. However non-violence is also problematized, as it can be misconstrued as passivity and result in colonization. The novel suggests that power lies in the act of storytelling, which, as discussed above, is understood in Hinduism to have the power to grant and sustain life. Sikander may not have the capacity to understand the stance of nonviolence, however, within the novel the mercenary George Thomas, whose tales of violence and courage stun his listeners, eventually puts down his sword, refusing to fight even though it means giving up his kingdom. Thomas adopts non-violence the moment he recognizes Sikander (named after the emperor because his destiny was to become an emperor as well) and Chotta (the step-brothers of Sanjay) as children of the magical ladoos, and therefore his children (through the blood he contributed to them) with the Rajput princess, Janvi, whom he had always loved. He refuses to fight them, saying, “I will not fight you, I am an Indian, but what about you?” (re 401). Thomas’s soldiers react by discarding their swords to become sadhus, however his sons fail to heed his warning, and go on to help the British solidify their regime in India, after which they are discarded, and relegated to the status of “chi-chi, half-and-half, black-and-white,” not white enough to join the ranks of the British, and not black enough to be considered native (re 456). Participating in the violence of the era results in their becoming “this new thing that nobody wants” (456), and living a life of submission to the Brittish Raj. Chotta says, “We were supposed to be princes. You were meant to be emperor, and I was to follow you. I did. I wanted you to be glorious. I spent my life following you, and now I am angry

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with what you have made me” proving the point the sadhu makes; a life of violence has made them maha-fools (460).32 Returning to the fictional dialogue, we see the translator gaining agency, and deviating from Alexander’s words. His responses to the sadhu sideline Alexander’s role in the conversation, as he seems to take liberties, adding his own explanations to the words of the king. He also exercises agency as he withholds information from the king, as indicated in his question to the sadhu, “You want me to tell him that?,” in an attempt to avoid an escalation of violence during the encounter, knowing how the king treats his adversaries. As the dialogue progresses, the translator becomes bolder, more engaged, and more in control of the situation, mediating between the contrasting positions of the sadhu and the king. As the sadhu elaborates on his alternative perspective, implying that the quality of life, one’s integrity and freedom, are more important than longevity, the translator attempts to shield him from the wrath of Alexander: “Translator: You’re crazier than he is. He says he’ll kill you. Right here, right now. Sadhu: I have to die someday. Translator: Listen, don’t do this. He’s demented, he doesn’t realize who you are, he thinks naked people are poor savages. He’ll really kill you. Sadhu: I’ll really have to die someday” (re 223). By disclosing his understanding of the world in which the sadhu lives (“he thinks naked people are poor savages”), the translator reveals that his knowledge surpasses that of Alexander, enhancing his agency, independence and authority. The translator, Chandra reveals, can fathom both cultures, he has the ability to judge what should be translated, what would be offensive, what would be misinterpreted, what would foster or hinder understanding. He has the power to pitch the words in a way that can be heard and understood by the respective listeners. This skill is acquired by living in-between cultures, where the prospective translator-writer-storyteller gains a clearer grasp of cultural difference that can be used as a tool to mediate between cultures. The novel attempts to make the reader aware of the complexities involved in translation and the ways in which interpretation can be construed as misrepresentation, depending on your vantage point and ideology. An example of this can be found in the novel, when young Sanjay reads – in English – an account of an event he himself had witnessed. Sanjay is present during the events leading up to Janvi’s sati, which is intended on her part as an act of defiance, protesting the loss of her daughters to the British colonizers. Mourning her lost daughters and her powerlessness in the face of colonial and p ­ atriarchal 32

Chotta self-destructs from disappointment, while his brother Sikander seems content with being powerless, yet it is not non-violence by choice, but by coercion. He eventually dies in a duel with Sanjay.

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oppression, Janvi undertakes sati out of choice, despite the objections of her sons and of Ram Mohan, who “went on for some ten minutes, quoting commentators and citing precedents, demolishing the authority of every text which could possibly support what she planned” (256). Sanjay discovers that the retelling of this story in English, by the British, is in fact a mis-telling, a distortion, a misrepresentation of her rebellious act against their aggression. Her act is interpreted as a primitive symbol of “the interior darkness of India” (re 303). The work of Gayatri Spivak, who famously deconstructed the act of sati to interrogate the place allocated to women in patriarchy and imperialism, sheds light on Janvi’s act. Read through Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Janvi’s act of sati can be reconceived as a challenge to the law and as a blatant protest against her status as object. Her defiant death works to “mark the place of ‘disappearance’ with something other than silence and nonexistence, a violent aporia between subject and object status” (102). Chandra underscores the reductive European translation of Janvi’s act, exacerbating the problems inherent in translation, which Spivak articulates as “the inaccessibility of, or untranslatability from, one mode of discourse in a dispute to another” (96). By positioning himself in-between cultures, as one who has “stereoscopic vision” (Rushdie, “Imaginary” 19), Chandra’s metafictional discourse on cultural translation reveals his awareness of the many pitfalls that can occur and distort. His attempt, in the privileged role of translator, is to do justice to disparate vantage points. Despite the translator’s proficiency, there are moments when even the most gifted translator is perplexed, and his limitations are exposed. In the fictional dialogue, the interaction between the Sadhu and Alexander reaches an impasse: Translator: He wants to know why you aren’t scared of dying. Sadhu: That’d be silly. Translator: He says that’s not a satisfactory answer. Sadhu: What sort of answer would he like? Translator: He says you should tell him exactly what mystic path you followed to reach this sublime state of indifference … Sadhu: Mystic path? Translator: Literal translation” (re 223–24). The sadhu’s incredulous “Mystic path?” suggests his utter lack of understanding of what precisely Alexander expects to hear from him (i.e. a doctrine of Eastern mysticism and wisdom), while Alexander is not satisfied with the simplistic, non ‘Eastern’ (secular) answer he gets. While the linguistic barrier has been removed, the cultural one still remains, and the translator, according to Raveh, “[o]verwhelmed by his incapacity to bridge the gap … takes a step back

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to the seemingly safer zone of literal translation” (xvi). The inclusion of this moment in the fictional dialogue however seems to suggest that despite his position as author and translator between cultures, Chandra is well aware of the limitations of this position. The lack of translatability may be seen for example, in some American episodes which might remain obscure to Indian audiences. For example, Abhay reproduces the story of Kyrie, who they picked up on their road trip, verbatim. She narrates her process of rebellion against her fanatical and demanding mother, which resulted in her becoming a porn star (re 333–54). The mother, daughter of an Apache Indian, was abducted and educated by Catholic nuns, and later ran away to find a job in New York, where she conceived a child with a Caucasian male of her choice. Never listening to her daughter, she forced her to fit into ideals of white respectability, which show a clear affinity to Sanjay’s struggles with whiteness. Yet one wonders what the audience on the maidan, i.e. the Indian audience more generally speaking, makes of a story like this, whether they have the ears to hear the sadness and the various instances of abuse or whether it merely subscribes to a view commonly held, namely, that American women are sexually promiscuous. The literal translation of the story could suggest the limits of translating it to an Indian audience, and may be an indication that Abhay (and Chandra) is caught in the gap that translation opens between text and audience. As the dialogue ends, the translator begins to ask the sadhu independent questions of his own: “Good luck to you too, or is that what one wishes people like you? Now I’m asking questions” (re 226). In asking a question of his own, which shows inquisitiveness and curiosity, the translator finally enters into a real dialogue with the sadhu, questions being the basis for cross-cultural dialogue which is the foundation for acknowledging and understanding ‘others.’ The attempt to see things from the vantage point of the other is also a priority for Brik of Hemon’s Lazarus Project, as he imagines himself as other, which becomes the basis for his moral positioning. Chanda’s dialogue with tradition illuminates the idea that man is not necessarily a rational being (Aristotle), nor merely a moral one (Indian epics), but rather that man is a storytelling animal. Sanjay Parashar, reincarnated in the body of a monkey, becomes a metaphor for the storytelling animal that lives within each of us. Sanjay imitates, as monkeys are wont to do, by playfully and creatively ‘copying’ from the epics, not merely their storytelling technique or their themes, but also their creative impulse. In the Indian tradition, the monkey deity Hanuman, who is Rama’s devoted helper, is a powerful symbol of loyalty. In the game of storytelling, Chandra has amply illustrated that his loyalty is directed toward the creative impulse.

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In creating a labyrinthine novel that employs the storytelling techniques of the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Chandra engages in the tradition of retelling the epics. The creative connections between Chandra’s novel and the epics endorse re as a transcreation, which draws also on Bollywood cinema and on across-borders stories, to create a multi-textual and multi-vocal narrative of intercultural connections. As he interprets, questions and reshapes the materials, Chandra appeals to his readership to ask questions, to enter into a dialogue with their ‘other,’ to see things from multiple vantage points. By leading us into the labyrinthine density of his novel, Chandra seeks to alter his readers’ mental perception, and with it, their ability to re-conceive the world.

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Index 1965 Immigration Act See Hart-Cellar Immigration Act A-temporal 99, 124 Abhay 185ff See also Red Earth and Pouring Rain Absence 49, 55, 61, 115n41 Ontological absence 162, 166 Aesthetic of absence 63–64 Absence-presence 135–136 Abu Ghraib 60, 68, 91 Abuse 59–60, 68, 86, 107, 109, 130n29, 144, 185, 215 Abuse of power 60, 68, 133 Accents 44–46, 69, 75, 144, 159, 175 See also Unaccented Aciman, Andre 18–19, 38, 39, 43–44 Across-borders story 36, 184, 216 Adorno, Theodor 1, 38, 180 Aesthetics Aesthetics of the grid 102 Aesthetics of the migratory See Migratory Afro-Caribbean-American 123 Aggressor/victim binary 76 Ahimsa See non-violence Ahmed Rora Halilbašic See Rora, Lazarus Project, The Aklujkar, Vidyut 204, 205n27 Alameddine, Rabih 12 Alexander the Great (Sikander) 208, 209, 211–214 See also Red Earth and Pouring Rain, Sikander, James Alexandru, Maria-Sabina Draga 197n15f Alien 88, 112, 136, 142, 139, 176–178, 181–182, 208 Alien script 182 Alienness 130 See also Other Alternative space 13, 34, 52, 77, 129, 153, 183 Alternative narrative 122 Alternative temporality and spatiality 14, 128 Ambilingual 27n53, 175 See also Language

American American Dream 88, 90 American English 28–29, 28n54, 181 American exceptionalism 23 American imperialism 32, 123, 186 Americanness 69, 194 See also West, the Amnesia 140, 148 Cultural amnesia 117n6 National amnesia 185 Anarchy 40–42, 54, 58, 61 Ancestral home 51, 66n36, 104–105, 116, 130, 136, 200 Ancestry 172 Eastern European ancestry 181 Jewish ancestry 173 Parashar ancestry 202 Serbian Ancestry 8 Anglo Anglo-American 3, 155n4 Anglo-centricity 119 Anglo-conformity 4 See also wasp Anti-Semitism 46, 63, 173n22 Antin, Mary 4–5, 150, 172n19, 175 Anxiety Anxiety of migrants 79 White anxiety 58 Anzaldua, Gloria 24 Apathy 59, 68 Appadurai, Arjun 6n19, 24–25 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 5n17, 184n3 Appropriation Appropriate 90, 132n31, 146, 151, 170–171, 187, 189, 198, 210 Creative appropriation 92, 97, 128, 151, 170–171, 187, 198–199, 201, 208 Re-appropriate 73 See also Plagiarism Arabian Nights 197–198 Arenas, Reinaldo 159 Aristotle 196, 215 See also Poetics Army See Military Artificiality 57n24, 63, 65, 176, 191

232 Asian Asian American 4n13, 72–73 Asian immigrant/migrant 9, 73n4, 96 Aspect-to-aspect 98 Assimilation 3–4, 158 Asylees See Refugees Ault, Donald 124–125 Aurobindo, Sri 205n27 Auschwitz 73, 155, 170, 181 Auster, Paul 160n6 Authoritarianism 117, 152 Autobiography See Memoir Autobiograpy 7, 26, 42, 45n13, 71–72, 172 Auto/biography 84 Autographic 72, 119n9 Averbuch, Lazarus 40ff, 91, 160, 185, 207 See also Lazarus Project, The Bacá See Baká Baká 35, 116 Bakhtin, Mikhail 17, 33, 125 Bal, Mieke 12, 19–20 Balaguer, Joaquin 9n26, 10n26 Barthes, Roland 39, 47, 57, 135, 136, 166 Baš Čaršija See Sarajevo Bautista, Daniel 141n39 Beah, Ishmael 1 Bechdel, Alison 84–85 Belicia (Beli) 118, 128, 133, 139–148 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Benjamin, Walter 30, 32, 47, 187 Benoît de Boigne 201–202 Berlin wall 38n4, 68 Berman, Jenifer 44 Between languages 26, 29–30, 119, 175, 178, 181, 208 In-between languages 153, 162 Bhabha, Homi 6, 14–16, 19, 21, 158, 187 Bharata 203–204 See also India Bharati See Bharata Bhava 200n20 Birth culture 4, 32, 69, 154, 155n4 See also Heritage Blank pages 142, 185 Blank pages of history (páginas en blanco) 117, 121 Bolechow 51

Index Bollywood 11, 13, 36, 147n49, 185, 189, 190, 193–195, 198–199, 202, 205, 210, 216 Bombay Cinema See Bollywood Booth, Gregory D. 190 Borders Cultural border 25 Ethical border 69 Linguistic border 28, 29 Literary border 149 Psychological border 116 Borges, Jorge Luis 17, 184, 188 Bosch, Juan 9 Bosnia 8, 43, 45, 46, 49, 68n37 Bosnian Rambo 60, 61n31 Boundaries 7, 12, 36, 72, 85, 118–119, 152, 169, 185, 194, 202 See also Border Bourne, Randolphe 20 Božović, Velibor 7–8, 49–50, 61–62, 64–66, 91 Braiding (narrative) 77–92, 123, 128, 139–140 Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The 10, 35, 98, 116ff, 211 See also Díaz, Junot Brik, Vladimir 30, 34, 38ff, 77, 91, 104, 185–186, 215 See also Lazarus Project, The British Raj 209–210, 212 Brodsky, Joseph 1 Broken English 176 See also Faulty English, Standard English Buddhist tree 78 Butler, Judith 63 Butler, Octavia 135 Cahan, Abraham 155–156 Calques 28 Capitalism 4n11, 24, 58 Capitán 132–133, 138 Captain Evans See Evans Carpio, Glenda R. 120, 121n14, 140, 147n49 Carter Era 24 Cemetery 62, 68, 104, 180 Césaire, Aimé 134–135 Chandra, Vikram 7, 11–13, 30, 34, 36, 39, 160, 183, 184ff See also Red Earth and Pouring Rain Ch’ien, Evelyn Nien-Ming 16n1, 119 Chandrasekhar 210 Chernvitsi See Jewish communities

Index Chicago 8, 12, 39, 40ff Chicago Historical Society 49 Childhood past 150, 180 Chisinau 68 See also Jewish communities, Kishinau Christianity 4, 206 Christian symbolism 141 Jesus Christ 59 See also Judaism, Islam, Hinduism Chronotope 17n40, 125, 160n6 Civil Rights Era 5, 23 Civil war Dominican Republic 9 United States 24 Civilizing 92, 210 Classic Indian narrative 184, 201 See also Indian epic Clear Line See Linge Claire Cohen, Robin 20, 21 Cold War 11, 173 Cole, Teju 13 Collective memory See Memory Colonial invaders 196, 201, 209 Colonialism 123, 139, 142, 186 Colonial worldview 30 Dominican Republic 9, 120 India 32, 34, 184–186, 192, 196, 211 Vietnam 109–110, 119 Columbus 22, 136 Comics 9, 13, 35, 63, 71–73, 83–85, 148, 197, 211 Japanese comics 98 Western comics 98 See also Frame, Graphic memoir, TinTin, Love & Rockets Comix 93, 145n47 Communism Communist iconography 97 Communist propaganda 110 Communist revolution 97 Fall of Communism 11 ussr 10, 11 Vietnam 8, 9n2, 100 See also Labor camp 86, 107n39 Community 59, 62–63, 99, 151–153, 182, 211 Composite Composite image 96 Composite language 119, 120, 135, 147n49

233 Concentration camp 163–164 See also Labor camp Consciousness 8, 17, 16, 185, 194 Fragmented consciousness 48 Migrant/Migratory consciousness 12–13, 18, 21, 40, 47, 48 National consciousness 63n34 Transnational consciousness 20 Continuity 77, 83–84, 96, 114, 124, 203 Cook, Roy T. 84 Counter-mapping 152–153, 157, 171 See also Mapping Counterspaces 16 Counterspell 117, 121 Cresswell, Tim 14, 154 Cricket 206, 210 Culture Cultural difference 13, 28, 175, 178, 213 Cultural loss 88 Cultural purity 6n20, 25 Cultural translation 34, 202, 214 See also Translation Curse 121, 134, 163, 181, 196, 200 See also Fukú Customs 4, 88, 136 Cutter, Martha 26–29 Daedalus See Labyrinth Danticat, Edwidge 12 Davis, Gregson 134n13 dc Comics 129n27 See also Comics, Marvel Comics Death-camp 163 See also Concentration camp, Labor camp Defamiliarization 72 Destabilization 20, 22, 24, 29, 49, 85–86, 97–98, 115, 149, 152, 157–160, 186, 206 Deterritorialization 21, 24 Detloff, Madelyn 55 Deutsch, Elliot 187 Dharma 205 Dialogue 52, 64, 74–75, 208–216 Cultural dialogue 25 Intergenerational dialogue 114 Visual dialogue 13–14 See also Intertext Diaspora 21–22, 149, 172, 193 Dominican Diaspora 10, 11n26, 116, 121–123, 133–136

234 Diaspora (cont.) Diasporic communities 21 Indian diaspora 193, 207n29 Díaz, Junot 7, 9–10, 12–13, 29–30, 34–36, 88n24, 98, 115, 116ff, 150, 153, 175, 186, 211 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Dictatorships 1, 9, 34, 116–122 See also Authoritarianism, Trujillo Diedrich, Lisa 55 Dimock, Wai Chi 23–24 Discrimination 2, 4–5, 9–10, 21, 32, 46, 73n4, 159 See also Xenophobia Dislocation 13, 21, 23n49, 48, 51, 67, 71, 85, 88, 99, 185, 188 Disorientation 65, 67, 104 Disruption 6, 9, 13, 21, 34, 35, 71, 86, 120, 128 Diversity 5–6, 22, 172n20 Linguistic diversity 27 Documentary (representation) 49, 77, 85, 91 Dominican Republic 9, 34–36, 116–149 Dominican Spanish 119 See also Diaspora, Trujillo Dominican Republic, American occupation  34, 132 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 33, 158 Doubleness 14, 35, 38, 40–44, 48–49, 60, 76, 134n32 Double consciousness 120 Double storyline 35 See also Duality Drawn photographic image 84–86, 136 See also Photographic images Duality 19, 21, 105 See also Plurality Dudrah, Rajinder 193 Durrant, Sam 19, 40, 64 Dzung 74–75, 80, 83, 85–86, 89–91, 96, 99, 102, 104–105, 107, 112, 114 See also Vietnamerica Earle, Harriet E.H. 109 East, the 202, 204, 208, 214 Eastern Europe 4, 38, 40, 49, 51, 62, 65, 70, 164, 176, 181, 186 Eckhard, Petra 160n6 Edwards, Brent Hayes 135 Eisner, Will 100, 127–128

Index El Jefe See Trujillo, Rafael Ellis Island 3n9 Embedded story See Frame Emigrant 1n4 See also Immigrant, Migrant Emptiness 64, 67 See also Absence England, Lynndie 60 Epic 6 See Indian epic Erasure 6, 31, 35, 49, 51, 64, 73, 104, 116–117, 132, 164, 169, 208 See also Silence, Absence Escher effect 42 Ethics 2n4, 34, 59, 68–69, 76–77, 164, 170, 212 Ethnicity 4, 6, 9n24, 20–22, 26, 28, 55, 73, 133n31, 145–146, 181 Ethnic cleansing 69 See also Race, Other Ethnoscape 24 European colonialism See Colonialism Evans, Captain 57, 60 Exclusion 4, 21, 119, 156, 159 Exile 1–2, 21, 29, 38, 67, 144, 146, 155–157 See also Exodus Exodus 11, 85 Expatriate 1–2 Extended family 35, 73, 80, 84, 168 See also Family Fall of Communism See Communism Family 7–10 Family album 83–89, 92 Familial gaze 90 Family history 36, 70, 74, 78, 94, 186 Family portrait 86, 88, 89, 91, 112, 114 Ideal family 90 See also Extended family, Memoir Fantastic Four 118, 129n27, 131 Fantasy 35, 117–118, 120, 122–123, 127, 129, 133, 136–137, 143, 146–148, 168, 180, 210 Faulty English 177 Feiereisen, Florence 66 First generation See Generation Fishman, Boris 7, 11–13, 29–30, 34, 36, 39, 74, 88, 149, 150ff, 186 See also Replacement Life, A Fitzgerald, James L. 187, 203 Flashback 94, 109

Index Flaubert, Gustave 130 Fluck, Winfried 23, 127 Fluency 45, 175 Cultural fluency 27 Focalization 74–75, 78, 86, 94, 99–100, 105, 110 Foer, Jonathan Safran 51n20, 176 Forced labor See Labor camp Foreign language 4, 30, 119, 176, 180 Forgery 151, 153, 158–159, 165, 169, 179–180 Format 26, 35, 100, 102, 122n17, 129, 134 Layout 13, 115, 119n9, 125n20 Page design 99–100 Foucault, Michel 16, 152–153 Fractionality 163 Fractured 33, 35, 42, 48, 51, 64, 68, 77, 105, 123 Fragmentation 48, 71, 74, 98, 118 See also Multiplicity Frame 36, 161, 185, 188, 196, 208 Non-standard frames 102 See also Panels Framing-device 133 See also Intertext Fraud See Forgery Freud, Sigmund 57, 170n16 Friedman, Susan Stanford 125–126 See also Verticality Fukú 121, 140, 142–143 Ganesh, the Elephant God 195, 203 Gantz, Lauren Jean 117n6 Gauthier, Guy 102n34 GB Tran 73ff See also Vietnamerica Generations 72, 104, 112, 114, 144, 155, 170, 176, 181, 204 Generational gap 74, 79n14, 88 Second generation 8, 77, 79, 88, 154, 167–168 Third generation 168, 181 Genette, Gerard 118n9, 125 Ghetto 6, 10, 41, 51, 61, 130, 155n4, 163–164, 169 Ghettoization 155 GhettoNerd 129, 130 See also Concentration camp Ghost writing 55, 158 Ghosts 39, 55, 64, 69, 136, 148

235 Gilberto, Astrud 137n36 Gilberto, João 137 Gilroy, Paul 21, 24 See also Diaspora “Girl from Ipanema” See Gilberto, João Globalization 13, 20–21, 23n48, 24, 189, 195, 207 See also Western Goldman, Emma 40, 41n9 See also Anarchy Gopnik, Adam 93 Goyal, Yogita 22, 25 Graphic art 13, 30, 72 Graphic element 98–99, 123–124 Graphic narrative Graphic memoir 9, 35 Graphic novel 12, 71ff See also Comic, Maus Great migration 2 Gregory-Guider, Christopher C. 66 Grice, Helen 76 Grimoire 121 See also Lovecraft, H.P. Groensteen, Theodor 71, 77–78, 102, 128 Guha, Ramchandra 210 Guy, David 169 See also Ghetto Haitian folklore 12 Hall, Stuart 7, 22, 134, 172 Hanuman, the Monkey God 194–196, 198, 204, 215 Harley, J.B. 150–152 Hart-Cellar Immigration Act 2, 10, 20 Harvey, David 154 Hatfield, Charles 78, 92–93, 96–98, 105, 112, 118, 122–126, 146 Haunting quality 55, 64, 74, 161, 168 Haymarket Massacre 40 See also Anarchy Hegemony 6, 16, 22, 75, 115 Hegemonic narratives 32, 34, 72, 83, 102 Linguistic hegemony 28, 175 See also Disruption Hemon, Aleksandar 7–8, 12–13, 30, 34–36, 38ff, 77, 91, 136, 153, 160, 169, 170, 175, 186, 206–207, 215 See also Lazarus Project, The

236 Herge See Tintin Heritage 120n10, 147, 155n4, 173 Hernandez Brothers See Hernandez Hernandez, Beto See Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Jaime and Gilbert 98, 145–146 Hershenov, David B. See Holocaust restitution Heterogeneity See Diversity Heteroglossia 33 See also Diversity, Linguistic diversity Heterotopias and heterotopologies See Spatiality Hibakusha 148 Hindi film culture See Bollywood Hindu gods and Protagonists 191 See also Ganesh, Hanuman, Rama, Satyavan, Savitri Hinduisim 191, 206, 212 Hirsch, Marianne 73–74, 90–91, 161, 167–168, 170 Ho Chi Minh City 102, 104 See also Saigon Hoffman, Eva 67, 178 Holocaust 155, 170, 176, 180 Holocaust memory 72, 149, 151, 162, 170, 185 Holocaust restitution 153, 164–165, 169, 181–182, 171 Holocaust story 169, 186 Holocaust survival 49n18, 162 Holocaust testimonial 32, 158, 162–163, 165–166 See also Spiegelman, Art Homelessness 129, 136 Homogenous space See Space Homophobia 55 Homosexual 65 Hong, Caroline Kyungah 72–73, 76n11 hooks, bell 16 Horizontality 14, 126, 128, 129–130 See also Verticality, Syntagmatic approach Huge lie 195 See also Storytelling Human trafficking 68 Humiliation 58–60 See also Abuse Hybridity 14n36, 16, 21–22, 71, 80, 184n3 Generic hybridity 122–123, 134, 172, 201, 211 See also Diversity

Index Hyperreality 84, 180, 194 Hyphenated American See Ethnicity Ibarrola-Armendariz, Aitor 77, 131 Identity 3, 6–9, 14, 17, 20–22, 25, 41, 44, 48, 68n37, 77–89, 92, 105, 120, 129, 131n30, 134 Identity politics 5 Illusion 63, 104, 123, 137, 194 Image-text 96 See also Verbal-visual Immigrant 1–4, 10–11, 20, 36, 38, 54, 73, 94, 96, 149, 150–151, 154, 156–157, 174–176, 181 See also Asylee, Emigrant, Migrant, Refugee Immigrant Act of 1924 20 Immigrant Acts 4n13 Imperialism 151, 204, 21 u.s. imperialism 9, 10, 32, 88, 123, 186 See also Colonialism In-between-ness 13, 19, 26, 120, 153, 174, 180, 213 In-between culture 17 In-between place 160, 180, 183 In-between space 15, 97, 153, 159, 170–171 Linguistic in-between 120, 153, 162, 172, 178, 182 Indian diaspora See Indian migration, Diaspora Indian epic 34–36, 184–190, 196, 197–201, 208, 215 Indian literary tradition 187, 199, 201, 202 Indian narrative 30, 184 Indian storytelling 186, 196, 197 Indian migration 11, 193 See also Diaspora Indian Popular Cinema See Bollywood Indigenous culture 192 Indigenous peoples 132, 147n49, 212 Institutional discrimination See Discrimination Integration 155 Intergenerational connections 88, 114, 168 See also Memory Intergenerational dialogue See Dialogue Internalization of racism 130, 144, 154

Index Intertexts 36, 124–125, 128, 131, 133, 137, 141–143, 158, 168, 197, 200, 205 Intransitive writing 166, 185 See also Barthes, Roland Iorio, Lyn Di 138 Iser, Wolfgang 127n22 Islam 1, 42, 206 Islamophobia 41 James, Marlon 12 Janette, Michele 76 Janvi 202, 212–214 See also Red Earth and Pouring Rain Jay, Paul 13n33, 14, 20, 22–23, 184n3, 207 Jewish ghetto See Ghetto Jin, Ha 45 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act See Immigration Act of 1924 Journeys 16, 21, 38, 41–42, 46, 68, 79, 83, 193 See also Borders, Boundaries Judaism Jewish ancestry See Ancestry Jewish culture 175 Jewish communities 62, 182 Jewish humor 170 Jewish immigrants See Immigrants Jewish people 3–4, 11, 18, 21, 38, 40, 42, 46, 51, 129n27, 156, 173 Jung, Jahaj 202 Kakar, Sudhir 189, 190 Kallen, Horace 20 Kauravas 198 Kaye, M.M. 211 Kellman, Steven 27–28, 175 Kertész, Imre 170 Kharkhurin, Anatoliy 29 See also Language, Multilingual Kincaid, Jamaica 12 Kipling, Rudyard 211 Kirby, Jack 129, 143 Kiš, Danilo 43, 69 Kishinev 38, 46, 57, 62 See also Chisinau Kishinev Pogrom 40, 41, 44, 63 Kraus, Joe 40–41, 49, 58, 61 See also Anarchy Kuhn, Annette 90 See also Family

237 Labor camp 85–86, 88, 107 See also Abuse, Concentration camp, Death camp Labyrinth 36, 39, 42, 160, 183, 186, 189, 216 See also New York Subway Map Lagaan See Bollywood La Inca 137, 140–142, 144, 146–148 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Laing, R.D. 141 Lang, Berel 166 Langson 99, 104–105 See also Vietnam Language Amiblingual 27, 175 Bilingual 29, 44–45, 46, 119, 135 Monolingual 5, 6n19, 27n53, 30, 44, 46, 57, 119, 175, 179 Multilingual 12, 28, 29, 44–45, 119, 120, 153, 175, 180 Native language 30, 178 Translingual 27, 28, 173n21, 175, 177 See also Linguistics Larson, Gerald 192 Lath, Mukund 187, 199 Layout See Format Lazarus Lazarus (Gospel of John) 41, 59 Lazarus Project, The 8, 34, 38ff, 77, 79, 91, 215 See also Hemon, Aleksandar See also Averbuch, Lazarus Lazarus See Averbuch Lee, Stan 129, 143 Lefebvfre, Henri 15–18, 152 Legends of Dune 143n43 Lessing, Doris 141–142 Levander, Caroline 24 Levi, Primo 162 Life writing 7, 74, 85, 110 See also Memoir Linearity 13, 35, 40, 62, 83, 100, 128, 197 See also Storytelling Linge Claire 105, 109 See also Graphic art Linguistics Linguistic borders/boundaries 8, 13, 25, 28, 29, 119, 175, 214 Linguistic creativity 45

238 Linguistics (cont.) Linguistic difference 12, 26, 176–177 Linguistic diversity 4, 27, 119 Linguistic inheritance 6 Linguistic landscape/Linguascape 6 Linguistic uniformity 29 Lola 118, 131–133, 135, 140, 143–144, 146, 148 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Long exposure See Photography Lord, Catherine M. 19, 40, 64 Los Bros See Hernandez Loss Bereavement 99, 168, 213 Loss of culture 4, 6, 47, 50–52, 55, 88 Loss of power 58 See also Erasure, Dislocation, Translation Love & Rockets 98, 145–146 Lovecraft, H.P. 121 Lowe, Lisa 4, 9, 73, 88 Lutgendorf, Philip 199 Lynching 57–58, 60 See also Racism, Violence Lyotard, Jean Francoise 162–163 Macroverse See Comics Mahabharata 36, 186ff See also Indian epic Manga 123 See also Comics Maps 24–25, 36, 88, 150–154, 157, 160–161, 183 Metaphorical map 88 See also Counter-mapping, New York Subway Map Marines 132 See also Military Marvel Comics 129n27 See also Comics Maus See Spiegelman, Art May, Elaine Tyler 145 McCann, Column 12 McCloud, Scott 92, 98, 100, 105, 126–127 Melting Pot 3, 160n7 Melting Pot 3, 20 See also Zangwill, Israel Memoir 7, 9, 35, 50–51, 71ff See Graphic memoir Memorialization 77, 84

Index Memory 18, 32, 36, 39, 51, 69, 74, 77, 84, 90, 109, 149, 153, 160–161, 167, 170–171, 178, 185 Collective memory 60, 124, 181, 204 Ethical memory 76 Intergenerational memory 74 See also Postmemory Mendelsohn, Daniel 51–52 Meta-fiction 25, 27, 30, 36, 42, 48, 74, 83, 131, 137, 169, 171, 186, 193, 195–196, 214 Migrants Migrant condition 19, 37, 48 Migrant consciousness 40, 47–48 Migrant fiction 25, 33, 88 Migrant imagined communities 14 Migrant writers 6–8, 12–13, 17, 19, 21, 26–31, 45, 48, 150, 173–174 Migration See Diaspora Migratory, the 19–20, 40, 48, 51 Migratory aesthetics 20, 40, 50, 116 Military 8–9, 132, 202 Miller, T.S. 42, 117 Minority status 6, 73, 91 Minsk 11, 150, 157, 161, 164, 169, 180 See also Ghetto Mirrors 48, 63, 158 Inverse mirroring 83 Mirza, Farhad 44 Mis-telling 214 See also Retelling Mishra, Vijay 189–190, 203 Mission Kashmir 12, 90 See also Bollywood Missionaries 209, 211 Mohanty, J.N. 192 Moment-in-sequence 78, 99 See also Comics, Graphic art Monolingual See Language Morena 119 See also Racism Morrison, Toni 148, 165 mta See New York Subway Map Mukherjee, Bharati 6 Multi-lingual See Language Multi-vocal narrative 35, 71, 209, 216 Multiculturalism 5–6, 184 Multiplicity 14, 22, 48, 50, 80, 120 See also Heterogeneity

Index Murrell, Rebekah 44 Muslim See Islam Nabokov, Vladimir 1, 45, 175 Nandy, Ashis 190–193, 210 Narrative Extra-diegetic narration 110 Narrative aesthetic 30, 123 Narrative sequence 124–125, 127 Narrative trajectory 125 Narrative voice 110, 114, 201 National Origins Act of 1924 4 See also Immigrant Acts Nationalism 23, 34, 55, 68–69, 195 Nationality National culture 6, 24 National myth 25, 32 National narratives 25, 33, 72, 115 Native tongue See Language Naturalization 9, 86, 89, 114 Nazism 1, 163, 166, 182 New imaginary, the 123 New York Subway Map 36, 151, 152n3, 154, 157 Nguyen, Viet Thanh 9, 12, 76 Nomadism 67 Non-linear design 99 See also Graphic art Non-standard frames See Frames Non-violence 212–213 Non-western 186, 197 Nontranslation 119 See also Translation Occupation of Vietnam 99 Olga Averbuch 41, 46, 49, 55, 59, 61, 173 See also Lazarus Project, The Olsson, Gunnar 167 Opposition, dialogical 33 Optical unconscious 47, 55 See also Benjamin, Walter Originality 34, 187, 197, 199 Oscar Wao 30, 36, 116ff, 185 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Otherness 5, 46, 117, 119, 129, 182, 207, 209 an-Other 16 Linguistic otherness 176 Othering 16 See also Diversity

239 Page design See Format Pandavas 198 Panels 77, 78, 80, 85, 89, 97, 99–100, 104, 107, 124, 126–127 See also Frames Paradigmatic approach 4, 124–126, 188 See also Syntagmatic approach, Verticality Parallel universes 50, 65 Parigüayo 132–133 Past-present paradigm 15, 64, 153 Pedri, Nancy 84 pen Atlas 44–45 People of color 12n34, 130 Perejil, 1937 massacre of the Haitians 116 Pérez-Firmat, Gustavo 29n58 Photographic images 35, 39, 47, 52, 84, 91, 136 See also Drawn images, Drawn photographic images Photography 13, 39, 47–48, 57, 70, 83–84, 90–91, 135 Pinto, Heloisa Eneida Mezes Paes 137n36 See also João Gilberto Place 14n36, 16, 18, 20, 24, 26, 61, 66, 77, 104, 107, 112, 154–155, 188 Language and place 29 Place of arrest 154 Place of arrival 36, 150 Place of origin 36, 150 Place/space 54, 61, 97, 102, 150n2, 152–153 See also Space Plagiarism 199, 200 Plátano Curtain 116 Plessey vs. Fergusson 4 Plurality 19, 33, 71 Linguistic plurality 33, 119 See also Duality Poetics of migrant writing 13 Poetics (Aristotelian) 196 Pogrom 40, 41, 44, 57, 63 Poletti, Anna 72 Pollock, Sheldon 192 Polyphony See Plurality Polyptych 105 Pope, Daniel 66, 134 Portes, Alejandro 2, 10–11 Post-/ 911, 35, 40–41, 57, 59, 70 Post-apocalyptic 147 Post-reconstruction era 147

240 Post-Soviet 38, 50, 62, 175 Postmemory 73–74, 167–169 Postrace aesthetics 122–123, 143, 186 present, the 15, 18, 47, 52, 54–55, 60, 67, 75, 96, 102, 104, 127, 143, 155, 185, 206 Punctum 39, 47, 52, 55, 64 Puns 28, 30, 45, 135 Purity, cultural 6, 25, 46, 172 Quijano, Anibal 132n31 Quixano, David 3n9 Race 120n10, 130, 148 Racism 5, 6n20, 9–10, 119, 122, 130, 209 Racist attitude and practices 4–5, 35, 43, 65, 72–73 Racist language 109, 144 Racist propaganda 72 Racial violence 60, 91 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 193n12 Rajasekhara 199 Rama 198, 200 Ramanujan, A.K. 187–188, 198, 200–203 Ramayana 36, 186–187, 189–190, 196–200, 216 See also Indian epic Ramirez, Dixa 136 Rape Rape culture 132–133, 137–138, 143 Rape victim 130, 138 Rathors, Rajput 212 Red Earth and Pouring Rain 11, 36, 183, 184ff See also Chandra, Vikram Read, Piers Paul 142 Reality 31, 47, 49, 64, 84–89, 99, 115, 123, 129, 137, 202, 205 See also Hyperreality, Illusion Red Scare 4 Refugees 1n4, 5, 8–11, 61–62, 76–77, 164 Registers Registers of meaning 94 Visual registers 13, 71 Reinhardt, Mark 58, 60 Renan, Ernest 31 Replacement Life, A 11, 36, 150ff See also Fishman, Boris

Index Restitution See Holocaust restitution Resurrection 41, 59, 70, 185, 207 See also Lazarus Retelling 36, 131, 143, 185, 187, 189, 190, 193–194, 199, 201, 214 Revenge 121, 123, 159, 182–183 Ribeiro, António Sousa 163 Role-playing games 131, 147 Romania 68–69 Rora (Ahmed Rora Halilbašic) 38–39, 41–43, 46, 49–51, 60–65, 68–69, 91 See also Lazarus Project, The Roth, Walter 40 Ruins 18, 121, 134 Rumbaut, Ruben G. 2n7, 4, 10–11 Rushdie, Salman 1–2, 6, 25, 37, 48, 64, 207 Russian Russian classic 186 Russianness 173, 174, 177, 179 Russian language 173, 175, 179 Russian speakers 178 Russian words 176–180 Russian writers 172–174, 177 Sadhus 198, 202, 208ff Sadvini 196 Sáez, Elena Machado 117n5 Sages 189, 198, 202 Saigon 8, 77, 99–100, 102, 104–105, 109, 112 See also Ho Chi Minh City Saigon See Ho Chi Minh City, Fall of Saigon Saldívar, Ramón 121–123, 143 Salvador, Dora Sales 184n3, 190, 197 Sanjay (Parasher) 30, 185ff See also Red Earth and Pouring Rain Sanskrit epic See Indian epic Sarajevo 8, 32, 41–43, 61, 69 See also Bosnia Sati 213–214 Satyavan 204, 205 Savitri 204–205 Scheherezade See Arabian Nights Schwartz, Lynne Sharon 50 Scrabble 94, 96 Scribe 117n4, 203 Sebald, W.G. 50–52, 55, 66–68

Index Self Self-as-other 67 Self-creation 172 Self-identity 8, 191, 200 Self-other encounter 208–209 Self-portraiture 72 Selimović, Ena 46 Shared reality 99 Shay, Maureen 79 Shifting of ‘shapes’ 116, 124, 147 Shippy, George M. 40–41, 49, 52–54 Shloka 200 Shteyngart, Gary 156, 173n21 Sikander, James (James Skinner) 201n21, 202n22, 212, 213n32 See also Alexander the Great, Red Earth and Pouring Rain Silence 31, 35, 63, 74, 112, 116–117, 127, 140, 142, 153, 162, 166, 168, 174, 214 See also Absence, Erasure Singh, Uday 202 Skaz 33 See also Storytelling Slava 30, 34, 39, 74, 150ff, 185–186 See also Replacement Life, A Slavery 139, 147–148 Smith, Shawn Michelle 47, 58, 60 Smith, Sidonie 7, 42, 72, 74 Sofia  160–163, 166–168, 170, 176, 185 See also Replacement Life, A Soja 16–17, 21–22 Sollors, Werner 3, 5, 28 Sommer, Doris 29, 46, 120 Sontag, Susan 59, 83–84 Sound-words 96 Southeast Asia 96 Soviet Soviet Bloc 2 Soviet Union 10–11, 156, 164, 180 See also Russia Space 7, 13–17, 22, 24, 35 Alternative spaces 13, 34, 52, 77, 129, 153, 183 Singular spaces 25 Social space 14 See also In-between,Place/space

241 Spatiality 13, 15–17, 25, 36, 70, 97, 128 Spatial discourse 15 Spatial dislocation 21 Spatial element 21, 139 Spatial fluidity 184 Spatial sensitivity 13 See also Temporality Spectacle 36, 58, 190–191, 194–195, 210 Speculative genres 35, 117–118, 122–123, 125, 143 Speculative realism 122 Spence, Jo 90n25 Spickard, Paul 2–4, 8, 9, 11 Spiegelman, Art 72–74, 85, 91, 167–168 Spielberg, Stephen 139, 141 Spivak, Gayatri 214 Standard English 143, 176–177 Stereotyping 72–73, 91, 137, 144–146, 155, 177, 209–210 Storytellers 27, 31–34, 77, 197, 207, 213 Storytelling 25–27, 31–34, 36–37, 43, 46, 69, 117, 122, 153, 161–162, 185–186, 191–197, 204–207, 211–212, 215–216 See also Huge lie, Retelling, Mis-telling Strathausen, Carsten 51, 67 Straus, Isidor and Ida 18n42 Subway See New York Subway Map Suffering 59, 74, 86, 99, 144 Survivor See Holocaust Synchronicity 78, 126n21, 191 Syntagmatic approach 124, 128, 144 See also Paradigmatic approach, Horizontality Syuzhet 125 See also Discourse Temporality 14–15, 21, 47, 54, 64, 71, 97, 128 See also Spatiality Terror 4n11, 38, 42, 55, 85, 177 Testimony 137 See also Holocaust testimony Third generation See Generation Third space 6, 15–16, 21, 70, 72, 158 Thirdspace 16–18, 21 Thomas, George 201–201, 212 Tintin 91–92, 105, 107, 186 See also Comic, Graphic art

242 Tomashevsky, Boris 125 Torture See Abuse Tran, GB 7–9, 12–13, 30, 35, 71ff, 123, 127, 128, 136, 146, 167, 185–186, 211 See also GB Tran, Vietnamerica Transcultural 184 Trans-atlantic 124 Transience 63–64 Transitions Abrupt transitions 98, 102, 104 Aesthetic transitions 102, 110 Cued transitions 99, 105, 112, 114 Temporal transitions 114 Un-cued transitions 99, 105, 112, 114 Translation 26–30, 34, 36, 93, 120, 179, 182, 187–188, 194, 202, 208, 213–215 Mistranslation 167 Nontranslation 119 Translatability 30, 178, 214–215 Untranslatability 214 Translators 26, 30, 71, 187–188, 208–209, 211–215 See also Language Translingual See Language Transliteration 177–178 Trauma 35, 55, 62, 72–74, 120, 131, 133, 140, 167 Traumatic memory 185 Traumatic narratives 123 Traumatic past 115, 123n19, 146, 176–177 Traumatic rupture 109 Tri 73, 78–81, 83, 86, 91–93, 99–100, 102, 104–105, 107, 109, 112, 114 See also Vietnamerica Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 31, 164–165 Trujillo, Rafael Leónidas 9–10, 32, 34 Trujillo regime 116, 132 See also National narrative Tuan, Yi Fu 14, 154 Tyranny 152, 161, 171 Unaccented 176 See also Accent Uncanny 55, 57, 64, 69, 160n6 Upper East Side 155, 157 Valmiki 198–201 See also Indian epic Vargas, Jennifer Harford 117

Index Vengeance See Revenge Verbal-visual 14, 39, 40, 49 See also Image-text Verticality 79, 126, 128–129 See also Horizontality, Paradigmatic approach Vertovec, Steven 20–21 Vietnamerica 9, 35, 71ff, 128 See also Tran, GB Vietcong 110, 114 See also Vietnam War Vietnam War 77–81 Vignelli, Massimo 152 See also New York Subway Map Violence 10n26, 31, 38, 44, 51, 55, 60, 70, 91, 138, 182, 200–201, 211–213 See also Non-violence Visual culture 186 See also Graphic arts Vyasa 198–199, 202–203 See also Indian epic Wanner, Adrian 172–177 wasp 23 Watkins, Charles 141 Watson, Julia 7, 42, 71–72, 74, 84 Wazir 12, 190 See also Bollywood Wells, Ida B. 58 Wertham, Fredric 92 West, the 11, 13, 36, 194, 195, 208 Western cinema 191, 200 Western comics 98 Western foreigner 136, 209–210 Western literature 123, 158 Western reader 197, 209 Western structures 186, 193, 195, 207, 212 Western technographic 102 Wexler, Lauren 63 White supremacy 58, 130 Whitlock, Gillian 72 Wiesel, Elie 155 Wisse, Ruth 170 Witticisms See Puns Woo, Benjamin 84 Word-image 93, 96–97, 115 See also Image-text, Verbal-visual

243

Index World War i 3, 57n23 World War ii 159, 161, 178 Writing in-between See In-between-ness X-Men: First Class 143n43 Xenophobia 1, 20, 32, 34–35, 41, 54, 62, 68, 70, 91 Yama 194–195, 197–198, 204–205 See also Hinduism Yezierska, Anzia 155n4, 156, 172 Yiddish 46, 175, 177, 180–181

Yunior 30, 34, 116–118, 120–122, 127, 129–138, 140, 142–146, 148, 150, 185 See also Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, The Yvgeny 154–155, 160–161, 163–165, 168, 174, 176, 182 See also Replacement Life, A Zangwill, Israel 3, 160 See also Melting Pot Žižek, Slavoy 137