Displaced: Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma 9780367438012, 9781003005889

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DISPLACED LITERATURE OF INDIGENEITY, MIGRATION, AND TRAUMA Edited by Kate Rose

Displaced

Through specific and rigorous analysis of contemporary literary texts, Displaced shows how writers from inside effected communities portray migration, Indigeneity, and trauma. In a world of increasing global inequality, it suggests how literature (and criticism) can effect positive social change, notably in the face of global environmental, economic, and social injustice. Joining literature and sociology (an approach editor Kate Rose names socioliterature), this collection brings together a diverse and compelling array of voices from international academics leading their fields. Displaced displays literary analysis anchored in engagement with our changing world. Since publishing Décoloniser l’imaginaire in 2007, Kate Rose has developed socioliterature, involving social justice, subversive magical realism, and traumatic memory. She taught comparative world literature in China for several years and now teaches at Northern Arizona University. Read her work at https://nau.academia.edu/KateRose and contact her at [email protected].

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

38 Collage in Twenty-First-Century Literature in English Art of Crisis Wojciech Drąg 39 Patrick McGrath and his Worlds Madness and the Transnational Gothic Edited by Matt Foley and Rebecca Duncan 40 The Working Class and Twenty-First-Century British Fiction Deindustrialisation, Demonisation, Resistance Phil O’Brien 41 Reading Contingency The Accident in Contemporary Fiction David Wylot 42 Death-Facing Ecology in Contemporary British and North American Environmental Crisis Fiction Louise Squire 43 Poetry and the Question of Modernity From Heidegger to the Present Ian Cooper 44 Apocalyptic Territories Setting and Revelation in Contemporary American Fiction Anna Hellén 45 Displaced Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma Edited by Kate Rose For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com

Displaced Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma

Edited by Kate Rose

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Kate Rose to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-43801-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-00588-9 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Socioliterature: Stories as Medicine

1

K AT E RO S E

PART 1

Migration 1 Dystopic Dissonance: Migration and Alienation in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers

5

7

AU G U S TA AT I N U K E I R E L E



22

39 C. R. GRIMMER

4 Linda Lê: A Literature of Displacement

56

G L O R I A K WO K

5 Languages at War in Latin American Women Writers

72

L I L I A N A C H ÁV E Z D Í A Z

89 J EFFR EY PEER

vi  Contents PART 2

Indigeneity

109

111 MEGAN E . CAN NELLA

121 C L A R I S S A C A S TA N E DA

137 M A RG A R E T M C M U RT R E Y

151 PAY E L G H O S H

167 K AT E RO S E

PART 3

Trauma

183

185 J OYA U R A I Z E E

194 M AY Y E L H AYAW I

214 H A K YO U N G A H N

Contents  vii 229 W H I T N E Y S . M AY

245 AV I VA X U E

Notes on Contributors Index

259 263

Socioliterature Stories as Medicine Kate Rose

How can the study of literature contribute to healing and social change? Recent years have seen an increasing recognition of the link between stories and both mental and physical health, as the field of narrative medicine expands into standard medical curricula. The other obvious field for such exploration is literature, yet practical implications of novels are rarely discussed. Indigenous theory recognizes the potential of stories to transform individual and collective mentalities, revise history, and voice silenced perspectives. Ecofeminists, radical feminists, American Indian and other Native scholars have taken the lead in linking literature and healing. They have shown that social engagement on the part of a researcher is in no way inimical to rigorous study. Socioliterature is an analytical current I have named to highlight literature’s impact on society. It represents and defines a growing current of engaged scholarship, crossing national, ethnic, and genre boundaries. Too often ignored, social justice through research is of urgent importance in an increasingly unequal world. Migration is a current issue where inequalities converge and are flagrantly devastating. Similarly, Indigenous people face historical and ongoing displacement along with theft of their lands, and a large proportion of migrants are Indigenous. Trauma is a common thread running through both migration and Indigeneity. Examination of specific texts can strengthen a common project for justice, in line with ecocriticism (and the foundation provided by feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, which might now be called radical feminism). Drawing from these and from French existentialism, socioliterature designates literary analysis anchored in social criticism and transformation. Although the sociology of literature is already an established field within sociology, socioliterature is a new concept centered on literature as the vantage point for analyzing and acting upon society. The chapters in Displaced incarnate this long overdue analytical concept. This book places together a plurality of authors and theories, building new bridges. Literary study can further the healing potentials of narrative, recognized even in more strictly scientific disciplines such as neurology. Life experience’s impact on health has been proven in large-scale

2  Kate Rose research such as the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study. This includes what happens to a person, and her ability to narrate and contextualize the lived events (in other words, story). We now know that during a life-threatening event, the brain survives by cutting off emotive and narrative centers (amygdala and hippocampus). These stay disconnected, resulting in dissociation, addiction to “hard drugs” the brain produces, and the imperative to relive trauma (through suffering or inflicting violence). Moreover, these dual paths are conditioned by norms of masculinity and femininity. This means recognition of traumatic memory is key to achieving social equity and eliminating sexual violence. It can improve response to survivors and justice for them, as well as strategies for prevention involving fields ranging from social work to criminology. Yet even conventional psychiatry ignores traumatic memory’s prevalent mechanisms, suggesting that politics (not science) determines practices. Literature has often been effective in voicing uncomfortable, marginalized truths. Many novels categorized as trauma literature illustrate the neglected facets of traumatic memory (how the traumatized brain functions and how this manifests in society), while attempting to reconstruct narrative through the fog of amnesia. This reveals healing techniques that can be used for survivors, including through studying novels and through writing. Painstaking reconstruction of narrative can actually heal the brain, freeing the survivor from the trauma colonizing her life. Formal literary experimentation offers glimpses into traumatized minds, errant societies, and the depths of domination. Authors like Monique Wittig improvise on the utopian genre through radical structural experimentation, insisting that the revolutionary power of novels resides in form even more than content. Similarly, magical realism has been widely studied with regard to postcolonialism, as a means for regaining precolonial culture while forging a future on a culture’s own terms (transcending colonial influence). My book Décoloniser l’imaginaire extended this beyond postcolonialism into the overall dynamic of domination, emphasizing female novelists subverting patriarchy. Literary study has the unique power of calling attention to what writers naturally do in voicing hidden truths and conceptualizing the otherwise unspeakable. Socioliterature calls forth the full political and healing potentials of literature. Literature has the advantage of being linked to many disciplines—a key to unlocking literary analysis’s largely untapped potential to serve society. The popular study of trauma literature has not led to detailed connections between neurological pathways, social manifestations, and literary forms. Medical facts should be allowed into literary scholarship, just as narrative medicine has willingly integrated literature. This interdisciplinarity can lead to more social usefulness of both disciplines. While some fields, like psychoanalysis, lend themselves well to integration

Socioliterature  3 into literary criticism, others (not only medicine but also sociology) have been taken less seriously especially in the contemporary U.S. There seems to be a bizarre mainstream consensus that the further we stray into abstraction, the more worthy literary scholarship becomes. Postmodern literary criticism is an entanglement of obscure words that, once untangled, leave little substance. What is being said of interest has often been said before (including centuries before) more eloquently. Yet we are obliged to read and cite authors who are the authorities of the moment; and if we do declare the Emperor nude, we are entering nonetheless into his dressing room, forced to read him more carefully than anyone, detracting from potentially useful research. (We find ourselves having to prove that he is naked.) In disciplines outside the Humanities, researchers are required to pursue goals that are useful. None would criticize a biologist for emphasizing how her research could be utilized for the betterment of society. Why then in the Humanities are so many scholars timid about openly applying knowledge? Objectivity, or the attempt at it, should not include blindness to real-world implications. What I am illustrating through the choice of chapters in Displaced is a socioliterature approach to criticism. This is inspired partly by the excellent discipline of sociolinguistics, which takes the scientific foundation of language study and applies it to real situations, people, and groups. Through departing from mimesis, novels can illustrate deeper truths, including the simultaneous historical, emotional, relational, and other facets of events. Through departing from fact, literature can provide new insights to make a complete and accurate picture (for example through the incarnation of metaphors, in the astute language of dreams or poetry). Displaced sparks new conversations at the center of literary scholarship. It fills in spaces that conventional academic discourse has disregarded as empty. Currently, many scholars are already doing what I would consider socioliterature, yet there is no acknowledgment, no distinction between this and all the conventional scholarship it is buried in (or it is isolated in the specificity of a field/ghetto). The conversations already being had by Indigenous women, radical and ecofeminists, activists and artists, can be placed at the center of literary analysis. This means stepping into socially engaged interpretation. Today, we are faced with a crisis of migration, largely the legacy of colonialism. This includes the ongoing violence to Indigenous peoples and to their land. The concomitant rise of nationalism blames the victims. Just as with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, the effects of violence lodge in the body and are manifested through it; perpetrators, through using the bodies of others, self-medicate their trauma through further trauma yet emerge unscathed. Although perpetrators and victims have both been traumatized in the past, and experience a similar

4  Kate Rose neurological imperative to relive trauma, they represent divergent paths (using self or others) that are conditioned by sex-based norms. (I use “sex” not “gender” because separating these masks the fact that both are social classifications.) These glorify female subjugation and male domination, in religion, pornography, and most everywhere else. The “choice” of prostitution also reflects the neurological imperative of trauma repetition, combined with sex-based conditioning. Perpetrators appear to be the most fit, sane, rational, and even benevolent. This is a problem for individuals and for the whole of society. We can never achieve equality unless the effects of trauma (historical and individual) are recognized and healed. Part of the healing (as the field of narrative medicine is developing and Indigenous peoples have always known) is through story. Migrants include a large proportion of Indigenous peoples. Displaced from homelands again and again, they are migrants whose homes have been stolen. Their resistance is not only for themselves and their communities but is also anchored in a worldview that is crucial for all of our future. Native authors around the world, through keeping alive embers of the flame of being human, are offering a way out of a dead-end. In fact, this dead end is desired by western patriarchy in its glorification of the afterlife. Nothing much about the world here and now matters, according to Christian doctrine of the Puritans who colonized America, as well as evangelical Christians today. This is not a question of interpretation. Their books could not make this more clear. Take, for example, Done by Cary Schmidt. This concise treatise immediately informs the reader that God did everything already, so nothing we do on earth, except submit to Him, matters at all. The author goes so far as to explicitly condemn socially responsible and beneficial acts, as an insult to the “everything” that Jesus already gave. A similar scorn for the earth and (woman-given) life on it can found in Buddhism, with its view of life as an endless cycle of suffering, with extinction (Nirvana) as the only escape. Surely we as humans can and have done better than this in organizing our ideology to correspond to what is conducive to peoples’ and other animals’ well-being. Socioliterature strives to meet this aim, and Displaced highlights how authors today address key issues, while demonstrating how literary analysis can add to their impact. Please note: This introduction expresses the ideas of Kate Rose only. Contributors of other chapters in no way participated in writing it, and may hold different views. Although all authors suggest some form of social engagement, there is a broad, diverse range in how they manifest and express this. This plurality is crucial for socioliterature overall and for Displaced in particular.

Part 1

Migration

1

Dystopic Dissonance Migration and Alienation in Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers Augusta Atinuke Irele

Introduction Within the past decade, anxiety over immigration and global migrant “crises” have garnered significant public attention. In the United States, one of the top host nations for displaced peoples, large-scale debates have centered the fate of the “Dreamers,” children brought into the country by their parents without the proper documentation. Limited by their immigration status, “Dreamers” were historically prohibited from gaining admission to college in the United States or qualifying for the federal financial aid necessary to pay for their post-secondary education. Furthermore, undocumented immigrants, Dreamers included, face severely limited employment prospects which, in many cases, meant they are relegated to unofficial and “under-the-table” often menial jobs that placed them at the mercy of untrustworthy or exploitative employers. Contemporary discourse about immigration in the United States largely presumes the migrant with origins in the South and Central America. The xenophobia that underlies American anxiety about low-wage job security and government resource exploitation depends on mostly unfounded stereotypes about so-called “illegal” immigrants arriving to terrorize already-vulnerable towns and cities near the country’s southern border. In the midst of the emotionally heightened debates about the United States’ obligation toward Latinx and Hispanic immigrants, another population of migrants tends to be overlooked in the debates from the beginning of the 21st century – undocumented or economically vulnerable Africans, displaced due to the continent’s pervasively turbulent economic and political history. Indeed, common discourse about contemporary African immigrants to the United States focused on data that documented the relative success of first- and second-generation Nigerians and their overrepresentation in the nation’s college and graduate school student bodies. According to these reports, African migrants, Nigerians in particular, had discovered the key to achieving the oft-glorified American Dream.1 However, the recent upsurge in African migrant

8  Augusta Atinuke Irele narratives opens an opportunity to explore the various subgroups whose experiences contribute nuance to academic and popular discourse about the West as desirable migrant utopia. Recently, African and Africanist scholars and creatives have taken up the question of the Afropolitan in their efforts to theorize cultural and social belonging of increasingly mobile Africans. “They (read: we) are Afropolitans – the newest generation of African emigrants, coming soon or collected already at a law firm/chem lab/jazz lounge near you,” declares Taiye Selasi in her somewhat infamous piece, “Bye-Bye Babar.” These Afropolitans are recognizable because of their “funny blend of London fashion, New York jargon, African ethics, and academic successes” (Selasi “Bye-Bye Babar”). Understandably, Selasi’s piece sparked fierce debate about Afropolitanism as a concept and an orientation. Because of its overt elitism, Selasi’s piece and, accordingly, Afropolitanism as a theory, have been the subjects of pointed debate. In the scholarly and popular realm, writers continue to question the parameters of the nascent school of thought. Can one be an Afropolitan having never left the continent? Can someone fluent in multiple indigenous African languages lay claim to Afropolitanism? To what extent are Afropolitanism and pan-Africanism different? Is Afropolitanism simply a new way to perform Westernization? Overlooked within the celebrations of successful African immigrants and the proliferation of African migrant narratives are those migrants from the continent for whom the American Dream remains unattainable. While it is true that many of the African-born migrants to the United States achieve levels of economic stability that may not have been possible in their countries of origin, a significant proportion of these contemporary immigrants remain politically and economically vulnerable for the duration of their residence in the United States. To them, the American Dream remains a mirage, ever unobtainable and taunting them all the while. More than simply difficult, the United States turns out to be inhospitable and, in some cases, hostile to these contemporary migrants as they strive to realize the aspirations of success in America that drove them from their home countries in the first place. Imbolo Mbue’s 2016 debut novel, Behold the Dreamers, calls attention to the largely ignored narratives of African migrants for whom New York, in metonymy for the country as a whole, figures as a dystopic space from which they must ultimately escape. For Mbue’s female protagonist in particular, the novel calls attention to the particularized vulnerabilities of postcolonial African migrant women as they navigate the dissonance between their abandoned homelands and their newly adopted metropolis. Far from the glamorous social chameleon invoked by Selasi in “Bye-Bye Babar,” Mbue’s female protagonist, Neni Jonga, endures an experience that offers an oft-ignored counterpoint to prominent discussions and images of contemporary female African immigrants. Behold

Dystopic Dissonance  9 the Dreamers depicts how gender affects migrant experiences before and after their displacement while portraying the multiple levels at which African women endure social and institutional alienation in deigning to ascribe to the notion of the “American Dream.”

Afropolitanism, Cosmopolitanism, and Utopia Contemporary configurations of cosmo- and Afropolitanism depend on a shared belief in the desirability of acceptance by and into the West. Demonstrated comfort in Western metropoles signifies one’s evolved nature, making one worthy of presence and attention within these same metropolitan spaces. That a contemporary African can be Westerneducated and still legible and accepted in her African hometown means she is, admirably, a cultural chameleon, at once skilled in many cultural registers. Of course, the desire to blend relatively seamlessly into European and American locales is not new. Rather, a convincing argument can be made that Afropolitanism is rife with colonial residue. However, as many scholars have aptly indicated, post-Cold War globalization requires new meditations on identity and global citizenship. How then does one retain particularity while also acknowledging and participating in new modes of interconnected relativity? It is now pro forma to marvel at the ways technology has changed our access to people and cultures from which we find ourselves at a physical remove. It is, indeed, incredible that children of African immigrants, stranded in the United States, can make use of the Internet to stay abreast of cultural trends on the continent. However, as the ending of NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names (2013) warned, technology only functions to host connections that are fractured and tenuous, at best. Mbue’s novel amplifies the dissonance between media portrayals of the United States and the realities of vulnerable African migrants upon their arrival. At the base of contemporary academic debate about Afropolitanism are two seemingly disparate configurations. The first, Taiye Selasi’s aforementioned “Bye-Bye Babar,” was published in 2005 in the now-defunct LIP Magazine special edition on Africa. In this piece, the Afropolitan has a direct connection to the continent, having either been born there, decided to live there now, or raised by parents who emigrated from the continent to other metropoles in the West. While some of them are multi-ethnic, Selasi’s Afropolitans perform their belonging to Africa: they DJ Afrofusion nights at dance clubs, they don Kente and Ankara print alongside Western items of clothing, they speak multiple languages, Romance languages included. What is crucial to Selasi’s concept of Afropolitanism is the fact that “there’s the G8 city or two (or three) that we know like the backs of our hands, and the various institutions that know us for our famed focus. We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world” (Selasi “Bye-Bye Babar”). Selasi’s Afropolitan is mobile. She uses media and

10  Augusta Atinuke Irele cultural capital to perform belonging when traveling the world while insisting on being of Africa. Selasi’s piece has been the subject of passionate critique, so much so that Achille Mbembe’s political construction of Afropolitanism is often overlooked. The most notable of Selasi’s critics is Binyavanga Wainaina, who delivered a plenary lecture at the African Studies Association UK’s 2012 conference titled, “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan.” Stephanie Bosch Santana (“Exorcising Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina explains why ‘I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan’ at ASAUK 2012”), Emma Dabiri (“Why I’m Not an Afropolitan”), and Rachel Strohm (“The Hipster Africa Experience Does Not Represent Anything Particularly Progressive”) have offered their own critiques. These and other critiques of Selasi’s piece take umbrage with her focus on the elite Africans who have, due to education and class, access to the glamorous settings the piece celebrates. Scholars and cultural commentators have united to condemn “Bye-Bye Babar” for its focus on consumerism and its supposed insistence that the upper-class globetrotters represent some kind of African ideal to which the rest of the continent’s populations should aspire. Selasi herself redoubled her insistence on her concept of Afropolitanism in a 2013 piece for the Guardian about her upbringing and her approach to writing her debut novel, Ghana Must Go (“Taiye Selasi on Discovering Her Pride in Her African Roots”). Scholars of contemporary African literature continue to debate about the utility of Selasi’s Afropolitanism. Meanwhile, an intellectual and cultural counter movement has emerged, largely on the Internet, to claim and assert Afropolitanism, as Selasi envisioned it, as a contemporary state of Africanness. These movements are closely tied to the many websites that sell “African-inspired” clothing and art and offer reviews of popular novelists and musicians. Published in 2007 in a pamphlet compiled to accompany an exhibition in the Johannesburg Art Gallery titled Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, Mbembe’s intervention is decidedly more theoretical. In his view, Afropolitanism emerges at a moment when scholarship has reached the limits of African politico-intellectual discourse. Whereas earlier scholarship focused on anti-colonial nationalism, African socialism, and pan-Africanism, contemporary discourse has shifted to two crucial questions: “Who is African and who is not?” (Mbembe 26). Now, according to Mbembe, critics of African aesthetic and cultural products neglect to acknowledge the continent’s long history of transnationalism and migration. Indeed, Mbembe asserts, Africa has always been a part of a “historical phenomenon of worlds in movement” (27). However, the core of the histories of the continent’s various and varied cultures depends on a “paradigm of itinerancy, mobility and displacement” (ibid.). African transnationalism is not new, but it now requires

Dystopic Dissonance  11 a theory through which it can be observed. Of course, migration within the continent is not new and continues to be the predominant mode of displaced African people. According to the 2018 UN Conference on Trade and Development, of the 258 million people considered global migrants, only 35% left the Global South for the North and only approximately “38 per cent of migration was South-South” (United Nations Conference on Trade and Development 11). Achille Mbembe’s notion of Afropolitanism allows us to observe and conceptualize these “SouthSouth” or intracontinental migrants as well in negotiating the position of borders in contemporary contexts. Thus, Mbembe proposes a complex definition of Afropolitanism: a “cultural, historical and aesthetic sensitivity” that informs “awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa [… and] the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness and remoteness” (28). Whereas Selasi’s Afropolitanism centers on a collective performance of belonging outside the continent, Mbembe’s version is a mode of relation. Selasi’s Afropolitanism is a cultural awareness, while Mbembe draws attention, through his own theory, to world history and long traditions of trade, movement, and exchange. Scholars have pointed out the distinction between Selasi’s individualistic Afropolitan and Mbembe’s figure, who is aware of belonging to a political, historical, and sociocultural collective. Accompanying these debates has been the emergence and hyper-visibility of African entertainers and athletes in Western popular culture, documented and amplified through various forms of media proliferated across the Internet. African studies scholars have, in various forms and with varying approaches, contributed to the ongoing dialogue about the Afropolitan, a notable early example being Jennifer Wawrzinek and J.K.S. Makokha’s edited collection, Negotiating Afropolitanism, published in 2011 by Rodopi. This volume includes insight on Afropolitanism as a mode of reckoning with the borders around African cultural production. It insists on relegating the Afropolitan figure squarely as subsidiary to the imposing and ever-expanding school of postcolonialism and, in doing so, misses the opportunity to evaluate Afropolitanism as a mode of selfrepresentation that has its own sociopolitical purchase and effect. More helpful for reading extreme contemporary literature is the collected edition compiled and edited by Carli Coetzee, Afropolitanism: Reboot (2017), in which we find pieces previously published in other forums across the academic and non-academic world that consider Afropolitanism as an intellectual, cultural, and political phenomenon of its own right. In the collection, several pieces emerge as particularly helpful in considering the intersection between metropolitan existence and utopian expectations encased within the migrant African subject’s imaginary.

12  Augusta Atinuke Irele Chielozona Eze reminds us of the constitutive elements of Achille Mbembe’s Afropolitanism when he declares that it “suggests a reading of the African postcolonial identity as necessarily transcultural, transnational, indeed, cosmopolitan; it must embrace the solidarity, that these conditions imply” (Eze 11). Eze generously reads Mbembe’s theoretical piece alongside Selasi’s more cultural one to draw the contours of what he calls “the Afropolitan model.” Having traced a brief historical review of aspects of cosmopolitanism as they relate to the figure at hand, Eze declares that “The African is contamination in the sense that she is not culturally or biologically pure. And this is good. The African is a mutt” (9). Eze goes on to insist that “to acknowledge [the African’s] muttness is to concede to the presence of the other in her life and to be ready to enter into an I-Thou relationship with this other, to make way for dialogue” (ibid.). Adopting a Glissantian approach, Eze casts postcolonial Africans as constitutive of various, sometimes contradictory elements that combine to condition them for transnational and transcultural engagement. As complex figures who are themselves already the products of long histories of cultural and political contact, contemporary Africans emerge as exemplars of the adaptive multicultural subjectivity as a result of their historical experiences of cross-cultural encounters and subjugation. Afropolitanism, then, becomes a means for attempting to grapple the particularities of contemporary Africanness. “To be sure,” Eze explains, “it suggests an application of the idea of cosmopolitanism on the African continent or on people of African ancestry. It is an African way of being cosmopolitan” (ibid.). With his fact, Eze takes issue. “Why can an African not just be a cosmopolitan?” he inquires (10). The answer that Eze offers himself is that Afropolitans “can no longer be explained in purist, essentialist, and oppositional terms or by reference only to Africa” (ibid.). As such, one need not be particularly mobile oneself to adhere to the Afropolitan mold. Indeed, as “their realities are already intermixed with the realities of even their erstwhile oppressors,” these “mutts” gesture toward the impossibility of so-called “cultural purity” (ibid.). Eze’s intervention thus widens the scope of Afropolitanism, allowing us to read lower-class and non-migrant subjects into the model while acknowledging the polyvalent nature of contemporary African existence. Even without having left the continent, one can be Afropolitan simply because of the present realities of cultural hybridity and intercultural encounters. Whereas Eze offers an Afropolitanism that “promises some moral re-examination of the world” (14), and in which “the colonized is no longer at the periphery” and no longer “understood exclusively as a victim” (15), Amatoritsero Ede regards the Afropolitan as a mode of performed cultural expression. It “began first as an intense artistic self-perception or self-identity” and eventually “was translated as a highly stylized

Dystopic Dissonance  13 cultural production and marketing strategy, and more recently as an infectious cultural phenomenon to be theorized” (Ede 33). Significantly, Ede recognizes assertions of Afropolitanism as measures of migrant or migrant-adjacent creatives attempting to distinguish themselves from earlier, parallel, and new African Diasporas, to borrow from Okpewho and Nzegwu’s 2009 work: the Afropolitan feels a sense of belonging to the metropolitan society only in being seen, in an artistic sense, as ‘cultured’ and as an ideal citizen. This is why it is mostly cultural-brokers – writers, visual artists, musicians, dancers, and so on, one might say cultured people who occupy a venerated social stage because of their valued and acquired symbolic capital, – who identify as Afropolitan. Opposed to them are members of larger black migrant populations and diasporas, who feel alienated and lack agency within metropolitan political and social establishments from the USA to the EU or South Africa (which one might consider to be strategically part of the West by dint of its long occidental geo-political history and current Westernized socio-economic infrastructure. (Ede 34) To Ede, Afropolitanism is a collective of individuals engaged in a “recuperative project of socio-political and economic agency” (ibid.). Accordingly, Afropolitans use cultural and creative expression to make it clear to their audiences that they are different from the “African writers” of old. In so doing, Ede claims, they shirk the political and economic obligations to the continent. They gain agency precisely by freeing themselves from the restrictive yoke of sole association with the continent. At the same time, Afropolitans highlight their elite pedigree and training in order to avoid being associated with other, less-privileged factions of the African Diaspora. Ironically, to the metropolitan audience they target, the Afropolitans emerge as spokesperson for the Dark Continent and for the disenfranchised in the Western metropole while also actively attempting to distance themselves from these very same people. “The result is a cultural negation of the black group agency that Afropolitanism could have inspired on the political level” (Ede 39). In their very assertion of cultural and political agency, that is, by disassociating themselves from other non-elite African and Black Diasporan subjects, Afropolitans become the embodiment of wasted political potential. Ede’s direct critique of willful Afropolitan subjects concludes with a scathing indictment of the radical individualism and political apathy he recognizes within the movement: While the idea of Africa cannot be said to have been temporally static, its Afropolitan or Afropean disavowal does not constitute a sophisticated or nuanced expression of African difference but

14  Augusta Atinuke Irele rather the desire for metropolitan sameness simply because it is powerful. It is difficult to argue with the Afropolitan writer’s longing for a utopia that is devoid of an Africa whose ‘legacy [is] hard to bear’. (39) Desire for perpetual legibility and cultural acceptance within the metropole is an empty pursuit, in Ede’s view. In the end, Afropolitanism contributes to a sanitized, ahistorical, irresponsible view of Africa’s position within the histories of globalizing or globalized transnational encounters. One should not, according to Ede, assert ones Africanness simply in the spirit of cleansing the continent of its less dazzling attributes. Ede’s critical position opens up insight into the centrality of the Western metropole in contemporary configurations of African subjects. In literature specifically, the self-designated Afropolitan author holds as intended audience cultural communities based in the major cities of the world who are willing to participate in the shared process of ignoring or diminishing the parts of belonging to Africa that are not glamorous. What Ede overlooks is that Afropolitan ideology depends on the very same negative stereotypes it aims to circumvent. In their pursuit to escape the negative imagery popularly associated with the African continent, the roving Afropolitan actually internalizes these connotations and declares herself intent on changing how Africans are regarded in the West. In its radical insistence on contemporary African sophistication, Afropolitanism both builds upon and distances itself from the concepts of Africa as underdeveloped dystopia from which one must escape. However conspicuous Afropolitan subjects may appear in the Western metropole, they are far less comfortable in their continental places of origin where they are restricted by what they perceive to be the limited resources available to them. The primary female protagonist of Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers, Neni Jonga, considers her move to New York City from Limbe, Cameroon as the opportunity to finally grow into her Afropolitan potential. When she first arrives in New York with her husband, Neni sees the city as a venue to host the dreams that were unimaginable in her native Cameroon. New York was “a place with all the pleasures she desired” (Mbue 13). The city is enchanting for the young newly married woman, “she still couldn’t believe she was here. Couldn’t believe she was walking around shopping for Gucci, no longer a jobless, unwed mother, sitting in her father’s house in Limbe” (12). For Neni, New York figures as an environment where new possibilities become attainable. New York City was her home, a place with all the pleasures she desired. She woke up next to the man she loved and turned her face to see their child. For the first time in her life, she had a job, as a home

Dystopic Dissonance  15 health aide through an agency that paid her in cash, since she had no working papers. She was a matriculated student for the first time in sixteen years, studying chemistry at Borough of Manhattan Community College […] And for the very first time in her life, she had a dream besides marriage and motherhood: to become a pharmacist like the ones everyone respected in Limbe because they handed out health and happiness in pill bottles. (13–14) Neni believes that Limbe stifled her and prevented her from achieving her dreams of being respectable. Her hometown transformed into a “faraway town, a place she had loved less with every new day” (13). A life in New York with the ability to move around without stigma and finally embark on a path to become a pharmacist is Neni’s reward for having “waited too long to become something” (14) and enduring the hardship of languishing in Limbe under her father’s strict authority. Compared to the relative freedom she experiences as a migrant in the United States, Mbue’s narrator casts Neni’s time in her hometown as period of imprisonment under regressive terms. The United States, cast from a distance, and even early in Neni’s migrant experience remains a utopic space in which she can enjoy experiences that are inconceivable in Cameroon. However, as the narrative progresses, the United States loses its glossy façade and Neni watches herself and her family transform into unrecognizable victims of the challenges of contemporary life in the United States’ large metropole. While the United States represents an escape from the desolation of her life in Cameroon, Neni differs from the Afropolitans of Selasi and Mbembe’s configurations in that she does not conceive of herself as inherently belonging to the glamorous Western locales she see in the media. Neni’s Afropolitanism remains latent, a quality to be unlocked upon reunion with her husband in New York City. Before she leaves Limbe, America remains an ideal about which she becomes obsessed as she ages and her prospects in Cameroon dwindle. While she accepts that “America might be flawed” (313), Neni also considers the United States “a beautiful country” and a place where she “could still become far more than she would have become in Limbe” (ibid.). Due to the images she sees of African-American prosperity on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and The Cosby Show, “America, to her, was synonymous with happiness” (312). Limbe, and by extension, Cameroon, and the entire continent of Africa restrict Neni’s potential. The easy lives of leisure she consumes from American media amplify her dissatisfaction with her life in Limbe. While Neni’s dreams of the United States are neither unique nor atypical, they do place her in a slightly nuanced subgroup of migrant Africans who have yet to realize their Afropolitan potential due to what they perceive to be limiting factors in their hometowns. Neni surrounds herself with other lower-class African women, attempting to maintain

16  Augusta Atinuke Irele their optimistic vision of what their lives could be while also facing the harsh realities of life in the margins in New York City.

Dystopic Dissonance At the heart of the idea and debates about Afropolitanism are the migrating African’s destinations. As such it is important to examine the privileged utopic role of the Western metropole in notions of cosmo- and Afropolitanism and how they figure and shape the contemporary genre of migration narratives. The central problematic of this paradigm however, is, as Dustin Crowley indicates, the logistical realities of borders and the nation-state. Crowley reminds us that “one cannot generally occupy a truly ‘transnational space.’” Instead, migrant Africans must contend with “borders [that] are thoroughly regulated, especially in the West” (Crowley 132). Afropolitans associate themselves with the entire continent of Africa, eliding the borders that distinguish each nation from the next, however, upon their migration to the West, they come into contact with the administrative realities of nations and state bureaucracies. Their new Western hosts do not ignore borders as the migrants do. In fact, within the process of their emigration, Afropolitans must contend with the variegated ways that nations endeavor to protect and limit their borders. In Mbue’s narrative, these borders become the early mechanism through which dystopia emerges when Neni’s husband learns that his application for asylum has been denied and that he is facing deportation from the United States. This news causes Neni to “cry the first tears of sadness she’d ever cried in America” (Mbue 60). Quickly, the Jongas’ relationship to the United States becomes antagonistic. Rather than offering them the ability to provide for their young son and the family they left behind in Limbe, the United States requires the young couple to drain their meager savings to fight its efforts to eliminate them from within its bounds (ibid.). According to Gregory Claeys’ comprehensive monograph, Dystopia: A Natural History, dystopia encapsulates the dissolution of civility during a time when the collective becomes more important than the individual. Thus, those seeking to assert a unique identity or experience quickly fall prey to the totalizing impulse of the collective (Claeys 4). Social group membership, Claeys argues, is central to modern political configurations. What is more, these groups define the ideals of proper belonging for their membership. Accordingly, in modern political contexts, one’s sense of self emerges from belonging to salient social groups; the individual subject defines herself in relation to the whole (34). In the Jongas’ case, the collective to which they belong remains uncertain throughout the whole novel. While they actively attempt to sever their associations to Limbe, they still feel out of place in New York City. This sensation of unbelonging is particularly amplified by Jende’s impending deportation. Neni’s identification with a collective

Dystopic Dissonance  17 is more tenuous than her husband’s. As an unwed mother, she becomes the outcast in her home community. However, in New York, she finds herself comparing American social norms to Cameroonian. Although she marvels at the opportunities now accessible to her in the United States, Neni “didn’t have a single non-African friend and hadn’t even come close to being friends with a white person” (Mbue 90). She is perplexed by the American habit of socializing in loud, crowded bars instead of in the comfort of their own homes. She insists that “people act as if things in America have to be better than things everywhere else. America doesn’t have the best of everything,” when teased by her husband’s cousin about her unwillingness to attend his birthday party (89). Her disillusionment with the United States heightens as her assimilation becomes increasingly implausible. Due to her particular point of original reference, becoming truly “of the world” and, in this case, “of New York” reaches new levels of improbability as Neni spends more time in the city. Neni exposes the limits of the Afropolitan ideal; her experience serves as a reminder that certain migrants are only legible within the stereotypes that Afropolitan subjects try so hard to refute. Neni and Jende both work for the same white well-to-do family in New York – Jende as the husband’s driver, and Neni as the summer nanny in the family’s vacation home in the Hamptons. While working as housekeeper and caretaker for the Edwards family, Neni constantly compares what she sees in the family’s home to her values and experiences in Cameroon. Of her employers’ younger son, she remarks on his “forwardness” which she finds “surprising” and “untypical of children in Limbe” (114). At the beginning of her stint as nanny, her young charge asks her questions about “African lions and leopards and what kind of animals she had seen roaming around Limbe.” To what would undoubtedly be Afropolitan horror, Neni “made up tales about monkeys stealing her lunch when she was a schoolgirl, and a classmate who used to come to school riding on an elephant” (ibid.). Neni’s reliance on the stereotypes of wild Africans undermines her declared mission to achieve respectability in the United States. She delights in being able to entertain her young charge with the stories of people interacting with animals in the wild locales of the African continent. At the same time, Neni uses these stories of primitive Africans consorting with dangerous wilderbeast to call attention to American naïveté. As she continues to interact with Americans, Neni reflects on the perceived superiority of her Cameroonian values. With her failed Afropolitan dreams, Neni occupies a particularly gendered vulnerable position, both in Limbe and in New York City. When she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant with her second child, Neni realizes the full scope of her contingent position, even in her new life in the major American metropole. While her husband awaits the start of his deportation proceedings, he comes home one day and declares that he has decided she will take a year-long leave of absence from her

18  Augusta Atinuke Irele community college in order to stay home with their newborn. “Babies need to start their lives in the hands of their mother, and I want you to enjoy the baby while you’re recovering from the pregnancy” (172). This decision, delivered against her will and as a command rather than a suggestion, enrages Neni. It also threatens her immigration status in the United States, a fact she reminds her husband as she persists in pleading he change his mind. Jende remains unmoved, and eventually Neni relents, reminding herself that “He had brought her to America. He paid her tuition. He was her protector and advocate. He made decisions for their family” (ibid.). Although she finds herself “in a city full of independent women” (173), Neni resigns herself to her husband’s decision. She knows that taking a year-long leave of absence would invalidate her student visa, which would, in turn, further complicate her alreadyprecarious situation in New York. However, she also recognizes that migrating to New York does not sufficiently free her from her position of subordination to her husband. The social order from which she naively believes herself to have escaped follows her to her new home in New York City. Neni, then, does not transform into the Afropolitan ideal upon setting foot in New York City. Rather, she finds herself in a migrant purgatory, trapped between the goals she longs to realize and the baggage of the society she left behind. Neni’s Western utopia fails her again. She finds herself continually relegated to secondary positions within her family structure and moving farther from her aspirations to become a well-respected pharmacist in the United States. With her second pregnancy, Neni is once again rendered helpless. Although she has now married her children’s father, she is still at home, under the authority of a dominant male figure, reliant on him to provide for her while she looks after their children. One of the most fatal blows to Neni’s Afropolitan ambition arrives when she receives notification of her eligibility for Phi Beta Kappa. Upon her acceptance to the academic honor society, Neni arranges a meeting with her community college’s dean to secure nominations for several member-only scholarships. The dean refuses due to how little service Neni has contributed to the school’s community. Furthermore, he questions her aspirations to pursue a career in pharmacy, counseling her to consider more “achievable” career goals instead (297). The dean conveys his perspective on Neni’s prospects brusquely, observing that You have two children, your husband doesn’t make enough money, and, by all accounts, you’re having a hard time making ends meet. Pharmacy school is very expensive, Ms. Jonga, and you’re an international student. Unless you change your legal status it’s going to be hard for you to get loans to get the degree, if you can find a way to get your associate’s from BMCC [Borough of Manhattan Community College] in the first place. (296)

Dystopic Dissonance  19 Bluntly, the dean of the community college exposes the chasm between Neni’s Afropolitan dreams and her less glamorous reality. The essence of the Afropolitan identity, according to Crowley, rests on the ability “to craft fluid and multiple selves, to establish home and belonging in several places as ‘universal’ subjects and agents of globalization” (Crowley 134). Although she aspires to life as a pharmacist so he can help people and achieve a level of economic comfort, her lived circumstances ultimately cast her dream as unachievable. This final conversation facilitates Neni’s eventual resignation to her husband’s plan to elect for self-deportation. She begins making arrangements to gather what she needs to craft a notable impression when she and her small family do eventually move back to Limbe, defeated by the mighty United States they had long admired from afar. Thus far, academic discourse considers literary utopias and dystopias as presentations of temporal constructions. “Dystopian novels,” declares Gregory Claeys, “are imaginary futures where much has gone wrong, though sometimes ways out are indicated” (269). In a sense, much of the discourse about African ways of life relies on tropes of old, outdated modes of existence and populations that must to “catch up” to Western technology and schools of thought. The persistent theories of the Dark Continent that requires enlightenment and salvation persist within the contemporary conversations of mobile African subjects – whether Afropolitan or not. However, narratives such as Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers expose the problematics of such condescending representations of Africa and its constituent populations. About another, quite popular, so-called “Afropolitan text,” Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, Dustin Crowley observes that “in effect, the narrative suggests that Afropolitanism is itself a privilege of the West” (133). The Afropolitan dream remains a critical characteristic of the Western utopia. In other words, in the West, the roving African subject can exercise the ability to craft a deliberate narrative of self and home. This creative self-fashioning, in the Afropolitan thought, is not entirely possible in the blighted and limited continent. Africa emerges as a place from which one escapes, rather than a setting in which people live and thrive. Mbue’s novel introduces nuance to this binary, casting the United States as a corrupting force in which one only has limited access to the coveted Afropolitan selffashioning. Indeed, for the Jongas, and for Neni in particular, emigration to the United States makes her vulnerable to a series of new limitations, entirely dependent on her identity and origins. Afropolitans, Crowley observes, “are free to fashion their identities and connections with the continent as they choose (both culturally and materially), enabled in part by a freedom of physical mobility with and between those manifold sites of belonging” (127). This freedom, though promised by Western nations such as the United States, actually begins on the continent from which these migrant subjects desire so fervently to flee. For those without

20  Augusta Atinuke Irele access to middle- and upper middle-class social and financial autonomy, the same dystopic limitations that frustrate them at home follow them on their missions to reinvent themselves in their new Western host countries. Disorienting and demoralizing experiences in the West reinforce social subjugation, and the underprivileged African migrant find herself languishing in the dystopic dissonance between what she thought was possible and what actually remains just out of her grasp.

Works Cited Adjepong, Anima. “Afropolitan Projects: African Immigrant Identities and Solidarities in the United States.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 41, no. 2, 2018, pp. 248–266. Bulawayo, NoViolet. We Need New Names. New York, Boston, & London, Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2013. Claeys, Gergory. Dystopia: A Natural History. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2017. Crowley, Dustin. “How Did They Come to This?: Afropolitanism, Migration, and Displacement.” Research in African Literatures, vol. 49, no. 2, 2018, pp. 125–146. Dabiri, Emma. “Why I’m (Still) Not an Afropolitan.” Afropolitanism: Reboot, edited by Carli Coetzee, Routledge, 2017, pp. 65–74. ———. Why I’m Not An Afropolitan. 21 Jan 2014. https://africasacountry. com/2014/01/why-im-not-an-afropolitan/. Ede, Amatoritsero. “The Politics of Afropolitanism.” Afropolitanism: Reboot, edited by Carli Coetzee, Routledge, 2017, pp. 30–42. Eze, Chielozona. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model.” Afropolitanism: Reboot, edited by Carli Coetzee, Routledge, 2017, pp. 4–15. Fasselt, Rebecca. “I’m Not Afropolitan – I’m of the Continent: A Conversation with Yewande Omotoso.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 50, no. 2, 2014, pp. 231–246. Fosco, Molly. “The Most Successful Ethnic Group in the U.S. May Surprise You.” Ozy, 07 Jun 2018. Jerome, Beau. “Why Nigerian Immigrants Are the Most Successful Ethnic Group in the U.S.” Medium, 2 Jul 2018. Kaba, Amadu Jacky. “Educational Attainment, Income Levels and Africans in the United States: The Paradox of Nigerian Immigrants.” West Africa Review, no. 11, 2007, pp. 1–27. Knudsen, Eva Rask and Ulla Rahbek. “An Afropolitan Literary Aesthetics? Afropolitan Style and Tropes in Recent Diasporic African Fiction.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2017, pp. 115–128. Kusow, Abdi M. “African Immigrants in the United States: Implications for Affirmative Action.” Sociology Mind, vol. 4, no. 1, 2014, pp. 74–83. Mbembe, Achille. “Afropolitanism.” Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, 2007, pp. 26–30. Mbue, Imbolo. Behold the Dreamers. Random House, 2016. Morales, Donald. “An Afropolitan 2017 Update.” Journal of the African Literature Association, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 223–237.

Dystopic Dissonance  21 More, St. Thomas. Utopia. Translated by Paul Turner, 1965: Penguin, 2003. Obioakor, Festus E. and Michael O. Afoláyan. “African Immigrant Families in the United States: Surviving the Sociocultural Tide.” The Family Journal, vol. 15, no. 3, 2007, pp. 265–270. Okpewho, Isidore and Nkiru Nzegwu, editors. The New African Diaspora. Indiana University Press, 2009. Santana, Stephanie Bosch. Exorcizing Afropolitanism: Binyavanga Wainaina Explains Why “I am a Pan-Africanist, not an Afropolitan” at ASAUK 2012. 8 Feb 2013. https://africainwords.com/2013/02/08/exorcizing-afropolitanismbinyavanga-wainaina-explains-why-i-am-a-pan-africanist-not-an-afropolitanat-asauk-2012/. Selasi, Taiye. “Bye-Bye Babar.” The LIP Magazine, 3 Mar 2005. http://thelip. robertsharp.co.uk/?p=76. ———. “Taye Selasi on Discovering Her Pride in Her African Roots.” The Guardian, 22 Mar 2013. www.theguardian.com/books/2013/mar/22/taiyeselasi-afropolitan-memoir. Strohm, Rachel. “The Hipster Africa Experience Does Not Represent Anything Particularly Progressive.” 26 Jul 2015. Takougang, Joseph. “Recent African Immigrants to the United States: A Historical Perspective.” The Western Journal of Black Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 1995, pp. 50–58. United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. Economic Development in Africa: Migration for Structural Transformation. New York and Geneva: United Nations, 2018. Wawrzinek, Jennifer and J.K.S. Makokha, editors. Negotiating Afropolitanism: Essays on Borders and Spaces in Contemporary African Literature and Folklore. Amterdam, Rodopi, 2011.

2

“Tear Down This Wall” Borders, Limits, and National Belonging in South Asian Postcolonial Literature Gaura Narayan

In the context of Gayatri Spivak’s call to the literary imagination to de-transcendentalize nationalism (Nationalism and the Imagination 2010), this essay claims that the movement of peoples from South Asia to the West – broadly conceived – as represented in literary texts undoes the boundary consolidating work of state moves like Brexit and President Trump’s immigration bans, enabling us to imagine communities counter to the nation-states as theorized by Benedict Anderson. These novels imagine what Joseph Slaughter calls “a geocultural and geopolitical alternative to the Westphalian model of the nation-state and of national citizenship” (32). The migrant moves I discuss are not from the metropolitan center of power to the nations of the global South but are from the nations of the global South to the metropolitan centers of power as borders “are easily crossed from metropolitan countries, whereas attempts to enter from the so-called peripheral countries encounter bureaucratic and policed frontiers” (Death of a Discipline 16). This is the problematic border crossing that I direct attention to in this essay as this border crossing extracts a human cost. The human cost accrues from xenophobic exclusions which have their origin in what Sherene Razack pace Hannah Arendt calls “race thinking” which she defines as “the denial of a common bond of humanity between people of European descent and those who are not” (Razack 6; Arendt 161). The literature of migrancy that I examine, articulates an alternate politics of accommodation by interrogating the raison d’etre of the bordered nation-state. Etienne Balibar theorizes the border as that “which isolates or protects communities, but which also … crystallizes conflicts” (68). The border, in other words, produces an “exclusive community” which is predicated on the “politicized exclusion” of the “variations” of the “figures of the stranger, the pariah, the monster, the ‘sub-human,’ the internal enemy, the exile” (70 emphasis in original). Similarly, in Who Sings the Nation-State, Judith Butler reminds us of Hannah Arendt’s argument that “the nation-state … is bound up, as if structurally, with the current expulsion of national minorities” (30). This reminder leads Butler to the observation that the nation-state finds it legitimacy through

“Tear Down This Wall”  23 a dual move made up simultaneously of expulsion and containment or, as she says, the nation-state is a political formation “that requires periodic expulsion and dispossession of its national minorities in order to gain a legitimating ground for itself” (33). The literature of migrancy centralizes border crossing and, thereby, challenges both these forces of expulsion and containment; it de-transcendentalizes nationalism even when it finds itself caught in the hostile binaries of material history, such as 9/11 and its long aftermath. While literature, generally speaking, codifies cultural memory as Spivak suggests (Nationalism and the Imagination 13–14) and while it participates in a massive nationalist rememorative project by recording everything that the collectivity has experienced, the literature of migrancy also pushes its reader “towards the complex textuality of the international” (Nationalism and the Imagination 21). The novels that I refer to in this essay exhibit this kind of a comparatist impulse – even though they are all written in English and so do not enter the lingual memories of non-English worlds – but because they interrogate and “undermine … the possessiveness, the exclusiveness, the isolationist expansionism of mere nationalism” (Nationalism and the Imagination 32). While this task of interrogation is difficult for the postcolonial writer because the postcolonial nation is the fetishized sanctity on which the postcolonial subject/citizen rests a claim to indigenous legitimacy and belonging, there are several examples of migrant populations in the nations of South Asia. At the outset of postcolonial nation formation in 1947, the genre of Partition literature captured the agony of dislocation produced by the dismemberment that accompanied nationalist triumphs following the end of territorial imperialism. In recent times, South Asia has not been as fraught a locus of migrancy or migrant literature as Europe and the United States, although Partha Ghosh’s recent book, Migrants, Refugees, and the Stateless in South Asia (2016), estimates that there are 50 million migrants, refugees, and stateless people in the region who have lived in their adopted host nations for the seven decades since independence and have, for the most part, experienced either benign neglect or assistance. Ghosh gives the example of undocumented Bangladeshis in India who seem to be numerous but, as he says, little is known “largely because of the unavailability of hard data” (xii). However, from 2000 to 2015 the Indian Border Security Force has killed more than a thousand Bangladeshi civilians along the border. There is also the case of the continually displaced Rohingya. Reece Jones explains that “[t]he Rohingya are a Muslim minority population of more than 1.1 million who live in Rakhine State in the northwestern corner of Myanmar” (Jones 62). According to the government of Myanmar, the Rohingya are Bangladeshis who crossed over from Bangladesh. In 1982 Myanmar – then known as Burma – passed a restrictive

24  Gaura Narayan citizenship law that limited citizenship to specific ethnic groups that did not include the Rohingya or to “people who could prove that their ancestors had resided within the borders of the country before 1823, which marked the arrival of the British” (Jones 62). The Rohingya could not document their pre-1823 residence in Myanmar and so they are “a stateless people without the rights of citizenship in Myanmar” (Jones 62). In the first four months of 2015, several boats full of Rohingya sailed for Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. They were and continue to be rebuffed by Thailand. Indonesia and Malaysia took them after a great deal of international pressure. The Bangladeshis in India and the Rohingya in Myanmar are compelling examples of refugee groups with incomplete or inadequate citizenship status. Despite the existence of these marginalized groups, the more compelling border-busting narratives seem to be primarily located in the excluding West where refugees from the Syrian war and other displacing forces have been regularly seeking safe haven. The arrival of these refugees has polarized politics in Europe leading to national decisions such as Brexit. The West was not supposed to end up the way in which Brexit and President Trump’s bans have taken it. According to Reece Jones, through “the 1990s the dominant media narrative was the removal of borders in Europe” with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the lifting of the Iron Curtain in 1990 and the establishing of the Schengen visa which eliminated the need for individual visas for several European countries (Jones 16). This trend toward a borderless world, however, reversed direction in recent times as the member nations of the European Union sought an older norm of “place-based” belonging which depends on the codification of land into “a disciplined commodity, captured on paper” (Jones 166; 97). In order to administer bounded lands, Frontex, a border enforcement agency in Europe was founded in 2005. In some views, 9/11 triggered the move toward a world with militarized borders and consolidated a process that had started in the 16th century in England and was formalized by the treaties of Westphalia in 1648 that set up the boundaries for sovereign political power – separated from the sacred power of the Pope – by which the kings could rule their people. The principles worked out in the treaties of Westphalia were extended in the Berlin Conference of 1884 by which Africa was carved on the basis of ownership by European powers. Similarly, with the breakup of the Ottoman Empire following World War I, Britain and France secretly agreed to separate areas of influence in the often derided Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 … The legacy of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, along with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, the San Remo Resolution of 1920, and the Cairo Conference of 1921, shaped the boundaries of the European Mandate territories in the Middle East that became independent countries in the 1930s

“Tear Down This Wall”  25 and the 1940s … [However,] the boundaries of the contemporary states of the Middle East do not match historical political entities. (Jones 111–112) These boundaries have, therefore, been subject to radical pressure from movements such as the Islamic State or Daesh, which in the post-9/11 world seeks “removal of the Syria-Iraq border as a triumph over the Sykes-Picot and European imposed boundaries” (Jones 112). The post-9/11 world, thus, has produced “border militarization” by the West (Jones 39) and an assault upon the borders of the West and those created by the West in non-Western politics. The postcolonial writers that I read in this essay expose the idea of a bordered nation to scrutiny in the West by locating the persistence as well as the violence of borders understood as political limits in the West all the while preserving the sanctity of the nation imagined as cultural memory for the postcolonial subject, naturally forcing the question why the notion of nation seems to be at different stages of conceptual understanding in the global North and the global South. This question leads me to Homi Bhabha’s opening statements in “DissemiNation” where he says: I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigres and refugees; gathering on the edge of ‘foreign’ cultures … gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language … gathering the memories … of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. (139) In Bhabha’s statement we see the doubleness of the migrant’s move which involves a scattering and a gathering – home and away, domestic and foreign, past and present. This doubleness may explain why the home that the migrant departs from is the clearly remembered nation as it has to be gathered up in memory even as the itinerant actor finds other domiciles, other places of belonging, and gathers in other national communities which are necessarily more labile on account of the doubleness of the migrant’s move. So, to return to my question about the differing notions of nation in the global North and the global South, I suggest – by way of answer – that the nations of the global South are etched in cultural memory that must withstand the assaults of colonial history rather as Partha Chatterjee postulated in his examination of anticolonial nationalism which “creates its own domain of sovereignty in colonial society” (Chatterjee 6). This cultural memory is channeled by the refuge-seeking migrant who seeks a safe place of material belonging in the host nation while also carrying a sense of home in the recesses

26  Gaura Narayan of the psyche. The refuge-seeking migrant, thus, inhabits two homes at once and simultaneously.

Seeking Belonging Doubleness of belonging is gendered in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003) which provides a janus-faced answer to the intertwined questions of scattering and gathering as Chanu leaves but Nazneen laces her iceskates and Razia says, “This is England … [y]ou can do whatever you like” (369). Chanu is a product of British imperial education and can quote from Chaucer, Dickens, and Hardy which his co-worker Wilkie cannot do. But, as Chanu points out, Wilkie is able to mobilize opinion against him and his cohorts because to “the white underclass” the South Asian immigrants “are the only thing standing in the way of them [the white underclass] sliding totally to the bottom of the pile … If they see us rise then they are resentful because we have left our proper place” (21). Race awareness grows and Chanu tells Nazneen when she first arrives, “most of our people here are Sylhetis … to a white person, we are all the same: dirty little monkeys all in the same monkey clan” (14). Despite Chanu’s claim to Englishness via English literature, notions of difference in the host nation prevent him from rewriting the text of Englishness as an inclusive one. This notion of nation that excludes Chanu actually excludes Wilkie also if Bhabha pace John Barrell is to be believed. According to Bhabha who follows Barrell, the language of the 18th-century English gentleman whether he be the Observer, Spectator, or Rambler was “Common to all by virtue of the fact that it manifested the peculiarities of none” (144). If this language of the 18th-century English country gentleman is the basis of the lingual memory that underwrites belonging in the English nation, Chanu and Wilkie are both outside it but Wilkie stakes a claim on the basis of race which visually anchors the claim of ancient birth. Chanu feels unable to stake this claim. What intervenes in Chanu’s assimilation into Englishness is the same thing that consolidates his alliance with the Sylhetis – Spivak calls it nationalism coded as “claims to ancient birth. Its ingredients are to be found in the assumptions of … reproductive heteronormativity” (Nationalism and the Imagination 12). Reproductive heteronormativity produces a sense of nation as a collectivity “bound by birth” (Nationalism and the Imagination 13). This collectivity operates in “the public sphere” as nationalism, but it takes its origin in what Spivak calls “the nation thing” which is an unnamed comfort that simultaneously augments identity and puts it at risk when strangers come to the border and are unaccommodated within “the nation thing” (Nationalism and the Imagination 17; 13). Judith Butler joins Gayatri Spivak as they discuss the condition of the unaccommodated member of a national polity at some length in their Who Sings the Nation-State (2007) where

“Tear Down This Wall”  27 they primarily respond to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of statelessness as it afflicts “the jettisoned life, the one [which is] both expelled and contained” (40). This is the nation-state that Chanu experiences in which sovereign acts are not limited to modes of governmentality but can be exclusionary in other ways. He, therefore, situates himself outside England’s “nation thing” and warns Nazneen of the dangers of making friends with “them.” Chanu’s greatest anxiety is about “the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage” (Brick Lane 78). Nazneen’s and Chanu’s daughter, Shahana, sets aside ethnic heritage and resists Chanu’s efforts to acculturate her into the ways of Bangladesh: “Shahana did not want to listen to Bengali classical music. Her written Bengali was shocking. She wanted to wear jeans … Shahana did not want to go back home” (Brick Lane 128). Chanu does not see that Shahana is home already in England defying the norms of ancient birth as the basis of nation. Poor un-homed Chanu, however, dreams of Mughal glory and retreats into fantasies about 16th-century Bengal (Brick Lane 131). While Chanu retreats into the past, Nazneen finds Karim. Karim is substantially more assimilated than Chanu. He finds his voice in English (Brick Lane 151). He also announces that England is his country (Brick Lane 152). Karim, however, has a dual allegiance since he is also invested in the Islamic ummah, thereby, undoing his relationship with England. He announces, “We are for Muslim rights and culture. We’re into protecting our local ummah and supporting the global ummah” (Brick Lane 174). Nazneen, with wholly unconscious irony, admires Karim for having a “place in the world” (Brick Lane 191). In truth, he seems to have exchanged a place of belonging with a hyper state of belonging to an idea. He is not exactly un-tethered like Nazneen and Chanu; they float between national cultures whereas he carries his sense of national cultures about with him. Karim leads the fight for Islam in England and succeeds in giving a voice to the group that gathers around him (Brick Lane 205). In response, the Lion Hearts announce a “MARCH AGAINST THE MULLAHS” (Brick Lane 286). Not to be outdone, Karim organizes “the March against the March Against the Mullahs” (Brick Lane 300). It is exactly at this point that Nazneen consummates her relationship with him. As Nazneen learns about global Islam from Karim, Shahana brings home a pamphlet called Multicultural Murder which articulates the conservative British fear of the immigrant. This pamphlet is an uncanny echo of De Quincey’s nightmare in which the Malay returns as a composite Oriental and takes over Dove Cottage (De Quincey 108– 110). It sets up the South Asian Muslim immigrant to England as the cause for the vanishing of Englishness from England. It speaks of “Muslims extremists … planning to turn Britain into an Islamic Republic, using a combination of immigration, high birth rates, and conversion”

28  Gaura Narayan (Brick Lane 182). Karim is fully immersed in the hardening of hostile attitudes between the Lion Hearts and the Bengal Tigers. He is strongly critical of the US-led sanctions against Iraq and of the neo-imperialism of the United States in general. All this only serves to undercut any sense of belonging that he might have to England. As 9/11 enters the story, the narrative shifts to the grammatical present as though to indicate the unending present-ness of the story. The family watches the “mesmerizing and impenetrable” story on the television, and Chanu knows that there will be a backlash (Brick Lane 270; 271). And there is as the space and time for debate shrinks. Unable to situate himself in the polarized cultural space that is now emerging, Chanu returns to Bangladesh but Nazneen and the girls stay. She does not stay for Karim – he is just a desire that she has made up like a “quilt with pieces of silk, scraps of velvet, and now that she held it up to the light the stitches showed up large and crude” (Brick Lane 339). She stays for herself. Nazneen, along with the other South Asian women of her community in Tower Hamlets, forms a business venture and finds financial and psychological independence. One of Nazneen’s friends, Mrs. Azad, helps her (and the reader) attach a gendered significance to the complex problem of assimilation and the preservation of ethnic heritage by pointing out some women spend ten, twenty years here and they sit in the kitchen grinding spices all day and learn only two words of English … They go around covered from head to toe, in their little walking prisons, and when someone calls to them in the street they are upset. (Brick Lane 78) We recall that when Nazneen had left her home in London for the first time she had become aware of herself as one without “a coat, without a suit, without a white face, without a destination” (Brick Lane 35). In the course of the novel she is able to find a destination for herself and it is different from the one she had imagined in her years of loneliness and homesickness. We see it at novel’s end when Nazneen goes ice-skating and says, “This is England … You can do whatever you like” (Brick Lane 369). Including stake a claim to membership in the national community, we presume. Peter Morey comments that Nazneen’s story arc “marks the completion of a process by whereby the British multicultural novel comes to embrace a neoliberal ethos of individual economic self-assertion … [and delivers us] an Islam ‘we’ need not be phobic about” (26). Morey is right in suggesting that even as Nazneen finds individual self-assertion, her individualism is an embrace of a core value of her host nation and it is that embrace that renders her Muslim identity non-threatening. Nazneen’s assimilation into England enacts the compromise that Joseph Slaughter discusses whereby the Bildungsroman find narrative conclusion by submitting to “the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, and

“Tear Down This Wall”  29 thereby legitimating the democratic institutions of the … rights-based nation-state” (Slaughter 94). So at novel’s end, Nazneen becomes a willing citizen of England, enters the world of globalized capital, and risks both self-erasure and the evacuation of difference. Her border crossing leads her to the sanctity of the bordered nation-state.

Radical Disengagement The story of Changez in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) is not nearly as genial, as hopeful, or as assimilationist and this is partly because Changez’s story arc reverses the direction of Nazneen’s development. While Nazneen journeys away from the “community assertion” of her migrant community, Changez makes the opposite move from relative assimilation in Western culture to radical disengagement with it (Morey 94). Changez’s story is the story of a perfect immigrant from the model minority in the United States whose American dream comes true until, of course, it does not. Crucial to the collapse of the American dream is Changez’s move from unmarked ethnicity to assertive ethnicity in the aftermath of 9/11. The novel is spoken entirely in the voice of the narrator who tells two tales – one of his life in the United States mostly before 9/11 and the other of his interaction with a silent but reactive interlocutor who is the primary recipient of the original story after 9/11 in Pakistan. We never find out exactly who the interlocutor is and why he is there. According to Morey, the one-sidedness of the novelistic narrative “refuses us the normalizing consolation of dialogue” as we are held captive in Changez’s mind and voice (Morey 216). We are compelled to follow Changez as he tells of his familiarity with America’s most privileged locations such as Princeton University and Underwood Samson, an elite Wall Street firm. The day Changez starts his job at Underwood Samson he says, “I did not think of myself as a Pakistani, but as an Underwood Samson trainee” as he swaps national belonging with corporate belonging (Reluctant Fundamentalist 34). When the new trainees go out to a bar on Forty-Fourth Street, Changez comments, “We were marvelously diverse … and yet we were not: all of us, Sherman included, hailed from the same elite universities – Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Yale” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 39). This sameness is fragile. The tension between sameness and duality is evident in Changez’s relationship with Erica and her family. As he surveys her family’s “prestigious apartment on the Upper East Side” of Manhattan it seems to him to bear something of a likeness to his own “prestigious house in Gulberg” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 50–51). He alone, however, sees the parity between himself and Erica. Difference asserts itself in the course of Changez’s conversation with Erica’s father who says, “You guys have got some serious problems with fundamentalism” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 55). Changez bristles at what he identifies as the “typical

30  Gaura Narayan American undercurrent of condescension” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 55). Despite bristling at American condescension, Changez momentarily takes on the performance of Americanness in Manila where he says of himself, “I was the only non-American in our group, but I suspected my Pakistaniness was invisible, cloaked by my suit, by my expense account, and – most of all – by my companions” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 71). In New York, Erica guarantees him social success which is contingent on the erasure of his Pakistani identity. This erasure cannot be complete in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 9/11 changes everything. Changez sees the twin towers come down by himself in a hotel room in Manila and smiles. He explains his reaction by saying, “my thoughts were not with the victims of the attack … no, I was caught up in the symbolism of it all, the fact that someone had so visibly brought America to her knees” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 73). He realizes, of course, that his “feelings would be unacceptable” to his colleagues and so he undertakes “to hide them as well as” he can (Reluctant Fundamentalist 73). Subterfuge and comfort both become difficult as he is strip searched before being allowed to board the plane to New York (Reluctant Fundamentalist 74). As he reads about the United States war against Afghanistan, “a fellow Muslim” nation to Pakistan, he finds that his alliances and allegiances are put under pressure (Reluctant Fundamentalist 100). Meanwhile, he is fired from Underwood Samson and spends his last days in New York being antagonized by the “affronts [that] were everywhere; the rhetoric emerging from … [America] … [that] provided a ready and constant fuel for … [his] anger” (Reluctant Fundamentalist 167). Disoriented and alienated in New York, Changez returns to Lahore only to come back to New York with a beard. This does not make him Mister Popular at work and he starts to think of himself not merely as a gifted professional but also as a cultural product with emotional complications that stand in the way of assimilation (Reluctant Fundamentalist 145; 151). Morey observes that in the aftermath of 9/11, Changez weaves his own legend – one consciously in alignment with the types of stereotype the media will concoct … He is, in effect, consciously pandering to the image of the ‘fundamentalist’ that will be eagerly beamed around the world as the required mediated Muslim ‘type’ – a sort of off-the-shelf Islamic Rage Boy, complete with beard, slogans, and flag burning. (223) Even as Changez changes, so does America. Once the place of desired belonging, America goes through its own transformation “giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time” and fundamentalism seems to spiral in a strange reciprocity as antagonists start to mirror and

“Tear Down This Wall”  31 resemble each other (Reluctant Fundamentalist 114). He decides that he has to stop America because as he says in an impassioned outburst to his interlocutor: As a society you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums … Such an America had to be stopped in the interest of humanity, but also in your own. (Reluctant Fundamentalist 168) The novel ends on the cusp of a violent crisis in which it is impossible to separate victim from perpetrator as both are bound by the epistemological violence of a hostile dynamic which is the basis of the real violence that probably ensues but remains outside the margins of the text. Even as this novel concludes with a sense of unbridgeable difference, it forces an interrogative reading of the West which injures even as it has been injured. It also, crucially, locates the conversation about America in Pakistan removing the privilege of a Western location for the Western agent/operative.

A Hostile Dynamic The hostile dynamic that marks The Reluctant Fundamentalist structures several 9/11 novels including H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009) and Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2010). H. M. Naqvi’s Home Boy (2009) essentially repeats the story arc of the misunderstood Pakistani who changes in the aftermath of 9/11. The “I” of the novel is Shehzad or Chuck as he is better known as. In the early chapters of Home Boy, Chuck believes that his ten months in New York have made him a New Yorker because as his friend Rakim says, “it’s not where you’re from but it’s where you’re at” (Home Boy 20). Chuck gets a job at an elite investment bank on Wall Street and becomes fluent in Street-speak – due diligence, granular analysis, etc. A year later the Great Bull Run ends and he is fired. He also learns that just like three black men were gangbangers, and three Jews a conspiracy, three Muslims had become a sleeper cell. And later, much later, the pendulum would swing back, and everybody would celebrate progress, the storied tradition of accommodation, on TV talk shows and posters in middle schools. There would be ceremonies, public apologies, cardboard displays. In the interim, however, I threatened order, threatened civilization. (Home Boy 154)

32  Gaura Narayan In that interim, he finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and is arrested along with his three close friends in the “aggressive policing of difference” that sweeps through a traumatized New York (Morey 147). His experience with the arresting police officers teaches him that it did not really matter what he did, he “couldn’t change the way … [he] was perceived” (Home Boy 130). He is perceived as a “sand nigger” (Home Boy 137) and expects to be tortured in addition to ordinary run of the mill beating because in “a changed America, it seemed anything could happen” (Home Boy 142). The novel, however, gestures to a miraculous recovery by having a gruff police officer believe Chuck and release him from prison and also by having Chuck receive a job offer when he is at his lowest point. These gestures are not enough for Chuck, however, and so when he calls his mother to tell her of the new job offer he says that he “feels like a marked man” (Home Boy 262). He decides to go home to Karachi. Before leaving, however, he permits himself a brief fantasy in which he marries Amo, moves to Scarsdale, has a family, and an SUV in the garage all in defiance of the fallout from 9/11 (Home Boy 268). The novel ends with an Epilogue which takes the reader back to a September day before 9/11. The last sentence embeds a fragment from Sinatra’s “New York, New York” and textually resurrects the city which has and has not shattered because the writing makes it whole. Shaila Abdullah’s Saffron Dreams (2010) shifts the gender emphasis of Hamid’s and Naqvi’s novels by giving us a grieving widow as the “I” of the novel. Her name is Arissa and her husband, Faizan, is one of the victims of 9/11. The central question that Arissa has to answer in the aftermath of 9/11 is: how could she possibly be a victim when she shares the religion of the attackers? A reporter asks her, “Mrs. Illahi, being a Muslim, how does it feel to be attacked by your own people?” (Saffron Dreams 123). Later in the novel she reflects that Muslims were regarded as a race gone bad, mad. The people of our adopted land had lost faith in us, and we couldn’t trust our own. The line between allies and enemies was growing thinner by the day. Watching our backs had become a habit, a necessity of the strange times we lived in. We struggled to know ourselves only to lose ourselves in the interpretation of others, in the hyphenation of our worlds. (Saffron Dreams 154) She also notes that as Muslim identity becomes difficult to sustain some of her Muslim friends change their names – Salim became Sam, Ali converted to Allan – in an attempt to hide identities. When asked their nationality they offered

“Tear Down This Wall”  33 evasive answers. We were homesick individuals in an adopted homeland. We couldn’t break free from our origin, and yet we wanted to soar. (Saffron Dreams 60) The hyphenation of her world, however, is also an expansion of her sympathies. As she says, “when you leave a land behind, you don’t shift loyalties – you just expand your heart and fit two lands in. You love them equally” (Saffron Dreams 174). In Abdullah’s novel, gender is key to this expansion. Indeed, we could say that it is Abdullah’s centralizing of gender that generates desire for the United States in her novel as Arissa is convinced that it is better for her and her imagined girl child to stay in the United States despite several arguments to the contrary. Arissa also has a key moment of connection with a woman near ground zero who had “paused near … [her] and nodded a silent admission of … [their shared] loss” (Saffron Dreams 56). A major moment of recovery is when Arissa receives a phone call from Ann Marie Beaumont who was very possibly the last person to see Faizan on the morning of the 11th. She had been having brunch with her daughter at the windows on the world restaurant at the top of one of the twin towers and Faizan had been her waiter. This connection rewrites the nation as a gendered and grieving collective in excess of the boundaries of the political entity that would demonize Arissa in the world outside novelistic imagining.

A New Mosaic Arrisa’s desire to remain in the United States re-emerges as immigrant desire in Mohsin Hamid’s recent novel, Exit West (2017). Exit West jettisons the journey narrative in the interest of a narrative of ambivalent arrival as Hamid attempts to fashion a new mosaic in his representation of the host nation. By making the border crossing an act of magic, Hamid’s novel seems to combine two major approaches toward a no borders politics as discussed by Natasha King. These two approaches are the autonomy of migration approach and the act of citizenship approach. The autonomy of migration approach radically disregards borders and envisions “an entirely other way of being to the state” (Exit West 32). The act of citizenship approach is concerned with the rights of the migrant within the host country. The difference between the two approaches is philosophic more than material because both approaches return us to the possibility of an alternate social organization – an alternate national community – that refuses the power of the state in favor of the power, the agency, and the centrality of the excluded migrant individual. In Exit West, Saeed and Nadia find themselves in a near constant state of movement without any certitudes about belonging. They embody the “Nomadology” that Deleuze and Guattari imagined as a response to

34  Gaura Narayan “the ordering logic of the state” (qtd. Jones 179). They are forced by the transformation of their unnamed hometown to flee from it and to seek refuge in Mykonos where they find “everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was” (Exit West 106). Their escape occurs a hundred pages into the novel so that the reader is very well aware of their personal and cultural history before they lose it as they gain refugee status. After Mykonos they find themselves in London in a house which also contains Nigerians, Somalis, Guatemalans, Indonesians, and a family from the borderland between Myanmar and Thailand. We assume these are the Rohingya. Meanwhile, All over London houses and parks and disused lots were being peopled in this way, some said by a million migrants, some said by twice that … [with] the great expanses of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, filling up with tents and rough shelters, such that it was now said that between Westminster and Hammersmith legal residents were in a minority, and native-born ones vanishingly few, with local newspapers referring to the area as the worst of the black holes in the fabric of the nation. (Exit West 129) London, appears to be two cities – one lit up “brighter than any place Saeed or Nadia had seen before,” and the other made up of “the city’s dark swaths” (Exit West 146). Light London and dark London seem to bear a striking and uncanny likeness to Fanon’s settler town and negro village reminding us of the persistence of colonial cartography (The Wretched of the Earth 38–40). Light London has people who dine “in elegant restaurants” and ride in “shiny black cabs … In dark London, rubbish accrued, uncollected, and underground stations were sealed” (Exit West 146). In all the different communities in the novel, sameness and difference jostle with each other and each group finds a different principle of cohesion. Nadia finds herself with the Nigerians and discovers that in this group they conversed in a language that was built in large part from English, but not solely from English … [and] they spoke different variations of English, different Englishes, and so when Nadia gave voice to an idea or opinion among them, she did not need to fear that her views could not be comprehended, for her English was like theirs, one among many. (Exit West 148) Saeed finds a community of people from his country or as Nadia says, people from “the country we used to be from” (Exit West 153). This group is led by a man who advocates a “banding together of migrants along religious principles” reminding us of Karim and his ummah (Exit West 155). Saeed finds comfort in sameness because in dark London the

“Tear Down This Wall”  35 migrants are subject to the violence of “murders and rapes and assaults” which cause them to blame each other, break up their solidarity, and also to move, in the manner of cards dealt from a shuffled pack during the course of a game, reassembling themselves in suits and runs of their own kind, like with like, or rather superficially like with superficially like, all the hearts together, all the clubs together, all the Sudanese, all the Hondurans. (Exit West 146–147) Nadia feels that “the farther they moved from the city of their birth, through space and time, the more he [Saeed] sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her was unambiguously gone” (Exit West 187). For his part, Saeed wants to “feel for Nadia what he had always felt for Nadia, and the potential loss of this feeling left him unmoored, adrift in a world where one could go anywhere but still find nothing” (Exit West 187). The exploding notion of national community impacts Britain and Nadia thinks, that “the nation was like a person with multiple personalities, some insisting on union and some on disintegration” (Exit West 158). The nativists resist the dissolving of the nation’s boundaries and advocate “wholesale slaughter” of the migrants (Exit West 159) reminding us that the hardening of the border is “the source of violence [and], not a response to it” (Reece Jones 5). The battle of London when it comes is hopelessly one-sided. It features British regiments “with ancient names and modern kit standing ready to cut through any resistance that might be encountered” (162). This battle could easily take on the contour of conflict engendered by what Sherene Razack calls “states of exception” (11). Drawing from several political theorists, Razack elucidates the state of exception as a condition in which civil order and the rule of law are suspended in order to contain the threat that the migrant poses to the social order of a host nation. Razack demonstrates that the state of exception grants the host nation the “right to police” socalled outsiders and to confine them in camps (12). Additionally, Razack points out that camps “are not simply contemporary excesses born of the West’s current quest for security, but instead represent a more ominous, permanent arrangement of who is and who is not a part of the human community” (12–13). In a darker understanding, this conflict could be a figuration of Balibar’s point that the exclusionary forces are “always citizens, ‘knowing’ and ‘imagining’ themselves as such, who exclude from citizenship and who, thus, ‘produce’ non-citizens in such a way as to make it possible for them to represent their own citizenship to themselves as a ‘common’ belonging” (76 emphasis in original). The novel refuses both these options of contaminated belonging and spatial containment as it seeks what Spivak considers the ethical responsibility

36  Gaura Narayan of the literary text to inscribe collective responsibility when “cultural origin is de-transcendentalized” (Death of a Discipline 102). At the end, the natives and their forces step “back from the brink” and London accepts the migrants. This is a remarkable moment because it recognizes the autonomy of migration and engages the problematic assumptions of citizenship and the exclusions encoded within it. In Hamid’s novel, migrant movement and the resulting challenge to citizenship have centralized “migrant agency rather than [state] control” and have rendered the migrant as the one with power (King 46). This end is qualitatively different from the end of Nazneen’s story precisely because it involves collectivities on both sides of the negotiation.

Concluding Thoughts It is productive, at this point, to invoke Hannah Arendt’s related notions of “the right to rights” and statelessness as discussed by her in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt describes statelessness as the result of the “revocation of naturalization” such as the denaturalization of “all naturalized Germans of Jewish origin” (277 fn). These stateless persons are also “rightless” because they are denied the rights and privileges of citizenship (279). Arendt shows that the problems of statelessness could not be solved either by repatriation or naturalization (283). According to Arendt, “the calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (295). Etienne Balibar discusses the “political use” rather than the “strictly statutory definition” of Arendt’s notion of the “right to rights” in his Citizenship (65). Balibar notes the shift in the use of the term from a “constituted right” originating in political citizenship or belonging in a nation-state to a “constituent power” or the “ability to assert rights in a public space” (65; 66 emphasis in original). Balibar points out that the “constituted right” is frequently located in border communities “where the question is precisely the possibility of expression or assertion, and therefore of political existence” (66 emphasis in original). One of the barriers faced by members of border communities, such as slaves and immigrants, is the resistance that emerges from “a collective imagination that portrays the young immigrant as a potential domestic enemy, who threatens not only the community’s security, but also its cultural and religious identity” (67). These groups suffer, what Balibar calls, “internal exclusion” whereby the “condition of foreignness is projected within a political space or national territory to create an inadmissible alterity” (69 emphasis in original). Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak discuss the position of the foreigner in Who Sings the Nation-State (2010) in terms of the power of the state. Judith Butler points out, “[t]he category of the stateless is reproduced not simply by the nation-state but by a certain operation of power that seeks

“Tear Down This Wall”  37 to forcibly align nation with state” (Who Sings the Nation-State 12). The stateless are those “spectral humans deprived of ontological weight and failing the tests of social intelligibility required for minimal recognition” including “those whose age, gender, race, nationality, and labor status not only disqualify them for citizenship but actively ‘qualify’ them for statelessness” (Who Sings the Nation-State 15). Butler and Spivak conclude that Arendt’s understanding of the nation as a public space that expresses a certain monolithic national identity prompts her critique of the nation. They remark that Arendt espoused the formation of a truly federated state which would institutionalize social plurality and diffuse sovereignty (Who Sings the Nation-State 24). The jettisoned life, such as we find in the novels I discuss, is “saturated with power precisely at the moment in which it is deprived of citizenship” (Who Sings the Nation-State 40). In all the novels discussed in this essay, we find Hannah Arendt’s disenfranchized stateless whom Judith Butler calls the “interiorized outside” of the nation (Who Sings the Nation-State 16). All the texts that I have briefly examined populate host nations with cultural and racial difference by forcing the reader’s imagination out of national boundaries. These texts mark the separation between the nation as the product of a reproductive heteronormativity and the nation as a re-imagined community with difference at its heart. Hamid, along with Ali and others, dares to include those who are in a “highly juridified” state “of dispossession” (Who Sings the Nation-State 42) in the public politics of the nation returning us to Nazneen who said, “This is England … You can do whatever you like.” In stark contrast is the plaintive statement made by Khalid Saifullah, 70, to the New York Times who migrated from Myanmar to Pakistan four decades ago: “They won’t let me be a citizen, because then they have to give me rights and they won’t call me a refugee, because then they have to give me aid … I am not a citizen or a refugee. I am illegal alien. I am nothing” (Zahra-Malik A4). In a novel he would have a local habitation as well as his name. Literature, as Spivak pace Derrida says, “escapes the system” and, via telepoesis, imagines alterity (Death of a Discipline 52).

Works Cited Abdullah, Shaila. Saffron Dreams: A Novel. Ann Arbor: Modern History Press, 2010. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2003. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Inc., 1968. Balibar, Etienne. Citizenship. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015. Barrell, John. English Literature in History 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide Survey. London: Hutchinson, 1983. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

38  Gaura Narayan Butler, Judith and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. London: Seagull Books, 2010. Chatterjee, Partha. The Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Ed. and Intro. Alethea Hayter. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Ghosh, Partha. Migrants, Refugees, and the Stateless in South Asia. New Delhi: Sage, 2016. Hamid. Mohsin. Exit West. New York: Riverhead Books, 2017. ———. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Orlando: Harcourt, 2007. Jones, Reece. Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. London: Verso, 2016. King, Natasha. No Borders: The Politics of Immigration Control and Resistance. London: Zed Books. 2016. Morey, Peter. Islamophobia and the Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 2018. Naqvi, H. H. Homeboy: A Novel. New York: Shaye Areheart Books, 2009. Razack, Sherene. Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. 2nd ed., Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2011. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham UP, 2007. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. ———. Nationalism and the Imagination. London: Seagull Books, 2010. Zahra-Malik, Mehreen. “Far From Myanmar’s Strife, Pakistan’s Rohingya Suffer.” New York Times 13 September 2017, p. A4.

3

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics Disability, Dispossession, and Diaspora C. R. Grimmer

Introduction In this chapter, global coalitional work emerges from global finance capital’s violent migration patterns enacted across, through, and out of water. While water in the selected text illuminates how it has been historically leveraged against livability for Black and Brown bodies, I examine how diasporic queer and feminist decolonial coalitions are already creating, as Ashon Crawley terms them, “otherwise possibilities” for livable worlds. They do this work, I argue, by re-imagining the relationship between migration, water, borders, and livability. In particular, while Black feminist theory offers an analytic of global finance capital as inherently racial capital,1 South Asian feminist and queer theories offer an analytic of environmental and colonial forced migration patterns, while crip, disability, and queer theory problematize property relations across each field. I will argue through a contemporary hybrid poetry text – Bhanu Kapil’s book of poems on South Asian diasporic migration and schizophrenia, Schizophrene – that building diasporic coalitions out of dispossession and environmental matter necessarily use water and legibility to create otherwise possibilities for linguistic and geographic borders and boundaries. This is not to say that Kapil’s text or a coalitional methodology across disciplines “erases” or “elides” borders and boundaries themselves – rather, Kapil’s literary work and this chapter’s interdisciplinary suturing necessitates re-apprehending dominant orders of meaning-making in colonial, global, and environmental representations for livability. 2 This chapter’s explicit turn to diasporic coalitions, unlike cosmopolitanism, concretizes the historical violence as well as particularity of different colonial racial formations by making explicit historical, 1 See work already excavating this history from Hortense Spillers to Grace Kyungwon Hong. 2 This is taken up by trans-oceanic scholars at length, such as Hoskins and Nguyen’s recent collection in 2014 on Transpacific Studies. I plan to better respond to this field in more depth through the revision process. Additional reading and research suggestions would be great for developing this work more in the future.

40  C. R. Grimmer concrete lived experiences. Diaspora here refuses universal or romanticized “melting pot” cultural contact or abstract universal status of “the human” as “global citizen.” Cosmopolitanism, for instance, supports a universalist liberal humanism that celebrates cultural difference only insofar as it does not challenge contemporary, existing structures of colonial violence3 or abstracted and universal definitions of the human as global citizen – such structures, for example, as finance capital’s exploitation of South Asian populations for cheap labor, access to global travel at will instead of by force through water privatization, and so on. In other words, selectively universalizing otherwise particularity serves a liberal humanist project that already took as its aim the commodification and dehumanization of colonized and enslaved subjectivities. This creates the free or cheap labor in global finance markets and existential surplus in global climate change that undergirds cosmopolitan access to wealth and livability even as that cosmopolitanism elides the ongoing violence of colonialism and racial slavery. This is not a new call: Jodi Byrd recently examined how these histories of exploitation and racism are braided in her 2011 seminal text, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Byrd articulates a necessary relationship between historical particularity and effective coalitions between disciplines that examine indigenous, migration, and Black feminist studies. How, then, in turning to coalitions with diasporas such as South Asian migration articulated in conjunction with Black feminist diaspora studies,4 can a different analytic build otherwise, livable worlds? The particular diasporic analytics in this chapter, then, must take seriously a critique of the human as it has been historically co-constructed across watery passages and ableist legibility frameworks. I argue that it is precisely through these necessary transgressions that Kapil’s text illuminates a coalitional livability only existent through the overlays between disability studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race and gender theories. I argue that Kapil’s text creates a queer, feminist, decolonial, antiracist, and crip posthumanism striving for particularity over universality, and in that process illuminating see what Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick term the “normally inhabitable” coincides with the “normally legible.” In this way, the troubled landscape troubles how language travels, and with that subjectivity. Disability studies on 3 Sarah Dowling’s recent book discusses this at length, historicizing the recent scholarly attention to diaspora and indigeneity in Chapter 1, especially. See Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood Under Settler Colonialism. 4 In this vein, colonialism’s anti-Blackness, as Latinx performance and anti-colonial scholar Jade Power Sotomayor explains, sustains the rhetoric of who is legibly read being “human” as a reckoning with multiple intertwined, particular histories of subjugation. This project functions in a similar methodology as Power Sotomayor, but turning to South Asian diaspora and disability studies.

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  41 legibility and humanistic embodiment have been already co-articulated with queer and antiracist illegibility through scholars such as Alison Kafer and Lisa Cacho. More specifically: cultural studies scholars Alison Kafer and Lisa Cacho have both explored the co-formations of disability, pathologization, race, and criminalization within fields of disability and critical race studies in the continental U.S.; however, co-forming analytics stemming from migration, queer feminism, global finance capital, and the South Asian diaspora remain as yet scarcely examined from a disability poetics lens. It is at this juncture, then, that texts creating borders and boundaries, or abstracting subjectivity to make it legible only as pathologization, that Kapil’s articulation of schizophrenic discharge emerges to write in these otherwise cartographies. This argument repeatedly references finance capital, which I mark here as always already implicitly racial finance capital. I use finance capital because of its specific relationship to diaspora and disability: That the Oxford English Dictionary does not house a concrete definition but rather conflates it with money in its most abstract state – “finance” – is endemic to how the operations produce the illusion of abstraction precisely in order to exact a historical violence that, while taking on new, speculative, risk-assessment features post-World War II (WWII), importantly enable the contemporary modes of racial violence. In this chapter, I argue that the post-WWII shift to late capitalism necessitates the specificity of “finance capital,” as the non-synonymous meanings with “finance” materialize the conditions that produce cultural emergences both supportive of and otherwise to racial property accumulation and exploitation. Finance capital in this argument will be distilled to rapid transformation of capital into liquid assets that are easy to move when at risk of no longer accumulating wealth. As finance capital scholars have already historicized, this is part of managing investments and the expansion of capitalism in post-WWII globalism.5 In an U.S. American continental context, this means positioning liquid assets in different global spaces as part of the attempt to make and create a global market managed by Western U.S. and European countries. This coincides with market shifts being simultaneously seen as inherently chaotic, “free,” and unmanageable – much like molecular life scales.6 I argue that seeing finance capital as producing modes of racialization in co-articulation with dominant environmental rhetorics functions through the two movements anxiety around invisible-to-the-eye yet deadly toxins and manipulation of risk management; in particular, 5 See Richard Godden’s “Labor, Language, and Finance Capital.” 6 This has already been explained by Bruce Braun, who terms it “the molecularization of life.” I explain this term and Braun’s argument in more detail in Chapter 2.

42  C. R. Grimmer the finance capital rhetoric of protection and immunity – a neoliberal method of individualizing risk and exposure to precarity through risk assessment and management7 – dovetails with rhetorics of “epidemics, extradition requests, the pathologization of immigrants, and computer viruses (and now environmentalism)” (Esposito 1). I argue that the twinned processes worked were participatory in each other’s formations as a mode of racialization to protect a historically constituted, propertied “human” from its implosion; or rather, to reconstitute it as an abstract, universal, global cosmopolitanist human or posthuman subject.

Terms for World-building: “Otherwise Possibilities,” “Antiracist Posthumanism,” “Demonic Ground,” and “Decolonial Performatic” This argument builds out of terms from each discipline that require introductory explanation. One of the significant barriers to cross-field, or even interdisciplinary work, is a shared rhetoric. Here, I outline several terms that I bring together throughout my argument. First: Crawley’s use of “otherwise possibilities” constitutes possibilities inherent to plurality. This method functions as world-building that escapes more linear, historically bound methods: … what is, what exists, is but one of many. Otherwise possibilities exist alongside that which we can detect with our finite sensual capacities … Otherwise is a word that names plurality as its core operation, otherwise bespeaks the ongoingness of possibility, of things existing other than what is given, what is known, what is grasped. Otherwise possibility is what I think Blackpentecostal aesthetics produce for thinking blackness and flesh, for thinking blackness and performance, as gathering and extending that which otherwise is discarded and discardable, those two modalities as modes of being and existence. Otherwise names the subjectivity in the commons, an asubjectivity that is not about the enclosed self but the open, vulnerable, available, enfleshed organism. (2, 24–25, emphasis added) Naming antiracist posthumanism as otherwise possibilities is critical to finding a hopeful response and praxis to the historical critique of the human. My use of posthumanism in this project as a potentially antiracist method for livability might in this way depart from abstract, dehistoricized, racially “colorblind” modes of posthumanism. Posthumanism already, for instance, is heavily and rightfully critiqued for prematurely evacuating the historical category of the human. As Alexander Weheliye 7 See Fredric Jameson’s “Culture and Finance Capital” and Jean Comaroff’s “Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism.”

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  43 points out, those who never had access to the legal and protected status of the human in the first place are rightfully wary when it is tossed out for another universal “posthumanism” without careful historical critique or awareness of how the human’s racial history might be perpetuated in posthuman theories. With antiracist posthumanism, though, a concept I build out piece by piece in each chapter, I am bringing antiracist, queer, feminist, decolonial, crip, and otherwise coalitional possibilities into the scope of posthumanism. The historical critique creates a coalitional method that sutures Crawley’s explanation of subjectivity and race with Rose Braidotti’s critical posthuman subject: I define the critical posthuman subject within an eco-philosophy of multiple belongings, as a relational subject constituted in and by multiplicity, that is to say a subject that works across differences and is also internally differentiated, but still grounded and accountable. Posthuman subjectivity expresses an embodied and embedded and hence partial form of accountability, based on a strong sense of collectivity, relationality and hence community building. (49) I argue in this way that antiracist posthumanism converges with the plurality of “otherwise possibilities” to create an affirmative linguistic. In these terms, the mode of being is not contingent on its “anti-” alone and thereby restructuring the original as the whole and epistemic beginning. This mode also refuses the universalist cosmopolitan human and posthumanist statuses that undermine the materially embedded possibilities for diasporic world-building. This term is also in coalition with Braidotti’s assertion that posthumanist work can be a hopeful project, one that does not “[sink] into the rhetoric of the crisis of Man” (37). In other words: this word choice responds to the “duplicitous” abstract/material conduits of finance capital’s racial regimes with multiple linguistic tools that both critique and affirm, that look back in order to look forward. In the terms of Epeli Hauʻofa: “It is there, far into the past ahead, leading on to other memories, other realities, other homelands” (19) that the coalitional work has already begun. It is thus also a temporal suggestion: the present tense refutes the debt economy of finance capital, where, since it “can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been” (Cooper 31).8 It is also, as I will argue, a necessarily affect-oriented 8 Finally, Frederic Jameson and related scholars have examined the relationship between poetry and finance capital, but without accounting for how finance capital operates by producing racial and gendered difference; like Cooper’s history of finance capital and molecular biology, Jameson reads race as tangential to capitalism.

44  C. R. Grimmer ­

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  45 basic binary of language and body, abstraction and materialization, or logocentrism inherent to focuses on the body’s performative acts apart from word-based language would be refuted through a more careful integration of dysfluency as potential subversion of linguistic norms (5).10 However, what forms of dysfluency are read as pathological or disabled because they subvert nationally grammared linguistic norms? Finally, to write scholarship based on poetry and poetics that refuse dominant meaning-making orders requires a constant awareness of how logocentrism oftentimes disavows the knowledges produced through inter- corporeal, kinetic/kinesthetic, musical, and other practices. In terms of logocentrism, whiteness and the abstraction of metaphorical linguistic representation does not necessarily map onto words themselves, but rather emerges out of conceptual fusions similar to those of whiteness and its colonial demands on universalized, abstract subjectivity. In addition, looking to how words might refuse the “whiteness … considers the limitations of scholars’ discursive resources and the ways Western intellectualism produces the conditions of possibility by which black social life remains largely incomprehensible and ignorable, as the two factors are co-constitutive” (Bragin 102). This incomprehensibility and ignorability re-surface in those word-based texts that refuse easy generic or grammatically linear readings of subject development. That sense of space as it is linguistically represented and inhabited becomes an entry point for Black feminist coalitions with additional texts on diasporic migration across the Atlantic. These moments of producing language also produce imaginaries in part through the word-based refusal of “transparent space” on the page of words as much as on the map. As Jade Power Sotomayor adds in a critique of logocentrism and the care necessitated by turning to word-based mediums for genre and theory critique: “It was the word that produced the border” (28). Power Sotomayor expands on how “dancing bodies threaten Western logocentric conceptualizations of the border, thus enacting a type of ‘embodied sovereignty’ in this geography,” a sovereignty11 that Power Sotomayor borrows from Sandoval’s term, “decolonial performatic” (17). This same type of dance and performance as enacted in texts that refuse the generic conventions of dominant literature and theory canons: texts that assert



46  C. R. Grimmer how grammar is already embodied and historical. As I will argue in the subsequent close reading of Kapil, decolonial performatics are not bound to abstract/material or word/dance binaries, but rather are “[movements that produce] space and place” (Power Sotomayor 27), which can also function in word-based texts as embodied sovereignty.12 This ensures that “we gain insight to the materiality of colonial occupation when we understand it as a ‘physical writing on the land” (Sotomayor 28). This insight includes word-based linguistic physicalities that write decolonial relations to land, water, and air. Here, schizophrenic world-building materializes out of the two-fold history of racializing brown bodies through global circulation of goods pathologizing the diasporic subjectivity that refuses a property, bordered sense of linear American grammars.

“The Account Begun Mid-Ocean”: Diasporic Waters and Disability Schizophrene, a book of poems by Bhanu Kapil, came out in December 2011 from Nightboat Books, a mid-sized indie poetry press. The book exemplifies Kapil’s cross-genre aesthetic: written in fragmented notebook prose excerpts, it examines the relationship between mental illness and migration for women in the South Asian Indian diaspora post-Partition. Her text becomes an environmental, nonlinear narrative for reclaiming the constructedness of all of identity without foregoing the violent conditions that mobilize diaspora and schizophrenic possibility in the first place. Throughout the book, for instance, Kapil co-articulates mental illness and migration in the South Asian diaspora, especially implicating bodies being gendered and racialized through rhetorics of (dis)ability. As I will argue, Kapil stages this confrontation through the syntactic, affective, disability poetics sites. Kapil begins her book in the middle of her notebook’s “notes,” setting the tone for a nonlinear material relation between the text, the writer’s material experience, and the environment: “I threw the book into the dark garden. The account begun mid-ocean, in a storm” (1). The two sentences, alone and a third of the way down on the page, contradict any possibility of writing from a linear temporality: the book’s various stages of decomposition (pun intended), as well as its being repeatedly thrown into the garden recur throughout the text. Notably, she does not say the account “is” begun, which would make a complete sentence, nor that it “began,” which would clarify the subject of the statement. The story itself becomes a potential speaking subject, so that neither

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  47 the account itself nor the “I” of the speaker begins in isolation from the other. The implication of begun is that it now has begun or it was begun  – two different tenses, neither of which are resolved. The confusion of “where” – garden or ocean – is thus partly about “when,” so that the story is immediately not in a “beginning” stance. It refuses a temporal and spatial ontology that delineates past, present, and future, as well as ground, water, air continuums. In this way, the opening challenges poetic traditions’ assumptions about the beginning, middle, and end remaining temporally and spatially secured within a larger narrative arc. The migratory experience, which is portrayed as a material relationship between telling the experience and the experience itself, here bears nonlinear ties to narrative trajectory and normatively/nationally bounded “home.” This recursive space is integral to Kapil’s subjectivity existing, as Jodi Byrd puts it when examining indigenous narratives, “liminally” in the “ungrievable spaces” of suspicion and unintelligibility (Byrd 2). In Gayatri Gopinath’s seminal text on queer South Asian Indian Diaspora, Impossible Desires, home and the queer female’s migratory experience becomes an archive for critical history (15). Here, the book lands in the garden of that home, and the beginning state is not necessarily reproductive nor propertied, which would embody Gopinath’s critique of how South Asian diaspora has been a gendering experience of womanhood being constrained to home-making across the continents in which migrants travel or “home-make.” Instead, Kapil’s garden bears a critical relation to the environmental, global matter of race, gender, disability, and colonialism. In this way, it can be co-articulated with a Black feminist critique of patrilineal kinship relations and propertied “ground” being nation-making and securing as opposed to demonic. At the same time, the opening explicitly centers linguistic temporality building, wherein the beginning is an imperfect, ongoing past act embedded within the text decomposing in the ecological space cultivated by the diasporic speaker. As the book continues, this temporal, materially linguistic act becomes inseparable from the process of lived schizophrenic subjectivity that contrast epistemological science and medical pathologies. Kapil explains: “Because it is psychotic not know where you are in a national space” (41). Kapil does not here call herself psychotic as a self-pathologization, but rather calls out the problem of propertied space as also national underpinnings that determine normative pathologies to retroactively justify border-crossing violence. This line responds to migratory and cross-bordered living is also a way of being non-rooted, and that non-rootedness itself producing pathologized subjectivities: being named psychotic when the migratory subjectivity reveals the limitations to livability in a nationalist and bordered framework. In other words, Kapil here implicitly critiques global finance capital’s cosmopolitan multicultural abstraction of the mobile, romanticized

48  C. R. Grimmer neoliberal humanist existence. She instead puts forward a material and historically constructed space, replete with its violent contradictions that twin racialization and pathologization when the diasporic subject would undercut nationalist borderlands. Kapil’s poetics insist that historically and embodied diaspora begins and decomposes in the cross-bordered life of the ground, water, and other cross-matter environments. Within the section titled “India: Notebooks,” for instance, Kapil’s speaker describes the “freezing silver day” that “penetrates even the university” as she waits to interview “a doctor specializing in migration and mental illness” (19). Instead of interviewing the researcher, Kapil “[documents]” the university corridor, suturing the silver day as a cold environment implicated in the institutionalizing of dominant knowledges and the territorial building out of “migration and mental illness” together through racialization and pathologization. Kapil creates a linguistic break through these themes of delineated textuality and subjectivity, focusing in the first section on the experience of schizophrenia to complicate traditional, textual modes of poetics. Her poems are not just temporally and spatially delineated in content but also in their use on the page: she does not use line breaks, but stanza and page breaks. This formal choice paired with her content challenges abstractions of textual schizophrenic subjectivity, such as Frederic Jameson’s, to instead open up to more materially nuanced grammars to narrate time and embodiment. On the seventh page of Schizophrene, for instance, Kapil performs an “otherwise” grammar for narrating schizophrenic subjectivity. In the second stanza, she explains how the lights that emanate from the body create “structures that perform a rudimentary narrative.” This leads into her third stanza, where she declares that, “to write this narrative is not to split it” in order to find a universalizable and “commercially produced” cure or singular metanarrative abstracted from the material experience of schizophrenia. She writes in this interaction between schizophrenia and doctors about how the “schizophrenic narrative cannot process dynamic elements of an image,” whether pleasurable or “so bad it can’t be tendered in the lexicon of poses available to it.” At this she breaks the stanza and creates a fourth, final stanza for the page: “I need a new pen.” These stanzas highlight the Foucauldian analytic of subjugation, wherein the “confessional” relationship to the psychiatrist, which is re-articulated in multiple power relations, subjectifies a body as schizophrenic or doctor through power relations that are also global and colonial. In particular, Kapil performs a “rudimentary narrative” of how the traditional language-making relationship between a binary material and abstract, a consolidated meaning and meaninglessness, becomes illegible within a nationbound Western biomedical lexicon unless pathologized as psychosis. Kapil needs a literal new pen, a new way to elucidate the particulars of being a South Asian Indian migrant female

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  49 who refuses traditional nationhood citizenship and its linear narratives of consolidated human – or abstracted posthuman – protected status. Kapil inhabits the book’s multiple decomposition states that, paradoxically, build out material lexicons specific to her lived experience. She creates a new pen as she emits embodied languages departing from traditional text-bound lexicons and genres. I use emit, here, as a way to also attend to matter Kapil’s outlines: light, particles, liquid, heat, and sound. That is, her emission of the parts in various decompositional states as opposed to a wholistic unit. Kapil’s work creates such emissions in part by using a poetic break, which I argue functions in kind to Black cultural studies’ use of the musical “break” for fugitivity in racial slavery. If Fred Moten identifies in the musical break fugitivity and a toward freedom, a state of being that is sought after and always necessarily transmotive, that state is at once the embodied ongoing relation between land, water, and embodied writing, but also the function of a poetic refusal for intelligibility: Kapil insists on the patterned breath and silences, the break from a linear and lineated rhythmic pattern. It is in this break that a resistance to the hegemonic, colonial use of abstracted language for border-writing and subjectifying emerges to escape from normative human-making. Using the break in this way undercuts the binary of word-based and kinesthetic languages. The break on the page illuminates how colonialism uses logocentric abstractions to map whiteness onto certain uses of word-based languages.13 Kapil creates a material dimension through the imperfect past action of “am begun” while the text decomposes in murky water and land. The first line of the book stands alone on a page, not necessarily offering a sequential moment. It becomes fleeting and liberatory in the use of juxtaposed light, ground, and water that remains untethered to possessive grammars for rootedness, home, and hetero-propertied whiteness for intelligibility. When “it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space,” so, too, the poetic space on the page “breaks” into a turn away from lineated or grammatically linear meaning-making. It is in this break that diaspora problematizes cultural and historical mechanics of belonging. This creates a moment of coalition between the fugitive from racial finance capital’s slave trade vestiges and the fugitive in global climate change racial colonialism’s migratory afterlife, between the dysfluent (non)subject and the crip subjectivity doing border-crossing work. Here, the poem becomes the caesura less as a formalist move than as a gesture of the break through embodied linguistic world-building. This caesura resists the abstractions of logocentric ideals around schizophrenic subjectivity, separated and nationally bordered land and water,



50  C. R. Grimmer and both racialized and pathologized subjectivity. The shift can be articulated with (not analogized or compared to) Black feminist Sonya Posmentier’s analysis of New Orleans eco-poetic filmic coverage in the aftermath of Katrina. Posmentier explains how in her text, The poem itself is the caesura, a rhythmic pause characteristic of lyric poetry, providing a break between the film’s focus on the local conditions of New Orleans in the first half and its attention to the diaspora – the loss of human bodies to the waters and the scattering of human lives – in the second. The film and the break in it remind us of the different forms diaspora takes: the movement of bodies, the movement of sound and text, and the movement of seeds and storms. These parallel and intersecting movements define the landscapes through which this book travels. (2) Here, Posmentier notes how the caesura of the break, the space of fugitivity, functions in part by turning away from generic norms and toward the interruption of how text is apprehended in the first place, at once analyzing the breaks within the poem and the break of the poem from dominant, visual, objectifying narratives. Too, Posmentier’s analysis picks up on how the break’s fugitivity and movement harkens diasporic movement even as it does global climate change’s “seeds and storms,” seeing the conjoined processes and how they form one another in traveling the watery and grounded landscapes. Kapil’s own migratory diasporic narratives build onto this a coalition between antiracist Black feminism and a South Asian queer feminist diaspora. This moment, akin to “describing Bhabha’s ‘temporal caesura’ (340) as part of, according to Adorno, ‘what we mean by lyric’ (59), that is, as a form characterized by a break or rupture” (Posmentier 16) does not erase the historical particularity of different diasporic migrations and the requisite transhistorical work. Instead, akin to Posmentier’s use of the caesura as a break or rupture in “the social and environmental history of the black Atlantic … [producing] an idea of lyric time” (16), Kapil’s caesura enacts a coalitional flight from South Asian Indian racial colonization. In Kapil’s poem, Western scientific and literary theoretical knowledges are both partial narratives; however, Kapil makes the material ramifications of being unable to abstract a “lexicon” palpable through multisensory images. Kapil’s earlier stanza, for instance, enacts synesthesia to create an image where “rich vibrations” become colorful auras that make distinctions between “sky, and what’s beneath it” impossible to distinguish. This enacts an apprehension of demonic grounds, wherein the relation to water, sky, and ground is de-territorialized. The inability to register certain images visually, which is biomedically pathologized,

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  51 contrasts her use of it as world-building. That world-building insists on embodied materiality to images, illuminating how biomedical pathologization occurs through uneven power relations naturalizing race and disability through dominant narratives of embodiment and language – a dominant grammar that writes national borders and converts ground and water into zoned property. Kapil thus literally and figuratively requires a new pen to continue, and the co-imbricated experience of narration, text, and atmospheric elements creates a materially registered theory of networked subjectivity. This networked subjectivity resists colonial discourses of nationhood corresponding to inhabitable ground and legible maps of bordered boundaries or legible selfhood as neoliberal subjectivity. If the “sound of the accent” can be read as “the sound of another language dying in the mouth,” thus becoming a “colonizing discourse hijacking any audible semblance of ‘I’” (Kocher 4), Kapil’s discharged story of migration and diaspora creates a “break” from that accent. In turn, though, that break in the normative grammar and temporal dimensions of embodied language-making can be read more hopefully as an opportunity for discharge instead of disclosure (Kocher 2). This relationship between racialization, colonization, and pathologization surfaces in the grammared embodiment of Kapil’s poetics and unintelligibility: in the pause is also where the breath becomes a more explicit focal point, enacting a vitality counter to dominant cultural assumptions around animacy and forward propulsion as living. It is the line and stanza break, the moment of turning the page for a recursive continuation prompted by blank page space that resists explanation.

“The Book’s Genetics Split”: Disability and Diaspora in Coalitional Poetics Here, finance capital’s global risk management works in concert with biomedical pathologization of illegibility. In response, the break resists revelation, creating a pleasure in this conversation with coalitional resistance to dominant orders of meaning-making that would otherwise colonize or grammatically elide global demonic grounds. In Section 8, “India: Fragments,” Kapil’s book is once more thrown “into the dark garden” and here the simultaneity of life and death surface in the break, the long expanse of page before the bottom line: “The snow and stars make a weak connection, and the book’s genetics split, opening wide then bursting on the chrome” (56). The simultaneity of the book and speakers’ voices as schizophrenic construct environmental as also diasporic and crip theory’s legibility grammars that harness matter necessary for life that are increasingly privatized, such as water and DNA. Kapil reworks this matter through the book itself as an erotic break, a splitting

52  C. R. Grimmer kinship and diasporic scattering that refuses patrilineal, reproductive temporalities, or privatizing of selfhood and bod. The schizophrenic gesture takes on the break, gesturing toward a diasporic coalition retooling of word-based language. This language transforms into an eco-poetics that will not reconstruct ahistorical apprehensions of nature, culture, and the human, or abstracted as extracted posthuman status. Instead, the gesture enacts the kinesthetic effort communication requires as it lingers and is pushed out of a body. I am turning here to the desire of, for, and within the break as a partial fragment of the South Asian Indian diaspora intersecting with a politics and poetics of desire, erotics, and increasingly privatized environmental water that also bears border-crossing possibility, such as water. The erotics of the book’s genetic splitting become a performative desire, another way of opening into the break of non-composure where “language fails … [emphasizing] the lack in language and narrative” by instead creating a “performative ‘want’” (Kocher 7). In this way, Kapil’s alternate history is implicitly in conversation with Black feminist scholar Habiba Ibrahim’s work on oceanic lifespans. Ibrahim’s work adds age and time to Hortense Spillers’ concept of patrilineal kinship and Blackness, arguing how “race, gender, and age have been mutually constituted across the Atlantic Ocean” (315). Ibrahim argues that these processes are intertwined through normative white humanist subjectivity monstrosizing or infantilizing Black bodies. This undergirds neoliberal notions of linear aging, time, space, and reproductivity. Further, Ibrahim is in conversation with scholar Anne McClintock’s work on gender, depicting how “language suitable to dementia” was ascribed to aged and racialized bodies in medical discourses. As Ibrahim argues, age “resides [in] the ‘nowhere land’ where usual pathways to the concepts of humanness or colonial agency – implicitly forged through gender difference – break down.” In turn, Kapil’s refusal of normative American English legibility dovetails with a biomedical assessment of schizophrenia, of “language suitable to dementia,” while the migratory experience of home takes up this “nowhere land” to critique “humanness or colonial agency.” In other words, adding in disability studies, Black studies, and South Asian diaspora studies to the temporal and legible, a moment of antiracist posthumanism emerges through the refusal to be “read” as a proper human or ahistorical posthuman status. Disability intersects with race in this moment where biomedical accounts of speech disorders infantilize the subject who is read as illegible or whose language is apprehended as incoherent (Ibrahim 315), and Kapil creates as otherwise possibilities. As Kocher notes in also reading Kapil, these poetics are necessarily “liquid, like mercury … at once singular and not, plural and not,” but certainly born out of the text’s genetic splitting within the “historical environment” (Kocher 8). That historical environment is, necessarily, also gendered.

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  53

Conclusion In part 7 of Schizophrene, “Partition,” Kapil’s speaker depicts her mother telling her a border-crossing story during the Partition. She describes her mother covering Kapil’s mouth and eyes just after women’s bodies are tied to trees and gutted as a warning to other potential border crossers. Here, the gutted female bodies at the border become an image wherein the voyage of migration is not one of discovery, but of erasure, one that refuses a purity of origins. Here, the fact of the “women’s bodies” through which “borders and boundaries of communal identities are formed” (Gopinath 9–10) becomes an undeniably violent and violating image which Kapil terms a repeatedly told “bedtime story.” The scene enacts how “gendered constructions of South Asian nationalism are reproduced … through the figure of the ‘woman’” as the alltoo-literal “boundary marker of ethnic/racial community in the ‘host’ nation” (Gopinath 18); this figuring is a literal, “violent [effacement] that [produces] the fictions of purity that lie at the heart of dominant nationalist and diasporic ideologies” (Gopinath 4). They undercut a cosmopolitan posthuman transnational subjectivity that would use borders as simply demarking mobile access to global finance capital, or flight from environmental climate change’s literal and metaphorical flows. The conditions of that mobility are not historically removed but repeatedly materialized. Kapil’s speaker muses: “Sometimes I think it was not an image at all, but a way of conveying information,” then goes on to expand on that information as coming from “the grave.” It is this series of images that leads to the famous line from the book as quoted earlier: “because it is psychotic not to know where you are in a national space.” This information from the grave, the processes of racialization, gendering, colonization, and pathologization, emerges as the unintelligible moment conveyed only through image as language fails it, escaped only from the page break between believing this as conveying information and reconciling how that information indexes the violation of female and queer bodies, as well as their figuring of “home” at the same time as nation as damsel in distress (Gopinath 188–189) in order to preserve the transnational flow of mobile capital: that flow depends upon even as it continuously reconstructs the borders it requires. Those borders index where gender, diagnosis, race, and colonialism meet, but where, too, a coalitional moment arises.

Works Cited Bragin, Naomi. “Shot and Captured: Turf Dance, YAK Films, and the Oakland, California, R.I.P. Project.” TDR: The Drama Review, vol. 58, no. 2, Summer 2014 (T222), pp. 99–114. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

54  C. R. Grimmer Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print. Cacho, Lisa Marie. Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Chen, Mel. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. London: Duke University Press, 2012. Cooper, Melinda. Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Crawley, Ashon. Black Pentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Dowling, Sarah. Translingual Poetics: Writing Personhood under Settler Colonialism. Iowa: University of Iowa Press, 2018. Eagle, Chris. Talking Normal: Literature, Speech Disorders, and Disability. New York: Routledge, 2014. Ebook. Ensor, Sarah. “Chapter 1: Terminal Regions: Queer Ecocriticism at the End.” Against Life, eds. Alistair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood. Evanston, OH: Northwestern University Press, 2016. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. First Vintage Books ed., Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, 1979. Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Print. Goss, James. “Poetics in Schizophrenic Language: Speech, Gesture, and Biosemiotics.” Biosemiotics, vol. 4, 2011, pp. 291–307. doi:10.1007/s12304011-9114-4. Hauʻofa, Epeli. We Are the Ocean Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Hong, Grace Kyungwon. Death beyond Disavowal: The Impossible Politics of Difference. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Kindle Edition. Hoskins, Janet, et al. Transpacific Studies: Framing an Emerging Field. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. Ibrahim, Habiba. “Any Other Age: Vampires and Oceanic Lifespans.” African American Review, vol. 49, no. 4, 2016, pp. 313–327. Jameson, Fredric. “Culture and Finance Capital.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 24, no. 1, 1997, pp. 246–265. Kafer, Alison. “Blackness, Disability, and Trauma: On Methodological Haunting.” University of Michigan. Crip Futurities 2016, Ann Arbor, MI. 13 February 2016. Keynote Address. Kapil, Bhanu. Schizophrene. Callicoon, NY: Nightboat Books, 2011. Kocher, Ruth Ellen. “F/fabula A/anima: Reading Bhanu Kapil’s ‘Writing/ not-writing: Th[a][e] Diasporic Self: Notes Towards a Race Riot.” English Language Notes, vol. 50, no. 1, 2012, pp. 47–53. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest. New York: Routledge, 1995. McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. McRuer, Robert. Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance. New York: New York University Press, 2018.

Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics  55 Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. eBook. Posmentier, Sonya. Cultivation and Catastrophe: The Lyric Ecology of Modern Black Literature. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2017. eBook. Sotomayor, Jade Power. “Moving Borders and Dancing in Place: Son Jarocho’s Speaking Bodies at The Fandango Fronterizo.” As Yet Unpublished – Cited with Permission Until Publication, But Not Circulated/Do Not Circulate with Permission from Author. Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17, no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81. Weheliye, Alexander G. “‘Feenin’: Posthuman Voices in Contemporary Black Popular Music.” Social Text, vol. 20, no. 2, 2002, pp. 21–47. doi: 10.1215/01642472-20-2_71-21. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3, no. 3, 2003, pp. 257–337.

4

Linda Lê A Literature of Displacement Gloria Kwok

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines “displacement” as the act of being removed from the usual or original place or being forced to flee from homeland. The fall of Saigon to communists in 1975 resulted in the displacement of more than 2 million Vietnamese from their home country of Vietnam. They were primarily repatriated to the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The exodus consisted principally of three waves: those who left in the final days of the war in 1975, those who fled as boat people between the years of 1977 and 1987, and those who left during the 1980s and 1990s. The first wave was relatively wealthy and consisted of military personnel, urban professionals, and their family. In the second wave, most died at sea, from starvation, drowning, or pirate attacks. Out of those who survived, more than 400,000 went to France, and 125,000 to the US. This wave was relatively poor and less educated. The third wave consisted of family relations of those already arrived. The Vietnamese exodus created one of the largest diasporas in the late 20th century. The refugee crisis still resonates in contemporary politics, reminding us of the current refugee situation in Europe, resulting from civil wars, persecution, and violation of human rights in African and Middle-Eastern countries. The Vietnamese exodus to the Western world since 1975 is one of the greatest tragedies in Vietnam’s history, but it has resulted in a Vietnamese exile literature. The exodus also brought Vietnamese francophone literature to France. Strictly speaking, Vietnamese francophone literature is a small body of works written in French by Vietnamese authors on Vietnamese and French soil spanning the 1900s to 1986 (Guillemin; Nguyen Giang Huong; Nguyen, Vietnamese Voices; Nguyen Tran Huan; Yeager). It came into being as a result of French colonization. Today in the 21st century, its definition as affirmation of Vietnamese culture, customs, and history and Vietnamese experience in colonial Vietnam and present-day Vietnam is obsolete. Colonialism and the American war1 are

Linda Lê  57 no longer salient issues. In a broader context, Vietnamese francophone literature can be used to include authors who write about experiences of the Vietnamese diaspora in France. This is true of Linda Lê, a French author of Vietnamese origins. She was born of Vietnamese parents in Dalat in 1963, eight years after the fall of the French colonial regime and the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam. She came to France with her mother and three sisters, leaving her father behind in Vietnam, at the age of fourteen in 1977, two years after Saigon fell to the communists. She herself is a displaced writer. She has been publishing for a little more than three decades. Her work includes novels, essays, short stories, and plays some of which have been awarded prestigious prizes. Some of her fictions have been translated into English and Vietnamese. Lê is known for her experimental style and transgressive themes such as death, loss, and exile.

Literary Production and Reception In 1987, at the age of twenty-three, Linda Lê erupted on the French literary scene with the novel Un si tendre vampire (Such a Tender Vampire). In her first novel Lê does not present any Vietnamese characters nor the Vietnamese experience, that is, the traumatic history of colonization, the American war, refugee camps, exile, and displacement (Bousquet; Le Huu Khoa; Nguyen, Voyage of Hope). Instead, Lê treats the theme of literary creation, a theme that seems not to have anything to do with the Vietnamese experience. In 1988, she published her second novel Fuir (Flight). In this novel she continues, for the most part, to forego the use of Vietnamese names. In 1989, she published Solo (Solo), a collection of short stories. The theme of the abandoned father, a recurrent theme in her later works, appears in several stories of this collection. These three works foreshadow her future works in tone and content although Lê has omitted them from her bibliography. In 1992, Les Évangiles du crime (The Gospels of Crime), written in an experimental style, marked her entry into literature, and in 1993, came the novel Calomnies (Slander). Over twenty works followed. While in most of her early works (1987– 1997), she does not reference Vietnam by name nor make Vietnam the actual subject matter of her novels, as most of Lê’s scholars noted, one can easily notice the presence of themes commonly identified in Vietnamese francophone literature in her later works (1997–present)—loss and trauma, war and displacement, settlement and acculturation. Critics have generally given Lê’s works positive reviews, emphasizing her originality and her acid style. These positive reviews notwithstanding, critics and the press have repeatedly emphasized her Vietnamese childhood and refugee status despite the explicit absence of the Vietnamese content in her works. Moreover, reviews of her works are almost always accompanied by a photograph of a young attractive non-Caucasian

58  Gloria Kwok woman with long straight hair looking at the camera in a demure manner. Lê is viewed through a series of stereotypes that orientalize her and reduce her to the Vietnamese Other—small, mysterious, and attractive. Judging from the reception of Lê by the critics and press, orientalism— the manner the West perceives its Other—still influences the way the Oriental, in this case, Lê is perceived by the Occident. In Writing Diaspora, Rey Chow rightly points out that orientalism as ideological domination is still felt in everyday culture and value (7–8). As Catherine Argand puts it so succinctly, the dominant discourse would like to portray Lê as attractive and as a token Vietnamese writer (28). As the Vietnamese Other, she is expected to represent the plight of the Vietnamese refugee and her Vietnamese community in France. “The dominant discourse” to which Argand refers earlier is the French literary institution including editors, critics, and the literary press. The task of the French literary institution is to decide which authors get published, to make statements about the authors, and to interpret them. The goal of the editors, critics, and the press is to produce a specific knowledge about Vietnam and the Vietnamese community for the metropolitan French. Editors, critics, and the press dictate the content for the writers and their reception, set rules of representation and consumption, thus controlling and containing them. In so doing, the literary establishment legitimizes certain categories of literature (Bourdieu; Chow 107; Barnes, Vietnam 10–21). This chapter argues that Linda Lê’s literary goal is to counter the will of the literary establishment to dictate the content for the writers. In her collection of essays Tu écriras sur le bonheur (You will write about happiness) (1999), she advocates for a “displaced literature.” This signifies a literature that is not a romanticized reading of the experience of immigrants, but one that disorients and surprises the reader. This chapter examines Lê’s interpretation of displaced literature in Lê’s novels Calomnies (Slander) (1993), Les Trois Parques (Three Fates) (1997), and Héroïnes (Heroines) (2017).

Literature of Displacement: Redefining Contemporary Vietnamese Francophone Literature Writers of Vietnamese origins are bid by the literary institution to write about what Lê calls “ces fameuses ‘paroles d’exil’ qui font tant vibrer la fibre paternaliste de la critique” (“these famous ‘words of exile’ that so excite the paternalist tendencies of the critics”) (“Littérature déplacée” 329). In other words, they are compelled to write about their Vietnamese experience, to confess themselves and to recount their experiences in the first person. In short, they are bid by the literary institution to write memoirs, testimonials, autobiographies, and autobiographical fictions. They are compelled to take the reader on an emotional roller coaster ride through colonial and present-day Vietnam, refugee camps, and the

Linda Lê  59 immigrant community in France. Kim Lefèvre, Bach Mai, Anna Moï, Kim Thuy, Kim Doan, and to a lesser extent Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut are authors known for stories about their experiences in Vietnam. Most of their works are first-person narratives in which the narrators relate their journey (for some, boat journey) to the host country, journey back to Vietnam and their conflicted feelings when confronted with their families, and past experiences in Vietnam during the American involvement. Thanh-Van Tran-Nhut differs slightly from the others in that her novels are not first-person narratives but historical crime fiction set in 17thcentury Vietnam. She still panders to the orientalist tastes of the French reader as she sets her story in Vietnam, and uses an exotic culinary Vietnamese repertoire. Lê refuses to practice self-confessional writing and be the native informant for her community. In order to counter the will of the French literary establishment to dictate the content for the writers, Lê proposes the concept of a displaced literature. In the literary manifesto “Littérature déplacée” (“Displaced literature”) in the collection, Tu écriras sur le bonheur, published in 1999, Lê explains her literary vision. 2 She advocates for “une parole déplacée” (336). She gives the traditional definition of a “displaced literature” as “paroles d’exile” (“words of exile”) or a literature written by displaced people or immigrants. This literature or what is usually known as exile or immigrant literature are usually stories that celebrate the Vietnamese immigrant experience or what Lê calls “le pathos du balluchon” (“the pathos of the exile/refugee”) (329). She refuses this traditional definition and redefines it to signify a literature written by a person displaced from her native country and therefore informed by loss. In short, it is a literature born of unimaginable loss—of homeland, family, language, culture, and literary tradition. As Lê puts it, a “displaced literature” gravitates around “la perte” (“loss”) (332), and “se fera donc sous le signe de la perte et non de l’héritage” (“is written under the sign of loss and not of heritage”)3 (332). Lê elaborates the notion of loss in a short story “Les pieds nus” (“Bare Feet”) in the collection La part d’exil (Share of Exile), published in 1995 and prepared under the direction of the sociologist Le Huu Khoa. This essay contains themes central to her future work—experience of exodus, exile, war, loss, and trauma. In it, she presents a short parable about a girl fleeing her home during the war shoeless. As a result of the war, the girl is uprooted from her country and left with two mismatched shoes or 2 Lê presents the characteristics of a “displaced literature” and discusses an international community of renegade writers like herself in the short essays, “Littérature déplacée” (1999), “Tangages” (2010), “L’autre” (2011), “Étranges étrangers” (2011), and also in the collections of essays, Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999), Le Complexe de Caliban (2005), and Au fond de l’inconnu pour trouver du nouveau (2009). 3 Except for Slander and The Three Fates, all English translations are mine.

60  Gloria Kwok “des chaussures dépareillées” (“mismatched shoes”) (58). The girl is required henceforth to learn to negotiate a double heritage, the native one and the adopted one. Like the girl, the writer of a “displaced literature” is a displaced person, an immigrant, and an exile. Lê uses the figure of the displaced girl as a model for the writer of a “displaced literature.” Duality (two selves, two cultures, two languages) informs this literature. As Lê explains it, a “displaced literature” nourishes a double in its breast (“Littérature déplacée” 330). Lê presents this idea in a short parable inspired from a news item in Vietnam in her manifesto. She tells the story of a Vietnamese peasant in whose stomach was found a dead fetus. The fetus was that of his twin who had developed inside his body. Lê writes, “Ma patrie, je la porte comme ce jeune paysan portait le foetus de son jumeau. C’est un lien monstrueux. Un lien où le pays natal, le jumeau donc, est couvé et étouffé, reconnu et dénié. Et finalement porté comme on porte un enfant mort. Ce lien monstrueux commande mon rapport à cette autre patrie, la littérature, qui naît de l’obsession d’une tare, d’une malformation, et qui s’adresse à un double” (“My country, I carry it like this young peasant carried the fetus of his twin. It is a monstruous relationship. A relationship where the homeland, hence the twin, is smothered and repressed, recognized and denied. And finally carried like one carries a dead child. This monstruous relationship commands my relationship to this other country, literature, which is born from the obsession of a defect, a malformation, and which addresses a double”). (330) Lê makes the connection between the native country and the twin double. In her interview with Catherine Argand in 1999 (31), she confirms that the twin double represents Vietnam. Lê defines a “displaced literature” as “une parole qui s’imposerait … comme … un invité importun” (“a literature that would impose itself … like … an unwelcome guest”) (330–331). In short, it is a literature that flouts the authority of the host country; hence the authority of French and Francophone literatures, refusing either categories. A displaced literature raises questions of authenticity and challenges the French literary establishment’s expectations of an ethnic writer. A black writer should not have to write about her black experience nor should a French writer of Vietnamese origins have to write about her immigrant experience. A displaced literature transcends categorization and refuses ghettoization. A “displaced literature” is “une littérature qui ne trouve pas sa place [,] qui serait […] ni d’ailleurs ni d’ici” (“a literature that cannot find its place (,) that (…) is not from elsewhere nor from here”) (330). It is for this reason that the writer of a “displaced literature” is like an orphan without a country. It comes as no surprise that Lê has been publishing

Linda Lê  61 since 1993 with Christian Bourgois who is known for his collaboration with an international community of “déplacés” or writers outside the literary canon. If a “displaced literature” seeks to impose itself like an unwelcome guest in the host country, it is by necessity rebellious and insolent in terms of style and content. In Lê’s words, this literature “se voudrait malvenue, voire inconvenante” (“wants to be inopportune, even inconvenient/insolent”) (330–331). In terms of style, a “displaced literature” flouts “le style officiel.” It is excessive and insolent on the level of vocabulary. In terms of content, it uses the inappropriate to evoke the pain of the exilic experience and invoke the exilic experience as a curse. A displaced literature does not seek to soothe this pain with a panacea of words. It is not a romanticized reading of the experience of immigrants, but one that disorients and surprises the reader. La littérature d’inconvenance: Redefining Vietnamese Francophone Literature In this section, I show how Lê challenges the French literary establishment’s expectations of a writer of Vietnamese origins with her notion of displaced literature. I show that unlike her contemporaries of Vietnamese origins, she uses an unnamed country, unnamed characters, an imprecision of setting in time and space, the mythical and not the historical, a nonlinear structure, and an experimental style to evoke the Vietnamese immigrant experience. With Western intertextual references and themes not limited to the Vietnamese experience, she transcends her own Vietnamese experience and universalizes the immigrant story, moving it from the specific to the universal. To what extent do the themes of war and exile, loss and trauma, and duality manifest themselves in Lê’s works? How does Vietnam, her native country which she had to leave at the age of fourteen, manifest itself in her works? These are some of the questions in this section. Calomnies (1993) is the first of Lê’s two novels translated into English, introducing her to the English reading audience. With its subject of incest, filiation and writing as slander, the novel marks Lê’s entry into literature. Lê evokes the Vietnamese immigrant story through the correspondence between two narrators, an uncle and his niece. The niece writes to her uncle to find out the truth after having been told by her mother that she is the product of an adulterous affair with a foreign officer during the American war. The voice of the uncle is presented in odd chapters and that of the niece in even chapters. The uncle is exiled by his family to a mental hospital in Corrèze in France for having had an incestuous relationship with his sister in Vietnam. The sister commits suicide in Vietnam while the brother (the uncle) leads a life of isolation in France and eventually also

62  Gloria Kwok commits suicide. The uncle and his sister form a couple and figure duality. They represent the split self of the immigrant, the sister representing the abandoned Vietnamese self and the uncle the French self. The sister who has been left behind in Vietnam figures loss (of country and loved ones) and the uncle figures the life of the exile as a curse in France. The uncle’s incestuous relationship with the sister in Vietnam mirrors the immigrant’s relationship with the native country. Like the uncle who is separated from his sister, the immigrant is separated from the native country and cannot return home. The uncle is now working in a library. At the end of the novel, the uncle sends the niece the notebook containing information about the identity of her father. The notebook is incomplete and the niece never reads it. Unable to find a place for himself in the host country, the uncle commits suicide by setting fire to the library. The uncle and the niece form a couple. The uncle is the twin other of the niece. They are both orphans. The uncle is a madman without a family. He has been exiled by his family to France. The niece does not know who her real father is. Both the uncle and the niece are métèques or foreigners who have abandoned their native language to communicate in a borrowed language. The uncle learned French at the mental hospital to communicate with the nurses at the asylum and to live. The niece is a writer and has learned French to write. They both see the French language and culture (books) as a tool to combat the burden of their Vietnamese past and advance themselves in the host country. Yet the French language separates them from their families. The other characters are the shoe repairman and his elderly mother. They form another couple. The shoe repairman is deduced to be Vietnamese as the niece calls him “l’homme de son pays” (“her countryman”) (15). The mother is deduced to be Vietnamese as she is the mother of “l’homme de son pays.” She is a grotesque figure. She is physically deformed and is in a wheelchair. She is barely tolerated by her son. The shoe repairman stalks and accosts the niece in “la langue natale” (“the native language”). Like Frantz Fanon’s “évoluée,” the niece avoids him as he represents the link she has with her native language. She is afraid that she will become his “woman” and go back to her jungle status and start speaking and writing in her native language. Lê uses the shoe repairman and his mother to represent the Vietnamese language and culture that the immigrant tries to flee. Ricin is another character in the novel. He is an editor, a critic, and a literary agent. He is a friend of the niece. Ricin warns the niece not to use her father’s story as subject for her novel: “Ne te laisse pas aller à écrire un épisode de L’Amour de leur vie. Tu ne dois pas te faire le feuilletonniste d’un secret de famille” (“Don’t let them talk you into writing an episode of The Love of Their Life. You must not make yourself into the hack screenwriter of a family secret”) (37). Lê uses Ricin to criticize writers who write autobiographical tales that pander to the

Linda Lê  63 orientalist tastes of the metropolitan public. According to Lê, these writers perform the cultural stereotype of the ethnic, that is, they reproduce the stereotypes of the dominant society of themselves. Lê refers to them as “distillateur[s] de calmants, [f]abricant[s] de sédatifs” (“distiller[s] of tranquilizers, manufacturer[s] of sedatives”) (11) through a comment of the uncle about his niece, a writer. Lê believes that the task of a writer is to reveal lies (“Littérature déplacée” 336). Lê also denounces the press for its exploitation of the plight of the boat people and appropriation of their stories through Ricin: “[Les fugitifs] sont des victimes qui ne sont pas mortes des sévices de leurs bourreaux mais d’avoir été remarquées, exhibées à la foire des injustices pour être ensuite envoyées à la casse quand le divertissement a cessé de plaire et que la foule réclame un nouveau numéro” (“[The fugitives] are victims who died not from the mishandling of their torturers but from having been noticed, exhibited at the country fair of injustices only to be tossed aside when the diversion ceased to be amusing and the crowd began to clamor for the next act”). (42–43) The plight of the boat people has been used by the French literary establishment—press and writers alike—to further their own interests. Calomnies disorients the reader. The novel is an “existence-soliloque” (“existential soliloquy”) haunted by themes of madness, incest, adultery, death and murder which figure the inacceptable (“Littérature déplacée” 335). There are two insane members in the niece (the writer)’s family. The uncle’s sister hanged herself. The uncle killed himself in a fire which he sets at the library. The writer comes from a family of hypocrites who pander to whomever is in power. The mother is a seductress who carries on an affair while married. There is even a murder committed by a secondary character. As Lê points out herself, a displaced writing does not present a romanticized picture of the immigrants and shows that life outside Vietnam is exile. Calomnies depicts the world of isolation of the exiles, not unlike that portrayed in Lê’s later novel, Les Trois Parques. Most of the characters are first-generation Vietnamese immigrants living their exile in France as a curse. They are displaced, that is, “out of place” in the host country. Calomnies “ne cherche pas à endormir la douleur, mais au contraire elle la réveille, par l’imprécation et la calomnie” (“does not seek to deaden the pain, but on the contrary it wakens it, through curse and slander”) (“La littérature déplacée” 336). In spite of the Vietnamese content, Lê does not mention the name of Vietnam but refers to it as “le Pays” (“the Country”) with a capital “C” (4). The principal characters are deduced to be Vietnamese but are nameless, and have no physical attributes. The secondary characters are white. They are, ironically, the only ones who have names. They are the

64  Gloria Kwok narcissistic lovers of the writer, Bellemort and Weideman, and Ricin, a literary agent. Lê’s refusal to name the country and use Vietnamese proper names gives a universal dimension to the Vietnamese immigrant story. The cover of the novel sets it apart from other works by French writers of Vietnamese origins. Instead of showing stereotypical pictures or photos depicting the native country or native women, Lê uses an etching of a girl eating her bleeding heart by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch on the cover of Calomnies. It sets the bleak tone of the novel— the alienation of the characters from their families, lies and truths circulated by the mother about the writer’s biological father, and the lies about the uncle by his family. Calomnies is a semi-autobiography while it questions the possibility of writing an autobiography. Like the author, the narrator has an international first name and an Asian last name, she is a writer from a former colony and has a father she idealizes and a mother she finds distant. In her manifesto, Lê states that a “displaced literature” has nothing to do with autobiography (335). Calomnies resembles an autofiction (term coined by Serge Doubrovsky) in that the novel contains fictional and autobiographical details. If writing is a fraudulent act, and contains both lies and truths (hence the title of the novel), then it is impossible to write an autobiography. Lê does not want a reading of a direct parallel between the world depicted in her novel and the Vietnamese community. In Calomnies, the themes of unbelonging, unclear origins, madness, and writing are not unique to the Vietnamese experience. Calomnies is a universal exilic narrative that transcends the Vietnamese experience. Les Trois Parques (1997) is the second novel translated into English. It is the first of a trilogy written following the death of Lê’s father. It marks a turning point in Lê’s writing trajectory and shows the evolution of her relation with her Vietnamese experience. It is the first in which she mentions the name of Vietnam and evokes more explicitly the Vietnamese immigrant experience. Les Trois Parques presents the voices from both the homeland and the Vietnamese immigrant community in France. The novel recounts the preparations of the three unnamed girls of Vietnamese origins for the impending visit of their elderly father. The voices from the Vietnamese immigrant community in France include le ventre rond (Potbelly), les longues jambes (Long Legs), and la Manchote (Southpaw). They left Vietnam with their grandmother and the boat people when Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. They now live in Paris. Lê does not use Vietnamese names but nicknames based on their physical and emotional attributes. This is to counter the French literary establishment’s emphasis on ethnicity. The elder sister is named Potbelly for her round pregnant belly. With this nickname, Lê draws attention to the deformation. The younger sister is named Long Legs for her “so long legs.” Their cousin

Linda Lê  65 is Southpaw. She is named for her missing hand. Lê again focuses on the grotesque. The three women are the three Fates of the title. Like the three Fates of Greek Mythology who guarantee the destiny of each individual, the three Fates of Vietnamese origins write the destiny of the Vietnamese diaspora. Potbelly represents traditions. She retains ties to her Vietnamese heritage. She keeps regular contact with her father through letters over the past twenty years, thus maintaining a tie with the homeland. She is also the only one who can read her grandmother’s recipes in Vietnamese. Long Legs is the “modern girl” who has broken away with traditions. She is a temptress who has no scruples casting aside men she has seduced. Long Legs works as a lowly telemarketer. She is haunted by her traumatic childhood memories of the American war. Southpaw is the first-person narrator and describes in minutiae the inner thoughts, memories, and activities of the other characters. She is the bleakest of the three characters. She is a prophetess. She is always dressed in a black cape. It is surmised that she had an incestuous affair with her twin brother back in Vietnam, and as punishment she lost her arm. In return, she is gifted with prophecy. Her missing hand figures absence and loss (of country and family). The three girls represent the three regions of the French Indochinese Union. Potbelly with her ties to traditions represents the northern imperial region of Annam, Long Legs with her frivolous attitude represents the southern region of Cochinchina, often associated with hedonism, and Southpaw as the narrator who has privileged insights into others represents the northern region of Tonkin, the center of communism. The voices from the native country include the girls’ father and uncle, le roi Lear (king Lear); le Couineur (the Wheezer); and lady Chacal (lady Jackal). They do not have Vietnamese names and are also known by their nicknames. They represent the family members left behind in the homeland. They have lived through the difficult postwar era of communist rule with re-education camps and state corruption. Like his namesake in Shakespeare, king Lear is abandoned by his daughters and figures betrayal and abandonment, and failed filial duty. The father’s friend is the Catholic priest. A victim of postwar communism in Vietnam, the priest is nicknamed the Wheezer for his voice lost from constant screaming at the re-education camps. Lady Jackal, the grandmother of the two sisters and their cousin, represents the voice from the first generation of the Vietnamese diaspora. Like her namesake, the jackal, an animal of prey, lady Jackal is ruthless and rapacious. She is a wealthy owner of a funeral parlor in Vietnam and preys on the dead and the unfortunate. She represents the wealthy first wave immigrants. In the absence of the father, and the mother who died at childbirth, she is the mother and matriarch. She kidnaps the three girls from king Lear and brings them to France and then raises them.

66  Gloria Kwok Lê uses food to push the boundaries of acceptability. The menu of dishes attests to the inacceptable and not the exotic, thus countering the orientalist expectations of the French literary establishment. Lê uses dishes such as “du sang caillé” (“congealed duck’s blood”) (106), “petites oreilles porcines” (“pig’s ears”) (91), and “le nid d’hirondelles” (“swallow nest soup”) (92) to disorient the reader. Even the preparation and the cooking of dishes in which meat and seafood are chopped up into small pieces and then fried in oil evoke dismemberment and death during the American war. The culinary repertoire of the three characters also compensates for the loss of their homeland. They are reproducing their culture through their grandmother’s recipes. Les Trois Parques is another “existence-soliloque.” It is transgressive and disorients the reader. The inacceptable takes place on the level of content and form. In Les Trois Parques, Lê challenges the French literary institution that wants her to use a conventional style. The novel is written in an experimental style with a non-traditional chronology, an absence of punctuation, paragraph and chapter breaks, a stream of consciousness style of narration, multiple narrators, different registers, digression, and flashbacks. With Les Trois Parques, Lê shows herself to be an enemy of the “style officiel” (“Littérature déplacée” 336). On the level of content, the novel deals with incestuous relationships, ghosts and witches. The characters and subject are scandalous and inspire repulsion. “Le ventre rond” is translated as “Potbelly” and not as “Pregnant One” by the English translator of the novel, revealing the emphasis on her grotesque body part. She constantly rubs her pregnant round belly. Long Legs is reduced to her body part, her legs which she crosses and uncrosses, emphasizing her vanity. Southpaw has lost one of her hands and is always scratching her stump with a piece of fruit and swatting away flies. Instead of being ashamed of her physical flaw, Southpaw flaunts it. Her incestuous past affair with her twin brother in Vietnam represents the trauma of the immigrant who has suffered loss of homeland, loved ones, language, and culture. The impossible union between Southpaw and her twin other represents the impossible reconciliation between the homeland and the immigrant community. King Lear died and was never able to make the trip to France to see his coddled offsprings and princesses in exile, symbolizing another failed attempt at reconciliation between the homeland and the immigrant community. Lady Jackal is already dead but is still present in the story as a ghost and appears in the girls’ memories of the homeland. These characters are certainly not model Vietnamese immigrants. They are Kafkaesque, lost and alienated in their new world. Lê uses Greek mythology—the three Fates—and Shakespeare—king Lear, a scandalous subject (incest) and a highly experimental style to prevent a literal reading of the Vietnamese immigrant experience.

Linda Lê  67 Héroïnes (2017), Lê’s latest novel, as the title indicates, is the story of three heroines of Vietnamese origins. They are la chanteuse (the singer), la maquisarde (the resistance fighter), and la demi-soeur (the half-sister). One day a photograph of a famous singer from Vietnam now living in exile in the US catches V.’s attention. He writes to the author of the photograph, wanting to find out more about the subject and in turn the history of her country of origin. V. and the photographer are both fascinated by the subject—the singer who represents “là-bas” (“there”) or the homeland they have never set foot in and whose history and culture they have only heard about. The photographer provides V. with information about the singer and two other women whose paths cross in Paris. The three women represent the first generation of the Vietnamese diaspora, displaced after the fall of Saigon since 1975. The first woman, a singer, was a cultural icon in Saigon during the American war. Her collaborator, a songwriter, was also a cultural icon in Vietnam of the pre-1975 era. They both represent the lost paradise, the prosperous Vietnam of the pre-1975 era. Today, they are fading and aging stars who dream of making a comeback in the Vietnamese community of exiles in the US and Paris. The second woman is another exile, the maquisarde. She is a former resistance fighter during the American war who lives in the same building as the singer. Their address—l’Avenue de Choisy in the 13th arrondissement in Paris, the Asian quarter with its Chinese and Vietnamese restaurants—figures the outsider status of the two Vietnamese exiles. The resistance fighter who used to fight against American imperialists has now become an opponent of the new communist regime installed after 1975 ruled with an iron fist. She runs an anti-communist newspaper for overseas Vietnamese. She represents immigrants who brought their homeland politics to their host country even though the war has been over for many decades. The third woman is the half-sister of the singer. Adopted by an Austrian couple, she is now resettled in Austria and married to an aristocrat. The half-sister is also the singer’s double. She figures the singer’s Vietnamese past and the ugly family secrets. Their father in Vietnam had a mistress while he was married. V. and the photographer represent the second generation of the Vietnamese diaspora, children of those displaced after the fall of Saigon in 1975, now resettled in Europe and the US. Héroïnes is the first novel where Lê presents the second generation. Born in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, and raised to be a pure product of Helvetia, V. has never seen Vietnam, “[c]e lointain petit pays de ses ancêtres” (“this faraway small country of his ancestors”) (47). The photographer too does not know much about her country of origins. Born to relatively wealthy parents who came to France in the 1960s, the photographer lives in France. V. and the photographer’s desire to learn about “là-bas” is reminiscent of the famous song “Bonjour Vietnam” by Quynh Anh, a

68  Gloria Kwok Vietnamese-Belgian. Marc Lavoine and Yvan Coriat co-wrote the song in 2006 for Quynh Anh (translated as “Hello Vietnam” by Guy Balbaert). In “Bonjour Vietnam” Quynh Anh also sings about her desire to learn about her country of origins and her roots and also her never having seen the country: “Un jour, j’irai là-bas, te dire bonjour, Vietnam/ te dire bonjour” (“One day, I will go there, say hello to you/Vietnam/ say hello to you”). Quynh Anh feels nostalgia for the country of her ancestors, but unfortunately she knows Vietnam only through orientalist images disseminated by the media: “des images de la guerre/Un film de Coppola/et des hélicoptères en colère” (“images of war/a Coppola’s film/ and angry helicopters”). They both belong to the “in-between,” the two cultures. V.’s feelings on his “in-between” status reflect best those of the second generation of the Vietnamese diaspora. In spite of his Vietnamese origins, V. does not feel any more Vietnamese than Swiss: “il se sentait aussi vietnamien que, disons, la chauve-souris se sent oiseau—il aimait cette comparaison, car tout comme la chauve-souris ignore si elle est oiseau ou mammifère” (“he felt as Vietnamese, let’s say, as the bat felt he was a bird—he liked this comparison, for just like the bat who does not know if it is a bird or a mammal”). (50) “Il se définissait comme EVNI, un être vivant non identifiable” (“He defined himself as an NIHB, a non-identifiable human being”) (50), V. soliloquizes. All the characters live the existential crisis of exiles characterized by loss, double culture, death, madness, and isolation. V. is a doctoral student who has abandoned his thesis and now spends his time in a photo gallery on the banks of Lake Leman. He has decided to write a book on the lives of the three “heroines.” Like many of Lê’s characters, he is a writer. They are Lê’s double. The photographer holds several temporary jobs. They are Kafkaesque and both seem to be lost and alienated. Their world appears to be the one that exists in their correspondence, the one about the three women. The singer fled from Saigon to the US and then to France to follow her lover only to be robbed by a swindler in her building. She is trying to make a second comeback in her second exile in Paris after the US. In the end she has completely vanished from the entertainment industry. The maquisarde ends up a cripple, suffers a heart attack, and eventually dies, thus unable to continue her dream of fighting against communism. The half-sister has vanished. The reader is unsure if she has ended up in an insane asylum in France or as a prisoner of her husband in Austria. All the characters are “enfant[s] des sinistres Destins” (“children of sinister Destinies”) alluded to in the epigraph that opens the first section of the novel and represent the tragic fate of the diaspora. V.’s comments on the lack of solidarity among the Vietnamese and the rivalry between those who arrived in Europe in

Linda Lê  69 the 1960s before the communist takeover and the poorer and less-well educated boat people who arrived after 1975 also reflect the sad fate of the diaspora: “les suspicions que nourrissaient ceux qui étaient arrivés dans les années 1960, bien avant la fin de la guerre, envers les boat people qui venaient d’obtenir l’asile en France: la méfiance des riches émigrés, installés à Paris près de deux décennies, était vive à l’égard des gueux, chassés de leur terre” (“the suspicions nourished by those who had arrived during the 1960s, well before the end of the war, towards the boat people who had just obtained asylum in France: distrust of rich émigrés, settled in Paris for almost two decades, was strong towards the beggars, banished from their country”). (39) V. would give up writing the book about the three women, leave his family and meet the photographer in Switzerland. He does not know if the photographer is going to show up and if they are going to do all the things he has fantasized about. Héroïnes is about the existential angst of the Vietnamese diaspora and their “ugly memories” of Vietnam before the fall of Saigon, and a Vietnam whose new generation does not probably want to hear about the past atrocities committed by the communist regime. The novel is also about literary creation and its inherent futility, which is reminiscent of Lê’s novel, Un si tendre vampire. V.’s thoughts “Les mots font l’amour” (“Words make love”) (212) show that the story is about writing as attested by the word “les mots.” None of the characters “font l’amour” in the story. The obsession of V. and the photographer for their subject becomes stronger, and at the same time the attraction between V. and the photographer becomes stronger although they have never met. The last sentence of the novel—“l’aventure ne fait que commencer” (“the adventure begins now”) (218)—shows that the story of creation begins anew with another novel undertaken by V. or by the author herself, Lê. The message seems to be that futility of creation is the condition for its future possibility. Héroïnes does not follow the norms of an epistolary novel. Lê does not present the exchanges between the two protagonists in the form of letters. Instead, Lê presents the exchanges in electronic mails (e-mails). The reader is not shown the electronic exchanges but loosely connected incomplete fragments about the three women. Like Lê’s other works of fiction, the reader needs to rearrange the information to create a coherent story. Despite the presence of the Vietnamese content, Héroïnes is not a typical story of the Vietnamese diaspora. The three women are not heroines. They are not role models. They are victims of men. Lê does not use Vietnamese names, thus countering the French literary establishment’s expectations of a writer of Vietnamese origins and universalizing the experience of the exiles. Lê uses numerous Western intertextual

70  Gloria Kwok references to transcend literary boundaries. To figure themes of dreams and imagination, Lê mentions American and European artists such as Iwan Gilkin, Léon Spilliaert, Francisco Goya, and The Stooges. As cover, she uses Francisco Goya’s “The Dog,” one of his “Black Paintings,” to set the tone of isolation and alienation in the novel. The picture of a dog gazing upwards, lost in the vast background, and showing only its head symbolizes all the displaced, lost, and alienated in their new environment.

Conclusion Lê’s fiction and nonfiction invoke the experience of exile. Exile is a traumatic experience that resulted from Vietnam’s longest war. Lê as a displaced author has lived the actual trauma described in her novels. Lê has evolved in her treatment of her Vietnamese experience which she described in an earlier interview as a “dead child.” Lê has moved from a mythical to a more explicit and historical exploration of her Vietnamese experience in her later works. In Calomnies and Les Trois Parques, she offers few geographical precisions and does not give any historical dates. In Héroïnes, Lê offers more geographical and historical precisions. She references the fateful event of the fall of Saigon in April 1975. She still rarely uses Vietnamese names. To transcend her own Vietnamese immigrant experience, she uses themes also found in other immigrant narratives—literary creation, displacement, and loss—and an experimental style with different registers, multiple narrators and points of view, and Western intertextual references. Her works, subtle variations of the same themes and obsessions relating to her Vietnamese experience, transcend boundaries, and universalize the Vietnamese immigrant experience. Lê rejects the reading of a direct parallel between her Vietnamese experience and the world depicted in her works. Her novels, or “soliloques,” are not romanticized accounts of the Vietnamese immigrant experience but narratives that make the reader uncomfortable and challenge the French literary establishment’s expectations of writers of Vietnamese origins. Together with memoirs, testimonials, autobiographies, historical accounts, Lê’s narratives of the Vietnamese experience contribute to the collective memory of the Vietnamese diaspora.

Works Cited Argand, Catherine. “Linda Lê.” Lire 274 (April 1999): 28–33. Barnes, Leslie. “Literature and the Outsider: An Interview with Linda Lê.” World Literature Today 82.3 (May–June 2008): 53–56. ———. Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Bourdieu, Pierre. La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979.

Linda Lê  71 Bousquet, Gisèle L. Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Chow, Rey. “Keeping them in Their Place: Coercive Mimeticism and CrossEthnic Representation.” The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. 95–127. Guillemin, Alain. “Viêt-Nam.” Littérature francophone: 1. Le roman. Ed. Charles Bonn et Xavier Garnier. Paris: Hatier, 1997. Le, Huu Khoa. Littérature vietnamienne: La part d’exil. Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1995. ———. Les Vietnamiens en France: insertion et identité. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1985. Lê, Linda. Un si tendre vampire. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1987. ———. Fuir. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1988. ———. Solo. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1989. ———. Les Evangiles du crime. Paris: Julliard, 1992. ———. Calomnies. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1993. ———. “Les pieds nus.” Littérature vietnamienne: La Part d’exil. Ed. Le Huu Khoa. Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1995. 57–58. ———. Slander. Trans. Esther Allen. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. ———. Les Trois Parques. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1997. ———. Tu écriras sur le bonheur. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1999. ———. Le Complexe de Caliban. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2005. ———. The Three Fates. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: New Directions, 2010. ———. “Tangages.” Vietnam, le destin du lotus. Paris: Riveneuve, 2010. 20–24. ———. “Étranges étrangers.” Carnets du Viet Nam 28 (2011): 38–42. ———. “L’autre.” Clair obscur: Nouvelles. Paris: JBZ and Cie, 2011. 33–45. ———. Héroïnes. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2017. Nguyen, Giang Huong. La littérature vietnamienne francophone. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. Nguyen, Nathalie. Vietnamese Voices: Gender and Cultural Identity in the Vietnamese Francophone Novel. DeKalb, IL: Southeast Asia Publications, 2004. ———. Voyage of Hope: Vietnamese Australian Women’s Narratives. Altona: Common Ground Publishing, 2005. Nguyen, Tran Huan. “La littérature vietnamienne de langue française.” Comptesrendus trimestriels des séances de l’Académie des sciences d’outre-mer 34.3 (1974): 437–459. Yeager, Jack. The Vietnamese Novel in French: A Literary Response to Colonialism. Hanover: New England University Press, 1987.

5

Languages at War in Latin American Women Writers Liliana Chávez Díaz

Memories are not only shaped by the past, but by the present in which they are produced. This chapter analyses the role of memoirs as a literary, written form of memory. From this perspective, they will be considered as acts of remembering with the power of making sense of our life-stories. It is not by chance that within the current context of human rights movements, indigenous and peasant rebellions looking for empowerment, civil wars and immigration crises in Latin America, since the end of the 20th century there has been a boom of testimonial-based narratives (memories, autobiographies, and so on) in this region, also known as the “subjective turn.” The boom also coincides with a global trend in biographical and autobiographical works by women in the Western world and life-writing studies.1 True stories of social struggle and state violence have been part of a Latin American “collective memory” (Halbwachs 25–26), and they have shaped the identity of an entire generation of left-wing politicians, intellectuals, artists, popular leaders, and workers. 2 I argue that contemporary memoirs of traumatic historical events by literary authors reshape our images of the historical past, whether they serve as a literary redemption, a sort of artistic and therapeutic response or as further

1 See, for example, Adriana Cavarero’s Relating Narratives (1997) and Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2001). 2 I am considering here Halbwachs’ definition of collective memory as the sum of individual memories of a given social group in a given time (2004: 25–26). Expanding Halbwachs’ proposal, a discussion regarding individual and cultural identity formation was updated by Assmann and Czaplicka (1995). They consider “cultural memory” as distanced, objectivized structures of memory, that is, fixed historical events whose memory is maintained through rites, texts, or monuments (128–129). This concept is in contrast with an everyday form of collective memory (“communicative memory”). For the purposes of my analysis I consider memoirs to be a blend of everyday collective memory and cultural memory. Particularly in the case of memoirs heavily based on oral history, like those about guerrillas or other historical events in Latin America which have been ignored or misinterpreted by historians or the State, it is difficult to consider them as fixed memories only because they are texts.

War in Latin American Women Writers  73 source of information for social scientists. During the 1980s the purpose of this kind of writings was to move the reader toward solidarity and empathy to their causes.3 In contrast, recent first-person narratives by women remembering their experiences in civil wars, social crisis, or guerrillas show a clearer intention to make sense of their present by introducing shifts in time, looking backward and forward in their own life-story, and creating awareness of their former political ingenuity through self-reflective narratives.4 Following philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s conception of life-stories, this chapter departs from the assumption that, unlike fiction, the narrated self in nonfiction is not only a linguistic construction but a representation of a flesh-and-blood, unique person whose story is shared with the reader obeying a human “desire for narration.” I will consider memoirs as a literary subgenre of life-writing or biography, which are life-stories in a broader sense: Biographies and autobiographies, before being textual sites of a refined and professional hermeneutics, are life-stories narrated as a written text. For as much as they are necessarily constructed according to diverse standards, or according to the epoch or the tastes of the time, they nonetheless tell the story of a narratable self whose identity – unique and unrepeatable – is what we seek in the pages of the text. It is this identity, which may be rendered as fragmentary or multiple segmentation of the self, which would deny its unity. (Cavarero 71) It is through biographical and autobiographical tales, says Cavarero discussing Hannah Arendt, that the other (the reader, in this case) get to know who the protagonist is: “Personal identity, which – in the gaze of the other or in a momentary encounter – cannot be exchanged for another, thus finds in his or her life-story a temporal extension; or, the continual dynamism of his or her persistence” (Cavarero 73). The uniqueness of the who, nonetheless, is intertwined with its what, and therefore heroic or everyday actions can tell us more about the person 3 The more recent origin of this trend comes from the boom of the testimonial novel or testimonio genre in the region, especially after Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1966). This genre privileged first-hand memories, told by a victim of violence, through journalistic or ethnographic-like interviews, to a professional writer. The most polemical work of this genre has been Elizabeth Burgo’s Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia (1983). For more about this topic see Gugelberg (1996). 4 In fiction, emblematic works include Marta Traba’s Conversación al sur (1981), Luisa Valenzuela’s Cambio de armas (1982), and Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984). This chapter focuses on lesser-studied nonfiction works.

74  Liliana Chávez Díaz and its context. It is in this sense that a woman life-story can also be that of a collective, for her life is shared with many other lives.5

Latin American Women Traveling and Writing In Memorias de España 1937 (Memories of Spain 1937, 1992), Mexican author Elena Garro remembers her first overseas travel. She was twenty years old and she had just married poet Octavio Paz when she shipped from Mexico to Barcelona via New York and Paris during the Spanish civil war. Her husband, a literary celebrity by then engaged with socialism, was invited to present a paper in the Second International Conference of Writers for the Protection of Culture, organized by the republican Spanish government. Instead of a conventional honeymoon in Europe, as it might be expected for a middle-class Mexican bride as she was, Garro experienced a close confrontation with the horrors of war. This confrontation was marked by her gender and class, as she would recall in diverse scenes in her memoirs. Garro was one of the few women in the group of intellectuals traveling around Valencia, Madrid, and Barcelona, and one of the youngest ones. Within the narrative, she uses an ironical tone of voice to stress her difference. She recalls small everyday details about their life there, with a critical view upon the intellectuals aiming to support social causes while maintaining their privileges, like living in luxurious hotels or enjoying great banquets while others were starving. Another difference stressed by the author is her expected role as a woman. She was addressed by her peers as a naïve bourgeois woman who knew anything about their political discussions. The environment outside her social circle was not so different, as it was rare to see women on their own. One night, for instance, she and her friend Lolita went out for a walk in Barcelona’s China town and a group of women asked them for an identification card. Elena and Lolita wondered what kind of identification they wanted and they said “the prostitution identification” (2011: 48).6 The female body plays a significant role in this kind of narratives, as the travel experience is never the same as that of a man. Garro’s image of a white, blond, elegant young woman made people doubt about her leftist ideology, and she was frequently confused with American.7

5 For a discussion on auto/biography approaches from a feminist perspective see Cavarero (2006). 6 Translations from this work are mine. 7 One of the few photographs from this time shows a shy, kind of scared and physically fragile Elena Garro, hold by her husband Octavio Paz in the middle of a crowded street in Madrid. Because of the photograph’s angle and the protagonists’ appearance, it is hardly the image of two people in a social protest. Her look in

War in Latin American Women Writers  75 Aware of the social position she had while traveling in 1937 in a conservative Spain, Garro remembers and writes from a different time and position. By 1992, when her memoirs are finally published, she was living in Spain with her daughter, already divorced from Paz. She had lived in several countries, exiled after her involvement in the 1968 student protests in Mexico. There is a fracture between the conventional female subject and the writer’s self-representation, as exposed in memoirs about a sort of political coming-of-age.8 By creating a narrative voice who seeks to represent herself at twenty, a seventy-nine-year-old Garro is able to bring past to present and to recover, and uncover, some episodes of a historic event from a fresh and unique female perspective. Nevertheless, Garro chronological account seems to ignore the time passed between the represented subject and the writing time. The reader knows the differences between narration and publication times only from paratextual information (e.g. book cover, introduction, author’s biography). It would take another generation of Latin American female authors to expose in a more evident way the process of becoming. This trend is particularly evident in memoirs about social revolutions or ethnographiclike travels during the 1970s; for example, in Beatriz Sarlo’s Viajes. De la Amazonia a las Malvinas (Travels. From the Amazons to the Falkland Islands, 2014), Alma Guillermoprieto’s La Habana en un espejo (Dancing with Cuba, 2004), and Gioconda Belli’s El país bajo mi piel (The Country Under My Skin: A Memoir of Love and War, 2001). In these works, there is a first-person self-reflecting female narrator who alternates memories from her younger past with those their writing present. These two different styles toward representing the past through literary acts of remembering (memoirs) can be analyzed as two modes of response for a time of individual and collective crises. German historian Jörn Rüsen (2014) considers history to be as a way of making sense of a given period of time. For this purpose, crises are essential in the writing of history. Moreover, he identifies three modes of crises that correspond with diverse possibilities of narration. Of course, Rüsen focuses on historical discourse and the tools that a given society particular – hair in an upsweep, wearing a tight midi skirt, silky polka dot blouse, and translucent scarf – reminds the fashion look of actresses or models from the time. See this image at https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/cultura/letras/2016/10/4/ la-lucha-de-octavio-paz-en-la-guerra-civil-espanola 8 Garro’s and Guillermoprieto’s narrations seem to follow Simone de Beauvoir’s approach to the cultural history of women in The Second Sex (1949), for their texts highlight a self-consciousness of their education and social background and the reader is guided to understand their particular position in society as females as a part of their process of identity. Although Beauvoir was an essential reading for Latin American female writers in the 1970s, there is no direct allusion to her influence in their writings.

76  Liliana Chávez Díaz in a given time have to interpret certain historical events. Nevertheless, I consider his classification of crises to be useful for analyzing how certain (literary) authors also make sense of historical events in which they had a more or less active role. This is particularly important for memoirs focused on events that have been deliberately forgotten or misinterpreted from official history, as have happened frequently in the history of social movements in Latin America. According to Rüsen, a “normal crisis” uses conventional narrative responses to make sense of the contingency. I believe this is the case of Garro’s memoirs, which are narrated in lineal past tense, with rare allusions to the future-present of the author. Clearly, the Spanish civil war was a milestone in her life, as it is shown in Memorias de España, but also in those fiction works in which sensations of paranoia and environments of persecution and displacement play a central role in the plot, like the novels Reencuentro de personajes (Reunion of characters, 1982), Testimonios sobre Mariana (Testimonies about Mariana, 1981), or Y Matarazo no llamó … (And Matarazo did not call …, 1991). The author does not experiment with innovative modes of narration; she uses traditional storytelling techniques to tell her first-hand account of the war. Her memory acts as a synchronic cut to history: by the means of language she is able to go back in time, taking the reader with her. In a Proustian style, she tries to recover the past by constructing a twentyyear-old self-referenced narrator: her own past self as a young and naïve woman. The other authors mentioned above can be read as a response to the second type of Rüsen’s taxonomy of crises: a “critical crisis.” This kind of crisis claims for a new framework under which it can be understood. Particularly, this can be the case for both Guillermoprieto and Belli, who decided to alternate times in their narrative, so the reader can experience a diachronic memory: a testimony of the change of events across time, but also of their own identity evolution. Even when they call their books “a memoir” – in both cases the phrase is part of the title – their narrative also involves an account of their present, as if they could make sense of history only through acknowledging the contrast between past and present. There is no doubt that dictatorships and other similar contexts of political repression in Latin America have generated specific testimonial narrative modes. These narratives have reshaped contemporary literature in the region and helped the victims to make sense of highly violent acts against human rights. Nonetheless, it is difficult, or at least polemical, to put these narratives on the same level of the Holocaust, which for Jörn is the most radical example of the third type of crises. The “catastrophic crisis” is trauma, that is, a crisis that destroys the framework of reference upon which historical sense is constructed without any change of creating a new one (Jörn 353–354). Holocaust is the “black hole of sense” (355); it is an experience for which there is no narrative possible

War in Latin American Women Writers  77 because nothing make sense after it. Therefore, any narrative based on memories demonstrates that at least some degree of sense is possible through language.9 In the particular case of the narratives analyzed here, I believe that even when the narrator experienced what can be commonly called “traumatic events,” the fact that the author- character survived change the interpretation of the event as traumatic. As the author moves apart from the traumatic place, her narrative becomes possible. This single act offers a historical sense for herself and her generation. A single testimony becomes communal when it is able to connect with similar accounts or similar times. In this sense, any survival narrative contains at least a small amount of hope for a future in which the narrator is able to speak, and therefore written language proves to be a therapeutic and artistic tool to understand the past. These narratives, after all, are trying to construct a cultural memory for the triumph of their revolutions, whereas they are individual or social causes.

Remembering/Becoming Gioconda Belli remembers her exile in Mexico as the freest period in her adult life. Away from the commitments of family life – she had two daughters by then – and the constant danger of her activism in Managua, Belli found in the solitude of her new studio the space she needed to write, and to write about those political themes she was not able to write under the dictatorship she was living in.10 Paradoxically, my geographic exile marked the end of my own personal exile. Living in exile freed me from the disguises and subterfuge I had needed to create a false image of myself, and allowed me to express what until then had been walled within me. […] In my room, curled up in bed for warmth, I read and I wrote. Never before in my adult life did I have so much free time to write without interruptions. (Belli 128) Until then, her poetry had been mostly amorous and erotic in theme, emphasizing her personal, female experiences. According to her own remembrances, her sexual and political awakenings were influenced by 9 The works I am analyzing here are mainly concern with an account of oneself, even when they relate with stories of victims that did not survive their historical context. A  comparison with first-person accounts of the Holocaust, in which the narrator speaks in the name of the ones who died, could seem unnatural or forced. It does seem, however, that in the recent context of drug-trafficking and gangs’ violence in Latin America other kind of testimonial or documentary narratives are emerging, which could be closer in perspective to the Holocaust narratives.

78  Liliana Chávez Díaz her first lover. He was a poet and introduced her into leftist and artistic groups in Managua. Almost at the same time she felt interest for the Sandinista’s ideology, Belli found in the poetic expression of sexuality a form of liberation from her class and gender, having grown up in a wealthy and traditional family. In her memoirs, she writes openly about her extra-marital relationships, although she uses nicknames for her lovers. Memories like Belli’s demonstrate that the revolutionary ideas, at least those disseminated in the Western world during the 1960s–1970s, influenced not only historical events but individual identities. Following philosopher Maurice Halbwachs (2004), individual memories of a specific historical time are part of a collective image of the past, especially in traumatic situations or when the facts could be forgotten or get darken. Halbwachs proposes to consider collective memory as a sum of individual memories from a given group in a given time (28). This conception of historical memory is essential to the sense of the collective, for as long as we are able to remember our time together and to give a testimony of that real, bodily experience, our sense of belonging to a certain community will be maintained. In this line of thought, I propose to read Latin American women memoirs as a testimonial of a certain time and community, that is, a generation, but also as part of female cultural history. According to Halbwachs, each individual memory represents a particular point of view on collective memory. The blends that result from these multiple points of view are so complex that to recover collective memory becomes a task that is guided by chance. It implies to abandon ourselves to the random ways in which individuals remember their past in common. In this regard, a comparison of Belli’s and Guillermoprieto’s memoirs can offer an interesting insight into the Latin American historical context of their times. To blend their personal lives with the collective seems a natural task for them while remembering the past. Belli, for instance, recreates the sense of freedom and cultural diversity that Mexico offered to Latin American people living there in exile as her: Mexico was the preferred sanctuary for the diaspora forced on a great number of Latin Americans by the many military dictatorships in the region. Idealists and dreamers from all over the continent ended up there. Each one of them managed to turn the hard reality and hopelessness of his or her country of origin into a springboard to soar and dream up the most romantic utopias. Singing, talking, writing, painting, we surrendered fully to the mystique of heroism. Come what may we had to usher in a new way of life that would be better than the one we were forced to live. There were too many of us harboring the same wish. Our illusions felt like tangible realities where we shared them with each other. (Belli 130)

War in Latin American Women Writers  79 In a more self-critical way, Guillermoprieto also remembers that time as a rebellion of a whole generation: When it came down to it, I did not want to be like Che. At moments of shameful sincerity, I recognized that there was something hard and intransigent in his character that repelled me. However, it wasn’t just the sweet eyes and fresh scent of the guerrilla who abandoned me forever in the Plaza de la Revolución that made me surrender my heart to him, but his pact with death as well. […] I think that particular combination of blind obedience and total rebellion embodied my generation’s dilemma and gave it meaning and purpose. We reached adulthood just at the moment when, with the contraceptive pill and the atomic specter now givens, the twentieth century broke its ties to the past. (Guillermoprieto 197) Both passages highlight an environment of prosecution and death. The repression and danger the activists suffered during this time can relate to other state violence and war situations in the world. However, both authors acknowledge the romantic sense of rebellion, creativity, hope, and a collective desire for individual and social change. The position from where the authors speak is influenced by the political and social context, and so their voices are the result of intertwined memories, not only of themselves but also of others. According to Cavarero, there is a self-sensing of the self as narratable, that is, a being who is able to remember and to create a “narrating structure of memory.” This is regardless if the self decides to put that memory structure into a textual form. Nevertheless, Cavarero accepts that the autobiographical text, as a “reifying experience” allows the self to know that he or she is indeed narratable: The effect of a life-story, whatever the form of its tale, always consists in a reification of the self that crystallizes the unforeseeability of the existent. In the autobiographical story that the memory episodically – and often unintentionally – recounts, the narratable self is therefore always found to be reified. She becomes, through the story, that which she already was. (35–36) As this story tells about the others she has encountered, it discovers but also creates a relationship between the self and the world. It is through the use of a grammatical “I” in the text, which is always fictional as it is a narrative strategy, that the individual becomes a (female) subject, with historical agency and social and political empowerment (Braidotti 2011: 155). On the one hand, the text allows the reader to know who Belli is in a subconscious level, that is, her identity – defined in terms of desire and uniqueness. On the other hand, it also performs an important role in the

80  Liliana Chávez Díaz process of becoming a subject, for the text is the space in which the multiple changes and negotiations of the self between diverse levels of power and desire appear through premeditated choices and unconscious impulses (Braidotti 18). In this regard, although auto/biographical writing cannot construct but represent an identity, at least in Cavarero’s sense of the term, it does develop and unveils a particular subjectivity. As acts of remembering, female testimonial writings claim for selfreflection and sense-making of the past that awakens gender consciousness. The narratable self tells her story from an empowered position that considers the uniqueness of their being and acts. Writing becomes a tool for self-knowledge and, later, for knowledge of the past and present. Belli begins to write her life-story only after she has realized the uniqueness of her past as guerrilla and its importance for the collective. Like an epiphany, she discovers she had been living diverse identities, as she states in the introduction: I have been two women and I had lived two lives. One of these women wanted to do everything according to the classic feminine code: get married, have children, be supportive, docile, and nurturing. The other woman yearned for the privileges men enjoyed: independence, self-reliance, a public life, mobility, lovers. I have spent the greater part of my life trying to balance and blend these two identities, to avoid being torn apart by their opposing forces. In the end I believe I have found a way that allows both women to live together beneath the same skin. Without renouncing my femininity, I think I have also managed to live like a man. (IX–X) Belli shows awareness that her story was not only about war but about her process of becoming the woman she is in the present of her writing. She thus demonstrates that “what sustains the entire process of becoming-subject is the will to know, the desire to say, the desire to speak, it is a founding, primary, vital, necessary, and therefore original desire to become” (Braidotti 18). A similar process is performed by Mexican-American journalist Alma Guillermoprieto in Dancing with Cuba, a memoir about her experience as contemporary dance teacher in Havana in 1970, after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. The facts are narrated in a chronological order, from her life in New York City as a careless and idealistic dancer to her disenchantment of Cuba and the artistic profession. Nevertheless, both the introduction and the epilogue show critical distance regarding her own young-self and the revolutionary environment of that time. Three decades after her six-month life-changing experience in Cuba, Guillermoprieto not only writes what she remembers but the result of her investigation about her own story. Acting as a journalist would do with the story of others, she fact-checks her own memory, although she advices

War in Latin American Women Writers  81 the reader not to rely completely in her “fragmented memories” and her “reconstructions”: It would be absurd to claim that the following pages are a reliable historical account of the events that took place in my life during those six months. Yet this is not a novel. It is a faithful transcription of my memories, some of them hazy, others riddled with holes left by the passage of the years, others patched up by time and the filters of experience a distance, and still others, no doubt, completely invented by the stubborn narrator we all have within us, who wants things to be the way they sound best to us now, and not the way they were. (Guillermoprieto 4) Like Garro, Belli, and Guillermoprieto are self-represented as educated middle- or upper-class women living in a big urban environment, with no freedom outside the family circles and less worldly experience than a man in their same position. Their first travels in this revolutionary context are the point of departure for a self-discovery, emotionally, and ideologically. From their gender and class position, these authors experience the encounter with others with a feeling of shame or guilt for their privileges. There is a distance between the poor, marginalized others and their own lifestyle. However, there is also a desire to belong. Negotiations between their bourgeois identity and a conscious aim to be part of the collective are complex. From one side, these authors felt empathy for leftists’ ideals, as they considered themselves to be women in rebellion with the social expectations of their cultures: My political attitude toward the world I lived in, if I had one at all, was, I believe, a mixture of sincere elements of antiauthoritarianism, anticlericalism, horror of torture, revulsion at social inequality, defense of animals, terror of any type of violence, and distrust of anything related to big business, especially advertising. To me, this was the attitude of a revolutionary, as I felt I was in art. But my deepest conviction, so deep I would never have been able to articulate it, was perfectly elitist: I had no doubt that we artists were the highest form of human life. That conviction justified my existence. (Guillermoprieto 25) In this passage, Guillermoprieto jumps from past to present as to be able to contrast her convictions as a young dancer with her present reflections upon her own story and identity. It is through their love for art that these authors get closer to the revolutionary environment and are able to feel solidarity for social causes: Garro would later defend Mexican peasants’ movements, Guillermoprieto would become a New Yorker

82  Liliana Chávez Díaz war correspondent for Central America and Belli was a public servant of the Sandinista government. Their memoirs are both coming-of-age stories, and self-portrayals of Latin American women as artists: in these works, the reader accompanies the author in the process of becoming a female subject and a writer within a context of social, political, and gender repression. From another side, the authors make an honest self-criticism exercise through their acts of remembering. A difference between this testimonial writings and others made by male authors in the region is their lack of stiffness, even when their writing is inherently political. They state since the beginning of their narratives the position from which they lived and the transformations that followed until the present of writing. For instance, they all felt uncomfortable in unfamiliar circumstances at the beginning of their travels. Garro complains about the unhealthy conditions of the accommodation arrangements during war: “Pablo Neruda took us to a small hotel full of bedbugs. We spent the night seated in two chairs and woke up very depressed. ‘You are a bourgeois, you should be strong!’, Paz said” (Garro 26). The “you are a bourgeois” complain is a recurrent phrase in Garro’s memoirs. She depicts herself in hilarious situations that also serve as a way to indirectly criticize Paz’s negative perception of her. The fact that a celebrity poet such as Pablo Neruda guided them to an awful hotel also stresses the image of Garro as an outsider, for no one else seemed to complain about practical situations as such. A similar situation is shown by Guillermoprieto when she recalls living in a decadent New York apartment with her lover Adrian, a Polish poet: Compared with him, moreover, I was a spoiled, bourgeois child: at night Adrian would put a carton of milk and one of orange juice on the freezing windowsill, and that was what we had for breakfast, though I would have preferred a cup of hot coffee from the corner deli. (Guillermoprieto 79) Unlike Garro and Guillermoprieto experiences and complains about their social background, Belli’s upbringing was an advantage while living a double-life: The more time I spent undercover, without raising any suspicion, the more useful I could be to the Sandinista movement. By maintaining a facade of innocence and continuing to do my rounds in the traditional social circles, I could finger on the pulse of the bourgeoisie, and report their feelings and thoughts regarding the dictatorship. Being an upper-class woman was an ideal alibi for my subversive endeavors. I knew I had to keep my position in that world in order to eventually blow it up from the inside. (40)

War in Latin American Women Writers  83 As in Garro’s memoirs, there is a frequent sense of glamour involving Belli’s self-image, as they were actually portraying cinema heroines in war times. Actually, earlier in their literary careers, both authors had published fiction works in which the protagonist has a striking resemblance to themselves, particularly in certain episodes of their memoirs.11 In the case of Belli her physical identity becomes a mask that even saved her from going to prison; as when the chief of Anastasio Somoza’s State Security Office called her boss at an advertising agency because they suspected of her. The boss told her about the call and she pretended to be the woman she actually was before entering the Sandinista movement: That I’m with the Sandinistas? Me? ‘Tania, the guerrilla?’ I said, laughing, bringing up the title of a well-known book about a woman who had been Che’s companion in Bolivia. “Are you crazy? Just look at me, please, look who you’re talking to!” They surveyed my tight blouse, faded jeans, and the flirty blue cap perched just so on the right side of my head, allowing a little ponytail to peep out of the left side. I knew they would see me for what I appeared to be: a bourgeois young woman dressed like a hippie. (Belli 72–73)

Love and Politics While the reader witness Belli’s ideological conversion to “Sandinismo” and her later involvement in a left-wing political party, both Garro and Guillermoprieto confess their ignorance about socialist ideology while living among prominent revolutionary and intellectual leaders. Garro admits she never read Marx until she went into exile in 1968 and Guillermoprieto begins to read El Che only when she arrives to Cuba. There is, however, an idealization of the political and sexual liberations that were on the air. For example, both Guillermoprieto and Belli refer to Fidel Castro as a figure of desire, as seen through the eyes of others they admired: I didn’t understand what my fellow dancers said about Fidel and the Revolution, but those stories too were full of emotion and romance […] Fidel’s Cuba embodied the most just of all causes. Generally speaking, revolutionary leftism is part of a long tradition among Mexican artists, and I took it for granted that the Cuban Revolution was on the side of good, and the U.S. government on the side of evil. (Guillermoprieto 24)

84  Liliana Chávez Díaz Similarly, Belli’s memoirs depict Castro within an idyllic, fairy-tale like framework: “To me Fidel was a romantic hero. In Cuba, he and his bearded, fearless, daring young men were accomplishing things that nobody had been able to achieve in Nicaragua” (Belli 5). In 1979 she was invited to celebrate the Cuban Revolution in Havana as part of the new Nicaraguan government. It was in this context, after her own revolutionary adventures, that she met Castro. Although she barely spoke to him in that reunion, Belli makes of this scene a symbolic point of departure for her memoirs about “love and war,” for it was no longer important to personally meet him or even speak to him. It is the collective memory of him, through the memories of her family and friends, what serves as her storytelling input: Who would have ever guessed, then, that one day I would find myself seated on a fluffy sofa in Havana, talking to Fidel? But we come into the world with a ball of yarn to weave the fabric of our lives. One cannot know exactly what the tapestry will look like, but at a certain moment one can look back and say: Of course! It couldn’t have been any other way! That shiny thread, that stitching couldn’t have led anywhere else! (Belli 6) By using the metaphor of the yarn, Belli links poetry with the feminine culture she relates to. Moreover, it shows a narrative structure that seeks to make sense of her past as seen from the present of her writing, that is, a definition of memory that refers to interpretations as the actual “past” (Feidnt et al., 2014: 43). According to Feindt et al.’s theory of “entangled memory” this is actually how an act of remembering works: from a synchronic perspective, each act is embedded in diverse social frames – in the case of Belli: guerrilla groups, upper-class family background, professional community –; whereas from a diachronic perspective, memory will be entangled between single acts of remembering and changing mnemonic patterns (43). The narrative structure of Belli’s memoirs thus shows how these patterns might change over the course of a lifetime. Another angle from which to interpret Belli’s yarn metaphor is that of the emotions, particularly in the encounter with Fidel Castro as point of departure for her memoirs, as every remembering comes with a vivid description of the way it made her feel. Recalling emotions gives a sensual tone to the narration. This technique also allows the reader to enter the story and the historical events it refers to from an intimate side, as if the reader was a witness of a veiled reality. Belli organizes her memories through the language of the senses and shares her phenomenological perspective with the reader. It is through the author’s experiences of love and passion that we know about other intertwined life-stories. And it is only through the narrator herself that the reader is allowed to enter this intimate past.

War in Latin American Women Writers  85 The interchange of life-stories between lovers is the model for the relationship between Eros and writing: Similar to feminine friendships, love is indeed often characterized by a spontaneous narrative reciprocity. The reciprocal desire of a narratable self into a suitable narrator of her story – is of course part of the narrative. In love, the expositive and relational character of uniqueness plays out one of its most obvious scenes. On the stage of love, the questions “who am I?” and “who are you?” form the beat of body language and the language of storytelling, which maintain a secret rhythm. (Cavarero 2000: 109) This conception of writing as a product of a dialogue, an intimate one, opens the possibility for a reading of memoirs considering the others: those whose stories pass through the life and memory of the storyteller (family members, companions, celebrities, and alike) and those who will know about them through the storytelling (the readers). As Walter Benjamin’s storyteller (1999), Belli has gone far away but comes back to share with her community stories about people she met and what they told her. Belli, as Guillermoprieto and Garro, exposes through her memoirs her vulnerable and unique self. In her need to give an account of herself, she also recognizes the other. Her story is actually a confession to the reader. Nevertheless, the divergence between their identity and that of those who surrounded them in their travels might be the cause of a common feeling of isolation and solitude. They both express a desire to come back home, for instance. Throughout her writing, Garro maintains a distance marked by irony toward the life full of privileges that her intellectual friends have in the middle of the war. Humorous descriptions of parties and banquets, for instance, show their hypocrisy or at least an incongruence between their ideology and their habits. In a similar situation, Guillermoprieto takes another route: she suffers an identity crisis and feels so depressed that eventually after her time in Cuba she left dancing and begun her career as journalist. In contrast, Belli transforms her life completely: she enrolls in the guerrilla and later she becomes a member of the government. A desire to belong, however, influences the tone of these narratives. They are moved by love, friendship, and solidarity. Besides, in their way of becoming conscious and self-critical female subjects, they also welcome the other as part of themselves. Skeptical toward socialism, Guillermoprieto founds herself wanting to be part of the crowd that passionately claims for Fidel Castro in a public square in Havana: I was increasingly unsuccessful in defending myself against my own internal prosecutor, but now all those doubts gently vanished before a distant murmur that was growing louder and louder. “Todos a la

86  Liliana Chávez Díaz plaza con Fidel!” said my student Roberto to my student José, out of the blue. Me, too, I thought, grateful to have landed in such a historic moment and place. I’m everyone now, too. (Guillermoprieto 148)

Displacements: Body and Writing In The Country Under My Skin, Gioconda Belli recalls an earthquake suffered in her beach house in Santa Monica, California in 1994. While surprised because her neighbors did not change their daily fitness routine after the earthquake and none of their houses were down, Belli still experimented the same sensation of fear and uncertainty she felt when back in Managua she suffered a first earthquake. This past experience completely changed the city and developed her sense of solidarity. As the earthquakes experiences, other life-and-death events such as persecutions, threats, and shooting scenes are essential part of the plot. This happens not only in memories regarding her political actions but also in her love-life accounts as she is usually involved in unsteady and socially forbidden relationships. The narrative structure of the book proposes that memory, to be narratable for the self, can be a yarn which threads have continuous knots. These knots are intersections of diverse circumstances and events in a life-story, acting as signposts that guide the author through her narration. Another narrative technique, particularly for exposing synchronic memory, is comparison. The contrast between her present as a middleclass housewife of an American journalist in California and her past as a revolutionary young woman is an essential narrative technique in Belli’s memoirs which unveils her multiple identities. There is a constant comparison between her privileged, not guilty-free social position and that of people she encounters during her years in politics, as when she remembers being in a public hospital and feeling the sights of poor people looking at her fine, pedicured feet (288). It is only when she is exiled in Mexico that she feels she belongs: My fears of foundering in a foreign city had evaporated. This was more like arriving home into the bosom of a family that loved me and worried about my welfare: the fraternity, the warmth of my compañeros brought me back to the uncanny elation I was seized with so often and so unexpectedly during those years of struggle. I often felt I was standing at the edge of a precipice, yet I experienced a profound and tangible happiness nevertheless. (124) From one side, Belli’s memoirs are evoking, and perpetuating an affective community by bringing back not only historical events but her own feelings and thoughts through writing (Halbwachs 34–36). By depicting the environment in which she felt a sense of belonging, she is reconstructing

War in Latin American Women Writers  87 an image of the past that concerns not only to her individual past but that of a whole community with the same dreams, worries, and hopes. She also recreates this affective community in her novels and poetry. For instance, in the three-stanza poem “La sangre de otros” (Other people’s blood), the poetic voice acknowledges the privilege of the witness: she has seen people died and she survived to testify the triumph of the revolution. She is now part of the collective, but she feels that still there is a lack of belonging: “I read the poems of the dead / and I feel that this blood that we love each other with / does not belong to us” (2015: 164).12 From another point of view, Belli’s experience outside her country demonstrates that physical displacement functions as a signpost for the narratable self. For Belli – as for many other women authors who participated in social and political rebellions during the 1970s in Latin America – war and literature were male domains. Traveling away from home allowed women to cross social borders. By the 1970s, Latin American women still did not reach the freedom and civil rights other women in the world were already enjoying, or at least fighting for. Their gender struggle was part of a wider political struggle, and it was through their involvement in social causes that they began to arise consciousness of their role. Garro, Belli, and Guillermoprieto exhibited in their acts of traveling and writing their desire for freedom, but they also condemned sexism and misogyny within the most liberal groups of their time. Apart for being bildungsroman or coming-of-age stories, these works can also be read as women travel stories in their process of becoming. Traveling and encountering other people and cultures influenced their own perspective of their role in society. Surely there were many other moments that shaped female identity in the works mentioned here, but the authors did not intend to give a full account of their life the way conventional autobiographies do. A close reading of these texts as acts of memory serves to show that by choosing creative narrative structures those who aim to remember are able to construct collective memories. As Jörn proposes, traumatic events must find new forms of historic narratives. These forms should be able to show the traces of trauma in their own interpretation frameworks and narrative processes (382). By rescuing oral stories and experiences from personal and other people memories, contemporary female authors as the ones mentioned here demonstrate that fragmented, disconnected forms of recovering the past are able to recover the past, without ignoring unsettling feelings and experiences. As a literary genre, memoirs are fragmented, partial autobiographies, which not only give account of oneself but of a whole community, generation, and time. In this kind of nonfiction, narrative time mirrors the



88  Liliana Chávez Díaz process of memory: it goes back and forth according to the author’s ethical and aesthetical intentions. As linguistic acts of remembering, memoirs are able to evoke, and even create cultural memory from a given time and space, recovering feelings and thoughts traced by an individual who is always changing her or his position toward the world.

Works Cited “Biografía,” Giocondabelli.org, Schavelzon Graham Agencia Literaria, 2019, giocondabelli.org/biografia/. “La lucha de Octavio Paz en la Guerra Civil Española,” Notimex, El Universal, 4 October 2016, www.eluniversal.com.mx/articulo/cultura/letras/2016/10/4/ la-lucha-de-octavio-paz-en-la-guerra-civil-espanola. Assmann, Jan and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique, no. 65, 1995, pp. 125–133. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/488538. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, translated and edited by H. M. Parshley, Vintage Books, 1997. Belli, Gioconda. The Country Under My Skin. A Memoir of Love and War, translated by Kristina Cordero and Gioconda Belli, Bloomsbury, 2003. ———. “La sangre de otros.” El ojo de la mujer, prologue by José Coronel Urtecho, 12th ed., Visor Libros, 2015, p. 164. ———. La mujer habitada, Seix Barral, 2017. Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zorn, Pimlico, 1999, pp. 83–107. Butler, Judith. Giving and Account of Oneself, Fordham UP, 2005. Cavarero, Adriana. Relating Narratives. Storytelling and selfhood, translated by Paul A. Kottman, Routledge, 2006. Freindt, Gregor, Félix Krawatzek, Daniela Mehler, Friedemann Pesteland, and Fieke Trimçev. “Entangled Memory: Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies.” History and Theory, vol. 53, no. 1, 2014, pp. 24–44, JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/24543010. Garro, Elena. Memorias de España 1987, prologue by Patricia Rosas Lopátegui, Salto de Página, 2011. Gugelberg, Georg, editor. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, Duke UP, 1996. Guillermoprieto, Alma. Dancing with Cuba. A Memoir of the Revolution, translated by Esther Allen, Vintage Books, 2005. Halbwachs, Maurice. La memoria colectiva, translated by Inés Sancho-Arroyo, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2004. Rüsen, Jörn. “Crisis, Trauma, Identidad.” Tiempo de ruptura, translated by Christian Sperling, edited by Silvia Pappe, Miguel Ángel Hernández Fuentes and Christian Sperling, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2014, pp. 345–383. Sarlo, Beatriz. Tiempo pasado. Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo. Una discusión, Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 2006. ———. Viajes. De la Amazonia a las Malvinas, Seix Barral, 2014.

6

They Won’t Take Me Alive Feminist Histories and Literary Journalism in El Salvador Jeffrey Peer

Documentary filmmaker Marcela Zamora Chamorro and poet and novelist Claribel Alegría both used documentary narratives to memorialize courageous Salvadoran women facing dramatic social upheaval, violence, and displacement. Zamora’s films depict some of the existential struggles faced by Central American women today: violence, immigration, organized crime, legacies of trauma. Alegría’s testimonial poetry and narrative portrayed women who were witnesses and participants in the Salvadoran civil war. Both strike a balance between revealing the larger social and geopolitical contexts shaping the lives of their subjects and also emphasizing the individual agency – and heroism – of these Salvadoran women and mothers. Their stories are separated by decades, but they share a common thread: the women in their narratives live through painful experiences of displacement. They are separated from their homes, families, and cultures, forced into hiding or across dangerous borders. They must leave children behind or go searching for missing children. Some even travel toward the United States, a country whose regional foreign policy, both Alegría and Zamora suggest, has helped worsen the crises of El Salvador. Yet Alegría and Zamora’s journalistic portraits of brave women pushed to extremes also reveal possibilities for resistance and historical agency. As such, they are not only portraits but also interventions, revealing Salvadoran women to be the unheralded protagonists of sweeping regional and geopolitical histories, articulating questions about justice, resistance, and historical responsibility. Comparing Zamora and Alegría suggests a link between the documentary narrative forms they used to tell their stories. Zamora is part of a younger generation of narrative journalists centered around the online publication El Faro, where she was the Film Director, who have gained international recognition during the past decade for chronicling the contemporary crises of migration, violence, and instability in Central America; Alegría was one of El Salvador’s most famous 20th-century writers, whose poetry and prose first came to prominence in the 1960s, and who produced several important works of testimonial narrative and testimonial poetry about the Salvadoran civil war. This chapter argues that the socially engaged narrative journalism practiced by Zamora and the El

90  Jeffrey Peer Faro generation of journalists follows upon older forms of socially engaged documentary narrative, including the genre often called testimonio. This is not to claim any direct connection between two historically distinct forms. The journalists of El Faro usually refer to their longer narratives as crónica, not testimonio, while Zamora, as a filmmaker, responds to both literary and non-literary precedents. Alegría’s documentary narratives do not always fit easily into the testimonio genre either, and contemporary critics have written skeptically about attempts to define or delimit testimonio as a category (see Cortez “La verdad”). Nevertheless, the El Faro journalists’ focus on using nonfictional forms to document social crisis can be read as a return to the ideals and narrative concerns that inspired testimonio, the paradigmatic genre of Central American literature during the 1970s and 1980s, after a period of postwar literature less interested in “revolutionary projects and denouncing injustice” (Perkowska 579).1 One of the narrative concerns shared by both generations of writers is showing how individual lives take part in collective histories. John Beverley points out a contradiction in testimonio between “the powerful textual affirmation of the speaking subject” and the way that same speaking subject comes to represent larger social groups or movements (“Margin” 16). This is sometimes referred to as testimonio’s metonymic character, because of which the story of a Rigoberta Menchú can become the story of all poor Guatemalans. 2 Beverley writes that “the insistence on and affirmation of the individual subject,” which seems so paradoxical in a work of collective history, makes testimonio “an affirmation of the individual self in a collective mode” (“Margin” 17). This chapter argues that Zamora and the El Faro journalists also explore the question of “the individual self in a collective mode” when they depict individuals as both the agents and subjects of geopolitical processes and collective histories. 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 The metonymic character of testimonio can easily be evinced from Menchú’s narrative, which Beverley takes as his primary example. Menchú’s title leaves no doubt as to whose story is being told, yet the opening lines emphasize the fundamentally collective nature of the narrative, “The important thing is that what has happened to me has happened to many other people also: My story is the story of all poor Guatemalans. My personal experience is the reality of a whole people” (qtd by Beverley “Margin” 16). However, the problem of representation and of the contradiction between speaking subject and represented group – especially when understood as the Other, or as those defined by an inability to speak – was the central question in the debate that followed upon Beverley’s first article on testimonio (see Cortez “La verdad”). This debate over testimonio overlapped to some extent with questions of postcoloniality and subalternity (see Spivak), postmodernity (see Jameson), and conceptions of identity (see Yudice). This chapter neither revisits those debates in depth nor ignores the problematic nature of testimonio that they signal, but instead attempts to show how a more recent generation of Salvadoran writers has approached similar questions with similar narrative strategies.

They Won’t Take Me Alive  91 Zamora’s 2011 documentary film María en tierra de nadie (María in Nobody’s Land), co-produced by El Faro, follows women from El Salvador traveling overland through Mexico, some in search of missing children, others heading toward the United States. The central figure is María Inés Méndez, a diminutive, gray-haired, sixty-year-old woman searching for her missing daughter, Sandra, who disappeared five years earlier while migrating along the same route. But Doña Ines is only one of a number of women in Zamora’s film making similar journeys. Zamora also follows two friends as they attempt to migrate from El Salvador to the United States: Marta Muñoz is leaving behind a violent husband and a small business, for which she is being threatened and extorted by gangs; her friend Sandra Campos has recently been deported from the United States and hopes to be reunited with her U.S.-born daughter. Zamora finds a number of other subjects along the way, Salvadoran women in migrants’ shelters, in protective custody, and on the road. Each of these figures is meant to be generally representative. The María in the title refers to them all, it is a metonymy that suggests Beverley’s “collective mode.” When describing the genesis of her film in an interview on a morning television show in her native Nicaragua, Zamora claimed that she set out to show “the feminine face of migration” (Zamora CCEN Presentación). She recalled how Óscar Martínez, one of the most recognized of the El Faro writers, invited her to participate in the reporting he was doing for a collection of crónica that became Los migrantes que no importan (2010) (translated into English, unfortunately, as The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail). Zamora’s story is revealing: I was watching the journalists showing up at the shelters for undocumented immigrants and doing interviews with Father Solalinde and Father Pantoja and then when they asked the immigrants for testimonies (testimonios), the ones who gave them were the men. The men always participated and the journalists always asked the men to speak. And the women stayed totally quiet, carrying that weight that, as far as I’m concerned, is heavier than what any of the men might be carrying, sitting there in the corner without speaking. So the truth is that I wanted to turn to those women who were not telling their stories. To tell the story of immigration from the woman’s perspective. (Zamora CCEN Presentación) Zamora attempts to tell a collective story and to narrate some of the typical experiences that thousands of displaced Salvadoran women have faced, but, as in testimonio, this impulse toward a collective mode or “perspective” is countered by the need to bear witness to and memorialize the lives of individuals, individuals like Doña Inés’ missing daughter, Sandra.

92  Jeffrey Peer The image of this small, stooped, gray-haired woman walking through the streets of southern Mexico, carrying a sign with her missing daughter’s image and name below the word, “Desaparecida,” asking strangers if they have seen her, reminds us of the specificity of each individual case. Doña Inés sets out on her journey on a bus with thirty other Salvadoran mothers, all of whom are searching for family members who have disappeared while migrating to the United States. They travel along the migration routes across the Guatemala-Mexico border and into Mexico, meeting with migrant advocates and Mexican bureaucrats, in a caravan that presages those that would follow in the years to come: The Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity; the parents of the forty-three missing students from the Escuela Normal Rural in Ayotzinapa. The Salvadoran mothers pray together, set floating candles adrift on the Suchiate River, sing and occasionally burst into tears. Zamora’s documentary technique is intimate and unadorned. Her subjects often sit and face the camera and Zamora is excellent at convincing them to open up about their experiences. They speak as if to a fellow traveler, and Zamora’s cinematographic style recalls the ideal of the “participant-observer method” typical of the social documentaries of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano period, like those of the Colombian filmmaker Marta Rodríguez (Suárez 51). This movement in documentary film was contemporaneous with and often shared the subjects of literary testimonio. Juana Suárez has argued that the socially engaged films of Rodríguez constitute “solidarity practices” with the subjects they depict, advocating for those subjects and for their causes in the same way that testimonios advocate for a larger group (48). Beatriz Cortez has described how contemporary Salvadoran cinema developed from the work of documentary film collectives affiliated with the leftist rebels during the civil war. Cortez writes that “without a doubt, cinematic productions during the period of the Central American revolutions create a precedent and forge a generation of filmmakers who are still working, from a diversity of perspectives” (“Ficciones”). Cortez also argues that “the most radical change” in Salvadoran cinema during the postwar period was a turn toward fiction, impossible for armed combatants in the midst of a revolution (“Ficciones”). Zamora’s focus on nonfiction might then be read as a similar insistence on the appropriateness of using documentary narrative forms to approach painful social questions. Zamora’s documentaries might also be called “solidarity practices,” only María en tierra de nadie depicts such practices just as much as it exemplifies them. The women whom Zamora interviews usually sit in pairs. The mothers of COFAMIDE (the Committee of Family Members of Deceased and Disappeared Migrants) traveling alongside Doña Inés can only make their journey as a group and their work is meant to develop international solidarity and awareness just as much as to search

They Won’t Take Me Alive  93 for the missing. Marta and Sandra insist on traveling together and perhaps the most dramatic moment in the film comes when Sandra, able to pay for a guide across the border while Marta cannot, leaves her friend behind at a shelter. Janeth and Irma were rescued together from captivity and narrate how, kidnapped by an organized crime group, they met and survived together as prisoners. Janeth was abandoned to the criminals by her uncle, who traded her for his freedom after assuring her “they will have to rape me first” (María). The most impressive depiction of solidarity in the film is perhaps the portrait of a group of women in southern Mexico called Las Patronas, who prepare meals for the migrants passing through their town on freight trains, tossing them up as the trains race past. These are all portraits of a specifically female solidarity. Narrating migration from a female perspective also means, for Zamora, narrating women helping other women. Gendered violence is one of the dangers women face on the journey, but it is also one of the causes of displacement, one of the factors that has led so many of them to leave their homes and lives behind. Both Marta and Marilú – another migrant Zamora meets, who has lost a foot after falling from a moving train – reveal they are immigrating in order to escape from violent and abusive men. The film ends with Marilú’s dramatic return to her home in El Salvador, but the final credits reveal that after only two months she again became a victim of spousal abuse at the hands of her ex-husband and decided, despite having lost a foot on her last journey, to once again attempt to reach the United States. Zamora’s depictions of female solidarity are countered by evidence of the gendered violence these female migrants face. Their testimonies form a powerful record of the physical and psychological effects of displacement, traumatic separation, and the loss of children, families, social networks, and homes. Both Marta and Irma make telephone calls to distant family members, losing their composure in scenes of great pathos. Doña Inés and her group reel from the loss of their children, while Sandra travels toward a daughter she has been separated from by U.S. immigration officials. The film’s next-to-last scene shows Marilú returning to her home in El Salvador, surprising her aging mother while the older woman is getting dressed. The intimacy of their reunion is emphasized by the mother’s partial nudity. This rare scene of reconciliation contrasts with the general theme of Zamora’s film and provides a conclusion. When Marilú asks about her mother’s well-being, the older woman says she is “suffering bitterly” (María). The viewer is reminded that the exodus of Salvadoran migrants is the result of a historical crisis with roots in this older woman’s lifetime, and that the legacy of that past is intergenerational, that it is a history shared by both women. Critics working in trauma studies have described this phenomenon. Gabriele Schwab describes how “the legacies of violence not only haunt the actual victims but are passed on through

94  Jeffrey Peer the generations” (1). The transmission of trauma between generations, according to Schwab, does not even require “actual memories or stories of parents (postmemory)” to be shared: How do children of parents who lived through violent histories “remember” events they did not experience themselves? … It is almost as if these children become the recipients not only of their parents’ lived memories but also of their somatic memories. Children of a traumatized parental generation, I argue, become avid readers of silences and memory traces hidden in a face that is frozen in grief, a forced smile that does not feel quite right, an apparently unmotivated flare-up of rage, or chronic depression. (13–14) Roger Luckhurst describes how the original Greek word, trauma, was first used in English to describe physical wounds or openings, writing, “trauma is a piercing or breach of a border that puts inside and outside into strange communication. Trauma violently opens passageways between systems that were once discrete” (3). Zamora’s subjects cross national and psychological borders, they face violent breaches of their lives, bodies, and communities, and they are traumatically separated from their children. In an interview for the AMBULANTE film festival, Zamora revealed that she asks all of her subjects to sing, “that they sing a song, because when you sing you take things out from within” (AMBULANTE). Zamora’s cinema attempts to “put inside and outside into strange communication” by creating a cinematic record of the inner experiences of trauma victims, capturing traces of their psychic experience in documentary narratives constructed out of their testimony. Zamora’s film is not only composed of travel scenes and migrants’ testimonies, however. Many scenes and interviews offer context through interviews with shelter directors and human rights workers, bringing the larger picture of Central American migration into focus. The format is typical of documentary narrative, alternating between survivors and experts. Several of these scenes also reveal the centrality of women and of female voices in the larger geopolitical story of Central American migration, a perspective rarely found in mainstream journalistic reporting. During a meeting between the COFAMIDE mothers and Mexican bureaucratic functionaries in Chiapas, a Mexican woman takes the microphone saying she “can’t hold herself back” (María). The bureaucrats have just finished assuring the grieving mothers that their governor’s position “is very clear” and that they are working as hard as possible “to eradicate the crimes committed against migrants” (María). But the woman with the Microphone does not believe it and says so, while the officials, all men, squirm uncomfortably in their seats. She begs them to behave as “people not functionaries,” to see the crisis from a human rather than an official perspective, because

They Won’t Take Me Alive  95 otherwise all their efforts will change nothing (María). The contrast between their officious tone and her impassioned plea exposes the insincerity of flawed government efforts to address the crisis and leaves the humanitarian position sounding distinctly feminine. It takes a woman to point out the obvious fact that real lives are being lost while the male officials exhibit a “naïve triumphalism” and congratulate one another, saying, as she mocks them, “‘What a nice program we have’” (María). Though she is not one of them, this unnamed woman’s perspective is aligned with the caravan of grieving mothers who communicate through their very presence the urgency of the task of finding their missing children. Luis Perdomo, founder of COFAMIDE, narrates the story of Salvadoran migration with women as its central figures. Of a population of nearly seven million, Perdomo claims that “almost three million are abroad. We are talking about 30 to 35 percent” (María). This mass exodus of people searching “for what their own country fails to provide” meant, at first, children living without their fathers, he says (María). But as the situation in El Salvador deteriorated, according to Perdomo’s unscientific version of history, women also began migrating: And what’s worse is that now the mothers are leaving too. And when the women leave on this migration trail, we lose leadership. And then we say, why all these gang members? Why all these criminals? Because very simply the system forced the mothers to leave. This is the pain of a country. (María) Perdomo narrates the crisis like a simple family drama, fathers and then mothers leaving to look for opportunity, but Zamora’s subjects reveal that, for most, the situation is far more complicated. Some are fleeing abusive husbands. Others are journeying toward their children. One seems to be a child herself. Zamora includes testimony from Perdomo, Padres Solalinde, and Pantoja, and other male human rights advocates, but never turns these men into the narrators of her story. They provide background information, the context of a corrupt “police [force working] with the support of the municipality,” as Solalinde says, and of dangerous criminal organizations turning migrants into merchandise, as Pantoja describes (María). However, the moral center of Zamora’s film is to be found in the faces and words of the mothers, like those of María Milagros Rivera, who has come to Mexico along with Doña Inés to look for her missing son. Milagros Rivera describes applying for “the American visa” twice, hoping to search for her son in the United States, “not to stay” (María). She was denied twice, then obtained letters from Interpol and various human rights organizations, only to be denied again. Her voice cracks as she says, “the dogs won’t let me” (María). Yet she is still searching. None of the women in María en tierra de nadie

96  Jeffrey Peer whom Zamora traveled alongside were able to learn the whereabouts of their missing children and yet their mission continued and even required Zamora to make something like a sequel. Zamora’s filmography reveals her concern not only with the contemporary struggles of Central Americans and Salvadoran women in particular but also with the historical roots of the region’s troubled present. In 2011, she co-directed a short film about government massacres during the civil war in 1981, Los masacres de El Mozote (The Massacres of El Mozote), in which around one thousand civilians, mostly women, children, and elderly, were killed. Zamora’s next feature-length documentary continued the unfinished story of María en tierra de nadie, returning to the subject of Salvadoran mothers searching for their lost children. But El cuarto de los huesos (The Room of Bones) (2015) interweaves their stories with the stories of a team of forensic anthropologists excavating mass graves that hold the remains of victims of gang violence, of migrants who have disappeared, as well as some older remains of those killed during the Salvadoran civil war. The importance of the civil war as the origin for the contemporary crises of violence and migration finds a powerful metaphor in the room where the unidentified remains of victims of all three conflicts are stored side by side. Zamora’s most recent documentary, Los Ofendidos (The Victims) (2016), turns toward the psychological legacy of historical trauma. The film explores the long-term emotional effects experienced by those tortured during the years of armed combat, including Zamora’s own father, Rubén Zamora, who was briefly a cabinet member during the Revolutionary Government Junta, then spent many years in exile. Later, in 1994, he would be the presidential candidate for the leftist coalition that included the FMLN, the former guerrilla movement turned political party. He would serve as Ambassador to the United States from 2013 to 2014 under an FMLN government, and then as Permanent Representative to the Headquarters of the U.N. Marcela Zamora’s more recent documentary films thus turn from contemporary social problems toward their roots in El Salvador’s troubled past, a history in which her own family was intimately involved. Other members of the El Faro generation have sought to connect the contemporary crises of organized crime, insecurity, and migration in El Salvador to the regional social and geopolitical histories from which they spring. Óscar Martínez was a co-producer of María en tierra de nadie. His most recent book-length crónica, written along with his brother Juan José Martínez, El Niño de Hollywood (The Hollywood Kid) (2018), narrates one life as an example of “how global processes create a multitude of microscopic histories” (Martínez and Martínez). As a member of the MS-13 gang nicknamed The Hollywood Kid, Miguel Ángel Tobar was responsible for more than fifty murders. The Martínez brothers spent six years investigating Tobar’s life, only to conclude that

They Won’t Take Me Alive  97 the story of Tobar and his gang could not be told without reference to decisions made long before he was born by politicians in a country to which he never traveled. They write: With the passing months and years we could see that this man’s life was conditioned by global processes, by world histories that he knew nothing about. We discovered that his power to make decisions or “agency” was always limited, always tied up with those distant processes designed by high officials in the United States and El Salvador during the twentieth century … He was the child of a long trajectory of bloody processes that ended up creating him. (Martínez and Martínez) The Martínez brothers use Tobar’s story to demonstrate the historic responsibility of U.S. foreign policy in creating the criminal organization today so frequently demonized in depictions of Central America. They trace the origins of the MS-13 street gang back to young war refugees and child soldiers, conscripted by the thousands by both sides during the Salvadoran civil war, who later escaped to Los Angeles. Gabriele Schwab ends her study of intergenerational trauma by turning to the figure of the child soldier, a sort of first-hand child trauma victim. Schwab writes that: the brutalization of these children lies in the fact that they are turned into merciless killers while their psychic life still bears the marks of childhood … Perhaps the torture inflicted upon child soldiers exceeds the horror of other forms of torture precisely because it erases the boundaries between victim and perpetrator. (180–181) The Martínez brothers’ discovery that the origins of one of the world’s most violent street gangs can be linked with child soldiers from the Salvadoran civil war reveals the invisible, long-term impacts of conflict on generations and communities. Among the decisions they argue helped create The Hollywood Kid and the MS-13 were U.S. funding for rightwing governments and violent paramilitary security forces in El Salvador during the 1980s, and a U.S. migration policy begun during the 1990s that, as they put it: was a poor judgment by U.S. authorities who thought that by deporting [gang members] they could solve the problem … The years would demonstrate that was so, when those gang members returned undocumented by the dozens to conquer neighborhoods in New York, Virginia, Maryland, Houston. (Martínez and Martínez) Zamora points to the same poor judgment in U.S. immigration policy at the heart of the migration crisis when María Milagros Rivera complains

98  Jeffrey Peer bitterly that “the dogs” won’t grant her the visa she needs to continue searching for her son, while showing how her subjects’ “agency” is also limited by the same geopolitical processes and world histories the Martínez brothers describe. Viewed in these terms, these contemporary narratives about individuals caught up in larger collective historical processes seem more cynical than 20th-century testimonios. Those texts, often grounded in left-wing revolutionary ideologies, emphasized solidarity as a means of fighting social injustice, changing governments, and liberating oppressed peoples. The subjects of Zamora and the Martínez brothers’ narratives seem to have comparatively little power to influence the world histories that shape their lives, no matter how courageous or intelligent they may be, regardless of the acts of personal solidarity that define their struggles. Claribel Alegría and her husband D.J. Flakoll’s No me agarran viva (They Won’t Take Me Alive) (1983) tells the story of Ana María Castillo Rivas, better known as Commandante Eugenia, who served in the revolutionary forces of the Fuerzas Populares de Liberación Farabundo Martí, which would become part of the FMLN. As the title suggests, Alegría’s narrative emphasizes the powers of resistance demonstrated by women participating in the armed leftist opposition during the Salvadoran civil war. Alegría’s protagonist does not narrate her own story but the text is, in John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman’s words, “a variation on the usual first-person form of testimonio” (194). Alegría’s prologue describes the project in terms very much like those in which Beverley saw “an affirmation of the individual in the collective mode”: Eugenia, perfect example of abnegation, sacrifice and revolutionary heroism, is a typical case and not exceptional among so many Salvadoran women who have dedicated their efforts, and even their lives, to the struggle for their people’s liberation. (Alegría and Flakoll 11) Amanda Hopkinson, translating the original Spanish version for the now defunct British imprint, The Women’s Press, did not bother to translate Alegría’s note at all. Instead, she wrote one that emphasized the narrative’s metonymic quality even more strongly, “But the story is not just Eugenia’s. It is that of her suffering and rebellious fellow-nationals, still engaged in waging the ‘popular war’” (Alegría 32). This emphasis on sacrifice, typicality and collective struggle is balanced by the “affirmation of the individual” found in many pages of testimony describing Castillo Rivas’ personal background, ideological formation, friendships, and personal courage. Her family members, friends, and guerrilla “comrades” all describe her in detail, weaving together a narrative portrait of an individual whose story seems anything but “a typical case.”

They Won’t Take Me Alive  99 Alegría’s story begins with an account of Castillo Rivas’ death. She was killed by government forces during the first week of the FPL general offensive in 1981, while she was overseeing a weapons supply chain for a group of guerrilla fighters. This opening chapter is the only that Alegría narrates mimetically, in the form of a novelistic scene. The rest of the book is composed of various testimonies, transcribed from interviews, edited, and inserted directly into the text. These testimonies are threaded together by straightforward descriptions of facts from Castillo Rivas’ life and El Salvador’s history, in a structure typical to documentary narrative. But Alegría’s intentions are not so simple. Her first paragraph suggests that what follows will be a standard biographical account: Eugenia’s real name was Ana María Castillo Rivas. She was born in San Salvador on 7 May 1950. Eugenia was a premature baby and had a twin sister who died during the delivery. She was a delicate child throughout her early years, requiring continual medical attention. (Alegría 41) But her narrative quickly turns from the biographical to the sociohistorical. After just a few sentences of biography, she turns to the political events unfolding in 1950 in El Salvador: Oscar Osorio’s accession to power, the opening of trade unions for industrial workers but not agricultural laborers, a crackdown on leftists, and the suspension of constitutional rights. Where readers expect to learn about Castillo Rivas’ childhood, Alegría includes pages of testimony from “Tulita,” the wife of Salvador Cayetano Carpio, describing her political radicalization and their joint arrest by Osorio’s forces (Alegría 42). Cayetano Carpio would later found the FPL, the guerrilla organization for which Castillo Rivas gave her life. There is no direct connection between her story and Castillo Rivas’. “Eugenia was, of course, unaware of all these episodes in her country’s history. She was barely four years old,” Alegría writes (45). Alegría will continue to alternate between biographical narrative and political history lesson for most of the book, suggesting the importance of the relationship between the individual and the collective. In place of Tulita’s testimony, Alegría might have included passages from Cayetano Carpio’s much more famous testimonio, Secuestro y capucha (Kidnapping and the Hood) (1954). That book also begins with a description of the same couple’s arrest. But instead, Alegría chooses the feminine testimony, revealing that her version of Salvadoran history will, like Zamora’s documentary, be “from a female perspective.” Alegría’s text is not the biographical narrative it seems, but like Zamora’s film, tells the story of a group of women each of whom is meant to be representative. The final chapters depart from the story of Castillo Rivas in order to describe

100  Jeffrey Peer other “Salvadorean Women in Struggle for National Liberation,” as the book’s subtitle puts it. The beginnings of those chapters suggest that Alegría saw her book as something closer to group portrait than individual biography: There exist innumerable instances in which the heroism of Salvadorean women stands out. For every one that’s public knowledge, there are many more that go unrecorded because all the witnesses are dead. (Alegría 90) Mélida Anaya Montes deserves a chapter to herself. (Alegría 110) Marina González is a typical Salvadorean proletarian woman, a Mother Courage from Cuscatlán, whose biography is included here because it could well be representative of thousands upon thousands of lives denied, lives at once anonymous and combative. (Alegría 117) Castillo Rivas serves as a primary example and central figure, but Alegría is at pains to establish that the example is representative, that there were many others like her whose stories can’t be told and some whose stories deserve to be included alongside hers. What is not to be found anywhere in Alegría’s text is testimony from Castillo Rivas herself. The testimonies about her come from her husband, sister, and “comrades.” Alegría and Flakoll could not interview her, of course, so Castillo Rivas becomes a sort of empty center, a voiceless figure at the heart of a chorus of voices. Polyphonic narratives built out of many voices were a popular variation on first-person testimonio. A famous example, Elena Poniatowska’s La noche de Tlatelolco (Massacre in Mexico) (1971), was published by the same imprint as Alegría’s text, Editorial ERA in Mexico. Attempts to define testimonio as a genre usually emphasized the first-person involvement of the narrator in the story, but critics like Beverley and Zimmerman always had to make exceptions for “variation[s] on the usual first-person form of testimonio,” of which there were many. Alegría uses a similar polyphonic technique to blend together personal and collective histories. The dramatic moment in Castillo Rivas’ personal story comes in 1976 when she and her partner Javier are forced to go into hiding. Isabel, a fellow guerrilla, explains what this means: ‘You,’ I told her, ‘will leave your family, your friends, and it’s inevitable that some of your loved ones will die. Perhaps they’ll kidnap your relatives to test if this’ll lead them to you. You won’t be able to do anything about it. You’ll even see people you know in the street, and your heart will be in your mouth with the desire simply to say hello, but you won’t be able to.’ (Alegría 72) For the sake of her militancy, Castillo Rivas faces a separation from family and friends that can be understood as an internal displacement. For

They Won’t Take Me Alive  101 the rest of her life, Castillo Rivas moves between safe houses and false identities. She and Javier were married just before going into hiding and a testimony describing their wedding ceremony and reception, at which caviar was served, reveals the upper-class, privileged lives they leave behind. Javier recalls, it “was pretty painful to Eugenia. It didn’t come naturally for her to abandon an open way of life among the people” (Alegría 79). There are more separations. Javier and Castillo Rivas’ sister, Marta, are arrested by the fearsome National Guard. Marta, nine months pregnant at the time, goes into labor while being tortured and gives birth in a maternity ward, under guard. Javier and Eugenia do not see each other for four months, during which time their eventual reunion is anything but certain. Alegría suggests this separation was the final step in Castillo Rivas’ political formation and that it inspired the “stoicism” for which she became famous, a stoicism that was, Alegría contends, a powerful argument for “sexual equality within the revolutionary struggle” (Alegría 87). Alegría reveals the gendered perspective of her narrative when she asks Javier and Marta about Castillo Rivas’ position on “women’s liberation” (Alegría 88). Interestingly, Marta seems uncomfortable with the phrase, which was not “the way we talked about it” (Alegría 89). Rather, they believed that the struggle against “machismo” was an essential part of their work as revolutionary organizers (Alegría 89). John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman describe how Alegría’s testimonial poetry constituted a turn in revolutionary literature toward a more feminine subjectivity: It is difficult to separate what in this poetry represents women joining in a national-popular voice and what is specifically centered on questions of women’s liberation as such. The distinction is somewhat academic in any case, since the revolution has been the context in which a women’s movement of any sort at all has developed in El Salvador. (Beverley and Zimmerman 138) As with Alegría’s testimonial poetry, the narrative of They Won’t Take Me Alive attempts to separate this incipient fight for gender equality from the revolutionary program of the Salvadoran left, or at least, to emphasize its particularly feminine aspect. The question of gender and revolution becomes most explicit in Alegría’s narrative when she turns to testimonies about childbirth and motherhood. During the course of her interviews, Alegría “questioned the women commanders on the subject of children” (Alegría 106). Castillo Rivas gives birth while in hiding, as do other female militants. Castillo Rivas’ sister says, “having children is the most beautiful experience there is, and the most revolutionary too, I believe … We mothers who are at the same time revolutionaries have still more sacrifices imposed upon us than the rest who aren’t” (Alegría 106). Nadia explains

102  Jeffrey Peer that these sacrifices often include long separations from their children, often without communication, “For security reasons (the police constantly hounded me, knowing that my son was there with my parents and that I was bound to turn up at some time), fourteen months went by without my seeing him. It’s the hardest trial I’ve been put through up until now” (Alegría 107). Rather than suggesting a direct comparison between Alegría’s revolutionaries and Zamora’s migrant women, these resonances reveal how Alegría and Zamora created documentary narratives from gendered perspectives, collective histories written from a female point of view. Central to both of their stories was the revelation that displacement, whether for reasons of economic and social necessity or because of civil war, meant traumatic separations of mothers from their children. During the debates about testimonio of the 1990s, Georg Gugelberger and Michael Kearney argued that “testimonial literature is powerfully gendered by the voices of women,” and that such “changing constructions of gender are comparable” to perspectives in postcolonial studies investigating the agency of the Other and the conditions under which the subaltern might speak (7). But critics like Arturo Arias and Beatriz Cortez have attempted to move beyond the early theorizations of testimonio of the 1990s which emphasized those perspectives. More recently, Arias has written about another work of nonfiction that portrays the voices of female Central American revolutionaries, their war experiences, and their trauma – only in this case the women are indigenous Guatemalans, not upper-class commanders from the Salvadoran rebel forces. The testimonies of Ligia Peláez’s Memorias rebeldes contra el olvido: Paasantzila txumb’al ti’ sortzeb’ al k’u’l (2008) offer depictions of women at war, which, Arias emphasizes, contradict simplistic gender representations. Arias writes that: They were surprised to discover that some men were more afraid than they were or that some women were better shots than men. One says that, at first, they could not run as fast as men or carry as much weight on their backs. But she realized that, with training, a woman’s strength is the same as that of a man (53). This removed something of the horror of the violence they witnessed and ameliorated the circumstances of extreme traumatic dislocation. The women are not shy about describing their ability to handle weapons, to organize resistance activities or teamwork, or to display military aptitudes. Combat, the hardest part of the guerrillas’ lives, required only one thing – physical ability. Women were proud to have been chosen over men considered not strong enough for combat duty … Lina never felt alone with her gun. Having it with her calmed her down. She says she was free in the mountains. Feliciana

They Won’t Take Me Alive  103 was bombed by helicopters and learned to avoid getting hit by them. Roselia was not afraid of weapons. When engaging in combat she had a big surge of adrenaline. She was always happy to be in a battle and enjoyed the thrill of coming out alive. She claims the best thing she ever did was to fight (87). (1876) These descriptions of women in combat add nuance to Alegría’s emphasis on ideological formation, solidarity, and the emotional rigors of separation in the lives of female revolutionaries. Arias also points out how Western conceptions of trauma were somewhat foreign to these Ixil and K’iche revolutionaries, who spoke Spanish as a second (or third, or fourth) language: the women employ the word txitzi’n, an Ixil word that means “deep pain.” The term signifies not only physical suffering but also “a wounded soul,” conceptualizing an image in which a part of the subject is dead. It defines a topic at the epistemic borders of modernity, and it conveys the unnamable condition of surviving genocide (14) that anchors a discourse articulating a new relation among violence, survival, ethics and politics. Feeling txitzi’n did not preclude the women’s agency. On the contrary, it was a prerequisite for meaningful agency, one that contextualized their struggle and constituted the former combatants as comprehensible subjects. The need to talk about profound pain, never previously articulated discursively by any of them, or by most Mayan women, was followed by the joy of being together again, by the memories of their deeds, achievements, courage, and capacity for making and executing decisions. (1874) For Arias, these more nuanced perspectives on the relation between gender and revolution and on specifically indigenous conceptions of trauma reveal the limitations of the “initial theorization [of testimonial literature] in the mid-1990s” (1877). Peláez’s work itself, however, suggests to Arias that, despite a shift away from testimonio in postwar Central American literature, “testimonial traits” remain a part of “the horizon of literary expectations” (1877). In Peláez’s subjects’ specifically indigenous stories of postwar recovery, Arias sees “practical resistance to the seemingly overpowering logic of neoliberal globalization. Their blueprint is an alternative vision for the construction of potential postcapitalist, postliberal, and poststatist societies” (1877). This reading points toward the importance of a focus on indigenous communities and indigenous power in contemporary analyses of the literature of trauma and displacement. Though Zamora does not include any speakers of indigenous languages among the migrants she follows through Mexico, we know that many of the people making this dangerous journey toward

104  Jeffrey Peer the United States today are members of indigenous communities and speakers of indigenous languages. Alegría’s text suggests more explicitly than Zamora’s does the role that the United States played in the crises of El Salvador. While narrating the political history that serves as a backdrop to Castillo Rivas’ personal story, Alegría repeatedly points toward U.S. foreign policy. Of the U.S.-backed 1954 coup against the Arbenz government in Guatemala, she writes, “This blow was yet another in the interminable list of those the United States has orchestrated against any reformist initiative within their ‘backyard’” (45). While describing U.S. support for right-wing governments in El Salvador and for their security forces, like ORDEN and the Salvadoran National Guard, which were widely criticized for their atrocities, Alegría writes: The US involvement was there from the beginning, in ideology and in practice. ORDEN’s raison d’etre was ‘to root out communists’ … The US input had a decidedly McCarthyite flavor from the start. As early as 1964, the US military was running a Central American Security Communications Network inside each country in the region. (62–63) Raymond Bonner, former New York Times correspondent to El Salvador and one of the reporters who broke the story of the El Mozote massacres, describes in his seminal history of U.S. involvement in the Salvadoran civil war, Weakness and Deceit (1984), how U.S. diplomats and policy-makers ignored and denied human rights violations committed by their client forces. Classified CIA and state department cables and reports revealed these U.S. officials knew full well they were not, as they claimed, “backing a moderate, democratically elected civilian government” (Bonner 64). The history of U.S. training for paramilitary security forces in El Salvador was extensive and dated “back at least to 1957,” Bonner claims (55). More recently, Hal Brands has shown that this support continued even when it “turned out to be counterproductive” and “inimical to our interests,” noting how Reagan consistently “sided with the hard-liners and continued to bankroll the activities of a repressive and reactionary government” even after evidence of grave human rights abuses like those in El Mozote had been made public (201). In Latin America’s Cold War (2010), Brands is intent on dispelling reductive histories of U.S. involvement in the region which would exaggerate the role U.S. foreign policy played. Instead, he emphasizes how Latin Americans were themselves the key actors in complicated histories in which regional politics met global politics. Yet even Brands describes how only “an emergency re-supply of the government forces” during

They Won’t Take Me Alive  105 the rebel offensive of January 1981, first authorized by Jimmy Carter and later continued by Ronald Reagan, prevented the collapse of the Salvadoran junta (201). It was during this same general offensive that Comandante Eugenia, Alegría’s subject, was killed. A Salvadoran official had warned the United States just five days before her death that the Salvadoran “military had only a few days’ ammunition left” (Brands 200). Brands describes the ideological Cold-War lens through which U.S. policy-makers saw the conflict in El Salvador, where they were intent on “‘drawing the line’ against Cuban-Soviet encroachments” (199). But Alegría argues this perspective on the situation was mistaken and that the roots of the Salvadoran resistance were instead to be found in stories of poverty and exploitation, writing: If President Reagan and his advisors really want to know why the Salvadorean people are up in arms, they’d understand a lot more from Marina González’s biography than from searching for proof of hypothetical conspiracies of Cuban or Russian origin. (117) González’s story is one of childhood hardship and grueling labor, in which from the age of thirteen she was forced to work in factories under extreme conditions. In at least one factory, González manufactured cheap garments as part of an international supply chain, producing, somewhat ironically, a brand of female underwear called, “She” (118). Like Zamora, Alegría shows how individual women like González and Castillo Rivas were caught up in wider historical and geopolitical processes, how their agency was limited by those historical processes and how through acts of courage and solidarity they fought to write their own stories. This comparison of the documentary narratives of Zamora and Alegría suggests that, if Central American literature and criticism moved away from testimonio during the postwar years of the 1990s and 2000s, testimonial narrative forms have remained part of what Arias called “the horizon of literary expectations.” A generation of literary journalists associated with the newspaper El Faro, often describing themselves as cronistas, are creating documentary narratives that may signal a return to the ideals and narrative concerns that inspired the era of testimonio. Zamora’s documentaries have turned from the contemporary crisis to the historical roots of El Salvador’s troubles, while the Martínez brothers have insisted on revealing “how global processes create a multitude of microscopic histories.” Alegría’s polyphonic interweaving of personal and political histories attempted an investigation from a feminist perspective similar to Zamora’s, while pointing even more explicitly than the Martínez brothers to the legacy of failed U.S. foreign policy. Worsening social problems in the region, humanitarian catastrophes in the

106  Jeffrey Peer news, and increasingly obdurate political positions in the United States suggest we will likely require such narrative forms to tell the stories of today as well as those of the years to come.

Works Cited Alegría, Claribel. They Won’t Take Me Alive: Salvadorean Women in Struggle for National Liberation, translated by Amanda Hopkinson. The Women’s Press, 1987. Alegría, Claribel and D.J. Flakoll, No me agarran viva: La Mujer salvadoreña en la lucha. Ediciones ERA, 1983. Arias, Arturo. “Letter from Guatemala: Indigenous Women on Civil War.” PMLA, 124 (5): 1874–1877, 2009. Beverley, John. “The Margin at the Center.” Modern Fiction Studies, 35 (1): 11–26, 1989. Beverley, John and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. University of Texas Press, 1990. Bonner, Raymond. Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador. Times Books, 1984. Brands, Hal. Latin America’s Cold War. Harvard UP, 2012. Cortez, Beatriz. “Ficciones centroamericanas: Ixcán y la producción cinematográfica centroamericana de posguerra.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, 13, 2006. http://istmo.denison. edu/n13/articulos/ficciones.html. Accessed 27 June 2019. ———. “La verdad y otras ficciones: Visiones críticas sobre el testimonio centroamericano.” Istmo: Revista virtual de estudios literarios y culturales centroamericanos, 2, 2001. http://istmo.denison.edu/n02/articulos/testim.html. Accessed 27 June 2019. Gugelberger, Georg and Michael Kearney. “Voices for the Voiceless: Testimonial Literature in Latin America.” Latin American Perspectives, 18 (3): 3–14, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. “De la sustitución de importaciones literarias y culturales en el tercer mundo: el caso del testimonio.” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana, 18 (36): 117–133, 1992. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008. María en tierra de nadie. Directed by Marcela Zamora Chamorro. Woman Make Movies, 2010. Martínez, Juan José and Óscar Martínez. El Niño de Hollywood. Kindle ed., 2018. Perkowska, Magdalena. “Dos escritoras centroamericanas ante la historia: las novelas posnacionales de Tatiana Lobo y Gloria Guardia.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 33 (3): 579–601, 2009. Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. Columbia UP, 2010. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorti. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Routledge, 2006. 28–37.

They Won’t Take Me Alive  107 Suárez, Juana. “Prácticas de solidaridad: Los documentales de Marta Rodríguez.” Chicana/Latina Studies, 5 (1): 48–75, 2005. Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” Latin American Perspectives, 18 (3): 15–31, 1991. Zamora Chamorro, Marcela. Interview. CCEN Presentación Documental María En Tierra de Nadie, Buenos Días Nicaragua, Canal 12. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaebOvFMY_M. Accessed 27 June 2019. ———. Interview. AMBULANTE. Entrevista a Marcela Zamora, Directora de El Cuarto de Los Huesos. 2015. Vimeo, https://vimeo.com/119481785. Accessed 27 June 2019.

Part 2

Indigeneity

7

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God Megan E. Cannella

Transgenerational trauma is mapped out in dystopian novels in a way that cannot quite be accomplished by other mediums or genres. By engaging in a speculative future, where the trappings of humanity as we know it have been stripped away, perhaps irreparably, pain can be explored in creative, versatile, elusive ways that we often cannot stand to face in reality. When warned of impending cultural or ecological disasters, people engage in cognitive dissonance as a means of self-preservation. Such denial tactics are used because the stark truth of reality feels, frankly, inconceivable. Speculative fiction dystopias, such as those discussed in this chapter, allow us to confront such fears in a controlled environment, allowing at once the option for both engagement and reflection. The dystopian Indigenous novels discussed in this chapter both place legacy at the center of their trauma narratives, providing a transgenerational map of displacement and loss. Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves (2017) thoughtfully and critically looks at the role of Indian Schools and their legacy of colonial terror. While Dimaline’s novel is set in the future, the violence that its protagonists are trying to escape and survive is a callback to a long history of violent eradication attempts levied against the Indigenous communities of North America. In this way, Dimaline’s novel focuses on attempts to preserve cultural legacy despite unrelenting cultural and personal traumas. Meanwhile, Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) draws on the history of breaking up Indigenous families by focusing on the future risks and consequences that come from such merciless efforts to separate mother from child. Both of these novels, with slightly different perspectives, tell the stories of the violences endured by Indigenous people, both contemporary and historical, making it clear that such displacement is indefatigable and must continue to be of the utmost concern as we consider what our future worlds will look like. Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves tells the story of a near-future, dystopian North America where the only demographic that is still

112  Megan E. Cannella able to dream is Indigenous people. As a result, Indigenous people are hunted for their bone marrow, as it is the source of their ability to dream. The novel follows a young teen, Francis, known as Frenchie, as he is separated from his family and tries to find a way to survive. Frenchie is essentially adopted by a disparate group of Indigenous people, at first strangers and eventually family, as they, constantly on the run, struggle to preserve their lives, as well as their traditions. This group is multigenerational, so questions of heritage and community sustainability are vital to the narrative, just as they are in Erdrich’s novel. Dimaline’s characters are fighting to preserve their memories of the past in case there is a future. As Miigwan, the group’s leader, explains while finally telling RiRi, the group’s youngest member, the rest of Story, the all-encompassing term that refers to Indigenous histories, “We go to the schools and they leach the dreams from where our ancestors hid them, in the honeycombs of slushy marrow buried in our bones. And us? Well, we join our ancestors, hoping we left enough dreams behind for the next generation to stumble across” (Dimaline 90). The idea of leaving hope or dreams for a future generation to draw from in times of hardship propels this novel. It is this fight to preserve the past that mirrors Erdrich’s characters’ explicit fight to create a future. Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017) looks at a world where children are being born victim of an evolutionary anomaly— they are evolutionarily digressing, becoming something that seems to be decidedly non-human, and thus is seen as a threat. The protagonist of this novel, Cedar is Indigenous, who explores her role of mother to her unborn, but potentially evolutionarily compromised child, while also trying to understand her relationship to her Indigenous birth mother, as well as her white, adopted parents. Cedar questions how an Indigenous child can be adopted by a white couple, in direct violation of the Indian Child Welfare Act, which is designed to keep Indigenous children in Indigenous communities (Erdrich 4). As she begins to unravel this, she confronts questions of what it means to be a mother, especially an Indigenous mother, and the consequences of the increasingly Puritanical government threatening to take her and her child into custody for their protection as well as medical experimentation. These novels offer distinct narratives of indigeneity as it exists in a speculative near-future, while speaking to more universal themes of displacement, legacy, and bodily autonomy, all of which are consistently harrowing topics to confront, especially within North American society. In a 2017 interview with Publishing Perspectives, Dimaline was asked whether or not she felt “there’s been a perceptible shift and that works by Indigenous writers are now in the mainstream, not in a niche or category” (Douglas and Anderson). In part, she responded,

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism  113 We’re going through a pretty brutal learning curve right now because Indigenous literature is unlike any other, and the rules are different. It’s why we’re having to call out writers and stories that are harmful or that misrepresent. […] Many of our stories are ceremony, history, teachings, and cannot be mishandled. (Douglas and Anderson) There are many traumas of colonization to which Dimaline and Erdrich’s novels reference and draw parallels, as they each push forward to explore Indigenous security and autonomy may look like in the future. However, the purpose of this essay is not to analyze those events but rather to explore the literary contributions shaped by these real-world atrocities. By using speculative future, dystopian literary forms, both Dimaline and Erdrich are able to use the future to engage and problematize contemporary issues of Indigenous oppression, while preserving the true histories upon which these futures are necessarily built. Both authors are careful to contextualize the traumas at the center of their respective novels, keeping in mind the legacy of displacement that has brought their characters to these near-future realities. One review of The Marrow Thieves asserts, readers with an interest in social justice and a grasp on colonial history will extract much deeper meaning. […] It is a timely and necessary read referencing pipelines, melting northern territories, rising water levels, and the consequences of government policies that don’t protect the environment. (Rose) This assessment speaks to the fact that while these novels can be read as dystopian escapism, they also grapple with speculative consequences of complex real-world histories. It is this kind of precarious narrative balance that makes these novels compelling parts of larger conversations surrounding displacement narratives and how they shape contemporary culture. Erdrich’s completion of Future Home is closely linked to broader contemporary cultural concerns about displacement. In conversation with Margaret Atwood, Erdrich explains her motivation to finish Future Home: I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation. Also crucial for me was that we lost on climate change; there was a real chance to keep the lid on carbon back then.

114  Megan E. Cannella Oh, and I was pregnant! My youngest daughter was born in 2001, so my identification with Cedar was total. I wrote obsessively in Cedar’s voice. […] I picked up Future Home of the Living God again, after the 2016 election, because I needed Cedar. Maybe I’m writing the biological equivalent of our present political mess. And of course it feels like things are going backward again. (Atwood and Erdrich) Both of these novels are responding to contemporary threats and anxieties. Genetics, reproduction, and the fight for bodily autonomy and recognition are central to these novels. Both are poised as colonial critiques of social structures that continue to position people of color, specifically women of color, and more specifically Indigenous women, as a resource to mine. The crudeness of this metaphor should be jarring and draw attention to the careless, cruel attitudes that have created and maintained a culture of abuse for Indigenous women to endure. Entire institutions— government, education, and healthcare prime among them—situate Indigenous communities, women in particular—as a means to an end—a specimen to study and experiment on, so long as it is useful, and then, they can be discarded and forgotten. Due to their discussions of institutional interest in Indigenous bodies, central to both of these novels are the ideas of continued surveillance and erasure. Dimaline’s novel pays a lot of attention to the ways in which past methods, primarily Indian schools, are used to commodify Indigenous peoples. This serves to illustrate the insidious, cyclical realities of colonialism. Early in the novel, Frenchie learns from his father that the threats they are facing are not entirely unique to their experiences, “Miigwans says the Governors’ Committee didn’t set up the schools brand new; he says they were based on the old residential school system they used to try to break our people to being with, way back” (Dimaline 5). Throughout the novel, there is an unrelenting awareness that what is happening has happened to some degree before. Alternatively, in Future Home, Cedar bemoans her biological heritage, My family has no special powers or connection with healing spirits or sacred animals. […] I was Mary Potts, daughter and granddaughter of Mary Potts, big sister to another Mary Potts, in short, just another of many Mary Potts reaching back to the colonization of this region … (Erdrich 5) By the very virtue of her birth name, Cedar cannot escape the legacy of colonialism. Both of these examples set their respective novels up to walk what often seems like a permeable barrier between past, present, and future within an omnipresent colonial reality. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson addresses this omnipresence in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (2017), as she explains:

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism  115 I understand colonialism as an overwhelmingly dominating force in my daily life that continually attacks my freedom and well-being as kwe.1 Colonialism tries very hard to keep me off my land. It tries very hard to ensure I cannot speak my language, think as my Ancestors did, find comfort in elders or the river or the lake of rice. It tries very hard to get me to think in a particular way. It tries very hard to get me to resist in a particular way. It tries very hard to get me to move about my territory in a particular way. It controls how I make a living and how I feed my family. It tries to control the relationship I have with my children. It tries to control my sexuality, the ways I express my gender, how I take care of myself, and how I parent with escalating magnitudes of structural and interpersonal discipline and violence if I do not conform. (44–45) Simpson’s understanding of colonialism as a pervasive, unrelenting part of her everyday experience as kwe is useful in understanding how colonialism functions in these novels. Both Erdrich and Dimaline position escalating colonialism as an inevitability that their protagonists must endure. In both novels, what is being targeted by colonialism is not exceptional but rather basic functions of human life: pregnancy and dreaming, respectively. It is by focusing their narratives around threats and oppressions based on two such basic functions of humanity that Erdrich and Dimaline are able to craft gripping narratives about the tireless pursuits of colonialism and the resulting transgenerational legacy of Indigenous trauma. In targeting core human functions such as dreaming and pregnancy, these novels explore the inherently dystopian functions of colonialism in the 21st century. Moving beyond seizure of lands or exploitative labor practices, this dystopian colonialism hones in on the core objective of all colonialist efforts: erasure of the individual. To that end, Simpson continues, “[Colonialism] creates a world where I am never safe. It is a violent system of continual harm forced on my body, mind, emotions, and spirit designed to destroy my ability to attach to my land, to function as kwe, and to be a grounded, influencing agent in the world” (45). What Simpson conveys here are the ways in which colonialism seeks to undermine and erode the lives and autonomy of the individual, in a

1 Simpson understands kwe to mean woman with in the spectrum of genders in Nishnaabemowin, or Nishnaabe language. Kwe is not a commodity. Kwe is not capital. It is different than the word woman because it recognizes a spectrum of gender expressions and it exists embedded in grounded normativity. Kwe cannot be exploited. […] Kwe does not conform to the rigidity of the colonial gender binary, nor is kwe essentialized. In my mind, kwe has the capacity to be inclusive of both cis and trans experiences, but this is not my decision to make, because I do not write from that positionality. (29)

116  Megan E. Cannella holistic, unrelenting pursuit of complete domination and erasure. The unrelenting nature of colonialist efforts is important to discuss, because if this persistence is not acknowledged, it is easy to think colonialist practices against Indigenous communities are a symptom of the past. Simpson purposefully situates her critique as a contemporary one, as she explains, “I understand settler colonialism’s present structure as one that is formed and maintained by a series of processes for the purposes of dispossessing, that create a scaffolding within which my relationship to the state is contained” (45). As pregnancy and dreaming are put under colonial attack in Dimaline and Erdrich’s novels, it becomes overwhelmingly apparent that control of these two functions of individualized humanity are key to complete erasure of Indigenous communities. If one’s ability to procreate and dream is curtailed, the ability to create anything new and the ability to carry traditional beliefs and culture forward are similarly abolished. By writing in the genre of speculative, dystopian fiction, Dimaline and Erdrich both infuse their narratives with a necessary degree of futurity. Where Erdrich’s epistolary novel serves as letters to Cedar’s unborn legacy, the fact that Dimaline’s novel is a young adult novel serves a parallel purpose of informing, if not warning, a rising generation about the transgenerational trauma into which they were born. There are long histories across North America of the education (dreams) and motherhood (pregnancy) of Indigenous communities being attacked, which both authors pay tribute to throughout their narratives. These are well-known yet oft-erased pieces of North American history. Nevertheless, Dimaline and Erdrich push issues of colonialism into the speculative future, facilitating thoughtful critiques of the ways in which Indigenous culture continues to be attacked with no end in sight. Similarly, Simpson argues, I certainly do not experience [colonialism] as a historical incident that has unfortunate consequences for the present. I experience it as a gendered structure and a series of complex and overlapping processes that work together as a cohort to maintain the structure. The structure is one of perpetual disappearance of Indigenous bodies for perpetual territorial acquisition, to use Patrick Wolfe’s phrase. (45) The erasure of Indigenous bodies is not solely a piece of neglected history. It is a purposeful and continuing act, with increasing degrees of insidiousness. Dimaline’s novel uses flashbacks to help its characters and readers alike to understand the dystopian colonialist reality its characters are battling. Crucial to these flashbacks is Story—in part, the explanation of exactly how Indigenous peoples came to be hunted for their bone marrow, the secret to their ability to dream at night. When faced with the lack of dreams and the madness it was causing, “[a]t first people turned

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism  117 to Indigenous people the way the New Agers had, all reverence and curiosity, looking for was we could help guide them” (88). This seemingly innocent beginning mirrors each character’s own version of Story, where things were hard but manageable, until they weren’t, They humbled themselves when we refused. And then they changed on us, like the New Agers, looking for ways they could take what we had and administer it themselves. How could they best appropriate the uncanny ability we kept to dream? How could they make ceremony better, more efficient, more economical? (88) Here, Dimaline taps into the well-worn colonial narrative, illustrating how harvesting Indigenous people for their bone marrow and dreams contributes almost seamlessly to a history filled with Indian Wars, Removal Acts, Indian Schools, or the abuses and disappearances of Indigenous Women across North America (143). To that end, what follows directly charts the colonial narrative that has been responsible for the genocide of inconceivable amounts of Indigenous culture and community: They asked for volunteers first. Put out ads asking for people with ‘Indigenous bloodlines and good general health’ to check in with local clinics for medical trails. […] By then our distrust had grown stronger, and they didn’t get many volunteers from the public. So they turned to the prisons. […] Whether or not the prisoners went voluntarily, who knows? There weren’t enough people worried about the well-being of prisoners to really make sure. (Dimaline 89) This progressive arc from volunteer to captive is one that is readily seen throughout U.S. history and is also seen in Future Home. First, one is given the opportunity to sacrifice themselves for the good of their nation, of their people, of humanity. Then, in the name of humanity, these same groups are dehumanized, commodified, and sacrificed en masse, “Soon, they needed too many bodies, and they turned to history to show them how to best keep us warehoused, how to best position the culling. That’s when the residential schools started growing up from the dirt like poisonous brick mushrooms” (89). The futuristic, dystopian displacement Dimaline offers in this novel is so grounded in the past that it cannot truly be exceptional. It is merely another step in a long, arduous process of colonial victimization. Essential to the narratives of both novels is the exploration of the ways in which colonization preys on the family structure. The Marrow Thieves offers a broad understanding of future colonization, with no one being immune from government displacement efforts. After the loss of young Ri-Ri and the capture of their Elder, Minerva, Frenchie

118  Megan E. Cannella reflects, “Everything was different. We were faster without our youngest and oldest, but now we were without deep roots” (154). By breaking apart not only each crew member’s family structure—which is often a core part of each character’s “coming-to story”—but also the crew that Frenchie is traveling and surviving with, colonizing efforts are working to strategically undermine Indigenous structures of community and support. However, Frenchie and his crew seem to echo Simpson’s assertion, “I am interested in freedom, not survival, and as kwe, I understand my freedom is dependent upon the destruction of settler colonialism,” as they continue moving, continue fighting even in the face of unimaginable, unrecoverable loss (45). Colonization is thriving on the isolation of individual tribe members, the erasure of Indigenous communities and tradition. Therefore, Frenchie and his crew’s commitment to each other to functioning and living as a community operates in direct defiance of the colonialist terror surrounding them. To that end, Future Home is centered on the fight to maintain not only Indigenous identity but also Indigenous pregnancy, ensuring the continuation of family bloodlines and the sense of belonging that can be inherent to them. Future Home follows Cedar as she tries to make sense of her lineage while trying to protect her own child and legacy. It is not without a heavy degree of irony that the figure that threatens both of these is named “Mother.” Mother is the digital presence used to recruit “womb volunteers.” When Cedar continues to hide from recruiters and resist institutionalization, which she rightly identifies as a direct threat to both her child and herself, Mother monitors Cedar through Cedar’s computer. Even after Cedar attempts to physically destroy her computer, and hopefully, Mother’s panoptic access to her, Mother persists: One pre-dawn, we see the image of Mother fading in and out. She looks haggard, much older, tinged with green like the head of the Wizard of Oz. ‘I’m back,’ she says, glaring exhaustedly up from under her eyebrows. ‘They failed to destroy Mother. I will always be here for you’. (Erdrich 90) As Mother attempts to compromise life instead of create it, the complicated understanding of the role of mother in this novel speaks to larger issues of colonization and displacement. From the very beginning of the novel, Cedar questions the construction of her family, Except I’ve never understood how I was adopted—I mean, the legality there is definitely to be questioned. There is a law called the Indian Child Welfare Act, which makes it almost impossible to adopt a Native child into a non-Native family. This law should have, even had to, apply to me. (4)

Dreams in a Time of Dystopic Colonialism  119 While Cedar questions how she came to be part of her adopted, white, Songmaker family, she also questions the extent of her indigeneity. Within the privileged white community in which she grew up, Cedar was “rare, maybe part wild […] a theoretical Native” (4). She “always felt special, like royalty, mentioned in the setting of reverence that attended the study of Native history or customs” but this idealized Otherness dissipates when she “went to college and hung out with other indigenes” (4–5). In college, when Cedar is finally able to form bonds with other Indigenous people, she finds that she does not quite fit in due to the fact that she does not know her origins. The ways in which her unknown origins were mythologized in her white community break away within her new Indigenous community, “I became ordinary, then. Even worse, I had no clan, no culture, no language, no relatives. Confusingly, I had no struggle” (5). For Cedar, struggle is key to her Indigenous identity. While the novel will go on to show that Cedar’s family history, both biological and adopted, is full of challenge and struggle, initially that is not apparent to her. This may be in part due to the fact that her past, present, and future are all the work of building aggressions, instead of one, lone cataclysmic event. It is initially this sense of separation and isolation that makes Cedar especially vulnerable to the colonizing work going on around her. The fact that the primary colonizing efforts of these novels are located in schools and hospitals is not a mistake. Schools and hospitals are part of the larger institutional fabric of North America. They are both meant to be places of enrichment and growth—one for mind, one for body. Yet within the context of settler colonialism, they are functioning in a way that explicitly contradicts their stated purpose. As Simpson argues, I think the insight that settler colonialism is formed and maintained by a series of processes is important because it recognizes that the state sets up different controlled points of interaction though its practices—consultations, negotiations, high-level meetings, inquires, royal commissions, policy, and law, for instance, that slightly shift, at least temporarily on microscales, our experience of settler colonialism is a structure. (45) As it becomes clear that such community staples, schools and hospitals, are no longer safe and are actively a risk, the institutional nature of the colonial action becomes undeniable. Just as prisoners are used as test subjects in The Marrow Thieves, Cedar learns, “All of the prisoners in the country have disappeared. Most people say they have been euthanized. Or freed, which Phil doesn’t believe. The prisons are for women” (Erdrich 85). The prisons have been turned into involuntary birthing centers where some babies are allowed to survive but babies of color are not (85–86). Simply the repeat use of prisons as government resources in these novels—for experimentation and extermination, all

120  Megan E. Cannella in the name of order—speaks to Simpson’s argument, “The state uses its asymmetric power to ensure it always controls the processes as a mechanism for managing Indigenous sorrow, anger, and resistance, and this ensure the outcome remains consistent with its goal of maintaining dispossession” (45). When Indigenous people are deprived of what are now common facets of daily life—schools, hospitals, stable homes, and food supplies—it is clear that the goal is to displace them as thoroughly as possible. Still both Dimaline and Erdrich’s novels speak to a larger cultural response, one of perseverance. While perseverance does not wield the same panoptic institutionalization as schools, hospitals, and prisons, it is still very much an institutionalized response to these other oppressions. It exists in direct opposition, as the other end of the binary and thus is never fully separate from the work of colonialism. Through their novels, both Dimaline and Erdrich tell transgenerational narratives of displacement and abuse. However, central to both novels is also a transgenerational priority of hope and endurance. Frenchie and Cedar both work tirelessly, despite unimaginable challenges and setbacks, to secure a future for themselves and their loved ones. In studying the narrative presence of displacement in contemporary, 21st-century literatures of North America, scholars are also afforded the opportunity to better understand legacies of transgenerational endurance and survival. Meaningful scholarship in these areas can provide unique, useful insight into the ways that histories of displacement provide a window into histories of creation, which Dimaline and Erdrich illustrate are essential to navigating future realities.

Acknowledgments I would like to acknowledge that this chapter was primarily researched and written on the traditional territories of the Washoe people.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret and Louise Erdrich. “Inside the Dystopian Visions of Margaret Atwood and Louise Erdrich.” Elle, Hearst Digital Media, 14 November 2017, www.elle.com/culture/books/a13530871/future-home-ofthe-living-god-louise-erdrich-interview/. Dimaline, Cherie. The Marrow Thieves. Dancing Cat Books, 2018. Douglas, Carla and Porter Anderson. “Indigenous Writers in Canada: Interview with Author Cherie Dimaline.” Publishing Perspectives, Publishing Perspectives, 3 November 2017, https://publishingperspectives.com/2017/11/ indigenous-writers-canada-interview-author-cherie-dimaline/. Erdrich, Louise. Future Home of the Living God. Harper Collins Publishers, 2017. Rose, Jessica. “Review of The Marrow Thieves.” Quill and Quire, St. Joseph Media, July/August 2019, https://quillandquire.com/review/the-marrow-thieves/. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

8

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory Forms of Translation in The Sun Dance and El Circo Anahuac Clarissa Castaneda Survivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name … Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry. Survivance means the right of succession or reversion of an estate, and in that sense, the estate of native survivancy. Gerald Vizenor (Chippewa), Manifest Manners

American opera is a confounding space for an indigenous archive to unfold. It is a tradition which began with the performance of colonial power narratives from late 18th- and 19th-century England, France, Italy, and Germany. The first grand opera from an American composer did not premier until the 1845 Philadelphia production of William Henry Fry’s Leonora (Holland 14). Consider that the opera houses of Boston, New York, and New Orleans came to flourish by the late 19th century in spite of the objections to performance and pageantry held by the 17th-century Puritan settlers and 18th-century Christian communities. Daniel Snowman’s work in “Opera in America: New World Overtures” for History Today explores some of this historical context for operatic production. In the three-hundred-year period leading up to the debut of Fry’s Leonora, the indigenous population of the Americas was decimated by disease, forced removals, and armed conflict with “explorers,” “settlers,” and colonizing forces. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent (1973) explores the conquest of native peoples as a methodical step in the claiming of natural resources for European and U.S. colonial powers. Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas (2019) revisits many North American legal documents, letters, and political ephemera to trace the relationship between native erasure and the building of an American nation-state. Neither European exploitative ventures nor American self-reliance sought to acquire indigenous knowledge beyond that which would aid

122  Clarissa Castaneda in colonial dominance. English-language opera in the United States has not evolved as fertile ground for the annexation of indigenous knowledge. However, two operas spanning over two centuries of native survivance impose upon operatic form and English-language conventions in order to produce hybrid language texts. Zitkala-Sâ’s The Sun Dance Opera (1913) (with a score credited to William F. Hanson) and Maria Elena Yepes’ El Circo Anahuac (2018, with a score by David Reyes) translate indigenous epistemic perspective and transpose indigenous language from a position of erasure to a position of untranslatable leitmotif for native protagonists. The Sun Dance Opera (a five-act opera) and El Circo Anahuac (a six-scene opera) feature hybrid libretto lyrics in Sioux-English and Nahuatl-Spanish-English, respectively. Understanding their central plot points as hybrid iterations of indigeneity representing a spectrum of negotiations between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial realities allows for scholars to read more than a linear narrative; it allows for the reading of variegate impact which indigenous languages and epistemic perspectives have had on English-language opera and arts production in America. While these two hybrid American operas draw from variant indigenous epistemic perspectives from two radically different eras of production, analysis of the libretto narratives shows how these works impose upon, manipulate, and reconfigure operatic form. The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac archive seminal steps in the procession of native survivance: the symbolic reclaiming of native land in a narrative context, the normalization of indigenous language within and in spite of the architecture of (post)colonial art traditions, and the passing of indigenous epistemic perspective from a suppressed form of aurality (oral storytelling and ritual) to a lauded form of aurality (melodrama in operatic form). While the two operas are both worth considering as archives and vehicles for native survivance, they are distinct in their epistemic commitments and roots. The Sun Dance Opera renders a precolonial understanding of god and virtue which rejects the violence of forced conversion to Christianity in the United States by establishing Sioux spiritual practice within a continuum of the sacred which cannot be undermined by Christian dogma because it does not contradict it. El Ciro Anahuac presents a living oral tradition text which rejects the postcolonial project of nationalism at the expense of indigenous communities in Mexico. The audience for both of these operas would have understood the “civilized” and “high art” import of the form which originated from the monarchy-produced masques of Early Modern Europe. However, Vlado Kotnik argues in “The Adaptability of Opera: When Different Social Agents Come to Common Ground” (2013) that even in Europe, opera houses were mirrors in which the actor-vocalists performed the world of the audience and the institutional context of arts production. He argues,

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  123 Each and every opera house has had multiple performative functions  … it has also acted its own various identities. Opera houses have performed themselves for their patrons, sponsors, financial supporters and appreciators. In doing so, they have entered into symbolic exchanges with all these social agents. (316–317) The idea that opera is a social venue wherein multiple spheres of performance lead to an exchange of information upends the most common stereotypes about opera: it is for the rich, and it is for white people. If the opera house—all of the moving parts working together to produce an opera—is tapping into the pulse of its audience’s sociocultural and sociopolitical realities to make their production relevant, if the opera house is realizing the expectations of its financial backers, and if the opera house is too performing the experience of those on stage and those behind the operatic composition, then the opera house has the potential for subversion against its own established hierarchies and against its audience’s established hierarchies. The symbolic exchanges between audience and opera house are necessarily impacted by factors outside the scope of operatic form itself. Opera is an intertext by virtue of its multiple spheres of performativity and representation. For The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac, the symbolic exchange at work is not one of indigenous peoples asking for the white elite’s recognition. Rather, the symbolic exchange is one of didactic, counter-historical, and disruptive import. By translating indigenous epistemic perspective into operatic form, The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac establish an intertextual dialogue between indigenous reality, narrative, and (post)colonial tools of cultural genocide. These operas exploit the performative spheres of opera production to affirm indigenous survivance and construct a living native perspective which decolonizes itself by occupying the fine arts systems of language in opera. These operas hold and transmit indigenous aural memory through an art form—recorded in libretto and score formats—which is not intended to archive modes of knowledge which defy the Western demand for textual record to validate.

Theoretical Perspectives in Translation, Survivance, and Dance Translation theories from Walter Benjamin and Roman Jakobsen provide a relevant structure for understanding the interlingual and intertextual work accomplished in The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac. In “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” (1959), Jakobsen argues for a three-area structuring of linguistic sign translation, with “verbal sign” being the common subject of interpretation. He categorizes them as follows: “1. Intralingual translation

124  Clarissa Castaneda or rewording is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language. 2. Interlingual translation or translation proper is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language. 3. Intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” (145) The aural nature of opera is necessarily reliant on a form of intralingual translation which interprets a narrative from static textual sign (music composition and libretto) to kinetic operatic performance. Most operas have some degree of intersemiotic translation with stage directions relating to the body of a performer on stage being interpreted from text to physical expression. However, interlingual translation is not a key feature of opera as a genre of art, and few music- and dance-oriented art forms feature intersemiotic translation of indigenous ritual to performance. The Sun Dance Opera features interlingual translation of an indigenous narrative from Sioux to English, and the intersemiotic translation of the Sun Dance ritual from a sacred tribal context to a creative (post)colonial context. The Sun Dance Opera libretto does not appear to bring the sacred into a (post)colonial arts context. Rather, its translation of the Sun Dance disrupts the Euro-American performativity of opera, as a communiqué of sorts, between those trained at opera performance and the interested public. If the opera house only performs European and American-national sociocultural systems, then the opera house mirrors and validates colonial power. The Sun Dance Opera is subversive in its performance of indigenous sociocultural commitments and knowledge because it takes performative space away from (post)colonial power while also claiming performative space for native survivance. El Circo Anahuac features interlingual translation of Nahuatl oral tradition myth from a Mexica cosmology and from a Spanish-language textual tradition related to the myth. Through the interlingual translation process from Nahuatl and Spanish to English, the opera decolonizes the Mexica oral narrative by taking it out of the realm of indigenous-past as myth and (post)colonial era mestizaje-aligned romance. Through interlingual and intersemiotic translation, El Circo Anahuac performs a living and contemporary form of indigeneity in which the stories of the past inform the stories of the present. The symbolic exchange between the opera house and audience of El Circo Anahuac is grounded in native survivance. The Náhua myth is also an iconic postcolonial narrative. In “Painting with Lava” (2005), Margarita De Orellana describes the symbolic significance of Popo and Izta from a Mexican national perspective: Thus, the two volcanoes crowning the horizon of the Valley of Mexico, the Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, have also assumed important

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  125 roles in our cultural landscape. Their eruptions have shaken the earth and also the imagination. Their unmistakable silhouettes are inwardly reflected in the body and soul of Mexicans. We can draw their outline with our eyes closed. They continue to exist within us even when pollution shrouds them from sight. (66) De Orellana’s essay acts as the introduction to a special issue of Artes de Mexico in which the contributors “attempt to show the various forms of intimacy that exist between these volcanoes, our country and our culture. How they are part of us and how we also belong to them” (66). El Circo Anahuac reifies an indigenous and precolonial homeland as memory and story which confounds the boundaries of postcolonial mestizaje as a mechanism for white-washing. Rhetorically, using the palette and discourse of opera in an American tradition argues for the translatability and sustainability of a precolonial epistemic perspective; the opera decolonizes the continuum of mestizaje and provides a blueprint for 21st-century creative innovation in a culturally hybrid context. The October 2018 production’s cast of soloists and dancers are composed of Latinx Americans who enact the Náhua narrative in line with what the name of the production company—Brown Fist Productions—implies: Chicano power, Latinx power, Mexica/Aztec power, solidarity, and sociopolitical resistance to the legacies of colonization. Further, it is important to note that not all words in The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac are interlingually translated into English. Jakobsen explains: Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey. Each verb or a given language imperatively raises a set of specific yes-or-no questions, as for instance: is the narrated event conceived with or without reference to its completion? Is the narrated event presented as prior to the speech event or not? Naturally the attention of native speakers and listeners will be constantly focused on such items as are compulsory in their verbal code. (149) Jakobsen’s point as to what a language must convey highlights the un-translatability of an array of narrative points in both operas. In the Sioux vows and words of The Sun Dance and the Nahuatl words of El Circo Anahuac, the symbolic exchange between opera house and audience is one which mirrors two concurrent aspects of the audience: there are two epistemic realities at work in these operas and in the postcolonial era of their productions. One episteme is that of the Euro-American or Mexican national status quo, and another episteme is indigenous-oriented. The “compulsory” aspects of verbal coding in Sioux and in Nahuatl are not only linguistic, but sociocultural. The two operas feature embodied

126  Clarissa Castaneda and living native narratives in a hybrid linguistic structure which is sometimes translating material into English and sometimes holding, with resilience, to indigenous words which must convey a verbal code known only to indigenous language speakers. There is a sphere of signification which is delivered to the status quo, English-speaking members of the audience and a sphere of signification which is necessarily beyond their grasp. El Circo Anahuac also features lines in Spanish. While Spanish lines in a Mexican national context are mirroring the status quo, Spanish lines in a U.S. national context are mirroring marginalized members of the Latinx American community. Anti-Latinx rhetoric in the U.S. is often couched in demands for English-only communication; in the age of Trump-validated xenophobia, speaking Spanish in public can draw the ire, anger, and violent response of monolingual and prejudiced passersby. The Yepes libretto normalizes Spanish-English-Nahuatl hybridity. In “Scene1” of El Circo Anahuac the character Tlapalla (the place of the red and black) welcomes the audience: Ladies and gentlemen, damas y caballeros, Welcome, bienvenidos al Circo Anahuac! Tonight, for your pleasure and entertainment We proudly present the Legend of the Volcanoes. Witness the amazing poise and grace of our tightrope walkers, Monarca and Quetzal. Thrill to the daring moves of our trapeze artists, Xochiquetzal and Ocelotl. Gasp in awe at the clever slight-of-hand, knife, and Love chamber tricks of Ixtli the Magician, the master of deception! And finally, share the joy of great Anahuac as you witness The birth of Popolt, the Smoky Mountain and Ixtla, the Sleeping Woman. Come one, come all!! Vengen todos and be amazed! El Circo Anahuac is about the begin! (Yepes 1–2) The stage direction notes that he is “dressed flamboyantly as a circus ringmaster.” In between scenes, there are interludes wherein stage directions specify that “a trapeze set of two swings descends from the ceiling.” By aligning the central characters with death-defying circus acts like the trapeze and tightrope, Tlapalla is establishing the interlude, between scene spaces as relevant spaces. The interludes are borderlands, in an Anzaldúian sense, with purpose and content which will amaze the audience. In terms of Jakobsen’s theory that languages differ in terms of what they must convey, El Circo Anahuac aptly mirrors the linguistically hybrid reality which many Latinx Americans experience. The “verbal code” of those “native” speakers who are bilingual or trilingual

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  127 must integrate disparate parts. The trapeze and tightrope could be understood as metaphors for the linguistic “tricks” and mastery which are unique to “native” combination Spanish, English, and Nahuatl speakers. The symmetry which Tlapalla establishes between “Ladies and gentlemen, damas y caballeros,” circus performance, and Náhua myth is a paradoxical arrangement. Linguistically, paradox is what the hybrid linguistic palette of El Circo Anahuac must convey. In “Translation: Literature and Letters,” Octavio Paz considers the inherent otherness amongst disparate language systems: The sounds of a tongue we do not know may cause us to react with astonishment, annoyance, indignation, or amused perplexity, but these sensations are soon replaced by uncertainties about our own language. We become aware that language is not universal; rather, there is a plurality of languages, each one alien and unintelligible to the others. (152) By maintaining libretto lines in Sioux, and in Nahuatl and Spanish, respectively, these operas interfere with the monolingual English speaker’s sense of certainty as to the primacy of their own epistemic perspective. The productions of The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac necessarily engage in a symbolic exchange which shifts the power dynamics by “othering” those in the audience who have rarely been pushed to the borderlands of signification. The Indian becomes the master of multicultural and multilingual exchange, while the Euro-American status quo becomes the “other” who is incapable of full perception. The opera house, high art venue for this reversal of marginalization implies that the “savage” is actually more civilized and cosmopolitan than the collective status quo. Within this simultaneously didactic and decolonizing exchange between opera house and audience, Gerald Vizenor’s concept of the fourth voice is a useful marker of native survivance. In “Aesthetics of Survivance,” Vizenor concludes his meditation on the formal or depictive aspects of survivance with a nod to Derrida’s brief and influential use of the term in Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews. In response to an interview question on the potential for Communism to return in a “different” form than the party of Karl Marx, Derrida replies that the survivance of Communism would not be in the form of a political party because the party was “disappearing” from politics. He goes on to reason that while the party format is disappearing, its survivance in this mode may have “a long life.” Vizenor understands Derrida’s use of “survivance” as one correlating with an afterlife of sorts for the subject. Formally, Vizenor is using Derrida’s term of survivance to acknowledge the dissolution of indigenous civilizations [the original “format”] and the cogent afterlife of indigenous epistemic perspective beyond and in spite

128  Clarissa Castaneda of colonization and cultural genocide. Vizenor’s conceptual expansion of survivance is specific to indigenous peoples. He reasons: Derrida would surely have embraced a more expansive sense of the word survivance, as he has done with the word differance. Peggy Kamuf points out in A Derrida Reader that the suffix ance “calls up a middle voice between the active and passive voices. In this manner it can point to an operation that is not that of a subject or an object, a certain nontransivity. Survivance, in this sense, could be the fourth person or voice in native stories. The fourth voice in native stories is the voice of survivance; it is neither the individual (first person), the audience (second person), or the subject (third person). The fourth voices in The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac are the postcolonial realities of native peoples within a continuum which maintains nontransitivity via the untranslatable libretto lyrics sung in Sioux and Nahuatl, respectively. This understanding of survivance as fourth voice aligns with Benjamin’s concept of “flowering” (73) as the afterlife of an original text in its linguistically translated iterations. The impact of a translation makes onto the host language at-hand is another type of implied fourth voice. The symbolic exchange between opera house and audience is not within the purview of the status quo or the disappeared structures of tribal life as it was known prior to colonization. Native survivance in these operas is expressed through and to the communities which continue to narrate indigenous epistemic perspective in new and often ephemeral modes. The unscored and unscripted dances and chants in The Sun Dance Opera are fourth voice ephemeral moments which were, while not entirely spontaneous in their produced opera house context, certainly particular from performance to performance. The symbolic exchanges and spheres of performance must have varied in relation to both the mood of the Sioux “Sun Dance” performers and the idiosyncrasies of a particular audience. The dances were not choreographed in Western terms, and no stage directions for these portions of the play are known to have existed. Unlike The Sun Dance Opera’s intercessions which break from operatic vocalization to unscripted simulacrum of a Sun Dance, El Circo Anahuac features choreographed sections of dance. The choreographic nature of dance in El Circo Anahuac is a product of indigenous movement becoming a significant component of modern dance. The integration of indigenous movement with modern dance is a type of intersemiotic translation; one palette of body language signification is translated into a foreign palette of body language signification. The translation impacts and alters the original and the host language. In “Scene III,” Ocelotl and Xochiquetzal enter the stage. Both sing of the call they hear from the “huehuetl,” a type of “Aztec

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  129 war drum” (Yepes 4). While Ocelotl must heed the call by going to war, Xochiquetzal must heed the call by letting him go. Before he leaves, she sings: “I swear on my honor/ Forever yours I’ll be” (Yepes 5). A primarily Spanish-English duet between the two follows; they promise to “love one another” forever. They call to the community of “great Anahuac” to “Dance and celebrate/ True love is among us/ War will have to wait” (Yepes 5). While the prewar dancing is not intended to signal a specific Náhua ritual to the audience, the call to “great Anahuac” invites the dancers and audience to enact their connection (or disconnection) to the Náhua myth in multivalent terms that support postcolonial iterations of indigeneity. In Jacqueline Shea Murphy’s The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories (2007), Native American dancers are described as enacting (rather than representing) their epistemic perspective. Like Vizenor’s concept of the fourth voice, Shea Murphy’s “enacting” is intransitive because it not the operation of a subject and not the operation of an object. There are critics of The Sun Dance Opera who deride the opera as an offensive caricature of the sacred. Zitkala-Sâ scholar P. Jane Hafen explains: It may have been beyond [Zitkala-Sâ’s] imagination to consider that, in addition to the direct attempts to deprive Native peoples of their rights, there would be those who would patronizingly rob through imitation the sacred rituals, as well. The Sun Dance Opera allowed Gertrude to assert the value of her own beliefs without apparent consequence. (“A Cultural Duet” 110) Murphy’s concept of “enacting” is likely closer to what Zitkala-Sâ accomplished in the original 1913 production, and definitely what the opera’s non-staging and non-scoring of the indigenous chorus sections invites. The Sun Dance Opera iteration of Sioux ritual remained within the possession of the 1913 “Old Sioux” led chorus precisely because it was not committed to a written record. The Sioux centenarian was a permanent guest of Zitkala-Sâ and her family; he lived with them in Utah during the opera’s genesis and first production (Hafen, “Introduction” xix). From an indigenous perspective, the Western libretto and score can be understood as deviations from an oral and dance tradition which welcomed spontaneity. In Act II, the libretto does not include details as to what the “Old Sioux” and the male Sun Dancers chanted, or descriptions of their dance and ritual-derived movements. However, the specification that this section is performed “senza orchestra” is an interruption to operatic structure. The silencing of the orchestra renders empty space for indigenous-produced musicality which is independent from and older than the arms of colonial assimilation. In El Circo

130  Clarissa Castaneda Anahuac, the ritual “flower wars” are referenced in “Scene IV.” Ocelotl and Itzli sing: With jaguars and eagles We’ll fight side by side! A ver quien se queda (to see who will stay) To see who will die. The flower wars call us. They beckon our fate. May Tonanzin guide us (Earth Mother and Protector) And shield us from death! (Yepes 7) Here, the “flower wars” (xochiyaoyotl) refer to the ritual battles fought between first the Toltecs and then the Mexica, and their neighboring tribes. The flower wars were not a battle for territory, material goods, or death. They were the precursor to ritual sacrifice wherein the Mexica would “battle” the Tlaxcalans and capture warriors and for sacrifice (Almazán 169). While the dance aspects of The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac differ in tribal orientation and in the degree of their scriptedness, both operas feature intersemiotic translations of indigenous dance from ceremonial and ritual contexts to an operatic narrative context. In these works, the enacting function of postcolonial indigenous dance is a form of discourse on par with the narrative fourth voice of survivance. The fourth voice is also manifest in the poetics of each opera’s libretto. Translator Martin Earl adeptly observes: Among other things, prose is principally an ethical project, while poetry is amoral, a tampering with truths which the world of prose (and its naturalistic approach to mimesis) takes for granted. Poetry creates its own truth, which at times is the same truth as the world’s, and sometimes not. The hybrid librettos—in linguistic and cultural terms—are an iteration of poetry which tampers with the “truths” of the Euro-American status quo via bilingual and multilingual structures. In “The Task of the Translator” (1923), Walter Benjamin asserts that “No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener” (71). These modes of expression are not “intended” for any single individual. Rather, these art forms exist as an architecture for discourse beyond the limited scope of immediate consumption. Opera encompasses all three of these forms of expression, and the libretto is its apparatus for poetry. It is an archive and catalyst which provides linguistic anchoring for the opera’s plot and character development. For example, in Act II

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  131 of The Sun Dance Opera, Winona has a “monologue” wherein she asks indeterminate and supernatural Indian spirits to come to Ohiya’s aid: A wonder world you reign upon, O gentle Moon. Yes! it turns to a fairy-world the most familiar trees and foothills. O fairy Indian People—People of the night world, hear me, I pray to you.— Aid my lover in his great test for me, for he has vowed. At the Sun Dance, give him courage—give him strength, for it is a great test. Yon fields of the firefly lands, I recall my childhood fright lest your crop of winged cinder should burn me in their flight. Send your myriad sparks to hover over the elfin arrowhead makers. (139) The lines point to a shift in the plot which brings the two Sioux lovers closer to the Sun Dance, where Ohiya will succeed or fail to earn the Chief’s permission to marry his daughter, Winona. They also mirror two conceptions of the fairy-world: one Western and one indigenous. The indigenous conception of “fairies” is rooted in a cosmology which understood vows and offerings as reaching intended recipients. The “fairy Indian people” (139) whom Winona asks to aid Ohiya as he prepares for the Sun Dance is a point of convergence between the two worlds; the fairies are a hybrid symbol which can be read by as being “magical” from a Euro-American perspective and as acknowledgment of the protagonists’ active relationship with “ritualized trance” as part of their “diverse” points of reference (Johnson 210) on Native American myth of the past and present from an indigenous perspective. Where Western tales call diminutive creatures of magic “fairies,” many indigenous Native American tribes (including the Sioux and Shoshone) recognize “little spirits” or “little people” as part of their ritual discourse with material, interior (personal), and sacred space realities. Socioculturally, the libretto lines which present “fairy Indian people” (139) and “fairies lithe and small” (142) claim space for indigenous myth—a product of oral tradition and ritual practice—by carving out space for itself from the Western context for “magic.” According to the opera narrative, immoral interference with the sacred elicits a negative outcome for unscrupulous individuals. In the Western world of the early 20th century, fairies transfixed the public. Even without having knowledge of the “little spirits” allusion in the opera, indigenous perspective remains part of the Western-world fairy discourse of the era. Like the waning comforts of pastoral life at the fin de siècle, indigenous life in the Americas was caught in a state of

132  Clarissa Castaneda being in close proximity to an old world while adapting to the anxieties of a new world. Accordingly, the rhapsodic bent of Winona’s monologue alludes to The Sun Dance libretto’s era of production. Unlike the industrialization of daily work and home life for Western peoples, indigenous peoples had to contend with institutionalized policies of tribal erasure and epistemic colonization as upheavals beyond the technological. In between Winona’s lines, the wonder world, night world, Ohiya’s vow, Sun Dance, and Winona’s childhood fear converge. The space established is one in which the supernatural, natural, sacred, apprehensive, nostalgic, and adult professions of faith assemble to establish a hybrid allusion. To clarify, these lines are in English (the language of the colonizer), and the melodrama is on par with the cultural temperament of the Western world just prior to the outbreak of World War I (WWI) (a world which romanticized childhood, pastoral life, and Indian alike). However, the libretto is also a text of survivance which renders the future of the Sioux, via the union between Winona and Ohiya, as a goal reached only through endurance in the face of egregious and supernatural interference. In El Circo Anahuac, the Monarca and Quetzal introduce “misfortune” and “tragedy” as primary themes in the opera. These themes are similar to the interferences Ohiya and Winona experience in The Sun Dance Opera. Monarca and Quetzal sing the following lines in “Scene II”: Awaken my people! Escuchen mi voz. (Listen to my voice) Hace muchos a-nos (Many years ago) Hubo un gran amor. (There was a great love) Awaken my people! Come closer and see How love was rewarded And finally set free. In days when Anahuac (Aztec territory) Ruled all the land A maiden and warrior Swore love to the end. (Yepes 3) The stage directions specify that Monarca and Quetzal’s costumes are “reminiscent of circus and Aztec attire.” The idiosyncratic “truth” established in this duet is one wherein indigeneity (Anahuac), an integrated English-Spanish tongue, and Western entertainment (circus acts) reflect “my people.” The commands, to awaken and escuchen (listen), are delivered to an audience with variant sociocultural realities. Some audience members will awaken to see their hybrid and indigenous-root worldview

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  133 validated, while others will awaken to find their monolingual and monocultural worldview undermined. The “truth” in El Circo Anahuac deconstructs the borders and walls between indigeneity, mestizaje, and colonial power. The fourth voice in Yepes’ libretto is the implied tailor sewing disparate parts together; the fourth voice recontextualizes and remembers the Náhua myth’s cosmology toward didactic and subversive ends which support native survivance. Hafen gives a top-down reading of The Sun Dance Opera which does not necessarily prohibit its potential to support native survivance. She refers to Zitkala-Sâ by her legal name, Gertrude Bonnin, instead of her Lakota penname. I refer the writer as Zitkala-Sâ throughout this chapter to respect the agency of the writer to identify herself in her own terms; it is the self-selected name that she ascribed to her published works. Hafen hones in on the uneven distribution of power between The Sun Dance Opera collaborators. Despite the collaboration with Bonnin, Hanson clearly assumes dominion over the work. His work represents a difficult aspect of Native American history and criticism, that of sentimental colonialism. The colonial relationship between Hanson and Bonnin is obvious from the title page of The Sun Dance Opera, which lists only Hanson. Although Bonnin refers to the opera as her work in her later writings, the dominant voice is clearly that of Hanson … the outcome remains paternalistic. The voice of the sentimentalist is louder than the voice of the Native. The association is a paradigmatic representation of Europeans and Euramericans who appropriate and define Native peoples according to their own conventions and conceptions-in this case, domestication of the intense and sacred Sun Dance into the harmless music of light opera. (Hafen, “Sentimentality and Sovereignty” 38) The opera’s hybrid sociocultural architecture can alternatively be understood as an example of what Benjamin called a “real translation,” as the English-language lines and Western-world trappings do not obfuscate the survivance enacted through The Sun Dance Opera. Benjamin explains, “A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not block its light, but allows the pure language as though reinforced by its own medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully” (79–80). The “language” in this interlingual and intersemiotic translation is “pure” by virtue of its contribution to native survivance. I would argue that it is not a purity derived from Judeo-Christian, colonial contexts. Rather, it is a “pure” language in the vein of Jewish Benjamin, who understood otherness and the translative as potentially degrading. “Pure” language, in this sense, is the ability to circumvent degradation to deliver some showing of truth which is enacting a real-world condition.

134  Clarissa Castaneda Benjamin also argues that translated poetic works are vessels wherein the translation must “lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification” to render a work which is “recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel” (79). The fragments of greater languages intermingled in El Circo Anahuac include Spanish, English, Nahuatl, modern circus performance, ballet, danca Azteca, Mexica percussive rhythm, and Western operatic vocalization. Rather than viewing the hybridity of form and cultural milieu(s) as degrading, understanding them as fragments which are arranged in a manner intended not to erase indigeneity but to carry it allows for the “otherness” of Náhua myth to take center stage. The enacting via dance in both operas is necessarily the product of indigeneity moving through and into a Western-oriented space. However, the fragmentation allows for a reconfiguration of “truth” from an indigenous perspective.

Conclusion How do The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac decolonize indigenous knowledge systems? They decolonize by cultivating a hybrid system for signification in an operatic performance context, which requires a digging up of sociocultural and sociopolitical layers covered in centuries of colonial sediment. They do so through careful and pointed fragmentation of disparate parts to enact an often counter-historical truth. In “A Mutable Silhouette: The Volcanoes in a Century of Change,” Guadalupe Garcia Miranda conceptualizes art in relation to the media: The media’s information overload has forced us to select the fragments we wish to conserve. We perceive reality as something that can be manipulated, edited and adapted to our individual needs in terms of representation. That is why each work of art made today is a small magnifying glass inviting us to focus on parts of reality, and to discover ourselves in them. Art continues to be a means of imprinting the way we see ourselves onto our consciousness. (79) While Zitkala-Sâ was working within the scope of early 20th-century media, the raw elements of operatic performance (music, dance, acting, set design, orchestrations, etc.) from then to now have not radically changed. Garcia Miranda’s conception of art as curated fragments, as magnifying glass, and as imprint(ing) clarifies the critical observations shared in this chapter. Both Zitkala-Sâ and Yepes made choices in terms of whom to collaborate with, how to craft the operatic narrative, and how to write indigenous epistemic perspective into postcolonial being. In The Sun Dance Opera libretto, Zitkala-Sâ returns Sioux consciousness to a tribal context which, ironically, she only experienced as a child. By naming another indigenous figure as the interloper, The Sun Dance

Indigenous Libretto and Aural Memory  135 Opera reclaims indigenous agency outside of colonial structures. And, in the monologue quoted earlier in this chapter, Winona’s articulation of concentric spaces link to her intention to aid Ohiya’s brave efforts. Winona’s lines create their own truth; the colonial world which had sought to eradicate indigenous knowledge exists as a diaphanous, melodramatic, linguistic pall over the “pure” multiverse of indigenous survivance. In “Scene VI” of El Circo Anahuac, Xochiquetzal sings a lamentation as Itzli covers her with his cape and guides her into a Death Chamber at stage right. She sings to “great Tonatiuh, Giver of Life” and asks him to “shelter [her] from treachery” and return Quetzal to her (Yepes 10). Her final lines speak of Náhua myth but to contemporary Latinx Americans, which include contemporary indigenous peoples from south of the border. Like the immigrants traveling on foot, by car, and by train to reach the Mexico-U.S. border, Xochiquetzal must pass through a border of sorts. She passes through the border between life and death in search of the “Peace and Community” which has escaped her. When she and her beloved Quetzal are transformed into the two volcanoes, “great Anahuac” is reconstituted on the operatic stage and the two are “finally set free!” Rhetorically, precolonial Nahuatl is the linguistic weapon which interferes with an array of colonizing structures represented by Spanish and English in the libretto. The Sun Dance Opera and El Circo Anahuac decolonize their respective indigenous epistemic perspectives by fragmenting the languages and art forms of colonial supremacy, and by collecting the parts of indigenous epistemic perspective which survived colonization. These pieces are reorganized according to principles which defy the erasure of a living indigenous culture. Decolonization is a process which cannot recover unfragmented indigeneity. However, these operas show that decolonization can and should imprint the way indigenous aural traditions and memory narrate themselves into the consciousness of the communities they speak to and through.

Works Cited Almazán, Marco A. “The Aztec States-Society: Roots of Civil Society and Social Capital.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 565, 1999, pp. 162–175. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1049544. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 1987. Aunte Lute Books, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” 1923. Translated by Harry Zohn. Theories of Translation, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, U of Chicago P, 1992, 71–82. De Orellana, Margarita. “The Two Volcanoes Popocatépetl & Iztaccíhuatl.” Translated by Richard Moszka. Artes De México, no. 73, 2005, p. 66. www. jstor.org/stable/24316204. Derrida, Jacques. Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, edited by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford UP, 2002.

136  Clarissa Castaneda Earl, Martin. “The Difference between Poetry and Prose.” Poetry Foundation, 2012. www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2012/04/the-difference-betweenpoetry-and-prose. Accessed 3 September 2019. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. 1973. Monthly Review Press, 1997. Garcia Miranda, Guadalupe. “A Mutable Silhouette: The Volcanoes in a Century of Change.” Translated by Carole Castelli. Artes De México, no. 73, 2005, pp. 77–79. www.jstor.org/stable/24316204. Hafen, P. Jane. “A Cultural Duet: Zitkala Ša and The Sun Dance Opera.” Great Plains Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 102–111. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/23532779. ———. “Introduction.” Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, edited by Zitkala-Sâ, U of Nebraska P, 2001, xiii–xxiv. Holland, Bernard. “Opera: Leonora by Fry.” The New York Times, 2 February 1987, p. 14. Jakobsen, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” 1959. Theories of Translation, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, U of Chicago P, 1992, 144–151. Johnson, Willard. “A Recently Received Native American Shamanistic Myth of Little Spirits.” Western Folklore, vol. 51, no. 2, 1992, pp. 207–213. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1499368. Kotnik, Vlado. “The Adaptability of Opera: When Different Social Agents Come to Common Ground.” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, vol. 44, no. 2, 2013, pp. 303–342. Ostler, Jeffrey. Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas. Yale UP, 2019. Paz, Octavio. “Translation: Literature and Letters.” 1971. Translated by Irene del Corral. Theories of Translation, edited by Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet. U of Chicago P, 1992, 152–162. Reyes, David. El Circo Anahuac Presents the Legend of the Volcanoes: Score, 2018. PDF File. Shea Murphy, Jacqueline. The People Have Never Stopped Dancing: Native American Modern Dance Histories. U of Minnesota P, 2007. Snowman, Daniel. “Opera in America: New World Overtures.” History Today, vol. 60, no. 1, 2010 (digital edition). Vizenor, Gerald. “Aesthetics of Survivance: Literary Theory and Practice.” Survivance Narratives of Native Presence, edited by Gerald Vizenor. U of Nebraska P, 2008, 1–13. Kindle Edition. Yepes, Maria Elena. El Circo Anahuac Presents the Legend of the Volcanoes: Libretto. 2018. PDF file. Zitkala-Sâ, Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera, edited by P. Jane Hafen. U of Nebraska P, 2001.

9

Not Lost “We Are People of the Land. We Are Clay People, People of the Mounds” Margaret McMurtrey

Multilayered and nuanced, Choctaw hymns must be listened to and heard from perspectives that resonate with deep experience: land, space, community, spirituality, identity, and depth beyond lines on a page. They call forth the past into the present to create the future. The act of music making is a lived experience in the same frame as lived religion. Neither is static. The Choctaw hymns must invoke that totality. Persisting in a worldview that is at once Chahta and Protestant-Euro-American, these hymns are mixed and living artifacts that sing of resistance, conversion, and assimilation. In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, Choctaw author and literary critic, Louis Owens reminds: “[T]he recovering or rearticulation of an identity, a process dependent upon a rediscovered sense of place as well as community” is at the center of American Indian fiction and for the traditional Native American storyteller, “each story originates with and serves to define the people as a whole as a community.” In his words, this is a syncretic process which is “necessary to the adaptive, dynamic nature American Indian cultures— that quality requisite for cultural survival.”1 Survival and identity are present, past, and future for Native people. Pre-removal Choctaw hymns (written before 1829) are embedded with nuanced reminders of Choctaw identity and illustrate the power of language to bring into being Choctaw survival. Owens warns that the “coercive power of language in Native American oral traditions—that ability to ‘bring into being’ and thus radically enter into reality—intersects with what has been called the ‘development of historic consciousness’ as a result of written language.”2 For him this juncture gives rise to historic consciousness and to the emergence of the individual author at the cost of community consciousness.

1 Owens (1992), pp. 1–31.

138  Margaret McMurtrey For Owens “within traditional Native American literatures, speakers and listeners are co-participants in the telling of a story.” The Native American writer is challenged to honor community through a syncretic process that represents the adaptive and dynamic nature of heritable cultures. Here, the vitalizing tension of orality to literacy, and literacy echoing in orality, is revealed. Without this tension, written literacy becomes “descriptive/historic and begins to lose its unique power as creator of reality.”3 Owens observed an always already Native worldview grounded in oral tradition and community when integrated into written text it reflects the adaptive and dynamic nature of Native culture. The Choctaw authors of pre-removal Choctaw hymns are forerunners of a long line of Native storytellers persisting and resisting within the orality/literacy vortex. Hymns composed by Choctaw speakers pre-removal reveal the animate power of calling into being: creating reality. In 1831, the Chahta4 were the first peoples to be removed from the Southeast to Indian Territory. While some Choctaw continue a sustained presence in Mississippi, we as a people remain scattered in pockets across Oklahoma, the Southeast, and the four directions of the world. Prior to removal in 1829, Protestant missionaries from the American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions (ABCFM), Cyrus Byington and Alfred Wright, published Chahta Vba Isht Taoloa Holisso, a collection of hymns written in Choctaw. These hymns were not translations of Euro-American hymns: they were original compositions in Choctaw by Choctaw speakers. The hymns were written text with metered notations to allow singers to select a similarly metered melody. These literate metered verse compositions were embedded with nuanced Choctaw language, culture, and survival. Translating worldviews from one language and culture into another language and culture through an artifact (hymnody) of the colonizing culture is the central task of these hymnal compositions that call into being these mixing prayers for survivance. Language bears identity, but these hymns carry the land and remain vessels of Choctaw culture brought to diasporic identities. The lived experience, the rising sound of these hymns bears the context of place and storied earth. Choctaw hymns tell a tale of many regions and many lands. They promote Choctaw identity through a storying of the land5 that cannot be lost, the living remembrance of place. The land through the songs, the many songs, came with us. These hymns connect us to our homeland in the Southeast … home to Nanih Waiya, the mound of our emergence, the sacred mound of our people. Pre-removal hymns call us home through philosophical and religious traditions syntactically and

Not Lost  139 morphologically embedded in the hymn structure. They are embodied through time, place, and culture. LeAnne Howe, Choctaw author and essayist, asserts Native American authors do not “tell strictly autobiographical stories, nor memoir, nor history, nor fiction but rather they tell a kind of story that includes collaboration with the past and present and future.”6 The 1829 hymns reveal the geographic and lingual translations and transmissions of racialized and deracinated peoples in vital collaboration with past, present, and future of Native America. That is, they “bring into being” the past, present, and future. Ivana Yi describes storying the land as the way Native places become reconstituted through storytelling after trauma. This practice of storying the land began prior to colonial contact and persists today. Building on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “survivance,” Yi hears the voices of Native American storytellers who continue to map cartographies of the Americas after colonization and trauma.7 Vizenor defines the very necessity of his word: “[S]urvivance is an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry.” Storying the land is not new. It is an ongoing vitality that has placed the Americas for thousands of years. For the Choctaw, the hymns carry forth our storying of the land—our survival. As Owens acknowledged that transitioning from orality to literacy forced an evolution to other ways of storying the land … written hymns as well as novels and other poetries. This violating moment of contact, missionization, demands our listening. And so commences a storying of the land—survivance—in first language Christian hymns of Native peoples. The Choctaw hymns, written pre-removal, are songs preserving place: the ancestors continuing to animate the living land of our people. These original hymns and later additions of English language hymns translated into Choctaw continue to be sung and heard today; they preserve Choctaw identity by maintaining kinship bonds to one another as well as to the land. Survivance, in this case, is a lived experience through the singing of the hymns in community. Not static in voice, the “we” remains a “we.” The Choctaw hymns, text, and the melodies are nuanced and, taken together as carried in a joined community of singers, are heard from multiple perspectives which reflect land, space, community, spirituality, identity, and go beyond lines on a silent page. Music making is lived experience in the same frame as lived religion. Limiting the interpretation and understanding of these hymns to only what is written, privileges literate fixity over lived orality. According to music theorist Christopher



140  Margaret McMurtrey Small, the fundamental nature and meaning of music is not in an object, nor in musical works at all, but in action, in what people do. Seeking to conjure meaning only from the translation of the text of a hymn independent of other experiential acts ignores the importance of the act of making music or musicking.8 Widening the circle of attention to hear relationships that constitute a performance or musical encounter clarifies that music’s primary meanings are not individually derived but perhaps primarily a social act. Musicking through singing and maintaining the Choctaw hymns manifests Choctaw identity—derived from the land, emerging embedded in the text of the hymn. While they are not static, these hymns are further sanctified by the fact that they were voiced in place just prior to loss. Singing the hymns in a choral group in Choctaw within a fellowship of Choctaws for two centuries imbues the musicking of the hymns with “an index of identity”9 an identity which sustains Choctaw to our ancestral lands.10 Distinguishing between individual and group identity is central to understanding the past and present significance of Choctaw hymns to Choctaw survival and persistence. The continued singing of the hymns in community becomes a recurring declaration of survivance11 as well as a metaphorical call to the Choctaw ancestral homeland and the cultural values and legacies it embodies. In Choctaw, a verb-driven language, the verb to be does not exist. Descriptive verb-driven languages emphasize actions called forth through naming: i.e., calling into being. Choctaw place names tell stories of actions on the land and when said in community they re-call into being place, people, and action (event). Choctaw hymns ARE embedded with the stories of the land and the People. After two centuries post-removal, the hymns and the singing of them ground Choctaw identity. As ethnomusicology, Thomas Turino asserts, “[t]he crucial link between identity formation and arts like music lies in the specific semiotic character of these activities which make them particularly affective and direct ways of knowing.”12 The community creates meaning: singers listen, listeners



Not Lost  141 sing, and even those who do not sing are participants in the communal act of musicking. The verb that is made by voiced Choctaw. Hymns sustain connective pathways to Choctaw culture, sacred landscapes, and spiritual beliefs. Published in 1829 (and composed between 1822 and 1828), the first Choctaw hymnal, Chahta Vba Isht Taoloa Holisso, did not inhabit static English. It centers Choctaw identity throughout the Choctaw diaspora expressed through living Choctaw. Multilayered, geographically and chronologically complicated, this community of song is vigilantly localized, concretized, and honored as placed, the place-based sacral. Native peoples are bound by kinship and land; these are undivided. The Native peoples of the Southeast have endured over five hundred years of invasion, violence, and forced assimilation. Singing the Choctaw hymns provides an active spiritual tether, an umbilical, to our homeland and to our ancestors. For many Choctaw, it is the vitality of the musicking of the hymns that voice, that animate Choctaw identity and ancestral roots in this now calling into being past, present, and future.13 The uncovering of the critical positionality of these hymns in forming Choctaw communities and identity, past and present, must integrate Thomas Turino’s diasporic perspectives and Peircean Semiotics theory as well as Christopher Small’s exploration of the act of music making or musicking. Initially, I did not understand the significance, nor the nuance of meaning, created when the text, melody, and community singing came together to become a voiced signifier of Choctaw identity.

In 2010 a decision was made to again reprint the 1872 sixth-ninth edition, but make the book larger print and add music notation to preserve the traditional hymn tunes. Also new tunes would be added to fit the meters of the existing hymns not being sung. Shaped notes would be used to reflect the traditional music training many Choctaws had received. The Choctaw Hymn Book, Chahta Vba Isht Taloa Holisso, contains no musical notation. It is the common hymn book to all Choctaw people in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and Louisiana. The songs are generally sung a cappella and over time the tunes began to vary from community to community. Most Choctaw hymns have been learned from preceding generations, committed to memory and then passed down to the next generation. See Chahta Vba Isht Taloa Micha Taloa Ikbi Holisso Hoke. Asheville, NC. Global Bible Society. 2017.

142  Margaret McMurtrey Previously, I examined and viewed the hymn texts, the melodies, and the community singing of the hymns, as separate, distinct acts related only by situational context. Now I acknowledge Choctaw identity and spirituality are not only voiced in the text of the hymns but also become further manifest in the singing or the musicking of the hymns. The singing of these hymns is a social act of an ethnic people maintaining and voicing their shared identity through remembrance of their ancestors and sacred lands. Choctaw identity is in part achieved and voiced by the integration of all three. This realization highlights the importance of the interplay of text, melody, place, and the musicking of the Choctaw community. Acknowledging this allows me to claim the hymns as not only the cultural legacy or tether which maintains the sacrality of the land as place of origin and keeper of stories for the Choctaw people of the Southeast but also a poetic manifestation of place and story. For Native peoples of the Americas, the natural landscape is emplotted with stories and cultural lessons. They story the land. Patricia Galloway (2006), references the land in stories of Native nations as woven into the history, cosmology, and moral discourse; hence the land is “emplotted and constructed cognitively as an active participant in the drama of human life.” Additionally, she comments that “without an understanding of the systematics and pragmatics of this emplottment, it is not possible to begin to grasp the man-land relation.”14 For Galloway, place names are one of the ways the man-land relation is expressed and maintained. She interrogates how the Choctaw of the 18th century inscribed their values in names and stories with respect to the land and the way they dwelt on it which made the land an actor in their lives and a part of Choctaw identity. Galloway argues that “We all carry around maps in our heads, consisting of several culturally specific grids, not all of them very regular, with specific images, names, events, and particular routes tagged more or less tightly to them.” We thus inhabit several different cognitive spaces concomitantly and there are “usually several distinct scales: 1) intimate map-our living space; 2) local maps-parts of our community and landmarks; and 3) country and world maps- in which all this is situated.”15 Consider Galloway’s conceptual frame of cognitive spaces alongside Keith Basso’s work in Wisdom Sits in Places. For Basso places and place names are the means for transmission of knowledge of the Western Apache. He describes these place names as alluding to events along the trail or path of Apache history … in which time is expressed spatially and all historical events are seen as present for consideration. Events commemorated by such names



Not Lost  143 always point to a moral lesson about appropriate conduct … The landscape itself speaks moral lessons to a traditionally educated Western Apache.16 It is these cognitive spaces we, Choctaw, carry with us individually and as a cultural group. I suggest for the Choctaw the pre-removal Choctaw hymns are part of our shared cognitive space found emplotted on the land and in our memories. According to Basso, the Western Apache revisit particular sites that are infused with story and cultural lessons. For the Apache, there are known places that “tell” stories. The land is spiritual partner and leader empowering seekers to sustain and maintain the people and their culture. On the other side of the river Linda Hogan (Chickasaw) calls the “long person,” lies the Southeast, the ancestral home of mound people, the Choctaw. The mounds were constructed by the people to honor the land with the bones of the ancestors. Archeological research speculates that mounds were created for varying purposes such as honoring the bones of ancestors, providing a platform for religious ceremonies, or as the dwelling places for a tribal spiritual elite.17 They are visceral sites of events and people. Stories and reminders of a cultural legacy to be voiced. The land IS eternal sacred space, where our stories remain for our people. The people have not forgotten our land, and our land has not forgotten the people. The land continues to call to us. The stories in the mounds were embedded eons ago and continue to be told through layered stones, sands, minerals, and flora. The creative partnership of Monique Mojica and LeAnne Howe invites us to learn to “read” these mounds. They ask us as readers as well as audiences to imagine a narrative tale unfolding from these pre-Colombian earth-glyphs. Mojica exclaims “the mounds sing and people sing to the mound!” (YouTube, 2016). In Embodied Tribalography Choctaw author, LeAnne Howe, identifies the land as keeper of stories.18 Her playwriting projects with Monique Mojica advance as well as illustrate, stories inscribed upon the land by human as well as divine agents. Howe and Mojica engage these ancestral mounds, found throughout the Eastern Woodlands, the Southeast, and the Plains of the continental United States, as storytelling mediums that call the mounds into being and inspire their Sacred Landscapes playwriting and playrighting. They gather and perform these story-filled places through careful examination of the mounds and their soil-layered (hi)-stories or histories. Their work speaks: the mounds embody the stories of the people. In her visionary poetry play Blood Run, Allison Hedge Coke, Native American poet, calls forth the land and



144  Margaret McMurtrey landscape. Masterfully invoking the mounds located at Blood Run, an ancestral dwelling place for over 10,000 people, spanning what is now the borderlands between Iowa and South Dakota, Hedge Coke animates this storied landscape. Giving voice to the land, the people of the land, and all beings of the land, animate and inanimate, she recognizes the sanctity of these ancestral lands and calls on us to protect it, for “no human should dismantle prayer.”19 I honor the People and the land as storytellers through the lens provided by Keith Basso’s and Patricia Galloway’s ethnographic work with the counterpoint lens offered by the creative work of LeAnne Howe, Monique Mojica, and Allison Hedge Coke. Hymns written in Choctaw by Choctaw, pre-removal, are embedded and spiritually grounded by storied landscapes that “no human should dismantle.” The embedded references in the hymns remind Choctaw of their ancestors and their ancestral homeland. Native time, ritual time, is not linear. A Choctaw tribal consultant I interviewed mused: “Choctaw people are not concerned about time … they see time differently. Choctaw see time as the event … they think about event and place.”20 Sacred mounds such as Nanih Waiya, or the Trail of Tears, or the ancestral ball fields, and even the gathering of river cane for basket-making, are events storied in the land. The singing of these traditional hymns provides a conduit to time, place, and event. From a Western perspective, singing the hymns causes time to collapse; the land is both presence and present. These storied places are embedded in the hymns; invoked and heard by past, present, and future generations carrying the stories and sacrality of the land with the people whether they remained in their ancestral homeland or journeyed to Indian Territory. These storied mound cultures sing a different song than the land of the Western Apache that Basso describes. The ancestral lands of the mound people hear and sing a story to, with, and through the land. The storying of the land continues to speak to the People through the Choctaw Hymns. Galloway’s scholarship on place names supports the notion that places such as those embedded in the hymns would have provided cognitive maps for people familiar with the land they referenced.21

20 Rev. Olin Williams, May 9, 2016, Bakersfield, CA.

[t]he event-based names, on the other hand, obviously did not refer often to any material residue at the given location; [instead,] …we can suggest that they were shorthand references to stories that had a place in the mnemonic schema of the path, referring to an event in the past. (2006, p. 199)

Not Lost  145 The embodied stories of the land of the Southeast were not lost with the advent of Protestant missionization of the 19th century, but rather they remained hidden in plain sight in the pre-removal Choctaw hymns of Native Choctaw composers. In their hymnal compositions, specific landscapes of the ancestral homeland and tribal cognitive maps familiar and significant to the Choctaw continue to be called into being. Their compositions reveal language construction particular to Choctaw rhetorical styles and surface clues to the “cognitive maps” of the Choctaw composers. Choctaw language construction illumines counter textual narrative. LeAnne Howe examining 1829’s Choctaw Evening Hymn #3022 hears a section of the hymn as a traditional Choctaw call and response: patterns that resonating with older songs sung into and with Nanih Waiya, the mother mound of origins. “Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii/ because you are holding onto me, I am not dead yet.”23 For Howe the composer is exclaiming “because you remember me, I am not dead … I am/we are still alive/here.”24 The hymn gives voice to past, present, and future. The linguistic construction and rich ambiguity, underwritten by the way the original Choctaw can be translated, permits more than one meaning to be voiced in the hymn by speakers of traditional Choctaw. These speakers were invited to read, hear, speculate, and live these words through a variety of evocative meanings, the meanings layered through the use of morphemic endings available to native Choctaw speakers. Choctaw syllabic suffixes known as evidentiary affixes, can cast doubt or credibility on the efficacy of the speaker and change the meaning of the prose. Many North American language constructions used specific suffixes to validate the reliability of the information given. 25 Translations then appear to have multiple interpretations and meanings. The original composer could be reminding a future listener: The land, and all its entities, is still here holding on to you and will not die. On the other hand, Christian interpretations of these lines could claim this statement is emanating from Father Jehovah and his uprising son, whereas other Choctaws might place this statement as emanating from the sacred mound. Another group might exclaim that because of the nuanced meanings it is a crafty veiled interweaving of both perspectives. All are possible … acts of survivance.

22 Editions of the Chahta Isht Vba Taloa after 1844 have renumbered this hymn; it became Hymn #93. 23 Howe (1999), p. 75. 24 The author’s suggested translation of Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii, illustrates the nuanced differences that Choctaw speakers could derive from this line in Choctaw by offering another interpretation of this line into the English language. 25 For example, was the information shared derived from first-hand experience, third party, or hearsay? For more information see Marianne Mithun (1999).

146  Margaret McMurtrey Mounds in the Southeast held the bones of our ancestors. The Choctaw are forever tied to the land and the land to those of us who were sundered. When our people were removed from our ancestral lands in Mississippi and Alabama, people carried on their back the bones of ancestors along with clay pots made from the land. They carried the land with them. Choctaw origin narrative invokes we emerged from clay within a cave in Nanih Waiya, our sacred mound in central Mississippi. After emergence these clay formed figures lay in the sun outside the opening of the cave on Nanih Waiya. The First Peoples were called into being by the rays of the sun. The clay pots made from the land are physical manifestations of our homeland and our origin. Early Choctaw hymns, such as Hymn #30, sung on our Trial Tears evoked our connection to the land as we carried the land with us and within us. An examination of the poly-syntactic nature of the Choctaw language enforces meaning-making as pendent on contextual clues. Said another way, language (i.e., Choctaw) structures the syntactic architecture which constructs and conducts meaning-making. The text of the Choctaw hymns, the embedded place-based stories, the two centuries of singing in community, and the oral traditions surrounding the hymns passing from one generation to the next, uniquely identifiable within and among specific family groups, manifests the relationship of the people with and through their land past, present, and future. Interpretations must heed context and awareness of the community in which the hymn was both created and in which it continues to live. The hymns are stories of the land and people called into being in community and by community giving voice to the land and the people. For this displaced Choctaw I too am called into being in a place where time and space elide when I read or hear works of American Indian authors. Resonating the line in Hymn #30 referenced earlier in this essay: Issa halali haatoko iksa illok isha shkii. “I am still here holding on to you.” I read this to mean: I am here now; I have not said goodbye. I support this claim by offering the observation that Choctaws do not have a word or phrase for goodbye. We say Chi pisa la chike! This roughly translates into English as: “See you as it will be!” The poignancy of this cultural practice is illustrated by LeAnne Howe in a short narrative piece “Indians Never Say Goodbye” in her collection of poems and stories: Evidence of Red. In this narrative she recounts her story of her aunt standing over her in her hospital bed when she had rheumatic fever as a young girl. She inched her face close to my face. She put her hands on my face. I remembered her immediately, but did not speak. My eyes blurred. They

Not Lost  147 were hot and heavy. It hurt to look at Ain’t Sally. It hurt to see. I closed my eyes. I felt her cool touch. She chanted. “You will be well. You will not die. Chim achukma taha che. You will be well. Chi pesa taha che.” She sang to me. Then I heard her leave. 26 Howe as narrator continues to recount the activities in the hospital room. The woman next to her calls out, the nurses come and go, pushing partitions back. “They said the whistling woman was dead. I go back to sleep … Before the hospital. Before the rheumatic fever. Before the woman. I had met Ain’t Sally. I was seven years old.” The readers learn that earlier she had visited this ancient aunt, Ain’t Sally, in Texas. At that time after she had spent some time alone talking and walking with her aunt, she recounts her aunt saying to her, “Che pisa lauchi. I’ll see you. Indians never say good-bye.”27 As the narrative comes to a close Howe explains, “I never saw Ain’t Sally again until the hospital. I thought she had died.” When the narrative does conclude the reader suspects that the exchange in the hospital room may have occurred in dreamtime—a time both past and present since “Indians never say goodbye.” Ain’t Sally is still with her. She is still here. Similar to the chant response in Hymn #30. Both reconstituted or called into being in the retelling of the story/chant. Past, present, and future also co-exist within the same space and time in LeAnne Howe’s novels Shell Shaker (2001) and Miko Kings (2007) as she calls into being the people and the land through the stories. They will not die. Ezol Day in Miko Kings and Shakbatina in Shell Shaker are the alikchi (healers) who create ceremonies to heal their people. Ezol Day and Shakbatina find ways to transcend time and space to heal their descendants. For example, in the novel Shell Shaker, the present-day protagonist Auda Billy’s maternal ancestor, Shakbatina, is a Choctaw healer called into being in the 18th century in the Choctaw ancestral homelands in the Southeast during a period known as the Choctaw Civil War. Both Shakbatina and Auda Billy, assistant chief of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma in the late 20th century, are called to heal the sickness in their tribal communities. Auda Billy unexpectedly turns to her Aunt Delores to find a way to rid the Choctaw Nation of an evil force emanating from the past while also inhabiting the present and the future. 26 Howe, LeAnne. “Indians Never Say Goodbye.” Evidence of Red: Poems and Prose. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. 2005, pp. 99–101.

148  Margaret McMurtrey Throughout the novel the reader experiences past and present simultaneously. The past is the present and the present is the past and all could be the future. Howe charges her protagonists with healing the Choctaw past, present, and future. Literary critic Kristin Squint, suggests that Shakbatina’s healing ceremony coheres both healing events within the novel and within the story. The novel’s healing ceremony is initiated in the middle of the 18th century in what is now known as Mississippi and Alabama and is concluded two centuries later in both Oklahoma and Mississippi. “Shakbatina first sacrifices herself for her daughter, and later, her spirit dances in a ceremony that resonates across centuries to save her female descendant Auda Billy.” Shakbatina’s spirit’s act in the 20th century serves to unite the two histories but also the dispersed bands of the Choctaw. Shakbatina’s narrative structures the novel in time and space and establishes parallels between characters from both eras. 28 At the close of the novel, Shakbatina concludes, “My story is an enormous undertaking. Hundred of years in the making until past and present collide into a single moment.”29 Howe’s hypertextual storyline fathoms contiguous lines among the events of the past and the present evoking community betrayal, sacrifice, and ceremony. The People of the 20th century living in present-day Oklahoma, the descendants of ancestors who walked the Trail of Tears in the 19th century, receive messages that they must return to the Choctaw homeland to heal the contemporary traumas of their people initiated by ongoing cultural genocide perpetuated by both the colonizers and the colonized. Healing will take place when they return to Nanih Waiya, the land of Choctaw emergence. Howe’s stories create bridges for the past to be present and the present to be past in a shared time and space of sacred time, revolving counter clockwise like the wind of the tornados in the Southeast, bridging earth and sky, encapsulating time and space. As a 21st- century Native storyteller, she continues to story the land by recreating stories of our land and our people invoking sacred time. We are the clay people, people of the land, people of the mounds holding on to one another and to our land of origin across time, space, and displacement. We are the clay people, people of the land, people of the mounds. We are the clay people, people of the land, people of the mounds. We are the clay people, people of the land, people of the mounds. We are the clay people, people of the land, people of the mounds. Chi pisa la chike!

29 Howe, LeAnne. Shell Shaker. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 2001, p. 222.

Not Lost  149

Works Cited Basso, Keith. Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico. 1996. Chahta Vba Isht Taloa Holisso, American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions. Boston, MA. 1829. Chahta Vba Isht Taloa Micha Taloa Ikbi Holisso Hoke. Asheville, NC: Global Bible Society. 2017. Galloway, Patricia. Choctaw Genesis: 1500–1700 Indians of the Southeast. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1998. Galloway, Patricia. Practicing Ethnohistory: Mining Archives, Hearing testimony, Constructing Narrative. Lincoln: University Nebraska Press. 2006. Harjo, Joy and Gloria Bird, eds. Reinventing the Enemy’s Language. New York: W.W. Norton. 1997. Howe, LeAnne. “Embodied Tribalography: Mound Building, Ball Games, and Native Endurance in the Southeast.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 2014, pp. 75–93. Howe, LeAnne. “Indians Never Say Goodbye.” Evidence of Red: Poems and Prose. Ed. Janet McAdams. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. 2005, pp. 99–101. Howe, LeAnne. Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. 2007. Howe, LeAnne. Shell Shaker. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books. 2001. Howe, LeAnne. “The Story of America: A Tribalography.” Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies. Ed. Nancy Shoemaker. New York: Routledge. 2002, pp. 29–48. Howe, LeAnne. “The Story of America.” Choctalking on Other Realities. Berkeley, CA: Aunt Lute Books. 2013. Howe, LeAnne. “Tribalography: The Power of Native Stories.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Vol. 14, No. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 117–125. Mithun, Marianne. The Languages of Native America (Reprinted 2001 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Owens, Louis. “An Introduction to Indian Novels.” Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, pp. 1–31. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Storyteller. New York: Arcade Publishing, Inc. 1981. Small, Christopher. Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 1998. Squint, Kristin. LeAnne Howe at the Intersections of Southern and Native American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2018. Turino, Thomas. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2008. Turino, Thomas. “Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music.” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 221–255. University of Illinois Press. 1999. Turino, Thomas and James Lea, eds. Identity and the Arts in Diaspora Communities (Detroit Monographs in Musicology). Warren, MI: Park Press. April 2004. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1999.

150  Margaret McMurtrey Yi, Ivanna. “Cartographies of the Voice: Storying the Land as Survivance in Native American Oral Traditions”, Humanities, Vol. 5, 2016, p. 62 ©2016 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

10 Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance History and Memory in Easterine Kire’s Novels Payel Ghosh Nagaland is one of the eight states that constitute the conglomeration generically called “northeast” India. This concept of northeast India is more of a cultural construct than a geographical location; one that reflects its peripheral existence in relation to the center, the “mainland” India. The notion has historically emerged in the national as well as global imagination as a cultural category which homogenizes the indigenous societies that inhabit these states, thus obliterating their individual historical and cultural identities. The process continues to date as the region is still subjected to multiple imaginations that reinstate its marginal existence. During the colonial period, the northeastern part of the nation now known as India, especially the Naga Hills, was largely portrayed as a troubled area inhabited by violent tribes. The Naga tribes raided their neighboring states of Manipur and Assam quite frequently. For this, the British made several expeditions between 1832 and 1846, but also failed to make any substantial change. Exasperated by the Naga hostility, the British decided to abstain from interfering, and even when they had to create the Naga Hills District in 1866 for administrative convenience, eastern and northern Nagaland was left outside the British purview as “unadministrative areas” (Khala 23). It was during the colonial times that a fundamental change occurred in the perceived image of this region and its inhabitants. Along with being viewed as strategic boundary and a bountiful province full of natural resources, the northeast also emerged as a cultural category during this period. Since the colonial imagination could not grasp the indigenous knowledge-systems, they viewed it as a primitive, antagonistic existence pitted against their modern Western discourses. They saw it as a dark cultural space that propagated primitivism (which was inherently savage in nature for the British) challenging their idea of Modernity. It is this creation of a dichotomous paradigm that perpetuated the alienation of the region even after the colonialists left. The British attempted to contain the hostility they faced from the inhabitants by largely excluding the region from rest of India. By the time the postcolonial nation of India had inherited the legacy of integrating the region from the colonizers, the segregation between this region and the rest of India was already quite prominent.

152  Payel Ghosh The image of the segregated other that the British had propagated had thus given birth to a conflict situation that was to continue for decades. Their representation of the indigenous tribes as violent and savage portrayed them as an obstacle in the process of modernization. Since the region was kept largely isolated, the nation-making discourse in pre- or post-independence India hardly made any impact here. That the colonial perspective is retained in the current national perception is quite apparent from the fact that these Hills are still viewed as a backward region as well as a source of threat against the national drive of integration. The exoticization of the region has continued as well, since the other identity with which it has captured the national imagination is that of a vibrant tourist destination that offers a token view of the indigenous lifestyle to the “mainlanders.” The Nagas had declared independence one day before India did—on 14th August 1947. The declaration of this independence was announced after the submission of six memorandums to the British government which was leaving the nation, and ten memorandums to the Indian government which was to rule the nation henceforth. In all of these memorandums the Nagas proclaimed their right to sovereignty based on political as well as historical backdrop. Their claim to sovereignty was based upon the fact that the Naga Hills had been inhabited from 150 AD by the Naga tribes, and they had independently existed in that region for thousands of years afterward (Kire “The Conflict In Nagaland: Through A Poet’s Eyes”). Although the British did set up a few administrative posts in the Naga Hills, large parts of the area could not be brought under control as they faced a vehemently violent opposition from the tribes. Even the neighboring Ahom rulers (who had ruled the adjacent province of Assam for 600 years) had failed to conquer these rough terrains, which made sure that the Sankritization of the tribes that had taken place in Assam and Manipur, never did so among the Naga Tribes (Ao 50; Smith 35) However as the British prepared to leave their South Asian Empire, they still decided to cede the Naga Hills to India, creating an atmosphere of hostility between the newly formed Indian government and the Naga people demanding sovereignty, which continued for decades to come. The estimation of the fatalities of this struggle varies widely since there is an obvious lack of documentation with some claiming a number of Naga casualties as high as 200,000 (Phillips 1; Kire “The Conflict In Nagaland”). It is hard to calculate the precise figures since even the data accessible on the South Asian Terrorism Portal’s website only go back to 1990. Villages after villages were burnt and destroyed in the name of the punitive action of “grouping,” giving the state-funded Repressive Apparatus direct access to even the personal spaces of the unarmed citizens. By 1956 the Government of India had declared the Naga Hills as a “disturbed area” under the “Naga Hills Disturbed Area” Ordinance,

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   153 and imposed the “Assam Maintenance Law” which sanctioned arrests without warrants, imposition of collective fines, and proscribing of public speeches and meetings. It is also during this time that the Assam Rifles battalion is replaced by the India Armed Forces to be stationed in the region. In 1958 the “Armed Forces Special Powers Act” is passed sanctioning search and arrest without warrants and shooting even to the causing of death, with complete protection of military and paramilitary forces from legal charges (Kikon 6; Khala 82). Numerous agreements and accords have been negotiated since then, like the Shillong accord of 1975 and the more recent Nagaland Peace accord of August 2015, between the National Socialist Council of Nagalim-Isak-Muivah (NSCNIM) and the Government of India. Although these accords have yielded in cease-fire between the army and the rebels, they have also given rise to the problem of factionalism, resulting in discord among several groups of the underground movement. It could be said that it was the 1960 Peace Accord (signed between the Government of India and the NSCNIM), that prepared the very outline for, what Manchanda and Kakran refer to as the “grand strategy of power sharing” to “territorially focused, ethnically delimited autonomies” (Manchanda and Kakran 66). The strategy did serve the State’s purpose of dividing the national movement to weaken its intensity; however setting up a “Naga State” could not put an end to the violence. While several years of cease-fire had undeniably reduced the unrest in the region, it could not eradicate the memories of the trauma that the people here had gone through for most of the post-independence period of India, as struggle for their own independence continued. In this process of conflict, many were dispossessed of their land, as well as their lives. The agony that they were put through is a memory that has shaped the lives of generations among the Naga Tribes. Because of the isolation and later the conflict situation, not much of the region’s past has been strictly documented. Moreover, hostilities with the Indian state have also meant that the state makes it categorically difficult to access materials related to the subject. In such a conflict-ridden zone, there is a pressing need for an alternative methodology to unearth histories that have not been documented in a proper manner. Memory narratives can prove to be an important alternative in such contexts. These narratives may also provide an insight on how pasts are imagined in popular consciousness. These narratives are helpful as they bear a twofold significance. First, they provide us with the perspectives regarding how common people perceive particular events and thus resist appropriation by both state and the non-state actors. Second, in this process we get access to multiple accounts of the same evens seen as accepted truths, which in result challenge the dominant interpretation of the statist discourse (Kanth 32).

154  Payel Ghosh Olabode Ibrionke, in his article “Monumental Time in Caribbean Literature” accurately points out the dominance of the archive in the process of writing history, which more often than not ends up overlooking the “historical knowledges that were subjugated” (151). The genesis of modern historiography seems to dwell in the very authority of “the document” as being the indisputable proof of human activity. In this process the document is sublimated from being mere recorded history to a primary icon of the modern society, thereby investing a sense of “totalizing authority” into the archives (151). In such a context there rises a dire need of an alternative discourse which is not solely settled upon the authority of the archives to capture those fragments of historical knowledges that are subjugated by the dominance of the document. The artistic imagination has a pertinent role to play in the attempts to encounter the past in its otherness, citing the fact that not all pasts have really been documented because of the politics of archiving. There are whole civilizations, like that of Nagaland’s, who do not own the kind of archive of written documents as possessed by Western civilization. In such contexts the artistic imagination may emerge as an indispensable appendage to historical narrative—especially when the objective is to render voices to those who are pushed to the periphery, away from the centralized production of knowledge. Kuisma Korhonen points out in his introduction to his book Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, that the conventional linear form of historical narratives may not be most suitable while dealing with the extremely convoluted web of various connection and individual perspectives that shape the historical events. Since, through a study of literature, several forms of hypertextuality may open up, relating our present to the past, literature retains the power to surface as “serious research on world making, language and their multifaceted relationship” (Korhonen 19). Sukalpa Bhattacharjee (an academic from India’s northeast working for a long time on literatures from this region) points out in her essay “Narrative as An/Other History or His/Story Otherwise” how, for quite some time now, critical study is encouraged in asserting “an/other history” through narratives by critiquing the “assumed differences between ‘literary’ versus ‘historical’ narratives’” (Bhattacharjee 27). She talks about the methodology of using narratives to familiarize oneself with incidents not chronicled properly in History. She writes, “it is through fiction, memoirs, testimonies, individual and collective memories that one could weave together the fragments of the moment” (Bhattacharjee 20). She traces these moments in an “interlocution” between the text and the context. Through this interlocution a space for dialogue may open up, between multiple histories and identities. This capability of accommodating differences is what differentiates literary narratives from the discourse of History. Literary narratives do not only let the author exert her own voice, it also gives her a chance to learn from the margins, instead of

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   155 merely re-presenting the marginalized subject in the author’s own semantics. It is only in the literary narratives that the victims may shed their objectified empirical status to become individuals with stories that create the History of a people. For Bhattacharjee, narratives gets an edge over history as a space of articulation and recollection, especially because, it returns history to the “real authors,” to whom it truly belongs, but who also, “have been turned into the other of dominant history” (Bhattacharjee 30). Literary narratives open up a space where one can engage with the stories, but more importantly, the memories of the “other.” Because the character of such narratives is determined by traces of lived experiences, it puts forth a sense of shared memory. Tilottoma Misra, also an academic and author from this region, believes that literary narrations are more suited to articulate the voice of the people and record them than Historical discourses, especially in a conflict zone such as the northeast India—specifically because of the “uncertain nature” of the literary discourses that allows memory to be present with all its “wonderful possibilities” forming the “main basis of all truth it may represent” (Misra 249). She notes that in History there is a “delayed representation” of memory of traumatic experiences, allowing memory to “pick and choose what it desires to remember,” particularly if the trauma is experienced first-hand by the subject. But because—as Bhattacharjee had mentioned—literary representations allow the complex play between the “real and the imaginary” and the “symbolic and the experiential” this indeterminate nature of memory does not mar the narration (Bhattacharjee 21). Memory plays a crucial role in helping an individual to recollect those slices from the past which are peculiarly traumatic. Temsula Ao (who is probably the most dominating literary figure from Nagaland) writes in the prologue to her celebrated short stories collection, These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone (pertinently named “Lest We Forget”), “memories are often sifted through as invisible sieve and selections are made…either to be preserved or discarded” (Ao ix). But the organic intellectual, who aspires to fetch the marginalia into mainstream, has to find the voices of the unheard, not through only her memories but shared communitarian memories. Ao questions her reader, “what do you do when it comes to someone else’s memory and when that memory is of pain and pain alone?” (ibid.) This is where it gets problematic— revisiting someone else’s memory is not only an arduous task, it is also impossible to discern the factuality of it. However, literary narratives do not get their sustenance because of their verisimilitude with the historical factuality; rather this play of knowability and unknowability is the very aspect that opens up the space for a discourse based on dialogue. This chapter studies the works of Easterine Kire, another author from Nagaland, in whose works the trope of memory narrative gains seminal importance. While addressing the issue of chronicling the history of her community, Kire writes—“the story of Nagaland is the story of

156  Payel Ghosh the Naga soul on a long, lonely journey of pain, loss and bereavement, a silent holocaust in which words seldom were enough to carry the burden of being born a Naga” (Kire “The Conflict in Nagaland: Through a Poet’s Eyes”). This “silent holocaust” has not found any space in the documents of statist history. In an interview with ICORN, Kire mentions that among all the narratives affected and “silenced” by the conflict situation, the one of Naga folktales was impacted the most— This was because folk tales require certain settings in order to be told. The Naga war with India, after military operations began in 1956, destroyed the settings for oral narratives. One may not think that something as simplistic as a folk tale would need to be approached with ritual and ceremony in order that its narration might take place, but it does. The folk tale belongs to eras of relative peace in the village community. (Stricklan) Her work as a litterateur, then, also entails unearthing those narratives, especially since the Naga culture was mostly dependent upon oral narratives due to the lack of a written script. She talks about this trope in her work during an interview with author Namrata Kolachalam, where she asserts that her work “represents storytelling through the oral tradition” (Kolachalam). Two novels of Kire depict two of the most crucial junctures of time in the Naga history that shaped the backdrop for the prolonged conflict situation in the region—Sky Is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered narrates the story of the colonial advent in the region, especially with reference to one particular village and the resistance that they put up against the British; while Bitter Wormwood captures the story of the Indo-Naga conflict since independence to its descent into the present infighting and chaos. A Naga representation of these events has failed to find much space in the grand narrative of the statist history in India. In the article “Opening up the Physical and the Spiritual Universe of the Angamis,” Kire notes that her novels aim to “chronologise the socio-cultural and historical life” of her people from information that she collected from the oral narrators of her community (Kire 54). This adaptation of the oral within the written narrative gives her an opportunity to include storytelling traditions in her work. Her first novel A Naga Village Remembered echoes this oral storytelling performance. It simultaneously features the narrator’s personal story while at the same time rendering a chance to the writer to theoretically inform the readers that these chronicles embody a social document. The novel covers the period from 1832 to 1900 and revolves around the historical event of the Angami-Naga resistance to the British colonization that took place at the village of Khonoma. The main narrative of the novel is supplemented by accounts of the first settlers of the village of Khonoma, resuscitated

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   157 through the oral storytellers of three clans from the village—Sebi Dole of the Mehrü clan, Niu Francis Whiso of the Thevo clan, and Thezaville Chücha of the Semo clan. Since Kire is a native author of a culture that used to be predominantly oral, within her oeuvre one finds a successful recollection as well as inclusion of people’s memories and experiences. Her writing, hence, exhibits a rich oral texture. This native orality is applied to historical events in her novels, especially in A Naga Village Remembered, to not only recount a resistance largely undocumented in the narrative of Indian history but also to encapsulate a lifestyle and worldview that are on the verge of extinction because of colonization and the consequent modernization of the communities. Since the modern written culture has largely replaced these old ways for the native tribal, Kire’s act of giving them a voice in written narrative gains seminal importance. Memory gains more significance than history for someone dealing with the native folklore and imagination, like Kire, because of the intimate nature of the act of remembrance. For the oral cultures memory is more like a “faithful storehouse” that contains the sum total of the past and present experience of entire communities (Patton 6). Although Kire deals with the written form of narrative, she does not fail to make use of native oratory and their belief in the power of the spoken word. In indigenous oral cultures such as the Nagas’ the spoken word held supremacy over writing, and hence verbal negotiations were given utmost importance. In A Naga Village Remembered, Kire portrays this aspect of the Naga communities through the episode of the clan-head Pelhu’s verbal intercession with the British after the war takes place, to mediate a treaty between the village of Khonoma and the colonizers— With the help of an interpreter, the General asked Pelhu “Why did you come?” Pelhu’s reply was very straightforward “I came to make peace.” He spoke with a calm dignity that the white man found himself admiring. The General asked again “Do you need a written treaty?” Pelhu shook his head and said firmly “No, if we have said there will be peace between us there will be peace. We do not need to write it down.” General Nation was suitably impressed by the old warrior’s wisdom. He stood to his feet and gripped pelhu’s hand firmly. The treaty was concluded between village representatives of Khonoma and the representatives of the British Government at Mezoma on the 27th March 1880. (Kire 107) Kire uses the oral discursive style of storytelling and paves the path for establishing a worldview that is purely based on indigenous experience and practices, thus subverting the order of knowledge imposed upon them by the Western mode of Rationality. In A Naga Village Remembered Kire, much like a tribal storyteller of the past, unfurls the life of the Angami-Naga community through commonplace everyday

158  Payel Ghosh experiences of different characters whose lives are essentially linked to the indigenous spatiality. The novel begins with the observation of simple village life by one such character—the village-elder Kovi. Through his eyes the readers experience the quietude of Khonoma in the dawn, as smoke curls up from the houses huddled along the slope of the hills (Kire 1). Such images, evoking the vision of a simple agrarian life of a small tribal village untouched by Modernity, are scattered through the novel. These images transcend the readers to a point in time before the British colonized these tribes and imposed their knowledge-system upon them. These descriptions hark back to a period while the native folk culture could thrive, unlike the recent times, when the consequent conflict situation has largely suppressed these narratives amid the violence of identity politics. Kire describes several ancient customs while presenting the Naga lifeworld to her modern globalized readers. It is important to remember in this context that customary laws are still an integral part of the Naga identity. The Naga customary laws are protected under the Article 371(A) of the Indian Constitution and still hold importance in the legal framework of the tribal communities. These customs guide the Naga way of life and hence should be treated as significant social documents that contain the lived experience of the indigenous communities. Kire describes multiple rituals that can be seen as traditional festivals connected to the agricultural cycle, examples would include the observation of the Genna day, the feast of Thekranyi, and the festival of Kelipie. These customary celebrations manifest the profound bond that the people of the villages shared with the land. It is this intense love for the land that shaped their warrior culture. As Kire writes, “before conversion the culture of the Angamis was a warrior culture … very focused on land and love for land” (Kire, “Opening up the Physical and Spiritual Universe of the Angamis” 54). Hence when faced with the threat of colonization it was only normal for them to put up a resistance even if they were outnumbered against the British military forces. The reference to the conflict comes early in the novel, when, in the very first chapter we find an account of the 1849 clash between the British police and clans of Khonoma where an Indian police officer, by the name of Bogchand and his men were killed. The residents of Khonoma describe it as a “matter of honour” since the police were killing their kin and torching their houses (8). In A Naga Village Remembered Kire does not merely recount a story about the battle between the Nagas of Khonoma and the British; rather, she goes beyond the action of the conflict (which is not given a lot of space in narrative as well) and attempts to capture the Naga ethos that fueled the resistance. Herein lays the supremacy of literature over the grand narrative of statist History, where individual and community experiences of an event are given more importance than the empirical truth about the event itself. However it would be wrong to assume that she portrays the pre-Christianized Khonoma to be an idyllic utopia of peace

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   159 and harmony. The fact that war and violence were part of their everyday life is apparent from the clan-members’ discussion at the “Thehou” (or the community house), where they discuss how vengeance is seen as a duty to the fallen (Kire, A Naga Village Remembered 4). Kire does not fail to point out the importance of the act of remembrance when it comes to war and violence—“When the young sang their poem-songs, there were too many songs mourning dead warriors” (41). Memories are thus performed and recreated in these communities through songs and poetry to carry forward the unwritten history of a people. Kire’s works capture a Naga society in transition. In A Naga Village Remembered she depicts the lifeworld of a tribal community with all its customs, rituals, and beliefs. However this community is also posited at a juncture of time when an indigenous society is giving way to a Christian one. It is significant to point out that today about 90% of the Nagas are Christianized and most of them are Baptist (“Naga: A People’s Struggle for Self-Determination”). This situation of flux, when Christianity is on the rise eroding the olden “animist” religions, is portrayed through the character of Sato, son of the warrior Levi. It is ironic that Sato is among the first Nagas to fall for an ideology that was propagated by the people whom his father persistently fought against. Levi dies a broken man while Sato refuses to hold on to the old ways of life, since he finds no point of contention between their old religion and the new one disseminated by the missionaries at his school— The creator deity we worship and sanctify ourselves unto at Sekrenyi, the one we call Ukepenuopfu has another name in the new religion. He is the father of Isu. Isu is his son and he is our chicken sacrifice— he sacrificed himself for all our ailments and misfortunes so we do not have to make chicken sacrifices again … the new religion says, do not steal and do not lie, how is it so different from the old religion? (Kire 126) The conversation between Levi and Sato regarding their positions in relation to this drastic change of society stands for the age-old conflict between the old and the new. However in the context of the colonial history of Nagaland it may also symbolize the success of the colonial politics in using the Ideological State Apparatus, like the school and the church, to repress the knowledge-systems of the colonial other—the indigenous and the native. Levi declares with apathy— When your brother and you chose to go to the white man’s school, how happy I was that my sons might finally learn his secret. But you have broken me today. How is it that you have forgotten the man who fathered you and brought you up? How is it, my son that you are turning your back on all that we’ve taught you of what is good

160  Payel Ghosh in our ways … the white man killed your grandfather’s brother and burnt your grandfather’s house four times. Do you hear me Sato, four times! You will have the blood of your ancestors on your hands. (Kire 127) This feeling of treachery is a by-product of the postcolonial condition of the indigenous where they are almost involuntarily thrust into the Western idea of Modernity albeit it having little to no connection with the indigenous philosophies. The novel ends at a time of transformation, with all of the characters of the older generation of Levi facing death, leaving the village and their land in the hands of the younger generation of Sato. But it also carries a sense of confusion that was probably the mark of the time. Sato returns home to see his dying mother Pelhuvino—a woman who is torn between the old and the new perspectives of her dead husband and elder son, respectively. Her death in the end may indicate the passing of an era that was remarkably different from the colonized and Christianized Khonoma. Kire’s writing bears a stamp of nostalgia—for not only the lost times but a lost home. It contains the idea of a homeland that is forever lost in the maze of conflict, almost like a vision of a mythical home. When Kire writes about home, the notion of the mythical homeland gets further problematized. She, as a part of a Naga tribe, identifies herself as a Naga more than an Indian. In an interview with Kim Arora, published in the Times of India, Kire says— We will always feel we’re Nagas. There’s a huge cultural difference. But we are able to embrace India, understand Indian culture … only if you’re a Naga, you will understand. You have a sense of belonging to a smaller degree to India. Your identity is always as a Naga … you can have a sense of belonging to India. But you know that because of the history and culture, you’ll never really be Indian. You’ll always be fully Naga in your mentality … we should actually build up on that—the levels of belonging, the levels of Indian-ness. (Arora) In her writing, her homeland is the memory of Nagaland that she left, beautiful, bloody, and full of a cultural heritage that India fails to recognize or comprehend. In the “Introduction” to her novel Bitter Wormwood she specifies that—“This book is not meant to be read as a history textbook … it is about the ordinary people whose lives were completely overturned by the freedom struggle. Because the conflict is not more important than the people who are its victims” (Kire 6). The protagonist of the novel Bitter Wormwood is a man named Mose, through whose perspective the readers are given a chance to experience the violence that had become part of everyday existence for a Naga. The novel commences with a grotesque image of a man lying in his own pool of blood amid a marketplace, evidently killed by faction conflict. The reader is

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   161 also made to realize how, even after decades since independence, the consequence of violent colonialism continues to haunt most parts of the Indian subcontinent. However this conflict situation had reduced their identity to victim/perpetrator to the rest of the world. This was something Kire wants to contend through her writing. She said in the above-mentioned interview, “For many years, the media presented us as the region of conflict. The culture was underplayed. Ordinary life was not valued. We became defined by the conflict” (Arora). Her novels attempt to go beyond the portrayal of blood spilling violence to capture the strength of the people who persistently put up a resistance. The protagonist of the novel, Mose, is born into a female-headed family which is not an unusual sight in these communities. Men of these tribes engaged in war with other tribes and hunting on a regular basis and quite a lot of them faced untimely death. This is most likely the reason that begot the norm of the matrilineal system in the Khasi tribe of Meghalaya as well. Mose’s father is also killed in an accident in forest leaving Mose’s grandmother and mother the only family left for him. Kire never fails to scrupulously capture the spirit of her homeland as she carefully illustrates the mystic traditions and the reverence for nature that the Naga tribes possess. Even the name of the book refers to one such traditional Naga belief, based into the therapeutic aspect of nature. Among the Naga tribes, Bitter wormwood, an herb commonly found in the forests here, is believed to have mysterious powers that keep the evil spirits away. Mose’s grandmother advises him to stick one behind his ear, as “it kept away those bad spirits that cause you to do bad things” (Kire 47). In the times of violence that came upon them, they needed such an amulet once again to help them survive the evil surrounding them. As the military atrocity reaches a brutal height, when they randomly pick up men and women to torture and brutalize them to death, Mose’s mother bitterly laments, “who is there to protect us from all these evils?” (Kire 69). It sounds akin to a cry for the loss of innocence itself. In the past, they could afford to believe that an herb has the quality of a talisman to guard them against evil, but thrown into the days of rampant violence that naiveté is not permitted anymore. The novel, much like A Naga Village Remembered, also portrays the peculiar situation that arises when an indigenous populace is suddenly introduced to Christianity through the European missionaries. Kire’s Nagaland is a curious amalgamation of the tribal animist spirituality and the Western structured religious belief. Hence, Mose goes to a catholic school and learns to worship “Jisu” and at the same time observes “Genna day” with his mother, a day “when no one works or goes to the fields… to please the spirits” (37). The first sign of the “modern” world comes to Mose’s life when he is introduced to the radio at his school, run by the European missionaries. This is also the first time that the event of India’s independence is mentioned in the book. Through the

162  Payel Ghosh radio Mose first learns that “the white man will soon leave and go back to England.” But when he breaks the news to his mother it confuses her since they cannot fathom who would be their leader now that the “white man” is about to go (31). Along with the news of India’s independence, however, started the movement of Naga Independence. As shown in the novel, it did not strike the Nagas as a strange idea to depart from India, since they never saw themselves as Indians. India’s politics and its leaders were never taken to be their leaders. One of the Indian leaders that the tribes were used to hearing about was Gandhi, and when a Naga Delegation, led by Phizo, met Gandhi and received positive responses from him regarding their autonomy, the common people of the Naga hills became even surer of the legitimacy of their demand, as we understand from the conversation of a young Mose with his school friend Neituo. But when the radio brought the news of Gandhi’s death, the situation became less optimistic for them. Kire takes the opportunity here, however, to show how far removed the Naga populace was from the whereabouts of Indian politics—the fringe from the politics of the center. When Mose mentions the news of death of Gandhi to his family, his mother simply wants to know “he is not the leader of India, is he?” (48) Through Mose’s mother’s failure to understand the very crux of Indian politics, Kire shows her readers, how far removed these tribes had been from the center, kept into their own abode of seclusion even during the reign of the British, and now all of a sudden thrown into a Nation-building discourse that they hardly understood. It is only after the arrest of Phizo that they are initiated into a tumultuous political discourse that will haunt them for coming five decades. Kire writes, “One Sunday morning, the pastor announced at the end of the service ‘we need to pray for our land. The Indian government has taken Zaphu Phizo prisoner for saying that Naga people want independence’ (52). Phizo was arrested on the charge of illegal entry to Burma, but the Nagas saw this as an offense toward their demand of independence. The arrest of Phizo along with Nehru’s condescending attitude toward their ideology (he termed their demand “absurd”) only perpetuated the discrimination and sense of isolation that the Naga tribes felt since the day of the colonial rule. The center’s idea to force them into integration also failed miserably. Mose’s mother Khrienuo echoes the sentiment of her people when she says “We haven’t been a part of India before. Why should we join them now?” (53) A region kept in isolation for years, was now to be integrated into a newly born nation, which did not stop itself from using even maximum military strength to compel the unwilling people into submission. The army brutality only increased since the arrest of Phizo. On 18th October 1952, the police shot upon a peaceful protest march as they approached the Deputy Commissioner’s office, in Kohima. The exact number of those who were injured or dead is unknown to date, but at least one person had died from the attack, by the name of Zasibito

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   163 Nagi, a Judge in the central Court of Kohima. In the novel Kire shows these violent events through the children’s eyes, who fail to grasp the sheer reason of such brutality that they see the Indian state apparatuses perpetrating around them. There are multiple incidents, described in the book, of torture, rape, and murder, which at the same time terrorized and angered the Naga people. Sometimes the violence was perpetrated just to terrorize the commoners so that they did not help the underground rebels, who were only starting to organize at this point. The first time the violence hits Mose’s family personally, is when his grandmother is killed by a bullet as she was working in the fields. No one seems sure why the army men would target an old woman. The absurdness of the violence is apparent when the neighbors recount the horrifying incident to Mose— Soldiers. We have seen them for the past five days in our woods … we thought that if they saw us peacefully cultivating our fields they would not harm us. But when we finished working there was a shout and they began to shoot towards the fields. (71) Not only did the armed forces perpetrate such random violence in the name of maintaining order, they got to go scot free for their actions too. Heightening the pathos of the event, Kire notes, “they didn’t know that the shooting has been documented in the army files and the soldier in question would not face prosecution. He was protected by the Assam Maintenance of Public Order Act 1953. The act empowered a soldier, to ‘shoot and kill in case it is felt necessary to do so for maintaining public order’” (78). Kire shows how violence only spews more violence when a passive, peaceful kid like Mose decides to quit school and join the underground movement, seething with anger at the brutality of the forces. In the hill tribes of Nagaland, a place of a warrior is at the top of the clan, and so when Mose informs his mother about his wish, she acquiesces peacefully. But even as a part of the underground movement Mose is written as a kind and empathetic soldier. He is against the execution of the “spies” in the underground sent by the government, although they stand traitors to their cause—“It was one thing to be shooting at an enemy soldier. But to have to shoot at someone from your own village … that was almost murder” (99). At this point in the book, the leaders of the movement are shown as ideological warriors who do not celebrate rampant violence either. “It is not our objective to kill the Indian soldiers first, said one of the officers. ‘Remember that any action on your part must be guided entirely by self defense’” (94). This aversion to use violence is lost as the movement progresses. In the present day, the violence has spiraled out of control as one underground clan kills another’s members, blinded by the thirst of power. With the attainment of statehood in 1963, the scenario in Nagaland started changing. Although they

164  Payel Ghosh were not entirely happy for this event, it gave them a new government who used both threat and persuasion to disband the underground and a group of political and religious leaders of the land has at last been able to broker peace and reach a situation of cease-fire. In the novel this turn of incident stands critical, as this is the time that Mose leaves the underground to tend to his ailing mother. Slowly he is completely taken out of his rebellious youth as he settles down into his own family. But the violence at the backdrop continues, the freedom struggle has gone beyond its twentieth year now, without yielding any substantial result. Mose’s wife, who was also part of the underground with him, is seen pondering at the futility of it all— At 30, she felt a little disillusioned by it all. Too many had died. Needlessly … twenty-one years without any respite … if it had been left to the women, maybe they would have talked it over and sorted it out long back. After all it was they who bore the brunt of the deaths… on both sides. But women did not settle wars … the woman’s lot was to mourn their dead. And the very next day try to find food for their families. (113) For the first time in the novel Kire writes from the point of view of not her male protagonist but a female fringe-character; but in her voice echoes the loss of an entire society’s youth. The war was a result of the politics, a sphere women are largely kept out of. Even in the present day, the 33% reservation rule for women candidates in electoral politics could not be implemented in the state of Nagaland. The most harrowing moment of the narrative arrives when Mose dies at the hand of a Naga underground insurgent near the end of the novel. The bleak irony lies in the fact that he dies trying to save a Bihari shopkeeper at Kohima who was being attacked by the militants. As he tries to save the man from getting beaten to death, the insurgents shoot Mose in his chest and his throat. Mose’s fight was against the discrimination and the oppression that the Nagas felt at the hand of the Indian government, it is then only apt that he dies guarding the rights of another oppressed man, even if the oppressor in this case was from his own clan. As he dies, the man he saved cradles his head on his lap frantically calling him “baba” (224). It is probably in this moment that we realize that any national or clan identity cannot rise above humanity. When he was young Mose wanted to sacrifice his life fighting for the Naga cause of Nationalism, but in his death he rises above the very idea of nation and its structure as a migrant Indian addresses him as “father.” I would like to go back to Kire’s comment on national identity that was discussed earlier in the paper. Being questioned on the issue of Naga integration, she answered, “I don’t believe people from my generation or my children’s generation will ever feel that they’re Indian. We will always feel

Writing Memory, Practicing Resistance   165 we’re Nagas. There’s a huge cultural difference” (Kire in interview with Arora). But she also mentions But we are able to embrace India, understand Indian culture … You have a sense of belonging to a smaller degree to India. Your identity is always as a Naga …you can have a sense of belonging to India … You’ll always be fully Naga in your mentality … we should actually build up on that—the levels of belonging, the levels of Indian-ness. (Kire in interview with Arora) In her work, like in her words, she champions the acceptance of the difference, the other. The novel shows that national identity cannot be the logic for perpetrating violence. It also shows that draconian rules like the Assam Maintenance Act or the AFSPA have failed miserably to help the center in its mission of integration just like faction violence has failed the cause of the Naga nationalism. Thomas King, while describing the scope of Native writing in North America, uses the term “Interfusional literature” to define narratives that are written in English but preserve the archetypal indigenous voice of the storyteller as well traditional themes and oral discursive devices (King 13). We find the same motif come alive in Easterine Kire’s novels. Although written in English, the formation, images, and even the themes and characters of Kire’s novels are reminiscent of Naga oral literature. Kire has consciously resorted to replicating the narrative voices of the indigenous Naga storyteller, because as an organic intellectual she has taken it upon herself to continue the oral traditions of her people in a world dominated by discourses of Western Modernity. The art of storytelling contains a moralistic scope. Since, from the anecdotes to the lore and legends, indigenous stories perpetually carry a moral code and value to infuse. The figurative meanings engendering from these stories are established on several planes—on the awareness of nature and ecology, ethics, and principles, but mostly to guide the young find a place in the community, especially in the time of great confusion yielding from a violent past. Kire accepts her role as the griot of her community, the keeper of her people’s memory when she declares, “we, indigenous communities are living books. Our elders are our history and culture books, our young are blank books on which beautiful stories need to be stored again” (Kire, “Opening up the Physical and the Spiritual Universe of the Angamis” 60).

Works Cited Ao, Temsula. “Lest We Forget.” These Hills Called Home: Stories from a War Zone, Zubaan, 2014, pp. ix–xi. Ao, Tajenyuba. British Occupation of the Naga Country. Naga Literature Society, 1993.

166  Payel Ghosh Arora, Kim. “Big Indian Publishing Houses Don’t Think the Northeast Will Sell.” Times of India, 9 Jan. 2012, timesofindia.indiatimes.com/interviews/ Big-Indian-publishing-houses-dont-think-the-northeast-will-sell/articleshow/11415634.cms. Accessed 12 Oct. 2017. Bhattacharya, Sukalpa. “Narrative as An/Other History or His/Story Otherwise.” Literatures and Oratures as Knowledge Systems: Texts from Northeast India, edited by Subha Dasgupta, Goutam Biswas and Samantak Das, Akansha Publishing House, 2011, pp. 20–31. Chakravarti, Uma, and Dolly Kikon. “Foreword.” Life and Dignity: Women’s Testimonies of Sexual Violence in Dimapur (Nagaland), North Eastern Social Research Centre, 2015, pp. 6–13. Ibrionke, Olabode. “Monumental Time in Caribbean Literature.” Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History/Literature Debate, edited by Kuisma Korhonen, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 151–160. Kanth, Idrees. “Writing Histories in Conflict Zones.” Economics and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 27, 25 June 2011, pp. 21–26. Khala, Khatoli. The Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and its Impact on Women in Nagaland. WISCOMP, 2003. King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 30, no. 2, 1990, pp. 10–16., doi:10.1080/17449859008589128. Kire, Easterine. Bitter Wormwood. Zubaan, 2011. Kire, Easterine. “Opening up the Physical and the Spiritual Universe of the Angamis.” Indigeneity: Expression and Experience, edited by Cherrie L. Chhangte and Kristina Z. Zama, Mittal Publications, 2019, pp. 53–60. Kire, Easterine. Sky Is My Father: A Naga Village Remembered. Speaking Tiger, 2018. Kire, Eaterine. “The Conflict in Nagaland: Through a Poet’s Eyes.” http://nagas.sytes.net, Sept. 2004, nagas.sytes.net/~kaka/articles/art006.html. Kolachalam, Namrata. “Stories of Nagaland.” Helter Skelter, 11 Mar. 2019, helterskelter.in/2019/03/interview-easterine-kire-a-respectable-woman-nagaland/. Accessed 14 May 2019. Korhonen, Kuisma. Tropes for the Past: Hayden White and the History, Literature Debate. Rodopi, 2006. Luithui, Shimreichon. Naga: A People Struggling for Self-Determination. International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2001. Manchanda, Rita, and Seema Kakran. “Gendered Power Transformations in India’s Northeast: Peace Politics in Nagaland.” Cultural Dynamics, vol. 29, no. 1–2, 2017, pp. 63–82., doi:10.1177/0921374017709232. Misra, Tilottama. “Women Writing in Times of Violence.” The Peripheral Centre: Voices from India’s Northeast, edited by Preeti Gill, Zubaan, 2010, pp. 249–272. Patton, Meribeni. “Native Voices in the Works of Easterine Kire and Thomas King: A Comparative Study.” Shodhganga: A Reservoir of Indian Theses, Nagaland University, 2016, hdl.handle.net/10603/219737. Phillips, Katherine. “The India-Naga Conflict: A Long-Standing War with Few Prospects of Imminent Solution.” CHRI, Summer, 2004. Stricklan, Kate. “Bitter Wormwood: Interview with Author Easterine Kire.” Sampsonia Way Magazine, 16 Jan. 2012, www.sampsoniaway.org. Accessed 12 Apr. 2017.

11 Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures A Comparative Analysis of Contemporary Novels from Three Continents Kate Rose Novels by Indigenous authors address urgent and specific real-life problems. Indigenous criticism subverts dominant canons of knowledge not only by applying analytical tools grounded in subjugated worldviews but also by emphasizing the political usefulness of fictional works. All three authors discussed in this chapter are activists as well as novelists, addressing the same issues in literature and in life. Departing from strict mimesis allows for a clearer perspective on reality. In other words, sometimes lies are more accurate than truths, when discourse is shaped to subjugate and silence. Other times, what dominant discourse considers fiction is actually the reality of another culture, for example conversations with animals (Sepie 2017) and some forms of “magical realism” (Roussos 2007). As Philip Mead in his interdisciplinary article “Indigenous Literature and the Extractive Industries” states clearly, the “conjunction of literary, political, economic and culture differences, in the present, is something that critical discourse needs to get its head around” (45). Mead includes in this conjunction Alexis Wright as a writer and activist, and the importance of her work for real-world policy making (particularly her first novel, Carpentaria, about mining). Likewise, Linda Hogan’s novels each parallel a specific real-world conflict, as does Last Quarter of the Moon by Chi Zijian. Using socioliterature (applying literary study for the betterment of society), this chapter explores novels as sociopolitical acts forging a shared pan-Indigenous paradigm.

World’s Largest Indigenous Population Most Chinese people know that there are fifty-five Indigenous ethnic groups recognized by their government (in addition to the dominant Han). They comprise 10% of China’s overall population, making China the country with the largest total number of Indigenous people. Referred to as 少数名族 (shaoshu minzu), literally “minority nationalities,” they are vulnerable to the Chinese government’s dual strategies of cultural

168  Kate Rose tourism and assimilation. These seemingly contradictory aims stem from the conviction that minority cultures are exotic and inferior relics, further back on a linear evolutionary scale. Authors like Chi Zijian voice another perspective, although minority nationalities are not allowed to directly defend their rights due to the Chinese government’s emphasis on national unity. Through fictionalization, censorship can often be avoided. This is a common use of literature in contexts of political repression, a notable example being the rise of magical realism amid South American dictatorships (Roussos 2007). Through fiction, Chi Zijian is clearly advocating for Evenki autonomy, and furthermore (as her postface suggests) for a global pan-Indigenous future. The Last Quarter of the Moon is the English translation of Chi Zijian’s novel 额尔古纳河右岸, literally The Right Bank of the Argun River, winner of China’s prestigious Mao Dun Literary Prize in 2008.1 Last Quarter depicts the Indigenous “Reindeer-Evenki” for the century leading up to their forced relocation in 2003. The land at the outset of Last Quarter is of little interest to governments, and the Evenki migrate freely from one side to the other of the Argon River (between China and Russia), finding abundant fish, animals to hunt, and lichen for their reindeer. Spanning generations, the narrative entwines history, traditional knowledge, shamanism, daily life, and interaction with the natural world. Chi Zijian also explores themes such as sexuality, male-female roles and their transgressions, and the brutality of contact with non-Indigenous peoples, be they Japanese, Russian, or Han Chinese. Championed by the Chinese government as a triumph of civilization over the nation’s last “primitives,” the 2003 forced relocation has led to deep unrest among the Evenki. An estimated thirty Evenki refused to leave the forest, pursuing their traditional lifestyle in an illegal and precarious way, facing environmental degradation from logging, mining, and poaching. Chi does not idealize traditional Evenki life. It has its own hardships and dilemmas, though she does suggest that these are worsened by contact with settler populations. Chi witnessed the advent of logging in the 1960s and explicitly advocates for “a harmonious form of survival, not a rapacious, destructive one;” after traveling to Australia, Chi became interested in the brutal, lasting trauma of displaced Aboriginal people, which she likens to the Evenki’s forced relocation (Chinese postface). The forced relocation is the starting point for Chi’s novel, structured as recollections told by the centenarian narrator to her grandson, both of whom stay behind in the forest after others have relocated. Fieldwork 1 The original title is more relevant, as the moon has little to do with the novel; moreover, the translator’s title suggests that Indigenous life is almost over (at least for this phase), whereas the original title establishes a dichotomous here/there, both of which persist (nonetheless, the translation overall is fluid and accurate).

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  169 by anthropologist Richard Fraser corroborates Chi’s own observations. Regrettably, there are no known Reindeer-Evenki writers, though there was a famous painter. Her suicide at a young age while returning to her homelands after successful establishment in urban society was the catalyst for Chi to begin writing this novel (Chinese postface). Though Chi is not Evenki herself, she grew up among them. Her empathy and understanding extend beyond telling of the Evenki, as she employs narrative strategies reflecting traditional environmental knowledge (TEK) and Evenki life-view, as well as pan-Indigenous paradigms.

Refuge in Nature: Hiding in the Tree’s Sinews Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book is reminiscent of Finnegan’s Wake in its playful obscurity, outpouring of allusions, and clever juxtapositions. It is at times a slow meander, other times a white water rage through a dense jungle of plot; if they can relax and go with the flow, readers are treated to poetic, witty, astute observations, and an emotional portrait of the trauma afflicting Aboriginal women. Research on how the brain responds to trauma provides inroads into this complex, intimate statement of Aboriginal women’s protest and quest for both healing and sovereignty. Sexual abuse of girls and women, and its lifelong, often misconstrued consequences, is similar to the collective trauma experienced by Indigenous peoples over the destruction of land, culture, and the sacred. What was once held sacred – the sovereignty of a body or of a people – has been violated. (Linda Hogan defines the sacred as that which can be destroyed, but not created.) The rape of women and the theft of land fall under a common colonial strategy. The Swan Book provides a glimpse inside a traumatized mind and collective culture. This shared link is being explored by Indigenous researchers, filling a gap in trauma studies (Visser 2015, Haskell & Randall 2009); novels assist in this effort through connecting the dots of a fragmented picture. The Swan Book centers on Oblivia, a young Indigenous woman in an allegorical dystopian future world, who was raped and has been hiding out in a tree. Her name suggests she is both the forgetting and the forgotten, as details of her past are murky, even for her. This corresponds to the reality of traumatic amnesia: the worst events are blurred, distorted, or entirely repressed. As Judith Herman writes in the first sentence of her illuminating book Trauma and Recovery, “The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness” (1). The banished memories return, however, through a range of symptoms, some that doctors misdiagnose as unrelated to trauma, and others they cannot figure out. The virus infecting Oblivia’s brain in the opening pages of The Swan Book is identified by Aboriginal doctors as “just one of those poor lost assimilated spirits that thought about things that had originated somewhere else on the planet and got bogged in my brain” (3). This alludes to the

170  Kate Rose Aboriginal belief in the Dreamtime, where thoughts (and non-physical bodies) can travel across space and time (Bell 1993). It also suggests how trauma colonizes the brain, implanting thoughts from others (such as perpetrators or colonizers) and forcing an emotional (non-narrative) reliving of violation. The physiological basis of the cutting off between narrative and emotive brain parts has been proven through neurological research involving brain scans and interpreted by French psychiatrist and trauma expert Muriel Salmona (2013; also see Rose 2018). Through Bella Donna, the woman who rescues Oblivia, Wright identifies rape trauma as a central issue in The Swan Book, linking Oblivia’s abused body with that of the land. First, a female body is described with a land metaphor and as spoils of war: “Bella Donna felt invaded by Oblivia’s hot breath striking her face. In an instant, her sense of privacy diminishes into the spoils of war flattened over the barren field of herself” (17). Then, rape trauma is addressed directly: “That the girl has never recovered from being raped. But feeling and knowing are two different things: she retaliates all the same, and like any other long-standing conflict around the world, one act of violation becomes the story of another” (17). The feeling-knowing divide is akin to the splitting off of the visceral and narrative parts of the brain during trauma. Wright also alludes to amnesia, repetition of trauma, and its persistence in colonizing a survivor’s life. As Wright suggests, one act of violation is both the consequence of and the precursor to other acts. Reliving a traumatic event through high-risk or destructive behaviors, inflicting suffering on oneself or (more rarely) others, is a neurological imperative when trauma is not treated through reconstructing a narrative (Salmona 2013, Rose 2018). The dual paths (harming self or others) are conditioned by sex-based norms. 2 Traumatized men are encouraged to “medicate” themselves through using another person (usually a woman or child), while women are conditioned to take the suffering upon themselves. This is not natural or inevitable. Recognizing how trauma functions could eliminate most sex-based violence. Although the neurological studies on this exist, it is perhaps through literature that the majority of people might finally grasp its complexity. Among Wright’s other frequent allusions to trauma: “the ghosts screaming in her sleep about the wars they had never left” (51). Again, this corresponds to the neurological phenomenon through which a traumatic event cuts off the brain’s alarm system from the narrative part. The alarm keeps ringing, since the danger cannot be categorized according to our evolutionary capacities (translated into narrative); therefore 2 I use “sex” instead of “gender” in keeping with Monique Wittig’s idea that the sex/ gender distinction is misleading: It implies that sex is a natural means of classifying humans, while gender refers to learned behaviors. However, there is nothing selfevident or natural about choosing genitals as a criterion for classification.

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  171 we do not, in our bodies, integrate that it has passed. We remain trapped in the time and place of trauma. The cutting off/shutting down is a survival mechanism but leads to renewed violation or perpetration through addiction to substances the brain produces to make this happen (Rose 2018). Numbing, disorientation, paralysis, and disassociation are among the colonizing consequences of violation. Although evidence exists it is often ignored, including by conventional psychiatry. This reflects how politics, not science, shapes practice, today as in the past. As Herman (1992) has described, Freud discovered the prevalence of childhood sexual abuse among his “hysterical” patients, but after making this connection he renounced it, not wishing to accuse such a large number of “upstanding citizens.” Thus trauma is the unacknowledged culprit for a wide variety of more convenient diagnoses. This is also true of collective, historical trauma, including symptoms recurrent in Indigenous communities such as addiction (Haskell & Randall 2009). Re-opening past wounds in order to heal, piecing together the narrative of traumatic events, can actually help the brain repair itself, translating terror into story. Bringing the past to light is about “salvaging the future,” as Lois Beardslee suggests in her forward to Linda Hogan’s performance poem “Indios” (xii). Trauma and healing through literature (akin to the growing field of narrative medicine) involve individual women, as well as the collective culture and land their bodies stand for and with. A key component is storied restoration.

Salvaging the Future: The Fluidity of Invention In Linda Hogan’s story poem “Indios,” a Native woman narrates from prison: “Everything goes through the hands of the guards./Even we go through their hands/As if we are water” (4). The woman’s body is an element, fluid, and also controlled. The woman’s body stands for the land, and her soul for the culture as a whole: “It is never the story of just one woman./It is the telling of many worlds, peoples, and lands” (12). Geographical features are her flesh, divided in loyalties, severed even from itself, exploited for her generosity: “I was, I am, the continental divide./I am the collision of continents/Contained in the silence of a body” (15). The narrator gave birth in warm water as her ancestors did, a practice the white civilization of her husband finds “barbaric”: “I was young/ But I knew how to bring a child to the world,/Though to them I was an animal,/As they said, Crude and barbaric,/But I never met an animal as barbaric/As a human so civilized as they” (23). This comment corresponds with the ecofeminist criticism voiced, for example, by Vandana Shiva, who states that the logic of industrial capitalism and the science that serves it is not sophisticated, it is primitive. It pursues immediate gain—the ruinous simplicity of the bottom line, blind to concerns about value and worth across time. It is influenced by religions that value death

172  Kate Rose and “afterlife” (monotheism) or state that life on earth is just a cycle of suffering (Buddhism). Such ideas necessarily go against the living body, and therefore those whose bodies make more living bodies: women. Hogan’s novels focus on American Indian women facing complex issues within their nations as well as ongoing attacks from settler populations; she bases all of her novels on specific contemporary issues, though she fictionalizes the nations. Previous scholarship has connected Hogan’s novels with the real-world issues that inspired them: In Florida, a Native man killed a panther and was acquitted in court (Makhdoumian); the Northwestern Makah Nation reintroduced whale-hunting in 1999 (Smith & Holland, Harrison). These cases appear to be victories of American Indians over the U.S. government. However, Hogan’s fictionalized nations confront a more complex reality. In People of the Whale, the whale is hunted with machine guns, to sell the meat to Japan. While this massacre is underway, the young man Marco Polo, designated to ensure the continuance of traditions, is murdered by the greedy and traumatized war veterans who instigated the hunt. Here, the dichotomy is as much about male versus female as Native versus settler, since the women consistently reveal that this hunt has nothing to do with tradition, and seek to save both whales and culture. Tribal elders (male and female) and most women protest against the unceremonious slaughter of animals they consider to be kin. Hogan highlights layers of oppression, as Indigenous women are marginalized within their nations and also by settler society, which only negotiates with men. The relationship between Indigenous women and whales is also explored by Hogan in non-fiction books such as Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals (1998), and Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey (2002), co-authored with Brenda Peterson for National Geographic. Hogan’s fictionalized account is anchored in real-world observations of a naturalist and an activist as well as a storyteller. This is equally true of Chi Zijian and Alexis Wright. All are reinventing spirituality anchored in the sacredness of women’s bodies and life in the flesh, here on earth. This converges with, and inspires, non-Indigenous allies such as Starhawk and the neo-Pagan movement drawing from eclectic traditions. The novels’ protagonists excel when guided neither by the reductionist logic of settler society nor by the dogmas of their own nations. They recall and also invent. Huebert (2018) suggests that Hogan’s depictions of woman and animal intimacy are both erotic and subversive: Unlike a car or an airplane, a horse feels back, loves back. Reading the poetics of equine eros through the lens of settler colonialism opens a seam into an erotic and affective world that persists beyond and in spite of settler logics of white human supremacy, rigid species taxonomies, and Western regimes of linear progress. (181)

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  173 The kinship between animals and humans is seen through children born with gills and webbed feet (in Hogan’s People of the Whale), predicting their link to the watery world. (This recalls the earliest known works of art, cave paintings depicting human-animal creatures, and the earliest stories.) Some characters can breathe underwater. In Hogan’s Solar Storms, an old woman wears a bear coat through which she can communicate with the animal’s spirit; this physical intimacy has an intense and passionate quality far beyond the constricted definitions of the erotic in settler society. Similarly, in Last Quarter, the Evenki “shriek like ravens” while eating bear meat, so the animals’ souls will not know that it is people who are devouring them, which would make them sad (6). In Hogan’s invented cosmology, the Taiga “believed that all the hunted, if hunted correctly, would return again. In Taiga, the word for sacrifice means ‘to send away,’ and the animal returns to the spirit world” (Power 111). Jane Soto, a tribal elder, shares the sadness of an ancient turtle crying because she knows the eggs she laid are going to be taken by hunters. Jane Soto’s grief causes an accident through which she loses her leg (when stuck in “one of the earliest man-made canals”), which she pronounces a sacrifice to the animals (Power 140). In Chi’s Last Quarter, the narrator stops her husband from killing a mother water dog, because her pups’ eyes are still closed: “if the first thing they see upon opening their eyes is mountains, the river and hunters pursuing them, they’ll be heartbroken” (104). Nidu the Shaman saves young Lena’s life by performing a Spirit Dance, but a gray reindeer fawn dies in her place (Last Quarter 8). Her mother treats the animal’s remains as if it were her own child. When Lena does go “into the dark realm in pursuit of that fawn” (dies) much later, the deer mother’s grief-dried milk returns (21). The spirits of Lena and that fawn are linked, just as Maria feels “as if the blood flowed from her own body” when witnessing the cutting of antlers (23). This antler-cutting meets quotas set by the Chinese government starting in the 1960s (the antlers being coveted for Chinese medicine), following the government’s control of Evenki hunting through collectivization policies (Fraser 319, Lin 240, Safonova & Sántha). In Last Quarter, the Japanese invaders rather than the Chinese government force Evenki hunters to sell pelts (a politically acceptable variation).

Everything Is Alive, Everything Is Sacred: The Politics of Pantheism All three authors affirm that tradition does not require applying any set of rules but is instead an evolving, individual response to a worldview based on knowledge accumulated over time. They emphasize the living world. Plants, water, wind, and “inanimate” objects (such as rocks) are infused with spirit; animals are peoples or nations comprised of individuals. As Amba J. Sepie has shown, “myths” from every culture portray

174  Kate Rose such connections and should be taken as evidence rather than fiction. In many Indigenous contexts, these “myths” have been proven to represent actual (not symbolic) instances of communication. Sepie suggests that interspecies communication was previously widespread. When animals in “myths” talk, humans are able to understand the other species’ own language/vocalization/signs, and translate for the listener/reader. Losing this ability does not represent progress, but rather a limiting of possibility. Sepie advocates for a pan-Indigenous revival of this capacity as a direct response to the indigenous and ecological thinkers (and their allies) who have called for the decolonization of all people as a response to earth crises. Their call is based on the wholesale rejection of ways of thinking and being that lead to destruction and domination, and the socialization practices which continue to perpetuate these elements within westernized societies. (2) This pan-Indigenous vision, extended to all humanity, is similar to what the three authors are illustrating, each from the specific vantage point of a people. The Evenki worldview is representative of this Indigenous, decolonized norm: “the world consists of various kinds of persons, only some of which are human, the remainder being non-human animals such as reindeer, as well as the intentionality attributed to specific trees and mountains” (Fraser 327). Women in the novels are especially close to the non-human world. When the earth is violated, women are violated; when the earth is made to suffer, animals and women suffer first. Although designating women as closer to nature than men has been used throughout patriarchal history to justify exploitation and subjugation (man’s dominion over animals and women in Genesis), it has also been reclaimed and reinvented by ecofeminists. Mary Daly, Starhawk, Vandana Shiva, and many other scholars, activists, priestesses, and authors present compelling arguments for this. Indigenous women authors are vital voices in this shared movement. Their writings root knowledge in complex traditions even when they have largely been lost or made invisible. Here, they coincide with Monique Wittig’s adage: “You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent” (126). One of the advantages of fiction over non-fiction is the ability to reclaim through intuitive invention without the factual constraints of research. In this way, novels restore truths more fully when too many pieces are missing for facts. They can use possibilities that transcendent what eurocentric canons allow. Last Quarter opens with all the Reindeer-Evenki having relocated except for the narrator and one grandson, to whom she tells her story. She explains, regarding her decision to stay in the forest: “I won’t sleep in a room where I can’t see the stars … My reindeer have committed no

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  175 crime, and I don’t want to see them imprisoned either” (4). Although the narrator does not ignore the hardships of nomadic life, nor the flaws in other characters (this is no utopia), she does portray a world that is fully alive, in contrast to the stagnation in the settlement. The Evenki “grant their animals agency … with herders emphasizing the reindeer’s own motivations from the perspective of the animals themselves” (Fraser 335). The symbiotic exchange between Evenki and reindeer is clear insofar as the reindeer return willingly to their humans (no need of fencing). Chi portrays nature, its elements, and creatures, as fully alive through the interplay of relationships, as suggested in the opening of Last Quarter: “I am ninety years old. The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them” (3). Contact with the forest and reindeer is essential as “a physical and existential closeness that grounds local conceptualizations of personhood in the ongoing relationships between people and their environment,” so that living in a settlement is not only removal from their traditional work and play, but also “existential dislocation” (Fraser 328). The pain people feel at the loss of their lands is difficult to quantify scientifically, hence the importance of literature for voicing (and denouncing) this loss. Parallel to the rise of Indigenous theory, TEK is increasingly valued for scientific research in areas such as climate change (Lavrillier & Gabyshev). Chi Zijian’s novel is situated within an Evenki worldview, borrowing narrative techniques and strategies from it, and affirming TEK at its center.

Healers: A Variation of Feminine Sacrifice? When Nihau succeeds Nidu as Shaman, a child of hers dies every time she saves someone else’s life. She knowingly accepts this fate and continues to save people, even when they are not of her tribe (Last Quarter 199). She considers others’ children as “her children” and her own children as “others’ children,” in a kind of spiritual interconnectivity or transference. Understanding this, the narrator admonishes her not to perform another Spirit Dance: “‘Nihau, think of others’ children first!’ I shouted. I thought only she would understand the significance of ‘others’ children.’ Nihau’s eyes moistened. ‘My own child can be saved, how can I …?’” (241, also see 147). She is not detached from the world: “This time Nihau didn’t allow anyone to enter the shirangju. Just how difficult it was for her to don the heavy Spirit Robe, Spirit Skirt and Spirit Headdress, none of us knew” (241). Chi, like Hogan and Wright, suggests potentials for empathy and power, extending beyond both kin and species. In Hogan’s works, women “are the moral compass for the community’s behavior” (Smith & Holland 68). Likewise, “Indigenous women writers contribute vital insights into the analysis of gendered colonial violence while envisioning new, non-violent realities” (Hargreaves 1). Not necessarily anchored in a stable tradition, they take on new challenges of

176  Kate Rose living here and now. This involves direct learning from nature, insofar as human concepts have been corrupted and distorted. Hogan writes: “Ama takes directions not from people, but from the earth itself” (Power 142). The connection to animals and elements is of body and spirit. Thus, the settler jury accusing Ama sees her as “a woman so unlike them as to exist in another world, another time. She is their animal” (136). Ama kills the endangered panther to restore the nation, though she is judged even more harshly by the elders than by the settler court. Rejecting dogmas, she takes upon herself to do what she sees as right in a broken context. She is, unlike the elders, between the worlds. She kills the animal that is a god, with the backing of legend, but most of all with her conviction that maintaining this animal in its sickly state is actually weakening the tribe. She accepts exile in exchange for this act, and disappears into the swamp, taking upon her body responsibility for the nation’s future in the world. In The Swan Book, Oblivia is enmeshed in the tree that has become her prison and refuge, just as her healer and rescuer Bella Donna (an outsider, being Italian) is named for a plant that is both poison and medicine. Oblivia also takes it upon herself to save the nation, when those officially charged to do so (such as her husband) do not. Her forced marriage is an adhesion to tribal dogma. The subsequent duplication of Oblivia is representative of traumatic dissociation, as a woman who looks exactly like her stands beside her president husband, while another Oblivia is locked up in a tower within a ruined city. Her forced removal from the swamp and destruction of it to prevent any future return are a second violation of her body, alongside that of the land. Like Hogan, Wright warns about Indigenous men using the pretext of tradition for their own gains. Women, on the other hand, do not use tradition; they embody and reinvent it. While perhaps in the past rules were more flexible and meaningful, the marriage now only serves the political ends of Oblivia’s husband, who becomes the first Aboriginal president of Australia. As with Hogan, Indigenous men and women take very different paths. Here, the dichotomy is as much about men and women as it is about settlers and Indigenous people. The authors suggest that women must lead the way to pan-Indigenous futures, not through dogmatically preserving traditions but in taking “directions not from people, but from the earth itself.” Also with Chi, Indigenous men can represent a hostility toward nature, as seen through the torture of a hawk by the elderly man Dashi, who reduces the hawk to dependent submission (alternately starving and stuffing the animal, tying it up, rocking it like a baby …) in order to execute revenge on a wolf. This bizarre scene may be an allegory for conflict with settlers that Chi is forbidden from expressing directly. The healer has an ambiguous role between creation and destruction. The theme of female sacrifice – the healer taking upon herself the misfortunes of the tribe and animals – is present in all three authors. Women’s

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  177 bodies suffer with and for the earth. In a context that is already unbalanced, unhinged by settler invasion, they bring about a restoration that is not without pain.

Escape from Barbaric Civilizations Indigenous women are particularly at risk of sexual violence. They are targeted by non-Indigenous men following the tradition of dehumanizing them as part of the spoils of land takeover and also because of the relative improbability of punishment. Whereas overall, women are at more risk of being killed by an intimate partner than a stranger or acquaintance, research in Canada suggests that this is not true for Native women. They are specifically “prey” for sexual predators, with four to five times more likelihood than the average of being assaulted (Hargreaves 2). A disproportionate number of Indigenous women worldwide are missing or murdered. While sexual violence is transversal and determinant in The Swan Book, it is also recurrent in Hogan and Chi. Hogan portrays sexual violence through the unwanted attentions inflicted on teenage narrator Omishto by her stepfather, Herm. Omishto alludes to this throughout the novel, always in the context of something else, such as trying on a dress her sister wants her to wear: “I don’t want to look pretty in the house with my mother and stepfather looking at me, his eyes always looking too much in the places they don’t belong, and my mom jealous like she is being replaced by me and it’s all my fault, my design” (Power 7). This reversal/victim-blaming is reminiscent of Ama’s trials (white and then tribal), wherein she, though acting to save the nation in the aftermath of colonial destruction, is the one accused of acting violently and selfishly. The individual female body is representative of the nation and the male–female power dynamics of settler and Indigenous peoples. As Hogan has written in her memoir The Woman Who Watches Over the World regarding prior abuse of the daughter she adopted, “It is a coldness that has its origins in events, not people” (78); or again: “History is our illness. It is recorded there, laid down along the tracks and pathways and synapses” (59). Neurology corroborates this, as elaborated by trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk (2014) with the revealing book title: The Body Keeps the Score. There are few boundaries between personal and collective traumas; both bodies and lands carry memories. Sexual abuse is a causal force in Power, determining Omishto’s frequent presence at Ama’s and pushing her to take refuge in wild nature (and eventually to favor traditional over settler life): “My mom says it’s not good to sleep in my boat and I shouldn’t camp out like that, but it’s the safest place there is, surrounded all around by water” (Power 7). There is a conventional cutting off of women from the wilds in settler societies, warning women not to venture out on their own. The idea that

178  Kate Rose man is woman’s “natural protector” masks both his additional role as assaulter, and the fact that without him she wouldn’t need a protector. (This was keenly and wryly observed by early 20th-century visionary Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 72.) Ama senses the abuse and welcomes Omishto into the safe haven of her world: “I haven’t told her a thing about Herm, but she sees it in him anyway, and has told me, in so many words, to stay out of his way. She says he’s an attack waiting to happen” (Power 18). Although it is suggested that Herm never touches Omishto other than with his perverted gaze and his belt, the effect of this along with the constant threat of further abuse has profoundly traumatizing consequences, for example, in the annihilation of a previously rich dreaming life (Power 21). To protect herself, Omishto locks herself with the chickens, in an “enclosure that keeps out predators” (Power 208). Through this act, siding with animals for protection, she grows, and Herm becomes smaller. She recalls him beating her naked body with his belt and comments: “I believe I have been too kind to him” (Power 209). She decides to live her own life, beyond the lies taught in school or what her mother wants, or even what Ama would have wanted: “I have just been born, just now risen into the silence of evening” (Power 212). This new-found autonomy is linked to reinventing tradition, including through (like Ama) “taking orders directly from nature.” Perhaps this kind of power (the woman-nature alliance) is the biggest threat to eurowestern patriarchy and also the starting point for acting on a new/old paradigm. Wild nature is forbidden to women under eurowestern patriarchy. What women are typically kept from, under pretext of protection, cuts women off from sources of power. Hogan’s water-birth example illustrates this wild power, later tamed/appropriated through gynecological practices (as Mary Daly has shown). The disapproval of Omishto’s newfound strength is revealing. Omishto’s sister warns her that Herm wants to have her institutionalized, locked, and chained up as mentally ill, just like he previously did to their mother (Power 214). This particular strategy of cutting off women from their wild selves under pretext of insanity has been widely explored by feminists (Ehrenreich 2005, Chesler 2018). Hogan introduces an American Indian specificity insofar as the “madness” is rooted in living and reinventing traditions as a source of strength and resistance. Although no one intervenes directly to punish Herm (instead welcoming Omishto into safe spaces), the elders previously cursed a man for abusing his wife. There is some controversy over whether it was their magic that killed him. Here, worlds collide when the widow (clearly suffering from the Stockholm syndrome) wants the elders arrested for this “crime,” and even succeeds in dragging a police officer out to Kili swamp to question the elders (Power 13–14). The man’s death is taken seriously enough to inspire some youths to join the elders and learn their

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  179 ways, shown to be relevant in the present. Sexual violence is depicted as a by-product of settler societies. Likewise in Last Quarter, the Evenki provide a refuge for Russian Nadezhda, a fugitive from sex trafficking. Evenki hunter Ivan happened across her in the woods and surmised that she had not gone willingly with the Russian trader, along with two more experienced women destined for the brothels that sprung up with the goldmines. Technically Ivan buys Nadezhda, exchanging some pelts for her, but his intention is full of empathy: “The thought of men lifting up that grey checked skirt, again and again, made his teeth chatter” (Last Quarter 18). Ivan marries Nadezhda and they live happily until the Japanese Occupation, when anyone with blue eyes is at risk of being killed or raped (Last Quarter 86). Nadezhda then flees back across the border with her children, who also have blue eyes (the first one is said by Yveline to be the offspring of the Russian trader, who raped her into submission following her multiple attempts to escape). Ivan is short and strong, she taller than him, and they are affectionate with each other despite Yveline’s scolding every time she touches him in front of others, even to pat his head. Nadezhda’s happy marriage and gratefulness to live among the Evenki are evoked many times, as is the trauma of what she escaped across the river in Russia: “Nadezhda eyed the Argun’s waters as if she were looking at a greedy master, her face filled with angst, terrified of being exploited again” (Last Quarter 20). Regardless of the reality of trauma within Indigenous communities, authors recall a pre-colonial equality and life-loving ethic, led by women. The past aside, it is a future they are attempting to piece together with words, memories, and thoughts.

Conclusion What are the boundaries of Indigenous literature in terms of what it is and who is writing it? How may stereotypes such as the “ecological Indian” or the “woman’s body is the earth” be reinvented to empower? I suggest that defending contemporary struggles of Indigenous nations for cultural autonomy and land rights is compatible with conceiving of Indigeneity as an ontological concept. The existence of Indigenous peoples on every continent and similarities in worldviews that are intrinsically linked to the definition of Indigenous (such as maintaining an ongoing relationship with the land) suggest that settler societies are not a human norm, but rather a wrong turn on the evolutionary highway. As Hogan remarks: you’ve lived some place for generation after generation, maybe a thousand years, maybe, like in Australia 60,000 years, some places here 20,000 years. You know everything about that environment, and you don’t endanger it because you have to keep it – the new word is – ‘sustainable.’ (Harrison 170)

180  Kate Rose Hogan is advocating a way of life that transcends blood and the specifics of one nation: a pan-Indigenous worldview. However, this does not mean anyone can be Indigenous in any way they choose, a danger that has been described with regard to Aborigines in a way that can also apply to American Indians: “Besides the desire for a spiritual wisdom lacking in modern civilization, primitivism typically involves a back-to-nature fantasy, so that Aboriginality is identified with the Australian landscape … part of Australia’s exotic fauna” (Brantlinger 356). Brantlinger elaborates: Postmodernity is also anachronistic, a dreamtime perhaps (capitalist, globalized, surrealistic), but also a time out of time, a futuristic falling away from the Western forward-march of progress, an acknowledgement that the clocks are running in reverse or at any rate are unreliable. If the original Aboriginal Dreamtime was authentic, the postmodern condition is the dreamtime of the inauthentic. (356) Although Indigenous worldviews may provide a solution to the deep dissatisfaction and environmental peril that afflicts us all – and indeed TEK is sought out increasingly in Western scientific disciplines, it should be led (as the three authors suggest) by Indigenous women. All three authors depict the opposition of two worldviews that stretches beyond an Indigenous-settler dichotomy. Their works not only argue in favor of Indigenous rights but also for transforming dominant society. Through this, perhaps the living, breathing reality around us can soothe and save troubled minds, bodies, and lands. We need a paradigm shift, and these women use fiction to create it. If it would be stereotypical to say that new worldviews grounded in Indigenous roots can save us all, I certainly have little faith that eurowestern patriarchy can solve the complex environmental, economic, and sociocultural problems we increasingly face, so I’ll take the chance.

Works Cited Bell, Diane. Daughters of the Dreaming. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. Brantlinger, Patrick. Notes on the Postmodernity of Fake(?) Aboriginal Literature. Postcolonial Studies. 14(4): 355–371, 2011. Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness: Revised and Updated. Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 2018. Chi, Zijian. The Last Quarter of the Moon. Translated by Bruce Holmes. London: Vintage, 2014. Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon, 1978. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women. London: Penguin, 2005.

Women’s Bodies in Indigenous Literatures  181 Fraser, Richard. Forced Relocation amongst the Reindeer-Evenki of Inner Mongolia. Inner Asia. 12: 317–345, 2010. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991 (first published in 1935). Hargreaves, Allison. Violence against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier U P, 2017. Harrison, Summer. Sea Level: An Interview with Linda Hogan. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 18(1): 161–177, Winter, 2011. Haskell, Lori and Melanie Randall. Disrupted Attachments: A Social Context Complex Trauma Framework and the Lives of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. Journal of Aboriginal Health. 5(3): 48–99, Nov. 2009. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Hogan, Linda, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson. Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals. New York: Ballantine, 1998. Hogan, Linda. Indios. San Antonio: Wings, 2012. ———. Mean Spirit. New York: Atheneum, 1990. ———. People of the Whale. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. ———. Power. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998. ———. Solar Storms. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. ———. The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Huebert, David. The Equine Erotopoetics of Linda Hogan and Joy Harjo. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. 25(1): 169– 185, 2018. Lavrillier, Alexandra and Semen Gabyshev. An Emic Science of Climate. Reindeer Evenki Environmental Knowledge and the Notion of an ‘Extreme Process.’ Études mongoles et sibériennes, centrasiatiques et tibétaines. 49: 2018. Available at: http://journals.openedition.org/emscat/3280. Retrieved Jan. 1, 2019. Lin, Hang. The Last Hunting Nation in China: The Ewenki Reindeer Herders of Aoluguya. Localities. 7: 239–246, 2017. Makhdoumian, Helen. Rewriting Billie and Asserting Rhetorical Sovereignty in Linda Hogan’s Power. Studies in American Indian Literatures. 28(4): 80– 110, 2016. Mead, Philip. Indigenous Literature and the Extractive Industries. Australian Literary Studies. 28(4): 31–46, 2013. doi:10.20314/als.e1e870ceeb. Peterson, Brenda and Linda Hogan. Sightings: The Gray Whale’s Mysterious Journey. Washington: National Geographic, 2002. Rose, Kate. Abuse or Be Abused: Traumatic Memory, Sex Inequality, and Millennium as a Socio-Literary Device. Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence. 3(3), Article 6, 2018. doi:10.23860/dignity.2018.03.03.06. Available at: https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/dignity/vol3/iss3/6 ———. Traumatic Memory: A Hidden Disability. Rain and Thunder: A Radical Feminist Journal of Discussion and Activism. (71), Winter 2018. Available at: www.academia.edu/38912197/Traumatic_Memory_A_Hidden_Disability. Roussos, Katherine. Décoloniser l’Imaginaire: du réalisme magique chez Maryse Condé, Marie NDiaye, et Sylvie Germain. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007. (Katherine Roussos is the birth name of Kate Rose, author of this chapter.)

182  Kate Rose Safonova, Tatiana and István Sántha. Evenki Hunter-Gathering Style and Cultural Contact. Hunter-Gatherers and their Neighbors in Asia, Africa, and South America (Kazunobu Ikeya and Robert K. Hitchcock, eds). Osaka: National Museum of Ethnology, Senri Ethnological Series 94: 59–79, 2016. Salmona, Muriel. Le Livre Noir des Violences Sexuelles. Paris: Dunod, 2013. Sepie, Amba J. More than Stories, More than Myths: Animal/Human/Nature(s) in Traditional Ecological Worldviews. Humanities. 6: 78, 2017. Shiva, Vandana. Monocultures of the Mind. London: Zed, 1993. Smith, Lindsey Claire and Trever Lee Holland. ‘Beyond All Age’: Indigenous Water Rights in Linda Hogan’s Fiction. Studies in American Indian Literatures. 28(2): 56–79, 2016. Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. London: Penguin, 2014. Visser, Irene. Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects. Humanities. 4: 250–265, 2015. Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillières. Paris: Minuit, 1969. Wright, Alexis. Carpentaria. Artarmon: Giramondo, 2006. ———. The Swan Book. New York: Atria, 2016.

Part 3

Trauma

12 Magical Combat in Central Africa Kim Nguyen’s War Witch Joya Uraizee

Magical Combat in Central Africa: Kim Nguyen’s War Witch Is magic an effective way to represent the exploitation of African children? In this chapter, I will analyze Vietnamese-Canadian director Kim Nguyen’s use of magic in his 2012 movie War Witch (Rebelle). Inspired by the lives of Burmese child soldiers, Nguyen’s story about Congolese child soldier Komona, was ten years in the making (Dillon 20). Using Rachel Mwanza, an abandoned child on the streets of Kinshasa, as his lead actress, and adding magical touches to the story line, Nguyen took plenty of risks with this venture (Obenson). In parts of the world where governments are weak, and employment opportunities are scarce, children often join armed groups (Kearney 71). Currently, tens of thousands of boys and girls are fighting in wars across the globe (“Questions and Answers”). Many were forced to do so, others chose to when faced with few alternatives (Honwana 37). Once recruited, they are taught to dehumanize their enemies, carry heavy loads, and go on reconnaissance missions, among other things (58). In War Witch, Nguyen uses magic to underscore the “every day trauma” that the protagonist experiences during her three years as a child soldier. Komona, a young girl in rural Democratic Republic of the Congo, is kidnapped by rebel soldiers at the age of twelve, forced to fight, miraculously survives an ambush, and is revered as a witch by her fellow rebels. Riddled with guilt and shame, she runs away with an albino soldier named Magicien, who loves her, and they live happily on a farm, till they are recaptured. Magicien is killed and she is forced to become a soldier again. After enduring sexual and physical abuse, Komona escapes a second time and returns to the farm with her newborn baby. This narrative of three years of Komona’s life includes several magical touches; magic is, in fact, used in three ways in this movie. It furthers the plot, when Komona’s voice-over foreshadows events to come; it creates an atmosphere of horror and mystery, as numerous ghosts of slaughtered villagers appear and disappear; and it symbolizes Komona’s guilt and powerlessness, especially through the visions Komona sees of her murdered parents staring silently at her.

186  Joya Uraizee These magical elements do more than set the tone for the movie; they underscore the “quotidian” nature of Komona’s trauma, functioning the way repeated flashbacks do for combat veterans, eventually providing her with coping strategies for her guilt (Brown 18). Nguyen’s choice of magic to tell his story resulted in mixed critical reviews. Reviewer Jake Wilson argued that the movie takes on elements of pulp fiction when the rustic Komona becomes a “ruthless killer” and “sex object” (42). Kiva Reardon suggested that the magic, while universalizing Komona’s story, also desensitizes it, making it “a form of liberal indulgence” that prevents us from dealing “with an uncomfortable reality” (75). I would argue, however, that the movie deals with the grim realities of the exploitation of children in war in ways that makes their trauma credible and believable. Komona’s voice-overs predict the future; we often hear her describing events (such as the deaths of other children and their parents) that have either happened off screen or are about to happen. This complicates the narrative in multiple ways. When Komona sees the ghosts of dead villagers who stare silently at her, suspense and anticipation are heightened. Likewise, whenever the ghosts of Komona’s murdered parents appear, the dramatic tensions of the movie are heightened. These magical elements underscore Komona’s vulnerability and resilience. The movie is set in an undetermined nation in sub-Saharan Africa, although it was shot entirely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2011, and the action spans three years. Nguyen, who wrote the script, was inspired by the lives of Luther and Johnny Htoo, twin brothers from Burma/Myanmar (Vancheri). In 1997, Burma’s ruling military junta sent an army unit to small village named Ka Mar Pa Law, because it was inhabited by the minority Karen ethnic group. In order to defend themselves, the villagers (including the twins) got weapons from the declining Karen rebel army, the Karen National Union, which had been fighting in the Burmese jungles for years. Calling themselves the God’s Army, they defeated the Burmese army unit, resulting in the villagers believing that the Htoo brothers were semi-divine. They believed that the twins could repel bullets and were invulnerable to land mines. Later, the God’s Army (and the twins) moved to Thailand, where they fought alongside a fringe rebel unit operating there and helped organize attacks on Myanmar’s embassy in Thailand (in 1999) and a Thai hospital (in 2000). Eventually, the army fell apart and the boys fled to a refugee camp where, in 2006, they surrendered. Years later, Luther emigrated to Sweden, where he now lives, while Johnny stayed in Thailand (“Briefly”). Nguyen took this story of twin child soldiers in Burma who supposedly repel bullets and created a narrative about a Congolese child soldier who sees visions of impending danger. While the Burmese God’s Army were supposedly inspired by God, the rebels that Komona fights with are more interested in mining coltan (used in cell phones worldwide)

Magical Combat in Central Africa  187 and force many of the children to do so. The human rights costs of these mining operations don’t factor much into Komona’s story, however (Vancheri). Nguyen was more interested in showcasing how Komona eventually finds peace. Armed with some funding from the Canada Feature Film Fund, he spent months traveling in many parts of Africa, looking for a suitable location (“Telefilm Canada”), eventually picking the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In July 2011, his camera crew shot the movie in and around Kinshasa, over a span of thirty-two days (Dillon 20). Rachel Mwanza, who plays Komona, is Congolese, and was abandoned by her parents when she was five or six years old. She lived at first with her grandmother and then on the streets of Kinshasa (Vancheri). She was noticed by a Belgian film team, who cast her in a documentary movie. Nguyen, as well as Marie-Claude Poulin and Pierre Even, War Witch’s producers, viewed that documentary, were very impressed by her, and traveled to Kinshasa to meet her. Describing that meeting, Nguyen said: “she had an intensity that no other girls had and we decided to cast her” (Szlarski). Many of the film’s other child characters were also Congolese and had no experience acting. Accordingly, Nguyen shot the film chronologically and did not show the cast the script (Dillon 24). Once the movie was completed, Nguyen had trouble finding a distributor because, as one agent told him, “a Black main actor doesn’t sell” (Obenson). Once he secured a distributor and the movie was shown at festivals, it got noticed. Eventually, Mwanza won the Golden Bear Award for best actress at the Berlin Film Festival, and the film secured ten Canadian Screen Association prizes including Best Motion Picture, Directing and Original Screenplay (also for Nguyen) plus best supporting actor for Serge Kanyinda (Kelly). After the movie was completed, Mwanza started living with fellow War Witch actress Marie Dilou in Kinshasa, and both Nguyen and Poulin started supporting her financially, pledging to continue doing so till she turned 18 (Szklarski). Komona’s story unfolds on two levels in the movie. The story of her kidnapping and brutalization by the rebel army unfolds in a chronological, linear narrative. That linearity, however, is undercut by the voiceover narration, mentioned earlier. The voice-over is “magical” in that it foreshadows events before the viewer can grasp their significance. The opening scene, which acts as a frame for the movie as a whole, is a good example of this magical un-decipherability. A series of establishing shots reveal a small, impoverished Congolese village, located by a river. The panning camera shows us a series of shabby huts with tin roofs and tarps strung between poles. Men and women cook, clean, and go about their business. Children don’t seem to have much to do, and look out, waiting for some kind of action. The camera closes up on fifteen-yearold Komona, wearing a dress that is too big for her, standing with her back to us, balancing herself on two logs of wood, which create a seesaw of sorts. There is a quick cut to a medium shot of Komona’s face,

188  Joya Uraizee now sitting inside her hut, looking out, while an older woman stands behind her, braiding her hair. We have every reason to believe that this woman is her mother. As the braiding continues, Komona’s eyes slowly close and she day dreams. In a somnambulant state, she begins an interior monologue in Lingala (narrated by Diane Uwamahoro), addressed to a baby that is, she declares, inside her “belly.” Telling the unborn child that she needs to know how her mother became a rebel soldier, she admonishes: “listen well when I talk to you … because it’s very important that you know what I did,” adding that she doesn’t know if “god will give me the strength to love you” (Nguyen). As she talks, the scene changes slowly to the outside of her hut, where there are now a lot more people. A market is in session, people move briskly about, and Komona now appears in a medium shot with a basket on her head, walking away from the camera. Later scenes underscore the fact that we are now in a flashback, the scene has shifted to the time, three years before, when the village had been untouched by war. As twelve-year-old Komona walks briskly along, her fifteen-year-old voice continues talking to the baby, telling her that she was kidnapped by rebels. As the fifteen-year-old Komona says this, twelve-year-old Komona drops her basket and runs screaming through the village. The camera now shows us what she has seen and the sights and sounds become chaotic as motorboats full of armed rebels approach the shore. Cinematographer Nick Bolduc chose to use handheld cameras to follow, with jerky motions and blurred pans, the actions of these rebels, as they jump ashore and start shooting the villagers indiscriminately. Amid the killing and pillaging, as the village is being slowly destroyed, Komona is captured by a man known as Rebel Commander (played by Alain Bastien). Abruptly, the scene goes blank and a sign appears, telling us that Komona is twelve years old. The camera then closes up on her face, as she looks at the ground while listening to Rebel Commander’s terrifying order: she must shoot her parents. Low angle shots of her face show her fear and confusion, as Rebel Commander hands her a rifle. In the background, blurry and out of focus, stand a man and a woman, whom we assume are her parents. As Komona hesitates, Rebel Commander tells her that if she doesn’t shoot them with the rifle, he will hack them to death with his machete, causing them to suffer a lot. The camera remains closed up on her face as the man we believe is her father (played by Alex Herabo) pleads with her to “do as he says.” Now we see Komona’s parents in sharp focus as they gaze fearfully at her. Komona begins to weep and, as she shoots them, the camera remains trained on her weeping face. We are not shown the bloodied bodies of her parents, instead, we see Rebel Commander congratulating her for joining the ranks of “the Great Tiger.” Still weeping, Komona is forced to kneel and watch while other villagers are shot, and, to mimic her traumatized state, the sounds are muted, and the actions are blurry and out of focus.

Magical Combat in Central Africa  189 Eventually, Komona is dragged on to a motorboat and glides away surrounded by soldiers with guns. Later events in the movie make it clear that the destruction of Komona’s village by the rebels was permanent, and it was never rebuilt after the soldiers left. Therefore, it would have been impossible for fifteen-year-old Komona to have returned to it, nor would her murdered mother have been braiding her hair. Therefore, the opening scene is a ghostly frame of sorts. While Reardon complains that the Komona’s voice-over here and elsewhere “protects” Komona (74), I would argue that his ghostly framing scene foreshadows the later events when fifteen-year-old Komona returns to the place that was once her village and symbolically buries her parents’ “bodies.” That burial is the only closure she is ever to achieve of the guilt of murdering her parents. Besides using a narrator that complicates the linearity of the movie, Nguyen uses ghosts, typically, dead villagers, to create horror and mystery. In one scene, after Komona has been with the rebel soldiers for a while, she is put at the head of a rebel ambush on government soldiers and is made to walk ahead. Eventually, a major shoot-out occurs. Overpowered, the rebel soldiers and Komona flee, while the camera focuses on the casualties. Instead of showing bleeding bodies, the camera reveals white figures resembling dead villagers lying on the ground in a heap. Slowly, they get up and walk about, but do not either harm or haunt the living soldiers. Before we, as viewers, have a chance to ponder whether these ghosts are physical manifestations of buried memories, or psychological fantasies, fifteen-year-old Komona informs us, using a voice-over, that they are, in fact, hallucinations. Pointing out that the twelve-year-old has been forced to take hallucinogenic drugs on a regular basis, Komona as narrator suggests that these visions make it possible for her to continue with her terrible task of killing civilians. There are, Komona-as-narrator suggests, “many, many ghosts here” that remain visible to Komona even when she sleeps. Leaving the viewers to ponder what or who these ghosts are, the narrative picks up at this point and reveals, through a series of events, that Komona is now being regarded as a witch by her fellow soldiers. In fact, she earns the moniker “Royal Tiger’s Witch,” since Royal Tiger is the Rebel Commander’s nom-de-guerre. Subsequently, her fellow soldiers believe that she can predict future events, particularly impending attacks by government soldiers. They revere her for these abilities and don’t tax her with labor-intensive chores. The ghosts, in fact, enable her to find some relief from her miseries. Therefore, they may be, as Tim Kroenert suggests, a “psychological coping device that replaces gruesome realities with an eerie but more palatable fantasy” (43). On the other hand, they could be visions of the outraged dead, who “silently accost her, seeking, if not justice, then remembrance” (Barnard E1). In my view, these ghostly visions are manifestations of Komona’s traumatic memories, that remind her, in agonizing ways, of patricide and matricide. Therefore they are also narrative-linking devices that connect her

190  Joya Uraizee actions in the present (killing innocent civilians) to her actions in the past (murdering her parents). As Komona’s traumatic memories upset her psychological well-being, her physical conditions also deteriorate. Later in the movie, she is brutalized by the Rebel Commander and becomes suicidal. Nguyen represents her situation via repeated visions, that Komona sees, of her murdered parents. Whenever she sees the ghosts of her parents, Komona experiences what appears to be posttraumatic stress disorder. In one scene, earlier in the movie, Komona readies herself for an upcoming ambush of government soldiers. The scene takes place in a wooded area, and the sunlight is murky, with tall trees filtering it out. Terrified of being shot at, bent double to avoid being seen, she inches ahead of her unit, with her rifle in her hand. The other rebel soldiers in her unit walk in silently in a line, at a safe distance behind her, their rifles ready. As Komona approaches a clearing, she stumbles past a strange looking couple, standing to one side. They are poor, shabbily dressed, and seem to be painted a chalky white color from the hair to their toes. They stand silently with their heads bent and we realize that they in the exact positions that Komona’s parents were when she shot them. As the camera pans these figures we realize that they are, in fact, her mother and father. The startled Komona lowers her rifle, and then suddenly, her father looks up and yells at her to run away. Terrified, she sprints back to her unit, where her fellow soldiers, sensing trouble, open fire. Later incidents make it clear that government soldiers were really close by and would have killed all of them had Komona not stopped where she did. Her vision of her dead parents, the narrative suggests, saved her life. In another scene, later in the movie, Komona is living a brutalized, abusive existence. A year before, she had run away and gotten married to another rebel soldier named Magicien, only to witness his brutal murder by Rebel Commander, who recaptures her and forces her to become his mistress. Miserable and exhausted, she becomes suicidal. Visions of her parents appear often to her at this point, and she slowly realizes that she will be haunted by these appearances until she gives her parents a proper burial. She runs away again, is captured by government soldiers and thrown in jail. As she lies on the floor of the jail cell, pregnant, shivering with a high fever, she hears a voice asking for help. She looks up to see the white ghostly figures of her parents, looking down at her. To her feverish eyes, they appear out of focus. Her father asks her, “why aren’t you helping us?” and she turns away, knowing she cannot give them a proper burial. Finally, after many misadventures and the birth of her child, she makes her way laboriously to the place where her village once stood. Arriving by boat (just as she had left when she was kidnapped the first time), she sees that her village is a shambles, and that it has no inhabitants. Slowly, the camera focuses on two white figures standing on the shore, the ghosts of her parents. She looks at them silently with

Magical Combat in Central Africa  191 the baby in her arms, and walks slowly toward them. The scene cuts to the ruins of a hut, outside of which all four of them stand. This hut resembles the one Komona grew up in, and her parents’ ghosts stand at the exact spot at which she had shot them in the opening scene. The bullet holes are evident in the cloth that flutters in the breeze behind them. As Komona stares at the ghosts of her parents, Komona as narrator tells us that there are “things in my head that even the magic milk cannot erase.” Her parents’ ghosts mysteriously disappear and Komona realizes that she is completely alone now. There is nothing else there: no humans, no houses, no human remains, not even ghostly ones. After rooting around a bit she finds a woman’s comb and a man’s torn shirt, lying on the ground. She digs two holes in the sandy soil and buries those items, using the shirt as a stand in for her father, and the comb to represent her mother. As she digs, she sings a dirge. Her parents’ ghosts appear once final time and walk slowly past her. There is the trace of a smile on her father’s face. Sobbing, Komona straightens up, and watches them fade into the distance. Significantly, there is no further voice-over in this scene, leaving us to assume that Komona will now be at peace. However, that question is left open ended even as the movie ends. Throughout the film’s diegesis, Komona’s combat trauma and her desperate attempts to find peace are made credible and believable precisely because of the film’s use of magical visions. As Nguyen said in an interview, when the child soldier kills, there is a whole system operated by the commanders, the armies of rebels, to soften the violence, to make it acceptable and even ‘satisfying.’ I decided to represent that by the fact that the people whom these children kill die, but one never sees them dying with the red blood rushing on the ground. We see ghosts. (Loranger) This suggests that the ghosts are, in fact, a distancing device that enables Komona to achieve a degree of resilience. Whether Nguyen used the magical visions to distance Komona from the realities of war, or to create horror and suspense, the overall effect is to personalize the narrative personal and make it more believable. Magical visions are, nevertheless, not the only narrative device that Nguyen uses to make Komona’s story believable. There are several scenes, especially in the middle of the diegesis, that are idyllic and tender and draw us into the action. Komona’s love affair with Magicien, for example, could have taken place in peace time or during war and adds a human element to the narrative. Soon after the young couple elope, they go on an unexpected and quite comical quest for a white rooster. After several failed attempts to locate one, Magicien catches one and asks Komona to keep her end of their bargain: that as soon as he did so, she

192  Joya Uraizee would marry him. She says yes, they have a romantic night together, and eventually make their way to Magicien’s uncle’s farm, who welcomes them as if they were his own children. They all live together as a happy family, with Komona and Magicien helping out with the harvest. The farm routines, the beauty of the countryside, and the warmth of the uncle’s affection, all help put Komona on the path to recovery. Despite all this, even before the peace is shattered and she is recaptured, there are signs that life on the farm isn’t entirely stress-free: the uncle is haunted by demons from his own past and Komona still has nightmares and emotional outbursts. These scenes of rural peace, nevertheless, offset the suspense of the scenes in which Komona is recaptured and re-enslaved, making them appear horrifying and grotesque. After all the horrors of the movie’s final scenes, it is significant that at the very end, it is her baby that occupies the narrative focus. In one of the final scenes, a tired Komona hitches a ride with a truck driver, who, she hopes, will take her back to Magicien’s uncle, her only real living relative. She climbs into the flatbed at the rear of the truck and finds it filled with other hitchhikers. An older woman takes her baby from her, signals for her to rest, and sings to the baby, rocking it gently as it falls asleep. The camera pans slowly over the singing woman and the now sleeping Komona as the credits roll. As Kroenert suggests, the baby and the attention shown to it create a “fragile hope that life may be made to flourish even in a landscape of violence and death” (43–44). As out of place as hope may seem in Komona’s war torn world, the tenderness of this final scene underscores how simple things, like helping a baby sleep or burying a murdered parent, can mitigate the unnaturalness of war.

Works Cited Barnard, Linda. “Haunting Portrait of a Child Soldier.” Toronto Star. September 21, 2012: page E1. www.ebscohost.com. July 19, 2013. “Briefly, Myanmar’s ‘God’s Army’ Twins Reunite.” The New York Times November 2, 2013. www.nytimes.com. June 21, 2019. Brown, Laura S. Cultural Competence in Trauma Therapy: Beyond the Flashback. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2008. Dillon, Mark. “Child Soldiers in Africa.” American Cinematographer. April 2013: pages 20–26. Honwana, Alcinda. Child Soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. Kelly, Brendan. “Jutra Soirèe Fails to Solicit Much Drama: Rebelle the Big Winner While Michael Cùtè Takes Home Lifetime Achievement Award.” The Gazette (Montreal). March 18, 2013. www.lexisnexis.com. June 12, 2013. Kearney, J.A. “The Representation of Child Soldiers in Contemporary African Fiction.” Journal of Literary Studies vol. 26, no. 1 (March 2010): pages 67–94. Humanities International Complete. April 2 2013.

Magical Combat in Central Africa  193 Kroenert, Tim. “Child Soldier Learns Murder and Motherhood.” Eureka Street Magazine vol. 23, no. 5. March 22, 2013. www.ebscohost.com. July 19, 2013. Loranger, Anne-Christine. “Director Kim Nguyen on War Witch.” filmmakermagazine.com. May 17, 2012. April 2, 2016. Nguyen, Kim. War Witch/Rebelle. Quebec: Metropole/Mongrel, 2012. Obenson, Tambay A. “War Witch Director on Racism in Global Film Distribution + Star Actress’ Current Life Struggles.” September 14, 2012. www. indiewire.com. November 29, 2012. “Questions and Answers on the Recruitment and Use of Child Soldiers.” United Nations Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict. 12 February 2016. childrenandarmedconflict. un.org. January 17, 2019. Reardon, Kiva. “Rebelle.” Cinemascope vol. 52 (September 2012): pages 74–75. Szklarski, Cassandra. “Rebelle Star’s Oscar Invite on Hold.” Toronto Star. January 31, 2013. www.pressreader.com. June 15, 2015. “Telefilm Canada Announces that Kim Nguyen’s War Witch (Rebelle) Is Canada’s Selection for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.” Canada Newswire September 18, 2012. https://telefilm.ca/en/news-releases. June 15, 2015. Vancheri, Barbara. “Enslaved Kids’ Grim Life Bared in War Witch.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. April 5, 2013. www.ebscohost.com. July 19, 2013. Wilson, Jake. “Shocking Trip into a Ghastly World.” The Age March 14, 2013: page 42. www.lexisnexis.com. June 12, 2013.

13 From Bearing to Burying Enacting Embodied Memories of Darfur Genocide in the Poetry of Emtithal Mahmoud Mayy ElHayawi No matter how accurate the calculation of the death toll or causalities is, the number of those traumatized by the genocidal memories of killing, burning, torture, burial, rape, or escape would always remain a mystery – seemingly revealed in testimonies, narratives, memorials, or recollection rituals, yet intrinsically concealed in distressed consciousness, misinterpreted by troubled consciences or obscured by post-traumatic amnesia. Undergoing or witnessing brutal physical violations does not only scar survivors’ bodies and psyches, but it also encapsulates them in a loop of death wherein oblivion is an unattainable luxury and survival is an unforgiven guilt. Hence, rather than investigating the accuracy of the statistics which report the killing of almost half a million and the displacement of 3 million human beings since the start of the conflict in Darfur in 2003,1 this chapter will focus on how the lifelong catastrophic impacts of the first genocide in the 21st century are retained and articulated through subjectively perceived, yet collectively enforced and/or endured bodily experiences, and how enacting embodied memories can be the means for scrubbing personal and collective wounds, redeeming distorted identities, reconstructing the disrupted self and sewing it back into the social fabric of the present.

Genocides in Modern History Bodies and memories are the key players in the victimizers’ perpetuation of a genocide and victims’ resistance of genocidal atrocities. While the former’s allegations of racial, historical, or religious supremacy justify the annihilation of those different in color, ideology, or heritage, the latter’s embodied memories of physical and psychological suffering fuel the struggle to reveal the brutalities, commemorate the sufferers and bring criminals to justice. The term “genocide” itself – a combination of the Greek word “genos” (race or tribe) and the Latin root “cide” (killing)



From Bearing to Burying  195 (Lemkin 79) – was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) who was appalled at the “sinister panorama of destruction of the Armenians” and eventually traumatized by the Nazi invasion of his homeland and the extermination of his family in the Holocaust gas chambers (Lemkin and Freize xii–xiii). Lemkin’s lifelong struggle – to internationally outlaw “the destruction of peoples” and protect not only “the physical bodies” but also “the collective minds of nations” – was nurtured by what he called: “a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world” including his parents and friends (Lemkin and Freize 138, 132). It is true that Lemkin finally managed to get the United Nations to ratify the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” in 1951, 2 in which genocide, as defined hereafter, was condemned as a “crime against international law”: … genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (280) Unfortunately, the blood and tears shed during the first half of the 20th century were only enough for acknowledging and outlawing genocides, but far too inconsiderable to prevent them. In the “age of genocide,” as Roger W. Smith maintains, 60 million men, women, and children, coming from many different races, religions, ethnic groups, nationalities, and social classes, and living in many different countries, on most of the continents of the earth, have had their lives taken because the state thought this desirable. (21) Jews and Armenians were only a part of a long list of victims that included: “Cambodians, Bosnians, and Rwandan Tutsis, … Ukrainian peasants, Gypsies, Bengalis, Burundi Hutus, the Aché of Paraguay, Guatemalan Mayans, and the Ogoni of Nigeria” (Hinton 1). 2 Though the UN General Assembly passed Resolution 96-I in December 1964 to make “the crime of genocide punishable under international law” and Resolution 260-III in December 1948 to approve the text of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” it was not until 1951 that the convention was “ratified by more than 130 countries” and “entered into force” (Andreopoulos).

196  Mayy ElHayawi The huge diversity of victims as crystalized in the aforementioned list – “Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Muslims; Communists, nonCommunists; kulaks, intellectuals, workers, stone age hunters, national groups, homeless peoples; persons who are black, brown, red, yellow, white,” and the shocking array of mass-killing pretexts – “race, religion, ethnicity, physical condition, political opinions, class origins, or stage of historical development” (Smith 32), have rendered every human being vulnerable to a similar fate. Bewilderment, anger, curiosity and fear fueled the dramatic rise of academic genocide studies in the last decade of the 20th century, which is manifested in “the emergence of new scholarly journals since the 1990s,” the publication of “Encyclopaedias of genocide” (Bloxham and Moses 2) and the proliferation of analytical, descriptive, diagnostic, comparative and pre-emptive research focusing on reports, statistics, testimonies, resolutions, laws, case studies, media, memorials, school curricula, narratives and works of art. Nevertheless, none of the above could ghost-proof the third millennium or save humanity from the genocide demons growing out of perpetrators’ viciousness and witnesses’ indifference.

Darfur Genocide On the threshold of the 21st century, Darfur – the three-state region which lies “in the farthest west of the Republic of the Sudan, bordering Chad and Central Africa,” and “covers an area of about 508,000 km 2 , which is almost equal to the area covered by the Netherlands, Germany, Austria and Switzerland together” (Ibrahim 7) hammered home to the world that Africa is premiering a new episode of genocidal terror. The complex synergy of motives for the extirpation war launched by the Sudanese government and the Arab Janjaweed militia against African groups in Darfur can be summed up in the following list: extreme drought; increased desertification; Arab supremacism; authoritarianism; extreme nationalism; an ever-increasing bellicosity in the region (within Sudan, Darfur, and beyond its borders); and the disenfranchisement of black Africans at the hands of the Sudanese government. (Totten 139) Categorizing Darfuris into Arabs and Africans, favoring the former and disadvantaging the latter through implementing “Arab-Islamic supremacist and demonizing policies that pit Arabs and Blacks against one another in an ‘us’ and ‘them’ kind of conflict” (Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 5), feeding African groups’ inferiority complex upon the pretexts of subjection to slave hunting and the difference in language and skin shade (Ibrahim 3), fueling the conflicts “between settled black African farmers and predominantly nomadic Arab herders” (Hagan and

From Bearing to Burying  197 Rymond-Richmond 5) over land usage and access to water, were quite enough for stripping the perpetrators off their slightest humanitarian values and depriving the victims of their least human rights. Darfur, which was one of the most powerful kingdoms in the Sahara desert until 1916 before being defeated and absorbed into the British Empire, as Flint and De Waal maintain, is the home of forty to ninety ethnic groups or tribes. Those can be categorized into the aboriginal Africans (headed by the Fur, Zaghawa and Masalit tribes), and the Arabs who arrived in Darfur in the 14th century as scholars, traders or Bedouins, worked mainly in herding cattle or camels, and increased in number through “marriage with Darfurians” and assimilation of the African groups which “claimed Arab descent” as “a means of protection against enslavement” (6–8). The seeds of conflict between Africans and Arabs were sown when the British maintained a “‘Native Administration’ system, by which chiefs administered their tribes on behalf of the government,” and propagated “a racial hierarchy in which Arabs were considered superior to non-Arabs” (Flint and De Waal 11). However, Arabs and Africans continued to coexist peacefully, and any arising conflicts were resolved through tribal laws. Economically, Darfur’s exclusion from any plans of development, even after the independence of Sudan from British colonization in 1956, has made it “one of the most under-developed and isolated regions of Sudan” which is considered as “one of the twenty-five poorest countries in the world” (Totten 138). The climate change which started in the 1980s resulted in “severe droughts,” “expanding desertification” and famines which further intensified the tribal conflict over natural resources (Akasha 10). “In the 1970s and 1980s … Chadian fighters and Libyan sponsored militias hid in or fled to Darfur. Libyan arms, such as heavy and automatic weapons, also found their ways to the other tribes” (Grünfeld 54). The peaceful cohabitation between Arabs and black Africans came to an end in the 1990s when the Central Government in Sudan (which assumed power after a military coup in 1989) “vigorously introduced fundamentalist Islamic custom and law” (Grünfeld 54), pursued a policy of “divide and rule” and divided Darfur into three states whose social structure is described by Fouad Ibrahim as follows: At the top of the social pyramid in these towns we find the influential Arabs of the Nile valley as well as the rich Arabs of Darfur. The majority of the town dwellers forming the basis of the social pyramid are poor, drought-stricken or civil-war-stricken displaced persons, mostly Africans of rural origin. The thin middle-class includes low-paid civil servants, small traders and artisans of mixed origins. (11) Under such deteriorating political, social, ethnic, and economic conditions, “Arab nomadic attacks against black Africans were becoming

198  Mayy ElHayawi more brazen, more frequent, more vicious and more costly in terms of lost lives and destroyed villages, farm land, et al.” (Totten 145). On the other hand, African groups were becoming more intolerant of racial bias, social injustice and imbalance of political powers. With the demise of the last decade of the 20th century, the Darfuri stage was readily set for an era of genocidal horror. The distribution of The Black Book: Imbalance of Power and Wealth in Sudan which detailed the grievances of African tribes in Darfur in 2000, and the formation of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) and Darfur Liberation Front (DLF) – which started attacking government units and claimed responsibility for killing 200 soldiers in “an attack on a military garrison” in Darfur in 2003 (Gangi 124; Grünfeld 59) – dramatically changed the Sudanese government policies in Darfur. Black Africans were to be brutally killed rather than unfairly treated and ethnically cleansed rather than racially marginalized. In his book Sudan, South Sudan and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know, Andrew S. Natsios describes the atrocities of Darfur genocide in the following terms: Khartoum’s campaign of terror followed a repetitive pattern. Sudanese air force [SAF] helicopter gunships – often flown by foreign mercenaries, because the SAF did not trust its own pilots to conduct raids – would carpet-bomb a village, bringing destruction and sowing panic, followed shortly thereafter by the arrival of Janjawiid troops on horseback or on trucks with mounted weapons. The Janjawiid would kill any likely recruits for the rebel army and bury them in mass graves, or dump their bodies into the village wells, rendering them unusable. They would rape village women to humiliate their fathers and husbands, who would be forced to watch helplessly at gunpoint. And they would loot anything of value, particularly animal herds, and burn crops on their way out of the village. (148) Though the real number of victims cannot be determined through the survivors’ testimonies, the appalling brutality of the perpetrators’ raids and the traumatizing horrors of the genocidal crimes are clearly identified in Darfuri refugees’ accounts of what they have endured or eye witnessed: Three boys were caught and slaughtered. Their throats were cut, a foot was cut open from the big toe to the ankle, hands were cut off, brains removed, sexual organs cut off. Boys were five, six, and seven … The seven-year-old’s stomach was slit open and his clothes were torn off. A man who tried to return to the village was caught and killed. His skin was removed. Found his body … Man traveling with him was killed. Shot in head and side. (Qtd. in Hagan and Rymond-Richmond 8)

From Bearing to Burying  199 As horrifying as those stories are, they still tend to focus on the dead victims and the brutal ways they were killed ignoring how such embodied memories of slaughter, corpse mutilation, burning, torture, rape and escape have killed the survivors a thousand times. With a view to exploring how Darfuris’ bodies have perceived and processed the genocidal atrocities and how enacting embodied memories can be the means for dealing with post-traumatic individual and collective predicaments, the following part of this chapter focuses on the process of phenomenological perception and psychological processing of traumatic memories.

Embodying and Enacting Genocide Memories “Our own body,” as Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains in his book Phenomenology of Perception, “is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system” (181). The human body, in other words, is “the fabric into which all objects are woven” and “the general instrument” of “comprehension” (211). The world, as Raymond Gibbs puts it, “becomes alive for us from being incorporated into our bodies, while, at the same time, we experience ourselves being absorbed into the body of the world” (18). Playing the roles of a receiver and a transmitter, “the body is reflexive; it both initiates and responds” (Becker et al. 322); “it contributes to the world we live in, but the reverse is also true: the world contributes to the constitution of our body” (Dillon xv). “A body is not just something that we own, it is something that we are” (Gibbs 15). In other words, the body is the producer of meaning, the locus of social practice, the bearer of cultural and moral knowledge, and the creator of personal identity (Becker et al. 322). Embodiment, as Gibbs maintains, refers to “understanding the role of an agent’s own body in its everyday, situated cognition” (1). While our knowledge of ourselves arises from “participatory interaction with our embodied existence,” our perception of time is founded upon “our embodied interaction with the world” (Gay et al. 17). The embodiment of the experiences of engagement (body in vitality or in activity), corporeality (body as an instrument or an object), and interpersonal meaning (body as appearance or expression of self) highlights the reciprocity that exists between our bodies and the environment (Pollio et al. 76). However, such reciprocity of embodied interactions which constitutes the body as the repository of data, the interpreter of meaning, and the creator of physical, temporal and social consciousness, is a double-edged weapon. Harri Roberts’ claim that “while the intermeshing of the body with signifying systems produces meaning and identity, it also makes possible their disruption or collapse” (1–2) triggers plenty of questions. What happens if the body is traumatized with the horrors of a genocide? How does the fabric of self and worldly perception react to the

200  Mayy ElHayawi experiences of pain, terror and loss? How can the recollection of embodied memories, or in other words, the bodily experiences that enact the past (Connerton 72), impact the individual and collective perception of place, time and identity? In his article, “Body Memory and the Unconscious,” Thomas Fuchs argues: Unconscious fixations are like restrictions in the spatial potentiality of a person, caused by a past which is implicit in the present and resists the progress of life; this includes traumatic experiences in particular. Their traces are not hidden in an interior psychic world, but manifest themselves – as in a figure-background relationship – in the form of “blind spots” or “empty spaces” in day-to-day living. (69) Memory is central “to embodiment and the creation of meaning” (Becker et al. 320). Through embodied perceptions and interactions, memories create a comfort zone wherein the self and the world are peacefully integrated. However, such circles of familiarity fall apart when invaded with massive brutalities and overwhelming feelings of threat, terror, bereavement and agony. “Traumatized historical consciousness,” as Alexander Hinton explains in his book, Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of the Genocide, “is housed in memory icons of the human body, and these images are in turn connected to cultural agency and political practice” (230). Memories of violence and terror, as Daniel and Knudsen maintain, refract the world through a lens distorted by fear and threat (2). “Trauma violates bodily knowledge, and in doing so, renders the world unknowable. Notions of self and world are thrown into disarray as trauma permeates the known and familiar with uncertainty and fear, making the body itself alien and unfamiliar” (Becker et al. 321–322). Caught in the labyrinth of unforgivable amnesia and traumatizing recollection, genocide survivors find themselves trapped in a death-stricken world, alienated from their older selves and estranged from their post-traumatic ones. In his article “Genocide and Memory,” Dan Stone writes: The perpetration of genocide requires the mobilization of collective memories, as does the commemoration of it. For the individual victims of genocide, traumatic memories cannot be escaped; for societies, genocide has profound effects that are immediately felt and that people are exhorted (and willingly choose) never to forget. (102) In a genocide, the national body, just like victims’ bodies, is ferociously violated. The collective memories – which primarily “originate from shared communications about the meaning of the past that are anchored

From Bearing to Burying  201 in the life-worlds of individuals who partake in the communal life of the respective collective” (Stone 103) – are painfully split into conflicting versions of the same past. The “narratives of collective guilt and collective victimization,” which as Peter Fritzsche maintains, “have the effect of recognizing and commemorating individual suffering in socially meaningful, if tendentious, ways” (117), are fused with grudges, stereotypes and prejudices that eternally haunt post-genocidal societies and prevent “peaceful resolution or mutually agreeable arbitration between competing versions of the past” (Stone 118). The three factors which create collective memories – “the intellectual and cultural traditions that frame all our representations of the past, the memory makers who selectively adopt and manipulate these traditions, and the memory consumers who use, ignore, or transform such artefacts according to their own interests” (Stone 104) – are paradoxically manipulated before, during and after genocides to justify the ruthless extermination of threatening groups, demand fair punishment or revengeful annihilation of perpetrators or promote willful amnesia and peaceful coexistence. One of the major challenges in post-genocide communities is “whether individuals have a right to forget past traumas of their communities in order to construct new, anti-essentialist identities that are not locked in past (group) identities, if there is to be reconciliation” (Zembylas & Bekerman 126). On the one hand, Jason Hill claims that communities “can keep alive the memory of historical atrocities, however, without requiring members of the relevant groups to adhere to a specific historical identity”; living in a cosmopolitan world and creating “a new, morally successful self” requires forgetting “the old tribalist self” (93–94). On a similar note, Maria Starzmann regards remembering and forgetting as “strategies of power” and argues that forgetting is “an active yet tacit answer to established narratives, either by misremembering past events … or by eclipsing them altogether.” Forgetting or unremembering “allows us to move away from more static models of memory that offer a binary distinction of dominant (or official) memories versus subaltern forms of memories (or countermemories)” (3–5). The choice of including or excluding memories, voicing the silences or silencing the voices of embodied perceptions, is thus regarded as a defense mechanism against dominant versions of the past or a pre-emptive tactic against tribalist versions of the self. On the other hand, Gregory W. Streich maintains that “justice requires that we remember, not forget, where we – as individuals and as a collective – came from” (526). “The past,” as William Faulkner puts it, “is never dead. It’s not even past” (69; Act 1). “Even if individual and collective memories of the past are contested, partial, and imperfect, we must continually examine our past and come to grips with it rather than sweep it under a rug in a collective act of amnesia” (Streich 542). In his

202  Mayy ElHayawi book Of Africa, Wole Soyinka uses “The Tree of Forgetfulness” – the ritual in which African slave hunters made their captives “move in circles” around an “infamous tree” to make them “forget their former existence, wipe their minds clean of the past and be receptive of the stamp of strange places” – to argue that fictionalizing or denying the past plagues humanity with “the curse of repetition, albeit in disguised, even refined forms” (67–68). “Being haunted by the return to the traumatic past,” as Bojana Couliblay maintains, “is a necessary step towards healing and a step against revisionism” (45). In his article “Genocide and Memory,” Dan Stone also highlights the importance of remembering for restoring the victims’ self-worth: Despite the risks of perpetuating old divisions or reopening unhealed wounds, grappling with memory, especially after traumatic events like genocide, remains essential in order to remind the victims that they are not the worthless or less than human beings that their tormentors have portrayed them as. For nothing is more human, and thus more geared towards the generation of meaning where meaning is otherwise absent (or at least to ‘keeping watch over absent meaning’), than the broad spectrum of practices that come under the heading of ‘memory’. (119) No matter how painful or risky remembering traumatic memories may be, it is still an inescapable step for commemorating the dead, protecting the living and rehabilitating the traumatized. In his article “Emotional Memory in Survivors of the Holocaust: A Qualitative Study of Oral Testimony,” Robert N. Kraft writes: Recalling traumatic events in public exposes painful emotion but does not diminish it. Documenting the traumatic events does not ease the pain of memory, nor does it provide meaning to the memories of suffering. Change occurs when survivors reinterpret the function of memory. No longer meant to be hidden, traumatic memories are meant to be communicated: to educate others and to commemorate the lives of those who were lost. (381) Giving voice to embodied memories by means of translating bodily perceptions into comprehensible narratives and enacting them to an audience or a readership is thought to be the best strategy to “reorder the world” (Becker et al. 321), keep “the past alive,” “create a bridge to the present,” give “meaning to the act of recalling” and allow “the survivors to coexist with the emotional pain of their memories” (Kraft 381). When trauma violates conscious perception, as Jennifer Griffiths maintains, “memory becomes encoded on a bodily level and resurfaces

From Bearing to Burying  203 as possession.” Reliving the original overwhelming experience “through a body memory,” and struggling to find words for an experience that exceeds representation, survivors are stricken with a break between body and language or observing and recording mechanisms (1). Failing to tell the story, as Dauri Laub argues, “serves as a perpetuation of its tyranny. The events become more and more distorted in their silent retention and pervasively invade and contaminate the survivor’s daily life.” (78) Communicating embodied memories through “bodily transaction rather than simply by creating a narrative in language” reassembles the “fractured pieces of the survivor’s self” and reunites “a body and a voice severed in trauma” (Griffiths 2). With a view to exploring the process of granting voice to the voiceless victims, finding a meaning for survival amid meaningless killing, generating a collective hope for rebuilding a hopeless nation, the remainder of this chapter will focus on the poetry of Emi (Emtithal) Mahmoud – the young Darfuri poet who was selected in 2015 as one of BBC’s 100 Most Inspirational Women and appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in 2018 (Mahmoud, “Slam from Sudan”).

Enacting Embodied Memories of Darfur Genocide In an interview with Rupert Hawksley in November 2018, Emi Mahmoud says: When I was very little, I didn’t understand why I was alive and my cousins didn’t get to survive … [One moment] you’re playing with them and then, a year or two later, they’re gone. You just think, ‘How is that fair?’ The only way to honour their existence is to do everything I can to change things. And then also, to live. When your existence is an act of defiance, the biggest rebellion is to live … It is like saying to the people who tried to kill us, ‘Look at us, look how brightly we shine. You’ve taken so much but you can’t take away our humanity. (“Emi Mahmoud”) Though Mahmoud fled from Darfur with her parents when she was a toddler, she has never lost connection with her homeland. After ending her journey as a refugee in Yemen to embark on the journey of displacement in the US, Mahmoud dedicated her life to “putting a human face on the refugee crisis and on the atrocities of Darfur” (Mahmoud, “Slam from Sudan”). Shortly before her graduation from Yale University, where she studied molecular biology and anthropology, Mahmoud managed

204  Mayy ElHayawi to overcome a writing block which started when the escalation of brutal conflict in Sudan overwhelmed her with emotions, reminded her of all that the Darfuris had lost since the start of the genocide in 2003, and left her with no words to express what she wanted to say (Mahmoud, “Spoken Word Performer”). Winning the Individual World Poetry Slam Championship in Washington DC in 2015 through enacting what she and her family members had endured or witnessed in Darfur, Mahmoud found that articulating traumatic memories is the best way not only to fill out the blanks, absences and silences that have plagued the individual consciousness and collective identities of Darfuri people but also to defy mathematizing victims – measuring atrocities in abstract numbers rather than in heartbreaking accounts of terror, torture, bereavement, humiliation, loss and despair. Since her graduation in 2016, Mahmoud “returned frequently to Sudan, setting up ‘poetry town halls’ for locals to share thoughts in a safe space.” She also “walked from Darfur to Khartoum in 30 days to raise awareness for peace” and was joined by thousands en route. During the perilous march, Mahmoud’s family was receiving death threats on daily basis, yet she managed to conquer her fear, enact the subaltern version of the past and penetrate the layers of the perpetrators’ narratives with a positive vision of a peaceful future: Their narrative was: ‘The Sudanese government has been conducting a weapons recollection programme and putting more security out there into the country, and security equals peace. Because there is security, there is peace, and this girl is walking because she wants to prove Sudan is safe.’ My narrative was: ‘If we can walk together we can work together, we can create and inspire a collective responsibility for peace. We’ll bring the peace together.’ (Mahmoud, “Emi Mahmoud”) Taking part in round-table discussions with President Barack Obama at the White House, launching the 100 Million Child Advocacy Campaign in New Delhi “alongside the Nobel peace Prize winner, Kailash Satyarthi,” supporting the UNHCR refugee-assistance programs in Uganda, Jordan and Greece (“Emtithal Mahmoud”), Mahmoud continues to integrate victims’ individual histories and collective grievances into a universal narrative exposing the unforgivable atrocities of vicious perpetrators and the unjustifiable crimes of supporters and passive bystanders. In her first published volume, Sisters’ Entrance (2018), Mahmoud weaves the threads of victimhood and resilience, oppression and defiance, disgrace and dignity to enact memories of genocidal terror and awaken humanity to the plight of survivors who might have escaped physical extermination, yet got sucked into the abyss of national traumas and trapped into a wider universal context of bigotry and injustice.

From Bearing to Burying  205 Establishing her body as the repository of memories which entangles her to the collective consciousness of her motherland, Mahmoud first investigates how the overwhelming violations of her embodied perception have locked her in the chains of a childhood trauma and kept her a slave to Darfur desert no matter how far she fled. She starts her poem “People Like Us” with the following lines: Memories of my childhood live between the rings of sand around my ankles and the desert heat in my lungs. I still believe that nothing washes worry from tired skin better than the Nile and my grandma’s hands. (1–6) Ironically, it is only through the Nile and her grandmother – the natural and human connections that have long glued the Sudanese people to one collective national identity – that her trauma can be relieved. As she proceeds to recollect her initial memories of the genocide, Mahmoud sheds light on how traumatic events can overwhelm perception, disrupt observing and recording mechanisms, and tragically change the meaning of signifying systems: The first time I saw bomb smoke, it didn’t wind and billow like the heat from our kitchen hearth. It forced itself on the Darfur sky, smothering the sun with tears that it stole from our bodies. (10–16) Failing to interpret the meaning of the bomb smoke through associating it with the familiar signifier of the cooking steam is the first step in the disruption of Mahmoud’s sensory perception. Witnessing “sixteen ways to stop a heart” (52), and watching how the soldiers “torched the houses, / threw the bodies / in the wells” (45–47), how her father “washed the blood from his face,” how her uncles “carried half the bodies / to the hospital, / the rest to the grave” (56–59) and how her parents “came home with broken collarbones / and the taste of fear carved / into their skin” (74–76), Mahmoud loses the labels she has previously assigned to the world and finds herself forced to view the land of terror and despair through a blood-tainted lens. Her inability to remember the “four other people” who hid with her “underneath the bed” (42) when her village was attacked, or to know where her “cousins hid when the soldiers/ torched the houses” (46–47) are typical manifestations of how intrusive traumatic memories are turned into unconscious fixations that keep

206  Mayy ElHayawi transgressing the present to overtake the consciousness which insists on oscillating between a willingness to remember details and an inclination to disremember physical and emotional agony. “Our practices,” as Starzmann and Roby maintain, give shape to narratives about ourselves, our families, our culture. The emerging stories are never whole, however, because every act of remembering includes a dimension of forgetting. The unremembered aspects of history accompany our memories as absences and silences. (4) In a genocide, severing the connection between body, mind and voice results in multiple absences or silences which are intentionally forced on the consciousness to avoid interpreting the inexplicable violence or expressing the unspeakable anguish. “The worst thing about genocide,” as Mahmoud puts it, “isn’t the murder, the politics, the hunger, / the government-paid soldiers … It’s the silence” (“People Like Us” 17–19; 21). Silence, which should normally give space for contemplation, recollection and prospection, is paradoxically endowed with torturing powers surpassing the frenzied uproar of killing and burning: I remember waking to the sound of hushed voices in the night etched with the kind of sorrow that turns even the loudest dreams to ash. (“People Like Us” 70–74) In her poem “Classrooms” Mahmoud draws another image of the horrors of silence likening genocide survivors’ dilemma to African slaves’ tortures: “If she’d tasted sorrow’s whip / that sewed the silence on my tongue” (10–11). Genocidal atrocities do not only violate victims’ bodily perception, but they also uproot them from circles of familiarity and leave them voiceless in a death-stricken world. Conjuring the horrors of hunting African slaves, Mahmoud uses an elaborate conceit featuring a desert haunted by fear which brutally tortures and enslaves the bodies of speechless victims: Fear is the coldest thing in the desert, and it burns you – bows you down to half your height and owns you. And no one hears you, because what could grow in the desert anyway? (“People Like Us” 81–88)

From Bearing to Burying  207 The extended metaphor outlines how the genocide victims are brainwashed into believing the perpetrators’ narrative of supremacy and dominance. The repetition of attacks, the brutality of dealing with victims and their inability to articulate the physical and psychological agony intensify the victimizers’ dehumanizing schemes, diminish their victims’ worth in the world’s as well as their own eyes. “Memory,” as Dan Stone maintains, is not simply synonymous with the way in which the past is represented in the present; it is itself constitutive of the present. “Memory and identity go hand in hand” (118). Painfully trapped within the horrors of the genocide at home and the tortures of diaspora in the hostland, undergoing ethnical cleansing in Darfur for not being reddish black and racial discrimination in US for not being white, Mahmoud’s identity and self-perception have been severely influenced. In her poem “For Muhannad, Taha, and Adam,” which is set in a morgue where the body of her country is “splayed across a table” (2), Mahmoud highlights how her failure to fit into the remnants of a collective identity fractured by racial hatred and ethnical cleansing has deprived her of a stable unfragmented identity: This cadaver I dared to call an identity Once held a belief that I could hold home On the tip of my tongue, In the breadth of my appetite In the weight of my memories I only recognize my country in photographs, in tour books Not in living color. (7–13) Undergoing the dilemma of clinging to a familiar photo that no longer exists and fitting into an existing photo that can never be familiar, Mahmoud uses her embodied memories of the pre-genocide Darfur to guard herself against losing sense of who she really is. In her poem “Sesame Candy,” Mahmoud clarifies how she has kept an intact version of a peaceful past hoping that one day she might use it to heal her fragmented self: I take the seeds home with me I keep them in a desk drawer waiting for a drier year, or a rainy one, or a reason I keep hoping that I’ll turn away and look back and see those girls playing again, the ones we used to be before the war. (9–15) In her poem “One-Drop Well,” Mahmoud dives to dig the fragments of her identity which go back to a collective narrative much older than her own: “… these parts of me were salvaged / From a story much older than

208  Mayy ElHayawi myself” (12–13). Eventually, she breaks the fragments she could rescue from a doomed homeland or collect from an unwelcoming hostland and struggles to create a new hybrid version of herself: I broke myself 500 times before the pieces started making sense. From the bloodied mayhem I make new me, who I want to be, who I am. (35–39) The process of breaking and assembling fragments of identity are nerve-wrecking, yet it cannot still be compared with the tortures genocide survivor have to undergo for escaping death and embracing life. Caught in the vicious circle of rage, remorse and retribution – wherein condemning perpetrators’ crimes and demanding their punishment is fused with a sense of guilt for surviving while others could not – Mahmoud echoes Dan Stone’s claim that “collective memories of past suffering are almost always brought to bear on current crises, lending them cultural meaning – the weight of dead ancestors weighing on the minds of the living – and imbuing them with added ferocity” (106). In her poem “Head over Heels,” Mahmoud likens her throat to a grave holding the bodies of all the genocide victims: My mind echoes through the numbers: One million gone, 400,000 dead in Darfur, two million displaced and this lump takes over my throat as if each of those bodies found a grave right here in my esophagus. (9–13) The lump, which symbolizes the guilt of survival in a death-stricken nation, is replaced in her poem “People Like Us” with the heavyweight burdening her shoulder for deciding to resist ethnic cleansing through outgrowing her limitations: Every day I go to school With the weight of dead neighbors On my shoulders. (7–9) The pressures of national schizophrenia which result from living in a nation while belonging to another are intensified in Mahmoud’s case by the psychological and ethical burdens of the past. Her insistence to resist perpetrators through shining in the present is outweighed by the victims’ persistence to haunt her embodied memories. Returning to Darfur and working in a hospital to help her people ironically strengthens Mahmoud’s guilt. In her poem “Dr. Poem” she

From Bearing to Burying  209 explains how “the prodigal daughter” – who had returned “from America to heal her people / with the things she learned in her ivory tower” (16–18) – failed the living and the dead alike. Losing “an entire would-be classroom of infants” (72) is as exasperating as saving them to suffer in an apocalyptic world: I’m ashamed to admit the guilt of being a doctor in the war zone, Bringing children into Armageddon. (77–79) Likening Darfur to Armageddon – which, in the New Testament (New Jerusalem Bible, Rev. 16:16) refers to the “place where the kings of earth under demonic leadership will wage war on the forces of God at the end of history” (Lerner) – connects Mahmoud’s national trauma to all the atrocities of mankind. Her sense of guilt is, therefore, extended in her poem “Bullets” to encompass her failure to help all the victims of discrimination, colonization and wars around the world: That week, burning cities made me feel numb, bullets made me think of my brother, so I closed my eyes and prayed. I dreamt of lead, of gutted windowpanes, of Damascus, of Gaza, of Baltimore and when I awoke, breathing made me feel guilty – makes me feel guilty like I should have been there, like I should have fought, should have stood and faced the firing squad. (24–34) Trying to exercise her transcultural agency through integrating herself into the collective memory of humanity at large, Mahmoud is further traumatized by a universal system plagued with the evils of power thirst, racism and injustice. Colors, which have played a major role in fueling racial prejudices throughout human history, are assigned new connotations in Mahmoud’s poem “The Colors We Ascribe.” The poem starts with a reminder of humans’ first existence on mother earth – when a shared collective identity was inscribed on human bodies and welded into their bones no matter how different their colors were: Our ancestors built our bodies from soil in the creases of their hands. We were loyal, not to the men in our lives but to the desert clay in our bones.

210  Mayy ElHayawi This is who we were: fire wrapped in faded skin, children of grandmothers, mothers of kings until the day our brethren fell. (1–7) When the fire – which used to melt individual differences in the pot of collective memory and wrap different color shades in one skin tone – broke out, colors brutally abandoned burned bodies and dramatically repainted the canvas of human history: When the last breath is taken, flesh turns. The colors of life that leave the body are the names we ascribe to our fears; we see rainbows everywhere. (8–10) Rainbows originally allude to the covenant between God, Noah and all the living creatures that took shelter in the ark to survive the devastating floods: And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth … Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.” (New Jerusalem Bible, Gen. 9:12–16) Rather than being a reminder of peaceful coexistence and acceptance of differences, rainbows are used in Mahmoud’s poem as symbols of death. The more rainbows she saw, the more human losses the world incurred. While rainbows for the genocide victims are symbols of liberating bodies from the burning hell of an earthly trauma to the limitless spheres of a heavenly paradise, they are embodied in survivors’ consciousness as reminders of their shattered collective identity and symbols of the racial prejudices plaguing humanity at large. In her interview with Alison Flood, Mahmoud says: It’s hard, in our world, when you see violence everywhere – you’re desensitised to it … What I try to do is to change the approach, so it helps people feel like it’s OK to feel again and to recognise that it is scary and it does hurt, and, it’s OK to cry. And people do cry … A lot of things are said about people like me – young people, black people, Muslim people, women … The reason I perform is to answer those things, to be a voice I didn’t really have growing up. (“Slam from Sudan”)

From Bearing to Burying  211 It is through enacting embodied memories of violence, pain, perseverance and resistance that Mahmoud addresses her lifelong trauma. Conquering the demons of fear, silence and indifference; bridging the gap between the violated bodies, hushed voices and uncaring hearts; and powering through the agony of recollecting the past and the tortures of fitting into the present, Mahmoud has managed to enforce the subaltern version of history onto the world conscience. Her major success is neither bringing Darfur crisis to international attention, nor commemorating the victims; it is rather her ability to integrate the readers of her poems, the audience of her poetry readings and the participants in her poetry workshops in refugee camps into a restorative narrative that grants them the voice to articulate their own traumatic memories or react to the traumas of voiceless victims. No matter how painful traumatic memories can be, projecting past bodily experiences into the present is the best means for stuttering personal wounds, scrubbing collective scars and sewing the fragmented self back into the fabric of the human race.

Works Cited Akasha, Mohamed Osman. Darfur: A Tragedy of Climate Change. Anchor Academic Publishing, 2013. Andreopoulos, George J. “Genocide.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1 Apr. 2019, www.britannica.com/topic/genocide. Accessed 6 Apr. 2019. Becker, Gay, et al. “Memory, Trauma, and Embodied Distress: The Management of Disruption in the Stories of Cambodians in Exile.” Ethos, vol. 28, no. 3, 2000, pp. 320–345. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/640647. Bloxham, Donald, and A. Dirk Moses. “Editors’ Introduction: Changing Themes in the Study of Genocide.” The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 2–17. Coulibaly, Bojana. “Haunting of the Return in Bouba-car Boris Diop’s Thiaroye: terre rouge and Murambi: le livre des osse-ments.” Boris Diop: Une écriture déroutante, edited by Boubacar Camara and Ousmane Ngom, Revue du Groupe d’Etudes Linguistiques et Littéraires, 2014, pp. 27–46. Daniel, E. V., and J. C. Knudsen. Introduction. Mistrusting Refugees, edited by E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr Knudsen, U of California P, 1995, pp. 1–12. “Darfur – Overview.” UNICEF, 25 Jan. 2019, www.unicef.org/infobycountry/ sudan_darfuroverview.html. Dillon, M. C. “Preface: Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity.” Merleau-Ponty Vivant, edited by M. C. Dillon, SU of NY P, 1991, pp. ix–xxxv. “Emtithal Mahmoud.” UNHCR, www.unhcr.org/emtithal-mahmoud.html. Accessed 6 Jan. 2019. Fritzsche, Peter. “The Case of Modern Memory.” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 73, no. 1, 2001, pp. 87–117. Gangi, Jane. Genocide in Contemporary Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Cambodia to Darfur. Routledge, 2014.

212  Mayy ElHayawi Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. Embodiment and Cognitive Science. Cambridge UP, 2005. Griffiths, Jennifer L. Traumatic Possessions: The Body and Memory in African American Women’s Writing and Performance. U of Virginia P, 2010. Grünfeld, Fred, and Wessel N. Vermeulen. Failure to Prevent Gross Human Rights Violations in Darfur: Warnings to and Responses by International Decision Makers (2003–2005). BRILL, 2014. Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. 1951. Vintage Books, 2011. Flint, Julie, and Alex De Waal. Darfur: A New History of a Long War. Zed Books, 2008. Fuchs, Thomas. “Body Memory and the Unconscious.” Founding Psychoanalysis Phenomenologically: Phenomenological Theory of Subjectivity and the Psychoanalytic Experience, edited by Dieter Lohmar and Jagna Brudzinska, Springer, 2012, pp. 69–82. Hagan, John, and Wenona Rymond-Richmond. Darfur and the Crime of Genocide. Cambridge UP, 2008. Hill, Jason D. Becoming a Cosmopolitan: What It Means to Be a Human Being in the New Millennium. Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Hinton, Alexander L. “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide.” Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, edited by Alexander Laban Hinton, U of California P, 2002, pp. 1–40. Ibrahim, Fouad. “Introduction to the Conflict in Darfur: West Sudan.” Explaining Darfur: Lectures on the Ongoing Genocide, edited by Nick Grono, Amsterdam UP, 2006, pp. 7–14. Kraft, Robert N. “Emotional Memory in Survivals of the Holocaust: A Qualitative Study of Oral Testimony.” Memory and Emotion, edited by Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel, Oxford UP, 2003, pp. 347–389. Laub, Dori. “Truth and Testimony: The Process and the Struggle.” American Imago, vol. 48, no. 1, Spring 1991, pp. 75–91. Lemkin, Raphael. Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Carnegie Endowment for World Peace, 1944. Lemkin, Raphael, and Donna-Lee Frieze. Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. Yale UP, 2013. Lerner, Robert E. “Armageddon.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, www.britannica. com/place/Armageddon. Accessed 4 Apr. 2019. Mahmoud, Emi. “Emi Mahmoud: The Poet Changing the Way We Think about Darfur.” Interview by Rupert Hawksley. The National, 3 Nov. 2018, www. thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/emi-mahmoud-the-poet-changing-theway-we-think-about-darfur-1.787637. Accessed 3 Mar. 2019. ———. “Interview with Spoken Word Performer Emi Mahmoud.” Interview by Ray Hardman. Connecticut Public Radio, WNPR, Washington DC, 10 Oct. 2015, https://soundcloud.com/wnpr/interview-with-spoken-word-performeremi-mahmoud. Accessed 13 Mar. 2019. ———. Sisters’ Entrance. Andrews McMeel, 2018. ———. “Slam from Sudan: How Emtithal Mahmoud Shook the World.” Interview by Alison Flood. The Guardian, 2 Jul. 2018, www.theguardian.com/ books/2018/jul/02/emtithal-mahmoud-emi-interview-slam-poet-activist-sudan. Accessed 23 Jan. 2019.

From Bearing to Burying  213 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. Taylor & Francis, 1982. Natsios, Andrew S. Sudan, South Sudan, and Darfur: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford UP, 2012. Pollio, H., et al. The Phenomenology of Everyday Life. Cambridge UP, 1997. Roberts, Harri Garrod. Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature. U of Wales P, 2009. Smith, Roger W. “Human Destructiveness and Politics: The Twentieth Century as an Age of Genocide.” In Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, edited by Isidor Wallimann, and Michael N. Dobkowski, Greenwood P, 1987, pp. 21–39. Soyinka, Wole. Of Africa. Yale UP, 2012. Starzmann, Maria Theresia. “Engaging Memory: An Introduction.” Excavating Memory: Sites of Remembering and Forgetting, edited by Starzmann, and John R. Roby, UP of Florida, 2016, pp. 1–21. Stone, Dan. “Genocide and Memory.” The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, edited by Donald Bloxham, and A. Dirk Moses, Oxford UP, 2010, pp. 102–121. Streich, Gregory W. “Is There a Right to Forget? Historical Injustices, Race, Memory, and Identity.” New Political Science, vol. 24, no. 4, 2002, pp. 525–542. The New Jerusalem Bible. Edited by Susan Jones, Doubleday, 1985. Totten, Samuel. “The Darfur Genocide: The Mass Rape of Black African Girls and Women.” Plight and Fate of Women During and Following Genocide, edited by Totten, Routledge, 2009, pp. 137–168. United Nations, General Assembly. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” Treaty Series, vol. 78, no. 1, 9 Dec. 1948. United Nations, 1951, pp. 278–311. “World Report 2019-Sudan.” Human Rights Watch, www.hrw.org/worldreport/2019/country-chapters/sudan. Accessed 25 Jan. 2019. Zembylas, Michalinos, and Zvi Bekerman. “Education and the Dangerous Memories of Historical Trauma: Narratives of Pain, Narratives of Hope.” Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 38, no. 2, 2008, pp. 125–154. JSTOR, www.jstor. org/stable/30053166. Zinkievich, Craig. Interview by Gareth Von Kallenbach. Skewed & Reviewed, 27 Apr. 2009, www.arcgames.com/en/games/star-trek-online/news/detail/ 1056940-skewed-%2526-reviewed-interviews-craig. Accessed 15 May 2009.

14 Masculine Failure Rape Culture and Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao Hakyoung Ahn Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is widely studied and celebrated for its portrayal of colonialism, dictatorship, and migration from the Dominican Republic; in particular, it is known for connecting individual trauma with a larger national trauma through its depiction of sexualized colonial violence as an intergenerational curse called the fukú. This connection is made through the novel’s main narrator, Yunior, who weaves together the stories of the marginalized Dominican subjects traumatized during the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo.1 Rape is the central thread that ties individual trauma to historic trauma; throughout the novel, Yunior’s recounting of Trujillo’s regime of sexual violence becomes a way of articulating an unspoken, personal rape trauma. In both cases, trauma is induced by a failed masculinity within a Dominican culture that condones the hypersexualization of both women and men in the name of patriarchal privilege. Thus Díaz establishes hypersexualization as an indication of trauma. In this chapter, I argue that Díaz simultaneously critiques and embodies masculine failure through his hypersexualization of the female characters of Oscar Wao. Hypersexualization becomes a mode of exposing and projecting the trauma of rape. In the novel, the legacy of colonialism and dictatorship is personalized and modernized through the younger generation of Dominican diaspora. 1 Rafael Leónidas Trujillo was a Dominican politician, soldier, and dictator, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961. His regime is known as “one of the longest, most damaging U.S.-backed dictatorships in the Western Hemisphere” (Díaz 3). Díaz describes Trujillo in length in a footnote in his novel as “one of the twentieth century’s most infamous dictators,” a “portly, sadistic, pigeyed mulato” who came to control nearly every aspect of the DR’s political, cultural, social, and economic life through a potent (and familiar) mixture of violence, intimidation, massacre, rape, co-optation, and terror; treated the country like it was a plantation and he was the master. (Díaz 2)

Masculine Failure  215 National and historical trauma is linked to personal trauma through the stories of Oscar, Lola, and Yunior, whose personal struggles become political as they mirror their parent generations’ struggles within an era of national and historical violence. The novel’s Dominican-American protagonist Oscar is born in New Jersey as a result of his mother’s migration, and the events of the novel take place in the characters’ movement between New Jersey and the Dominican Republic. Oscar’s story is interwoven with those of his sister, Lola, his mother, Belicia (Beli), and his grandfather, Dr. Abelard Louis Cabral. The narrator, Yunior, is Oscar’s friend and Lola’s on-and-off boyfriend, who meets the siblings during their college years at Rutgers University and ends up documenting Oscar’s life and death, a task that involves uncovering the experiences of generations of Oscar’s family as well the Dominican Republic’s national history of dictatorship and colonialism. Beli and Abelard, as contemporaries of Trujillo, suffer direct and indirect persecution generating from his regime; Oscar, on the other hand, who is born in New Jersey as the result of migration, is persecuted his entire life by his failure to fit the standards of a hypersexual Dominican masculinity that affects him across borders. Despite being hopelessly obsessed with beautiful women, he is constantly bullied and overlooked due to his “nerdiness”— his enthusiasm for science-fiction and fantasy genres—and his obesity. While he is characteristically optimistic, the condemnation (both social and self-inflicted) that results from his failure to conform to sociocultural standards of masculinity leads him to multiple bouts of suicidal depression. Clearly, the curse that manifests as the violence of dictatorship during Trujillo’s regime manifests in Oscar’s life through idealized standards of masculinity; both operate as systems within which individuals are overpowered. The national and historical violence of the Trujillato thus continues into the modern day through systematic gendered violence. This system victimizes men as well as women by perpetrating a model of toxic masculinity that affects both sexes. The origins of the fukú’s hold on Oscar’s family, which lie in Abelard’s refusal to allow his daughter to be raped by Trujillo, are mirrored across borders and generations in Oscar’s defiance of standards of masculinity in the United States. In this regard, Trujillo’s regime of violence against women is linked to a contemporary culture of toxic masculinity that renders men into perpetrators of sexual violence against women. Albeit in opposite ways, Oscar and Yunior are both affected by this culture: Oscar is victimized by his failure to conform, but Yunior’s struggles come from having internalized these standards in a way that renders him unable to not conform. Yunior compulsively cheats on Lola and mistreats Oscar, and Yunior himself suffers from the trauma generated by his own toxic behavior. The novel ends with a picture of a recovering Yunior, who nonetheless continues to pay

216  Hakyoung Ahn the price for past toxicity through feelings of hopeless longing and regret toward Lola as well as intermittent guilt about Oscar. This sense of irresolution mirrors Díaz’s implication (conveyed through the dialogue of the DC Comics series, Watchmen) that the fukú’s legacy continues: “‘In the end? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends’” (Díaz 341).2 Despite its multiplicity of perspectives and characters, the vast majority of the book is filtered through Yunior’s unique narrative voice, a subversive mixture of English and Spanish slang that frequently invokes the genre fiction with which protagonist Oscar is obsessed. 3 Much of the novel’s scholarship focuses on the subversiveness of Yunior’s narration, which Monica Hanna describes as a “hybrid narrative model,” as well as the potential problems of this narration (498); for example, Elena Machado Sáez argues that Yunior’s narration embodies a heteronormative rationale that ultimately silences Oscar’s “points of queer Otherness” (523). Díaz himself has referred to Yunior’s narration as a form of dictatorship, stating in an interview with Katherine Miranda: “What’s ironic is that Trujillo is this horror in this book, but the readers don’t even recognize that the person telling the story is Trujillo with a different mask.” Though Yunior focuses on the vast history of the nation as exemplified by the specific experiences of Oscar and his family, his relation to these events is framed by his personal relationship to Oscar and Lola, and the struggles with masculinity Yunior undergoes in both relationships. In this regard, Yunior’s narration of national history is much more personal than it initially appears. His documentation of Oscar’s life and the generational trauma with which it is associated becomes the ground in which his deep inner grappling with his own masculinity plays out. This personal, private battle is at the core of the novel. Masculine trauma is a central concern in Díaz’s other works, including his first book, Drown (1996), which portrays the ways in which masculine identity is crucially shaped by the effects of migration. A young Yunior appears as the main character and prominent narrator in 2 This irresolution is confirmed in Díaz’s most recent work, This Is How You Lose Her (2012), in which Yunior reappears as a character mourning the loss of his fiancé, who has ended their relationship after discovering that Yunior has cheated on her over fifty times. Maja Horn links the “negrita from Salcedo” Yunior is married to at the end of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao to the “bad-ass salcedeña” that appears in This Is How You Lose Her (134). 3 Oscar is described as a “fat sci-fi reading nerd” (Díaz 19) who frames his experience in terms of genre fiction; Yunior catalogues Oscar’s nerdiness in the following often-quoted passage: Could write in Elvish, could speak Cakobsa, could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic […] Dude wore his nerdiness like a Jedi wore his light saber or a Lensman her lens. (Díaz 22)

Masculine Failure  217 this collection, allowing for an interconnected understanding of Drown and Oscar Wao. In his study of Latin American masculinity in Drown, John Riofrio investigates the effect of the potential trauma which migration has on the male, working-class psyche. As a process impacted by trauma, immigrant Dominican masculinity can be seen as a reflection of socially oppressive circumstances that cause men to reproduce the violence of those circumstances; for example, Riofrio suggests that the adolescent boys in Drown engage in a violent hypersexuality as a means to compensate for the humiliation of poverty and other socially oppressive circumstances, a process by which “oppression over women and girls functions as a direct means towards the assumption of patriarchal privilege” (27). Thus Díaz’s conception of masculinity crucially involves interaction with the feminine, a category that includes those who are feminized in their marginalization or “otherness,” as well as women. Riofrio thus establishes that masculine hypersexuality can be conceptualized as a traumatic response that unfolds through the failure of empathetic connection with the feminine. While this interpretation is compelling, it seems, against real-world evidence to the contrary, to condemn victims of oppression to themselves become oppressors, excusing perpetrators of their aggression because it can be explained away by previous trauma. In one of his talks at Davidson College, Díaz himself addressed the source of the Caribbean hypersexuality depicted in his stories as the literal and metaphoric rape and subjugation of colonialism, pointing out that hypersexuality, often a coping mechanism developed by traumatized victims of sexual violence, occurred at the level of the social in the Caribbean (qtd. in Gonzalez 282). In Oscar Wao, it is clear that the hypersexuality of both male and female characters alike are a response to this trauma. When seen as a continuation of the themes in Drown, the Yunior that narrates Oscar Wao has seemingly come to terms with an empathetic identity that allows him to emotionally connect with the experiences of the novel’s women—particularly Lola and Beli, whose stories are presented at length. However, even as Yunior sympathetically describes these women, his perspective contains an empathetic distance toward them that signifies his ongoing struggle with masculinity. This empathetic distance derives simply from the fact that the central female characters, as well as nearly every female character in the novel, is explicitly hypersexualized by their narrator. As an activist writer, Díaz has been open about his own use of writing as a mode of political engagement. He is known for his conscious social representation of communities of color, particularly Dominican migrants and black Dominicans, those who are socially and racially othered. In an interview with Olga Segura, Díaz explicitly describes his understanding of his role as writer as an “anti-politician” that is invested in “mak[ing] the country better.” As such, Díaz’s interviews and

218  Hakyoung Ahn speeches about his writing have been referenced by scholars and commentators on his work as paratexts that participate in their production of meaning, and it is in this context that Yunior, the main narrator of all three of Díaz’s published books, is considered a version of Díaz’s own political persona. On the one hand, Díaz has been openly critical of Yunior during interviews; in addition to comparing Yunior’s narration and by extension his own literary voice to Trujillo’s dictatorship, he has acknowledged that Yunior is “sexist,” “misogynist,” and “racist,” while linking this behavior to Yunior’s status as a victim of childhood rape: Thinking about Yunior as having been raped made (in my mind at least) his fucked-up utterances in the novel have a different resonance. And while he wasn’t yet ready to bear witness to his own rape, it gave him a certain point of view around sexual violence […] that helped me produce a novel with a feminist alignment. (Díaz, interview with Moya) On the other hand, Díaz has implicitly identified himself with Yunior’s behavior by revealing his status as a victim of childhood rape in a 2018 essay for The New Yorker, wherein he vulnerably opens up about the traumatic aftermath of his own rape and the toxic behavior it induced in him. The piece can be understood as an intentional political gesture on Díaz’s part that invites the possibility for understanding his writing in terms of his status as rape survivor, while at the same time recognizing the complex work of its fictive constructions and avoiding an autobiographical conflation of the author and narrator. An inherent problem with Díaz’s political framing of masculine toxicity and hypersexuality as a traumatic response to rape, however, is that this trauma continues to be deflected onto women. This deflection mirrors the public allegations of sexual misconduct brought up against Díaz by several female writers shortly after his New Yorker confession, which include accusations of verbal aggression and forceful kissing.4 In the wake of these revelations, the boundaries between the author and the narrator of Oscar Wao are not as clear-cut as previously assumed. As a writer whose status as a victim of sexual trauma and as an inflictor of this trauma have both been politicized, Díaz’s implication that Yunior’s toxicity and hypersexuality must be understood as a traumatic response to having been feminized, both as a migrant and as a victim of rape, has political ramifications. While Díaz clearly critiques hypersexual masculinity in Yunior, he creates empathy toward Yunior and the male characters by linking their toxicity to trauma. Yet this affordance

4 Díaz has since been restored to both his position as chairman of the Pulitzer board and his teaching position at M.I.T.

Masculine Failure  219 is not allowed the female characters. While the female characters are hypersexualized, their behavior is never linked to trauma; as a result, women are detached from empathy. While standards of masculinity are profoundly damaging to the male characters, the female characters are not shown to have any problem conforming to standards of hypersexual Dominican femininity by which they are objectified. Díaz empathizes with rape trauma and hypersexuality, but this empathy is ultimately not extended toward the female characters themselves, who are objectified by the narrative as primarily sexual beings in a way that dehumanizes them. Their function in the novel remains largely to embody the grounds for the male characters’ negotiation of trauma. Female hypersexuality is never questioned or critiqued by the narrator in the way male hypersexuality is, even as it is clear that both the novel’s male and female characters disapprove of and look down on female hypersexuality. Oscar himself displays this attitude throughout the story, despite the fact that the love of his life, Ybón, is a sex worker. Oscar’s family aggressively protests Oscar’s relationship with Ybón on the basis of her profession; this resistance begins prior to their knowledge of her “jealous Third World cop boyfriend,” at whose hands Oscar ultimately meets his death (Díaz 302). Oscar’s mother, Beli, and abuela, La Inca, are outraged by Oscar’s association with Ybón, whom they consistently refer to as a “puta,” telling him that “not even God loves a puta” (297). The paradoxical distinction between male and female hypersexuality is revealed in the words of Rudolfo, Oscar’s uncle: “Yeah, […] but everybody knows that God loves a puto” (Díaz 297). The contrasting attitudes toward male and female hypersexuality are ironically portrayed; the novel is clearly critical of the fact that male hypersexuality is encouraged while female hypersexuality is demeaned. While Oscar and Yunior suffer from and resist this attitude toward hypersexual masculinity, however, the female characters do not resist this attitude toward hypersexual femininity. Even as Oscar defends Ybón’s profession, and braves death in pursuit of a relationship with her, it is ultimately unclear whether he is attracted by anything other than her overt sexuality. Oscar’s pursuit of Ybón is framed as a sexual conquest, which in turn is framed as his last opportunity to “become a man” in terms of Dominican masculine identity: He was a not-so-fat fatboy who’d never kissed a girl, never even lain in bed with one, and now the world was waving a beautiful puta under his nose. Ybón, he was sure, was the Higher Power’s last-ditch attempt to put him back on the proper path of Dominican maleitude. (Díaz 294) In this passage, Ybón is clearly distinguished in terms of her profession as a sex worker. It is important that she is a beautiful “puta,” not just

220  Hakyoung Ahn a beautiful woman, the implication being that her profession increases Oscar’s chances of having sex with her. Ybón’s potent sexuality is what consistently motivates Oscar’s pursuit of her in crucial moments. For example, accidentally glimpsing Ybón’s bare breasts one night has the effect of consolidating Oscar’s decision to press in on the pursuit: “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” (Díaz 303). A similar moment occurs when he returns to see Ybón after recovering from a near-fatal beating from her dangerous boyfriend, the capitán: “[…] for a moment he thought about letting the whole thing go, about returning to Bosco and getting on with his miserable life, but then [Ybón] stooped over, as if the whole world was watching, and that settled it” (Díaz 325). In neither of these instances is Ybón described as conscious of being seen by Oscar or able to reciprocate his feelings; she merely becomes a sexual spectacle. In the comatose dream Oscar has after his near-fatal beating, in which he is at the crossroads of life and death, it is the memory of his family—Lola, his mother, and La Inca—along with childhood memories of his love for nerd genres (his Planet of the Apes lunchbox) that prompts him to choose “more” (Díaz 312). Notably, it is not Ybón who occupies his thoughts in this crucial life-and-death moment, suggesting that his love for her does not consist of the true empathetic connections he has with his family and his nerd identity. The implicit shallowness of Oscar’s obsession with women on the basis of their physical sexuality is demonstrated throughout his other (onesided) romantic encounters. Even as Oscar is attracted to sexual women, he joins his family’s pronounced disapproval of female sexuality when his affections are not reciprocated. When he walks in on his college crush Jenni Muñoz (La Jablesse) in bed with another guy, he calls her a whore and vandalizes her dorm room (Díaz 194). His violent reaction is possibly influenced by his traumatic first relationship with his high school crush, Ana Obregón, who is entangled in an abusive relationship with an older man. (When she and Oscar reach the Elizabeth exit on the New Jersey highway she screams, “Elizabeth! […] Close your fucking legs!” [Díaz 40], metaphorically displacing her anguish at her own toxic relationship with her boyfriend, Manny.) Additionally, Oscar’s brief, childhood “girlfriend” Maritza Chacón is also characterized as a “cuero” known in the community for her promiscuity in her adolescence and adulthood, who “seemed to delight in getting slapped around by her boyfriends” (Díaz 18, 42). Each of these women is described in extensive physical detail that foregrounds their sexuality. Olga Polanco, Oscar’s other childhood girlfriend, the only named female character in the novel who is not sexually attractive—growing up to be “huge and scary, a troll gene in her somewhere,” and later ending up in jail for robbery,

Masculine Failure  221 never to be heard of again—is one of the only characters in the book more marginalized than Oscar himself (Díaz 17). Empathetic distance from the female characters is dictated in the novel by an implicit moral standard for women that does not exist for the men, which is ostensibly based on their sexuality. Maja Horn identifies this standard in her study of Dominican masculinity in the aftermath of the Trujillato, maintaining that Oscar Wao remains “caught up in the lasting desirability and lures of hegemonic Dominican masculinity,” which includes the “tendency to divide women into ‘good’ and ‘bad’”; according to Horn, this is a division that is partly based on women’s willingness to abide in a stable, hegemonic union (129). For example, women like Lola in Oscar Wao and Yunior’s fiancé in This Is How You Lose Her, who are willing to leave infidelious men for stable relationships, are distinguished from women who engage in casual sexual encounters with Yunior, whom Yunior calls “sluts” (Horn 135). Díaz himself has implicitly referred to this division during an interview in terms of his characters’ pursuit of what he calls “decolonial love”: “the only kind of love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial violence” (Moya). In Díaz’s words, Yunior fails his “one best chance at decolonial love and, through that love, a decolonial self” because he fails to confess his own sexual abuse to Lola, which would have “tied him in a human way” to her (Moya). This explanation foregrounds the trauma of rape as the basis of empathy; the ability to pursue and obtain a “decolonial” relationship free from the traumatic legacy of rape culture becomes an ethical standard for the characters of Oscar Wao. This standard, however, is one that is symbolically obtained through hegemonic malefemale relationships that mark a distinction among the novel’s women; women either embody this decolonial love, or they embody the opposite. For instance, Lola functions as a symbol of life because, for Yunior, a relationship with Lola represents salvation; by contrast, the “side-sluts” through which Yunior enacts his trauma-induced promiscuity symbolize Yunior’s entrapment and represents his inability to obtain a salvaging relationship (Díaz 192). Women are thus implicitly rendered responsible for the decolonization of the minds of men; this notion reflects an oddly conventional sense that only normative, hegemonic relations can accomplish such a task. This is a dynamic that plays out in the characterization of the novel’s major female figures in their embodiment of conflicting qualities. The women of the novel function as advocates of life and love, means for the male characters’ obtainment of “decolonial self,” but, at the same time, they are thoroughly commodified by their sexuality. While Ybón is the only woman in the novel who earns money as a sex worker, Lola and Beli, whose stories are fundamental to the narrative, are also implicitly associated with prostitution. Lola, in particular, is what Melissa

222  Hakyoung Ahn M. Gonzalez calls “the voice of ethical authority” in the novel, the only character granted first-person and the only one apart from Yunior whose words offer direct ideological critique (282). Yet as a female character, Lola’s sexuality is implicitly objectified when she has her “big puta moment”; she engages in an affair with the politician father of one of her classmates during her time in Santo Domingo, offering up her body for sex and then demanding two thousand American dollars in return (Díaz 212). Despite being narrated from Lola’s perspective in first-person, an empathetic distance is created in Lola’s own detached description of this sexual maneuver. While she acknowledges that she is “messed up” at this time because of her frustration at having to leave Santo Domingo against her wishes, her motives are otherwise unclear even as her moral awareness is (Díaz 212). She quotes La Inca’s words: “Every snake always thinks it’s biting into a rat until the day it bites into a mongoose,” detachedly referring to herself as the mongoose that tricks the snake (Díaz 212). She is aware of the fact that the man is rich and manipulates the guilt he feels after their sexual intercourse: “I kissed him when he dropped me off at the house only so that I could feel him shrink from me” (Díaz 213). This description marks a teenaged girl used sexually by an older man of power as herself an intentional predator. In this context, both Lola’s and Ybón’s positive associations have the effect of distancing them as symbols of “decolonial love” rather than humanizing them as characters. Directly after her “big puta moment,” Lola’s ex-boyfriend, Max, dies in a tragic traffic accident, leaving Lola with remorse for having broken up with him in her fit of rebellious frustration. Max’s status as the recipient of the fukú contrasts with Lola’s role as an advocate for life: “The curse, some of you will say, Life, is what I say. Life,” Lola narrates (Díaz 216). She effectively compensates for breaking Max’s heart by giving his impoverished family the money she receives from her “puta moment,” stating: “My toto good for something after all” (Díaz 216). In this passage, Lola’s sexuality becomes a means for the benefit of those in need, and Lola herself is associated with a force of life. This is a dynamic that occurs in Ybón’s relationship with Oscar, wherein not only does Ybón’s sexuality “save” Oscar from dying a virgin but is also associated with her celebration of life. In response to Oscar’s telling of his traumatic life events, she raises her glass, “To life!” (Díaz 299); later, once they have consummated their relationship and Oscar laments the waiting he has endured, she suggests “calling the wait something else”: “Maybe, she said, you could call it life” (Díaz 345). In these instances, life is associated with the femininity represented by women, yet these women are simultaneously objectified in their embodiment of a monetized hypersexuality. Thus, these women’s advocacy of life implicitly arises from their sexually commodified status.

Masculine Failure  223 One might argue that the sexually commodified portrayal of the women characters testifies to their exploitation rather than perpetrates it. Jill Toliver Richardson, for example, maintains that the portrayal of the female characters in the novel is empowering—particularly in her point that Díaz positions Isis, Lola’s daughter, to take on the work of excavating her family’s lost past; as a daughter she is “more deeply connected to the female family members’ legacy of gendered violence and sexual violation” (Richardson 329). However, Isis is more a symbolic embodiment of a “decolonial” future than an empowered female character. Although, as Richardson points out, Isis is named after the powerful Egyptian goddess as well as a DC Comics superhero, her power consists of her symbolic representation of a potential traumafree future rather than as an actual human being. 5 Describing her as dark and blindingly fast, Yunior attributes to her the power of lightning, by which he expects her to “take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights” and “put an end” to the curse (Díaz 339; 341). Yet even as Isis is imparted this important role, her name links her to a legacy of sexualized femininity that is invoked through Díaz’s reference to the figure in his description of Maritza’s sexual development at the beginning of the book: “Well, before you could say Oh Mighty Isis, Maritza blew up into the flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New Peru. […] body fine enough to make old men forget their infirmities, and from the sixth grade on dating men two, three times her age” (Díaz 18). Even though this passage describes Maritza’s abuse in what would legally be categorized as statutory rape, it is framed more as a lauding of Maritza’s power—a power that seems to consist of inspiring men to abuse her before she has even completed middle school. The reference to the DC Comics superhero inextricably links Isis’s femininity to the liberating role Yunior expects her to undertake in the future. Although Isis is not explicitly sexualized, she is clearly expected to grow into a beautiful woman who is “as smart and as brave as [Yunior] expect[s] she’ll be” as an embodiment of the “life” that counteracts the fukú (Díaz 341). In this regard, Isis is also commodified. The implicit commodification of these women characters is revealed in the contrast between Beli’s and Oscar’s respective beatings in the sugarcane fields, which mirror each other intergenerationally but contain crucial differences. The sugarcane fields are a symbolic location that directly references the violent legacy of systematic rape associated with

5 Ancient History Encyclopedia describes the goddess Isis’s powers in hyperfeminized terms: “selfless, giving, mother, wife, and protectress, who places others’ interests and well-being ahead of her own” (Mark).

224  Hakyoung Ahn the migration of enslaved Africans to work the colonial sugarcane fields in Hispanola. Scholars such as Anne Garland Mahler, Maria Kaaren Takolander, and Richardson have pointed out that Beli’s and Oscar’s beatings in the sugarcane fields links them to the colonial violence by which hundreds of sugarcane slaves were raped, beaten, and murdered. In this regard, the sugarcane fields are a site of postmemory, conceptualized by Marianne Hirsch as the transmission of trauma across generations in a “structure of inter- and transgenerational return of traumatic knowledge and embodied experience” (Hirsch 6). Beli’s and Oscar’s personal trauma becomes a repetition of the collective and cultural trauma of generations before them. In the scene of Beli’s beating, Yunior reports on the physical damage inflicted on Beli’s body but does not confirm that she was raped, representing this trauma as a “página en blanco” (Díaz 155). Díaz confirms in an interview that rape is the unspeakable trauma Yunior inherits, stating that the three blank lines of silence Yunior cannot convey to Lola, the “words that could have saved” their relationship (Díaz 337), are “I too have been molested,” an admittance of his own abuse that “would have tied him in a human way to Lola, that indeed could have saved him” (Moya). The novel’s foregrounding of the women’s stories of rape has been noted by Richardson as a political reframing of the historical narrative around the experiences of those who are most marginalized and silenced (28). While the transmission of this feminized sexual trauma constitutes the central foundational arc of the narrative, it is clear that its legacy is inherited by the male characters. Oscar is aligned with the violative experiences of his mother and sister by his inheritance of the fukú in his murder in the sugarcane fields; his role as the bearer of this inheritance is demonstrated in his acknowledgment of its existence when Yunior claims, “I don’t believe in that shit, Oscar. That’s our parents’ shit,” to which Oscar asserts, “It’s ours, too” (Díaz 200). While sexual violation is enacted upon the bodies of the novel’s women, the women themselves are aligned with a life that counteracts this trauma in a way that undermines their experience of sexual trauma. Beli, in particular, embodies both harrowing sexual violation and a supernatural transcendence of this trauma in the scene of her beating. In the sugarcane fields, she encounters a magical golden mongoose that encourages her to survive her beating and escape the cane; while this mongoose also appears to Oscar after his beating, Beli is conflated with the mongoose to the point that she almost becomes the mongoose, a conflation that does not happen with Oscar. Richardson makes this connection when she links the mongoose’s “chabine eyes flashing through the stalks” to Beli’s “golden eyes of a chabine” (Richardson 32). While the mongoose functions as a magical symbol of life in these instances, it is also ironically the animal Lola aligns herself with when she “tricks” the older man in her “puta moment.”

Masculine Failure  225 Beli’s beating occurs after Trujillo’s sister has discovered that Beli has become pregnant by her husband, “the Gangster,” and is almost identical to the beating that Oscar receives at the end of the novel when the capitán discovers Oscar’s relationship with Ybón. Unlike Oscar’s beating, however, Beli’s survival is clearly framed in terms of her femininity to the extent that her femininity becomes her source of life: […] so did our Beli resolve out of her anger her own survival. In other words, her coraje saved her life. Like a white light in her. Like a sun. She came to in the ferocious moonlight. A broken girl, atop broken stalks of cane. Pain everywhere but alive. Alive. (Díaz 155) The “white light” like a sun links Beli to the power of “lightning” that her granddaughter Isis will come to embody, as well as to the life that is repeatedly embodied by the other female characters. While the description of the medical damage inflicted on Beli’s body is much lengthier than that of Oscar’s, Oscar is saved from his beating by Clives, the taxi driver, who finds Oscar lying unconscious in the cane field and hauls him out. Beli, on the other hand, survives the beating by finding her own way out of the cane field, weeping for the dead baby in her womb, fueled by her maternal instincts: “Each time she thought she would fall she concentrated on the faces of her promised future—her promised children—and from that obtained the strength she needed to continue” (Díaz 156). At the same time, however, Beli is associated with hypersexuality not only through her physicality but also through her association with the Gangster. The Gangster is a character closely associated with Trujillo’s regime, prominently defined by his success in the prostitution business: Skilled our Gangster became in many a perfidy, but where our man truly excelled, where he smashed records and grabbed gold, was in the flesh trade […] And there was something about the binding, selling, and degradation of women that brought out the best in the Gangster; he had an instinct for it, a talent—call him the Caracaracol of Culo. (Díaz 126) Tellingly, it is with a man who makes a living out of the prostitution business that Beli falls in what she perceives to be a “pure uncut unadulterated love, the Holy Grail that would so bedevil her children throughout their lives,” even as everyone else in her community views her relationship in terms of prostitution (Díaz 131). Her relationship with the Gangster unfolds mostly in love motels and on his terms; the fact that she “spent more time inside the love motels than she had in school” causes the community to believe that she has “finally found her true station in life, as

226  Hakyoung Ahn a cuero” (Díaz 133). Later, as she is being beaten to near-death on the orders of the Gangster’s Trujillo wife, Beli herself understands that she has been “tricked” and “played” by him (Díaz 154; italics in original). Ironically, however, the Gangster remains the love of Beli’s life because he “adored” Beli and awakened her to her sexual agency: “it was he who taught her all about her body, her orgasms, her rhythms, who said, You have to be bold, and for that he must be honored, no matter what happened in the end” (Díaz 132). Beli’s sexual awakening in this moment is allotted so much value as to render her exploitation by the Gangster and its horrific consequences “honorable.” In this regard, Beli embodies a contradiction. Her sexuality is depicted as a mode of agency, but it is clear that this sexual agency does not translate into political agency, the fact of which Yunior seems unaware. Thus, Beli embodies the paradoxical conflation of sexual agency with political agency at the core of Yunior’s struggles with masculinity. Mahler writes that the similarities between Beli’s and Oscar’s beatings convey the intactness of the cycle of tyranny and oppression despite Trujillo’s death, the passing of time, and Beli’s migration, and that this cycle is crucially linked to the writer’s tyrannical control of language (128, 130). Referencing multiple interviews in which Díaz compares his writing to dictatorship, Sáez furthers this focus on the writer’s tyranny and argues that Díaz entices the reader into becoming complicit with the heteronormative rationale embodied by Yunior that is used to “police male diasporic identity” (523). The framing of Oscar’s death is thus regarded by many as an act of tyranny on the part of the writer and narrator, by which Oscar’s life is molded into a representative heroic narrative. For Yunior, the sexual agency Oscar obtains through his sexual conquest at the end of the novel clearly indicates a degree of political power. For the female characters, however, each of whom is undeniably sexually empowered, sexuality in no way indicates political power. Decolonial love, or decolonial self, a condition liberated from the trauma of rape, is ultimately not found in sexual agency within relationships. In a New York Times Magazine interview regarding his recent work, This Is How You Lose Her (2012), Díaz states: “I wanted to capture this sort of cheater’s progress, where this guy eventually discovers for the first time the beginning of an ethical imagination. Which of course involves the ability to imagine women as human” (qtd. in Horn 136). Horn critiques this statement, maintaining that Díaz’s problematizing of Dominican masculinity fails to extend into a gender awareness that surpasses Yunior’s “own afflicted self” or goes “beyond the male world” (136). This masculine failure is clearly depicted in Oscar Wao. Yunior writes in a moment of poignant internal reflection on his relationship with Lola: “I thought about my own fears of actually being good, because Lola wasn’t Suriyan; with her I’d have to be someone I’d never tried to be”

Masculine Failure  227 (Díaz 205). Yunior’s failed relationship with Lola, reflecting his failure to “actually be good,” is emblematic of his failure to empathize with women as fully human beings throughout the narrative. Trauma leaves everyone internally and externally displaced; Díaz’s novel connects the external displacement of migrant diaspora to the internal displacement of the feminine within the construction of a diasporic masculine identity, as a rape trauma that transcends generations and national borders. In the wake of Díaz’s self-admittedly autobiographical depiction of Yunior, this displacement not only inflects the author’s critique of the narrator’s exploitation of women both physically and narratively but also casts the author as complicit.

Works Cited Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Riverhead Books, 2008. ———. Drown. Riverhead Books, 1996. ———. “Junot Díaz, Diaspora, and Redemption: Creating Progressive Imaginaries.” Interview with Katherine Miranda. Sargasso II, 2008–2009, pp. 23–40. ———. “Junot Díaz Talks Dominican Identity, Immigration and the (Complicated) American Dream.” Interview with Olga Segura. America: The Jesuit Review, 2017. www.americamagazine.org/arts-culture/2017/05/04/junotDíaz-talks-dominican-identity-immigration-and-complicated-american. ———. This Is How You Lose Her. Riverhead Books, 2012. ———. “The Search for Decolonial Love, Part II.” Interview with Paula M. L. Moya. Boston Review. 27 June 2012, https://bostonreview.net/archives/ BR37.4/junot_Díaz_paula_moya_2_oscar_wao_monstro_race.php. ———. “The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma.” The New Yorker, 9 April 2018. Web. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/ the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma. Gonzalez, Melissa M. “‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 57, no. 3, 2016, pp. 279–293. Hanna, Monica. “‘Reassembling the Fragments’: Battling Historiographies, Caribbean Discourse, and Nerd Genres in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Callaloo, vol. 33, no. 2, 2010, pp. 498–520. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia UP, 2012. Horn, Maja. Masculinity After Trujillo. UP of Florida, 2014. Mahler, Anne Garland. “The Writer as Superhero: Fighting the Colonial Curse in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, vol. 19, no. 2, 2010, pp. 119–140. Mark, Joshua J. “Isis.” Ancient History Encyclopedia, 19 Feb 2016. Web. 17 Jul 2019. Richardson, Jill Toliver. “Enduring the Curse: The Legacy of Intergenerational Trauma in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” The Afro-Latin@ Experience in Contemporary American Literature and Culture: Engaging Blackness. Springer International Publishing, 2016, pp. 27–48.

228  Hakyoung Ahn Riofrio, John. “Situating Latin American Masculinity: Immigration, Empathy and Emasculation in Junot Díaz’s Drown.” Atenea, vol. 28, no. 1, 2008, pp. 23–36. Sáez, Elena Machado. “Dictating Desire, Dictating Diaspora: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as Foundational Romance.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 52, no. 3, 2011, pp. 522–555. Takolander, Maria Kaaren. “Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.” ARIEL, vol. 47, no. 3, 2016, pp. 95–122.

15 The Technology of Anguish (Re)Imagining Post-9/11 Trauma in Tamora Pierce’s Fantasy Universes Whitney S. May Wyldon, his men, Sergeant Connac and his squad, and Owen found the dead. They placed them in double lines on one side of the ruined gate. Kel tried not to watch. Some of the dead were in pieces when the grimfaced soldiers laid them out. She would have to look at them soon, but not now, surely, when some had to be reassembled like puzzle toys. Despite the men’s care, a head or foot sometimes thumped the ground as those lowering a corpse slipped. Coming out from behind the looted storage sheds, Kel noticed that someone had found the head of the carpenter Snalren and was placing it in its proper position atop his neck. Snalren had once told Kel that Dom had informed him she was a disaster as a carpenter, so she must not work those chores. Kel shuddered. Was this how she would always remember him, as a corpse in pieces? Tamora Pierce, Lady Knight

Even taken on its own, this moment from the final novel of Tamora Pierce’s young adult medieval fantasy quartet The Protector of the Small is a haunting one, to say the least. However, it also presents an important juncture in several respects, both from within and from outside the immediate frame of the novel, that warrant closer study from a historical/cultural standpoint. Most readily in terms of the narrative, this scene registers the moment when the quartet’s protagonist Keladry (Kel) of Mindelan first publicly known female page and squire and second Lady Knight of the fantasy realm of Tortall, returns to the fort and refugee camp over which she presides after being away to deliver a report. To her horror, she discovers that it has been razed in her absence, and many of its occupants slaughtered by the soldiers of Tortall’s political enemy and their specialized weapons. In shock over the loss of the people in her charge, Kel tours the ruins of Fort Haven, finding herself compelled to catalogue every gruesome scene in meticulous, agonized detail that slows the pacing of the novel to a noticeably plaintive crawl. She registers a distant fury that these indelibly human lives have been lost in the theater of a war that presses in on her—and by extension the reader—throughout the novel, but most viscerally here in the smoking, corpse-laden remains

230  Whitney S. May of a refugee camp. It is this miserable procession that propels Kel toward the novel’s—and the quartet’s—climax, a mission to rescue the survivors who have been kidnapped and marched into enemy territory for nefarious purposes. But beyond, or perhaps more accurately above, the bounds of the narrative, Kel’s funereal inventory of human suffering and loss also marks a significant shift for its author and her audience, one that carries broader implications for the cultural air around the novel at the time of Pierce’s writing and revising—that is to say, in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 9/11. In her acknowledgments for the U.S. edition of the book, which was released in October 2002, Pierce reveals that she had sketched out the events of the quartet, including the fall of Haven, in the mid-1990s. She adds, though, that she was in the process of drafting Lady Knight when the attacks occurred. A resident of New York City at the time, in the immediate aftermath, Pierce “forgot where in Lady Knight [she] had stopped writing when September 11 swept us all into the real world” (Lady Knight 430). Upon discovering, once she was able to sit down to write again, that she had left off at Kel’s return to the leveled fort, Pierce confides that the next twenty pages, including the scene excerpted above, were “the hardest twenty of [her] life” (Lady Knight 430). Such a statement is all the more sobering when one remembers that at that point in her career, Pierce had written eighteen novels between the two universes in her richly developed corpus. Yet while war had certainly been a present theme throughout many of these, and had also been diligently interrogated in several of her previous novels, none had reached quite the same tone of shock and bleak disgust evoked in Lady Knight. Much of this effect stems from the enemy weapons responsible for the destruction of Fort Haven, the “killing devices” introduced in Squire (2001), the third book of the quartet, but more attentively explored in Lady Knight. After so many novels containing no references whatsoever to modern—that is to say post-medieval—technology, the first glimpse of a killing device is jarring, to say the least. This monstrosity is a frightening blend of mechanization and sorcery, all steel pulleys and razor-fingers, and animated by the magically captured and weaponized souls of refugee children murdered by Tortall’s political enemy Scanra. While these magical machines are ultimately defeated by Kel at an enormous cost, they serve a unique function: Using a fantastic format, they make very real, post9/11 tensions about war, military technology, and civilian casualties accessible to Pierce’s (primarily, although not exclusively young) readers. More broadly, Lady Knight, and in particular Kel’s discovery of the killing devices’ grisly handiwork at Fort Haven registers one woman’s attempts to construct, out of a landscape of destruction, a heartfelt snapshot of personal and collective pain. It characterizes an example of

Technology of Anguish  231 the fantastic mode being used to record very real trauma, at both the individual and the national scales. The result is a work of fantasy that affords its readers a restorative and transformative literary terrain by which to begin healing, first by reconciling the past and then by imagining the future. Indeed, as I’ll argue here, it empowers them to do so even when the future seems at its most unimaginable. In her investigation into the subversive potential of fantasy, Rosemary Jackson avers that the inclusion of machines as instruments of villainy in medieval fantasy literature like Pierce’s constitutes “referring with disgust to the ‘materialism of a Robot Age’ and looking backwards to a medieval paradise” (155). Jackson’s argument, echoed by Marxist critics such as Darko Suvin and Carl Freedman, who focus it on fantasy inspired by Tolkien (like Pierce’s), belies an unyielding association of fantasy with a past-centric, escapist impulse and an inherent rejection of futuristic thinking. Fredric Jameson engages this same temporal tension with regard to generic conventions, famously working to disentangle, in particular, fantasy from science fiction. The result of his attention is a similarly stark schism animated by a binary of science fiction’s machines versus fantasy’s magic. Furthermore, Jameson determines, whereas science fiction doggedly interrogates the constraints of history, fantasy (or more accurately High Fantasy) merely celebrates “human creative power and freedom which becomes idealistic only by virtue of the omission of precisely those material and historical constraints” (278). While Jameson is not necessarily dismissive of fantasy as a genre, it’s clear that he regards science fiction—and what he views as its superior capacity of reflecting, and thus engaging with our real world—as worthier of critical analysis than its “idealistic” and comparatively escapist sister genre. But where in this model can there exist a book like Lady Knight, which features magically animated machines made from steel-coated giants’ bones held together by burnished hinges and murdered refugee children’s necromanced souls? Where do we locate a narrative that mobilizes magic and machinery to achieve a more dimensional interrogation of time and history, to record and process historical trauma? The answer, it turns out, lies in the space Jameson acknowledges for a subgenre of fantasy, a radical fantasy, to emerge where history does intrude upon fiction. “History” and “historical trauma,” he suggests, make way for “a fantasy narrative apparatus capable of registering systemic change and of relating superstructural symptoms to infrastructural shifts and modifications” (280). Jameson offers two texts as examples of radical fantasy, the second of which, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station (2000), also forms the basis of William J. Burling’s own historicization of the subgenre. According to Burling, radical fantasy cannot be considered ahistorically; its significance “can be understood only by an approach that recognizes innovation in form as a response to specific

232  Whitney S. May historical context affecting not just fantasy but the entire system of the arts” (327). Although discussions of radical fantasy’s more recent contours typically situate these as reactionary to increasing—and increasingly globalized—pressures regarding shifting economic, political, military, environmental, and technological forces, to name a few, Lady Knight stands out as a case study of radical fantasy that seeks to engage similar pressures as they are reconfigured in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 in the United States, in its “entire system of the arts” (Burling 327). Of particular note is its careful attention to and rejection of the gendered revisions of trauma and grief that pervaded American media in the wake of 9/11. While pontificating in October 2001 about John Lennon-inspired “fluffy nihilists” and the perceived hazards of pacifism in his bluntly titled National Review article “Fight Now, Love Later (The Awfulness of an Oprahesque Response),” Mark Steyn lamented what he viewed as a shameful, “palpable” urge to “move on” in the media around him (45). He lambasted Oprah’s address at New York City’s special prayer service at Yankee Stadium on September 23, 2001, as “Oprahfying” (Steyn 45). Oprah’s statement at the event with which he took the most issue was as follows: “May we leave this place … determined to now use every moment that we yet live to turn up the volume in our own lives, to create deeper meaning, to know what really matters. What really matters is who you love and how you love” (Winfrey). Steyn’s disdain was clear in his closing retort to this statement: “This is war. Save the love-in for later” (46). Writing on a similar theme for American Spectator’s first issue of 2002, John Strausbaugh denigrated the rhetoric of “healing,” “bereavement,” “trauma,” “spirituality,” and “recovery,” labeling practitioners of this language as “vultures” in the “Sisterhood of Grief” (33). Strausbaugh’s comments mark an important connection in post-9/11 political language: that between grief and femininity. Notably, the chief “vulture” Strausbaugh singled out for this offense was a man, in a heavy-handed attempt at rhetorical emasculation. Lance Morrow similarly prescribed a strict, gender-based division for the immediate aftermath of trauma: In the first issue of TIME printed after the attacks, he issued the opening charge: “For once, let’s have no ‘grief counselors’ standing by with banal consolations, as if the purpose, in the midst of all this, were merely to make everyone feel better as quickly as possible” (50). As a counterpoint to the perceived effeminate—“Oprahesque”— desire for consolation he felt had diluted Americans’ responses to 9/11, Morrow invoked three historical (white, male) figures as inspiration for the “nourishment of rage” that he saw as the solution to this problem (50). He insisted that then-president George W. Bush take his cues from John F. Kennedy and political philosophers like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and lead the nation in “toughen[ing] up” (50). The immediate aftermath of the attacks is bloated with similar examples of this deprecation of

Technology of Anguish  233 trauma where, in post-9/11 rhetoric, grief became a weakness, a feminine occupation that neutered any men who “chose” to indulge in it. The “correct” response, the response that would “make ‘em pay,” as it were, was rage as a way to reframe the masculinites that its advocate believed had become “eroded”—all in the interest of war. This re-stratification of gender roles into the U.S. image at home and abroad forms the basis of Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America. Therein, she notes: “Of all the peculiar responses our culture manifested to 9/11, perhaps none was more incongruous than the desire to rein in a liberated female population. In some murky fashion, female independence had become implicated in our nation’s failure to protect itself” (25). Faludi’s study indicates that the gendered grief/rage model operated as a much-desired restructuring force after the dominant social codes and expectations of gender and domesticity had been upended by the attacks. This served the two-pronged function of at once bolstering national support around a masculinized military image and silencing the voices of detractors by associating opposition or even hesitation with the “feminine” weakness that had left the nation open to attack in the first place. This “peculiar response” explored by Faludi is the loaded atmosphere into which Pierce deliberately entered Lady Knight. In the U.S. acknowledgments, Pierce confesses: “[W]hen I did the rewrites, I expressed my feelings about war, refugees, and disaster a bit more forcefully than I had in the first draft” (430). This uniqueness of Lady Knight’s composition, wherein a little under half of the narrative was chronologically drafted and all of it was revised and edited immediately after 9/11, makes it a significant record of these joint real-world political flexes toward misogyny and hostility, albeit a fantastic one. Pierce tackles these impulses head-on through Kel, repeatedly favoring calm rationality over bellicose belligerence and, subverting the gendered grief/ rage model pervading American media following 9/11, continuously positioning Kel’s gender as a component, but certainly not the sum, of her military experience and aptitudes. For example, in the first group of refugees to arrive at Haven is a prickly woman named Fanche who assumed command of her band of refugees when her village was attacked by the killing devices. Chafing at Kel’s authority, Fanche bucks against her immediately by leveling a misogynistic quip at the other woman by way of introduction. When Kel remarks that she’s surprised by the sexist direction of the insult, Fanche responds: “Why? Because we’re all sisters under the Goddess?” (112). “No,” Kel replies. “Because I expected you to know what it’s like, to be a woman and command” (112). Praising Fanche’s fortitude while under attack by the killing devices, Kel continues: “I know you must have had men who argued and balked and nearly got you all killed … What I’d like you to see is that if we aren’t all united inside these walls,

234  Whitney S. May noble and common, soldiers and cooks, male and female, then the enemy will take us all” (112–113). In this exchange, Kel recognizes and refutes the idea that either grief or combat skill are gendered experiences, instead opting for an egalitarian model of duty that she implies is the most productive. Such a stance is of course notable in its opposition to the swift and discreet restructuring of women’s roles in the military following 9/11.Three weeks after the start of the War in Afghanistan in October 2001, the U.S. News & World Report disclosed the remarks of an unnamed Pentagon official who claimed that the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services would slowly be “minimalized and marginalized” (Bedard 2). Although this decision was protested by women’s rights groups including the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Bush administration quietly allowed the committee’s charter to lapse after over fifty years of renewal, replaced its women’s rights activists with party loyalists, and defanged what remained by restricting the committee’s scope to family and health issues. This erasure of female representation was not limited to the military; it extended into the news, too. Although the exact data was lost when The White House Project, an organization devoted to cataloguing gender inequality in political engagement, shuttered its doors in 2013, some of its initial findings remain in a letter to the editor of The New York Times from December 2004. Then-president of the organization Marie Wilson noted, among other troubling disparities, that women guests at that time comprised only 11% of national Sunday morning political news shows. “That miniscule number,” she continued, “dropped by almost 40% after the 9/11 attacks” (Wilson). In such a fraught environment, where “the need to remedy that failure [of the nation to protect itself] somehow required a distaff correction, a discounting of female opinions, a demeaning of the female voice, a general shrinkage of the female profile” (Faludi 25), Kel’s insistence that women can and should participate not only in combat but in the minutiae of combat, provides a remarkable counterpoint to the real-world attempts to exclude women from combat that is all the more commendable in its consistence. To borrow from Kel, smiling as she surveys a petite refugee woman requesting spear training, “Just shows you can’t judge us females by size” (Lady Knight 212). In addition to championing, in fantasy, female visibility while in reality it was under attack, Lady Knight also insists upon refocusing war on its victims, regardless of nationality, when the dominant narratives sought to establish a national fantasy of masculine invincibility by redirecting popular attention to its (male) heroes. In “Politics, Perception, and Popular Culture: The Shaping of 9/11,” Stacy Takacs notes the ways in which areas of popular culture, among these Pentagon-assisted “militainment” productions, sought to recuperate 9/11 in the cultural

Technology of Anguish  235 consciousness. “Masculinity and violence were the keys to this recuperation,” she notes, where, for example: the male passengers of United 93 were lauded as “heroes” for their “let’s roll” machismo, and New York City firemen were celebrated as icons of American courage. Meanwhile, the more obvious “victims” of the day—Wall Street stockbrokers, “falling bodies,” women, and widows—were shunted off the national stage. (24) This is of course not to say that the actions of these men were not heroic—merely that they were coopted and repackaged in such a way as to draw focus from other victims of the attacks and to reframe the national narrative to ensure popular support for violent military retaliation. Indeed, following Takacs’ attention to United Airlines Flight 93, the only hijacked aircraft that did not reach its target on 9/11, and that instead crashed in Pennsylvania during an attempt by passengers and crew to regain control of the plane, yields an exquisite case study of this American mythmaking project immediately after the attacks precisely because it reached such intense media heights so quickly and with so few available facts. Although it would be years before the cockpit tapes would be available (in transcript in 2006 and in audio in 2011), by September 13, 2001, the media had already begun to laud the flight’s passengers as heroes. Without the tapes and before the official 9/11 Commission Report offered a verdict on whether or not the passengers had actually managed to breach the cockpit, the media based their reports on the passengers’ final cell phone calls to loved ones and their family members’ assertions about their character. From these pieces of testimony, four dominant figures from the flight quickly rose to the fore: Faludi usefully gathers many of these testimonial scraps in The Terror Dream: remarks that Jeremy Glick was “a take-charge guy,” that Todd Beamer was a “go-to guy” who “didn’t take no for an answer,” that Thomas Burnett “would never go down without a fight,” and that Mark Bingham “would have jumped into action” were “treated by the network correspondents like hard news leads” (73). In the end, these outlets focused almost exclusively upon these men, inordinately enumerating their collective athletic pursuits from as far back as high school and then digging even further into their childhoods to excavate tales of their boyhood appreciation for comic book superheroes. Such determination to establish these men as Homeric heroes on a national stage reads as disingenuous when taken with the fact that Flight 93 attendant CeeCee Ross Lyles’ final call to her husband informed him that she was part of the plan to retake the cockpit, or that attendant Sandra Bradshaw appraised her own husband that she and some of the other crew and passengers were boiling water in the plane’s coffee pots

236  Whitney S. May to throw on the hijackers. Indeed, although twenty-one of the forty passengers and crew on the flight were women, all speculation of heroism seemed to be focused on Glick, Beamer, Burnett, and Bingham. In the aftermath of 9/11, theirs became the image of heroism: They were conventionally handsome, white, and male. Meanwhile, a woman of color, Lyle’s pre-flight attendant years spent as a police officer and then detective were bizarrely eclipsed in the news circuit by tales of the main heroes’ college rugby and judo days, or their exploits on their high school football/baseball/basketball teams. This discrepancy lingered, too: When the True American Heroes Act was drafted in 2003, initial proposals for the legislation exclusively recognized these four men from the flight. Although the honor was ultimately extended to all passengers and crew who perished on the plane, largely due to documentaries, films, and even graphic novels about Flight 93, Glick, Beamer, Burnett, and Bingham tend to dominate the legacy of the event. To this day, the first return in a Google search for “flight 93 women” is a news story about the wives of the passengers. Lady Knight, however, resists this tack at every level, from action to dialogue. While lamenting the destruction of a different refugee camp before Fort Haven’s fall, Kel’s childhood friend Owen slides into talk of vengeance that Kel is swift to neutralize with reason. Speaking graphically of the carnage left by the killing devices, Owen seethes: “I wish I could find him, [the sorcerer responsible for them]. I’d gut him and drag him around Scanra by his insides” (Pierce 203). Not unkindly, Kel refuses to indulge this line of thinking: “Then you’d have another rotten body to deal with,” she points out pragmatically (203). In addition to promoting female visibility beyond that of grief, Kel’s characterization also refuses to conflate ideas of machismo and rage into the model of masculine military heroism underscored in post-9/11 American media, opting instead for a focus on the casualties of war, both soldier and civilian. The key to Kel’s rage, when she experiences it, lies in an awareness of its human consequences that impedes it from developing into the likes of rage stoked (or “nourished”) by Steyn and Strausbaugh. Kel’s strongest expression of fury in all four novels comes during the Fort Haven scene, notably within the twenty pages that Pierce identifies as those written within days of 9/11 and as the hardest she had ever written. The focus of Kel’s anger is uniquely superstructural and in keeping with Jameson’s designation of radical fantasy’s attentions: As Kel inventories Haven’s devastation, she finds herself continuously comparing the ruins of the fort’s scant defenses with those of Tortall’s larger military force, and her observations fuel her fury. Although a fort in name, Haven was a refugee camp in practice; as a civilian base, it had not been as highly prioritized or equipped as the military forts on either side of it, a disadvantage for which Kel sought to compensate

Technology of Anguish  237 by mandating that all occupants learn combat. The result was a defensive force that was, however diligently drilled, still largely civilian, outnumbered, and against the enemy’s killing devices, strikingly out“gunned.” While an international arms race over the killing devices had occupied the soldiers of two warring nations, the noncombatants under her care were caught in the crossfire. Surveying the miserable results of this arrangement, Kel finds that “her hands shook, her rage was so intense … They had been left out in harm’s way, and harm had come calling” (255–256). Focusing her fury on the international dimension of the brutality around her, Kel muses: In quiet moments, Kel knew the shape of the war … The whole realm was in danger, not just a camp of homeless people. [The northern military commander]’s first priority was the use of his armies to defend strategic sites. Those armies could only be so many places at once. But this was not a quiet moment. Kel didn’t care about the large tapestry, about thousands of miles of border to protect, two cities under siege, the movement of armies, raiding parties, and ships at sea. She hadn’t even been here to defend Haven with her own body. (256) This moment of smoldering horror demonstrates Kel’s attempts to situate herself in relation to the carnage she sees, as well as to the larger systems that demand and execute this bloodshed. Rather than aggression exploding in all directions, her fury takes precise aim at institutional forces. It also, notably, never loses sight of the victims. In my copy of Lady Knight, Kel’s tour of Haven takes ten pages. Her painful inspection of the rubble is periodically interrupted by the corpses that she discovers along her path. In the space of these ten pages, Kel stops by the bodies of seventeen individual citizens. Pierce’s template for these discoveries is as brilliant as it is powerful in its consistency: Kel recalls at least one specific memory about each person while they were alive, and then punctuates each memory by describing the sickening condition of the body and/or offering insights into the gruesome way each would have died. Pierce’s message is clear: this is the cost of war. The collateral damage is measured not in numbers, but in human beings with lives and forfeited futures. This is a theme to which Kel returns throughout the novel, but is perhaps at its most distilled when she at last completes her circuit of the wreckage. A Stormwing—an immortal, humanoid creature of Pierce’s creation that exists to discourage war by defiling the corpses of those who die in combat—lands before Kel and admits that her flock feels at least a morsel of remorse about what has happened there. Indeed, the creature confides that they were initially unsure of whether or not to deface the bodies—although it’s worth noting

238  Whitney S. May that they decide to do so. The creatures didn’t know whether the “rules” of their species applied, because Haven was a refugee camp and not technically a fort. The Stormwing’s observation is a significant one: these immortal beings whose quasi-divine “rules” about such things certainly have a long history in this universe have nevertheless not encountered this level of overlap between soldier and civilian before. Such a conflict serves to highlight the reconfiguring nature of trauma, as well as to underscore the relationship between individual and collective trauma on the scale of a massive catastrophe. This reconfiguration is explored at length in Jeffrey C. Alexander et al.’s groundbreaking collection Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity which theorizes the role of social meaning-making in cultural trauma formation. “The process of trauma creation,” Alexander overviews, “occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways” (1). Or, as Neil J. Smelser agrees, “cultural traumas are for the most part historically made, not born” (37). In its narrative reworking of the attacks, American media thus historically remade the trauma of 9/11 as a means to restructure and reforge a collective American identity in a direction that bolstered rage over grief, especially in ways that served to further its political and military agenda. In addition to accomplishing this along gendered lines, it’s worth noting how this occurred along cultural ones, as well. One of the more memorable examples of this comes, of course, from the reverend Jerry Falwell’s infamous condemnation on the Christian television program The 700 Club on September 13, 2001: I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say “you helped this happen.” (“Falwell Apologizes to Gays, Feminists, Lesbians”) Spanning four scholarly books so far, Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo’s massive and ongoing critical enterprise lies in considering the 9/11 attacks as a rupture of social, political, and ideological discourses. From this standpoint, the enduring 9/11 project, as they call it, constructs certain bodies as “American” while designating other sexualized and racialized bodies as un- or anti-American. In 2010, they posited that these other bodies (bodies of color, bodies of women, LGBTQ+ bodies, trans bodies, immigrant and refugee bodies, etc.) “were positioned as threats to the security of the nation, while the

Technology of Anguish  239 nation’s citizenry overwhelmingly adopted and reinforced the rhetoric provided by its leadership” (Bloodsworth-Lugo and Lugo-Lugo xiii). In 2017, they added that “When we invoke 9/11 we do not invoke national trauma; rather, we highlight the punctum involving national re-inventions and restructurings” (Lugo-Lugo and Bloodsworth-Lugo 18). True to form, Lady Knight addresses and subverts these restructurings, carefully rejecting an us-vs.-them division in favor of empathy and consideration, regardless of culture or nationality. This is most clearly visible in Kel’s journey across the border between Tortall and Scanra as she races to rescue the kidnapped Haven refugees despite knowing that she risks capture if she fails on the one hand and on the other hand, faces charges of desertion or treason if she succeeds. On the surface, this journey is a harrowing one, but it is also suffused with subtle cues that reiterate the novel’s theme of questioning and ultimately eroding preconceived binaries about war: Kel’s party is shuttled across the natural border between the warring countries, the violent Vassa River, by a band of Tortallan smugglers whom, it is revealed, are the mirror image of a Scanran smuggler posse on the opposite bank. The latter are referred to as “Scanran kin” or “Scanran counterparts” in a continuous effort to cast them as familiar and welcome despite their positions on opposite sides of a national border. Further, as Kel’s group rides deeper into enemy territory, Kel registers surprise that the terrain looks the same on the Scanran side of the river as it does on the Tortallan side. She shakes her head, musing: “The land didn’t change because humans divided it with an invisible line” (Lady Knight 311). Ultimately, Kel and company are able to catch up to and free most of Haven’s captives, only to learn that the children had been separated from their group earlier and taken to the keep of Blayce, the villainous sorcerer who harvests their souls to power the killing devices. The site of the novel’s climax, this is naturally where its various themes crystallize. As the small party reaches the village on the castle’s perimeter, they are met with what at first appears to be an enormous army, the size of which guarantees the Tortallans’ defeat. Upon closer inspection, however, they realize that the army is merely an exceptionally convincing illusion that Blayce has conjured to deter his enemies. Behind the false army, they meet the villagers, formerly the Scanran king’s, but now Blayce’s pitifully neglected and hideously abused subjects, and learn that before he started kidnapping Tortallan children, Blayce preyed upon those of the villagers. Brutality, too, is indiscriminate to governing forces. Horrified, Kel wonders about the Scanran king’s callousness: “Did it bother him that those who should be his first concern were now preyed upon by his successor? Or were the killing devices so important that he didn’t care?” (Knight 365). The message here is clear: Military posturing is a form of illusion-making. Behind the illusion, behind the pomp and circumstance involved in beating war drums, the suffering of innocent people looks

240  Whitney S. May the same on both sides. Additionally, it confirms that everyone suffers when war neglects military responsibility in favor of an arms race. The invention of the killing devices not only accounts for this conflict militarily, but the devices themselves also embody it symbolically as perfect illustrations of innocent civilians killed or forced into combat by warring nations. The conflation of soldier and civilian has changed the rules or been refigured after the punctum of 9/11, forcing deeper consideration of where the line between friend and enemy actually lies. Finally, there is also much to be made of Kel’s estimations of the sorcerer who invents and animates the killing devices. The previous two boss villains of Pierce’s Tortallan universe had included a power-mad sorcerer who commanded potency even before he defied the gods to return to life and the Goddess of Chaos herself, respectively. But as Kel finally faces Blayce in Lady Knight’s climax, her first impression is that for a man who brutally and delightedly murders children and weaponizes their souls into monstrous machines, he is shockingly anticlimactic: He is “the worst letdown of her life” (388), “the most commonplace monster she might ever meet” (398). After she dispatches Blayce within a brisk five pages (half the length of Kel’s survey of Haven’s victims), she contemplates the expansive destruction the sorcerer has caused to Tortall and Scanra alike. She wonders abstractly if he was a curse on the world, but dismisses the thought. “No, she decided … The bloody triangle made by Blayce,” as well as his right-hand officer and the warlord who had deployed them, “was sheer, clumsy, human bad luck” (399). The message here is clear: One “Nothing Man,” as Kel calls him, can inflict irreparable damage, and justice must be brought against him. However, that justice will never be as important as his crimes, and it must be focused enough to minimize the potential for even more collateral damage. Rage, she reasons, the likes of which is mobilized as a response to 9/11, cannot accomplish this; instead, the humanity and empathy of grief enable responsible justice over blind vengeance. Appropriately, the epilogue of Lady Knight reveals that in the three months after Kel’s defeat of Blayce and rescue of her people, she has overseen the construction of a new fortified town over Haven’s remains. Rather than rebuild the fort, she has chosen to give it new life and as such, a new name: New Hope. Once a site of gruesome violence and still, in a sense, a burial ground, it has become a place of unity as well as of tribute, in much the same way that One World Trade Center both maintains and evolves the legacy of the Twin Towers. The conclusion of this work of radical fantasy thus both reflects and enables the real-world work of grief and healing that occurs in memorial. Following Jameson’s consideration of historical constraints and their relationship to fantasy, Miéville offers an optimistic take: “No matter

Technology of Anguish  241 how commodified and domesticated the fantastic in its various forms may be,” he writes, “we need fantasy to think the world, and to change it” (48). In the wake of so much suffering first on 9/11, and then of so much more brought on by ensuing retaliatory measures, in the midst of a firestorm of voices calling for brutal, rhetorically masculinized vengeance on many over careful justice against the fewer responsible enemies, this is the primary lesson of war that Pierce worked to deliver to her readers. She encourages them to reconsider what “justice” and “evil” look like, and to decide carefully and for themselves who the real enemy is, as perceptions of this can be illusory. She cautions against unfocused rage, advocating instead for the strength found in grief, healing, and community. In all of these senses, Pierce’s fantasy medium becomes ideal for the delivery of such messages and certainly a useful one through which to navigate national trauma of this nature. In defense of J. R. R. Tolkien on a similar point, Robert Tally, Jr. elegantly sums up this sort of relationship as follows: “Otherworldliness may indeed be the best way of seeing our world with fresh eyes, and, in an age which seems to have forgotten how to think critically, historically, or speculatively, the sort of literary work accomplished by Tolkien in Middle-earth,” or, I’d add, by Pierce in Tortall, “be it labeled fantasy, utopia, or other—is all the more necessary” (54). I believe that Pierce would agree with this assessment of fantasy. In a recent interview with Scott Simon of NPR, Pierce confesses: I try very hard to include elements of reality into everything I do. I think one thing fantasy does, and science fiction as well, is we give kids exposure to parts of the real world at a safe distance, so that they can read about it and think about it, and turn it over, close the book, go away, talk about it with people they trust, then come back and think about it again. (Simon) Ultimately, Pierce’s fantasy, steadied by such deliberate attention to historical constraints and the dialogic interplay evidenced in her statement on NPR, yields an exquisite example of the radical fantasy Jameson pursued. This is demonstrated most clearly in its transcendence of the retrograde escapism both Jameson and Jackson associate with fantasy, as well as its overall capacity not only to make sense of but also to effect change in our real world. Rather than subscribing to a rootedness in the past that so troubles Jackson, Pierce’s radical fantasy emerges to link past, present, and future on the same terms as does trauma. Jacques Derrida insists of 9/11 that the wound remains open by our terror before the future and not only the past … if it is the present or the past, it is only insofar as it bears on its body the terrible sign of what might or perhaps will take

242  Whitney S. May place, which will be worse than anything that has ever taken place. (Borradori 96–97, emphasis in original) If this is the case, then the very boundlessness of radical fantasy offers national imaginaries through which to reconceptualize, and to heal from, national traumas. This is especially true of Lady Knight’s YA format, which positions this trajectory even more lucidly. As children’s literature scholar Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak writes of radical fantasy in YA literature, “By acknowledging children’s impact on society and highlighting the very possibility of achieving intergenerational solidarity, Radical Fantasy texts challenge the notion of childhood as a human resource to be exploited in the future.” With this in mind, it is easy to see why a narrative like Lady Knight remains as urgently needed in 2019 as it was in 2001/2002, as similarly coded rhetorics of grief, rage, and nationalism are once again coopted by American media to manipulate a collective national identity, especially where exploiting childhood and weaponizing refugees is concerned. Lady Knight, through its radical-fantastic conventions, continues to offer meaningful critique of its turbulent historical moment. Making these ideas accessible to readers, especially to children and young adults, empowers them to participate in the crucial project of healing and reconstruction after the attacks, as well as to equipping them to criticize and dismantle these rhetorics where they emerge in other subsequent political agendas. It especially positions young people— rightly, as we see from the Gen Z social activism of our own historical moment—as the inheritors of this project and the architects of the related restorations that are still coming, that are still yet to come. Perhaps inspired by radical fantasy works like Lady Knight, these inheritors and architects will trade technologies of anguish for those of progress and unity. After all, it is fantasy readers, Pierce wrote in an article long before 9/11 in 1993, who “seem to know that what happens in books can be carried over, that the idea of change is universal, and that willpower and work are formidable forces, wherever they are applied” (51).

Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, with Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. University of California Press, 2004, pp. 1–30. Bedard, Paul. “Washington Whispers.” U.S. News & World Report, 29 Oct. 2001, p. 2. Bloodsworth-Lugo, Mary K., and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo. Containing (Un) American Bodies: Race, Sexuality, and Post-9/11 Constructions of Citizenship. Rodopi, 2010.

Technology of Anguish  243 Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. The University of Chicago Press, 2003. Burling, William J. “Periodizing the Postmodern: China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and The Dynamics of Radical Fantasy.” Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 2, 2009, pp. 326–344. Deszcz-Tryhubczak, Justyna. “Reading about Solitary and Collective Action: Social Minds and Radical Fantasy Fiction.” Children’s Literature in Education. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s10583-018-9379-1. Faludi, Susan. The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11. Picador, 2008. “Falwell Apologizes to Gays, Feminists, Lesbians.” CNN, Cable News Network, 14 Sept. 2001, 2:55 AM, edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/14/Falwell. apology/. Freedman, Carl. “A Note on Marxism and Fantasy.” Historical Materialism, eds. China Miéville and Mark Bould, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, pp. 39–49. Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. Routledge, 1998. Jameson, Fredric. “Radical Fantasy.” Historical Materialism, eds. China Miéville and Mark Bould, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, pp. 39–49. Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy. Lugo-Lugo, Carmen R, and Mary K Bloodsworth-Lugo. Feminism after 9/11: Women’s Bodies as Cultural and Political Threat. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Miéville, China. “Editorial Introduction.” Historical Materialism, eds. China Miéville and Mark Bould, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, pp. 39–49. Symposium: Marxism and Fantasy. Morrow, Lance. “The Case for Rage and Retribution.” TIME Magazine, vol. 158, no. 11, 14 Sept. 2001, p. 50. Pierce, Tamora. “Fantasy: Why Kids Read It, Why Kids Need It.” School Library Journal, vol. 39, no. 10, Oct. 1993, pp. 50–51. ———. First Test. Random House, 1999. ———. Lady Knight. Random House, 2002. ———. Page. Random House, 2000. ———. Squire. Random House, 2001. Simon, Scott, and Tamora Pierce. “Tamora Pierce Writes One For The Boys (But Just One) In ‘Tempests And Slaughter.’” NPR Books, 3 Feb. 2018, www.npr. org/2018/02/03/582785250/tamora-pierce-writes-one-for-the-boys-but-justone-in-tempests-and-slaughter. Smelser, Neil J. “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, with Jeffrey C. Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. University of California Press, 2004, pp. 31–59. Steyn, Mark. “Fight Now, Love Later (The Awfulness of an Oprahesque Response).” National Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 15 Oct. 2001, pp. 45–46. Strausbaugh, John. “Don’t Cry For Us, Oklahoma.” American Spectator, vol. 35, no. 1, Jan./Feb. 2002, pp. 33–34. Suvin, Darko. “Considering the Sense of ‘Fantasy’ or ‘Fantastic Fiction’: An Effusion.” Extrapolation, vol. 41, no. 3, 2000, pp. 209–247. Takacs, Stacy. “Politics, Perception, and Popular Culture: The Shaping of 9/11.” Oklahoma Humanities, Fall 2011, pp. 23–26, www.okhumanities.

244  Whitney S. May org/Websites/ohc/images/Magazines/fall_2011/Politics%20Perception%20 and%20Popular%20Culture.pdf. Tally, Robert T. “Places Where the Stars Are Strange: Fantasy and Utopia in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth.” Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey, with John Wm. Houghton, Janet Brennan Croft, Nancy Martsch, John D. Rateliff and Robin Anne Reid, McFarland, 2014, pp. 41–56. Wilson, Marie. “‘Letter to the Editor.’” The New York Times, TNYT, Archives, 3 Dec. 2004, www.nytimes.com/2004/12/03/opinion/where-are-thewomen-801399.html. Winfrey, Oprah. “Clip of New York Prayer Service,” Oprah 2.0, C-SPAN, Video Library, 23 Sept. 2001, www.c-span.org/video/?c4674048/ oprah-winfrey-20.

16 Women with Swords Reinvention of Female Warriors in Contemporary Chinese Women’s Writings Aviva Xue Gender equality in China has worsened year after year, falling from 61 in 2010 to 106 in 2019 in the ranking of Gender Gap Reports of World Economic Forum. Examining the statistics, we can find a dramatic imbalance between Chinese women’s social contributions as professional and technical workers and their lack of power in politics and culture. For both years 2010 and 2019, the female-to-male ratio for professional and technical workers remained at 1.07, meaning even more women working as professional and technical workers than men. Together with comparatively high labor participation, it contributes to China’s higher scores in the subindex Economic Participation and Opportunity. But another statistic under this subindex, the female-male ratio for legislator, senior officials, and managers was only 0.20. The lowest sex ratio of declared births among all the countries ranked exposes the tip of the iceberg of Chinese misogynistic culture; selective abortion and the massacre of females at birth has been a common practice during most of one of the world’s longest patriarchal histories.1 Severe social injustice contributes to the feminist awareness of Chinese women, especially young independent professional workers in cities. The worsening of women’s living conditions in the last decade coincides with the emergence of online feminism of China on Weibo, the largest online community, which has formed a complete discourse including opposition to “surrogate” motherhood and marriage, as well as a call for mutual aid among women. But even earlier, from the turn of 21st century, Chinese feminism has found its expressions in online literature, which is among the most popular forms of cultural production among youngsters in contemporary China. The female-oriented online literature station Jin Jiang/晋江, for example, possesses 2.77 million novels of different genres, 70,000 contracted writers, and millions of registered readers. 2

1 All the statistics come from The Global Gender Gap Report, World Economic Forum, 2010 and 2018. 2 From the official website of Jin Jiang: www.jjwxc.net/aboutus/#fragment-30

246  Aviva Xue Chinese female writers seem to be reluctant to establish feminist utopias, even in their wildest fantasies. On the other hand, their descriptions of women confronting the world as warriors on an individual level are remarkably forceful. They adopt individual sufferings to point to systematic persecutions. Enthusiastic utopian fantasies could appear far-fetched to Chinese feminists who are in a situation of political urgency in dealing with solid phallocentric constructions confronting them every day. They begin with reinventing female warriors from the Wuxia literary tradition and then write beyond them to establish their own terms of discourse. This chapter will mainly deal with two contemporary female writers, Cang Yue/沧月 and Piao Deng/飘灯, who both began with online writing and then had their representative works published in print, enjoying a wide readership among young women. Cang Yue’s Ting Xue Mansion Series/听雪楼系列 (2011) is a story of pathetic female heroism. By putting natural, independent, and professional women against an overwhelming misogynistic background of Wuxia, it betrays the contemporary professional females’ indomitable attempts to struggle against the persecuting mechanism, to open the road for later generations. Mirror Series/镜系列 (2016), a later work of the same author, is more mature artistically. It buries anti-patriarchy in the anti-slavery epic. Piao Deng’s The Queen of Amazon/亚马逊女王 (2009) is a book of ambitious political metaphors, with a variety of races including mysterious Amazon female warriors, Spanish colonizers, Native Americans, Black slaves, and Chinese confronting one other against a wide geographical background from the Amazon Rainforest across the Atlantic to Spain. It discusses the choices of Amazon women facing new-coming white capitalist patriarchy and also the local feudal patriarchy. Taken female warriors as embodiments of Chinese professional women, the novels are reflections of women’s consistent struggles against the overwhelming patriarchal hegemony in real life, and their self-defense against being othered by phallocentric languages. Through the writing and reading of female warriors, women are getting back the power to define themselves independently of men. Through readings of ancient texts, we first observe how female warriors in male-defined Wuxia tradition are alienated from authentic women, and function as a requisition of female power from prehistorical symbols for patriarchy constructions. Second, by describing a female warrior’s struggles in the misogynistic Wuxia word, the works reflect female warriors/workers breaking into homosocial male conglomerates with superb professional skills and their zero-sum game against solid constructions of patriarchy and overwhelming misogynistic culture. Finally, we focus on women’s fantasies of imaginary worlds created by themselves. The world settings are not for creating feminist utopias, but function as methodologies to deconstruct the patriarchal mechanism, disenchanting history, and phallocentric cultural myths.

Women with Swords  247 Because of increasingly strict cultural control from the government and the restoration of patriarchal traditions implied by the authorities, feminist expressions in online literature have been hindered severely in recent years. Jin Jiang, the largest female-oriented online literature station, has been closed down due to overall censorship in May 2019. The novels about autonomous women are targeted in cyberbullying that accuses the female authors of anti-patriotism or humiliating patriarchal heroes. Simultaneously, large quantities of female-oriented online novels, as well as their TV adaptations, begin to eulogize female dependence on men and patriarchal hierarchy in couples and families, glamorizing violence and male-dominance and humiliating intelligent female characters. The female-oriented online literature is being depoliticized and degraded.

Mythology of Men-Made Female Warriors Originating from records of wandering swordsmen or assassins in historical texts as Sima Qian’s Shi Ji/史记 (about 91 BC), Wuxia/武侠 is a term referring to individual heroes with martial arts skills and chivalrous deeds, and the female ones are called Nü Xia/女侠. As early as in Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907), some chuan qi/传奇 (meaning legendary stories) have taken female warriors as protagonists. In the middle of 20th century, a body of modern Wuxia literature was defined by works of Liang Yusheng/梁羽生 (1924–2009), Jing Yong/金庸 (1924–2018), Gu Long/古 龙 (1938–1985), and Woon Swee Oan/温瑞安 (1954–). The fervent patriotic spirits, romantic love, and individual freedom against Confucianism in the modern Wuxia echoed the epic urgency of anti-colonialism and national revolution, which made it gain much popularity. With the prosperity of Hong Kong Wuxia films and television, Wuxia culture has reached its highest point, becoming one generation’s common memory in all Chinese societies including Hong Kong, Taiwan, the mainland, and the Chinese communities in Malaysia. It is often assumed that the figuration of female warriors “runs contrary to such a patriarchal construct” that “deemed the feminine body as weak and pathological” (Sheau-Shi 12). However, through a closer examination, we can find these female warriors are actually disconnected with women and fundamentally connected with patriarchal narrations. They are more than tokens, but a part of patriarchal construction. “Patriarchy asserts its power over others … by using the ancient symbol of nonhierarchical, gynocentric transforming energy” (Daly 82). For China, consistent legitimation of men’s political and cultural hegemony by Confucianism has been supplemented with intermittent pleasure-taking emotional catharsis such as legendary tales, to soothe the repressions resulting from the dehumanizing legitimation. To understand the prototype of female warriors, or, on the other hand, that of

248  Aviva Xue gentle male intellectuals, which look like reverse of patriarchal gender stereotypes at first glance, one “must learn to double-double unthink to go past the obvious level of male-made reversals and find the underlying lie” (Daly 60). One chapter Marquis of Lu on Punishments or Lü Xing/吕刑 in the first compiled historical documents of China, Shang Shu/尚书, 3 which literally means The Book, The Classic of History, or The Book of Documents, mentioned an ambiguous but essential concept in Chinese political philosophy and culture history, Jue Di Tian Tong/绝地天通, meaning “make an end of the communications between earth and heaven.” When interpreting the concept, historians believe originally it is forbidding descents of spirits among either conquered Miao people or ordinary people, realizing a better political control by depriving their divinity. “Religion is an instrument of the ruling class; ordinary people has been dejected from touching divine power./宗教是统治阶级的政治工具, 平民染指神权必然会遭到反对”4 (Xiao Qi 41). But this primary intention of this political act is probably targeted to women, who enjoy a high status in ancient religions. In ancient historical book Guo Yu/国语, Guan Yifu/观射父 explained this concept Jue Di Tian Tong/绝地天通 to the King of Kingdom Chu/楚. He said: appointed south minister Chong to administrate divine affairs concerning spirits, and minister of fire Li to administrate secular affairs concerning people, restoring the old orders, prohibiting the two sides from mingling with each other, which is called making an end of communication between heaven and earth. /命南正重司天以属神, 命火正黎司地以属民，使复旧常，无相侵渎，是谓绝地天通。 Prohibiting the divine and the secular from mingling with each other implies depriving the ancient divine religions of their actual political power, opening the way for the hegemony of non-divine Confucianism in later history. Attributing political actions to the purpose of “restoring the old orders,” which is a typical political justification in ancient China. Due to the ancestor worship tradition, the old being the perfect was political righteousness. But the right of explaining what the old had been

3 Just like the Bible, the writing times of this book have always been an intricate archaeological issue, for it probably both includes original historical materials from early Zhou Dynasty (11 BC) and writings of later generations. The chapter Lü Xing, however, is generally believed by Chinese scholars to be one of the earliest materials. See Ma Xiaohong. On the Writing Time of Lü Xing. Academic Journal of Jinyang, 1989(6). 4 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author.

Women with Swords  249 like lay only in the hands of patriarchal rulers or male scholars. Like others, Guan Tifu’s reports of the old time fell into a typical ambiguity. But one interesting thing in his statement is that in the old times, divine spirits can descend on both men and women. “When the spirits descend on men, he is called Xi/觋(wizard or priest); on women, she is called Wu/巫(witch or priestess)./在男曰觋，在女曰巫.” The Chinese character Xi/觋 is a Wu/巫 plus the character Jian/见, meaning see. So originally, Xi/觋 can be explained as someone who can see or pay regular visits to Wu/巫 in sacred temples, or as someone who travels into ordinary people, providing religious services, and so can be seen by ordinary people. In either way, Xi/觋 is probably lower-ranked, supplementary or assisting, while Wu/巫 is primary and closer to divinity. If the two roles had really been taken, respectively, by men and women as Guan Yifu/观射父 said, it only implies that women ranked higher in terms of divinity and had actual control over the ancient religions. This power has been permanently lost with the political struggle of Jue Di Tian Tong/绝地天通. Male Xi/觋 lost their power, too. But new ideologies such as Rites of Zhou/周礼, a whole patriarchal gender institution formed around 10th century BC (and later, Confucianism originated from it), guaranteed political powers distributed only among men from royal courts to every family. The only hints of past glories in women were the obscure belief of their closer relations to the magical, the nature or the supernatural, which, however, was even not allowed to be talked about officially: “The subjects on which the Master (Confucius) did not talk, were: extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings./子不语怪力 乱神” (Legge 201). He did not talk about it, but he did not deny or abolish it, either. This tricky gesture of Confucius interestingly betrays something essential in maintaining phallocentric political and cultural institutions. The secret lies in its creating the otherness by dividing and keeping some parts of life in the unmentionable corner, and in its relying on the discrimination against it, while sucking blood from, the unspeakable otherness, as exemplified in the figuration of female warriors. Take legendary tales of the Tang Dynasty (AD 618–907) The Hermit Lady Nie (Nie Yinniang/聂隐娘) and Red Thread (Hongxian/红线) as examples. Red Thread is only a female slave who plays Ruan/阮, a Chinese musical instrument, to please her master lord at first. But with her magical ability, her status has actually lifted to that resembling a knight or consultant to the Lord. However, it turns out that Red Thread has been a male doctor in the last life and caused a pregnant woman dead with two fetuses because of a medical mistake, therefore is degraded to be born female this life. She is a fake woman, a male soul that takes over the female body. Her promotion in social status and eventual freedom are all coming from this identity.

250  Aviva Xue The stories of Nie Yinniang and Red Thread are woven around their interactions with the orthodox Confucianism social construction, and end when they leave the construction. Their disappearance from ordinary people’s sights leaves readers an enjoyment of individual autonomous spirits and mysterious natural power outside patriarchy. But in fact, it just illustrates the fact that they have no place within the patriarchy order. After using their power to mend the disorder which is rooted in patriarchal mechanism, they’re exiled to the otherness and stayed that way. “No one has seen Yinniang from now on/自此无复有人见隐娘矣” (Pei Xing 1012). That means she is socially invisible and silenced. What if the female warriors do not come for patriarchy’s rescue? What if they come for their own construction? In the modern Wuxia, such female warriors are portrayed into a typical prototype called Yao Nü/妖女, evil and bewitching women. They function as reflections of male protagonists’ inner requests for individual liberation, to rebel patriarchal Confucianism doctrines that persecuting them. Li Shengnan/厉胜男 and Lian Nishang/练霓裳 in novels of Liang Yusheng, or Xiao Longnv/小龙女 and Huang Rong/黄蓉 in these of Jin Yong are all belong to this type. However, the rebellion of male protagonists in modern Wuxia has always stayed at half-way and then returned to their due positions in patriarchy mechanism sooner or later. But their attempts to discipline the female warriors are consistent. Huang Rong, raised by her anti-Confucianism father, used to be a free woman out of the bonds of patriarchal rites, but she totally adopts her husband’s political ideology and sacrifices her whole life to it, thus turning into a boring stereotypical worrying wife and mother. Lian Nishang, having been an orphan raised by wolves and with a higher self-consciousness, refuses such disciplines. Therefore, not only her love with Zhuo Yihang is impossible, but she could only settle down in Mount Tianshan, a marginal region far from Han Chinese cultural centers. Female warriors are consistently disciplined, criminalized, and judged by phallocentric culture. What’s more, the homosocial male bonds and ultraviolence especially toward female characters betrays the misogynistic core of Wuxia literature. Hurting, raping, or killing women function as entertaining and exciting points, such as in many novels of male Wuxia writers as Woon Swee Oan. In the male characters, there may have some realistic reflections of social upheavals, although with boastful masculinity and male heroic deeds, while with regard to female characters, mythology and misogyny dominate.

Alienation and Tragedy: Women’s Narrations What female Wuxia writers have done is more than restoring to female warriors the subjectivity or the self. They are also bringing about social or cultural criticism through putting autonomous female warriors into

Women with Swords  251 the male-set misogynistic Wuxia world, dominated by “the imagination of a realm of male homosocial relationships encompassing not only the horizontal ties between sworn brothers but also the vertical or hierarchical ones between masters and disciples” (Yip 85). The conflicts between female warriors and the Wuxia world reflect the alienated life of professional women amid the omnipresence of phallocentric hegemony in real life in the late 20th century. In other words, women with swords and women with professions overlap each other. Ting Xue Mansion/听雪楼, a series of novellas by Cang Yue/沧月 first published in 2001, borrows some settings from Woon Swee Oan’s Wuxia novel series Tales of Hero, Who Is the Hero/说英雄谁是英雄, but tells a different story by letting in a female protagonist Shu Jingrong/ 舒靖容. Compared to Woon’s novels, which celebrate aggressive male adventures and heroism, Cang Yue describes bound lives, constrained bodies, scarcity of choices, and overwhelming injustice. Female warriors with superb martial arts (professional skills) have no choice but to turn against the persecuting social and cultural institutions desperately at the cost of their lives with the aim to save her own kind, to open a road for younger women to survive. The plot in Woon’s novel is focused on loyalty and betrayal among three sworn brothers, while female warriors function only marginally as their girlfriends or enemy. When Bai Choufei/白愁飞 and Wang Xiaoshi/ 王小石 swore to be brothers of Su Mengzhen/苏梦枕, master of a powerful gang-like organization who suffers from severe tuberculosis, and joined his organization as subordinates, a male homosexual hierarchical system was formed. Cang Yue adopted almost all the settings in Su Mengzhen, including his status and illness, in creating Xiao Yiqing/萧 忆情 in her books, but replaced the other two male protagonists with a female warrior, Shu Jingrong/舒靖容. Through focusing on the relation of mutual attraction and destruction between the two protagonists, the author managed an experiment of women’s treading into the hierarchical system originally designed by and for men. First, the fundamental reason for all the conflicts and the tragic end between male ruler Xiao and female warrior Shu lies in the contradiction between the aim of dying and the aim of living and curing. Tuberculosis, a fatal illness in ancient time, bears more significant metaphoric meanings in Cang Yue’s writings. Xiao Yiqing’s tuberculosis represents his living while dying, and a complicated mixing of death-phobia and death worship at the core of the male ruling mechanism and phallocentric culture: “Patriarchy is itself the prevailing religion of the entire planet, and its essential message is necrophilia” (Daly 39). Xiao is described as “he is enthusiastic about power and enjoys killing, but afraid of death; He is remorselessly determined and rational, but simultaneously very lonely and fragile. /他重权嗜杀，却害怕死亡；他冷淡决绝，为人极重理性，可另一 面却又非常寂寞和脆弱” (Cang Yue 35–36).

252  Aviva Xue All the contradictions are interwoven and inseparable. Behind his fear of death, there is the fundamental worship of death and hostility toward lives. The heroine Shu Jingrong managed to bring back a kind of herb, in an eager attempt to cure him; however, Xiao got angry and split the precious herb soup during their trivial quarreling. The fact is, he refused to be cured. As the highest ruler of Ting Xue Mansion, and powerful dominator in the cruel hierarchical Wuxia world, Xiao is both dehumanized by and dependent on the power of death. Although there remains some natural humanity longing for someone equal to him, he has long lost the ability to treat others equally. Even though he has already found someone, he forces her to kneel before him several times. Necrophilia is glorified: “Your finest clothes are those you wear as soldiers” (Woolf 21). What Xiao Yiqing needs is not curing medicine, but a death monument: Because life is too short, he only wants to unify the whole martial arts world before death, which has been split for more than thirty years. He intends to make himself an everlasting grandeur monument with unprecedented exploits. In this way, even he died, he would still be living in legends. 因为生命太过短暂，所以他只想在死之前统一分崩离析三十多年的江 湖，他想用前人没有的功业，为自己铸造一个永恒的丰碑。那么即使死 了，他还会活在传说里。(Cang Yue 2011, p. 19) Shu, on the other hand, is described as a survivor and a struggling dissident. Her father’s suicide and “intolerable discrimination, loneliness, exclusion and exile/令任何人都无法忍受的歧视、寂寞、排斥和放逐” (Cang Yue 2011, p. 12) at childhood leave her lifelong trauma, trapping her in a self-abhorrence and a feeling of being deserted. She shows much resentment both to human beings killed by her and to herself as a killer. This traumatic self-abhorrence explains her complicated feelings toward Xiao, a mixture of hatred and admiration. However, Shu made persistent efforts to cure herself through saving and protecting other women. Bonds among women are of special significance here. Only by saving her own kinds can she soothe her antagonism toward the world and toward her own fate. But these attempts are always interrupted and destroyed by Xiao Yiqing, who tries to draw her down to him, saying “We’re accomplices … No matter to the heaven or to the hell, we go together /我们是共犯 … 将来无论上天堂还是下地狱，我 们都会在一起的” (186). The repeated failure, the incapacity of making a difference but to see other women doom, adds to her desperation. Finally, she launches fatal strike against him and dies in the struggle. The mutual destruction of Xiao and Shu is inevitable, because it is not personal. The patriarchal core of contemporary Chinese political and cultural constructions goes against women with superb professional

Women with Swords  253 skills who are longing for independence and human right on every level. The peace which is barely maintained by the high power of the former and the endurance of the later doesn’t seem to be able to last forever. For Shu, the struggle is doomed to be self-destructive because she finds herself in a world where a misogynistic persecuting mechanism is justified on every level. In The Bell of Maiden Guarding Shu/护花铃, a novel of the series, Shu Jingrong’s fate has been foretold as “covered by the light of death star/冥星照命,” which would bring disaster to people close to her. It caused her to be discriminated against by her martial arts master in childhood. Significantly, she is not the death star, but imprisoned under its shadow. She has suffered not only from her father’s suicide and her first love’s death, but also from the misogynistic belief that she is to blame for all her misfortunes. Shu’s sword, Blood Rose, is a reflection of her character, her alter self. The personified sword manages to speak out for its dead/silenced master as the narrator. Blood Rose is considered to be an evil sword that would bring misfortune to its users. Blood Rose defends itself at first, “but I don’t want to kill anyone, including all my owners. In fact, every time sipping human blood, I feel sick. /可是我并不想杀任何人，包括我的历任 主人，甚至在每一次饮了人类的血的时候，我都忍不住想吐” (9), but after Shu’s death, it gives up arguing in great sorrow, sinking into self-blame. Individual voice is fragmented by consistent negations and criminalization from the dominant discourse. The relations between women are the only resort for healing and mutual salvation. Shi Mingyan/石明烟, a young girl who didn’t shed any tear upon her kinsmen’s death, is Shu’s younger alter self. Shu is desperate to protect her, to guarantee her living on “complete and happy/完 整、幸福地过完人生” (24). However, to avenge her family, Shi Mingyan cuts off her own feet, making Shu assume that Xiao ordered this. After Shu and Xiao’s death, Shi Mingyan became the new master of Ting Xue Mansion, according to Xiao’s last will. Years later, the handicapped girl makes her reconciliation with Shu before Blood Rose. The sword narrates, ‘Sister Jing, Sister Jing!’ She calls the name in a low voice, holding me tightly in arms, putting her warm face against my cold body. I feel there are something warm splitting on me. This time, I know, it is tear./’靖姐姐 … 靖姐姐！’她低低唤了一声，抱着我，把温暖的脸颊贴 在了我冰冷的脊背上。然后，我感到有什么湿热的东西溅落。这一次，我 知道，那是泪水。 (37) This reconciliation brings Shi Mingyan power to break through this suffocating world. Shu has trodden the way at the cost of her own life for the younger one’s eventual self-liberation; the mechanism which tortured Shu all her life would no longer trap Shi Mingyan. “She steps out

254  Aviva Xue without a glance back/头也不回地走了出去” (38). Likewise, female writers begin to exit the hostile Wuxia world of unnecessary ultraviolence, and move on to freer expressions.

Female Warriors Surpassing Wuxia Tradition From the late 20th century, modern Wuxia has gradually declined. In contemporary Chinese online literature, the popularity of Wuxia has fallen far behind those works classified into Xianxia/仙侠, meaning Taoist swordsmen, Qihuan/奇幻 or Xuanhuan/玄幻, meaning fantasies or strange tales. In creating fantastic worlds and defining the histories, geographies, religions, and myths, and the female writers go into a deeper level in exposing and deconstructing the mythologies of patriarchy social and cultural mechanism, thus bring in a more open and forceful revolt against it. Cang Yue’s Mirror Series (consisting of six thick books) is an epic of all the forces joining hands to revolt against patriarchal tyranny, embodied as the demon. The persecuting and dehumanizing nature of patriarchy is illustrated through tracing its artificial historical and religion construction. The historical records of Kong Sang Empire have been falsified, erasing the records about the first Empress who has risen up against her tyrannical husband. One of the twin divinities that people worship as the embodiment as their Emperor is the demonic Destroyer, who would take control of the Emperor and bring massacres. Prince Zhen Lan is a “bastard son” of the former Emperor, who was forced to the capital, because the Emperor had no other offspring. His mother and her people in the tribe are slaughtered because they refuse to give him out, thus one of the earliest political struggles – patriarchy robbing offspring from matriarchy, taking children away from their mothers’ sides. The merfolk race, which is described as beautiful and artistic, has been forced to leave their hometown sea and has been enslaved for seven thousand years. Their fish-like lower bodies are brutally cut apart to be legs; they are kept in cages, forced to shed tears which would turn to pearls and weave Jiaoxiao/鲛绡, a precious textile in Chinese folktales produced by merfolk. Because of their beauty, they are also used as prostitutes. As home slaves, they must remain in custody, not allowed on streets without their masters. All these abuses are obviously what patriarchy has done to women, from physical deformation as foot binding, to economical exploitation and prostitution. Patriarchal mechanisms take the form of a demon spirit, or the Destroyer in these novels. The Destroyer revives itself continuously in patriarchal rulers’ bodies one generation after another. Almost all the male protagonists are in danger of being taken over by the Destroyer. The first Emperor Lang Xuan has never died. In his own coffin, in addition to his Emperor clothes, he put a mirror where that is supposed to be his face.

Women with Swords  255 Seven thousand years later, when his last offspring Zhen Lan opens the coffin, what he sees is his own face reflected in the mirror. This not only triggers Zhen Lan’s traumatic memory of being forced to take the role of patriarchal prince but also realizes that on this position, under this mechanism, he could hardly maintain his self. He determines to leave no offspring, cutting down the patriarchy bloodline. On the other hand, the female warriors fight against the Destroyer persistently, resorting to their power from the Creator. Empress Bai Wei/ 白薇 rises up against her tyrannical husband in an attempt to release the merfolk’s patron god, Loong. The author models the language of ancient Chinese historical texts, restoring female warriors into recorded history: Emperor got furious, leading his army racing after. They launched fierce battle at the foot of Jiu Yi Mount, which lasted for months. Empress’s elder brother surrendered secretly in fear of punishment, causing the defeat of Empress’s army. Empress employing her superb power, confronted thousands of men by herself. Emperor went out and fought with her. Empress recessed to Cang Wu Abyss, attempting to break the golden chain that locked Loong but exhausted. Seeing Emperor approaching with his sword, Empress laughed and cursed, “A Lang, A Lang! I would die with my eyes open, to see the day when this wicked Empire falls!” Empress cut off her finger to remove the ring, her blood split on Emperor’s face. There died she. /帝怒不可遏，发兵急追，于九嶷山下 与后鏖战，经月不休。后长兄惧祸而暗投帝，后军遂败。后灵力高绝，虽 千万人不可围。帝亲出，与之战。后败而奔至苍梧之渊下，欲开金索而力 竭。见帝提剑至，知不可为，乃大笑，咒曰： “阿琅，阿琅！愿吾死而眼不 闭，见如此空桑何日亡！” 语毕，断指褪戒，血溅帝面，乃死。(Cang Yue, Mirror I, p. 345) After her death, although the Emperor is said to sink in great grief, he has never thought of following her last political request. On the contrary, he uses all her power in the ring that comes from the Creator to put another lock on Loong. But women’s spirits are immortal, which revives again and again. Bai Ying, believed as Empress Bai Wei from samsara, who has been almost burnt to death because of her love with a merfolk slave, Su Mo, comes back for the rescue of the last Kong Sang people at the fall of the Empire. “Seven thousand years later, you returned to your people, leading the soldiers one more time against me. This time, unlike seven thousand years before, my anger ceased. All my heart is peace and gratitude. /七千 年后，你回到了族人之中，再度带着战士们向我宣战！这一刻，我再也没有七 千年前的愤怒，心里只是一片释然和感激” (Cang Yue, Mirror IV, p. 343). Female warriors also function as ties joining all oppressed forces together against patriarchy. Out of intense hatred to the oppressor

256  Aviva Xue race, Su Mo betrayed Bai Ying, causing her sentenced death by fire. Despite his betrayal, Bai Ying still sets him free and requests a goddess to help the blind puppeteer pass the boundary safely. When Su Mo came back to lead his race to liberty, Bai Ying persuaded Su Mo to put aside his hatred and cooperate with the last Kong Sang people, “At least you can trust me … If he betrayed this convention, I would stop him at cost of everything! /至少请相信我！ … 若真岚将来毁约, 我便会不惜一切阻止他” (Mirror I, 316). In addition to describing the epic slave emancipation or empire restoration, the books do not neglect the dark side in all kinds of phallocentric political struggles. The abuse of women is universal. The author is eager to describe pains, even those of minor characters. Court of Stars and Sea of Clouds is the biggest brothel of merfolk prostitutes and simultaneously an important secret spot of the merfolk rebellious army. While committing to setting more warriors free, the brothel also abuses prostitutes of their own race. When female warrior Xiang is taken good care of in the secret room, Ling Yin, a merfolk child, was forced to take medicine to change her ungendered child body to female one to please her master who just bought her. “There’s a voice filling the corridor, so sharp as to almost break people’s eardrums. The sharp voice makes out endless groaning and crying, and violent breath, as if her heart and lungs are being torn apart. /楼道里充斥着一个声音，几乎 撕破了人的耳膜。那个尖厉的声音在不停地呻吟和哭泣，剧烈地喘息，撕心 裂肺” (Mirror IV, p. 71). Taking the background of the Amazon rainforest in 16th century, Piao Deng/飘灯’s The Queen of Amazon/亚马逊女王 is also a fantasy full of political metaphors. In this book, Spanish Catholic church secretly joined hands with a noble vampire family, appointing vampires as priests. Medina, a Spanish colonizer who is relentlessly immoral and greedy for gold, devoured the God of Death at its weakest time and turned into the God of Death himself. As a representative of capitalism that has accomplished deicide, he embodies a more relentless and powerful patriarchy ruling. His skeletons, when constructing castles for Lord Medina mechanically, are singing a song “we skeletons have power” as a mockery of the famous Chinese song in the Maoist age “we workers have power,” betraying the common male-dominating nature from capitalism to socialism of the Soviet Union’s type. On the other hand, tortures and persecutions against women are universal, from indigenous women in the Amazon rainforest raped by white colonizers to black mothers on slave ships watching her babies being shot and killed. And also, there’s a girl from Ming Dynasty with secret mission to revive Chinese civilization called Red of the Oriental, the name of a widely known song eulogizing Chairman Mao and often implying the renewal of China in Chinese context. She is supposed to sacrifice everything for this mission, including her life and love.

Women with Swords  257 When Amazon women having indulging in their paradise for seven thousand years must confront patriarchy invasion, the author re-studies patriarchy through their eyes. Separating women from their mothers and sisters is a patriarchy trick to break them down one by one. Siren has been allured to Medina’s ship, but she has never accepted Medina’s sadistic way of love. When Medina allures her that if she falls in love with him, he will give her freedom, Siren thinks “How this man dare talk about freedom before an Amazon, and in such an arrogant manner  – give you. /这个男人居然敢在亚马逊人面前谈及自由，而且用的 是居高临下的两个字 – 给你” (Piao Deng, p. 48). Siren is forced into patriarchal order, because her matriarchal Kingdom Amazon has deserted and exiled her. Although she never gives up her autonomous mind, her Self, she, as a female individual, is too weak to confront the whole patriarchy mechanism. The description of the dilemma of the Amazon Kingdom betrays the author’s disbelief in feminist utopia, especially amid patriarchy mechanisms. Facing Medina’s colonizing threat, the democracy of the Amazon Kingdom collapses. The new Queen Shia established iron and blood system under her absolute leadership. Amazon women who have given up weapons seven thousand years ago and are “fascinated with arts and construction, and despised violence and killing/醉心于艺术和建设，鄙视 暴力和杀戮” (16) are forced to restore the ancient traditions of Amazon female warriors, including cutting off or burning the right breast. The mutilation of female bodies is misogynistic and the presumption that breasts will hider a woman in using bow and arrow is ridiculous, just like other men-made myth to drive women out from many fields, from archery to driving, from army to school. But here, the author tends to believe that to defend their land from patriarchal colonization, women must be more relentless than men, even injuring their natural instincts. It leaves an ontological problem of female warriors, that is, are women and warriors compatible identities by nature? Without patriarchal threat, would women still choose violence? When the free citizens of the Amazon Kingdom indulge in arts, they do not know there are a team of Amazon warriors carrying on endless battles behind a door that would never open again, protecting the Kingdom from invaders and death spirits. Women’s kingdoms have never been safe but are surrounded by hostile opponents. Conservatism has never stopped their attacks on feminist movements. In a country that has undergone radical communist revolution and then abrupt restoration of capitalism, nationalism, and Confucianism, and witnessing women’s social status move from improving to falling, Chinese women of the post-1980s and post-1990s generation are inclined to believe more in the necessity of constant personal striving, which is reflected in the imagination of female warriors. The goal here is empowerment on a level deep enough to act beyond the patriarchal jungles, cutting through the miasmas that hold women back

258  Aviva Xue through internalizing their own oppression. The sword-wielding woman is a fierce personal symbol that is profoundly political; the government has now recognized this, and penalties for transgressing are high. The complexity and inventiveness of feminist online literature, however, will persist in its magical, protean ability to take on new guises, forever evading the enemy.

Works Cited Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990 (1978). James Legge, trans. 1893. Confucius Analects. In The Chinese Classics, Volume 1. Taipei: Southern Materials Center, 1985. Sheau-Shi, Ngo. “Nüxia: Historical Depiction and Modern Visuality.” Asian Journal of Women’s Studies, V. 20, I. 3, 2014, pp. 7–26. Woolf, Virginia. Three Guineas. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 1966 (1938). Yip, Man-Fung. Martial Arts Cinema and Hong Kong Modernity: Aesthetics, Representation, Circulation. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2017. 沧月. 听雪楼·血薇.长春：北方妇女儿童出版社, 2011. ———. 镜·双城. 北京联合出版公司, 2016. ———. 镜·辟天. 北京联合出版公司, 2016. [Cang Yue. Ting Xue Mansion: Blood Rose. Changchun: Northern China Women & Children Publishing House, 2011. ———. Mirror I. & IV. Beijing United Publishing Co., Ltd, 2016]. 裴铏. 聂隐娘. 全唐小说·第二卷. 山东文艺出版社, 1993. [Pei, Xing. Nie Yiniang. From the Complete Collection of Tales of Tang Dynasty, Volume II. Jinan: Shangdong Literature and Arts Publishing House, 1993.] 飘灯. 亚马逊女王. 江苏文艺出版社, 2009. [Piao Deng. The Queen of Amazon. Nanjing: Jiangsu Literature and Art Publishing House, 2009.] 肖琦.”绝地天通”考辨.中国哲学史, 2019(4). [Xiao Qi. A Study on “Jue Di Tian Tong.” History of Chinese Philosophy, 2019(4), pp. 37–43].

Notes on Contributors

Hakyoung Ahn is an advanced Ph.D. candidate and graduate instructor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University. She is currently working on her dissertation, “Rape Culture and the Illusion of Empowerment in Contemporary Transnational Literature,” which explores structural gendered violence and its manifestations in the era of transnationalism. Her article, “Queer Eyes and Gendered Violence in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India,” has recently been published in Journal of Postcolonial Writing (forthcoming, 2019). Augusta Atinuke Irele  is a joint Ph.D. Candidate in Africana Studies and Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches undergraduate courses on AfricanAmerican, African, and World Literature. Her research centers on contemporary African migrant narratives and notions of diaspora and African belonging and unbelonging in 21st-century African literature. She has presented at numerous conferences, including the Afro European Studies Conference, The American Comparative Literature Association, the Northeast Modern Language Studies Association, and the Modern Language Association. Her current project explores the components of the global African novel and considers the many ways migrant African subjects express and explore their simultaneous belonging to the continent and elsewhere. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Megan E. Cannella  is a Ph.D. candidate in the English department at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on narratives of motherhood and motherwork in 21st-century American speculative fiction. She teaches classes in American culture, composition, and gender studies. She has published on the works of Margaret Atwood, as well as the works of Philip K. Dick and Kazuo Ishiguro, respectively. Please contact her at [email protected]. Clarissa Castaneda has a PhD in English from UC Riverside and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona. Her research interests include poetics, Latin and Native American literatures, American Ethnic Literature, hybrid texts, and visual culture. Her research is guided by the theoretical

260  Notes on Contributors frameworks of border-consciousness, survivance, and decolonization. She is interested in scholarship related to form and symbolism, memory in relation to ephemera and the body, the counter-historical, archival practice and theory, and conscientization. Rather than limit her work to a time period, geographic area, or art-type, her interests are predicated on connections between architectures of sociocultural and sociopolitical otherness. Liliana Chávez Díaz  is a postdoctorate researcher at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. Her current research focuses on the representation of traveling in contemporary Latin American women writers. She holds a PhD in Spanish from University of Cambridge and a master’s in Latin American Studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She is interested in nonfiction narratives, particularly in the relationship between journalism and literature in Latin America. Her journalistic work has been published in Mexican print and online media. Dr. Mayy ElHayawi is an Associate Professor of English Poetry at Ain Shams University, Egypt. She was a postdoctoral Fulbright Alumna at Stanford University, the Leader of the Fulbright Humanities Circle in Egypt and a guest speaker at different universities including Yale, UC Berkeley, UC Merced, Stanford, Florida Atlantic University, San Francisco State University and the University of Texas, Kingsville. She has published a book titled Paradoxes of Diaspora in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, and a number of articles and poems in international anthologies and journals including Universal Oneness, Verbal Art, Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, Other Modernities and Montreal Writes. Her areas of research include diaspora literature, gender studies, digital humanities and media studies. Payel Ghosh is working as an Assistant Professor in Rabindra Bharati University, India, where she teaches English Literature. She is also a visiting faculty in many other institutions in India, like the Indian Association of Cultivation of Sciences, Lady Brabourne College and Jadavpur University. She is pursuing her Ph.D. from the Department of English, Jadavpur University on the rise of the subaltern counterpublic among the Naga women of India. She can be contacted at [email protected]. C. R. Grimmer (they/she) is a poet, scholar, and lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle and Bothell campuses with an MFA, MA, and PhD. They host and produce The Poetry Vlog (TPV) as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Public Scholar Fellow and a Jack Straw Artist Support Fellow. TPV is a public, open access scholarship video and podcast project dedicated to building queer and antiracist coalitions through poetry, higher education, pop culture, and related

Notes on Contributors  261 arts dialogues. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals, from POETRY and [PANK] to FENCE and Drunken Boat, while scholarship on contemporary queer and race theory can be found in journals such as The Comparatist. The Harlan Hahn Disability Studies Fellowship partially funded the completion of their manuscript, The Lyme Letters, which has been a finalist with presses such as Alice James Books. For more info or to reach out, visit crgrimmer.com. Gloria Kwok is a researcher and a former associate professor of French at Truman State University. She holds a Ph.D. in French from University of Illinois. Her dissertation examines four Vietnamese Francophone women writers from 1910s to 2000s—Marguerite Triaire, Trinh Thuc Oanh, Ly Thu Ho, and Linda Lê. She has published on Duong Thu Huong, Linda Lê, and Oliver Stone’s Vietnam War film, Heaven and Earth. She can be contacted at [email protected]. Whitney S. May is pursuing her Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Texas and is an adjunct lecturer for the Department of English at Texas State University. Although her primary research interest is Gothic horror, her work frequently considers genre fiction and popular culture. Her recent research has been published in Children’s Literature, Supernatural Studies, Representing Kink (Lexington, 2019), and The Big Top on the Big Screen (McFarland, 2020). Margaret McMurtrey  is a doctoral student at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB). Her research focuses on the origin, provenance, and embedded Choctaw spiritual beliefs of Choctaw Hymns written pre-removal. She is a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. She is founding co-convener of the American Indian and Indigenous Collective Research Focus Group (AIIC RFG) under the auspices of the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. She continues to serve as one of the co-conveners for the AIIC RFG which is now in its seventh year. At UCSB she is advisor for the American Indian Student Association, co-founder of the Native American Author reading group, founder of the Native American and Indigenous Literary Society, and co-founder of the UCSB American Indian and Indigenous Garden. In the community, she is a founding member of the Elders’ Council of the Central Coast, and Past Board Chair of the American Indian Health and Services, Corporation of Santa Barbara. Gaura Narayan,  Associate Professor of Literature at Purchase College SUNY, received her PhD from Columbia University in 1998. She is the author of Real and Imagined Women in British Romanticism (New York: Peter Lang, 2010) and articles on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight Children, colonial India, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Phoolan Devi, and

262  Notes on Contributors Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Her teaching and scholarly interests are British Romanticism; gender; colonial and postcolonial theory and literature in South Asia. Her current project is about the construction of India in the British imagination during the first phase of imperialism in India (1757–1857). Jeffrey Peer earned his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from The Graduate Center, CUNY, in 2019. His research emphasizes hemispheric perspectives in the literature of the Americas, forging connections between U.S. and Latin American cultures. He can be contacted at [email protected]. Kate Rose has developed socioliterature—a critical approach that combines literary analysis and sociology, linking fiction to society in transformative and useful ways. She is currently working on a book called Socioliterature: Engaged Criticism for Today’s World, and another titled Behind Heavy Doors: Traumatic Memory and the Hidden Epidemic of Child Abuse. She taught sociology, philosophy, and comparative world literatures in a Chinese university for several years, after earning her doctorate in France (in Comparative Literature and French). Among her publications are two books of literary criticism (Décoloniser l’Imaginaire, L’Harmattan, 2007; and Une Terre à Elles, Bord du Lot, 2014), a novel in French about traumatic memory (Mosaïque des Autresses, L’Harmattan, 2009), two edited books with Cambridge Scholars Press (China Beyond the Binary, 2019; and China from Where We Stand, 2016), and numerous academic articles as well as short stories and poems. She currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona, and teaches at Northern Arizona University. Much of her work can be read at https://nau.academia.edu/KateRose. She can be reached at [email protected]. Joya Uraizee is Associate Professor of English at Saint Louis University where she teaches postcolonial literature and film. She has written two books, This Is No Place for a Woman: Nadine Gordimer, Nayantara Sahgal, Buchi Emecheta and the Politics of Gender and In the Jaws of the Leviathan: Genocide Fiction and Film; and is completing her third, Writing That Breaks Stones: African Child Soldier Narratives. Please contact her at [email protected]. Aviva Xue, born in 1989 in Xuzhou, Jiangsu, China, has received her master’s degree in arts from China University of Mining and Technology and is going to be a PhD candidate (Society and Culture) next May in James Cook University, Australia. Her research includes contemporary women’s writings in English and Chinese, Chinese online literature, and feminist culture and actions in China.

Index

Africa 9–10, 12, 13–16, 19, 24, 185–192, 196 amnesia 2, 169, 170, 194, 200, 201 Asian (East) 24, 25 Asian (South) 22–37, 39, 40, 41, 46, 47, 50, 52–53, 152 assimilation 17, 26–30, 129, 137, 141, 168, 169, 197 babies 18, 99, 119, 185, 188, 191, 192, 225, 256 Black 13, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47, 49, 50, 52, 187, 196, 198, 246 childbirth 26, 27, 35, 65, 101, 112, 114, 119, 171, 178, 190, 195, 245 China 167, 168, 245, 247, 248, 256 Christian 4, 44, 121, 139, 145, 159, 196, 238 colonial 2–3, 9, 25, 34, 39–40, 45–49, 51, 53, 56–57, 111, 113–124, 133– 135, 139, 151, 152, 156, 159, 161, 162, 169, 172, 175, 177, 214–215, 217, 224, 262; see also postcolonial decolonial see postcolonial deportation 16–17, 91, 97 “Dreamers” 7, 8, 9, 14, 19 dreams 14, 15, 17, 19, 27, 29, 67–70, 78, 87, 112, 115–117, 180, 188, 206, 220 dystopia 14, 16, 19, 110, 111, 113, 115–117, 169 ecofeminist 3, 171, 174 existential 1, 40, 68, 69, 89, 175 feminist 1, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 50, 52, 74, 105, 178, 218, 238, 245, 246, 247, 257, 258

gender 4, 9, 26, 28, 32, 33, 37, 40, 46, 47, 52, 53, 74, 78, 80, 81, 82, 87, 93, 101–103, 115, 170, 175, 215, 223, 226, 232–234, 238, 245, 248, 249 genocide 103, 117, 123, 128, 148, 194–199, 200, 201, 203–211 health 1, 15, 117, 234; see also medicine immigration see migration Indigenous 1, 3, 4, 8, 111, 112–120, 167–169, 171, 172, 174, 175–177, 179, 180 Islam 23, 25, 27, 28, 30, 32, 197, 210 Jews 31, 36, 195 Latin America/Latinx 7, 72, 74–77, 78, 82, 87, 104, 125, 126, 135 literary analysis 1, 2–4, 262 magical realism 2, 167–169 medicine 1–4, 171, 173, 176, 252, 256; see also health migration 1, 3, 10, 11, 16, 18, 33, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 45–52, 89, 91, 92, 94–97, 168, 214–217, 224, 226 mimesis 3, 130, 167 motherhood 15, 32, 53, 57, 61–65, 89, 92–96, 100, 101, 102, 111, 112, 116–118, 145, 160–164, 173, 177, 178, 188–191, 209, 215, 223–224, 254 Muslims see Islam nationalism 3, 10, 22, 23, 25, 26, 47–48, 53, 122, 164, 196, 242, 257 New York City 14–18, 80, 230, 232, 235

264 Index Pagan 172, 238 postcolonial 2, 8, 12, 23, 25, 40, 43, 45–46, 102, 122, 124, 125, 128–130, 134, 151, 160, 221, 223, 226 pregnancy 18, 115, 116, 118 prison 28, 32, 83, 117, 119, 120, 171, 176 prostitution 4, 74, 221, 225, 254, 256 racism 37, 39, 40, 41–44, 46, 50–51, 53, 209, 218 rape 35, 93, 163, 169, 170, 179, 194, 198, 199, 214–215, 217–219, 221, 223–224, 226, 227, 250, 256; see also sexual abuse religion 4, 32, 137, 139, 159, 171, 195, 196, 248, 249, 251, 254 sex (male/female) 4, 170 sexism 87, 218, 233 sexual abuse (sexual violence) 2, 3, 77, 169, 171, 177, 179, 185, 214,

215, 217, 218, 221, 223, 224; see also rape sexuality 44, 78, 115, 168, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 226 socioliterature 1–4, 167, 262 trauma 1–4, 57, 59, 61, 65, 66, 70, 72, 76–78, 87, 89, 93–94, 96–97, 102, 103, 112, 113, 115, 116, 139, 148, 153, 155, 168, 169–172, 176–179, 186, 188, 190, 191, 200, 202, 204, 205, 214–219, 221, 223–224, 227, 231–233, 238, 241 traumatic memory 2, 189, 190, 199, 200, 202, 204, 205, 211, 255 United States of America 7–9, 15, 16–19, 23, 28, 29, 30, 33, 89, 91–93, 96–97, 104–106, 122, 165 utopia 8, 14, 18, 19, 158, 175, 241, 246, 257 witch 66, 185, 189, 249–250