Postcolonial Gateways and Walls : Under Construction [1 ed.] 9789004337688, 9789004337671

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Postcolonial Gateways and Walls

Cross/Cultures Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English

Edited by Gordon Collier Geofffrey Davis Bénédicte Ledent

Co-founding editor †Hena Maes-Jelinek

VOLUME 195

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

Postcolonial Gateways and Walls Under Construction

Edited by

Daria Tunca Janet Wilson

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover Illustration: © Álvaro Germán Vilela (2 April 2008). Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954681

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-33767-1 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-33768-8 (e-book) Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhofff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Gateways and Walls, or the Power and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Metaphors DARI A TUNCA & JA NE T WIL SO N

I. G A T E W A Y S

AND

ix

W ALLS: B ET WEEN EAST

AND

WEST

Clothing the Borders: Dress as a Signifier in Colonial and Post-Colonial Space G ARETH G R IF F I T H S

3

“As Rare as Rubies”: Did Salman Rushdie Invent Turkish American-Literature? ELENA FURL ANET TO

21

The Bosphorus Syndrome GERHARD STILZ

41

Geography Fabulous: Conrad and Ghosh PADM INI MONGIA

59

The Concomitant Spaces of Territory and Writing: Crossing Cultural Divides MARTA DVO\ ÁK

II. U N D E R C O N S T R U C T I O N : N A T I O N S

69 AND

CULT URES

Towards an Australian Philosophy: Constructive Appropriation of Enlightenment Thinking in Murray Bail’s The Pages MARIE H ERBILLON

87

Image-i-nation: Africa/nation, Identity, and the Nation(s) Within BRON WY N MILL S

107

Refugees and Three Short Stories from Sri Lanka SI MRA N CHADHA

129

Gateway to the Unknowable: The Kala Pani in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès J O H N C. H A W L E Y

147

Postcolonial Literature in the Time of World Literature DEEPIKA MARYA

165 III. T H E B O R D E R : W A L L

G AT EW AY ?

OR

“Die Mauer is no joke!”: The Berlin Wall in Cilla McQueen’s Berlin Diary and in the Works of Kapka Kassabova CLA UD IA DU PPÉ

183

The Wall as Signifier in Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s Works CAR ME N CO NCILIO

205

Enclosed: Nature. Carol Shields’ Textual Mazes VERA AL EXA N DE R

219

An Ethics of Mourning: Loss and Transnational Dynamics in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh GOLNAR NABIZADEH

IV. G E N D E R E D G A T E W A Y S

241 AND

WALL S

The Mirage of Europe in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street ELISAB ETH BE KER S

255

Desexing the Crone: Intentional Invisibility as Postcolonial Retaliation in Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices D E V O N C A M P B E L L –H A L L

279

The Burden of Possessions: A Postcolonial Reading of Letters from Bessie Head, Dora Taylor, and Lilian Ngoyi M. J. D A Y M O N D

293

Gendered Gateways: Australian Surfing and the Construction of Masculinities in Tim Winton’s Breath SISSY HELFF

315

Notes on Contributors Index

329 335

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Annalisa Oboe, who generously acted as consultant on this project, as well as to Geoffrey V. Davis and Bénédicte Ledent, who offered invaluable advice that helped us to complete this volume. We also wish to thank, for their financial support, the Commonwealth Foundation and the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EAC LALS ).

Introduction Gateways and Walls, or the Power and Pitfalls of Postcolonial Metaphors D ARIA T U NCA & J AN E T W IL SON

F

O R C E N T U R I E S or, indeed, millennia, scholars in the humanities have based some of their most elaborate theoretical thinking on the use of seemingly simple but evocative metaphors. Most notable in contemporary times are notions such as postcolonial ‘hybridity’ or the poststructuralist ‘rhizome’, which find their roots in the scientific discipline of biology and its subfield of botany. This type of conceptual cross-fertilization has also occurred in the arts themselves – think, for instance, of how literary criticism has turned the musical and visual techniques of ‘polyphony’ and ‘collage’ (i.e. the concrete superposition of, respectively, voices and images) into flexible interpretative tools. This constant recourse to the metaphorical is hardly surprising. As the cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have famously argued, metaphors not only pervade everyday language but they are essential components of our systems of thought, allowing us, as they do, to conceive of complex, abstract domains in terms of more familiar, concrete ones.1 Importantly, Lakoff and Johnson indicate that the correspondences established between different domains of experience within metaphorical mappings are always partial. 2 For example, in the case of the ‘collage’ mentioned above, the analogy established rests mainly on the idea of superposed surfaces, but it leaves aside the fact that a visual collage, unlike a literary one, uses materials such as glue to effect the new structure. Interestingly, however, these conceptual blind spots are precisely

1

See George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1980): e.g., 3 & 115. 2 Lakoff & Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, e.g., 13 & 52.

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what allows metaphors to be creatively extended, and therefore be used in such flexible, fertile ways in philosophical, sociological, and literary thought. If this malleability of metaphors is one of their main strengths in intellectual discourse, it is, paradoxically, also one of their potential weaknesses. If metaphors originally bring the tangibility of the concrete to the elaboration of abstract thought, the flexibility of the figure also means that the analogy that initially motivated a metaphoric mapping may rapidly become obscured by disincarnated rhetorical acrobatics. This danger is exacerbated in postcolonial studies, which by definition must navigate the murky waters between tangible (economic, racial) inequalities and the slippery ideological legacies of empire that precipitated these disparities. On more than one occasion, the concrete anchoring of metaphors such as ‘hybridity’ has not been able to prevent the lapse into a well-meaning but homogenizing discourse that all but ignores the realities of formerly colonized peoples and eventually perpetuates the neocolonial agenda that postcolonial criticism purportedly sought to denounce. This is precisely the issue addressed by Norbert Bugeja in his recent discussion of the concept of ‘liminality’, another metaphoric buzzword in postcolonial studies, mainly popularized by Homi K. Bhabha in his Location of Culture.3 As Bugeja reminds us, the term ‘liminality’ derives from the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold’, and it is used metaphorically to refer to “a state of existing on the threshold of experiential or discursive conditions, or in the interstices and peripheries of social, political, and cultural normative structures.”4 The liminal, Bugeja continues, “has proved to be a fertile grounding concept for the projection of political, historical, and social positionings both within the humanities and the social sciences”; yet, as the critic cogently observes, “the ‘in-between’ has very often come to exist as [...] a magic password by which subaltern ontologies come to be ‘empowered’ by being artificially depicted as participants or stakeholders in the theoretical deconstruction of imperialist texts.”5 In short, Bugeja identifies the liminal as a positivist, disincarnated, and potentially neo-imperialistic construct.6 Nevertheless, rather than abandoning 3

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Norbert Bugeja, Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2012): 2. 5 Bugeja, Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East, 2 & 3. 6 In all fairness to Bhabha, it must be added that Bugeja’s pertinent criticism of the ‘in-between’ stems as much from other scholars’ celebratory readings of Bhabha’s notion of the liminal as from the Harvard scholar’s own words – indeed, the latter merely states that the “interstitial passage between fixed identifications opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains 4

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the notion altogether, Bugeja exposes how it can surreptitiously be put in the service of reactionary ideologies, in particular in memoirs from the Mashriq, the focus of his study. This critical endeavour partly rests on the reinvestment of the liminal (and the attendant notion of the “Third Space of enunciation,” also theorized in Bhabha’s Location of Culture) with the original concrete, spatial dimensions of the limen.7 Central to Bugeja’s enterprise is thus a back-and-forth movement between the literal and the metaphorical, the material and the theoretical, and, ultimately – with reference to the memoirs examined in his book – the personal and the political. These somewhat lengthy reflections on metaphor and liminality constitute a necessary starting point for outlining the rationale behind the present collection. It will not have escaped the reader that the title of this volume, Postcolonial Gateways and Walls: Under Construction, relies precisely on such spatial metaphors as those discussed above. The ‘gateway’ and the ‘wall’, in the context of this book, are conceptualized as figures that suggest the practical and piecemeal yet also transitional nature of postcolonial studies, and the way in which knowledge may be constructed to function as both barrier and pathway to further modes of enquiry. Using these metaphors, the volume proposes a series of case studies which, taken collectively, offer a reflection on the current condition of postcolonial criticism, whose founding theories are increasingly used alongside new models taken from migration studies or globalization theory. This expansion offers a ‘gateway’ to new discourses and disciplines, but, correspondingly, traditional postcolonial frameworks are also inevitably in danger of losing their critical purchase – in other words, one might feel concerned that the founding theories of postcolonialism may eventually act as ‘walls’ that block understanding of the increasingly complex cultural and political networks that make up the contemporary world. From this observation follows the idea that, to remain relevant in the twenty-first century, the discipline of postcolonialism must necessarily consider itself to be permanently ‘under construction’. The readers of this book are, therefore, invited to perform a critical inspection of the postcolonial construction site. Crucially, however, if the ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’ that pervade both the above paragraph and the essays in this collection are to carry any critical weight, their textual occurrence must go hand in hand with a constant re-evaluation of the metaphoric uses to which they are put. One such way of interrogating the difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 4, our italics). In other words, Bhabha does not present liminality as subversive in essence. 7 Bugeja, Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East, 6–9.

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nature and pertinence of the ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’ metaphors is to examine them, much as Bugeja did with reference to liminality, in the light of their concrete spatial incarnations. Several authors in this volume undertake such a task. For instance, Vera Alexander in her article assesses the symbolic implications behind the ‘maze’ in the Canadian context, while Claudia Duppé investigates the literary uses made by New Zealand writers of the Berlin Wall. Arguably, the latter construction was a quintessential embodiment of division, both literal and ideological, and its economic and political impact can still be felt decades after its fall in 1989. Elsewhere in the world, other such walls and barriers continue to serve similarly divisive and exclusionary functions, whether on the Israeli West Bank or on the shores of the French port town of Calais. Walls erected against the threat of invasion are also ubiquitous in the South African urban landscapes examined by Carmen Concilio in her essay on the works of Ivan Vladislaviǰ. But, as Concilio shows, walls need not have a divisive function in all cases: they may also unite. Thus, Vladislaviǰ, in his Portrait with Keys, evokes an artist’s project of erecting a transparent commemorative wall made of resin blocks, each of which would enclose an object donated by an inhabitant of the Johannesburg area.8 In this instance, the wall becomes an “an explicit sign of communication,” as Concilio puts it, epitomizing the exploration of the instability of signs that constitutes the very terrain of art. If one must consider the ‘wall’ as a fluid signifier rather than a unidimensional symbol of separation, so one must resist the temptation to celebrate the ‘gateway’ as having an invariably liberating role in a universally subversive practice of border-crossing. Gateways, indeed, may take the form of the infamous ‘Door of No Return’ through which enslaved Africans left their continent for the New World – an image invoked in this volume by Elisabeth Bekers, in her essay on the works of Caryl Phillips and Chika Unigwe. Metaphorical gateways, too, can be treacherous, as highlighted by John C. Hawley in his contribution, which focuses on crossings of the kala pani, the Indian and Atlantic oceans that represented impoverished Indians’ ‘gateways’ to other lands and a more prosperous future, yet which rapidly became synonymous with uncertainty and disillusion. In sum, the images of the ‘gateway’ and the ‘wall’ are at once suggestive, slippery, and multifaceted, and they demand to be approached from various conceptual angles. To this end, this collection of essays is divided into four parts. The first section, “Gateways and Walls: Between East and West,” evokes the city 8

Ivan Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (London: Portobello, 2006): 43.

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of Istanbul, the literal subject-matter of some essays and a metaphorical reference point for many others.9 Istanbul is a city of border-zones that straddles Europe and Asia, and which historically has also been a gateway between North and South, between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, between ‘wild Scythia’ and the ‘civilized’ Roman Empire, between orthodox Russia and the Byzantine metropolis of Constantinople. In paying homage to this city, the essays contained in this section take the historical issues inspired by the Turkish location as a point of departure to revisit questions of imperialism, Orientalism, and East–West influences in a decidedly postcolonial and contemporary light. The opening essay, by Gareth Griffiths, takes up the discussion of ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’ where the preceding paragraphs left off. Namely, Griffiths discusses dress – a metaphorical gateway or wall – as a signifier of either belonging or exclusion within specific, bounded space. Focusing on Kemalist reforms of dress codes in Turkey in the 1920s and examples from colonial history, the scholar shows how present-day prohibitions, most notably those linked to the Islamic veil in both Europe and Australia, are part of an evolving discourse in which clothing acts as a feature of border control and national identity-politics. Turning to the links between Turkey and the postcolonial world in the field of literature, Elena Furlanetto investigates the parallels between the works of the British Indian Salman Rushdie and the Turkish American Elif Shafak, arguing that contemporary Turkish-American writers appropriate postcolonial themes to reflect Turkey’s hybrid position as a former imperial power and a participant in modern neo-colonialism. Through her study of the intertextual connections between Rushdie and Shafak, Furlanetto more generally contributes to the construction of a critical gateway that enables a comparative approach between European and non-European imperial formations – an analytical framework that acknowledges both the commonalities and specificities of these formations’ past incarnations and their contemporary legacies. Gerhard Stilz also establishes a link between past and present, more specifically by delving into the history of the gateway city of Istanbul. Using sources ranging from Homer to Edward Said, Stilz explores how notions of East, West, North, and South have developed since antiquity at this geographical crossroads. The critic explores not only how the dichotomies associated with the four cardinal points have 9

The essays contained in this volume were carefully selected from among the papers presented at the 2011 conference of the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (E A C L A L S ) held in Istanbul. A different, thematically coherent cluster of articles deriving from the conference was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.1 (2015), special issue on “Postcolonial Thresholds: Gateways and Walls.” The present book might be viewed as a companion volume to this journal issue.

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shaped the discursive construction of Istanbul, but also how they emerge as variants of what he terms the “Bosphorus syndrome.” Cultural crossroads, in the form of influences between East and West, are also at the heart of Padmini Mongia’s essay on the literary relationship between Joseph Conrad and Amitav Ghosh. Conrad’s influence on Ghosh, Mongia argues, is particularly conspicuous in the Indian writer’s reliance on romantically tinted notions of geography discussed by Conrad in a 1924 essay. Ultimately, Mongia’s analysis serves to expose the limits of the traditional colonial–postcolonial binary that informed postcolonial studies in its early stages. Marta Dvoˀák also argues against the existence of a colonial–postcolonial binary, but further contends, with specific reference to the Indian subcontinent, that cross-cultural influences between colonizers and colonized were prominent well before the contemporary period, which is marked by globalizing trends. Using Bakhtin’s work on linguistic heteroglossia, Dvoˀák shows how the English language, far from being a subjugating force, is in fact far more flexible – hence, prone to the expression of hybrid identities – than more normative indigenous languages such as Bengali. In the second section, “Under Construction: Nations and Cultures,” the nation-state is the major focus, in response to pressing questions that arise about its roles and functionality in a time when global pressures penetrate and undermine national boundaries. Within the new borderless economy where cultures as well as market forces circulate in formations of influence and exchange, nations and their identities are under reconstruction. In this part of the volume, the traditional empire–centre and colonial–periphery binary, already questioned in the opening cluster of articles, is radically challenged, as global flows and transnational and/or multi-directional movements have even more radically overturned these traditional divisions. Marie Herbillon opens this section with her reflections on the importance of the Enlightenment for an Australian philosophy. In examining the role of the hero in Murray Bail’s novel The Pages (2008), she shows how the universalism associated with Enlightenment thought can be traced through the final textualization of the character’s quest for identity. Yet Herbillon also relativizes this position in arguing that Australia’s global identity demands greater cultural pluralism: Enlightenment thinking, therefore, is but one of several inherited cultural frames that produce a broader perspective on postcolonialism’s traditional theorizations of settler societies and empire. Bronwyn Mills positions her essay in relation to the collision between statist discourse and earlier framings of the ‘nation’ as a cohesive group of persons bound by language, religion, and culture, known either as ‘tribe’ or as ‘ethnic group’. Drawing on research undertaken in Bénin in 2007–2008, and considering African hybridities rather than authenticities, she employs as an

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analytical tool the way African ‘nations’ communicate and interrelate with each other in order to examine the creation of African beliefs and their influences on artistic practice in postcolonial African and Afro-Caribbean communities and cultures in the region and its diaspora respectively. Simran Chadha considers the position of the stateless person, the refugee or asylum seeker, in relation to the destiny of the post-independent nation-state of Sri Lanka. She enquires into the dystopian present moment and the consequence of the civil war between the government and Tamil separatists in creating millions of Internally Displaced People (IDP s) in the nation-state itself. Chadha examines three short stories for what they reveal about agency and ethnic ambiguity, to show how the refugee question marks a shift in articulations of ethnic and national identity. John C. Hawley, in his essay, examines the Indian ocean as a gateway to new discoveries of land and self in a comparison of two texts, both concerning the island of Mauritius. Focusing on the classic quest journey to destinations both geographical and metaphorical, he finds that the voyage to the island in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008) has a metaphorical counterpart in Barlen Pyamootoo’s novel Bénarès (2004), about the hero’s journey across the island in an existential search for roots. In Hawley’s reading, the framing metaphor of gateways and walls, in relation to the nation and its cultures, introduces the metaphysical concept of the subject him/herself under construction. In concluding this section, Deepika Marya challenges eurocentric categories in a global era and considers how postcolonial Africa and Asia might mark a theoretical shift that will speak to the master-concept of worlding and its European claiming of the world. She returns to Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur (1800) as defining a post-hegemonic and post-national idea that will embrace universality for all. Marya advocates a literary practice that is spatialized with metaphors of displacement and mobilization, to accommodate the subaltern space rendered invisible by global discourse and to emancipate the disenfranchised. This includes superseding the comparativist frameworks associated with World Literature and exploring unifying methods for lexicalizing the non-European other, such as Said’s contrapuntal as a decolonizing tool for recovering suppressed voices, literary frames of reference informed by the temporal and historical rather than categories such as nation-states, and a generative, rather than a prescriptive, lexicon that accommodates non-paradigmatic, more inclusive meanings. Section I II , “The Border: Wall or Gateway?,” examines the construction of the border as both a wall, and – when crossed, deconstructed or demolished – a gateway. The essays in this part of the book all deal with manifestations of the border as wall, both literally and figuratively, and they consider points of cross-

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ing or moments of transgression. Claudia Duppé’s essay is about that icon of Cold-War politics, the Berlin Wall, as represented in the work of two writers from New Zealand: the poet Cilla McQueen, whose Berlin Diary (1990) records her stay in the German city in 1988–89, just before the wall came down; and the Bulgarian-born poet and memoirist Kapka Kassabova, who experienced the wall in her teenage years, and returned to Berlin from New Zealand, where the family had settled in the late 1980s, as a writer in residence in 2002. Duppé investigates how both authors use the Berlin Wall as a literary trope and how this use reflects on the negotiation of both the German and the New Zealand cultural environment. Carmen Concilio examines variations on the theme of the wall in South African literature and culture before and after the demise of apartheid, using the narratives of Ivan Vladislaviǰ to focus on the development of the wall as a metaphor in relation to history and memory. On the one hand, she examines the wall as a divisive structure, with its attached and implied fortifications (such as iron grids, barbed wire, security systems); on the other, she evokes artistic reconfigurations of the wall as an inclusive symbol of historical memory, as mentioned earlier in this introduction. Vera Alexander investigates the role of the garden as a postcolonial border space where the relationship between human beings and constructions of ‘nature’ is negotiated. Her text for analysing parallels between anthropomorphization and enclosure is the Canadian writer Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party (1997): in the novel, the hero constructs mazes for a living, and Alexander examines the resulting reconfigurations of his life narrative. This section concludes with Golnar Nabizadeh’s study of how the state of loss, as often found in post-national and transnational formations of migration, can be relativized with an “ethics of mourning.” Her focus is on Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1988), a novel which, in dealing with historical events such as the Partition of 1947 and the 1964 Muslim–Sikh riots in Dhaka, privileges the work of mourning in relation to memory, desire, and imagination. Nabizadeh argues that the book’s ethical engagement with the productivities of loss confirms recent critical insights into the mourning subject’s imbrication in a community of others. The final section, “Gendered Gateways and Walls,” considers, as its title suggests, the book’s central metaphors from a gendered perspective. Elisabeth Bekers offers a comparative analysis of Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2003) and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), two narratives of illegal migration focusing on the struggle of, respectively, male and female African protagonists. Lured by the prospect of Europe as a ‘gateway’ to freedom and dignity, the characters, once on the continent, find themselves forced to negotiate a metaphorical ‘wall’ that prevents them from participating fully in white

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European society. Devon Campbell–Hall also discusses migrants and gender issues, but in novels by authors of Indian descent. In her analysis of Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman (1987) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), Campbell–Hall demonstrates how young women dressing up as crones use their own bodies as ‘walls’ against the exoticizing male gaze. Central to this study is also the interpretation to be made of the young women’s eventual decision to revert to their attractive youthful appearance. In the next essay, Margaret Daymond turns her attention to another manifestation of female agency, as expressed in the correspondence of three well-known South African women writers or activists: Bessie Head, Dora Taylor, and Lilian Ngoyi. Drawing on archival material, Daymond shows how the under-researched genre of the personal letter, often associated with the private sphere, can in fact be used as a critical gateway to the public and the political realms. In the final essay of the collection, by Sissy Helff, the focus moves from avatars of femininity to constructions of masculinity. Examining Tim Winton’s surf novel Breath (2008), Helff argues that the writer offers a gateway to a reconceptualization of white Australian masculinity, traditionally characterized as either heroic or carefree, with no interaction between the two. Ultimately, Helff interestingly points out, Winton nonetheless fails to address the important topics of race and ethnicity, making for a project that, particularly in the Australian context, remains partial and incomplete. Helff’s essay illustrates what many of the other essays in this volume also point to: namely, that the attainment of a contemporary postcolonial condition is itself still very much a work-in-progress – or, one might say, that it is still ‘under construction’. The metaphors of ‘gateways’ and ‘walls’, which are the building blocks of this volume, thus contribute to an imagining of constructedness as consisting of different pathways, barriers, openings, and closures. In the twenty-first century, as the periphery–centre model of empire and colony yields to the overlapping disjunctive order of globalization, there is a need to define and explore more diverse trajectories, and more complex structurations. By tracing arguments and building theoretical paradigms that expand the varied routes into the discipline, over or around the obstacles and apertures of metaphorical walls and gateways, a picture of the evolving field of postcolonial studies emerges. Admittedly, a project such as that undertaken in this collection requires constant negotiation of the treacherous frontier between, on the one hand, the evocative power and critical potential of metaphors and, on the other, the looming danger of turning the images and analogies at the heart of its conceptualizing enterprise into a stale – and, ironically, static – celebration of border-

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crossings and of all things ‘under construction’. The best way of avoiding this pitfall, it seems, is to engage in a self-reflexive practice that continually questions its own epistemological premises. This much is suggested – in another ironic twist – in Bhabha’s discussion of the “Third Space of enunciation,” one of those concepts that so rapidly became fossilized in postcolonial criticism. Bhabha’s theory, the scholar himself insisted, was originally meant to highlight the fact that “the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized and read anew.”10 Thus, the notions of hybridity and liminality, as well as the metaphors of gateways and walls used throughout this volume, need to be constantly contextualized, reassessed, reconfigured, so as to help us to soundly reassess the past but also ambitiously build gateways – or was it walls? – to look into the future.

W OR K S C I T E D Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Bugeja, Norbert. Postcolonial Memoir in the Middle East: Rethinking the Liminal in Mashriqi Writing (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2012). Lakoff, George, & Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1980). Vladislaviǰ, Ivan, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (London: Portobello, 2006). Wilson, Janet, & Daria Tunca, ed. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 51.1 (2015), special issue on “Postcolonial Thresholds: Gateways and Walls.”

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Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 37.

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Clothing the Borders Dress as a Signifier in Colonial and Post-Colonial Space G AR ET H G RIFFITHS

Introduction: Dress and Postcolonial Identity

C

are among the oldest and still most frequent identifiers used to police the borders of ethnic and cultural difference. Clothing can be used literally as a device to close borders and manage the intercourse between peoples and cultures, as so-called ‘profiling’ practices at national borders have shown. This essay suggests that to understand this and the attitudes underlying the recent spate of legislation on dress codes in Europe we need to place these events in wider historical and geographical contexts. Clothing has long been a crucial factor in defining colonial and post-colonial identities. The examples below make it clear that how people dress or were permitted to dress has been one of the key ways in which identities were formed and contested in post-colonial territories. This essay will examine how dress featured in a series of defining moments in colonial histories from different regions. The examples range widely both in time and in space. They suggest that the issue has implications which contemporary public debates in the media do not fully engage with, so often implying as they do that it is not a recurring issue. This essay contends that the origin of contemporary discrimination against certain dress codes lies in older forms of discrimination stemming from colonial history and that these in turn stem from a specifically eurocentric idea of modernity rooted in the Enlightenment. Recent debates in Europe on the legislation of dress codes (what, in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, was termed ‘sumptuary laws’) are often justified by invoking the idea of human rights, and their corollary of rights for women. These are important issues and we must all engage with them. But as we have long been aware in post-colonial LOTHIN G AND D RESS COD ES

GARETH GRI FFI THS

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studies, we need to be careful of what we mean when we justify what we do by invoking universal categories, for even human rights can be spoken of too casually or loosely without defining what these are and who decides them. Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography, or are we perpetuating an Enlightenment-era, universalist doctrine that dictates the terms of relations between the West and the Rest? Moreover, how do these ideas shape and influence the exploration of human rights in specific discourses such as media reports and literary texts and broader public debates on issues such as the public veiling of women? The recent legislation and the media arguments supporting public veiling characteristically assert that what is at stake are individual rights, particularly the rights of women, but are these claims being used to mask other and less worthy goals, such as discrimination against specific groups in society? This essay will suggest that earlier examples from the history of dress-code practice in the postcolony warn us to be wary of these seemingly uncontestably liberal arguments. It argues that dress codes have been used at various times and in different locations to buttress prejudice as well as to resist discrimination. Saving people and setting them ‘free’ is a desirable end but, as the history of colonization shows us, it can often be a cover for a new and different kind of oppression. The essay uses historical examples of this mainly from Africa, a choice which reflects my area of academic interest, and more contemporary examples from Australia, where I live and work, and with the social practice of which I must engage as a responsible citizen. Although the legislation recently has been passed mainly in Europe, in an increasingly globalized world social phenomena such as dress-code legislation can have a reverberation well beyond their specific locations, as my Australian examples will show.1 This new global phenomenon is part of the ongoing story of the effects of European colonial and neo-colonial expansion. Many so-called legal and illegal migrants come from the postcolonies and travel to countries that are ex-colonial powers. In this regard, rich post-colonial settler colonies such as Australia and Canada find themselves ideologically and practically aligned with the powers that once colonized them and from which they claim to have freed themselves after independence. The essay also suggests that these debates flow from the issues that developed in the aftermath of the U S 1

Perhaps this reflects the anxiety of a settler colony. Australia has often seemed to follow leads from Europe, especially Britain but increasingly from Europe at large, and increasingly from the U S A , in shaping its responses to social change, most recently in ‘border protection’ and immigration policy and now in its reaction to the issue of ‘dress’ codes. Since Australia’s closest neighbour is the world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, this issue is of crucial importance as Australia defines its role within Asia and within the new global dispensation.

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declaration of the so-called War on Terror in late 2001, and these have had consequences in many locations across the globe.2 It therefore suggests that only by relating these present events to wide-ranging locations and to larger historical forces can we begin to address their meaning more fully and effectively.

Dress Codes and Anti-Colonial Resistance In the early 1920s, Mustapha Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic (which replaced the old Ottoman Empire after the First World War), introduced one of the most extensive revisions of public dress codes. The dress reforms did not at first focus on the use of veils by women, despite Atatürk’s insistence that Turkey’s future depended on Turkish women’s attaining greater civic freedom and enjoying wider opportunities for education and employment than under Ottoman rule. In fact, the so-called Hat Law of 1925 focused exclusively on male headgear such as the fez and turban, and did not insist on the removal of veils or headcover (hijab) by women. Dress-code reform was only one part of a broader set of reforms that included the organization of land and tax administration, the secularization and nationalization of education, the reform of the Turkish language, and the replacement of an Arabic orthography with a modified form of the Roman alphabet. After 1934, when the law relating to the wearing of Prohibited Garments was enacted, the public wearing of many forms of religious attire for men and women was banned, including the full face veil. Headscarves were not banned under this law but were discouraged by the general reforms, which were aimed at allowing women greater opportunities by facilitating their free movement in public spaces. Kemalist reforms were not aimed specifically at religion; indeed, Islam was protected, as was the freedom to practise all religions in the new legislation. But the overall drive of the reforms was to secularize public life and government, and to express Atatürk’s belief that Turkish society would have to westernize or, as the reform put it, ‘modernize’ itself both politically and culturally in order to survive.

2

There is a clear need to discuss how and in what ways the U S A has functioned as an imperial power over the last century or more, given the role it has played in developing global attitudes to borders and border protection since 9/11. While this lies beyond the scope of this essay, I have tried to address the ways in which American practice and ideology regarding imperialism evolved during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries in an article entitled “Grover Cleveland and the ‘Dusky Queens’: Religion, Ideology and American ‘Imperial’ Expansionism,” in ‘Imbatti’: Crosscurrents in Postcolonial Memory and Literature: A Festschrift for Daniel Massa, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Msida: Malta U P , forthcoming).

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In a post-colonial context, it is worth noting that these reforms, including those on dress, were part of Atatürk’s successful resistance to the ambitions of the British and French colonial powers, which had already swallowed up most of the previous Middle Eastern territories of the Ottoman Empire and which had clear designs on the Ottoman homeland, the area that is now modern Turkey. Since these legal reforms in political organizations, in education, in language, and in dress codes were all part of this wider resistance to colonialist pressures, one is struck by the fact that the dress-code laws in the Kemalist reforms seem to resemble the recent laws banning full face veils in Belgium and France. But this resemblance seems to me to be superficial. Atatürk’s reforms were part of his attempt to show that the emerging Turkish Republic was a modern state that could not be treated as inferior by the victorious colonial powers after Turkey’s defeat in 1918. Atatürk was responding to the colonial perception that intervention could be justified if states were seen as bound by what European colonial powers saw as outdated and socially repressive traditions, traditions often exemplified by dress codes. Of course, by aggressively modernizing and changing Turkish social practice, Atatürk might be seen as accepting this eurocentric view, but he did so in order to preserve and develop his people’s independence from direct colonial control. So Atatürk’s response to this is an example of how any such actions by early anti-colonial leaders can never simply be judged as wholly resistant to or wholly collusive with colonial ideologies. As this and later examples will show, the range of responses to dress codes needs to be analysed in terms of the specific political situation of the time as well as the politics of gender, class, and generational change involved in the formulation and reception of these codes. The adoption of each dress code may function and need to be understood differently in different periods or in view of distinctive and overlapping concerns within the same period. No cultural event is free from the need to recognize multiple overlapping meanings. That is to say, like all forms of signification, the meaning of dress codes and their function is processual, and the processes of inscription and reading that control the ways in which they make meaning are, like all forms of signification, “a complex interaction of language, history and environment.”3 Understanding the function of dress codes and our response to them requires specific and particular analysis of each case, though the parallels and differences between them can also provide us with useful insights, as the following examples will seek to show.

3

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, “Place,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 345.

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In colonies, of course, such changes were not, as was the case with Atatürk’s reforms in Turkey, under the control of a newly formed independent national government. But even in colonial territories the function of such reforms was – and still is – part of a complex story involving positions that a simple binary such as that between traditional/modern or resistant/complicit positions fails to describe at all adequately. If we extend our examples back into colonial times, it can readily be shown that clothing was frequently a marker of colonization – i.e. dress became a signifier of whether or not specific individuals had been ‘civilized’ by the colonial power. Examples abound, but in British East Africa, for instance, individuals who had not been assimilated by colonialism were frequently known as the ‘blanket people’ – i.e. they still used a blanket or cloth wrapper as their main body cover rather than adopting the European dress code of shirt and shorts or trousers, and were discriminated against by settlers on this basis. They were accused of refusing to engage with the modernizing process that was used as the justification for colonialism. But at the same time those who did adopt European dress were then often dismissed as trying to ‘mimic’ Europeans and were treated as suspicious for this reason, while those who wore traditional dress were contradictorily represented as ‘authentic’ – i.e. natives uncorrupted by the desire to pass themselves off as whites. This reflects the paradoxical response that lay at the heart of the colonial project, which justified itself by its supposed mission to modernize and ‘civilize’ the colonized peoples (that is to say, to europeanize them in dress and social habits); however, those who did receive formal education and adopted European dress, housing, language, and social manners were often not accepted but, rather, as mentioned above, regarded with suspicion as a threat by settlers and by colonial governments. This was especially so when they began to demand equality under the law and access to political rights. The same double reading was employed within the indigenous communities themselves as they struggled to come to terms with the complex and ultimately irreconcilably contradictory roles that colonizers demanded from those they colonized. For example, South Africa Xhosas who had not converted to European religious and social practices were known as the amaqaba or ‘red’ people, a reference to the fact that they continued to smear their bodies with the red ochre clay traditionally used as a protection from cold and insects. During the colonial period those who refused to change their dress code were classified as recalcitrant and discriminated against by settlers and their own community, especially by the amakholwa or literally the ‘schooled’, a term that describes those who had embraced Christianity and the European cultural practices in dress, habitation, and food, and the sexual and social relations that such conversion entailed.

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Gandhi and his followers in India provide an interesting example of how the dress codes used to discriminate against colonized peoples in the colonial period came to be re-employed as signifiers of resistance in the anti-colonial struggle. The use of traditional dress (dhoti and shawl) by Gandhi became a dress code specifically and deliberately adopted to indicate the decision that he and his followers would not support the economic and political normative codes of the Raj. However what evolved as a dress code adopted by most of Gandhi’s supporters (the use of khadi or homespun cotton) was an adaptation of a form of dress largely discarded until then among the European-educated classes that formed the Indian National Congress before Gandhi’s rise. Even after its adoption, khadi continued to be combined with additional identifying dress signifiers that marked sub-groups within the movement: e.g., Sikh turbans, Kashmiri tunics, or Pashtun headgear. Even then, not all the opponents of British rule in India followed suit (if you will forgive the pun), emphasizing the often neglected fact that dress codes may be employed within larger domains of identity for internal discrimination, dissent, and/or assertion, as I have suggested above. Thus, many members of Congress in the early years after Gandhi’s return who did not agree with his approach continued to wear European clothing, and leaders of the Muslim League such as Jinnah frequently wore Western-style suits as a deliberate marker of their difference from the members of the Congress, who had by that time virtually all adopted the use of khadi.4 Similarly, Dr Ambedkar, the leader of the dalits (erstwhile Untouchables, so-called), also dressed in European suits, not khadi. Eventually the use of khadi cloth came to be an almost obligatory marker of Congress Party identity, functionally becoming a signifier of orthodoxy, not of resistance and opposition. In a similar way, in South Africa at a later date during the period of the breakup of apartheid and the first elections that followed, the members of the mainly Zulu party, Inkatha, at rallies in Johannesburg and elsewhere, employed items of traditional Zulu dress (e.g., anklets and head rings) and symbolic miniweapons (small shields and assegai) as public identifiers of their separation from the ANC , which at that time had a predominantly non-Zulu leadership, to which Inkatha’s leader Chief Buthelezi was strongly opposed. These examples may serve to remind us again of the seemingly obvious point that dress codes shift their significance and should not be assumed to represent fixed positions. I

4

Jinnah dressed in traditional Indian Muslim dress in public photographs after his confirmation as President of the newly formed state of Pakistan in 1947. But he continued to wear European dress in private, as personal photographs show.

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say ‘seemingly obvious’ because in contemporary media discussion surrounding dress as an identity marker this reservation is notably absent.

Fanon and the Recent European Debate on Unveiling The dress code which commands attention in the media at the present time – to the exclusion of almost all others, it seems – is that involving various forms of full face cover. In April 2011, the law first enacted in France in October 2010 came into practice; this forbade the wearing in any public place of any garment that covers the face. A similar piece of legislation in Belgium was first proposed and then rejected in 2005 and was re-introduced in 2010. This has since been passed and came into power in June 2011. Other such laws are under consideration in a number of other countries across the EU . The French law specifies the banning of any covering of the face in public, though, with a sort of unintentional black humour, the amendments include exemption for face coverings for the purposes of art or entertainment (e.g., carnival masks or stage costumes). Supporters of these laws also stress their opposition to forced covering based on gender discrimination. This suggests that the real target of the laws are the forms of face cover that are exclusive to Muslim women. Although the French law does not mention them specifically, it effectively bans Muslim garments such as the burqa that covers the face with a mesh over the eyes and the niqab that covers the face but reveals the eyes, though it would not exclude the headcover or hijab.5 It is clear that in practice the principal effect of the law is to prohibit the use by Muslim women of full or partial face veils such as the burqa and niqab. The purpose of this essay is not to address the complex questions involving the motivation for this legislation, such as the emergence in France, as elsewhere in Europe, of a resurgent right wing in the lead-up to the 2012 election. Rather, the essay looks to the longer-term contexts in which these recent events might be viewed, and suggests ways in which they might be seen to be part of an evolving discourse in which differences are policed and borders increasingly closed by profiling methods in which clothing plays a major role. These processes in which clothing features as a means of social control go back to a time well before such recent events, and extend well beyond them. I want to develop the debate on the recent French law by recalling an earlier and 5

Of course, the hijab had itself been the subject of earlier controversy when it was forbidden to be used in the French public-school system as a religious symbol that might not be displayed – though many French schoolchildren had long worn crosses as pendants. This was reinforced by the law against conspicuous religious symbols in schools passed in March 2004 that came into effect at the beginning of the new school year in September 2004.

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classic response to the policing of Muslim dress codes from the perspective of the colonized. I refer, of course, to Fanon’s famous essay “Algeria Unveiled,” probably written in the mid-1950s when the Algerian liberation war was still at its height.6 In looking at the many media reports of the debate on the law introduced in France, I was surprised by how little attention the French and other European media were paying to this classic analysis of the veil as a signifier written more than a half-century ago, especially since it is set in a French colony. Fanon’s essay looks at the role that women played in the Algerian Liberation War and the ways in which the colonial power and the resistance fighters behaved in regard to the veiling and unveiling of women. Fanon’s analysis was mainly concerned with the celebration of the vital role of women in the liberation struggle in Algeria, as Drucilla Cornell has argued, rather than with the problematic configuration of the woman and the female body, as Diana Fuss’s earlier feminist reading suggested when she claimed that Fanon saw women merely as a symbol of the nation.7 What Fanon does in analysing this tactic in practice is to show that an act of systematic colonial cultural abuse – the unveiling of Algerian women as a means of dismantling the idea of a resistant Other – led to a series of pragmatic responses by the leaders of the resistance and by Algerian women themselves, which involved complex shifts in their dress codes and social behaviour. At the beginning of the revolution, the extensive use of the veil (not widespread in Algerian culture anyway at the time) had become more general as women (especially younger women) adopted it as a symbol of resistant identity. In response, the French colonial authorities began a systematic campaign to coerce Algerian women to unveil in public. This was partly a means of policing the borders of resistance to the colonizers’ versions of modernization and assimilation. The authorities clearly saw ‘veiled women’ as representing the threatening unassimilated ‘native’, symbolizing the larger ideological threat to their authority. Initially, veiled women had also been employed by the revolution as couriers and to smuggle arms, as the veil allowed them to conceal messages and weapons more easily. By forcing women to unveil, the authorities also sought to restrict their ability to act as agents or couriers. The assumption of the French was that women sympathetic to the revolution would always be those veiled in public spaces. Thus, the colonial

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Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An cinq de la révolution algérienne, 1959; tr. New York: Grove, 1965): 35–67. 7 Drucilla Cornell, “The Secret Behind the Veil: A Reinterpretation of ‘Algeria Unveiled’,” Philosophia Africana 4.2 (2001): 27–35; Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies,” in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Humanity, 1999): 294–328.

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power wished to ‘unveil’ women both as part of a conscious ideological programme to dismantle public symbols of resistance to colonial values and for pragmatic reasons of ‘security’. As a result, those women who supported the revolution, including those who had only recently adopted the veil as a symbol of their alter/native, anti-colonial identity, found that if they changed their behaviour once again and went out into the public spaces of the colonial part of the cities in European dress and unveiled, they were not placed under suspicion or searched. They had been re-identified by their clothing as those who had assimilated culturally and so were therefore not perceived as a threat to French colonial power. This engagement with the life of active resistance required a radical shift in the attitudes that both these women and their families took towards their social behaviour, since, until then, many of them were not accustomed to travelling in public unaccompanied, whether veiled or not. Ironically, after it became clear that young unveiled women were still acting either as carriers of documents and weapons or as decoys for the carrying of such ‘contraband’, the authorities became suspicious of them and started to search unveiled women, too. These radical young women then sometimes reverted to wearing a veil, often one that covered more of the body than previously. The colonial authorities were thus forced again to redraw the lines of the borders they patrolled as regards clothing – i.e. they could no longer find an easy clothing identifier (veiled or unveiled) that distinguished the resistant from the complicit. Fanon makes a number of points in his essay, two of which I want to consider here: first, if the motive for dress is to avoid surveillance, then no form of dress code will enforce it permanently; second, if a political policy forces any group (in this case young Algerian women) to change their dress and/or social behaviour in order to achieve their end, the unintended outcomes of this policy cannot easily be reversed. So, while Fanon is primarily concerned to show how women in Algeria responded to the colonial laws on dress by resisting and subverting them, he also warns that the longer-term effects will continue within the community, for good or bad, even after the repressive regime has been defeated. Put differently, he warns that when the liberation struggle ends conservative forces in Algeria might seek to impose older dress codes or even to insist on a more radical form of those codes as identifiers of the ‘new’ identity of being Algerian.8 What Fanon’s essay implies is that during the resistance period these

8

That Fanon makes this point clearly refutes Fuss’s suggestion that he endorses the idea that the woman, veiled or unveiled, can ever be a signifier of the ‘nation’, except in the eyes of an oppressive discourse that seeks uniformity to police identity successfully: i.e. in this case, the French colonial authorities.

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traditional dress codes may have been adopted for reasons that do not necessarily endorse traditional female roles or the religious laws that they claim to enforce. But he also warns that after the liberation struggle ends there is a danger that the dress practices of these young women might be used to endorse regressive forms of cultural and gender identity that in his view are incompatible with the ideologies of liberation which the revolution supported. In other words, the issue is not what dress code is involved, or its cultural origins, but how its adoption functions in any specific social and political condition and what that may imply for the future. The danger Fanon sees is that post-independence regimes might employ the voluntary pragmatic practices adopted as part of the independence struggle to create a false idea of consent to fixed conservative cultural values.9 While obviously not hegemonic power in the strict Gramscian sense, it is a variant of this, in that it cloaks economic, class, and gender repression in the form of a false idea of ‘natural’ cultural or religious practice. As in all such moments, a sense of history and a detailed account of what happened, when and under what conditions, is the best defence against such misuse.10 It is useful to revisit this piece by Fanon when we think of more recent examples in France and elsewhere of reactions to distinctive dress codes. In France, the law passed in April 2011 was endorsed by members of the left as well as the right, joined in opposing what they argue is an anti-secularist and genderdiscriminatory dress code. In fact, the law was first proposed not by right-wing adherents but by a male Communist deputy to reinforce what both right and left supporters of the law represented as a defence of the core secular national 9

A clear example of this occurred during the lead-up to the Iranian revolution against the rule of the late Shah. Fanon’s work had been translated by one of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s supporters, Ali Saharati. A recent commentary has characterized its use at the time as “this vulgarization, instrumentalization even of Fanon’s ideas [that] would in subsequent years and certainly by 1981 – the year that marks the victory of the conservatives in Iran – lead the powers that be to interpret Fanon’s essay ‘Algeria Unveiled Itself,’ [sic] as a plea for a return to the veil.” Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, tr. Nadia Benabid (Frantz Fanon: Portrait, 2000; tr. Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2006): 200. 10 This is also part of a broader issue that women have with post-independence governments when their often central role in the achievement of political power is denied as post-independence regimes construct a form of the pre-colonial that insists on a traditional subservient role for women. Needless to say, this ‘tradition’ is largely invented to serve the needs of male leaders and of conservative social and religious forces that endorse them. Examples of this abound, from the dismissal of the central role of women in anti-colonial struggles in many African nations to the relative isolation of women’s role in the struggle for independence in India (including regions now part of modern Pakistan).

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values of French life and the French Constitution and of women’s freedom to choose what they wear. The first of these two claims depended on an assumption that the national social imaginary could never change to reflect evolving demographic forces. The second assumed that the decision of the women to veil was always subject to male control, or, more subtly, to broader cultural constraints from within the community. The latter case is assumed to be more powerfully applied in some cultures than others, though little evidence was assembled by the legislators to prove this contention. While there is a clear case to be made against women’s being compelled to wear any garment, it is less easy to determine when this is occurring and impossible to legislate against it without the law’s becoming either potentially or actually discriminatory against the larger group to which the women wearing the signifiers of the specific identity belong. Only a small minority of the female Muslim community currently wear a face veil regularly in public in most Western societies. But the veil operates as a symbolic marker of the larger Muslim community in much public discourse. Attempts to ban this practice on the grounds of gender discrimination may result, intentionally or inadvertently, in the increase of anti-Muslim feelings. Although the current French law neither specifies a particular ethnicity or religion nor specifically cites the Muslim custom of face veiling, in practice the legal text becomes a signifier that discriminates almost exclusively against Muslims. This reflects the increasingly negative press coverage Muslim communities have experienced since the declaration of the so-called War on Terror following the attack on the World Trade Centre in Manhattan in 2001. Specifically, it illustrates the way in which Muslim identity has been conflated in many of these accounts with anti-Western, fundamentalist views. Even when media reports deny this conflation of Islam and extremism, the emphasis in these reports on the more visible forms of Islamic dress for women becomes a way of encoding this negative representation within a seemingly liberal discourse of human rights and anti-discrimination. Why any particular Muslim woman decides to veil or not can never be reduced to a single reason, as examining any specific situation or case shows. But particular instances of veiling everywhere are now inevitably tied into this broader global response to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and ‘terrorism’. The reactions in the media and by politicians when they comment on decisions to wear facial veils by Muslim women cannot be isolated from this broader public perception in a world where news reports are available worldwide and when media institutions are owned by corporations which have outlets in countries across the globe. Similarly, politicians, too, respond to the specific event in a global discursive climate in which the decision

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to veil is seen as a threat to public security, or as an affront to modern values in much the same way as Fanon observed in the Algeria of the 1950s and 1960s. The paranoia of the colonial state has been inherited by the emerging global world order and manifested in its increasing paranoia. In such a world, the distinction between the local and specific situation and that of the world at large has collapsed, encouraging a public discourse that feeds on a dangerous confusion of specific events and universalizing generalizations. As an Australian citizen, it is to my own country that I must look to see how this world-wide phenomenon has affected the society in which I live.

Choosing to Veil: The Australian Debate In 2010 a case was brought against the male principal (head teacher) of a Muslim school in Perth, the State Capital of Western Australia. The Director of Public Prosecutions of Western Australia charged him with inflating the numbers of pupils enrolled to increase the government grant subsidy for private schools. The sum involved was considerable, several hundred thousand Australian dollars. One of the prosecution’s key witnesses (a voluntary witness, by the way) was a woman who taught at the school and who had chosen to wear the niqab (falsely reported as a burqa in the WA and world press). She insisted that she was uncomfortable giving her evidence without her usual face covering and requested permission to wear the niqab in court.11 The female judge, after considerable debate, ruled that the woman had to have her face uncovered while giving evidence.12 The ironies of this case are multiple. First, it was the prosecutor who had called her who had first insisted that the jury could not evaluate her evidence properly if she was veiled, while the defence and the defender (the principal) said they had no objection to her giving evidence against them while veiled. Secondly, an important local imam ruled that there was no compulsion in Islamic law for her to remain veiled in a court, but that if she chose to do so this was her personal choice and right. In fact, it was clear that the decision to be veiled was the woman’s and the debate was about her right to personal com-

11

In this case, the face veil the woman chose to wear was the niqab (which exposed her eyes), but which, as mentioned above, was referred to in the press throughout as the burqa, a garment in which the eyes are also veiled behind a mesh. The use of the term burqa for all face coverings is general, and, significantly, burqa implies the most complete cover that is commonly employed for all forms of facial veiling. 12 Diana Guest, “Woman Wants Ruling on Burqah in Court,” Australian (5 August 2010), http: //www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/woman-wants-ruling-on-burqa-in-court/story-e6frg 6nf-1225901330693 (accessed 8 December 2014).

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fort in public versus the judge’s assessment of whether or not veiling would interfere with the jury’s ability to evaluate her evidence fully. The case clearly turned on the woman’s right to her choice of clothing versus the requirement of a specific public institution (the law court) to have her evidence presented in a way acceptable to the local institutions of civil law. But in the press reports it became a discussion about the general right to wear the face veil anywhere and everywhere in Australia. As with other cases, the specifics of a debate rapidly slipped into a public discourse that, in this case, confused a gendered compulsion to wear the face veil (that did not apply) with the broader rights to freedom of private and public dress. The press coverage of the case also quickly evolved into a public discussion of whether specific group practices such as facial veiling were acceptable or not in Australian society at large. In this debate, the fact that the practices were confined to a specific group, a minority of Muslim Australian women, was not addressed. The debate on veiling in Australia, as in Europe, became a covert way of voicing a fear of Muslim minorities, an anxiety that had been conflated with the concerns about terrorism that swept the world after 9/11. The Australian reaction to this and how its reporting in the media engaged with the idea of appropriate dress is worth discussing further. As with public debate generally, the internet played a large role, with the printed press reports of the Perth case attracting large numbers of online comments, whose volume and exaggerated tone rapidly outstripped the original report. These postings were often far more violent and angry than the initial print or television news coverage. The public response of leading politicians also shifted debate from the specific case to the general. Tony Abbott (former conservative Federal Opposition Leader and then Prime Minister), commented thus on a wholesale condemnation of the burqa by the conservative (Liberal/National Party) Senator Bernardi as incompatible with Australian values: I think a lot of Australians find the wearing of the burqa quite confronting and I wish it was not widely worn. But the point is we don’t have a policy to ban it and we have always respected people’s rights in this area. He (Bernardi) has expressed a view, I respect the view, I don’t absolutely share it, but I can understand the concerns in the community.13

In this response, the subject of the debate has shifted again, this time from the feelings of the woman to Tony Abbott and his feelings, while the right-wing Michael Owen, “Australians Find Burqa Confronting, Tony Abbott Says,” Australian (7 May 2010), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/australians-find-burqa-confronting-tonyabbott-says/story-e6frg6nf-1225863717990 (accessed 8 December 2014). 13

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senator’s view is conflated without evidence with that of the community at large. When asked later about the specific case in Perth, Abbott said that despite his own feelings he did not agree that the burqa should be banned. In fact, of course, the issue was never about whether or not it should be banned but only about whether it could be worn in a court while giving evidence. But politicians had found a way to spin the case into a statement that would see them positioned as ‘tolerant’ (“I don’t think it should be banned”) while engaging emotionally with the idea that in Abbott’s words his ‘discomfort’ with the burqa was shared by “a lot of Australians.” Thus, Abbott neatly aligned himself with the idea that “a lot of Australians” share his ‘core values’ which are ‘natural’ and not socially constructed. The Lebanese–Australian sociologist Ghassan Hage has pointed out that this idea of national “core values” implies that although anyone may be admitted to ‘citizenship’ only certain groups may define what the core identity of the nation is – these groups he calls the “governmental belonging” groups: It is clearly this governmental belonging which is claimed by those who are in a dominant position. To inhabit the nation in this way is to inhabit what is often referred to as the national will. It is to perceive oneself as the enactor or the agent of this will [...]. It is what makes the nationalist a subject whose will can be exercised within national space. It is also by inhabiting this will that the imaginary body of the nationalist assumes its gigantic size, for the latter is the size of omnipresence, the size of those whose gaze has to be constantly policing and governing the nation. It is also, by the same token, the inability to represent and inhabit such a will which makes the other a national object.14

These dominant groups who claim exclusive rights to articulate the national will may do so from positions on both the right and the left of politics, and may articulate their claim in either conservative or liberal forms. Whatever, the problem is that they function as the self-authorized owners of an unchanging and unchangeable culture and they claim the right to define the dominant social imaginary of the nation as one that is beyond dispute, natural and unchangeable. As Hage also notes, this view may be opposed by minority groups, but their resistance is determined by the agenda that this ‘governmentally belonging’ group defines: How do some people inhabiting the nation manage to take up such a managerial position within it and not others? Clearly, not all those 14

Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale, N S W : Pluto, 1998): 46 (italics in original).

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within national space feel the nation to be their own to an equal degree. Newly arrived migrants who may dislike an ‘Anglo’, for example, are not likely to feel nationally empowered to act violently against them. Even not so newly arrived migrants, who might feel quite at home in Australia, will not necessarily feel empowered to do the above [...] they may experience passive homely belonging, but not governmental belonging.15

When minorities or non-governmentally belonging groups claim equal rights to define a new social imaginary of the nation, they are represented as undermining the ‘core values’ of that nation, one to which as citizens they belong but within which they have only limited rights as ‘non-governmentally empowered’ citizens.16

Conclusion: Unmasking the ‘Human’? This essay has argued that legislation cannot hope to address all the varieties of decision which are lumped under the simplistic concept of a right to choose one’s dress that politicians and media routinely employ. That, of course, has profound implications for any legal attempt to police the border of identity by banning a garment. If we refuse to recognize the complexity in practice of each such event as the wearing of a piece of clothing that positions one as not a member of the ‘governmentally belonging’, ‘dominant’, ‘core’ group, we lay ourselves open to the dangers not only of allowing prejudice to flourish but also of endorsing the ability of governments to define the object of surveillance as anyone they wish to survey – the danger Fanon’s essay pointed out so many years 15

Hage, White Nation, 49. The phrase ‘core values’ has particular resonance in recent Australian political discourse, as it featured in the then Federal Treasurer Peter Costello’s infamous 2006 speech advocating active intervention to preserve what he regarded as the ‘core values’ of Australians that had, in his view, been undermined by left politics from the 1970s onwards. While this speech did not explicitly discuss dress codes, it did single out Muslim ‘extremists’ as a specific threat to ‘core’ Australian values that elsewhere John Howard, the Prime Minister at the time, defined, rather quaintly, as rooted in what he termed “Anglo-Saxon identity,” a nostalgic category that would exclude a majority of postwar Australian immigrants. Like the recent French law on public face covering, Howard’s ‘core values’ speech was supported by elements of left and right parties, from the One Nation party of Pauline Hanson, who used it to reassert her attacks on immigration and the idea of multiculturalism, to Morris Iemma, the then Labor Premier of New South Wales, who called the speech “reasonable and practical” and said immigrants should “leave the disputes, leave the extremism and leave the fights behind.” For a report of this speech and these reactions, see David Humphries, “Live Here and Be Australian, Howard Says,” Sydney Morning Herald (25 February 2006), http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/live-here-be-australian/2006/02/24/11406702691 94.html (accessed 8 December 2014). 16

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ago. Then it was the colonial regime in a colony; now the surveillance is of “citizens” of the modern multicultural state. Recent work by the American cultural scholar Mike Hill is useful here, especially his 2009 essay “‘Terrorists Are Human Beings’: Mapping the U S Army’s ‘Human Terrain Systems’ Program.” This title, “Terrorists Are Human Beings,” is a quotation from a handbook issued in the U SA to border police, customs officials, etc. These manuals are the most recent response to the failures of ‘profiling’ to identify terrorists. Their response has been to suggest that the category of ‘terrorist’ is increasingly difficult to identify as distinct from the general category of ‘human being’. But rather than seeing this as evidence of the idea that an existential category of being called a ‘terrorist’ was always a gross simplification that reflected unacknowledged prejudicial generalizations, the manuals use this failure to define the abstraction ‘terrorist’ by profiling identity markers as the justification for extending surveillance literally to anybody. Thus, Hill shows how the rhetoric of more recent handbooks on anti-terrorism chillingly conflate the idea of the human and the terrorist. Hill concludes: according to conditions in which terror is ubiquitous – and this is key – if we “consider everyone a potential terrorist” (189), then “every person [...] even the casual observer [...] is [also] a potential surveillant” of some future terror in humanity’s disguise (225). This is the nature of using “ethnic or territorial rhetoric as a ‘political’ mask,” the Handbook suggests (24). And we could say, according to this suggestion, where the subjects and objects of terror disintegrate into one another, that under such a mask lies nothing more than the infinite layers of still more disguises.17

This official and governmental frustration with the protean face of the ‘terrorist’ echoes the response of the colonial authorities Fanon discusses, when their simplistic method of distinguishing resistant from compliant colonized subjects was subverted during the liberation struggle by the actions of Algerian women in first donning and then discarding the veil. The result that is implicit in both cases is to render everyone suspect. In this sense, masking and unmasking become the face and obverse of a single identity. It matters little whether we mask or unmask in the name of liberation and modernization, or of protection and control. Whatever the reasons offered to justify identifying distinct categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, normal and abnormal, these distinctions invest not 17

Mike Hill, “Terrorists Are Human Beings: Mapping the US Army’s ‘Human Terrain Systems’ Program,” differences 20.2&3 (2009): 251. The internal page numbers that appear in the quotation are to pages in the Handbook to which the article makes reference.

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only the Other but ourselves in a process whose logical end is the idea that the mask is the inescapable condition of identity. As a result, the ‘real’, the ‘unveiled’, the quotidian human is always already displaced into an endless speculation of doubt, disguise, and ultimately fear. In this even more threatening future, we are faced with a universal paranoia that traps both the surveyed and the surveyor and in which it is our own masked identity that is unveiled.

W OR K S C I T E D Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. “Place,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin (London & New York: Routledge, 1995): 345–46. Cherki, Alice. Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, tr. Nadia Benabid (Frantz Fanon: Portrait, 2000; Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2006). Cornell, Drucilla. “The Secret Behind the Veil: A Reinterpretation of ‘Algeria Unveiled’,” Philosophia Africana 4.2 (2001): 27–35. Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled,” in Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An cinq de la révolution algérienne, 1959; New York: Grove, 1965): 35–67. Fuss, Diana. “Interior Colonies,” in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Humanity, 1999): 294–328. Griffiths, Gareth. “Grover Cleveland and the ‘Dusky Queens’: Religion, Ideology and American ‘Imperial’ Expansionism,” in ‘Imbatti’: Crosscurrents in Postcolonial Memory and Literature: A Festschrift for Daniel Massa, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Msida: Malta U P , forthcoming). Guest, Diana. “Woman Wants Ruling on Burqah in Court,” Australian (5 August 2010), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/woman-wants-ruling-on-burqa-incourt/story-e6frg6nf-1225901330693 (accessed 8 December 2014). Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Annandale, NS W : Pluto, 1998). Hill, Mike. “Terrorists Are Human Beings: Mapping the US Army’s ‘Human Terrain Systems’ Program,” differences 20.2&3 (2009): 250–78. Humphries, David. “Live Here and Be Australian, Howard Says,” Sydney Morning Herald (25 February 2006), http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/live-here-be-australian /2006/02/24/1140670269194.html (accessed 8 December 2014). Owen, Michael. “Australians Find Burqa Confronting, Tony Abbott Says,” Australian (7 May 2010), http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/australians-find-burqaconfronting-tony-abbott-says/story-e6frg6nf-1225863717990 (accessed 8 December 2014).

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“As Rare as Rubies” Did Salman Rushdie Invent Turkish-American Literature? E L E N A F U R LANE TT O

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as rare as rubies” is a line from Elif Shafak’s novel The Bastard of Istanbul 1 that happens to resemble the title of a short story by Salman Rushdie, entitled “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies.”2 The use of this unusual proverbial comparison with reference to suicide and good advice establishes an immediate connection between Rushdie and Shafak’s ‘metaphoric’ use of English.3 The appearance of such a specific proverbial formula in the writing of two authors whose works seem at first sight to be unrelated motivates one to hypothesize further intertextual similarities which might provide evidence for significant cultural intersections, influences, and exchanges. The following study aims to demonstrate how Elif Shafak’s writing is interconnected with Salman Rushdie’s. The intertextual relations between Shafak’s and Rushdie’s texts are in fact no mere coincidence, and indicate, rather, the two writers’ similar preoccupation with religious and secular forms of imperialism. On the one hand, Salman Rushdie has repeatedly characterized Islam as an imperialist venture; on the other, Turkey – an empire until the First World War and a Republic since 1923 – is now producing national and international literary responses, both in Turkish and in English, to the 1

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Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul (2006; New York: Penguin, 2008): 611. Further page references are in the main text after “Bastard.” My gratitude goes to the editors and reviewers of this volume for their constructive suggestions and interventions in my text. 2 This short story was published separately in book form: Salman Rushdie, Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies (New York: Pantheon, 1994). 3 Similar formulations can be found in the Bible. For example, in Proverbs 20:15: “There is gold and abundance of rubies; But the lips of knowledge are a rare jewel.” And Proverbs 3:15–18: “[A virtuous wife] is more precious than rubies; nothing you desire can compare with her.” Both quotations are from the New Jerusalem Bible, ed. Susan Jones (New York: Doubleday, 1985). Nevertheless, retrieving the exact origin of this expression is beside the point of this essay.

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Republican political ideology perceived by several authors as a colonial agent welcoming Western cultural and economic influence over Turkey. In several Turkish and Turkish-American literary texts,4 the “over-obsession”5 of Republican Turkey with westernization has been connected to a loss of identity “to the economic and cultural centres of North America and Europe,”6 of which Turkey lived in perpetual awe and imitation. I suggest that the similarities that connect Elif Shafak’s writing with the literary imagery of Salman Rushdie prove how discourses employed by postcolonial writers can be applied to the representation of modern Turkey, especially in the ongoing dialogue with its imperial heritage. The works of these two writers are most strikingly similar when they deal with issues of migration, cultural imperialism, and the writing of history. The notion that Turkey might be considered a neocolonial or “semi-colonial” nation, characterized by an “over-dependence on the West,”7 is crucial to justifying the use of postcolonial theory in the analysis of modern Turkish literature and to legitimizing my comparative analysis. Studies in the field of history are starting to integrate imperial and post-imperial Turkey in a comparative perspective, attempting to demonstrate that European and non-European imperial formations reveal similar patterns of domination and Othering strategies. Alan Mikhail and Christine M. Philliou’s “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn” is a particularly relevant work in this respect, along with Dina Rizk Khoury and Dane Kennedy’s “Comparing Empires: The Ottoman Domains and the British Raj in the Long Nineteenth Century,” which invites a comparison of Ottoman and British imperial practices.8 Nevertheless, a postcolonial framework is hardly ever used when engaging with the literature of the post-Ottoman age. 9 It is my impression that such 4

For example, Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book (1989) and The New Life (1994), and Maureen Freely’s Enlightenment (2008). 5 Ömer Taspinar, Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism (Washington D C : Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008): 14. 6 Ian Almond, “Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narratives in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book,” New Literary History 34.1 (Winter 2003): 82. 7 Andrew Mango, “Perplexed by Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 39.4 (October 2003): 211. 8 Alan Mikhail & Christine Philliou, “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54.4 (October 2012): 721–45; Dina Rizk Khoury & Dane Kennedy, “Comparing Empires: The Ottoman Domains and the British Raj in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27.2 (2007): 233–44. 9 Other studies that discuss the possibility of applying the postcolonial framework to postimperial Turkish literature find it not entirely satisfactory. In East West Mimesis, Kader Konuk opts for “more nuanced and historically specific models,” as the westernization of the Ottoman Empire, Konuk claims, was “an autonomous decision.” “To see late Ottomans and early republican Turks

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a choice would prove most fruitful for analysing the literary landscape of contemporary Turkey, which in the last two centuries has been traversed by narratives of neo-colonial domination. Based on the examination of the intertextual references between Elif Shafak’s fictional works in English and one of the most controversial postcolonial novels, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses,10 my essay aims to investigate how modern Turkish literature (particularly when written and published in English) draws on postcolonial literary imagery in order to address the issue of Western cultural imperialism and national identity in present-day Turkey, as well as to negotiate the relationship between westernized Turkey and its Ottoman legacy. In spite of the parental influence that such an eminent author as Salman Rushdie may have had on modern Turkish writers, I claim that the latter have absorbed postcolonial canons in order to adapt them to the Turkish context, giving birth to an anti-imperialist discourse that locates the origins of Western cultural imperialism in the early stages of the Kemalist Republic. The assimilation of postcolonial imagery and theories does not render Turkish literature unoriginal or mannerist; on the contrary, it emphasizes the need for further research on this peculiar evolution of postcolonial thought. Salman Rushdie’s significance for modern Turkey does not end with Elif Shafak. More Turkish writers, especially those open to the Western literary market (i.e. including Europe and the U SA in their implied readership), share some of Rushdie’s imagery and style. Studies of Turkish-German literature, for example, offer comparisons between Rushdie and Turkish migrant writers living in Germany, such as Emine Evzgi Özdamar.11 Curiously enough, a quotation from Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children closes the Turkish-German film Almanya, Willkommen in Deutschland, documenting the life of Turkish migrants in

primarily as people under the hegemonic influence of Western European powers,” she concludes, “would thus be too narrow, if not misleading.” See Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2010): 7. ErdaȪ Göknar agrees that the postcolonial model “is not appropriate for the modern Turkish novel,” especially when applied to Orhan Pamuk. Even though Göknar admits that Pamuk’s work “in other traditions, would be described as postcolonial,” he clarifies that the label would “reconstitute the very opposition to Europe that [Pamuk’s] work successfully overcomes”; Göknar, “Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45.2 (2012): 310. It is important to specify that Konuk’s and Göknar’s observations take into consideration literature in Turkish, while the present study applies the postcolonial framework to literature in English by a Turkish author. 10 Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1989; New York: Penguin, 2008). 11 Ahmet S. Bayazitoglu, “Motion Sickness: Literatures of Migration and Minorities” (doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2001).

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Germany.12 The parallels established between Rushdie’s poetics of migration and the condition of Turkish writers in Germany provide evidence of how the tradition of Turkish migrant literature – of which Shafak might be considered an example – has been influenced by the work of the Anglo-Indian writer. Other comparative-literature studies often associate Orhan Pamuk’s oneiric prose with Rushdie’s magical realism.13 The two writers resort to a type of magical realism because realism is insufficient to describe complex realities like those of Turkey and India – where the ‘realism’ of everyday urban life cannot be separated from the ‘magical’ dimension of religious folklore; where clashing traditions of thought, the hegemonic and the oppressed, produce contradictory versions of history; and where “black and white descriptions of society are no longer compatible [and where] fantasy, or the mingling of fantasy and naturalism, is one way of dealing with these problems.”14 Elif Shafak’s novels, especially The Bastard of Istanbul and The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004), offer the most explicit, complete, and easily traceable patterns of intertextuality with Salman Rushdie’s work, as she appropriated, borrowed, and drew inspiration from Rushdie’s literary imagery, especially when dealing with themes of migration, displacement, and hybridity, projecting a postcolonial framework onto the Turkish context. In my essay, I intend to explore the intertextual allusions connecting Shafak’s aforementioned novels with Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The first part of my work consists of an overview of those themes, images, and textual areas where the novels of Rushdie and Shafak display the most striking similarities, and where it is possible to visualize best their commonality of concerns. This first part will help delineate the great significance of The Satanic Verses for Elif Shafak, and how this work has contributed to shaping her perception of anti-imperialism in Turkey, partly based on a re-interpretation of some of the themes present in Rushdie’s novel. The second part will emphasize the concept of the ‘gendered city’ and its relevance for the creation of a similar anti-imperialist discourse.  12

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981); Yasemin õamdereli & Nesrin õamdereli, dir. Almanya: Wilkommen in Deutschland (Roxy Film  The Chau Ngo, Germany 2011; 101 min.). 13 Merve Aktar, “Forms of Relation: The Western Literary Canon and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” (M A thesis, SabancƯ University, 2008), http: //research.sabanciuniv.edu/11383/ (accessed 23 November 2014). 14 Salman Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands” (1982), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991; New York: Penguin, 1992): 19.

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The Satanic Verses and The Bastard of Istanbul: Areas of Intertextual Overlap One can identify four areas in The Bastard of Istanbul where Shafak’s text displays postcolonial themes and appears to be very close to Rushdie’s Verses. First, both Rushdie and Shafak resort to the image of metamorphosis in order to confront the questions of migration and displacement; second, migrant characters often have two-sided identities, composed of an assimilated façade and a repressed ethnic double that is dark, enraged, and destructive. In Rushdie and Shafak’s fiction, the displaced body of the migrant is a metamorphic one, hybrid and monstrous, made such by the judgmental glare of the white Western world, and by the uneasy struggle between the migrants’ attachment to their ethnicity and their need to assimilate to the lifestyle of the Western host country: these conflicting drives are enacted on the migrant’s body, turning it into a two-sided monstrosity. Third, both writers comment on the potentially fatal nature of literature, revealing the central role played by writing and storytelling in the minorities’ search for identity; and fourth, both make abundant use of formulaic expressions drawn from fairy-tales, casting a shadow on the narrator’s reliability, pointing to the uncertain, subjective nature of historiography, and providing an alternative to its masculine and West-centred tradition. This study will provide a brief analysis of how the two texts come together in these thematic areas. As he falls from a hijacked plane headed to England, the protagonist of The Satanic Verses, the Indian actor Saladin Chamcha, is transformed into a twosided creature, a devilish faun: half goat, half human. He survives the fall and after his arrival in London is captured by a group of policemen who, in a shower of racist comments, take him to a place where more metamorphic creatures are kept prisoners. Among these are a man with a tiger head, a woman who is half water-buffalo, men with tails, men who have turned into snakes, a talking wolf, a woman whose body has turned to glass, and “men and women who were also partially plants, or giant insects, or even, on occasion, built partly of brick or stone; [...] men with rhinoceros horns instead of noses and women with necks as long as any giraffe.”15 As Simona Sawhney points out, “the connection between migrancy and metamorphosis is fairly obvious […]. Metamorphosis [is] a guiding trope of the novel, a metaphor that responds at once to the lives of migrants.”16 Thus, the episode adds to the discourse on migration expressed in 15

Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 171. Further page references are in the main text after “Verses.” Simona Sawhney, “Satanic Choices: Poetry and Prophecy in Rushdie’s Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 45.3 (Autumn 1999): 259. 16

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the novel, and comments on the condition of foreigners and migrants in England through the image of “internally and externally generated mutations.” 17 In fact, all of the metamorphic prisoners, like Chamcha himself, are foreigners. As the following passage shows, the misrepresentation experienced by immigrants in the Western world is made visible in the absurd bodily mutations that affect the hosts of this unusual prison: “The point is [...] some of us aren’t going to stand for it. We’re going to break out of here before they turn us into anything worse.” “But how do they do it?” Chamcha wanted to know. “They describe us,” the other whispered solemnly. “That’s all. They have the power of description, and we succumb to the pictures they construct.” (Verses, 168)

A reference to hybrid bodies in The Bastard of Istanbul is also related to the question of migration. One character in the novel, Zeliha, owns a tattoo parlour in Istanbul where the customers mostly request figures of animals, monsters, and mythical beasts. The practice of having animals tattooed – an ancient one, rooted in the country’s past (Bastard, 204), is a way to enter into dialogue with local traditions and history, but, most importantly, a way for the author to represent the Istanbulites’ inner displacement through the concept of physical hybridity. In Shafak’s oeuvre, Istanbulites are frequently described as displaced individuals, as migrants in their own homeland. The author considers such inner displacement to be a consequence of the last century of Turkish history, when the ideas of westernization and modernization introduced with the birth of the Republic encouraged Turks to detach themselves from their Ottoman and Islamic traditions to embrace Western secularism. Like migrants living abroad, Turks found themselves caught in the dilemma between loyalty to their past traditions and assimilation to Turkey’s forward-looking, secularized, westernized identity, promoted by the Kemalist government and, since the 1920s, representing a crucial discourse of Turkey’s modern society.18 Zeliha’s tattoo parlour is reminiscent of the Verses’ absurd bestiary: in both passages, cultural displacement is made visible, revealed through the expedient 17

Michael M.J. Fischer & Mehdi Abedi, “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology 5.2 (May 1990): 142. 18 It is important to clarify that Kemalism is arguably no longer the principal political ideology in present-day Turkey. Neo-Ottomanism, with its stress on the dialogue with the Western powers and the preservation of the Islamic heritage, has been gaining prominence since the 1980s. Shafak’s neo-Ottoman sympathies clearly emerge in her fiction as well as in her non-fiction, as they inform her idealized representation of the Ottoman Empire, her advocacy of a form of cosmopolitanism reminiscent of the imperial times, and her retrieval of disused Ottoman words.

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of a hybrid bodily appearance. Rushdie’s hybrid migrants are represented in the process of interiorizing the stereotypes of Western representation (describing them as monsters and animals) until they submit to them, whereas in The Bastard of Istanbul, Istanbulites choose to express their position of cultural hybridity by making their bodies hybrid, signalling the presence of two natures in one being. In both texts, animal symbolism, indicating physical as well as cultural hybridity, is connected to the problem of migration, and to the coexistence of two different cultural systems in one body. Another expedient through which both writers address themes such as migration and identity is the use of doubles. Through this motif, Rushdie and Shafak stress how migrants’ identities are split, once again, between the desire for assimilation and, conversely, loyalty to their roots: i.e. between an assimilated outer self and a repressed ‘ethnic’ double. In The Satanic Verses, Saladin Chamcha and Gibreel Farishta embody opposite types of immigrant and can be delineated, for many reasons, as a couple of ‘doubles’ – either as parts of a whole or as complementary forces. Nevertheless, the aspect of their ‘doubleness’ I will focus on in this study can be linked to the theme of migration, so dear to both Rushdie and Shafak. Saladin loves every aspect of English culture; he is married to a white Englishwoman and constantly struggles to repress his Indianness and become fully British. By contrast, Gibreel seems impervious to English norms and habits, and remains attached to his Indianness, so much so that, instead of adapting to the English environment, he attempts to tropicalize London to make it look like his native India. If, in Saladin’s case, England powerfully changes the individual’s nature, in Gibreel’s it is the individual who acts in order to change England according to his needs. Therefore, it can be said that if Saladin stands for uncompromised, radical assimilation, Gibreel represents the opposite tendency of a migrant, that of being indifferent to foreign customs and retaining loyalty to one’s cultural identity. The Bastard of Istanbul displays a similar structural pattern: it presents two female characters who personify two different ways of being migrants. Each is a victim of the same dilemma: whether to assimilate or to remain committed to one’s ethnicity. Asya is a Turkish girl born in Istanbul who feels like a foreigner in her own country: in spite of her name, which seemingly indicates emotional belonging to a vague notion of the East, she is imbued with Western values and lives accordingly. She is indifferent to the story of her family, professes to be a nihilist, and claims not to mind not knowing who her father is, as her mother Zeliha kept his identity secret. Her disregard for her past and personal history, which she describes as “shackles we need to get rid of” and “an excruciating burden” (Bastard, 148), extends to envy of her grandmother, who suffers from

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Alzheimer’s and cannot remember her past. The element of ‘fatherlessness’ is metonymic of Asya’s ignorance of her country’s past and traditions, provoked by the heavy westernization that left her generation devoid of history and identity. The equivalence between father and nation is in fact one that permeates the novel. “Being a bastard is less about having no father than having no past,” Asya explains to a group of Armenians demanding that she apologize for her forefathers’ crime (the genocide in 1915), “and here you are asking me to own the past and apologize for a mythical father!” (Bastard, 262). The cultural narrative identifying Turkey with its first charismatic president, Mustafa Kemal ‘Atatürk’ (an honorary title that means ‘father of the Turks’), doubtlessly contributes to the characterization of the nation as a male entity, an issue problematized by Elif Shafak in her article “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture” and explored in detail in the second part of my analysis.19 Owing to her troubled relationship with her own past, Asya is cast into an existence characterized by alienation, nihilism, and suicidal tendencies, all of which bring to the surface a “dark side, full of rage” (Bastard, 146), as her partner calls it. Yet, Asya is torn between this inconclusive life of alienation and a timid drive to retrieve the old traditions of her people, as they were handed down to her by her grandmother. Her contradictory selves, governed by the alternation of indifference and curiosity, alienation and feelings of community, homelessness and rootedness, identify her as a good example of a ‘double’ character, reflecting the dichotomy between westernization and loyalty to one’s roots. The co-protagonist, Armanoush, is quite different from Asya, who has never left the city where she was born. Armanoush is a second-generation Armenian immigrant in the U SA , who constantly wonders whether she should assimilate to the Western world-views of her American mother or, rather, adhere to her Armenian father’s world and delve into the history of her Armenian family in order to cultivate the century-old hatred towards Turkey, responsible for the Armenian genocide. Armanoush’s ethnic awareness is often connected to animal imagery and evokes a second personality, referred to as “the other Armanoush that resided in there,” “a creature deep in slumber,” “resplendent with rage” (Bastard, 114). Armanoush’s ethnic awareness, so different from her gentle americanized outlook, can doubtlessly be considered as a dark, beastly, repressed ethnic double. Both Rushdie and Shafak, in the tradition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, suggest that the only way to cope with the duplicities in19

Elif Shafak, “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture,” Turkish Daily News (30 July 2006), repr. Elif õafak, http://www.elifsafak.us/yazilar.asp?islem=yazi&id=401 (accessed 15 December 2014).

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trinsic to their condition is by attaining a hybrid status: in other words, by integrating the two doubles or cultural components into a hybrid whole. Cultivating only one double leads to the individual’s death in both novels: in The Satanic Verses, Gibreel Farishta is killed by his uncompromising refusal to integrate in his host country. By the same token, Mustafa, a Turkish immigrant in the U SA in the Bastard, metaphorically kills his Turkish self in order to remove all obstacles to his assimilation into American society, but then dies after eating a poisoned Turkish traditional dish as soon as he returns to Istanbul. In fact, the figure of the double and the thread of metamorphosis overlap, as in both The Satanic Verses and in The Bastard of Istanbul these images contribute to shaping a similar discourse on migration, identity, and assimilation. Shafak and Rushdie also seem to agree on the fact that literature actively shapes the destiny of individuals and peoples, plays an active role in society, and, most of all, can lead to death and madness. It can be argued that the decision to address ‘fatal’ literature in The Satanic Verses and The Bastard of Istanbul has proven to be prophetic of the developments in the lives of the two authors, united by the persecution they had to suffer because of their published work. A fatwa was issued against Rushdie by the Ayatollah of Iran in 1989, while Elif Shafak was tried under article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, according to which she had “denigrate[d] Turkishness” in her novel.20 The destructive potential of literature figures prominently in The Satanic Verses. The title itself can already be seen as metadiscursive, prefiguring the role of this literary form in the development of the plot: in the novel, different sets of ‘verses’ lie at the basis of misunderstandings and incidents. In order of importance, the most significant verses the reader encounters are those recited by the 20

The textual areas which stimulated the reactions of the Iranian and Turkish authorities were, respectively, the Jahilia chapter in The Verses and the Armenian subplot in The Bastard, providing the point of view of some Armenian-American characters on the Armenian genocide, which the Turkish government is yet to recognize. Article 301 of the Turkish penal code states that “a person who publicly denigrates Turkishness, the Republic or the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, shall be sentenced [to] a penalty of imprisonment for a term of six months to three years.” This translation is from Bülent Algan, “The Brand New Version of Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code and the Future of Freedom of Expression Cases in Turkey,” German Law Journal 9 (2008): 2238, http: //www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol09No12/PDF_Vol_09_No_12_2237-2252_Developments_Algan. pdf (accessed 15 December 2014). Algan’s article also states that Elif Shafak was tried because of the following sentence: “I am the grandchild of genocide survivors who lost all their relatives to the hands of the Turkish butchers in 1915, but I myself have been brainwashed to deny the genocide because I was raised by some Turk named Mustafa” (Bastard, 52). See Algan, “The Brand New Version of Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code and the Future of Freedom of Expression Cases in Turkey,” 2238–39, fn 11.

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archangel Gibreel (Farishta’s avatar) to Mahound (a derogatory nickname for the Prophet Mohammed), inviting him first to accept the archaic cult of the goddesses Lat, Uzza, and Manat into Islam. He then reverses the message, declaring Allah to be the only god of Islam, adding that the first, deceitful revelation was delivered by Satan, and not by himself, the archangel, even though the two of them, in Gibreel’s words, are one. Mahound’s uncritical obedience to the angel’s ambivalent verses brings about the destruction of Jahilia, a tolerant city, home to the female cult of the three pre-Islamic goddesses, at first embraced by the ‘satanic’ verses and eventually rejected by the ‘angelic’ ones. The second hint at the presence of ‘satanic’ verses involves Saladin Chamcha’s stalking of his former wife Pamela and her new partner by making anonymous phone-calls, during which he recites disturbing jingles. Thanks to plot turns that make Farishta’s and Chamcha’s personal stories intersect in fluid, osmotic symbiosis, both the telephonic jingles and the revelation verses drive Gibreel to madness, pushing him towards the final tragedy. A similar conception of literature as harmful appears in The Bastard of Istanbul in relation to the Armenian genocide. Armanoush’s Armenian grandmother expresses her disapproval of her granddaughter’s love of books, especially novels, establishing the disturbing parallel between literature and death, intellect and persecution. According to the grandmother, being educated and well-read exposes Armanoush to the danger of persecution, as the members of the Armenian intelligentsia were the first to be seized and eliminated by the Ottoman government in 1915. A confirmation of this comes with a flashback about one distant relative of Armanoush’s, an Armenian poet who was captured and sent on a death march after accusations of stirring revolutionary feelings in the Armenian population through his verses. The last area of ‘contamination’ involving the works of Salman Rushdie and Elif Shafak, and possibly the most interesting from the point of view of its implications, is the problem of narration and the use of fairy-tale terminology. Both authors make use of fairy-tale formulae in order to de-centralize and de-authorize the figure of the narrator, thus participating in the quest for an alternative historiography that also takes into consideration individual memories, folklore, and the voices of minorities. The following passages show two formulae that frequently appear in The Satanic Verses and The Bastard of Istanbul: Kan ma kan/Fi qadim azzaman ... It was so, it was not, in a time long forgot (Verses, 143) Kan ma kan Fi qadim azzaman

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It was so it was not in a long time forgot Well, anyway goes something like this I can’t be sure (Verses, 544) Once there was; once there wasn’t; When the creatures were as plentiful as grain And talking too much was a sin. A preamble to a Turkish tale And to an Armenian one. (Bastard, Prologue)

Comparable formulae – “it was so, it was not” in the Verses, and “once there was, once there wasn’t” in the Bastard – link storytelling to historiography. In the Verses, the formula seems to relate to the role of the narrator and his ability to represent reality. Evidence of this assumption can be found in two aspects of the text. First, the narrator of the Verses, being Satan himself, is repeatedly connoted as unreliable, uncertain, and deceptive; he is also the author of the first, fallacious revelation to the prophet Mahound, in relation to the female cult of Lat, Uzza, and Manat and its legitimacy. Second, in the passages involving the conquest of Jahilia by Mahound, the solemn writing of the Qur’an is threatened by Salman the scribe (it is not merely a coincidence that the writer and the fictional scribe have the same name), who mystifies Mahound’s dictation by “surreptitiously changing things” (Verses, 367). Salman’s challenging of Mahound’s religious authority – “my devilment,” as he calls it – is meant as a joke at the beginning, but continues unnoticed by the prophet, until the Qur’an is completely compromised by the scribe’s interventions. Therefore, not only does the problem of unreliable narration dominate The Satanic Verses – whose plot is fluid, concentric, and full of digressions – but it also affects the Qur’an, presented by the Verses’ narrator as a limited, subjective, and male-centred interpretation of the Islamic religion. Similarly, the opening of The Bastard of Istanbul locates oral storytelling and folklore in a dominant position, clarifying that, first, what follows does not claim to be historically objective, as the formula “once there was, once there wasn’t” signals a rather insecure reconstruction. Second, the opening explains how the Turkish and Armenian populations were united by a common tradition of storytelling and folklore before nationalist agendas and new historiographical perspectives drew a division between the two. Like the Verses, the Bastard does not rely on an orderly, steadily chronological narrative structure. The main storyline

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(Asya and Armanoush in Istanbul) is interrupted by various flashbacks documenting the individual stories of the two family matriarchs, the Armenian and the Turk, and the beginning of the Armenian genocide from the point of view of an Armenian writer. The history of the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the dawn of the Turkish Republic are presented as a background to these individual stories. In addition, the character who unveils the most complete account of the whole family history, including the full story of Asya’s conception, is a ‘jinni’, a demonic figure. In other words, the history of the country is re-analysed, reconsidered, and retold through different historiographical perspectives, such as the personal lives of two women – one Turkish and one Armenian. By so doing, the narration of history includes the perspective of women and minorities, relinquishing a male-centred, West-centred historiography, and the narrative abandons any claim to factual objectivity, exposing its unattainability, hiding it in the ‘demonic’ account of the jinni. If in the Verses the symbol of traditional historiography is the Qur’an, its equivalent in the Bastard can be identified in the ‘Nutuk’ (the Speech), a famous 1927 address by Atatürk that later became a book, describing the Turkish war of Independence (1919–22) and the foundation of the Republic.21 Although the text amounts to a hyperbolic celebration of Kemal’s leadership, it was received as an unchallengeable, central historical document for that period. In their novels, Rushdie and Shafak are thus united by the intention of creating an alternative version of history that may include a multitude of voices, rehabilitate folklore, integrate the points of view of minorities, and give credibility and resonance to individual histories. Most importantly, Rushdie’s and Shafak’s narratives challenge the dominant position of male-centred historiography, represented by the Qur’an in the Verses and by Kemalist Turkey in the Bastard. In the latter, the female perspective is predominant, to the extent that the male-centred notion of historiography is almost effaced in favour of a matrifocal one. Even though Asya is adamant in remaining ignorant of her father’s identity and national history, it is with immense tenderness that she regards her grandmother’s world of Islamic folklore and superstition. In fact, it is Asya’s grandmother who “secretly put[s] grains of wheat sanctified with prayers into Asya’s pockets to save her from the evil eye” (Bastard, 128) and thus instils in her granddaughter the love of her people’s tradition. By briefly presenting four areas of ‘contamination’ between the works of Salman Rushdie and the younger Turkish-American author Elif Shafak, I hope to have provided an overview of the concerns shared by the two authors. It is, in 21

Mustafa Kemal, Nutuk–Söylev (1927; Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1984).

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my view, particularly striking how Shafak is inspired by traditionally postcolonial themes and integrates them into her fiction about Turkey’s post-Kemalist present. The Kemalist government emerges in some Turkish fiction as the agent that opened the doors of the modern Turkish nation to Western cultural imperialism. Shafak’s focus on the displaced identity of Turkish migrants both abroad and in Turkey, on the loss of national memory and identity, and on the need for a more variegated, alternative historiography including the points of view of women and minorities, as well as a re-evaluation of the Ottoman legacy through the interest in Islamic folklore, recalls The Satanic Verses’ critique of English and Islamic imperialism. What follows will provide further and more specific evidence to back up this claim.

Gender and the City: Femininity and Hybridity in The Satanic Verses and The Saint of Incipient Insanities The most solid and extensive analogy between Rushdie and Shafak lies in the representation of the gendered city as a meaningful element in their anti-imperialist discourse. The following quotations, drawn from Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities, provide a valuable introduction to my next argument: He imagined the DC -8 was the mother-ship [...], he corrected himself, not the mother ship, the father ship, yes the father ship, an aircraft was not a flying womb but a metal phallus, and the passengers were spermatozoa waiting to be spilt. (Verses, 40–41) An ugly queen, a whimsical alma mater, an amorphous womb nonstop absorbing the semen of its newcomers but never, in her history, inseminated by anyone, home to the dispossessed but she herself owned by no one.22

The thematic areas where the works of Rushdie and Shafak collide most evidently – colonialism, gender, and migration – appear in these two parallels between cultural exchange and insemination, where Rushdie describes his protagonist’s impressions on his flight from Bombay to London, and Shafak writes of Istanbul. The representation of a male entity colonizing a territory that is essentially female is a familiar trope in postcolonial literature, but it recurs in such a striking manner in the work of both authors that it requires closer 22

Shafak, The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004; New York: Penguin, 2007): 326. Further page references are in the main text after “Insanities.”

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investigation. The analogy between the city of Jahilia as Rushdie describes it before it became Mecca, and Istanbul’s Ottoman soul, repressed by Atatürk’s Republic and yet unchanged in The Saint of Incipient Insanities, illuminates how Shafak makes use of postcolonial themes in order to represent present-day Turkey, and to denounce the age of cultural imperialism triggered by the Kemalist ideology. ‘Jahilia’, an Arabic term indicating the state of ignorance before the Qur’anic revelation to Mohammed, is also, as indicated above, the name of the city where a chapter of The Satanic Verses is set. Jahilia is a multicultural, tolerant, commercial centre: merchants from all over the world meet in Jahilia, where they are allowed to worship their gods. This climate of religious tolerance can be seen in a temple where dozens of religious statues are kept and worshipped. Formally, Jahilia has had a male governor, but the governor’s wife, Hind, is the city’s real ruler. She is the heart of Jahilia: more skilled than her husband in politics and administration, Hind ensures that the climate of multiculturalism and tolerance continues. Her figure is a hybrid one: she is a partly divine, partly sensual being; part-goddess, part-woman; part-beautiful, part-monstrous. She is the most devout worshipper of Lat, Uzza, and Manat, the three goddesses who shared the Middle Eastern pantheon with Allah before Mohammed’s intervention. As long as Hind stays in Jahilia, poetry, literature, art, and even satire can prosper. When the prophet Mahound conquers the city and turns it into the modern Mecca, imposing the monotheistic cult of the male divinity Allah and becoming Jahilia’s new ruler, Hind is forced into hiding, and the city loses its splendour. Literature is silenced and the idols in the temple are destroyed; polytheism and tolerance are replaced by monotheistic fundamentalism; a male ruler and his male god dethrone a semi-divine female ruler. Shafak’s Turkey, as it is described in her fiction and non-fiction, undergoes a similar process of ‘de-feminization’. In the aforementioned article, where she claims that Turkish culture has gone through a gradual and systematic masculinization, Shafak isolates two ‘gendered’ stages in Turkish history, claiming: the very construction and consolidation of the Turkish nation-state needs to be investigated by taking into consideration the intermingling between nationalist and gender ideologies.”23

In her writing, Shafak constructs an image of Turkish history as divided into a ‘feminine’ component, the Ottoman empire, tolerant and cosmopolitan, and a ‘masculine’ one, the Republic. The latter is identified with a male ruler who in-

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Shafak, “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture.”

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jected Turkey with alien doctrines of Western origin – the introduction of Turkish nationalism is the most representative example – that narrow the spectrum of Ottoman citizenship to a more repressive, nationalistic idea of Turkishness. At this point, it must be said that Elif Shafak’s construction of the Ottoman Empire is evidently an idealized one, ignoring the actual tensions between the various ethnic groups within the Ottoman Empire.24 In the same way, her condemnation of the Republican ideology needs to be problematized: in her words, “one of the functions of the Kemalist reforms had been monologizing the culture.”25 Yet, her focus on the monologizing aspect of the Kemalist government does not accord with an equal emphasis on the liberal reforms carried out during that period (e.g., women’s suffrage in 1934, strengthened by general support for gender equality and celebration of women as fundamental to the making of the country). The city of Istanbul in Shafak’s The Saint of Incipient Insanities resembles Rushdie’s Jahilia in terms of both form and function. In other words, not only does Istanbul resume the set of images used in describing Jahilia, but it is also part of the same discourse on gender and colonialism, which most clearly expresses Rushdie and Shafak’s common concerns. A group of parallel themes appearing in both novels supports my statement: first, the figure of the goddess simultaneously used in reference to a woman and a city; second, the establishment of a female ruling principle where a male one would be expected; third, the close relationship between freedom and language, conveyed by the possibility of poetry in Jahilia and the representation of Istanbul as a talking universe; fourth, the depiction of a utopia of multiculturalism and hybridity. In the first place, the figure of Hind reverberates in the discourse on the goddess that permeates The Saint of Incipient Insanities, which applies to both the novel’s protagonist, Zarpandit, named after a Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, and the city of Istanbul. Istanbul displays Hind’s contradictions: she is “far too aged and ageless. She had long before arrived at the end of her time and yet she is endless. An ugly queen, the whimsical alma mater” (Insanities, 326). If Hind is at the same time a woman, a goddess, and the incarnation of Jahilia, Istanbul and Zarpandit share the feature of primitive divinity, creating a dialogue that ends with the merging of the two, when Zarpandit drowns herself in the waters of the Bosphorus. The concept of a female ruling principle replacing a weak, non-existent male one is mirrored in Shafak’s effort to re-create a matriarchal universe from which 24 25

Ussama Makdisi, “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107.3 (June 2002): 774. Shafak, “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture.”

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men are excluded, sometimes violently. Her novels are populated by matriarchal families, such as Asya’s in the Bastard, or the Mexican family in Insanities, whose members are described as rigidly hierarchical groups of goddess-like individuals, endowed with different divine characteristics and headed by a charismatic matriarch. In the Verses, Jahilia’s official governor, Hind’s husband, is a cowardly, incapable ruler who would surrender the city to Mahound’s army without fighting. Similarly, in Insanities, when the American Zarpandit travels to Istanbul with her Turkish husband Ömer, she alone engages in a real, intense dialogue with the city, whereas Ömer finds it threatening and repulsive. Istanbul’s resilient voice echoes in the connection between Hind and the possibility of poetry in Jahilia. Istanbul is depicted as a talking, even shrieking city whose inner voice, an intensely feminine one, protests against any form of appropriation, from tourism to colonialism. Thus, the musical and historical patterns underlying the urban chaos constitute a female narrative that has resisted the manifold strata of colonization, in particular the Republican de-feminizing effort. Jahilia’s religious tolerance and multiculturalism contribute to the creation of a utopia of hybridity where different cultures coexist peacefully, a paradise eventually destroyed. In this sense, Jahilia reminds one of the utopias of neoOttomanism, a Turkish political current and state philosophy celebrating the Ottoman Empire as a paradise of multiculturalism ante litteram, lost after the birth of the Republic. The Ottoman Empire, purified of its historical faults, is transformed by neo-Ottomanists into a utopia of religious tolerance, universal acceptance, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity, and is seen as an alternative to the nationalist, restrictive, militaristic Republican age. With her mention of “cosmopolitanism as a supra-identity to address the various nationalities of the Ottoman Empire,” and her representation of Istanbul as a mythical “home to the dispossessed,”26 Shafak makes manifest her adherence to a vision of a neoOttomanist utopia. The city of Jahilia in The Satanic Verses, the utopia of femininity and hybridity it represents and its opposition to monotheism, or, in Shafak’s terms, to interventions intending to “monologiz[e]” culture, 27 certainly represents an inspiration for neo-Ottomanism.

Is the Empire Still Writing Back? The main difference between the two utopias of hybridity – Rushdie’s Jahilia and Shafak’s Istanbul – is that, while Rushdie’s vision is deeply pessimistic, 26 27

Shafak, “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture.” “The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture.”

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Shafak’s appears to be quite optimistic, even naive. If Jahilia falls and is swallowed up by Mahound’s monotheistic fundamentalism, Istanbul preserves its Ottoman identity even after the Kemalist epoch. If Jahilia’s fall determines the end of poetry, Istanbul signifies the possibility for the subaltern to speak, and offers an invitation to rewrite history as a narrative whose centre is femininity, folklore, and individual memories. A second difference can be seen in the fact that Elif Shafak, like many other Turkish writers, directs her anti-imperialist bias at a period that has little to do with Turkey’s imperial experience. On the contrary, the agents that brought about the loss of a pre-existing culture sacrificed to programmatic westernization are the Turkish Republic and its first president, who replaced the cosmopolitan, diverse appearance of the Ottoman Empire with alien ideals of Western origin (Turkish nationalism and national citizenship above all), imposing, as Benedict Anderson puts it, “models of nation, nation-ness and nationalism distilled from the turbulent, chaotic expression of more than a century of American and European history.”28 Moreover, whereas Rushdie describes the yielding of a multi-ethnic, multi-faith environment to a regime of religious fundamentalism, Shafak laments the loss of a similar environment (the Ottoman utopia represented by the Ottoman cultural and political capital, Istanbul) to a strictly secular government that aimed to diminish the relevance of Islamic religion and tradition in order to enter a future of progress and secularization. The representation of colonialism as the intervention of a masculinized agent into a feminized territory has constituted a successful trope in colonial and postcolonial texts. My article has, I trust, helped clarify how this model, appearing in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, still retains its relevance and validity and has presently been taken over by new anglophone literatures denouncing contemporary forms of cultural imperialism. In support of my claim, I have shown how this model can be found in Elif Shafak’s best-known works in English, The Bastard of Istanbul and The Saint of Incipient Insanities, with reference to twenty-first-century Turkey. In my view, this analogy provides sufficient proof that contemporary Turkish fiction, of which Elif Shafak is one of the most representative examples, can use postcolonial imagery in order to describe the reality of modern Turkey as a semi-colonial one, establishing parallels with Rushdie’s discourse on migration and its critique of Islamic imperialism. At the same time, I hope to have illuminated a field where postcolonial analysis can be extended, pointing to how discourses related to imperialism can be applied to 28

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983): 140.

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national realities that are not immediately identifiable as postcolonial, such as those that exist in Turkey. Thus, my ‘postcolonial’ analysis of Shafak’s work has allowed me to problematize the writer’s preference for neo-Ottomanist predicaments and idealized construction of the Ottoman Empire. On the one hand, they function as a vehicle for ideals of tolerance and cosmopolitanism, pointing to the multicultural composition of the Ottoman Empire as a model for Turkey’s ‘monologized’ modernity. On the other, neo-Ottomanist stances necessarily evoke a degree of imperial nostalgia that sits uncomfortably with Shafak’s denunciation of neo-colonialism. Even though, as the political scientist Ömer Taspinar points out, neo-Ottomanism does not pursue a neo-imperialist agenda, it does “seek Turkish grandeur and influence in foreign policy,” particularly in the former Ottoman territories; it calls for a more audacious and proactive policy-making, and it appeals to a time in which Turkey was a multinational empire to strengthen national self-confidence.29 Shafak’s denunciation of the responsibilities of Kemalism in regard to the ‘monologizing’ of a traditionally cosmopolitan culture echoes the words with which the satirist Baal addresses the prophet Mahound in The Satanic Verses: “Your monophilia, your one one one, ain’t for Jahilia” (Verses, 106). The partly historical, partly fictional account of the fall of Jahilia denounces Islamic imperialism by referring to the most significant metonym of its expansion: the conquest of Mecca and its pre-existing, local culture in the name of a masculine, monotheistic religion worshipping a male God and a male prophet. In the same way, the newly born Republic of Turkey was embodied in its charismatic male leader, Mustafa Kemal. This implied a “de-feminization of Turkish culture” and the introduction of Turkish nationalism, an idea “copied and adapted” from the American and European experience30 which clashed with the Ottoman cultural structures. The Turkish Republic, embodied in a virile first president, is perceived by Elif Shafak as an imperialist ‘agent’, for two reasons. First, it enhanced Turkey’s westernization and opened the country’s door to Western (first European, later American) intervention and thus paved the way to Western cultural imperialism in Turkey. Second, it introduced a series of concepts that were unknown to Ottoman society and deeply affected the nation’s self-perception – above all, the concept of Turkish nationalism (Turkism), which contradicted the more tolerant, cosmopolitan idea of Ottoman citizenship, including Turks, Armenians, Greeks, Kurds, and Jews as Ottoman citizens. 29 30

Taspinar, Turkey’s Middle East Policies, 3. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 140.

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My title deliberately insinuates that Turkish-American writers such as Elif Shafak might have borrowed extensively from earlier postcolonial authors, so much so that these Turkish-American writers might come across as lacking originality and a voice of their own. Yet, the answer to the question ‘Did Salman Rushdie invent Turkish-American literature?’ is: No, he did not. The aim of this essay has been to highlight how postcolonial theory and imagery remain a suitable tool for the interpretation of different, contemporary manifestations of discourses related to imperialism.

W OR K S C I T E D Aktar, Merve. “Forms of Relation: The Western Literary Canon and Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children” (MA thesis, SabancƯ University, 2008), http://research.sabanciuniv.edu/11383/ (accessed 23 November 2014). Algan, Bülent. “The Brand New Version of Article 301 of Turkish Penal Code and the Future of Freedom of Expression Cases in Turkey,” German Law Journal 9 (2008): 2237– 52, http://www.germanlawjournal.com/pdfs/Vol09No12/PDF_Vol_09_No_12_ 22372252_Developments_Algan.pdf (accessed 15 December 2014). Almond, Ian. “Islam, Melancholy, and Sad, Concrete Minarets: The Futility of Narratives in Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book,” New Literary History 34.1 (Winter 2003): 75–90. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). Bayazitoglu, Ahmet S. “Motion Sickness: Literatures of Migration and Minorities” (doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 2001). Fischer, Michael M.J., & Mehdi Abedi. “Bombay Talkies, the Word and the World: Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses,” Cultural Anthropology 5.2 (May 1990): 107–59. Freely, Maureen. Enlightenment (New York: Overlook, 2008). Göknar, ErdaȪ. “Orhan Pamuk and the ‘Ottoman’ Theme,” World Literature Today 80.6 (2006): 34–38. ——.“Secular Blasphemies: Orhan Pamuk and the Turkish Novel,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 45.2 (2012): 301–26. Kemal, Mustafa. Nutuk–Söylev (1927; Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1984). Konuk, Kader. East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford CA : Stanford U P , 2010). Makdisi, Ussama. “Ottoman Orientalism,” American Historical Review 107.3 (June 2002): 768–96. Mango, Andrew. “Perplexed by Turkey,” Middle Eastern Studies 39.4 (October 2003): 206–28. Mikhail, Alan, & Christine Philliou. “The Ottoman Empire and the Imperial Turn,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 54.4 (October 2012): 721–45. The New Jerusalem Bible, ed. Susan Jones (New York: Doubleday, 1985).

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Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book, tr. Maureen Freely (Kara Kitap, 1990; London: Faber & Faber, 2006). ——.The New Life, tr. Güneli Gün (Yeni Hayat, 1994; London: Faber & Faber, 1998). Rizk Khoury, Dina, & Dane Kennedy. “Comparing Empires: The Ottoman Domains and the British Raj in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27.2 (2007): 233–44. Rushdie, Salman. Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies (New York: Pantheon, 1994). ——.“Imaginary Homelands” (1982), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991; New York: Penguin, 1992): 9–21. ——.Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). ——.The Satanic Verses (1989; New York: Penguin, 2008). õamdereli, Yasemin, & Nesrin õamdereli, dir. Almanya: Wilkommen in Deutschland (Roxy Film  The Chau Ngo, Germany 2011; 101 min.). Sawhney, Simona. “Satanic Choices: Poetry and Prophecy in Rushdie’s Novel,” Twentieth Century Literature 45.3 (Autumn 1999): 253–77. Shafak, Elif. The Bastard of Istanbul (2006; New York: Penguin, 2008). ——.“The De-Feminization of Turkish Culture,” Turkish Daily News (30 July 2006), repr. Elif õafak, http://www.elifsafak.us/yazilar.asp?islem=yazi&id=401 (accessed 15 December 2014). ——.The Saint of Incipient Insanities (2004; New York: Penguin, 2007). Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (1886; New York: Signet, 1987). Taspinar, Ömer. Turkey’s Middle East Policies: Between Neo-Ottomanism and Kemalism (Washington DC : Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2008).

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The Bosphorus Syndrome G E R H AR D S T ILZ

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on commonplaces and how they shape the world. But it is also an essay investigating the construction of a special place: the Bosphorus. With its old and venerable urban heritage, and its gateways and walls around Byzantium, Constantinople or Istanbul, the Bosphorus has been ‘under construction’ for more than 2,500 years, both literally and discursively. In hard material terms, this process has included phases of destruction and ruin. At no time, however, has the creative discourse on this extraordinary geographical and geopolitical node fallen silent. In times both of vital exuberance and of miserable decay, the ambivalent presence of the Bosphorus as a pivotal hub has continued to be felt in the four regions of the old world which have always contributed to and profited from its existence. Travellers and traders from North and South, from East and West, met here at the ideal territorial conjuncture of waterways, ferries, and bridges. In their writings, visitors (and residents) preserved and indeed rejuvenated the myth of the Bosphorus as a puzzling interface in both spatial and temporal terms – a contested ground between familiar manners and alien modes of behaviour, between triumphant cultural achievements and abject misery and stagnation. Life in the city on the Bosphorus and its precincts, among both outsiders and insiders, has continued to be presented in partly elegiac, partly heroic tales of survival and persistence. Istanbul’s image, more than that of many other cities, has remained undecided between the contrasting notions of millennial splendour and gothic twilight. My claim in the following argument is that both the social history of this place (the Bosphorus area and the city of Istanbul) and the international discourse that accompanied its changes was (and is) intimately linked with its particular geopolitical position. The Bosphorus, in offering a naval gateway between North and South and, at the same time, constituting a land bridge HIS IS AN ESSAY

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between East and West (and vice versa), has become profoundly charged with conflicts whose territorial background has in fact always been much larger than the limited area of exchange where they actually erupted. The city on the complex border of the Bosphorus therefore tended to be charged with heightened and more intensive antagonisms and differences than cities such as Rome, Paris or London, inhabiting a more homogeneous heartland. In our case, the nervous, even feverish condition attributed to places of conflict suggests the use of a metaphor first introduced in psychology and medicine. An indissoluble co-presence of (usually ill-defined) symptoms creating a latent feeling of disease is called a ‘syndrome’. Syndromes are assumed to be based on factors which, on the one hand, cannot be clearly separated or fully analysed but, on the other, must not be ignored when trying to come to terms with the prevalent mental or physical condition attributed to an individual or a group of people. Discerning and investigating what I will call the ‘Bosphorus Syndrome’ on the basis of discursive evidence left in texts on the Bosphorus largely written by visitors and temporary residents, however, throws up a highly critical question in the first place: whose syndrome is being discovered in this way? Is it that of the supposed patients or, rather, that of the diagnosticians? In literary matters, more than in psychology and in medicine, we have become used to the idea that authors, when describing the world along romantic lines, elucidate their subjective selves at least as much as their worldly objects. Modernists and postmodernists have not dissuaded us from taking this constructivist bias for granted. Yet, the idea of an ‘objective’ diagnosis through literature gains a little more credit if competitive ‘doctors’ from various backgrounds and even some of the more sensitive ‘patients’ converge or agree on certain symptoms – or even on the syndrome at large. This seems to be the case, at least to a certain extent, with the ‘Bosphorus Syndrome’. In order to demonstrate this, I will present in this essay a wide panorama of views and assumptions about the Bosphorus and the particular atmosphere of contest and conflict encountered on its shores. I will invite literary and mythical references, which altogether range historically over some 2,500 years, and I will not only be quoting from texts originally written in Greek, Latin, English, French, and German but will also draw on contemporary Turkish literary samples. The subdivisions chosen for developing my argument are intended to indicate the major symptoms that together constitute the ‘Bosphorus Syndrome’. They highlight recurrent themes and fundamental divisions found in the myths and experiences deposited in this cultural and literary archive for over two and

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a half millennia. My explicit quotations, however, will concentrate on the last three centuries.

Fearful Crossings There may be other places in this world where the crossing of old trade routes has led to rich, lively, and ongoing exchanges of commodities, persons, and ideas. After all, many cities owe their rationale and lasting existence not to the fact that they occupy some ‘centre’ in a more or less unified area (like Paris, Moscow – or modern Ankara) but, rather, to their ‘threshold position’ in straddling two widely different though neighbouring areas. Along with their goods and merchandise, the trading people and their ideas are exchanged in such borderline marketplaces (think of ancient Carthago, Marseille, or Timbuktoo, of medieval Vienna or Magdeburg, or of more recent New York, Sydney or Shanghai). But you will hardly find a city whose threshold position has been so manifold – and, we might even say, ‘universal’ – as that of the ancient city on the Bosphorus, where the convergence of trade routes has been so pointed, so attractive and inescapable for travellers and traders by both land and sea. There is no naval passage from the cold northern Pontus to the warm Mediterranean other than through this narrow passage, and there is no more convenient and friendly way from Thrakia to Anatolia (and vice versa) than across the waters of this strait. Darius crossed it with his huge Persian army more than 2,500 years ago on a pontoon bridge (as Herodotus mentions in his Histories). The ancient tradition that claimed the name of ‘Europe’ for the western shore of this narrow strait while its eastern shore was called ‘Asia’ accentuates the difference felt between these two parts of the world joining hands here. Though the Bosphorus was navigable and offered easy crossing, the Greek story of its name (‘Bosporos’) insinuates that Io, beloved of the divine Zeus and pursued by Hera as an interloper, escaped to the eastern shore, graciously transformed into a heifer, never to be found again in that ‘other’ world. Here, ancient mental geography seems to have drawn a mythical line between two ‘different’ territories called ‘Continents’.1 For the passage of ships, the Bosphorus traditionally posed other risks and dangers. Jason and his Argonauts, on their adventurous trip to Colchis, had to beware of the Symplegades, the ‘wandering rocks’ at the entrance to the Black 1

Correspondingly, the only other comparable land bridge between Europe and Asia, the nearby Dardanelles with the Hellespont, was marked by the warnings of the primeval national catastrophe outlined in Homer’s Trojan War, and by the fateful tragedy enacted by Hero and Leander, the two ancient lovers.

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Sea, which threatened to squash the boats of uninformed sailors. Moreover, oncoming winds and obverse cross currents delayed the Argonauts’ enterprise for forty days and were only able to be abated by intensive prayer and sacrifice. Such winds and currents (whether the northerly ‘Poyraz’ or the southerly ‘Lodos’) have, for thousands of years, made it difficult to force one’s passage through the Bosphorus under adverse conditions. And there were winds and currents in a metaphoric sense that have pressed or attracted people from the West and East, from the North and South, to settle in this area. Altogether, the city on the Bosphorus has both profited and suffered from its location. In Istanbul, from its first foundation, territorial joys and terrors were found to be unusually intimate and indeed inseparable. The citizens and rulers on the Bosphorus were exposed to the uneasy dilemma of either colonizing others or being colonized in turn. At best, they enjoyed multicultural triumph; at worst, they suffered from xenophobic neurosis.

Troubled Identities Among the first texts of classical antiquity are eerie stories from the wild Scythians populating the northern shores of the Pontus. Ironically, they never really approached or threatened Byzantium or Constantinople. But the Visigoths and Ostrogoths did, before moving west in order to destroy and transform Rome. The Roman Emperors, starting with Septimius Severus, came to Byzantium earlier in order to ransack and eventually reinstate and aggrandize it as Constantinople or the ‘Second Rome’. They built naval batteries on the entrance points to the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and a huge land wall in the west of the city, which proved to be impregnable for more than a thousand years. From the North, the Avars and the Bulgars came more than once and laid siege to the walls of Constantinople; they were later followed by the Varangians and eventually the Russians (or those who were taken for such). But the southern neighbours were not always friends, either. The Arab fleets, from 674 AD through to the eighth century, repeatedly beleaguered the narrows and the city of Constantinople. Istanbul’s list of doubtful friends and invidious enemies is long, and, in the long run, all such visitors left their offspring on these shores – the Magyars and the Serbs, the Normans and the Frankish Crusaders, the Genoese and the Venetians of the Middle Ages, and, since the seventeenth century, the Hapsburgs, British, and French.2 Nor was it clear at all times to the inhabitants of this city that the Sassanids, the Seldjuks (after the ruinous battle of Mantzi2

Christopher M. Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History (London: Faber & Faber, 1977): 44.

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kert, in 1071) or the Osmanlis (arising from neighbouring Bursa from the fourteenth century) came as friends, and their advance on Constantinople cannot be restricted to an Eastern origin.3 After all, the ‘Fall of Constantinople’ in 1453, so bitterly bewailed in the West, was brought about with massive ethnic and religious support from the European hinterland, in the Muslim capital (Edirne) in which the Ottoman conqueror, Mehmet II , was born. But this city survived, not always well, and neither did its inhabitants always survive its bloody sieges, falls, and conquests. In any case, even after the worst bloodshed, Istanbul was quickly repopulated not only by politically welcome traders and administrators, invited or transferred from remote areas, but also by lowly rustics from the surrounding provinces. Many old settlers chose to adapt to the new systems, both political and religious, rather than lose their lives or livelihoods. Yet without walls and towers, on the one hand, and bridges and doorways, on the other, this city would never have been able to build up and maintain an attractive cosmopolitan stature. Even the desecration (or, rather, reconsecration) of venerable churches into no less venerable mosques (exemplified by Mehmet II in the Hagia Sophia in 1453) proved to be the saving official guarantees for their transcultural survival. As a sign of continuity and toleration (but also of wise political expediency), the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church (the state religion of the Byzantines) maintained his residence in the Sultan’s new capital. The city on the Bosphorus has remained a challenge to narrow-minded identities ever since. Most of the authors quoted in this essay were foreign visitors to the Bosphorus, though often enough they were visitors with a presumed cultural claim on Byzantium, Constantinople or Istanbul, or parts thereof. Quite a number stayed for some time (between a few months and many years). Most of the European visitors during the last three centuries were deeply aware of an irretrievable Christian past and a Muslim present, which they observed with a mixture of irritation and fascination. Almost unanimously they designed a dark, cold, barbarian Pontus in the North versus a bright, warm, civilized Propontus and Mediterranean in the South; they pitched a Western, ‘European’ versus an Eastern, ‘Asian’ shore; they confirmed the existence of a Turkish ‘Stamboul’ versus a Frankish ‘Pera’ (alias ‘Galata’ or ‘BeyoȪlu’), divided by the Haliç. They felt existentially exposed and profoundly divided in this city, which seemed both to confirm and to threaten their cultural identity. But such sensitive visi3

Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1965); Judith Herrin, “A Christian Millennium: Greece in Byzantium,” in The Greek World: Classical, Medieval and Modern, ed. Robert Browning (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985): 235–46.

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tors were not alone with their divided selves. They found elective affinities – friends, teachers, and disciples – among the inhabitants on both sides of the ‘Golden Horn’. Thus, Orhan Pamuk, in Istanbul: Memories of a City (2005), has amply described the emotional identity of his home place as ‘hüzün’ – which might be vaguely translated as a kind of profound cultural sensitivity verging on schizophrenia and steeped in melancholy contemplation.4 There is good reason to attribute this mental state to the ‘Bosphorus Syndrome’ discussed here.

Exposed to Four Winds The Bosphorus is (and has always been) a natural site of trans-regional concourse and conflict. Therefore, time and again, the blessings and curses of this place have been attributed to its privileged position under (metaphorically if not literally) the four winds. A few literary examples may serve as illustration. On 28 December 1837, young Helmuth von Moltke, Prussian advisor to the Sultan Mehmet I I ’s military reforms in 1835–39 (and a literary talent in his own right), described the antiquities of Constantinople. He imaginatively placed the Hagia Sophia as one of Istanbul’s most ancient and venerable buildings in the centre of a wind rose,5 not without significantly flagging it up with his cultural baggage and banners of expectations: Such floods of devastations have so submerged Constantinople that almost every trace of its antiquity has been erased. [...] Yet a few monuments emerge from its olden times [...]. There still stands the old Sophia, grey-headed in her white garment like an honourable matron propped on her mighty crutches, looking out over the incessant activity of the present, over land and sea into the distance. Left alone by her protectors and children, the one-thousand-year-old Christian was forcefully converted to Islam; but she turns away from the grave of the prophet and looks east into the face of the rising sun, looks south towards Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria, Corinthus and the grave of the Redeemer, looks to 4

See Chapter 10 in Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, tr. Maureen Freely (Žstanbul: Hatƭralar ve õehir, 2003; tr. London: Faber & Faber, 2005): 81–96. For a recent discussion, see Norbert Bugeja, “Post-Imperial Culture and its Melancholies: From Théophile Gautier’s Constantinople of To-day to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City,” Le Simplegadi 12.11 (2014): 142–65, http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi/wp-content/uploads/2014/Simplegadi_12_2014_Bugeja.pdf (accessed 1 May 2015). 5 A ‘wind rose’ (a nautical and meteorological term) is the graphic presentation of the prevalent wind conditions in a certain place. In a wind rose, the prevalent wind directions can be decorated with flags or colours in order to indicate their intensity and/or other qualities. Moltke obviously plays with the concept of a wind rose in the passage that follows.

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the West, which deserted her, and to the North from where she expects liberation.6

When Théophile Gautier, the eminent French travel writer and journalist, visited Istanbul in 1854, following Gérard de Nerval’s sentimental voyage of 1843, he traversed the city, largely on foot (and occasionally on horseback). Travelling up the Bosphorus in a caique, he mused evocatively on the dark and changeable currents of this strait, which appeared to him more as “a river” than an “arm of the sea.”7 Here he observed the many nationalities which had been accommodated in the various villages along its shores. In the course of history they had arrived from north and south, east and west: Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Frankish women, Bulgarian peasants, and Eastern Jews. Approaching Rumeli Hisar, Gautier imaginatively notes: It was here that Darius caused his army to cross, in their expedition against the Scythians, upon a bridge erected by Mandrocles of Samos. Seven hundred thousand men passed there; a gigantic assemblage of the hordes of Asia, of exotic types with strange arms, and supplied with a cavalry, blended with elephants and camels. Upon two stone pillars erected at the bridge-head, was engraved the list of the different nations, marching in the train of Darius. [...] The Bosphorus, at this point, is about four hundred fathoms in width; and it is at this place, that have crossed the Persians, the Goths, the Latins, and the Turks. The invaders, whether coming from Europe or Asia, have followed the same path. All these grand out-pourings of nations have streamed through the same channel, and marched in the track of Darius.8

Still, more than a hundred years later, in Orhan Pamuk’s sombre view of this city’s self-complacent but notoriously edgy existence outlined in Istanbul, the vague, fearful notions of nameless foreign aggression and destruction flare up again. They are associated with the winds that sweep through the Bosphorus from north-east to south-west (and vice versa). On looking closely at the grand etchings in Anton Melling’s Voyage pittoresque (1819), Pamuk imaginatively conjures up the insidious atmosphere spread by the ancient “Boreas”: Yes, I’ll tell myself – just when you’re leaving Tarabya Bay, and the sea is no longer calm, suddenly the north wind ripping down from the Black 6

Helmuth von Moltke, Unter dem Halbmond: Erlebnisse in der alten Türkei 1835– 1839, ed. & intro. Helmut Arndt (Wiedbaden: Erdmann & marix, 2008): 215. My translation. 7 Théophile Gautier, Constantinople of Today, tr. Robert Howe Gould (Constantinople, 1853; tr. London: Bogue, 1854): 352. 8 Gautier, Constantinople of Today, 352–55.

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Sea ruffles its surface, and on the crests of its hurried, nervous waves there are the same small, angry, impatient bubbles that Melling shows in his painting. Yes, in the evenings, the woods on the hills over Bebek recede into just this sort of darkness and only someone like me, or someone like Melling, someone who has lived here for at least ten years, would know how this is a darkness that comes from within.9

The autumnal south-westerly, on the other hand, Pamuk feels, is even more intensively foreboding of destructive evil: The darkest, most murderous and authentic strain of melancholy creeps in from streets too distant to see, and I can almost smell it – just as an experienced Istanbullu can tell from the soft scent of algae and sea on an autumn evening that the south winds are bringing us a storm; like someone who rushes home to take shelter from that storm, that earthquake, that death, I, too, long to be back within my own four walls. 10

Ambivalent Comfort – Attractive Decay In 1950, Paul Bonatz, a major German architect who had contributed significantly to the introduction of modern building design in Turkey during the 1940s, adapted a dictum by Ali Pasha11 to praise the incorruptible townscape of Istanbul: “For a hundred years, Investors, Speculators, Authorities and Private investors have tried hard to destroy the beauty of this city; they have not succeeded as yet.”12 Such a statement might be amplified in several ways: the multiple gateway position of the Bosphorus has produced an unusual amount of economic and cultural attractiveness and comfort. Since ancient times, the city flourishing here has promised extraordinary enticements and opportunities based on transcultural encounters and intercultural trade. Even when depreciated in the West by the derogatory variant of Orientalism, Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul has continued to impress the world with the riches, triumphs, and splendours (and even the ruins) provided by its ancient glory. Istanbul’s natural comfort is praised by Edward Gibbon, the famous British historian, in his epochal Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (written during 1776–89). Gibbon envisages, with Constantine’s eyes, “the incomparable position of Byzantium”; he “observe[s] how strongly it was guarded by nature against an hostile attack, whilst it was accessible on every side to the benefits of 9

Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, 61. Istanbul: Memories of a City, 286. 11 Ali Pasha (1769–1849) was Governor in the Osmanian province of Egypt, 1805–48. 12 Paul Bonatz, Leben und Bauen (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1950): 265. My translation. 10

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commercial intercourse”;13 and he expands this “advantageous position”14 in some detail: When the gates of the Hellespont and the Bosphorus were shut, the capital still enjoyed within their spacious enclosure, every production which could supply the wants or gratify the luxury of its numerous inhabitants. [...] But when the passages of the capital were thrown open for trade, they alternately admitted the natural and artificial riches of the north and south, of the Euxine and of the Mediterranean. Whatever rude commodities were collected in the forests of Germany and Scythia [...], whatsoever was manufactured by the skill of Europe or Asia; the corn of Egypt, and the gems and spices of farthest India, were brought by the varying winds into the port of Constantinople, which, for many ages, attracted the commerce of the ancient world.15

But even more, ignoring for the moment this potential note of envy and the covetousness of would-be conquerors,16 the city on the Bosphorus has always fascinated those seekers after alternative ideal worlds whose impulses are best understood as ‘exotic romanticism’.17 Under this rubric, I would like to point out the repeated (and largely successful) attempts at aesthetically redeeming fallen ‘Istanbul’ from the blemishes of the Muslim conquest among Western audiences. The readiness in Western Europe not only to search the city on the Bosphorus for past glories but also to respect, venerate, and adapt ‘Oriental manners’, if only for decorative purposes, has been noted as an old form of Orientalism, also called “Turquoiserie.”18 Edward Said has, perhaps with a blind eye, all but ignored this Romantic craze for the utopian impulse. 13

Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2 (London: Dent Dutton, 1910): 71. 14 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, 76. 15 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2, 77. 16 Considering its lasting influence on British education, Gibbon’s historical view might still have fuelled the Australian–New Zealand A N Z A C campaign in the Dardanelles near Gallipoli (Gelibolu) 140 years later as well as the temporary occupation of Istanbul by British and French troops after the First World War. 17 W.B. Yeats’s “Byzantium” poems (“Sailing to Byzantium,” 1927, and “Byzantium,” 1930) are rather sophisticated latecomers in this vein and will therefore not be highlighted here. Nor am I much concerned with the early archaeological enthusiasm in The Antiquities of Constantinople (New York: Italia, 1988), which Pierre Gilles, the “faithful servant of the French crown” (xvi), displayed after his “fact-finding mission” (xviii) in 1544–47. 18 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 1985): passim. This movement of Romantic orientalism evidently presupposed the defeat of the Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean (Lepanto, 1571) and the retreat of the Ottoman troops in the Balkan region. Once the Turkish army

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In fact, the sympathetic Orientalist revaluation in Western Europe does not occur much before the eighteenth century. Sir Paul Rycaut’s massive, remarkably well-informed but nonetheless fearful denunication of the Turkish state and its political structures can serve as a point of departure.19 His History of the Turkish Empire (1687) was written during his eighteen years of office as a British consul in Smyrna. Rycault was deeply split between fascination and fear when describing the Sublime Porte in Istanbul and the “covetous and corrupt” disposition of the Turks.20 By contrast, thirty years later, Lady Montagu explicitly set out to correct the prejudices and mistaken attitudes found in Rycaut. This remarkable woman, the wife of a failing diplomat sent to Istanbul by the British Crown (and undoubtedly supplied with an imperturbable aristocratic haughtiness), not only parades her lush Turkish garments in the frontispiece to her Letters (1837; written in 1717–18) but also prides herself on having won the confidence of the Sultana and having had free access to the Sultan’s harem. Lady Montagu ironically observes that “’Tis a particular pleasure to me here, to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far removed from truth, and so full of absurdities.”21 Though living in westernized Pera, north of the Galata Bridge, she enjoys her forays into ‘Turkish’ Stamboul across the Golden Horn, seeks intimate contact with the Sultana ‘Hafiten’ (a garbled version of Hafise Kadinfendi), and adores Oriental dressing and the mores at the Sultan’s court. Foreshadowing a Shavian flourish, she even insists that neither the women nor the slaves in Istanbul have a worse fate than women and slaves everywhere in the world – “they are bought and sold as publicly and infamously in all our Christian great cities”22 – and yet she finally concedes, in the elegiac mood of her

had been turned away from the walls of Imperial Vienna (1683), the military music of their elite troops could sound interesting and even pleasant. A movement “á la turca,” playfully recalling the terror of the Janissaries (with Mozart) or provocatively integrated into the “Ode to Joy” (as Beethoven has it in his Ninth Symphony), was felt to be enjoyable in the concert halls of Vienna as soon as such terrifying sounds were no longer heard from Sultan Süleyman’s troops outside the gates. 19 Paul Rycaut, The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677 [.. . ] (London: Basset, 1687); The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, Containing the Maxims of the Turkish Polity […] (London: Basset, 1687); The History of the Turks, Beginning with the Year 1679 [. . .] (London: Basset, 1700). 20 Rycaut, The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677, 962. 21 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Letters and Works, ed. Lord Warncliffe, vol. 2 (London: Bentley, 1837): 13. 22 Montagu, The Letters and Works, vol. 2, 41.

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aristocracy, that “human grandeur [is] here yet more unstable than anywhere else.”23 This was to become the schizophrenic division in Romantic orientalism, later shared even by citizens of Istanbul. On the one hand, Anton Melling, resident and painter at the ‘Porte’ for eighteen years, in his Voyage pittoresque (1819), his meticulous etchings of Istanbul cityscapes, presents us with a highly attractive mixture of bliss, charm, hospitality, and good life. Merry dancing and omnipresent music characterize his graphic scenes in and around the palaces and gardens on the Bosphorus (as amply illustrated in forty-eight glorious plates). On the other side, moral and aesthetic depravity and decay for more than a century continued to lurk behind every wall and curtain. The ‘Oriental Gothic’ stealthily rises from the dust of the nameless backstreets (teeming with stray dogs) and dim bazaars (peopled with frauds). This at least is the common denominator of fascination interspersed with fear and loathing that emerges from the youthful Miss Julia Pardoe’s The City of the Sultan, and Domestic Manners of the Turks (1837), from Gérard de Nerval’s romantically perfumed journal in Voyage en Orient (1843), and also from Théophile Gautier’s Constantinople of Today (1854). Even Helmuth von Moltke’s surprisingly fresh, sympathetic, and ironical Prussian observations (taken in 1835–39) are repeatedly concerned with the paralysing traditionalism and disorientation found in the Turkish civil and military administration. Moltke generously refrains from explicit charges of corruption, but he can see the systematically crippling character of officialdom and fatalism. Still, between irony and pragmatism he accepts the ubiquitous stray dogs as Istanbul’s sanitary police.24 Franz Grillparzer’s Hapsburg–Austrian attitudes are different. His morose and hypochondriac Diary from a Journey through Constantinople and Greece (1843)25 falls in with admiring Istanbul’s antiquities while loathing dogs, despots, and dancing dervishes. Lord Byron, on his visit in 1810, still overwhelmed with pride at having swum across the Dardanelles from Sestos to Abydos, had made short shrift of Istanbul, which, he found, had been amply presented before him by “Gibbon” and “fifty descriptions by sundry travellers.”26 In Don Juan, Cantos V and VI , however, he made the 23

Montagu, The Letters and Works, vol. 2, 56. Moltke, Unter dem Halbmond: Erlebnisse in der alten Türkei 1835–1839, 163–64. 25 The translation of the title is mine. See Franz Grillparzer, Reise nach Konstantinopel und Griechenland 1843, in Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, vol. 4 (Munich: Hanser, 1965): 646–88. 26 See Byron, Letter to Hodgson, 15 May 1810, and Letter to his mother, 24 May 1810, in Byron, ‘In My Hot Youth’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 1: 1798–1810, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 1973): 242, 244. 24

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Sultan’s harem the centre of a prickly and extended sexual grotesquery. Similarly, the young Mark Twain’s superficial experiences of 1867, included in The Innocents Abroad, or: The New Pilgrim’s Progress, Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion into Europe and the Holy Land (1869), do little more than repeat stock Western responses to the sights of Istanbul (i.e. the motley crowds including cripples and dwarfs, the shops and cafés, the dancing dervishes, the Hagia Sophia, the Reservoir of Columns, the Great Bazaar, the slave market, the stray dogs, the Turkish Bath), very much in the topsy-turvy mode of Old-World ridicule, taking advantage of Orientalism and turning it into a form of American humour. But Istanbul remained an attraction of the first rank, aesthetically, economically, and politically, even during its most downcast and bankrupt period at the end of the nineteenth century, as the absurd capital of the ‘sick man on the Bosphorus’.

Doomed Defences From time immemorial, such an attractive site was in need of defences in order to be preserved. Walls and towers, barriers and garrisons are the externally visible manifestations of such protective concerns. The cry for strict laws, unitarian religious movements and measures, veiled or open sympathies for orthodox and autocratic forms of regime, and the majority support for occasional purges and pogroms are less visible manifestations of the public need for defence and its neurotic variants. This, it should be stressed, is by no means a territorial terror27 specific to Istanbul, though it can be studied here with reference to an unusually rich history of conflict. The solid fortifications of Istanbul count among the favourite topics of historical descriptions, starting with the famous land wall built by Theodosius, which proved to be impregnable for close to a thousand years. The stronghold on the Bosphorus, moreover, included the ancient Greek castles at the entrance of the Black Sea, lending a kind of material presence to the ‘wandering rock’ myth of the Symplegades. Half-way up to that entrance, the Bosphorus was further reinforced by the pair of fortresses called Anadolu Hisar and Rumeli Hisar, built in the fifteenth century by the Ottomans for both the blockade of Constantinople and (later) the defence of Istanbul. Constantinople’s Harbour in the ‘Golden Horn’ could be closed by heavy double chains (which in 1453 caused 27

For this concept, see Gerhard Stilz, “Introduction: Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” in Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007): 1–21.

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the Muslim conquerors to pull their boats across the Pera ridge in order to gain access to the back harbour). But the southern gate of the Dardanelles was heavily fortified, too. Two pairs of castles, Sedd-ül-bahir and Kumkale at the entrance in the south-west (near ancient Troy) and Kilitbahir vis-à-vis Çanakkale at the Hellespont, along with numerous coastal batteries on the shorelines, were maintained – and needed constantly to be renovated – from classical antiquity up to the twentieth century. Guaranteeing access through the narrows and keeping them open as peaceful international waterways, while reserving the right to lock both Bosphorus and Dardanelles to hostile warships, was regarded as a vital issue by all those who wielded power over this area: the Byzantine emperors, the Ottoman Sultans, and modern Turkey alike. Wars and international politics followed the logic of keeping control over Istanbul’s lifeblood. Orhan Pamuk’s fascination with watching big foreign ships moving cumbrously through the Bosphorus and the strange thrill evoked by the real and imagined hazards and accidents produced by such uncanny alien giants reflect this widespread feeling of being victimized by defenceless exposure and hostile intrusion.28 Romantic visitors from Byron to Gautier saw the ruin of Istanbul’s defences on the Bosphorus, and above all the decay of the Great Wall, as elegiac symbols for the dying civilizations of the East: Byron: [...] the ride by the walls of the city on the land side is beautiful, imagine, four miles of immense triple battlements covered with Ivy, surmounted with 218 towers, and on the other side of the road Turkish burying grounds (the loveliest spots on earth) full of enormous cypresses. I have seen the ruins of Athens, of Ephesus and Delphi, I have traversed a great part of Turkey and many other parts of Europe and some of Asia, but I never beheld a work of Nature or Art, which yielded an impression like the prospect on each side, from The Seven Towers to the End of the Golden Horn.29 Gautier: I do not suppose that there is in the world a ride more austerely melancholy, than upon this road, which extends for nearly a league between a cemetery and a mass of ruins. [...] These embrowned walls, encumbered by the vegetation peculiar to ruins, which seemed itself to expand lazily in the solitude, and over which crept fearlessly an occasional lizard, witnessed, four hundred years ago, thronging around their base, the hordes of Asia, urged on by the terrible Mahomet II. The bodies of Janissaries and savages rolled, covered with wounds, in this moat, 28

Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories of a City, 180–96. Byron, Letter to his mother, 28 June 1810, in Byron, ‘In My Hot Youth’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 1: 1798–1810, 251. 29

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where now peaceful vegetation displays itself; streams of blood poured down, where now droop only the tendrils of ivy or of sassafras. One of the most fearful of human struggles – the conflict of race against race, of religion against religion – occurred on this spot, now deserted, and where now reigns the silence of decay and death. As is always the case, the young and vigorous barbarism overpowered the old decrepid [sic] civilization.30

Between Glory and Trepidation – Creative Exits? The ‘Bosphorous Syndrome’ thus arises from a profoundly uneasy disposition. Possessing material attractions and at the same time being in continual fear of losing them through foreign envy and conquest makes for a difficult balance. Moreover, manifest comfort jeopardized by lack of internal cohesion and control can create irritating feelings of latent insecurity. This dual ambivalence marks a basic symptom of the Bosphorus syndrome. Staging civilization and refinement in the midst of real or threatening decay and barbarism, the desperate joy of dancing on the rift of earthquakes, the proud display of luxuries that may disappear any time, enjoying favours that may turn into disfavours without notice, playing colonizer while being colonized – this mental feature has been ascribed to life on the Bosphorus for over two thousand years. Looking back from the middle of the twentieth century, André M. Andréadès summarizes this city’s fundamentally ambivalent political and trading position: The Byzantine Empire was situated at the junction of the communications between Asia and Europe, and Europe and Africa; all routes, by land, sea or river, connecting Eastern Europe with the Mediterranean passed through Byzantine territory. This geographical position was a veritable calamity from a political point of view; for no Italian State or any region in the Danube lands or in Hither Asia could develop without being tempted to invade Greek territory. On the other hand, from the commercial standpoint, that geographical position was of inestimable benefit, for automatically it made Byzantium the centre of international trade.31

The imminent dangers within the Byzantine Empire, as they appeared from the beginning, had been inherited from the older, disintegrating Roman one. Seeing that Constantinople’s wealth had to be fed by extensive trade with the imperial 30

Gautier, Constantinople of Today, 228–30. André M. Andréadès, “The Economic Life of the Byzantine Empire,” in Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization, ed. Norman H. Baynes & H. St. L.B. Moss (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948): 63. 31

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provinces and the adjoining European, Asian, and African areas, Christopher M. Woodhouse notes: “There was little reason for the Emperor’s subjects to feel loyalty towards him. They were heavily taxed, and there was much illicit extortion on top of the taxation.” Under such conditions, Woodhouse continues, quoting John of Lydia, Justinian’s contemporary, “a foreign invasion seemed less formidable to the taxpayer than the arrival of the officials of the treasury.”32 In spite of the Great Wall, neither foreign invasions nor internal corrosions of the state seemed to be unlikely. In fact, the Byzantine theocratic ideal that the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Emperor should gloriously represent the divine Christian state until the end of history was subverted by innumerable heresies and fundamentalist debates. During the eighth and ninth centuries, some of them, like monophysitism or iconoclasm33 came quite close to the major tenets of rising Islam. Accordingly, in some parts of the Byzantine Empire (including its European provinces around Constantinople) the Muslims appeared to offer less incomprehensible and more popular answers to subtle and rigid but rather academic Christian dogmas. Internal dissent and dissolution could be sensed to exist in Constantinople and Istanbul mainly between the ‘ethnic’ communities who tended to separately settle in their own quarters, and above all the Greeks, the Latins (including the Venetians and the Genoese), the Armenians, Syrians, Franks, Jews, and prominently, from 1453, the Muslim ‘Turks’. Though occasionally called ‘nations’, these divisions were, on close examination, based on religious communities. Under favourable circumstances, they were mutually tolerant and cooperative, all contributing to the common wealth of the metropolis. But, under economic stress, group chauvinism repeatedly broke out in communal strife, public riots, and bloody pogroms, reaching well into the twentieth century. Kemal Pasha Atatürk, with his modern idea of a secular Turkish nation, strove to overcome such divisions – a policy largely successful among his followers though not without relapses into phases of ethnic and religious partialities.34 What can be observed today among young Turkish authors is an intellectually reflective and in many ways sentimentally submissive response to these 32

Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History, 36–37. See Judith Herrin, “A Christian Millennium: Greece in Byzantium,” 247; John Julius Norwich, “The Return of Iconoclasm,” Byzantium: The Apogee (1991; London: Penguin, 1993): 21–40. 34 This summary is largely based on the literature mentioned in this article and bibliography, including especially Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization, ed. Norman H. Baynes & H. St. L.B. Moss (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948); Woodhouse, Modern Greece: A Short History; Herrin, “A Christian Millennium: Greece in Byzantium.” I also discussed my conclusions with Edhem Eldem, historian at Bogazici University, during the E A C L A L S conference. 33

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dichotomies of triumph and trepidation. Their tales of Istanbul tend to display a contemplative mode of acceptance, an occasionally rather comfortable cult of melancholy, a fatalism that might be religiously motivated but can be easily linked up with the ‘Bosphorous Syndrome’ developed in this essay. On reading a number of short prose texts by Demir Özlü, Selim Ileri, Serdar Rifat, Fahrettin Çiloglu, Fatih Özgüven, and Sabâ AltƯnsa (all translated into German),35 I gained the impression that the air of ‘hüzün’ as described by Orhan Pamuk may still be widespread in the present-day, bustling megalopolis of Istanbul. Such an observation – which cannot be corroborated on a broader scale within the confines of this article – would endorse the ongoing productivity of the ‘Syndrome’ supported by the ancient spirit of this place. It appears to be natural that those individuals and ‘nations’ who settled, lived, and survived on the Bosphorus over centuries – including Byzantines, Greeks, Romans, Armenians, Syrians, Jews, Franks, and Turks – have learnt to be at home and, to a certain extent, to integrate, in this long process of bridging and barring. Strangely, however, most newcomers, even after spending only a few weeks or days in this place, have felt (and seem to have reason) to be part of this ongoing process of immersion, this seemingly schizophrenic but in fact deeply humanizing experience of reaching out while digging in. Cheap metaphors like ‘melting-pot’ are not enough to describe this remarkable potential for integration-cum-diversification. What has been offered in ‘Istanbul’ from time immemorial is a spatial meeting-ground where cultural extremes are drawn together, necessitating and producing compromises that may lead into the future. The humans exposed to such challenges tend to keep their horizons open and their senses alert. The melancholy of ‘hüzün’ and the creative art of integration are the two faces of that coin that may be most desperately needed on all sides of the Bosphorus.

W OR K S C I T E D Andréadès, André. “The Economic Life of the Byzantine Empire,” in Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization, ed. Norman H. Baynes & H. St. L.B. Moss (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948): 51–70. 35

Demir Özlü, “Der Ekel” from Bunaltƭ (1958); Selim Ileri, “Das Böse” from Bir Pencereden (1982); Serdar Rifat, “Zu jener Stunde, an jenem Ort” (2003), all included in Türkische Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Petra Kappert & Tevfik Turan (Frankfurt am Main: Insel. 2008); as well as Fahrettin Çiloglu, “Die Reise meiner Großmutter nach Istanbul”; Fatih Özgüven, “Amapola”; Sabâ AltƯnsay, “Wer schon?,” all included in Unser Istanbul: Junge türkische Literatur, ed. Constanze Letsch (Berlin: Berliner Tachenbuch, 2008).

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Baynes, Norman H., & H. St. L.B. Moss, ed. Byzantium: An Introduction to East Roman Civilization (Oxford: Clarendon, 1948). Bonatz, Paul. Leben und Bauen (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, 1950). Bugeja, “Post-Imperial Culture and its Melancholies: From Théophile Gautier’s Constantinople of To-day to Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories of a City,” Le Simplegadi 12.11 (2014): 142–65, http://all.uniud.it/simplegadi/wp-content/uploads/2014/Simplegadi _12_2014_Bugeja.pdf (accessed 1 May 2015). Byron, [George Gordon]. Poems, vol. 3: Don Juan, ed. V. de Sola Pinto (London: Dent Dutton, 1963). ——.‘In My Hot Youth’: Byron’s Letters and Journals, vol. 1: 1798–1810, ed. Leslie A. Marchand (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P /Belknap Press, 1973). Gautier, Théophile. Constantinople of Today, tr. Robert Howe Gould (Constantinople, 1853; tr. London: Bogue, 1854). Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. 2 (London: Dent Dutton, 1910). Gilles, Pierre. The Antiquities of Constantinople (New York: Italia, 1988). Grillparzer, Franz. Reise nach Konstantinopel und Griechenland 1843, in Grillparzer, Sämtliche Werke, Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, vol. 4 (Munich: Hanser, 1965): 646–88. Herrin, Judith. “A Christian Millennium: Greece in Byzantium,” in The Greek World: Classical, Medieval and Modern, ed. Robert Browning (London: Thames & Hudson, 1985): 233–50. Kappert, Petra, & Tevfik Turan, ed. Türkische Erzählungen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1992). Letsch, Constanze. Unser Istanbul: Junge türkische Literatur (Berlin: Berliner Taschenbuch, 2008). Melling, A.I. Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople et des rives du Bosphore (Paris: Treuttel & Würtz, 1819). Moltke, Helmuth von. Unter dem Halbmond: Erlebnisse in der alten Türkei 1835–1839, ed. & intro. Helmut Arndt (Wiedbaden: Erdmann & marix, 2008). Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Letters and Works, ed. Lord Warncliffe, 3 vols (London: Bentley, 1837). Nerval, Gérard de. Voyage en Orient, vol. 1 (1843; Paris: Garnier–Flammarion, 1980). Norwich, John Julius. “The Return of Iconoclasm,” Byzantium: The Apogee (1991; London: Penguin, 1993): 21–40. Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories of a City, tr. Maureen Freely (Žstanbul: Hatƭralar ve õehir, 2003; tr. London: Faber & Faber, 2005). Pardoe, Miss [Julia]. The City of the Sultan, and Domestic Manners of the Turks, with a Steam Voyage up the Danube (1837; London: Routledge, 1854). Runciman, Steven. The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1965). Rycaut, Paul. The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623 to the Year 1677 […] (London: Basset, 1687).

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——.The History of the Turks, Beginning with the Year 1679 [...] (London: Basset, 1700). ——.The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, Containing the Maxims of the Turkish Polity [...] (London: Basset, 1687). Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; London: Penguin, 1985). Stilz, Gerhard. “Introduction: Territorial Terrors – Home to Cosmopolis,” in Territorial Terrors: Contested Spaces in Colonial and Postcolonial Writing, ed. Gerhard Stilz (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007): 1–21. Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad, or: The New Pilgrims’ Progress, Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City’s Pleasure Excursion into Europe and the Holy Land, 2 vols. (1869; New York: Harper, 1929). Woodhouse, Christopher M. Modern Greece: A Short History (London: Faber & Faber, 1977). Yeats, W.B. “Byzantium” (1930), repr. in Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950): 280–81. ——.“Sailing to Byzantium” (1927), repr. in Yeats, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats (London: Macmillan, 1950): 217–18.

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Geography Fabulous Conrad and Ghosh 1 P A D M IN I M ONGIA

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often located in South and South East Asia, Amitav Ghosh revisits territory many readers of novels in English have known through colonial writers such as Conrad, Kipling, and Greene. This is not a surprise. Several writers we categorize under the rubric ‘postcolonial’ are impelled, at least in part, by a revisionist agenda, which leads us to question the worlds the colonial novel offered. Among these postcolonial novelists, Amitav Ghosh is one of the foremost, and not only in the context of India. His training as an anthropologist and his involvement in academic debates inflect his novels so strongly that the latter are often more scholarly than novelistic in their engagement with issues that concern postcolonial theorists and historians. Ghosh’s works, more than those of other writers on the world stage, are critical to an ongoing understanding of the previous two centuries and their legacies in this one. What might it mean, then, for Ghosh to say, as he did in a 2008 interview after the publication of Sea of Poppies, that breaking the imperial gaze brought by Kipling or Conrad did not interest him?2 Conrad’s maritime world, Ghosh said, contained few, if any, Indian or South Asian characters of note. The few that appear there are caricatured, whereas Ghosh claimed that Melville is the truly cosmopolitan writer with whom he wanted to engage. There is no denying the truth of Ghosh’s understanding of Conrad: Conrad’s colonial worlds, situated though they may be outside Europe, are peopled by Europeans, Europeans 1

N AN IM PRESSIVE BOD Y OF WORK

A slightly different version of this essay appears in Coldnoon: Travel Poetics 3.1 (Summer 2014): 191–201, http://coldnoon.com/322/ (accessed 14 January 2015). 2 Amitav Ghosh, in Chris Lydon, “Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies,” Radio Open Source (20 November 2008), http://radioopensource.org/amitav-ghosh-and-his-sea-of-poppies/ (accessed 5 April 2011).

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disintegrating through their location and their interaction with the locals with whom they come into contact. Yet, one ghost hovering over Ghosh, it seems to me, is that of Conrad. Kipling seems a more distant ancestor, but Conrad, concerned with the moral and psychological ambiguities that mark his characters and deliberating on particular moments of contact between Europeans and others, seems an unlikely figure for Ghosh to distance himself from. By probing Ghosh’s comments on Conrad and Melville, I want to understand better the weight behind what seems an unnecessarily precise distinction between affiliative connections. In order to tease out what may be at stake in Ghosh’s position, I will work my way through Conrad’s “Geography and Some Explorers,” a late essay which has received little attention except as another articulation of Conradian concerns better spelt out in Heart of Darkness.3 Through this essay, I argue for the presence of Conrad in Ghosh’s work. Having done so, I address his comments quoted above and try to dismantle the simpler oppositions implied by the binary colonial/postcolonial.

Geography and Some Explorers “Geography and Some Explorers” was published in Britain by Strangeways, in a limited edition of thirty copies, in January 1924. In February that year, it appeared as “The Romance of Travel,” again in Britain, in a publication called Countries of the World that came out between 1924 and 1925 and was intended as “a photo-illustrated gazetteer of all the world’s countries and regions in alphabetical order.”4 Conrad’s essay was included in the first volume of the publication and given prominence by being cited on the cover itself.5 In addition, this first volume also carried an essay on Conrad by the series’ editor, John Hammerton. Later that year, in March 1924, Conrad’s essay was published under the title “Geography and Some Explorers” in the National Geographic Magazine, complete with sixteen full-page illustrations, selected by the staff at the

3

Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” in Conrad, Last Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1926): 1–21. 4 Conrad First (nd), www.conradfirst.net/view/periodical?id=65 (accessed 5 April 2011). 5 Although Conrad’s essay is cited often, there is next to no sustained work on it. Ray Stevens’s “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor, The National Geographic Magazine, and ‘Geography and Some Explorers’,” Conradiana 23.3 (1991), 197–202, is the only full-length article I have found on the essay. The article addresses, as its title suggests, the life of Conrad’s essay in the National Geographic Magazine, rather than Conrad’s text itself. I rely on Stevens’s essay for the publication information shared above.

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magazine without any consultation with Conrad.6 It featured as the lead article in the magazine. On 24 August 1924, an extract from the essay was published as “Conrad on Geography” in the Oakland Tribune, just two weeks after Conrad had passed away. At the time of the essay’s publication in both Britain and the U SA , Conrad was a well-known, much celebrated writer. By the time the work appeared in the U SA , he had already been on the cover of Time magazine and had completed a successful literary tour of the country the previous year. Peter Mallios’s fascinating Our Conrad examines the concerns and impetus behind the North American embrace of the Polish/British writer.7 The construction of Conrad as a literary master had as much to do with his will-to-style as it did with the ways in which he could be seen as a European front-lier to where the novel was heading. Not surprisingly, then, Conrad’s late essay was sought after and solicited by Gilbert Grosvenor at the National Geographic. Conrad was a name, and a respected authority on matters of exploration, the sea, geography, and the foreign. His status was the main reason for the several appearances of his essay within a very short time, as if it were some sort of composite reflection on hitherto disparate and scattered concerns. Further, Grosvenor approached Conrad with a proposal for a series of essays on “seamen explorers especially for the Geographic.”8 As Stevens points out, “this request was consonant with Grosvenor’s compelling desire to increase interest in geography by increasing the circulation of The National Geographic and by broadening the Geographic’s base of appeal.”9 Conrad declined the invitation, citing lack of time and knowledge, but he did suggest writing a “‘general article on a period of sea exploration in its picturesque aspect’ at some indefinite time in the future.” 10 Conrad’s prominence may help explain the lack of reaction to what seems to me a series of interesting but contradictory approaches to geography and exploration within the essay. Whereas Conrad’s text positions itself to reflect on what he calls “geography,” the piece is a much more explicit meditation on 6

Stevens points out that Grosvenor, the President of the National Geographic Society, accepted American rights to Conrad’s text even though it “was not written as narrative for a photographic essay, the way submissions to The National Geographic Magazine were customarily published” (Stevens, “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor,” 197). The illustrations published with the essay had little, if anything, to do with Conrad’s text. As a result, the meditative, personal quality of Conrad’s piece is subsumed by the celebration of fearless exploration, as implied by the photographs. 7 Peter Mallios, Our Conrad (Palo Alto C A : Stanford U P , 2010). 8 Stevens, “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor,” 198. 9 “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor,” 198. 10 “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor,” 198.

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“exploration.” Ranging from Columbus through Tasman to Captain Cook, the work examines different moments of geographical/seafaring exploration, addressing variously the travails and trials that attended these journeys. The essay seems neatly divided into different stages of geographical awareness – geography fabulous (the medieval phase), geography militant (the post-Columbus phase), and geography triumphant (the phase prevalent at the time of Conrad’s writing) – but, as Shirley Chew astutely suggests, “by linking from the start his fanciful mapmaking with the deeds of adventurous men, Conrad draws geographical discovery into the province of romance.”11 Further, Chew goes on to emphasize their similarity: both have their origin in action, in particular the lonely endeavors of the heroic individual in distant places and times; both yearn to ‘remake the world in the image of desire’; and both, in their moments of greatest intensity, are characterized by a perfection that carries with it its own dissolution.12

While Chew’s essay is focused on Conrad and Naipaul, my interest in her reading of Conrad’s late work lies in the attention she pays to the nostalgia that inflects his comments on geography. Chew rightly points out the “all-consuming” quality of Conrad’s nostalgia, so pervasive that his meditation is able to ignore, among other features, the Great War “or the decline of sea power in the face of new technology and inventions.”13 As a result, despite his efforts to organize and categorize different stages of geographical awareness, Conrad himself collapses the distinction between geography and exploration that he is at pains to make. From the beginning of the text, where he distinguishes them, only then to see them as coterminous, the essay remains a paean to geography, but geography of a particular kind. The easy transposition of titles for this work when it was first published in Britain and the U SA may say it best: “the romance of travel” and “geography and some explorers” are one and the same. That world of boyhood wonder when the young Conrad gazed at blank spaces on the map and vowed to visit them, a moment remembered in Heart of Darkness14 and in “Geography and Some

11

Shirley Chew, “(Post) Colonial Translations in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” World Literature Written in English 37.1–2 (1998): 119. 12 Chew, “(Post) Colonial Translations in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” 119. 13 “(Post) Colonial Translations in V.S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” 120. 14 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902), in Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Selections from the Congo Diary (New York: Modern Library, 1999): 1–96.

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Explorers,” is the one that accentuates what Conrad has to say about geography as a science and explorers as the tools for at least some part of that geography. The power of romance – romance understood as expressive of heroic action, lonely men, and distant places – is exerted not only in the worlds that Conrad created in his fictions and lived out in his own seafaring days. It is that same power that I see in Ghosh’s writing, even as I am acutely aware of the ways in which Ghosh revises the idea of romance that compelled writers such as Conrad. Perhaps there is no work more explicitly responsive to Conrad’s essay and its celebration of the force of romance than Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines.15 Drawing its title from Conrad’s novella The Shadow-Line,16 Ghosh’s novel creates an unforgettable character in its nameless narrator: a boy stuck in Calcutta learns to dream with precision as he learns that places are to be imagined, and so must be imagined with care.17 This passion for travel has been nurtured and developed in the narrator through his uncle Tridib; they spend hours poring over Tridib’s tattered copy of Bartholomew’s Atlas, as Tridib – his uncle – tells him stories of places with magical names. “Those names, which were to me a set of magical talismans because Tridib had pointed them out to me,” help train the young narrator to use his “imagination with precision,” laying the groundwork for the narrative imagination that leads him to construct the moving and cathartic tale he tells.18 Those hours spent gazing at the atlas recall Conrad’s childhood passion for maps, of which he speaks in “Geography and Some Explorers”: Map gazing [...] brings the problems of the great spaces of the earth into stimulating and directing contact with sane curiosity and gives an honest precision to one’s imaginative faculty.19

Just as Marlow in Heart of Darkness dreams of visiting the white heart of Africa as a boy, so did the young Conrad. The magic associated with travel and discovery that so compels Marlow’s urge to visit the Congo in Heart of Darkness has a distinct flavour, particular to the period Conrad evokes in the novella. But the excitement and childlike wonder associated with unknown spaces and a world newly-discovered that both Marlow and Conrad recall from their boyhoods is 15

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (1988; New York: Penguin, 1990). Joseph Conrad, The Shadow-Line (1917; New York: Vintage, 2007). 17 I examine some of the ways in which Ghosh’s novel echoes Conrad’s novella in my essay, “Post-Colonial Identity and Gender Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,” College Literature 19.3–20.1 (October 1992–February 1993): 225–28. 18 Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines, 20, 24. Further page references are in the main text. 19 Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers,” 13. 16

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shared by the nameless narrator of Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines. Tridib gives his nephew, through their map gazing, “worlds to travel in and [...] eyes to see them with” (20). Not only capable of using his imagination with precision, the narrator becomes a storyteller who uses his passion for travel and adventure to discover the mystery of space and contiguity rather than the limitations placed by boundaries of geographical difference determined by national borders. Like Conrad’s meditation on map-gazing, the meditation of Ghosh’s narrator on space reveals nothing but the mystery of distance. Despite the honest intentions of map-makers who believed in the “enchantment of lines,” the narrator discovers the tenuousness of borders which do not separate but reflect sameness, so that Calcutta and Dhaka become in The Shadow Lines the “inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free – our looking-glass border” (228). Inevitably, Ghosh’s meditation on borders and distance has a different inflection from Conrad’s boyhood passion for maps. While both are compelled by the mystery and attraction of the unknown, Ghosh’s novel struggles with late-twentieth-century concerns, particularly the imagined community of the nation. The rapid changes between ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ in the maps that fascinated Conrad have given way to new realities in Ghosh’s novel, which he approaches in ways unimaginable to Conrad or in Conrad’s time. Yet, despite these differences between Ghosh and Conrad, the power of romance remains an important feature in the works of both novelists.

Ghosh and Lydon Chris Lydon’s programme, produced by the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, was set up as a conversation with world writers on the global stage. On 20 November 2008, Lydon introduced Orhan Pamuk and Ghosh, his guests on this show, as the children of “Achebe and Naipaul,” each telling “the other side of the story.” In the interview, Lydon asks Ghosh if he sees himself “confronting Kipling and Conrad, [...] old voices which told the world story one way.” Ghosh agrees with Lydon that, indeed, these writers told the story one way, and adds that of Kipling he has nothing to say. Of Conrad, Ghosh comments, “his was a more ambiguous voice,” but when Lydon proposes to him that it may be Ghosh’s “project to retell those stories from the subcontinent’s point of view,” the writer’s response is strong and forceful: “No, not at all.” Ghosh adds that Conrad does not evoke a strong response from him and does not interest him; the author who does interest him is Herman Melville, whom Ghosh considers the greatest writer America ever produced. It is Melville’s more

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cosmopolitan vision that compels Ghosh, who again reminds us that “Melville is the only nineteenth-century nautical writer who paid enough attention to Indian sailors.” But of the lascars, for example, Asian and Arab sailors, there is no mention in the worlds of either Conrad or Melville, and it is “their absence from the imaginative record of sail that made [Ghosh] curious about them” and compelled him to explore their story.20 Ghosh is right that the stories of the lascars are not the stories that either Conrad or Melville told, although occasionally lascars do appear in both their works. However, Ghosh’s rejection of the mantle of respondent to colonial writers such as Conrad and Kipling appears odd, given his stated interest in telling the story that Conrad and Melville did not. What might it mean, then, for Ghosh to say that Conrad does not interest him? Why would Ghosh so deliberately want to distance himself from Conrad and assert his artistic links to Herman Melville? Inadvertently, perhaps, by placing both Pamuk and Ghosh within a ‘writingback’ model, Lydon may have set up the response Ghosh gives. It is hardly surprising that Ghosh should reject Lydon’s model where the children of “Achebe and Naipaul” are simply telling “the other side of the story”: Ghosh understandably sees his own mission as a writer as quite separate from being a respondent to the colonial fictions of Kipling and Conrad. Returning the imperial gaze seems a limitation of Ghosh’s agenda, which is a sprawling set of concerns offering alternate and alternative visions of the history and intellectual traditions that we have inherited in the twentieth century. That said, it remains of continuing interest to me not that Ghosh should prefer to align himself with Melville but that Ghosh is so invested in distancing himself from a forebear from whom it is impossible, it seems to me, to do so. Even if Conrad’s ghost may not hover as near Ghosh as it did for Naipaul, Ghosh’s set of chosen interests were visited a century before by Conrad. These, loosely put, would include not only the colonial encounter and its residues but, more importantly, although with great delicacy, the romance of travel and adventure, and the allure of distant places. That romance which Conrad locates in his boyhood imaginings of adventuring and glory, of going to places nobody he knew had visited, is an allure Ghosh’s novels also reflect. In his Lydon interview, Ghosh mentions meeting some Indian sailors in Alexandria who invited him to join them on their sea voyage. He was certainly young when this encounter took place, but what is startling is that he packed his bags and went down to the port to join the sailors, 20

Lydon, “Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies.”

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only to see their ship sail away. That romantic response to the unknown, to a journey leaving behind known structures that makes Ghosh say of these sailors “they were truly free,” is one that Conrad’s characters seem to understand so well.21 Nor, it seems to me, is Ghosh able to distance himself from the magic of places, the allure of distance, the hypnotic quality contained in the names of places and the ways we imagine them, however different that imagining is in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries from the ways the appeal of unknown places was articulated by Conrad in the previous one. Another answer to the question of why Ghosh needs to distance himself from Conrad and align himself with Melville may lie in Ghosh’s self-placement, in this twenty-first century, as a cosmopolitan American writer. That Ghosh is placed in the interview in the same context as Conrad is no surprise, given that the empire has been writing back quite robustly in the USA (as well as in the U K ) for the last fifty years and longer. However, to see Ghosh in the context of Melville, and to hear Melville’s cosmopolitanism celebrated, is to see the U SA outside of that ‘isolation’ that is so much a part of the country’s understanding of itself. Just like the rest of Ghosh’s interview, it also firmly connects the time of the interview with the British colonial past. Ghosh explicitly states that he started writing Sea of Poppies when Bush Jr. invaded Iraq. From the outset, Ghosh wants us to connect the British in India and the opium trade that funded the empire to the U SA in Iraq and the U S dependence on foreign oil. Connecting the time of the American invasion of Iraq with a U SA which had just elected Barack Obama, Ghosh says Melville is the true ancestor of Obama. And why? Because Obama’s family and affiliations are reflected in those worlds Melville created, whether in Moby-Dick or in Melville’s other narratives of exploration and anthropological curiosity.22 To see a trajectory linking Melville to Obama, on the one hand, and to our cosmopolitan novelist, on the other, is definitely to widen the contours of literary history where Indian novelists, writing in English, of empire and its aftermath, have been placed. Such a context restricts the scope and interests of these authors to the ‘writing-back’ model. This paradigm, so important in the 1980s and ’90s when it served to help clear space for novelists such as Ghosh, now seems restrictive and outmoded. As we look back now on three decades and more of energetic activity in the area known as postcolonialism, we can reflect on what was once a fruitful opposition between the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘postcolonial’. Works such as the series Europe and Its Others (published by the University of Essex) or the 21 22

Lydon, “Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies.” Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; New York: W.W. Norton, 2002).

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first anthologies that appeared in the 1990s, such as Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams’s Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory,23 helped solidify a tension between the colonial and postcolonial. Increasingly, though, the value of the ‘writing-back’ model appears limited, in part because it fossilizes a relationship that ought to be, and is, more productive than the one suggested by the binary on which it is based. Ghosh’s alliance with Melville rather than Conrad, then, may be a way for him to widen the conversation on the novel and to steer it away from the national or empire-and-its-aftermath model that has been so influential in literary studies.

W OR K S C I T E D Chew, Shirley. “(Post) Colonial Translations in V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival,” World Literature Written in English 37.1–2 (1998): 118–34. Chrisman, Laura, & Patrick Williams. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (1993; New York: Columbia U P , 1994). Conrad, Joseph. “Geography and Some Explorers,” in Conrad, Last Essays (Garden City N Y : Doubleday, 1926): 1–21. ——.Heart of Darkness (1902), in Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Selections from the Congo Diary (New York: Modern Library, 1999): 1–96. ——.The Shadow-Line (1917; New York: Vintage, 2007). Conrad First (nd), http://www.conradfirst.net/view/periodical?id=65 (accessed 5 April 2011). Ghosh, Amitav. Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). ——.The Shadow Lines (1988; New York: Penguin, 1990). Lydon, Chris. “Amitav Ghosh and his Sea of Poppies,” Radio Open Source (20 November 2008), http://radioopensource.org/amitav-ghosh-and-his-sea-of-poppies/ (accessed 5 April 2011). Mallios, Peter. Our Conrad (Palo Alto C A : Stanford U P , 2010). Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (1851; New York: W.W. Norton, 2002). Mongia, Padmini. “Post-Colonial Identity and Gender Boundaries in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,” College Literature 19.3–20.1 (October 1992–February 1993): 225–28. Stevens, Ray. “Conrad, Gilbert Grosvenor, The National Geographic Magazine, and ‘Geography and Some Explorers’,” Conradiana 23.3 (1991): 197–202.

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Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (1993; New York: Columbia U P , 1994).

The Concomitant Spaces of Territory and Writing Crossing Cultural Divides 1 M AR T A D VO \ ÁK

T

A F R I C A T R I L O G Y was one of the most successful as well as original theatrical events at Toronto’s annual arts festival, Luminato, in June 2010. The small Toronto-based company Volcano Theatre was commissioned to assemble a trilogy of short plays to explore a complex, protean subject: Africa and its relations with the West. Playwrights and directors from three continents contributed to the trilogy. Among these plays, Shine Your Eye, written by the Kenyan Binyanvanga Wainaina and directed by Volcano’s Ross Manson, is set in contemporary, axiologically-fraught Nigeria. Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God, written by the German playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig and directed by Liesl Tommy, takes as its setting an unsettling homecoming party for a couple who have spent six years in Africa as part of a medical-aid team. The clever writing and directing, deploying multimedia techniques such as freeze-frame action, video, overlapping, and reprise, clearly borrow from Edward Albee’s landmark play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Albee’s play, like its alternative theatre venue Off-Broadway, having, significantly, gone mainstream) and take it global in both content and form. In 2011, Luminato subsequently presented the world premiere of an ambitious new adaptation of an ancient literary classic, created by Tim Supple, who in 2008 staged the unorthodox South Asian version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a multilingual, multi-ethnic Indian cast which illuminated the play by underscoring the different ways in which Shakespeare ‘speaks’ to, throws into relief, and often even merges with 1

HE

This essay develops part of the paper I gave at the Istanbul E A C L A L S conference. For a version which also engages with the Indo-Irish novelist and essayist Aubrey Menen as an exemplar adroitly underscoring cultural convergences by stressing cultural divides, see Marta Dvoˀák, “Inhabiting the EdgeS: Transtextuality and Subduction,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 34.1 (Autumn 2011): 11–23.

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their own world-views. His subsequent One Thousand and One Nights was a two-part, equally multilingual epic with a cast of twenty-five from the Arab world.

Global Dialogism Such cultural events are redolent of global dialogism. No culture is full unto itself, no culture is plainly plenitudinous, Homi Bhabha declared to Jonathan Rutherford over a decade ago, arguing that each culture’s symbol-forming activity and interpellation in the process of representation and meaning-making is in translational relations with other cultures.2 Also over a decade or a decade and a half ago, other critics and cultural theorists such as Elleke Boehmer, Derek Walcott, J. Michael Dash, and Vinay Dharwadker were already acknowledging that the dynamic mixing of languages, forms, and styles functioning as a catalysis of creation was a global phenomenon, and that publishers were consequently boosting their transnational distribution to reach global audiences. 3 The critics linked the poetics of creolization involving linguistic and cultural imitation and reconfiguration to postcolonial concerns and praxis, but also to postmodernism’s suspicion of “sacred origins and pure beginnings” and its preoccupation with displacement and incompleteness.4 While such transnational interplay in the arts is evident in the postcolonial era, it is indeed doubtful that its origins can be attributed entirely to the global marketing of Graham Huggan’s postcolonial exotic,5 or even to the more general paradigms of twentieth-century decolonization and migration which critics such as Bill Ashcroft and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have recently reinvestigated in essays such as “Transnation” and “Planetarity” respectively.6 I propose to reach beyond and

2

Homi Bhabha, in Jonathan Rutherford, “The Third Space: An Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Laurence & Wishart, 1998): 210. 3 Vinay Dharwadker, “The Internationalization of Literatures,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 105–108. See also Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford U P, 1995); Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 36–64; and J. Michael Dash, “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures, ed. King, 45–58. 4 Dash, “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” 52. 5 Graham Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 6 See Bill Ashcroft, “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (Abingdon & Burlington V T :

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engage with the transcultural writing and reading practices on the march well before our current postcolonial period. I wish to explore how the environment of social heteroglossia found in imperial spaces, an environment in which different language consciousnesses with their discrete world-views interrelate, catalyses a process of penetration and stratification which explodes the ossified deposits of closed socio-linguistic systems that literary language is often rooted in. Grounding my analysis in Bakhtinian theories of linguistic heteroglossia, I want to move beyond notions of submission: namely, the monovalent submission of one language and its accompanying culture and belief system to a newly dominant language and its cultural baggage, and to explore the complex way in which the alien other-languagedness of English, like Sanskrit, Persian, and Arabic before it, has rather been seized, appropriated, or even expropriated by indigenous writers to fissure the sharply delineated boundaries of their own literary language. It can be useful to recall that English itself is a hybrid product catalysed by conquest, having undergone the stratifying saturation of Norman French after 1066. At the risk of going against the grain of influential postcolonial currents, I shall show that many a writer on the Indian subcontinent embraced the English language as a gateway, not so much for its audience-reaching potential as for its dialogic elasticity. I shall also argue that the expropriation involved a connection between language and genre. English began to be adopted as a literary language in South Asia in the nineteenth century. So did the relatively new, imported genre of the European novel. The two did not systematically overlap, for novels were produced in Bengali and other vernacular (rather than sacred) languages such as Malayalam and Telegu as well as Hindi. But both were embraced precisely because they allowed these latecomers to prose the digressions and convolutions which their own entrenched literary language and generic conventions resisted. The emergence of cultural and ideological interstices is particularly discernible in the 2011 EAC LALS conference venue, Istanbul having been the capital of two great empires (Byzantine and Ottoman). These provided the impetus and matrix for a fruitful, at times painful, cross-cultural dialogue between East and West – a dialogue which has inscribed a distinctive eclectic style in Western Europe’s architecture, music, dance, decorative arts, and literature. These interstices are also discernible in spaces such as northern India, where Turks, Mongols, and Persians had always intermingled and conjoined in a Routledge, 2010), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Planetarity,” in Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia U P , 2003): 71–102.

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manner analogous to the compound words and conglomerations of Turki (the private language of the Mughal royal family until the end of the eighteenth century)7 and Persian (the official language of the court until the nineteenth century, maintained as the official language of diplomacy and the judiciary by the British colonial forces until 1835). The intermingling of peoples is also analogous to the linguistic mingling of Urdu (derived from the Turkish ordu) which grew from the interaction of Arabs with Hindustani or Khari Boli as early as the seventh and eighth centuries. Analogous, too, to the collapse and rise of multiple, overlapping empires such as that of the Mughal Emperor whose reign strikingly coincided with that of Elizabeth I: the famously ecumenical Akbar, son of a Sunni father and a Shia mother who took a Hindu wife, Jodhaa, daughter of the Rajput Prince of Amer (near today’s Jaipur), and allowed her to keep her religion. Indian writers are thus well positioned to decentre the postcolonial commonplace used in investigating British imperial and post-imperial space and to substitute for the centre/edge paradigm a vision of flux. Their more distanced, syncretic vantage point contends with the cyclical nature of history and the building and crumbling of empires which readers also find in Western reflections on dying world orders, from Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, William Faulkner’s Light in August, and Derek Walcott’s “Ruins of a Great House.” Indian fiction in English can thus be considered exemplary of global literature which can be collocated within cross-cultural as well as culture-specific frameworks, and which undermines monologic axiologies by multiplying the sources from which it freely and shape-shiftingly borrows. Among the authors from various parts of the world I shall discuss, the Indian writers chose or have chosen to write in English when conditions were often inimical to such an adherence. As Amit Chaudhuri observes in the introduction to his anthology of Indian writing, “What is perceived to be, or even constructed as, standard English is seen to be linked to an alien sensibility and to the verbal traditions of colonialism” and thus less compatible with the hybrid, multilingual nature of Indian consciousness. Chaudhuri judiciously points out, however, that hybridity “need not be worn like national costume.” 8

7

See Bamber Gascoigne, The Great Moghuls (London: Robinson, 2002). Amit Chaudhuri, “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English” (1999), repr. in the “Introduction” to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xxvi. 8

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Wars Over a Spoken Tongue Prose: Inter-Peripheral Comparisons Why should Anita Desai declare in the early 1980s that she was “very glad to be writing in a language as rich, as flexible, supple, adaptable, varied and vital as English”?9 Over a century earlier, further back than the British Raj, why should the renowned Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1824–73) declare as early as 1854 in his essay “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu,” “I love the language of the Anglo-Saxon. Yes – love the language – the glorious language of the Anglo-Saxon!”10 An explanation is subsequently offered indirectly, through a combination of personification and extended simile. What Dutt values in the English language is that “It laughs at the limit which the tyrant Grammar would set to it,” and that “It flows on like a glorious, a broad river, and in its royal mood, it does not despise the tribute waters which a thousand streams bring to it.”11 The geographical analogy configures a reversal of the stereotype of the English language as a subjugating force, recalling, rather, that it has undergone and been nourished by successive waves of occupation and conquest, from the Saxons and Danes to the Normans, which have enriched it with a complex verbal-ideological history and heteroglossic dynamic. Dutt exults: “There is no one to say to it – thus far shalt thou go, and no farther! Give me, I say, the beautiful language of the Anglo-Saxon.”12 Dutt’s celebration paves the way for Salman Rushdie’s statement a century later that “to conquer English is to complete the process of making ourselves free”13 linguistically as well as politically.14 What especially appealed to Dutt, and Rushdie subsequently, is apparently the incremental language-bending the pliable system offers, absorbing and passing on

9

Anita Desai, “The Indian Writer’s Problems,” in Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, ed. R.K. Dawan (Delhi: Behri, 1982), repr. in Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed. Ramesh K. Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal, 1984): 1. 10 Michael Madhusudan Dutt, “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu” (1854), repr. (excerpt) in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri, 6, italics in original. 11 Dutt, “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu,” 7. 12 “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu,” 7. 13 Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991; London: Granta/ Penguin, 1992): 17. 14 Geetha Ganapathy–Doré points out the discrepancy between such a stance and that of certain Caribbean writers such as George Lamming. She does not hesitate to pair Rushdie with Shakespeare in their manner of amplifying and developing “the flexibility of the English language and its potential for concrete imagery” by freely resorting to foreign loan-words, portmanteau words, neologisms, and puns, and observes that both “draw from the literary and vulgar varieties of English.” Ganapathy–Doré, “Shakespeare in Rushdie/Shakespearean Rushdie,” Atlantis 31.2 (2009): 20.

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portmanteau neologisms from Lewis Carroll’s chortle to Rushdie’s chutnification. In other words, what appeals is the absence of regimentation encountered in single, closed language systems which privilege unity and purity. That Dutt should see his own mother tongue, Bengali, as a confining system from which English provides an opening is corroborated if we look at how another major figure of the Bengal Renaissance, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), steered and tacked between poetry and prose, Bengali and English, and classical and modern registers, all of which amounted to choosing between a stilted book language that had become ossified over the centuries (sadhubhasha) and the colloquial living language of contemporary everyday speech (chalitbhasha). An analogy closer to home for today’s Western audiences and allowing them a clearer picture of the friction might be found in the comparison between sadhubhasha (the chaste or classic language) and literary French and its mandatory deployment of the aoristic, completive passé simple. As in sadhu, the high register of the passé simple cohabits uneasily with colloquial spoken French, which wields the ongoing passé composé and, increasingly, the historical present. As Amit Chaudhuri points out, “the hegemonies Bengali writers were concerned with subverting [...] had less to do with Empire, the colonizer, or the English language” than with “traditions and hierarchies embedded in the Bengali language itself.”15 The older Tagore rebelled against the normative linguistic and generic stratifications which were coterminous (for traditional verse was by definition – and has always been – more tightly shackled by the sclerotic deposits of convention than the more recent, imported, hybrid genre of prose). He initially introduced spoken language in dialogue, all the while keeping the classic language for the narration, a compromise which anticipated the mixed diction practices of Caribbean writers such as V.S. Naipaul, tending to deploy standard English – deemed elegant – for the narratorial voice, and to keep the local idiolects – deemed vulgar – for the direct speech of the characters, while in other writings such as Sam Selvon’s16 the vernacular began to invade the narration itself.17

15

Chaudhuri, “Buddhadev Rose (1908–74),” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Chaudhuri, 106. 16 Sam Selvon, “The Cricket Match” (1957), repr. in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, ed. Stewart Brown & John Wickham (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 91–95. 17 The divorce between literary language and spoken language has been extreme even in twentieth-century Europe. We tend to forget that modernist writers like Franz Kafka continued to write and publish in German, not Czech, because after centuries of Austrian political and cultural domination no work written in the national language would be given the stamp of serious literature.

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The Missing Links in these stylistic wars over a spoken-tongue prose connected to notions of identity and nationhood and stretching from the Indian subcontinent and Europe to the West Indies may be exemplified by the figures of Tagore in the East and his admirers Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats in the West. Modernism was espousing common language. This involved rehabilitating the ordinary as appropriate subject-matter and vocabulary for even poetry (for instance, T.S. Eliot’s chimney pots, vacant lots, newspapers, and window-blinds in “Preludes” or his factory and by-pass, figures of mass production and mass transport, in “East Coker”).18 But also the manner in which modernists such as Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos were imposing an idiomatic North American English in place of the high style still required by standard literary decorum.

The Irish Literary Revival and the Global Jigsaw Another identifiable connection is with Ireland’s sense of place and the turn-ofthe-century Celtic Twilight or Irish Literary Revival, which created subsequent shock waves in the analogously insular and colonized spaces of the Caribbean. Yeats is a key piece in the global jigsaw puzzle reconciling contemporary reality, writerly trans-lation/transmutation, and readerly recognition. The author of Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and founder of the Irish National Theatre Company admired Tagore’s early writing, notably the Gitanjali prose poems which Tagore had self-translated or, rather, re-composed or even re-incarnated. As Samuel Beckett19 would go on to do with his frictional auto-translations and fraught tradaptations (Murphy and Watt, for instance, were published in English in 1938 and 1953, and rewritten and published in French in 1947 and 1968 respectively), Tagore confessed to wishing to “rekindle” his poems “through the medium of a foreign language.”20 Yeats lightly edited the poems and had them published along with an introduction in 1912 by the India Society in London, garnering for the Bengali writer the Nobel Prize for Literature (1913) – ironically, a decade before Yeats himself was awarded the same prize. What arguably pleased the Irish poet in Tagore’s English recasting of Gitanjali was the flavour of other-

See Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis, tr. Susan Bernofsky, intro. David Cronenberg, afterword by Bernofsky (Die Verwandlung, 1915; New York: W.W. Norton, 2014). 18 See T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). 19 Interestingly, Beckett (another Nobel Prize recipient) was an avowed admirer of Kafka. 20 Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Letters of Tagore, ed. Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson, foreword by Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997): Letters 65, 117 (n.p.).

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languagedness that Beckett would go on to pursue,21 and its successful effect of stretching and deforming the literary language. This was precisely what Yeats and his fellow Irish playwright John Millington Synge were undertaking by deploying the rhythms, syntax, and musical intonations of Irish speech 22 complete with unfamiliar, unglossed local words in, for example, Synge’s Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907),23 the first performance of which caused an uproar at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Synge, too, is an important piece in our interlocking global jigsaw. The Caribbean poet and playwright Derek Walcott, also a Nobel recipient, has freely proclaimed Synge’s Riders to the Sea to be his model, an intertext as well as a hypotext, for his first folkplay, The Sea at Dauphin (1954). Walcott declared in an interview that he embraced such models because what he had “was the same thing Synge had: a totally new language, a totally new set of rhythms, and a totally new people, in a sense.”24 Adhering to the linguistic, dialectological torsions of his fellow modernists, Walcott’s writing of (re)locatedness involves not only the use of Antillean idiom but also the transposition and transliteration provided by a multilingual, bi- or multi-cultural society. Michael Malouf’s study of how Walcott’s dissimilation of Riders to the Sea resides in the way it transmutes an Irishnationalist aesthetic to a Caribbean-federationist aesthetic has wider reverberations.25 Its inter-peripheral comparisons engage with a reflection on cross-

21

Beckett then pushed his linguistic experiments with Viktor Shklovskii’s ostranenie or defamiliarization to an extreme by writing his trilogy in French first. Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’Innomable are literary–verbal performances, even performative acts of free will involving choosing a language the better to violate it – the violation of the acquired cognitive language increased exponentially when translated (back) almost literally into the mother tongue made strange (Molloy, Molloy Dies, The Unnamable). 22 With respect to standard English, this notably involves inversion and dislocation, but especially the paratactic elision of relative pronouns and conjunctions, auxiliaries, and even the verb ‘to be’. The overall effect is that of paring away the taxemes (serving to indicate relations between syntagms) and trimming the language down to its vital essentials – dynamic verbs and nouns. 23 These two plays are collected in J.M. Synge, The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (1995; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2008). 24 Derek Walcott, quoted in Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante (Cross/Cultures 49; Amsterdam & Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2001): xviii. See also Walcott’s discussion of influences in the following conversation: Walcott, “Derek Walcott and E.A. Markham Read and Talk,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 28.2 (Spring 2006): 95–107. 25 Michael Malouf, “Dissimilation and Federation: Irish and Caribbean Modernisms in Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin,” Comparative American Studies 8.2 (June 2010): 140–54.

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cultural encounters on the margins of dominant modernisms not so much in terms of identity as in terms of recognition and collocation.

‘Common Language’ and the Antipodean Periphery I have been demonstrating the malleable English language’s ability to bridge cultural divides. The plasticity which allows it to take on the rhythms, say, of South India’s Kannada vernacular in Raja Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) or, in Narayan’s terms, to “take on the tint of any country”26 has been addressed by Feroza Jussawalla. Jussawala has identified nativization strategies used by Rao, Anand, and Narayan (but which resonate with my discussion of Synge and Walcott and are transferable to, for example, a Nigerian writer such as Chinua Achebe [Things Fall Apart, 1958] or a Canadian writer of Italian descent such as Nino Ricci [Lives of the Saints, 1990, set partly in Italy]). Such strategies range from interpolating indigenous terms or their literal translations (calquing) to “syntax whose disconcerting simplicity [a metropolitan English] readership finds alien.”27 In fact, even a native anglophone, also exemplary of peripheral modernisms – the New Zealand novelist, poet, and short-story writer Janet Frame 28 – met with a mixed reception. While her collection of stories The Lagoon and Other Stories (1951) did win the Herbert Church Award for best first story collection, it initially outraged some critics, fellow writers, and general readers because of a style consisting of “simple statements, endlessly joined by a chant of ‘ands’,” and of dialogue “all run together into long paragraphs, and plenty of New Zealand slang and colloquialisms.”29 Interestingly, the very qualities that certain critics disparaged in Frame’s writing were those which Bakhtin has identified as the key dialogic qualities of novelizing. The Russian Formalist judiciously defined the novel as “a diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diversity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices, artistically organized.”30 Frame’s style is exemplary of the

26

R.K. Narayan, quoted in William Walsh, R.K. Narayan (London: British Council/Longman, 1971): 7, my italics. 27 Feroza F. Jussawalla, Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (New York: Peter Lang, 1985): 79. 28 Long overshadowed by Katherine Mansfield, Frame went on to win the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 1989. 29 Anon. (1951), Christchurch Press review of The Lagoon, quoted in Michael King, Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Auckland: Viking, 2000): 108. 30 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981): 262.

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stratification of language into the disparate social dialects, professional jargons, and generational, tendentious, and authoritative languages of interest groups, each with its own formulae, which, Bakhtin argues, had never been combined before the unfurling of the hybrid genre of the novel. The everyday-conversational style which the late-modernist from the antipodean periphery (like her early modernist predecessors) adopted in her first short-fiction collection, moreover, corresponds to one of the five basic types of compositional-stylistic unities into which Bakhtin breaks down the novelistic whole: namely, skaz, the Russian term for textualized orality, or “the stylization of the various forms of oral everyday narration.”31 The features that make Frame’s writing sound like spontaneous speech are the repetition, colloquialisms, stereotyped sentences, and parataxis – the extremely simplified syntax consisting of placing one clause after another with no connectors except for a string of ‘ands’. I have discussed how Samuel Beckett unsettled the stock phrases of socio-ideological language shot through with the intentions and accents of countless other speakers by approaching one language through another (writing in an acquired language, French, rather than the mother tongue, then transliterating back into a deliberately fraught English). Frame went about the war on trite language from the opposite pole. She took the words in people’s mouths and injected their everyday-conversational language into the still sharply defined borders of written language, and a large part of the New Zealand literary establishment was taken aback. It went against the grain of the coherent, unified segments of narrative at the heart of the realist aesthetic which in the early 1950s was still dominant in societies inhabiting the edges, and which was entrenched in notions of an abstract-linguistic unity of (high) literary language. “The Day of the Sheep” illustrates well Frame’s mercurial shifts in voice and point of view, flitting from dialogue to inner focalization inhabited by the speech of others.32 Asked by his wife Nance if his bringing home of handkerchiefs forgotten in the pockets of coats left at his dye-works might amount to stealing, Tom’s voice answers, then with nary a transition, mutates into Nance’s interior monologue, indissolubly mingled with what Bakhtin terms “common language”:33 31

Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 262. Janet Frame, “The Day of the Sheep” (1951), in Frame, Stories and Poems: The Lagoon and Other Stories, The Pocket Mirror (Auckland: Vintage & Random House New Zealand, 2004): 57–62. For an in-depth discussion, see Marta Dvoˀák, “Frame-Breaking: ‘Neither Separate Nor Complete Nor Important’,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 137–49. 33 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 301. 32

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–Stealing my foot, I tell you I’ve worked two years without a holiday. You see? Tom striving for his rights and getting them even if they turn out to be only a small anonymous pile of men’s handkerchiefs, but life is funny and people are funny, laugh and the world laughs with you.34

The author puts the concluding common adage into the focalizer’s mouth/ thoughts precisely to underscore “the common view,” the local society’s normative verbal approach to people and things, “the going point of view and the going value,”35 as conveniently flexible as language is in the polysemic word “funny” (strange/comical). Elsewhere, Frame stylizes and diffracts the platitudes of pietism. A stream of visitors and corresponding run-on sentences consoles a mother for the death of a daughter: But it’s all for the best and you have Wonderful Faith Mrs Todd, she’s happier in another sphere, you wouldn’t have wished it otherwise, and you’ve got her photo, it’s always nice to have their photos. 36

These affectedly sanctimonious phrases denying the grief, anger, fear, and existential doubt which thinking, perceiving humans encounter in a close brush with mortality are hollow, it is suggested through the distancing device of ironic emphatic capitalization, and also through the flippant equation made between a picture and a child. The equal value given the picture is part of the on-going point of view and the on-going value of the social group from which the authorial consciousness distances itself and us. The axiological distance engineered by the verbal refraction is thus a satirical one challenging the authoritative, monolithic thought potentially concealed in an apparent multiplicity of social voices which the author ventriloquizes. Frame’s disruption of a doctrinal belief-system through the spoken-tongue disruption of local linguistic traditions – in other words her speaking and acting through language – underscores once more the homology between poetics and life, between stylistic form and the socio-ideological cultural horizons which open up behind the heteroglot language. The written text, too, is a form of dialogue, a “verbal performance in print”37 involving three coordinates. As Julia Kristeva has argued in Desire in Language, the writing subject engages syntagmatically with the response of the projected audience; all the while, the word in 34

Frame, “The Day of the Sheep,” 57. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 301–302, italics in original. 36 Frame, “Keel and Kool” (1951), in Frame, Stories and Poems: The Lagoon, 30. 37 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell & Bruce Herzberg (Boston M A : St Martin’s, 1990): 939, italics in original. 35

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the text is paradigmatically oriented towards a dialogue with exterior texts: namely, a diachronic or synchronic literary corpus which melds with a broader cultural context.38 The spectrum of works I have discussed deploys both horizontal and vertical distributional relations of discourse involving, on the one hand, combination, and on the other, substitution and layering. The displacements and palimpsestic superimpositions can be identified on sundry levels – semantic, stylistic, narrative, and intermedial.39 The textual spaces which they occupy illustrate the slippages between different worlds of lived and storied experience and the manner in which societal perceptions, practices, and predilections crisscross, diffract, and interlock, in fruitful friction which mutually shapes and illuminates. I am not going to align myself with the oversimplified position of the naive Hungarian–Canadian character, Janet, in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s story “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” who is convinced that “people all over the world are the same, just with different languages, art, and music.”40 The Toronto production of Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God mentioned above did transpose the complacent frustrations of an idle Western married couple in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf onto a global stage. But when the white female character who has worked in fraught situations as a nurse in Africa finally cries out to the couple who have never left the West, “You have nooooo idea,” the audience is made to realize that there are things which can never be adequately represented, and that storied experience may not be apprehended by those who have not lived such trauma. Language is always subjective and always in a context. Still, localized forms of knowledge interlock with global forms in a dialogic process much like the living, developing English language and the prose genre of the novel, epitomes of absorbability. It may be useful to return spiral-fashion to the exemplar of global dialogism I evoked in my introduction: namely, the iconic work One Thousand and One Nights revived and re-invented for the stage by the renowned Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, dramatized and directed by the theatre and opera dramaturg from Sussex, Tim Supple, commissioned by the 38

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (essays selected from Sèméiôtikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse, 1969, & Polylogue, 1977; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1980). 39 Using an Anita Desai novel as a test case, I elsewhere investigate transnational writing rooted in different canons and their belief systems which have always migrated, mixed, and mutated. See Dvoˀák, The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). 40 Shauna Singh Baldwin, “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” in Baldwin, English Lessons and Other Stories (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 1999): 103.

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Toronto-based festival Luminato, produced by the London-based Dash Arts, and created and performed in 2011 (in English, Arabic, and French with surtitles) by actors, musicians, and designers from across the Arabic-speaking world. Its production and subsequent participation in the Edinburgh International Festival and the world tour that followed celebrate the processes of collocation. Celebrating the powerful influence of Eastern cultural and artistic traditions on the cultural landscapes of the West relativizes and aggregates, illustrating the full import of Edward Said’s assertion that “neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability.”41

W O R K S C I TE D Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart (1958; London: Penguin, 2001). Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962; New York: Signet, 1983). Ashcroft, Bill. “Transnation,” in Rerouting the Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru & Sarah Lawson Welsh (Abingdon & Burlington V T : Routledge, 2010): 72–85. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). ——. “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language,” in The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, ed. Patricia Bizzell & Bruce Herzberg (Boston MA : St Martin’s, 1990): 928–44. Baldwin, Shauna Singh. “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit,” in Baldwin, English Lessons and Other Stories (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane, 1999): 99–128. Beckett, Samuel. L’Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953); The Unnamable, tr. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1958). ——.Malone meurt (Paris: Minuit, 1951); Malone Dies, tr. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1956). ——.Murphy (1938; New York: Grove, 1957); Murphy, tr. Samuel Beckett (Paris: Bordas, 1947). ——.Molloy (Paris: Minuit, 1951); Molloy, tr. Patrick Bowles & Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1955). ——.Watt (1953; New York: Grove, 1994); Watt, tr. Samuel Beckett (Paris: Minuit, 1968). Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Migrant Metaphors (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995). Chaudhuri, Amit. “The Construction of the Indian Novel in English” (1999), repr. in the “Introduction” to The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): xxiii–xxxi.

41

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1994): xvii, my italics.

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——.“Buddhadev Bose (1908–74),” in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): 106. Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard, tr. Stephen Mulrine (Vishnevyi sad, 1904; tr. London: Nick Hern, 1998). Dash, J. Michael. “Psychology, Creolization, and Hybridization,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 45–58. Desai, Anita. “The Indian Writer’s Problems,” in Explorations in Modern Indo-English Fiction, ed. R.K. Dawan (Delhi: Behri, 1982), repr. in Perspectives on Anita Desai, ed. Ramesh K. Srivastava (Ghaziabad: Vimal, 1984): 1–4. Dharwadker, Vinay. “The Internationalization of Literatures,” in New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction, ed. Bruce King (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996): 102– 19. Dutt, Michael Madhusudan. “The Anglo-Saxon and the Hindu” (1854), excerpted in The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature, ed. Amit Chaudhuri (London: Picador, 2001): 3–7. Dvoˀák, Marta. The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). ——.“Frame-Breaking: ‘Neither Separate Nor Complete Nor Important’,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 33.2 (Spring 2011): 137–49. ——.“Inhabiting the EdgeS: Transtextuality and Subduction,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 34.1 (Autumn 2011): 11–23. Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1975). ——.Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943). Faulkner, William. Light in August (New York: Harrison Smith & Robert Haas, 1932). Frame, Janet. “The Day of the Sheep” (1951), in Frame, Stories and Poems: The Lagoon and Other Stories, The Pocket Mirror (Auckland: Vintage & Random House New Zealand, 2004): 57–62. ——. “Keel and Kool” (1951), in Frame, Stories and Poems: The Lagoon and Other Stories, The Pocket Mirror (Auckland: Vintage & Random House New Zealand, 2004): 28–35. ——. The Lagoon and Other Stories (Christchurch: Caxton, 1951), repr. in Frame, Stories and Poems: The Lagoon and Other Stories, The Pocket Mirror (Auckland: Vintage & Random House New Zealand, 2004). Fumagalli, Maria Cristina. The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante (Cross/Cultures 49; Amsterdam & Atlanta G A : Rodopi, 2001). Ganapathy–Doré, Geetha. “Shakespeare in Rushdie/Shakespearean Rushdie,” Atlantis 31.2 (2009): 9–22. Gascoigne, Bamber. The Great Moghuls (London: Robinson, 2002). Huggan, Graham. The Post-Colonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001).

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Jussawalla, Feroza F. Family Quarrels: Towards a Criticism of Indian Writing in English (New York: Peter Lang, 1985). Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis, tr. Susan Bernofsky, intro. David Cronenberg, afterword by Bernofsky (Die Verwandlung, 1915; tr. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014). King, Bruce, ed. New National and Postcolonial Literatures: An Introduction (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). King, Michael. Wrestling with the Angel: A Life of Janet Frame (Auckland: Viking, 2000). Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, tr. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine & Leon S. Roudiez (selected essays from Sèméiôtikè: Recherches pour une sémanalyse, 1969, & Polylogue, 1977; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 1980). Malouf, Michael. “Dissimilation and Federation: Irish and Caribbean Modernisms in Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin,” Comparative American Studies 8.2 (June 2010): 140–54. Rao, Raja. Kanthapura (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938). Ricci, Nino. Lives of the Saints (1990; Toronto: Cormorant, 2003). Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (1991; London: Granta/Penguin, 1992). Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: An Interview with Homi Bhabha,” in Identity, Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Laurence & Wishart, 1998): 207–21. Said, Edward W. Orientalism (1978; New York: Vintage, 1994). Schimmelpfennig, Roland. Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God, dir. Liesl Tommy, Toronto Luminato Festival (10–20 June 2010). Selvon, Sam. “The Cricket Match” (1957), in The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories, ed. Stewart Brown & John Wickham (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1999): 91–95. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Tim Supple, prod. Dash Arts, Toronto Luminato Festival (7–15 June 2008). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Planetarity,” in Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia U P , 2003): 71–102. Supple, Tim, dir. One Thousand and One Nights, adapt. Hanan al-Shaykh, prod. Dash Arts, Toronto Luminato Festiva (11–19 June 2011; 360 min.). Synge, J.M. The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, ed. Ann Saddlemyer (1995; Oxford: Oxford U P , 2008). Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Letters of Tagore, ed. Krishna Dutta & Andrew Robinson, foreword by Amartya Sen (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1997). ——.Gitanjali (Song Offerings): A Collection of Prose Translations Made by the Author from the Original Bengali (1912; Chennai: Macmillan India, 1992). Wainaina, Binyavanga. Shine Your Eye, dir. Ross Manson, prod. Volcano Theatre, Toronto Luminato Festival (10–20 June 2010). Walcott, Derek. “Derek Walcott and E.A. Markham Read and Talk,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 28.2 (Spring 2006): 95–107.

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——. “The Muse of History” (1974), in Walcott, What the Twilight Says: Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 36–64. ——. “Ruins of a Great House” (1962), in Walcott, Collected Poems: 1948–1984 (London: Faber & Faber, 1992): 19–21. ——.The Sea at Dauphin: A Play in One Act (Mona: Extramural Department, University College of the West Indies, 1954). Walsh, William. R.K. Narayan (London: British Council/Longman, 1971). Yeats, W.B. Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), repr. in The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats, vol. 2: The Plays, ed. David R. Clark & Rosalind E. Clark (New York: Scribner, 2001): 83–93.

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II. U NDER C ONS TRUC TIO N : N ATIO NS AND C UL T URES 

Towards an Australian Philosophy Constructive Appropriation of Enlightenment Thinking in Murray Bail’s The Pages M ARIE H E R B IL L ON

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N T H E L A S T T H R E E D E C A D E S , a number of critics – including the authors of The Empire Writes Back – have emphasized that “a major feature of postcolonial literatures is the concern with the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place.”1 Like many Australian writers, the contemporary author Murray Bail is no exception to this rule: with a view to problematizing the seductiveness of place as a matrix of cultural identity, he has tended, throughout his fiction, to subject both his fellow Australians and their cultural productions to the shaping influence of their environment – a literalist process I have described elsewhere as geomorphism. 2 In particular, Bail has manifested an ongoing – if oblique – interest in the notion of linearity. In his work, linearity can, in my view, be regarded as a metaphor for some aspects of the Western cultural legacy: although Holden’s Performance (Bail’s second novel, published in 1987) was quite literally permeated with myriad straight lines, it can be argued that Eucalyptus and The Pages (his third and fourth novels, released in 1998 and 2008) engage with more symbolic equivalents of geometric linearity: i.e. with realism and rationalism respectively. While Eucalyptus dealt with the influence of the local landscape on, and the

1

Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London & New York: Routledge, 2002): 8. 2 See Marie Herbillon, “Spatial Linearity and Post-Colonial Parody in Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance,” in A Sea for Encounters: Essays towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Cross/Cultures 117; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 149–64; “Linearity as Metadiscourse in Murray Bail’s Fiction,” Anglophonia / Caliban (French Journal of English Studies): Divergences and Convergences 21 (2007): 225–37 (in which a narrative variant of geomorphism is described).

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position of realism in, the national literature, The Pages addresses the similar impact of the country’s geography on, as well as the relative weight of European rationalism in, Australian thought. Since Adorno and Horkheimer’s famous Dialectic of Enlightenment,3 it has become customary to dismiss eighteenth-century thought – often associated with hardcore rationalism and linear progress – as a discourse legitimizing imperialism and other types of totalitarianism. Arguably, such a radical indictment can only operate as an epistemological barrier, failing as it does to do justice to the philosophy on which the intellectual foundations of modern culture were laid. In The Pages, Bail offers, as we shall see, a more nuanced view of the Enlightenment. When it came out a decade after Eucalyptus, the book nevertheless elicited far less critical enthusiasm than its acclaimed predecessor. Some reviewers complained that “it [did] not read true or believable.”4 Others were “left wondering whether [they] had missed anything.”5 Although “familiar with Bail’s ways,” Tim Howard wrote: “It is difficult to get a firm grip on The Pages. [...] Even more so than his early work, The Pages is elusive, ambiguous. [...] The reader is rarely sure what she [sic] is ‘supposed’ to think.”6 Along the same lines, Hermione Lee even contended that “it is hard to tell if this intellectual bildungsroman, in itself absorbing, [was] intended as a joke.”7 No doubt the novel’s deceptiveness and subsequent lukewarm reception are partly due to its tonguein-cheek, unreliable narrator, who, from the outset, feigns to assume that Australia’s archetypal ‘emptiness’ (famously pinpointed by Patrick White in “The Prodigal Son”8) could only induce a lack of philosophical interest in the self. Several critics fall into the narrator’s trap and are misled into thinking that “The Pages presents the reader with a rather interesting concept, that Australia as a

3

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Dialektik Der Aufklärung, 1944; ed. Frankfurt am Main: Samuel Fischer, 1987; Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2002). 4 Ekaterina Rodyunina, review of The Pages, by Murray Bail, http://www.thebookbag.co.uk /reviews/index.php/The_Pages_by_Murray_Bail (accessed 14 September 2009). 5 Anon., review of The Pages, by Murray Bail (23 August 2009), http://kimbofo.typepad.com /readingmatters/2009/08/the-pages-by-murray-bail.html (accessed 14 September 2009). 6 Tim Howard, review of The Pages, by Murray Bail, http://quarterlyconversation.com/thepages-by-murray-bail-review (accessed 7 September 2009). 7 Hermione Lee, “Thinking about the World,” The Guardian (23 August 2008), http://www .guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/23/fiction6 (accessed 7 September 2009). 8 Patrick White, “The Prodigal Son” (1958), in The Vital Decade: Ten Years of Australian Art and Letters, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Melbourne: Sun, 1968): 157.

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country could not produce a philosopher of world standards.”9 According to yet another commentator, “the book [...] posits that the Australian climate and landscape do not generate the kinds of conditions necessary to develop philosophical thought.”10 It is nevertheless doubtful that the perplexed responses to the novel can be ascribed exclusively to its dry humour and its narrator’s unreliability: although it occasionally tends – not least in the passages devoted to psychoanalysis, the evil twin of philosophy – to take the parodic turn that characterized Bail’s early fiction (Homesickness and Holden’s Performance especially), the author himself declared in an interview that The Pages dealt “very seriously with what life is, and how to make sense of that.”11 It is, moreover, not impossible to establish a link between this impulse to seriousness and “the nearfatal heart attack” that Bail suffered in 2003 “while reading Heidegger.”12 It thus becomes possible to consider The Pages as a metaphysical novel in its own right, in which Bail proceeds to demonstrate that there may still be such a thing as some Australian philosophy. In this context, the general puzzlement described above may be seen to derive from the central protagonist’s very quest for identity, the highly tentative nature of which implies various tensions and misunderstandings, both for himself and for the reader. This indeed makes for a complex novel that resists interpretation and requires considerable critical effort to be grasped. In this essay, I first intend to deconstruct the main character’s convoluted trajectory and expose the various external (i.e. mostly European) influences that have shaped his philosophical background. I will then focus on this exemplary Australian thinker’s discursive construction of his life-work: with a view to highlighting a possible transition in the postcolonial treatment of rationalism, I will investigate the ways in which the final textualization of the protagonist’s quest for identity both incorporates and particularizes (instead of rejecting) this specific Western legacy. Ultimately, I aim to show that a genuine sense of Australianness should rest on a search for cultural pluralism (instead of purity) and, more generally, that a constructive reassessment of Enlightenment thinking can only enlarge, rather than restrict, the scope of postcolonial studies. 9

Anna Hood, review of The Pages, by Murray Bail (11 July 2008), http://www.boomerangbooks .com.au/Pages/Murray-Bail/book_reviews_9781846552168.htm (accessed 14 September 2009). 10 Anon., review of The Pages. 11 Murray Bail, interview on Radio New Zealand National (19 July 2008), http://www.radionz .co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20080719 (accessed 11 December 2009). 12 Susan Wyndham, “Interview with Murray Bail,” The Sydney Morning Herald Blogs (28 June 2008), http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/undercover/019622.html (accessed 1 October 2008).

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Wesley Antill, on whom the narrative centres, is an outlandish philosopher whose intellectual aspirations take him from the family homestead in New South Wales to Sydney, where the theoretical part of his philosophical education takes place. From there he heads for Europe, where he wanders for many years in the hope of “establish[ing] some sort of deep-footing in philosophy.”13 After these twenty-three-year-long peregrinations, he comes back to the family property, intent on completing his philosophical work in an old shearing shed while his brother Roger and his sister Lindsey run the sheep station. When Wesley suddenly dies, a more academic philosopher called Erica Hazelhurst is sent from the University of Sydney to appraise his writings, the publication of which he had requested in his will. If the path to knowledge (and self-discovery) is never linear, Wesley’s philosophical itinerary proves particularly meandering, dotted as it is with epiphanies which, more often than not, turn out to be anti-climaxes. Once again: Wesley may not mean to deceive anyone (let alone himself), but the reader cannot help feeling baffled by his frequent erroneous – albeit earnest – illuminations. Before his return to Australia, he appears to commit repeatedly three major mistakes: first, he tends to compensate for his sense of ontological emptiness with a mere accumulation of knowledge. Secondly, he manifests a clear affinity with the characteristically Cartesian ‘tabula rasa principle’ which causes him to keep starting from scratch, as though he believed (with the narrator) that “for a philosophy to be possible today it would have to begin afresh” (36); and, thirdly, he displays an equally Cartesian propensity to dissociate ‘pure thought’ from ‘emotional life’. These idiosyncrasies earn him two significant nicknames from the other characters: the “Prodigal Son” (90, 106) and “the Cartesian bore” (133). The former, which echoes Patrick White’s homonymous essay, seems at first sight to portray Wesley as a child of “the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions.”14 As for the latter (for which see, of course, the ubiquitous provider of water for Australia’s parched farmland, the artesian well/bore), it appears to present him as a true inheritor of European rationalism (but with a sarcastic warning that Cartesianism – often thought of as a universal panacea, as if this kind of non-pragmatic rationalism were to the human mind what water is to dry land – might be boring to non-European ears, particularly those of Australians). We shall soon see to what extent such assumptions are applicable. 13

Murray Bail, The Pages (London: Harvill Secker, 2008): 178. Further page references are in the main text. 14 White, “The Prodigal Son,” 157.

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Before doing so, I would like to delineate in some detail the successive stages of Wesley’s mental evolution, identifying his mistakes, re-routings, and hesitations as I go along. Upon his arrival in Sydney, he soon confesses to his future girlfriend Rosie Steig that “he [doesn’t] know what to make of anything much” (52). He is obviously afflicted by his native country’s archetypal emptiness, which he attempts to counter in two ways. On the one hand, he “gain[s] experience [... through] observation” (46): on the streets at night he was a large slow fish [...] taking in and digesting the many different movements between people, and the people themselves, their expressions, temptations. In fact, the world had turned its details in his direction; every little thing seemed to wait in bright, clear light for his inspection. (45)

On the other hand, he acquires complexity through the absorption of (mostly) European knowledge: at the university, “he filled almost to overflowing the emptiness of his childhood and youth with density – with grey matter” (55). After studying a vast array of subjects (ranging from Greek myths to Old Norse), Wesley chooses to focus on the philosophy classes taught by a Professor Clive Renmark. Although he may, at first sight, appear as a genuinely enlightened thinker, Renmark, with his narrow views on a number of philosophical issues, quickly betrays his acquaintance with the most stereotypical approaches to Enlightenment thought. His conception of philosophy as “a by-product of the Northern Hemisphere” (64), for example, is unambiguously eurocentric. The narrator, mimicking the Professor’s (biased) rationale, offers a geomorphic explanation for this phenomenon (which sharply contrasts with the fact that “nothing much has happened down here,” 64): dark forests, the cold, the old walls, the shadows of superstitions worrying the darkened lives, windows closed, all were pushed about by words which joined up into propositions to let in light, a little, a dark light. (64; italics in original)

In other words, Renmark’s preconceived idea of philosophy conditions its mode of production (since only the European space described above could produce a philosophy defined as “a dark light”) but it does not occur to him – or to Wesley at this point – that a different mode of production (depending, for instance, on another national space) could result in an alternative type of thought: in this, Renmark is responsible “for breeding prejudices detrimental to native talent.”15 15

Michael Ackland, The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail (Amherst M A & New York: Cambria, 2012): 198.

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His complementary definition of philosophy as “a climb” (64) “towards something out of reach” (63) also echoes the ideals of linear progress that were all too systematically associated with the Age of Enlightenment. Even his “determined shape [...] going forward, always forward” (68) is that of a rigid rationalist whose all-too-linear movement points to his belief in progress. Those ideals of progress were informed by doctrines such as that of scientism, which posits that the mere accumulation of knowledge automatically leads to moral progress, as well as by a form of humanism verging on eurocentrism: relying on the assumption that man evolved from the primitive to a civilized state, this European sense of cultural superiority is said to have justified colonialism. Yet, those beliefs were not shared by all eighteenth-century philosophers, whose humanism was a universalism that could by no means have legitimized imperialism: these ideas should thus be regarded as a caricature of Enlightenment thought. As an imperfectly enlightened rationalist, Renmark also proves unable to reconcile life and thought, which translates – in practice – into his visits to prostitutes (a convenient alternative to a proper relationship). Like his mentor, Wesley decides, at that early stage, to “remain separate” from Rosie, in spite of the “naturalness” (53) between them. Around that time, he goes so far as to admit to her that he finds “the emotions [...] a difficult category” (96). Unlike Rosie herself, who extends her interests to “many subjects” (85) and encourages Wesley to “enrich his way of seeing” (97), he becomes more and more singleminded, though aware that “a gap existed between the clarity of his chosen subject and the softer, unavoidable intrusions of everyday life” (85). His obsession with Renmark’s “deep thinkers” (67) paves the way for a first apparent epiphany: “before he encountered their example he had been one person; after he was an entirely different person” (67). However, this felt intellectual metamorphosis soon turns out to be rather superficial, amounting to nothing but a superimposition of foreign thoughts upon his original self, since “all his available time spent scaling the tremendous peaks of Western thought had left [him] with the uncomfortable feeling his own mind was dutiful, pedantic, unoriginal” (84). The word “peaks,” which recalls Renmark’s “climb,” suggests that Wesley may have begun to be bothered by the notion of temporal linearity: namely, the ideas of progress, continuity, and chronology informing the narrowest approaches to the rational philosophy of the Enlightenment – all the more so as he attributes his feeling of unoriginality to the “chronological path” (84) his studies had followed. His longing to assert his “free-ranging, [...] unconventional mind” (84) will nevertheless be nipped in the bud by the death of his mother, which gives rise to a second alleged epiphany. Although he claims he is “an altered person” (102), the metamorphosis caused by this unexpected

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intrusion of life on thought (“his first life-shock,” 101) proves no deeper than the previous one. Supposedly “forced into attempting to think clearly about what lay not on the page, but directly in life in front of him” (102), he fails to engage not only with the complexities of life but also with those of thought and self: as he leaves behind both Rosie and the Western thinkers, he lapses back into an emptiness that has little to do with his dreams of self-definition. It is in London that he makes his first Cartesian clean start, based, as I said, on a global removal of complexity. After “emptying his mind of all thoughts” (118) for a while, he takes to accumulating knowledge again, although previously he seemed to question Renmark’s purely quantitative view of progress. This socalled “return to thinking” (122) nevertheless boils down to little more than an absorption, at first vicarious then more active, of experience through observation. Encouraged by Lyell, the local postman, who – unlike his Australian friend – at least bothers to supply detailed oral “descriptions” (120) of the world around him, Wesley re-enters the skin of “the philosopher of the streets” (115) he used to be when in Sydney. In the English capital, his “way of ‘thought-making’, own description, was to continue wandering and take in. Remain open and fill in emptiness” (123). Although he is convinced that he deliberately avoided (see 115), then resumed (see 122) thinking, it can be argued that proper critical thought is precluded by a further dissociation between the thinking and the experiencing selves, the counter-productive effects of which Wesley still fails to perceive at this point. Despite an increasing inability to “make sense of it all” (124) and “think constantly, even if he wanted to” (125), he persists in seeing his “separateness from nearby people,” which “widen[s]” day after day, “as a source of strength” (124). Furthermore, we are made to understand that the impossibility of genuine thought is linked to a more general sense of “double-separateness” (136, italics in original) which results from an additional disjunction between self and place caused, in turn, by the daily experience of “living in a foreign place” (136). Yet, instead of trying to come to terms with these inner discrepancies, Wesley concludes that “it was necessary to begin all over again” (136) and opts for a convenient evasion. He thus makes his second Cartesian fresh start, this time on the Continent, where he endeavours, once more, to gather factual knowledge in order to “avoid becoming blunt and plain-thinking again” (143) – to fill in his mental emptiness: “my method of wandering in Europe had returned to being haphazard, hardly a method at all” (141). However, his method (or lack thereof) does not enable him to know “what to avoid” among the flow of external data, let alone to “make sense” (144) of this complex mass of images, ideas, and emotions. His failure to think critically thus depends on the inefficiency of his indiscriminating method.

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It could also be paralleled with the previously identified double dichotomy, whereby Wesley’s thinking self keeps both his affective life and his native place at bay. As he sets foot in Europe, he feels “separate from the majority of other people” (136) and is definitely unprepared to start bridging this ever-widening gap. For instance, he considers that “any thoughts [he] may have had of a philosophical nature were hampered by [his attempt] to unravel what attracted [him] to the women [he] had known” (138, my italics), just as he remains faithful to the idea that “the search for philosophical answers of any worth requires a certain remoteness from life” (148). On the other hand, he feels irritated by the sight (in a Swiss museum) of a painting by Mondrian representing “something common [he] had left well behind” (142–43): namely, a eucalypt. The fact that “it was the last thing [he] wanted to see” (142) clearly hints at the distance Wesley seeks to maintain between himself and his motherland. It is nevertheless worth noting that the chapter devoted to Wesley’s stay in Germany performs an interesting reversal, insofar as it encapsulates the beginning of a change in the protagonist’s approach to both home and life: although he previously “felt at home” (142) in Europe, he now takes to contemplating a return to his original homeland, Australia. He also invites Rosie, whom he had asked to join him in Germany, to come and live with him on the property, thereby indicating a wish to reconcile life and thought. Yet, beyond a faint awareness that “the narrowness of [his] way of thinking had undoubtedly infected [his] behaviour” (180), he seems intellectually more mistaken than ever. His philosophical peregrinations culminate in a strange negative epiphany, during which he ‘realizes’ (so to speak) that “[his ...] wanderings had been a waste of time” (184) and that he should refrain from mingling his thoughts with those of others, since “hybrid creations are not singular” (185). Fortified by his blind insights, he chucks out his notebooks “with their dodgy propositions and dependence on other thinkers” (189), thereby dismissing all previous experience, and prepares for a third Cartesian fresh start. It takes Rosie’s death (shortly followed by his father’s) in a car accident on a snowy German road to abort his foolish project. This second, most brutal lifeshock, which constitutes the novel’s real – though belated – turning-point, profoundly modifies Wesley’s self and thought: “I was a different, an altered person” (191), he declares. In fact, the genuine metamorphosis that it triggers, symbolized by the sudden whitening of his hair, marks the final change of epistemological paradigm in Wesley’s meandering itinerary, as suggested by his one true illumination (later textualized in his philosophical work). As he confesses, “I realised after the visit of R[osie], and the unwanted experience of tragedy, it was necessary to build on what I had learnt and to make up for lost time” (134).

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This tragic event also gives rise to an epiphanic passage pertaining to the form of Wesley’s new philosophy – I will return to this in a moment. When he goes back to Australia, a proper new beginning can finally take place. As he appropriates experience and transforms it in order to develop his own brand of thought, Wesley “adjust[s] [his] shape” (152) like those ordinary individuals who manage to become what the narrator has called “extensions of our selves” (152).16 In the process, he comes to embody some sort of pioneering Australian thinker, demonstrating that ontological emptiness is not necessarily endemic to his native country. As regards his philosophical work itself, two aspects should be distinguished. Most of the pages Erica finds in the old woolshed (Wesley’s workplace) take a first step towards textualizing experience: in this palimpsest-like autobiographical narrative that reconstructs his whole meandering trajectory (implying that his wanderings may not have been such “a waste of time,” 184, after all), the Australian philosopher looks back on his life as a series of incidents, of sobering alterations – along with the observations, speculations and corrections, snatches of what had gone on in [his] mind, thought-thinking, and a few notes on what [he has] learnt more from study than ‘life’, even if [he has] trouble saying exactly what [he has] learnt. (191; italics in original)

As specified in the programmatic epiphany, his life-narrative also “make[s] note of the acts of oafish ignorance, the examples of blindness... how [he] had spent too long on a certain way of life, or following a single line of thought. (‘Tunnel vision.’)” (191). The new philosophy itself, which first takes the shape, for Erica, of cryptic statements included in the pages (or pegged on a line above Wesley’s desk) and then materializes for the reader as a list of metaphysical aphorisms gathered in the novel’s closing chapter, takes another step in the direction of textualization: it turns “experience [...] into [...] proposition[s]” (128), a process whereby an extended life-story is converted into its quintessence while the self (represented by the pronoun ‘I’) recedes into the background. This quintessential, and discontinuous, autobiographical account emerges as an attempt to overcome the sense of “double-separateness” (136; italics in original) that has been alienating Wesley’s thinking self from both his non-intellectual experience and his home place. First, it thus strives to acknowledge the weight of experience in philosophical writing, for Wesley (even though one of his aphorisms self-reflexively 16

In the above-mentioned interview aired on Radio New Zealand National, Bail similarly describes his own writing as “an extension of the self.”

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interrogates this theoretical possibility) comes to realize that the experiencing ‘I’ cannot be removed from philosophical production, just as the stranger in Eucalyptus demonstrates that subjectivity cannot be entirely erased from literature. Yet, Wesley’s philosophy also highlights the need to transcend the self (“refract” is the word Bail used in an interview17): i.e. to texturize experience to the highest possible degree, instead of indulging in self-absorption as contemporary developed societies complacently tend to do (hence the novel’s parody of psychoanalysis, which I do not have enough space to elaborate on here). Through the agency of his main character, Bail thus seems to endorse Nietzsche’s conception of philosophy (quoted in the text without acknowledging the source) as “a confession on the part of its author, a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir” (107; italics in original) – only to problematize the issue further. In this respect, the accidental spilling of coffee on a section of Wesley’s life-work, which erases the ‘I’ from the pages that Erica was trying to decipher, acquires a highly symbolic value. Moreover, while integrating the European legacy of rationalism that partly constitutes his self (as I will explain below), the new philosophy also enlarges it and ends up following a more empirical line of thought: late in life, Wesley understands that it was a mistake to think “[he] could get on with [his] work” “by keeping separate from people” (199), since “life is [always] the intruder on thought” (132, 194). Convinced at last (with Locke) that “experience is like the furniture arriving in an empty house” (196), Wesley appropriates another, less rigid branch of Enlightenment thinking, that of empiricism, and endeavours to develop a new “theory of the emotions” (Erica’s phrase, 176) that would convincingly articulate life and thought. In this sense, Bail might be paying tribute to the many genuinely enlightened philosophers who did regard experience as a “key [...] to true knowledge.”18 Yet, if the author appears to sustain that such a rational humanism – provided it is not reduced to a dry Cartesianism – could act as a possible matrix for an Australian philosophy, he also remains faithful to the critical spirit of the Enlightenment by suggesting that this Western legacy would need to be particularized so as to avoid the pitfalls of universalism (such as the erasure of local specificities). Secondly, the existence of a connection between self and place thus seems to be recognized – albeit more implicitly – in the new philosophy (witness an undeveloped aphorism on the possible link between “landscape and thought,” 198). I have already pinpointed the gradual shift in Wesley from a recurring sense of ontological emptiness to a certain longing for home. This does not 17 18

Bail, interview on Radio New Zealand National. Roy Porter, The Enlightenment (London: Macmillan, 1990): 3.

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prevent him from going astray again: for example, when back in Australia, he has a grove of eucalypts cut down because they are deflecting his thoughts. As a result, he obliterates “the usual Australian mess” (167–68) associated with those trees, substituting artificial emptiness for natural diversity with the sole purpose of “gain[ing] clarity” of mind (168). Yet, no matter how hard he tries at times to escape the decisive impact of the local landscape, his philosophical thought definitely registers its influence. However, it is neither inner emptiness nor a lack of metaphysical interest in the self that the landscape induces here. If a fairly archetypal landscape appears to shape the contours of Wesley’s philosophy, its very heart seems to take its cue from a less stereotypical type of space: on the purely formal level, Wesley’s philosophical thought, which consists of a collection of terse entries separated by blank spaces, may well imitate the Australian landscape as it is traditionally viewed: namely, as a barren interior landscape in which “the distances between objects” are said to favour “the laconic manner” (78). As he recuperates these clichés through the voice of his sardonic narrator, Bail is nevertheless careful to suggest that a differently conceptualized national space could certainly produce a more varied, no doubt enlarged, form of thought. In terms of content, Wesley’s new philosophy displays, for instance, striking similarities to the mixed space of the Antills’ property, which could then be regarded as a metaphor for Australia as a whole. History is, indeed, subtly inscribed in the palimpsest-like family grounds, which are laden with signs from previous temporal layers. Among those are the traces left by Wesley’s English ancestors, including a chimney (“the only thing left of a hut,” 88), as well as lines of fence wire and “ironbark posts as grey as newsprint” (88) which seem to cry out for interpretation. The place also teems with natural life, and Erica, as she takes a walk on her own, is struck by the “many new shapes” (90) (such as trees and animals) she sees. Like the Antills’ property, Wesley’s new philosophy is characterized by its hybridity, diversity, and complexity. Once (wrongly) persuaded that “hybrid creations [were] not singular” (185), Wesley ultimately allows various (and sometimes contradictory) influences to coexist in his work, thereby qualifying their relative importance. Rationalism, for instance, emerges as one form of knowledge among many others. Insofar as philosophy is conceived as a form of life-story, Wesley’s necessarily incorporates the legacy of rationalism, since the latter left its imprint on his existence in several ways (down to his very impulse to make chronic Cartesian starts), but it also broadens it so as to embrace the philosophical category of experience. As a matter of fact, even Renmark (the figure of narrow rationalism in the text) once seemed interested in “how the empirical tradition formed” (66) – without being able, as we

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saw, to reconcile thought and life in practice. Yet, his mentor’s theoretical interest in empiricism may be the reason why Wesley, although he was not prepared to accept it at first (the narrator tells us that “he began shaking his head at what was being said,” 67, when the empirical tradition is mentioned in class), did not actually discard the memory of Renmark before starting afresh in London but “placed [it] in the back of his mind somewhere for possible reference” (68). Renmark’s view of progress as a purely accumulative, uncritical process, which underlies his conception of philosophy, remains, however, deeply challenged. The way in which Wesley’s thought is textualized indeed suggests that philosophy can no longer be construed as “a climb” (64): i.e. as a linear movement epitomizing the ideology of progress promoted by the most narrowly rationalist brands of Enlightenment, but that it might be more productively constructed as a complex, fragmented pattern of thoughts based on both experience and theoretical knowledge, which – in Wesley’s words – could be read “in any order, for they are random parts of a single life, mine” (191). Like Wesley and through his narrator, Bail thus seems to stand for a philosophy defined not as “an explanation parallel to [i.e. at a remove from] the real world” (67; my italics) (as Wesley mistakenly believed in Renmark’s time) but “as a natural force” (104, 195) that might re-map the bonds between Australian space and thought. In this sense, The Pages can be said to investigate not only the place of the experiencing ‘I’ in philosophical writing but also the triangular relationship between place, self, and thought, dissolving the stereotypical perceptions surrounding these categories. It should also be emphasized that such a pragmatic – i.e. experience-based, outward-turned, and texturized – philosophy, however plural and complex, is modest enough (unlike rationalism, for example) not to lay any claim to some final truth. As suggested by the fractured form, the truth of the self can but be glimpsed. Through Wesley’s meandering philosophical trajectory, The Pages nonetheless strives to thematize and textualize what an Australian philosophy (among others?) might be: as is also the case with fiction, writing, and art in general, it is precisely the attempt to invent new ways of coming to terms with the real world that is worthwhile. In Wesley’s words: “the effort of moving towards a philosophy becomes itself the philosophy” (198; my italics). This struggle for a new philosophy defined as a form of life-narrative is doomed to be a work-in-progress, which can only be interrupted by the death of the thinker. In one of the only two excerpts from the extended first-person life-narrative that we ever get to read, Wesley asserts: “I wanted to create a philosophy so I could die happily” (149). Although the novel remains silent about the reasons for his

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passing, the reader is tempted to imagine that, despite the imperfections of his gift to posterity (which will be further expounded below), he did die in peace. More than one critic has nevertheless taken issue with Wesley’s empiricism. For example, while I have pinpointed Wesley’s late conversion to a genuinely empirical creed, Ivor Indyk has identified the protagonist as being, from the start, “a dedicated empiricist,” since “the beginning point [of his enterprise] is observation, experience.”19 Indyk further contends that despite “a positivist’s dedication to turning what he sees into propositions,” Wesley is, as a character, “notable for not achieving [his] ambition.”20 In this perspective, Wesley’s methodology (based on observation and subsequent description) only yields “a series of reflections on his own limitations, as a thinker, and as a man,”21 ultimately precluding him from constructing – as any proper philosopher supposedly ought to – a sustained explanation about the universe. In my view, however, it is also because Wesley’s “scatter of notes” reflects an “acceptance of limitation,”22 because it recognizes the mistakes made throughout the imperfect life it endeavours to review, that it cannot be considered a complete failure: as one of the final aphorisms reads, “modesty is a species of ambition” (196). Whereas Wesley’s modest philosophy is pitted, in Indyk’s interpretation, against the “encyclopedic ambition”23 characterizing some of Bail’s previous protagonists, Michael Ackland, by contrast, likens Wesley to those fictional empiricists who erroneously believe that “reality could be subdivided into measurable and knowable subsections which, when named and categorized, supposedly gave a reliable and usable picture of the quotidian world.”24 Although I fully share Ackland’s view that Bail’s entire œuvre is underpinned by “a comprehensive critique of the founding imperial project in Australia” and of the “empirical procedures [it] was premised on, and built around,”25 I think that Wesley’s philosophical allegiances should be distinguished from the kind of ‘empiricism’ (not to say extreme positivism) that the characters possessed with 19

Ivor Indyk, “The Provincial and the Princess,” Sydney Review of Books (8 March 2013), http: //sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-provincial-and-the-princess/ (accessed 17 March 2014). 20 Indyk, “The Provincial and the Princess.” 21 “The Provincial and the Princess.” 22 “The Provincial and the Princess.” 23 “The Provincial and the Princess.” 24 Michael Ackland, “‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’: Murray Bail’s Creative Case against the Imperial Word,” in The Tapestry of the Creative Word in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Caterina Colomba, Maria Renata Dolce, Stefano Mercanti & Antonella Riem Natale (Udine: Forum, 2013): 232. 25 Ackland, “‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’,” 232.

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a categorizing impulse classically display in Bail’s writings. Like all enlightened empiricists, Wesley realizes (however belatedly) the need to articulate reason with a form of experience that is not limited to “the visible and the rational dissectible.”26 If anything, Wesley’s philosophy, which Erica intuitively (yet convincingly) interprets as “a theory of the emotions” (176), is an attempt (however imperfect) to come to terms with issues that lie beyond the realm of the purely intellectual.27 His empiricism differs, it seems, from the narrow brand of positivism on which the imperial project was founded; its limitations, which will be further developed below, are mostly embedded in Wesley’s above-mentioned inability to reconcile theory and practice, so that – as Ackland rightly points out – he ends up pursuing philosophical aspirations “to the exclusion of human relationships and the antipodean landscape.”28 Wesley, however, is at least partly aware of these shortcomings, which Ackland is willing to concede: in a remarkable study that dissects Bail’s entire fiction, he asserts that Antill “joins the ranks of Bail’s characters who learn that cultivating a narrow segment of knowledge is fraught with difficulties and personal dangers.”29 The dangers, in this case, have to do with “the menace projected by creation,”30 which causes Wesley to “sacrific[e] life to derivative academic thought.”31 At the end of his existence, Bail’s protagonist nevertheless comes to perceive the inadequacy of this inextricable dichotomy, as suggested by a previously quoted adage that deserves to be reproduced in full here (rather than by any concrete change in his attitude towards daily life): “by keeping separate from people, I thought I could get on with my work” (199; my italics). Humbled into accepting that he is “incapable of distinguishing the truth” (195), he is, at that stage, also ready to admit that “philosophy is the modelling of imperfect materials” (195). For these reasons, Wesley can be said to occupy an intermediate position on a spectrum opposing two visions of reality: pure positivism at one end and more imaginative approaches at the other. In the novel, the classifying urge is notably embodied in Wesley’s biological father Cliff, whose first name possibly hints at 26

Ackland, “‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’,” 232. In this context, it is significant that, just before Rosie is killed in their German car crash, she is telling Wesley about her former abortion and asking him – “There’s a philosophical question for you!” (190) – how he would have reacted if he had known about their child when she could still keep it. Wesley’s subsequent ‘conversion to empiricism’ reinforces the idea that his philosophy, like a response of sorts to Rosie’s unanswered question, might well grapple with the intangible. 28 Ackland, “‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’,” 238. 29 Ackland, The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 194. 30 The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 208. 31 The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 201. 27

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his tendency to cleave reality (i.e. to subdivide it into manageable units): as a passionate philatelist, he strives to fill in the “gap in the pattern of his life” (47) with postage stamps – in vain, since philately, which centres “not only on the specimens secured in rows, but in [sic] the contemplation of those that were missing” (47; italics in original), can only deepen his existential void. As for Wesley’s younger brother Roger, a practical man “who reaches beyond logic and pure intellection towards instinctive insights of greater antiquity conveyed by the local landscape,”32 I concur with Ackland in saying that he embodies one of the “alternative approaches to existence which, in Bail’s later fiction, will bring hope of genuine change to individuals and the nation as a whole.”33 However, the “praxis”34 developed by “Wesley’s antithesis”35 is tantamount to a largely “untheorised acceptance of nature”:36 allowing it to prevail unambiguously over Wesley’s attempt at textualization would, to some extent, overshadow Bail’s concern with the narrativizing of experience (and, by extension, with the place of the ‘I’ in literary and philosophical writing), which has been central to his fiction from Eucalyptus onwards. Therefore, it would be reductive to dismiss Wesley’s philosophical endeavour as a sheer failure or, more generally, to view philosophy as one of the “imported methodologies that might have deflected local questers away from the crucial lessons offered by antipodean nature.”37 Wesley’s life-work is more than a mere transplanted methodology: we have seen how a local, freshly re-imagined landscape, instead of operating as a simple “alternative to abstruse disciplines,”38 contributed to particularizing – and thus hybridizing – the Western legacy of rationalism, arguably turning philosophy into “a natural force” (104, 195).39 Conversely, it would be equally incorrect to

32

Ackland, “‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’,” 238. “‘ On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’,” 237. 34 Ackland, The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 219. 35 The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 214. 36 The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 188, my italics. 37 Michael Ackland, “Beneath the Camouflage: Mimicry and Settler False Consciousness in the Fiction of Murray Bail,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17.2 (2011): 86. 38 Ackland, The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 211. 39 It can be noted in passing that it is partly through Roger that Wesley’s philosophy registers the influence of the local landscape (or, at least, of the living creatures associated with it). When Wesley shows him his early work (written at the turn of the twenty-first century), Roger indeed dares to tell his brother that he has “too many ideas running off in every direction, in each sentence” (133). In his later report to Erica, the grazier adds: “To show what I meant, I’d point to the sheep in the yards: they’re made to go through a narrow space, one at a time, not all at once” (133). After thanking him for his insight, Wesley replies that “[he is] going to bear that in mind” (134) – 33

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assume – as young Wesley himself does (see 185) – that a philosophical creation (or, for that matter, any kind of creation) cannot be singular because it is hybrid. To understand how such an inaccurate conclusion could be reached, it might be necessary to call upon onomastics (since, in Moya Costello’s words, “naming has always been a place for riddles in Bail’s fiction”40) and to focus not only on Wesley’s family name but also, on the one hand, on the would-be philosopher’s relationship with it and, on the other, on the ties between this name and Wesley’s thought. In this connection, it should be underlined that when Wesley returns from Europe in 2001 (i.e. just before he starts writing his life-story), he seriously considers changing his name. As he once explains to the family’s solicitor, he finds it too light and fears it might hinder his thought. Indeed, this influence could only be negative, since – this is at least what he believes then – “there can be no such thing as ‘light’ philosophy” (20); at this moment of his life, the very concept is an oxymoron to him. Encouraged to reflect on the issue, Wesley eventually gives up on his project. This reversal of opinion is probably less insignificant than it seems: the surname Antill is indeed phonetically (and even orthographically) akin to the substantive anthill. With these elements in mind, regarding Wesley’s life-work as a failure amounts to seeing nothing but a barren mass in the hybrid conglomeration of debris which effectively constitutes an anthill. However, it is not unlikely that Wesley came, for his part, to recognize that this anthill could also represent a functional and productive system. By accepting his name, Wesley, who stems from “an old pastoral family” (18) (itself descended – as stated above – from English ancestors), thus seems to embrace a legacy that is first of all historical: his family “name [is one] with a history” (20) and his first name – Wesley – similarly sheds light on his Western self. This legacy is also spatial: in this respect, it is no coincidence that the narrator insists on the fact that there are many ants (see 172, 175) on the family property. Unlike his first mentor (and spiritual father) Clive Renmark, who – along the same lines as his near-homonym – introduces cleavages41 between the Northern and and he does. It can thus be argued that the farmer’s pragmatism plays a considerable part in giving his brother’s life-work its final shape. 40 Moya Costello, “Murray Bail, The Pages; Helen Garner, The Spare Room,” T E X T 12.2 (October 2008), http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/costello_rev.htm (accessed 7 September 2009). 41 Both are indeed deluded into thinking that the real can be (at least partly) controlled through the often obsessive acts of subdividing and organizing aspects of it. While Cliff collects objects (stamps), Clive does the same with “theories of knowledge” (66): “gathering up everything he knew, Renmark arranged it in a reasonable order and gave it back to [.. . his] students” (66, my italics).

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Southern hemispheres just as he does between life and thought, Wesley is the sum of the influences that constitute him: he is made of reason and experience, and is fashioned by his Western origins (and education) and by an Australian land that – as we saw – cannot be reduced to what the colonial myth (denounced, in the first place, by Patrick White) attempted to turn it into. The philosophy he produces is like him (and like Australia itself): rich and light. This anthill-shaped philosophy (to put it in visual terms) takes its cue from an archetypal (i.e. vast and open) Australian space, in which objects are themselves spaced out; by not failing to incorporate a distinctly less stereotyped diversity and complexity – by contrast to traditional mythological representations – it thus miraculously seems to succeed in fusing two aspects that are all too often deemed incompatible. We know now that it is Rosie Steig, whose very surname (meaning ‘mountain path’ in German) encapsulates an idea of ascension, who is the catalyst of his inner elevation: indeed, it is primarily this woman, with her interest in many subjects and her ability to transform theory into practice and thoughts into emotions,42 who enables him to understand, on the one hand, the importance of experience and, on the other, the possible existence of a singularity rooted – paradoxical though it may seem at first sight – in plurality. As for Bail, by setting Wesley’s passing (and Erica’s discovery of his work, a few years later), discreetly but pertinently, a little later than the novel’s publication, he may be seeking to point out to us the value of this research. Arguably, he makes it unfold in a nearby future (which more or less fits in with our present, since Wesley is supposed to die in 2012 – the exact date remains unknown – and Erica to discover his work in 2015) because he wishes to present this philosophy as a conceptual tool worthy of being taken into consideration in the future. Beyond the qualities of Wesley’s work, a fundamental paradox nonetheless lies at the core of his philosophical undertaking, which may have induced some readers to envisage it as a failure (cf. above). In my view, the paradox in question derives from the fact that Wesley’s late realization (related to the importance of experience) compels him to retrospection. In other words, the intellectual treatment of his past experience leads him to suspend, to a large extent, his present experience and to interrupt almost completely the flow of his daily life in order to devote himself to his thought. For the whole period following his realization, he thus leads a spartan life, feeding on ham and boiled eggs, hardly

42

As the narrator notes, “areas of soaked-up learning had added to her; they were hidden, but came out as generosity” (97). Fittingly, Ackland observes that in the novel, “she is persistently associated with plenitude, warmth, generosity and the possibility of embracing life and love” (The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 208).

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interacting with his brother and sister (whom he barely knows) and, as far as possible, staying away from his immediate environment. This life–thought dichotomy that haunts every thinker (not to say every author or artist) 43 is here pushed to extremes: like Kant, Wesley spends eleven long years locked up in a shearing shed to write his life-work (a kind of Australian Critique of Pure Reason, as it were, or, more descriptively, a purely intellectual attempt to reconnect reason and experience which might transcend its contradictions to eventually emerge as a philosophical landmark). In this context, The Pages can be read as an allegory of a segment of European philosophy, illustrating the shift from narrow Cartesianism to enlightened rationalism, as initially a “Cartesian bore” (133), Wesley then transmogrifies into a Kantian figure, with Nietzschean aspirations. A corollary to this primary paradox is that if the reconciliation of reason and experience remains very theoretical for Wesley, especially throughout his last eleven more ‘life’-depleted years, it is also relative within his philosophy. If Rosie’s death (and Wesley’s related realization) symbolically tolls the knell of the latter’s ‘active’ life, it also marks the beginning of his ‘productive’ life (i.e. of the period during which he produces his philosophy). From that moment onwards, Wesley develops a thought that is the retrospective story, not only of his past life but especially of his life before Rosie’s disappearance: in eleven years of thinking, he never succeeds in going beyond this turning point in his (hi)story. In this regard, it is interesting to notice that at the time of his own death, Wesley is working on precisely the pages pertaining to the realization that followed Rosie’s passing. Wesley’s autobiographical narrative, which stops when he becomes aware of the importance of experience, thus fails to take into account his ‘second Australian period’, when the time devoted to the development of his thought did not allow him – as previously indicated – to store up many new lifeexperiences. If, before his death, his story could have met the point he reached in real life, Wesley would have achieved not intellectual and moral maturity (which remains a horizon, notably according to Kant), but the possibility of articulating life and thought in the present. By adopting such a critical attitude in the face of the present: i.e. by making real and productive lives coincide in his own autobiographical notebooks, in which a plural, resolutely dynamic, porous, and outward-turned self unfolds, Bail himself might be the one who achieves “the reintegration of theory and

43

More than once, the narrator stresses the philosopher (and not only the Enlightenment philosopher)’s inevitable detachment (e.g., 148), whose activity would necessarily isolate him from the outside world.

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praxis”44 that, to various degrees, eludes his protagonists, and who thus gives Enlightenment its most modern interpretation. Several scholars have noted an intriguing similarity between Wesley’s life-work and Bail’s notebooks. For instance, Ivor Indyk remarks: “Antill’s philosophy is to reside finally in a fragmentary series of notes, just as his author’s does in the notebooks that hold the beginnings of his stories and novels.”45 Likewise, Moya Costello observes that “until I checked, I thought [...] that Anthill’s [sic] last written thoughts had come directly from Bail’s Notebooks.”46 This striking resemblance certainly deserves to be further investigated – but that is another (long) story, which has yet to be written.

W OR K S C I T E D Ackland, Michael. “Beneath the Camouflage: Mimicry and Settler False Consciousness in the Fiction of Murray Bail,” Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies 17.2 (2011): 72–89. ——.The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail (Amherst MA & New York: Cambria, 2012). ——.“ ‘On All Fours Passing, Tintinnabulation’: Murray Bail’s Creative Case against the Imperial Word,” in The Tapestry of the Creative Word in Anglophone Literatures, ed. Caterina Colomba, Maria Renata Dolce, Stefano Mercanti & Antonella Riem Natale (Udine: Forum, 2013): 213–40. Adorno, Theodor, & Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Dialektik Der Aufklärung, 1944; ed. Frankfurt am Main: Samuel Fischer, 1987; tr. Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2002). Anon. Review of The Pages, by Murray Bail (23 August 2009), http://kimbofo.typepad .com/readingmatters/2009/08/the-pages-by-murray-bail.html (accessed 14 September 2009). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (1989; London & New York: Routledge, 2002). Bail, Murray. Eucalyptus (1998; London: Harvill, 1999). ——.Holden’s Performance (1987; London: Harvill, 2000). ——.Homesickness (1980; London: Harvill, 1999). ——.Interview on Radio New Zealand National (19 July 2008), http://www.radionz .co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/20080719 (accessed 11 December 2009). ——.The Pages (London: Harvill Secker, 2008). 44 45 46

Ackland, The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail, 195. Indyk, “The Provincial and the Princess.” Costello, “Murray Bail, The Pages; Helen Garner, The Spare Room.”

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Costello, Moya. “Murray Bail, The Pages; Helen Garner, The Spare Room,” TE X T 12.2 (October 2008), http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct08/costello_rev.htm (accessed 7 September 2009). Herbillon, Marie. “Linearity as Metadiscourse in Murray Bail’s Fiction,” Anglophonia / Caliban (French Journal of English Studies): Divergences and Convergences 21 (2007): 225–37. ——.“Spatial Linearity and Post-Colonial Parody in Murray Bail’s Holden’s Performance,” in A Sea for Encounters: Essays towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Cross/Cultures 117; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 149– 64. Hood, Anna. Review of The Pages, by Murray Bail (11 July 2008), http://www .boomerang books.com.au/Pages/Murray-Bail/book_reviews_9781846552168.htm (accessed 14 September 2009). Howard, Tim. Review of The Pages, by Murray Bail, http://quarterlyconversation.com /the-pages-by-murray-bail-review (accessed 7 September 2009). Indyk, Ivor. “The Provincial and the Princess,” Sydney Review of Books (8 March 2013), http//sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-provincial-and-the-princess (accessed 17 March 2014). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781; Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1998). Lee, Hermione. “Thinking about the World,” The Guardian (23 August 2008), http: //www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/23/fiction6 (accessed 7 September 2009). Porter, Roy. The Enlightenment (London: Macmillan, 1990). Rodyunina, Ekaterina. Review of The Pages, by Murray Bail, http://www.thebookbag.co .uk/reviews/index.php/The_Pages_by_Murray_Bail (accessed 14 September 2009). White, Patrick. “The Prodigal Son” (1958), in The Vital Decade: Ten Years of Australian Art and Letters, ed. Geoffrey Dutton (Melbourne: Sun, 1968): 156–58. Wyndham, Susan. “Interview with Murray Bail,” Sydney Morning Herald (28 June 2008), http://blogs.smh.com.au/entertainment/archives/undercover/019622.html (accessed 1 October 2008).

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Image-i-nation Africa/nation, Identity, and the Nation(s) Within B R ON W Y N M I LL S

At the time of the French Revolution there was a belief that the institutions of small independent towns, such as Sparta and Rome, could be applied to our great nations of thirty or forty millions of souls. In our own day a still graver error is committed: the race is confounded with the nation, and to racial, or rather to linguistic groups, is attributed a sovereignty analogous to that of really existent peoples.1 One important religious feature or practice that has not received the critical attention it deserves, and that is relevant to the understanding of the concept of nation in Africa and its instantiations in the New World Diaspora, is the existence, permanence, and indeed cultivation of the phenomenon of double or multiple religious and cultural loyalties – across geographical entities.2

T

H I S E S S A Y W I L L E X P L O R E an alternative West African concept of nation – of which Ernest Renan, in the quotation above, would probably not have approved. I will note how the term ‘nation’ travelled to the New World, and became an adjective that modified not only persons but also language. This topic raises issues of identity in and beyond contemporary Western notions of nationhood and, conversely, problematizes the popular view of the ‘Mother Continent’ held by some in its diaspora who espouse the vision of a romanticized, uncontaminated African culture to which they are 1

Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, tr. William G. Hutchison (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation, 1882; London: Walter Scott, 1896): 61–62, repr. in Nations and Identities: Classic Readings, ed. Vincent P. Pecora (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 163. 2 Olabiyi B. Yaï, “African Diasporan Concepts and Practice of the Nation and Their Implications in the Modern World,” in African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Sheila S. Walker (Lanham M D : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001): 246.

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rightful heirs (a view which, incidentally, also ignores the obvious fact that Africa is a continent of numerous and diverse cultures, not a monolith). Clearly, this is a broad topic. However, I shall limit my West African examples largely to La République du Bénin (where I was a Fulbright Fellow in 2007– 2008), especially as its ancient kingdom, Dânxom͇,3 is of great interest for having disseminated many aspects of its culture overseas via the transatlantic slave trade. In particular, I will refer to cultural markers of power in Bénin, those of religion and political dominion, remembering that separation of state and religion was foreign to traditional Dânxom͇, to many subsequently exiled overseas, and, later, to those colonized in France’s Dahomey. Indeed, as the Béninois scholar Olabiyi Yaï reminds us, “African world-views and religions inform all other aspects of African life,” and, he continues, these “are expected to provide conceptual tools for other disciplines.”4 I will close with a brief discussion of language and the Caribbean imagination – in the New World location where, it is important to recall, the first captive Africans were brought – and an example of its literature; for, even today, understanding the disjuncture between the Western nations and traditional West African nations offers a key analytical tool with which to re-examine postcolonial literary practice in both the Old and the New Worlds.

La République du Bénin Bénin has a particular presence in the Atlantic world: it is touted as the home of Vodou/Vodun,5 a complex of West African religious practices brought by Fongbe-speaking people to the Caribbean (especially to Haiti and certain parts of Cuba), to Brazil, and to the U SA ’s Deep South. Bénin is home to forty-three different languages: in the New World, some of them have made an impact on the culture and colonial languages that succeeded them, hinting at the presence of several ethnic groups and their cultural practices (especially Fongbe, the language of southern Bénin, which figures strongly and significantly in Vodou

3

This is the proper spelling in Fongbe, predominant language of southern Bénin and of that ancient kingdom. I use the Fongbe whenever possible. Please note that the Fon are a people and Fongbe is their language. 4 Olabiyi Babalola Yaï, “Introduction,” African Studies Quarterly 1.4, special issue on “Religion and Philosophy in Africa” (1998): 1. 5 In the Americas, the word ‘voodoo’, which one might see in older documents, has been replaced by the more favoured spelling ‘vodou’. It is variously spelled in Africa. I shall use ‘Vodun’ for the African varieties and ‘Vodou’ for the American, unless it is a direct quotation. Although it appears to have arrived in the Caribbean via the Fon, its African range is and was much wider.

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liturgy). Though it has had its share of colonial impositions, unpleasant governments, and a few military coups, the country is oddly stable when compared to its neighbours – Togo, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Chad, Burkina Faso, and so on. Remarkably, it is also the only West African country where an autochthonous religion, Vodun, is officially recognized. Nonetheless, Bénin is under-researched: given some infrequency in scholarly efforts, the same older sources are recycled in the literature again and again (in works by Melville Herskovits, Bernard Maupoil, William Bascom, Harold Courlander, Pierre Verger, and so on) in a scholar’s version of an island economy where inhabitants survive by taking in each other’s laundry. This situation wants correction. Historians will recognize Bénin, not as the source of the famous Bénin bronzes, but as the former French colony of Dahomey which was once dominated by the southern Fon kingdom of Dânxom͇. Further, at the same time as European political philosophies seemed to be leaning in favour of devotion to monarchy rather than republican polity, the Royaume de Dânxom͇ was also consolidating itself around an absolute monarchy. Robin Law’s article “‘My Head Belongs to the King’” notes that this process of consolidation required “consideration also of the sphere of ideology,” for the transatlantic slave trade had profoundly affected the political order.6 Where before the province of the previous Allada state was “an enlarged kin-group comprising a federation of essentially autonomous related lineages” limiting royal authority, Dânxom͇ based its authority on “the right of conquest rather than consanguinity or inheritance,” and stressed a profound level of “absolute and unmediated authority of the king over his subjects” as the article title, from a Dânxom͇ citizen’s statement, “My head belongs to the king,” indicates. Says Law: In Dahomian tradition [...] it is explained [as] alluding [...] to a royal prohibition of the decapitation of deceased Dahomians, being connected with a reform of burial practices, involving a ban on the beheading of corpses [...] attributed to an early king of Dahomey, Wegbaja.7

The prohibition’s real intention was to prevent “veneration of the deceased by his own kinsmen,”8 thus concentrating or monopolizing “ritual [religious] as 6

Robin Law, “‘ My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 30.3 (1989): 399. 7 “‘ My Head Belongs to the King’,” 400, my italics. Wegbaja was Dânxom͇’s mythological, but not necessarily actual, ‘first king’. 8 This idea was also confirmed by one informant, Martine da Souza, whom Law and I have both variously used. Martine explained to me that the deceased could “let you know” if they were to be venerated – that is, if they were to become vodun.

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well as political and judicial power in the hands of the monarchy.”9 Indeed, among Yorùbá/Nagô10 whose religion influenced that of the Fon, the seat of the soul is in the head.11 Thus, the Fon citizen literally owed his head (the vessel of his soul and its contents) to the monarch-as-patria, rather than to his own lineage. As in Europe, nation became hostage to the imaginary of its absolute ruler. This absolute authority was further secured through an ideology that was both political and crafted through religious metaphor. Edna Bay details the politically driven manipulation of religious practice in Dânxom͇ under King Tegbesu (1740–74), demonstrably the Royaume de Dânxom͇’s first genuinely imperial leader, and his ‘Kpojito’, Queen Mother Hwangile, long before the modern concept of the nation-state had currency in Africa.12 As European pressures arising from an increasing demand for slaves in Europe’s Caribbean and American colonies impacted upon Tegbesu (who still made a tidy profit from this activity), he and Hwangile significantly rearranged traditional theologies and made sacerdotal arrangements synchronize with their secular counterparts in order to buttress royal power. “Core symbols,” to use the archaeologist Christopher Fennell’s term, were intentionally manipulated by royalty rather than simply altered by the passage of time.13 For example, the insistence on a distant über-Gott in the ‘person’ of Mawu (once a female spirit, she became recast as male) was the end result of one such manipulation that persists into presentday Vodun;14 it sprang from Tegbesu and Hwangile’s elevation of the divine twins Mawu/Lisa so as to dominate the spirits of traditional, pre-Dânxom͇ religion and to mirror their own shared rulership.15 9

Law, “ ‘ My Head Belongs to the King’,” 401. Nagô: both ancient Dânxom͇ and today’s Bénin refer to Yorùbá living in the kingdom/ present nation as such. 11 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983): 4–16, 47. 12 Edna G. Bay, “Belief, Legitimacy and the Kpojito: An Institutional History of the ‘Queen Mother’ in Precolonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 36.1 (1995): 1–27. The ‘Kpojito’ (roughly, ‘Queen Mother’) was not the king’s wife but one of the preceding generation, chosen from among his predecessor’s wives. In Tegbesu’s case, Hwangile really was his mother. 13 Christopher C. Fennell, Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World (Gainesville: U P of Florida, 2007). 14 Hounhoungan Ghendehou, interviews with author from March–June 2008. ‘Hounhoungan’ is a high priest. 15 See Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 1998). One might also consider the impact of Christian missionary activity and its monotheisms which used, as V.Y. Mudimbe points out, an 10

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If priests (or laypersons) resisted change, the Royaume of Dânxom͇ simply sold these dissidents overseas: according to Kristin Mann, “the ruling elite in the Fon kingdom of Dahomey [sic] used the slave-trade to exile political and military rivals and were themselves occasionally exiled through it.”16 With them went their out-of-favour, older beliefs and/or already creolized ideologies, both of which then took root and were further adapted to the lives and cultures of captive Africans (in some cases, also Amerindians) in the Americas.17 In effect, the seeds of Fon-based religions and philosophies (already ‘impure’ in the sense of reflecting multiple contributions, especially from the neighbouring Yorùbá) were regularly being sown in parts of the Americas through the regulation of thought in Bénin. Crucial here is the idea that mixed ideation did not start in the New World but is characteristic of African Old-World thought.

‘Nation’ and Nation18 In an optimistically-titled chapter of The Black Atlantic, “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity,” Paul Gilroy queries the same issues raised in Renan’s famous statement. Gilroy says: “black intellectuals have persistently succumbed to the lure of those romantic conceptions of ‘race,’ ‘people,’ and ‘nation’,” whereas nationality, and the emphasis given to “conspicuous differences of language, culture, and identity which divide the blacks of the diaspora from one another, let alone from Africans, are unresolved.”19 This does not mean

“adaptation theology” that looks into “traditional systems of beliefs for unanimous signs or harmonies which might be incorporated into Christianity in order to Africanize it without fundamentally modifying it”; Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991): 13. In that theology, the Dânxom͇an Mawu becomes a synonym for the Judaeo–Christian Almighty. 16 Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” in Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, ed. Kristin Mann & Edna G. Bay (London & Portland O R : Frank Cass, 2001): 3. 17 Robin Law notes that Tegbesu’s father and royal predecessor, “Agaja,” had “many priests and worshippers of these cults, sold out of the country as slaves.” The cults referenced were those of “Sakpata, the earth deity, and the gods of the rivers and the silk-cotton trees.” See Robin Law, “Ideologies of Royal Power: The Dissolution and Reconstruction of Political Authority on the ‘Slave Coast,’ 1680–1750,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57.3 (1987): 322. 18 With profuse apologies to the scholar Olabiyi Yaï, I use quotation marks for the West African word, and leave the statist word unbracketed, only to distinguish the two. 19 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1993): 34.

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that Gilroy is an unabashed occidental nationalist; rather, he suggests that an overriding identity appears to trump the more intimate one: the dependence of those black intellectuals who have tried to deal with these matters on theoretical reflections derived from the canon of occidental modernity – from Herder to Von Trietschke and beyond – is surely salient.20

Skipping over the black Caribbean, black Latin America, and Brazil, Gilroy focuses on the U SA (“America”) and Britain when discussing the diaspora. He cites W.E.B. Du Bois’ admiration for Bismarck for having spectacularly united a “mass of bickering peoples” and “foreshadow[ing] [...] what American Negroes must do.”21 He then describes Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass, as those “whose lives and political sensibilities can ironically be defined through crisscrossing of national boundaries,” but who seem “to share the Hegelian belief that the combination of Christianity and a nation state represents the overcoming of all antinomies.”22 Clearly, Gilroy’s statements affirm a tension between identity and the occidental nation. On the West African side of the Atlantic world, Dr Olabiyi Yaï – Nagô, French educated, a Babalaou (Ifa priest) born in Bénin, and now Chairman of UNESCO ’s Executive Board – offers an Afro-cosmopolitanism as counter-paradigm for the kind of boundaries of nation drawn by Europe during the African continent’s colonial period. Not unlike Gilroy, Yaï interrogates the idea of nation that Europe imposed artificially on colonized lands, separating peoples in and from their former homelands. Yaï qualifies his rejection of this Western project by citing Africans’ routine border-crossing, cultural blending, and multiple affiliations – most frequently found in West African religious practices and all, he asserts, testifying to African cosmopolitanism as well as to the limitations of the nation-state. Indeed, even Gilroy himself dismisses the idea of pure Africanisms blended only in the New World; rather, he suggests an inclusive, heterogeneous Atlantic culture that evolved over time. Few nation-states in the West have offered Africans and their descendants a desirable alternative to a strong, resistant affiliation with one another.23 Not as 20

Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 34. The Black Atlantic, 35. 22 The Black Atlantic, 35, my italics. 23 J. Lorand Matory, “‘The English Professor of Brazil’: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.1 (January 1999): 72. According to Matory, Gilroy suggests that “shared cultural features [among] African diaspora groups generally result far less from shared cultural memories of Africa than from these groups’ mutually influential but cul21

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citizen, citoyen, but as members of a ‘nation’ – that is, “[religiously inspired or affiliated] peoplehoods [...] which link them with specific places in Africa,” – captive Africans and their descendants were hard pressed to renounce their ancestors.24 Rather, in the early struggle for a better life, they were often sustained by their remembered rituals (including homage to their ancestors) and remembered beliefs.25 Because Africa’s polytheistic practices suggest that multiple allegiances do not necessarily equal subsumed or divided ones, and that lateral sets of allegiances do occur, Yaï suggests a paradigm for New- and Old-World identification with ‘nation’ as a non-statist marker that coexists with an interest in the nation-state, rather than an annoying mind-set which modernism must eradicate. Further, ‘nation’ as a framework for African alteridentity serves as a paradigm for a critique of the nation, as Gilroy and Yaï have shown in their interrogation of occidental modernism. It is important to remember, too, that if the historical Africanity of the Old World has been denigrated by colonialism, it has also been aggressively denied or hidden by plantation culture in the Americas. In the diaspora and in Africa, as Greg Carr puts it, “the severing of African memory from the African cultural and social body” is secured, as Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o tells us, by “planting European memory in Africa.”26 At the site of the earliest New World colonies, the Caribbean, this same denial or occultation fuels its writers’ and artists’ efforts to remember that Africanity. Aimé Césaire’s Tempest,27 says Joseph Khoury, uses Sycorax to signify the African context in the Caribbean; and, he explains, Caliban challenges Prospero with “[Caliban’s] recuperation and full affirmation of his mother, a metaphor for history.”28 Further, Khoury points out that, to

turally neutral responses to their exclusion from the benefits of the Enlightenment legacy of national citizenship and political equality in the West.” 24 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 75. 25 In Old-World Vodun, as suggested in an earlier footnote of this essay, one’s deceased relative can become a spirit or Vodun. Thus ancestors themselves have a place beyond mere lineage (Martine da Souza, interview with author on 2 March 2008). In addition to this spiritual influence, there was interchange between later arrivals, both captive and non-captive – Brazil is exemplary in this regard. 26 Greg Carr, “Translation, Recovery, and ‘Ethnic’ Archives of Africana: Inscribing Meaning Beyond Otherness,” P M L A 127.2 (March 2012): 361. “Planting European Memory in Africa” is the subtitle of a chapter in Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o, Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009). 27 Aimé Césaire, Une tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969). 28 Joseph Khoury, “‘The Tempest’ Revisited in Martinique: Aimé Césaire’s Shakespeare,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.2 (Fall–Winter 2006): 28.

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counteract the fact that “Prospero degrades her” in celebrating Sycorax’ death, Césaire has Caliban declare: (Dead or alive, she was my mother, and I won’t deny her!): Anyhow, you only think she’s dead because you think the earth itself is dead [...]. It’s so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that it is alive, and I know that Sycorax is alive. Sycorax. Mother. 29

The Bajan poet and scholar Kamau Brathwaite refers to Sycorax as the woman “who still carries within herself, [...] in a submerged manner, the very essence of the native culture,” and who holds on to “the secrets of a possible alternative culture for the Caribbean.”30 Surely this submersion is an apt metaphor for the occultation of Africanity on the historical stage, in and beyond Caribbean texts, as well as the poet’s own journey in his creative work. Moreover, Brathwaite locates Sycorax as the one who provides Caliban (standing, in turn, for the displaced, colonized African) with the key to liberation in “his own mother’s language.”31 Thus Brathwaite calls attention to “nation language,” Sycorax’s and, by extension, Caliban’s mother tongue: nation language not only gives a more authentic identity to its speakers, it also gives them a creative voice which colonially imposed languages do not and cannot offer.

From the Transatlantic Trade to European Colonialism As in other West African kingdoms, in Dânxom͇ slavery was good business. Much of it was conducted with Brazil, Cuba, and the anglophone and francophone colonies of the Caribbean. Transported to the New World, captives’ commodified bodies were uniformly and colonially labelled by European slave dealers and their customers as ‘African’. As merchandise, these same people were further sorted, re-named, and re-categorized (often misidentified) by NewWorld colonial slave traders and given group names that arbitrarily related to ethnicity, place/port of origin, and so on. A not uncommon practice among

29

My translation. The original French version is quoted in Khoury, “‘The Tempest’ Revisited in Martinique: Aimé Césaire’s Shakespeare,” 28. 30 Kamau Brathwaite, “An Alternative View of Caribbean History,” in Brathwaite, The Colonial Encounter: Language, ed. Anniah Gowda (Mysore: U of Mysore, 1984): 44, quoted in Silvio Torres– Saillant, “The Trial of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” World Literature Today 68.4 (Autumn 1994): 705. 31 Brathwaite, “An Alternative View of Caribbean History,” quoted in Torres–Saillant, “The Trial of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” 705.

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Africans and slaveholders alike was to choose “ethnic or place name designations as surnames”: Thus we read of [in Latin America] Pedro Angola, married to Victoriana Angola; Francisco Biafra, the husband of Luisa Manicongo; Lucia Arara, the wife of Pedro Congo, and so on.32

Africans also gathered and got organized “among themselves on the basis of ethnicity all over the New World,” for they were designated members “of specific sociocultural groups, or what could be called in some cases ethnicities, and what in point of fact were called nações in Brazil.”33 The word nações in Portuguese, naciones in Spanish, or nations in English, was altered semantically and conceptually in its non-European, creolized context; enslaved Africans responded to enslavement as members of nações, often rebelling on the basis of ethnicity, form[ing] cooperative ventures such as the irmandades (brotherhoods) on that same premise.34

Long before the nineteenth century, in Mexico and Peru, “the view of Africans as members of particular naciones, like the Brazilian nações, was fully elaborated.”35 In short, Africans in the New World were very much aware of who they had been in the Old World, and engaged patterns of collective behavior that sought to recapture and reinforce Old World realities.36

32

Michael A. Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” Radical History Review 75 (Fall 1999): 117. 33 Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 113. Among those from Dânxom͇ – or those who were transported as captives from Dânxom͇ – who appear in the New World were Jeje (Fon in Brazil), Arada or Arara (originally referring to the pre-Dânxom͇an kingdom of Allada from which Dânxom͇ royalty came), Nagô (the Fongbe denomination for Yorùbá living within their borders, still used in Bénin today), Lucumí (another name for Yorùbá), and Mina (see Robin Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora – On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa 32 [2005], for further discussion, as this is both the name for a language in southwestern Bénin and, some suggest, refers to the infamous slave port Elmina, located in present-day Ghana). An important Haitian Vodun spirit, Gede, may very well reference the Gedevi, or children of Gede, who were conquered by the Dânxom͇an kings when they took Agbome as their capital. The Gedevi whom I met in Bénin still honour a spirit named ‘Gede’, though s/he/it is quite different from the Haitian Gede and far more chthonic. 34 Gomez, “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 113. 35 “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 116. 36 “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” 118.

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The words they chose (nation, nações, naciones) were affected by the overall conceptual field into which these terms were fitted and by the contexts of use in which they appeared. However, ‘nation’ – ethnicity/locale plus African-based religion – as applied to persons from the African continent did not translate well into an encroaching European-derived statist discourse.37 By the end of the nineteenth century, the international slave trade officially ceased, and the Berlin Conference (1884–85) divided up Africa into distinct spheres of European and (briefly) Ottoman commercial influence. Europeanimposed boundaries cut through the older, more fluid borders of nation as defined by Africans. In 1889, Dânxom͇ became Dahomey; in 1894, the last Dânxom͇an monarch, King Behanzin, was sent into exile on the Caribbean island of Martinique via Marseille “with his five wives, his favourite son, Ouanilo, and a daughter, Kpo Tassa.”38 In 1904, Dahomey became a colonial province of French West Africa, part of France Outre-Mer. Then, while earlier missionaries had made a negligible impact in Dânxom͇, what the Kenyan writer and critic Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o has famously called the “colonisation of the mind” began in earnest through standardized education, culture, and language imposed from the outside, and administered by the metropole.39 In time, and more so as a generation of Westerneducated native elites and returning World War Two soldiers agitated across the continent for separation from the metropole, the nation-state appeared as the model of modernity and nationhood.40 When independence became a reality in the mid-twentieth century, that same generation of elites, acculturated into the imposed culture and well-disposed to doing business with their former colonizers, took over. Dahomey became an autonomous republic separate from French West Africa in 1958. In 1960, Dahomey became fully independent and, in .

37

Yaï, “African Diasporan Concepts and Practice of the Nation and their Implications in the Modern World,” 246. 38 Behanzin was allowed back to the continent, to Algiers, “where he soon died of pneumonia, on 10 December 1906.” See Peter Morton–Williams, “A Yoruba Woman Remembers Servitude in a Palace of Dahomey, in the Reigns of Kings Glele and Behanzin,” Journal of the International African Institute 63.1 (1993): 115. 39 Famously, Ngˤƨɉ elaborates on this in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey & Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986). He is emphatic about the effects of colonization. In the Central Africa of V.Y. Mudimbe, the emphasis is on missionary activity in the Bantu-speaking parts of what is now the Congo. The major impact was achieved after colonization, however. See Mudimbe, Parables & Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa. 40 Dr Jonathan Allen, personal communication with author (3 January 2012).

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1975, it was renamed the People’s Republic of Bénin, then, in 1991, the Republic of Bénin, all the time with elites adhering to the model of the nation-state. Although, from the early stages of colonialism, colonial ‘subjects’ were acculturated – some might say: also bullied – out of their allegiance to prior fleshand-blood ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities, a number of ordinary Béninois retained identification with the ‘old nation’. Furthermore, they adhered to nation-state citizenship as merely the latest layer in a palimpsest of more traditional identities, as a kind of conceptual antidote to being identified as merely a subject of the former metropole. Among elites and in the urban areas of the New World, the idea of ‘nations / nações / naciones’ seems to have disappeared with emancipation.41

African Nation / Nation Language Clearly, extrapolating a counter-hegemonic definition of nation is fraught with difficulty. Multiple loyalties consistently worry political monocultures, in or out of the West. If nothing else, however, the forced exchanges noted earlier in this essay and used by Tegbesu and Dânxom͇’s subsequent kings to enforce political, cultural, and religious orthodoxy, shaped the kind of Vodun culture and the kind of Fongbe42 brought by Vodun’s devotees to the colonies, first to St Domingue (now Haiti) and then to other parts of the Americas. We know that in the Old World, colonialism alienated local people from their own cultures, people, and native languages; and though it did not necessarily wipe out local languages, it denied them the means of becoming fully themselves. As Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o has said: Language [...] also the producer of a community [...] enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and indeed that which makes possible their multifaceted evolution. It is in that very negotiation that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others.43

41

The old, pre-nation-state definition survived only among the peasantry in the most remote places. See also Edward Kamau Brathwaite’s discussion of Miss Queenie in Kumina (Savacou Working Paper 4; Mona, Jamaica: U of the West Indies, 1982): 56–57, 59. 42 For example, classic Fongbe, spoken by Gedevi, is different from the way non-Gedevi Fongbe speakers use the language. 43 Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o, “Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 2.

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In Bénin today, there is a curious absence of literature in the local African languages – curious because the oral tradition is so rich.44 Béninois novels and, to some extent, books of poetry are few and overwhelmingly written in French. On the other hand, in the Americas, more recent Caribbean culture has a rich literary tradition, despite the loss of African languages. Bénin’s Old World deficit is oddly reminiscent of the situation in the early anglophone Caribbean colonies, where work written in the English of the day was elevated (some might say ‘affected’) but bloodless, if we are to believe Derek Walcott’s scathing review of the anglophone Caribbean collection Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777. Walcott’s “Frowsty Fragrance” notes acidly, among other things, that ancestors of today’s Caribbean writers were illiterate and disenfranchised, and that the literature of the master was revealed at that time, but that of the masses was not. 45 What African captives transported to New World colonies before the infamous ‘Scramble for Africa’ was the idea of ‘nation’ as a means of self-identity and psychic resistance; and, if we are to believe Mann, they were already accustomed to a flexibility – a way of adapting – at ‘home’ (certainly in West Africa).46 Indeed, Yaï asks us to consider that flexibility as sourced in an in47 herent cosmopolitanism in West Africa’s concept of nation, similar to Law’s pre-Dânxom͇ “enlarged kin-group,” a polyethnic but autochthonous cultural adaptation that a centralized Dânxom͇ began tampering with in the eighteenth century.48 Further, we can speculate that not only the polyvalent, African version of nation confounded Europe’s colonizing project, but so did West Africans’ well-known polylingualism.49 To the extent that African ‘nations’ were 44

See Olabiyi Babalola Yaï’s critique of the Herskovits’ Dahomean Narrative and its distortions of that rich oral tradition in “The Path is Open: The Herskovits Legacy in African Oral Narrative Analysis and Beyond,” P A S Working Papers 5, ed. Jonathon Glassman, Jane I. Guyer & Mary F.E. Ebeling (1999), http://www.africanstudies.northwestern.edu/docs/publications-research/working -papers/yai-1999.pdf (accessed 2 April 2015). 45 Derek Walcott, “A Frowsty Fragrance,” New York Review of Books 47.10 (15 June 2000): 57–61. 46 Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” 7. 47 Yaï, “African Diasporan Concepts and Practice of the Nation and Their Implications in the Modern World,” 248. Interestingly, the pre-nation-state city-states of the republican ideal in Europe also touted a cosmopolitanism that was then left in the dust when the ‘real’ nation–state began to emerge. See Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 48 Law, “‘My Head Belongs to the King’,” 399. 49 If we believe critics like Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o, both still confound the neo-colonizing projects of Europe and the U S A .

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constituted on the basis of common language, clearly many enslaved Africans taken from the western Slave Coast in the eighteenth century would have had, in effect, a choice of ethnicities, being able to communicate with both Akan 50 speakers (and/or Ga-Adangme speakers) and Gbe speakers. Just as clearly, such identification might include religious affiliation. Despite exile, then, we see linguistic traces of Dânxom͇ (and a wider Africa’s) presence in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil, and perhaps even in the US South. Yorùbá also arrived with Nagô captives, and classical Yorùbá still appears in the liturgy of Brazil’s Candomblé. 51 Even earlier, when the original inhabitants of Allada (Alladanou), then of Agbome (the Gedevi) were conquered by very aggressive Fon in what is now Bénin, a more formal but older Fongbe was transferred to the New World as dissidents and the defeated were sent overseas via slave ships; and, combined with some Bantu languages and Amerindian influences, Fongbe appears in Haitian Vodou’s liturgy.52 To this day, it structures Haitian Kreyòl expression among the common folk of that region. Indeed, though African languages were fragmented and submerged in the overseas colonies – to use Kamau Brathwaite’s metaphor of Sycorax – they were not without substantial influence. I will close briefly with some remarks on literature, as the contrast between (some might say the conflict between) a secular, modernist understanding of a political identity from an older, multi-layered ethnic and a religious identity has significance regarding culture in Dânxom͇’s diaspora, and may be paradigmatic for still other African cultures. In this regard, Kamau Brathwaite writes relevantly of the Haitian writer René Depestre, whom he sees as suffering a certain mental colonization: it seems even more acute with francophone ‘colony’ writers than with the anglophones – not that we don’t have our own too acute problems too – because of the pressure, presence and reality/effects of the French metropolitan policy of physical/cultural assimilation.53 50

Law, “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora – On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),”

255. 51

Dânxom͇ regularly raided Nagô/Yorùbá communities for ‘stock’ to sell overseas. Classical Yorùbá persists in the Candomblé houses of Brazil, according to C. Daniel Dawson, scholar and former director of the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York City (personal communication, 2004). Dawson has also noted that Candomblé houses regularly sought – and received – sacerdotal staff from Africa throughout the period of slavery in Brazil. 52 Timothy Landry, initiated Vodou priest, in on-going conversations with author (2008). 53 Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre: René Depestre’s A Rainbow for the Christian West,” Caribbean Quarterly 30.1, special issue on “Poets and Poetry” (March 1984): 44.

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As evidence of Depestre’s at least partly colonized condition, Brathwaite cites the Haitian author’s Rainbow for the Christian West, in which he uses the infamous Dânxom͇an slave port and Beninois tourist town of Ouidah54 as a synedoche for the transatlantic trade and in order to testify to the fact of Haiti’s denial of its own history during the time when ‘Papa Doc’ – François Duvalier – was in power. Brathwaite quotes Depestre’s comments (in the Joan Dayan translation) regarding the denial of slavery, describing them as “brilliant witty negatives of irony”: The Black Slave Trade did not take place. It is the invention of a mad historian. There is no small beach in Africa named Ouidah where cargos of black cattle set out towards America [...]. Their desolation [about enslavement] did not cross the sea. [...] They were not branded with a red-hot iron. No one ever counted their teeth or felt their testicles. They were never probed, weighed, and hefted!55

For Brathwaite, Depestre’s use of irony (above) is not enough; what bothers him most is Depestre’s use of French: Haiti’s colonizers spoke French; their Haitian slaves and descendants spoke and speak Kreyòl, whose grammatical structure, while an artifact of Dânxom͇an influence and ancestry, is also infused with its speakers’ folk culture. As creolized languages persist, the Caribbean writer, according to Brathwaite, is compelled to visit Caribbean culture in a new way; to use the colonial language, Brathwaite says, indicates a negation of the folk culture which figured so importantly in the early achievement of Haitian independence in 1804. Though Depestre deploys Haitian ‘vodoun’ culture to enable his narrative, the use of French creates “a problem of centre, style and final allegiance” and “despite the generosities of at least the first 3/4 of Arc [Rainbow],” Depestre has never been able “to come to grips with all that creole (nation) involves; above all with the question of language.”56 Lacking a solution to what a counter-definition of nation involves – that would be evident in the culture of Kreyòl – the postcolonial Caribbean writer must return to this problem again and again. Finally, a question which arises out of Depestre’s and many Caribbean writers’ years in exile (and that goes beyond the chronology of Depestre’s

54

In the 1990s, Ouidah was re-created as a monument to the transatlantic slave trade – not without inaccuracies. It is an odd mix of testament to slavery’s terrors and invented nostalgia for a monolithic African homeland. 55 René Depestre, Rainbow for the Christian West, tr. Joan Dayan (Un Arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien, 1967; Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1977), 211, cited in Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre,” 40. 56 Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre,” 45.

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work) is: whether in or out of exile, what language does the Caribbean writer use? Is such a dilemma, then, ultimately – and only – about language or is it also about imagination? Can one even separate the two? Although Brathwaite analyses Depestre’s relationship to this dilemma in 1984, he had coined the term “nation language” even earlier.57 Significantly, and even before he wrote “History of the Voice” in 1979, 58 Brathwaite described the formation of what many linguists call ‘creoles’, but which Brathwaite himself later dubbed “nation languages.” These are, as Maureen Warner–Lewis tells us, largely stocked by the vocabulary of a European language, even though a noticeable segment of their lexicon derives from Native American, African and Asian sources. Meanwhile, their syntax or grammar – that is, the sequencing of words in sentences and idiomatic formulations – is as strongly influenced by the syntactic practices of western and west-central African languages as by the conventions of western European languages. Creole languages then, embody features which attest to their origin in the economics of and cultural contacts among Africa, Europe and the Americas.59

The presence of nation language in Haiti is not, as the scholar Lois Wilcken would have it, a retention of African language features as “keepsakes.”60 Rather, this presence is an integral part of the complex pattern of arrivals and depar-

57

Sources vary: even the Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature, which lists the term and credits Brathwaite with its origin, does not provide a date for that creation. See Gay Wilentz, “Nation Language,” Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature: 1900–2003, ed. Daniel Balderston & Mike Gonzalez (New York: Routledge, 2004): 379. 58 “History of the Voice” was originally delivered as a lecture at Harvard University in 1979; a revised version was published as “History of the Voice, 1979–1981,” in Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1993): 259–304. The lecture was also famously expanded in Brathwaite’s book-length History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984). 59 Maureen Warner–Lewis, “The Rhythms of Caribbean Vocal and Oral-Based Texts,” in Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul (Kingston: U of the West Indies P , 2007): 56, my italics. 60 Lois Wilcken, “The Sacred Music and Dance of Haitian Vodou from Temple to Stage and the Ethics of Representation,” Latin American Perspectives 32.1 (January 2005): 195. She remarks that Vodou’s songs “are in Haitian Kreyol, with a generous salting of Fongbe, Yoruba, Kikongo and other keepsakes of Voudou’s African ancestry” (195, my italics). First, to refer to the appearance of complex tonal languages as “keepsakes” sounds patronizing and not particularly aware of the ways in which language changes. Secondly, while Yorùbá and central African Kongo practices have contributed to Vodou, other practices – Santería, Candomblé, the more specific Kongo-derived religions – should not be confused with the Old-World African religion, Vodun.

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tures, new alliances, births, and, sadly, deaths that accompanied the journey and subsequent interactions of captive Africans and, later, common laborers from Africa who created Caribbean culture and its language(s). Critical to Brathwaite is not only the question of how one aligns oneself with Caribbean culture but also how one uses its language, particularly in creative work. To Brathwaite, Depestre appears to temporize, to be linguistically unwilling to relinquish the idols of European culture. Haiti is a creolized state. It is not France: Michael Dash points out that it was not until 1955 that we find Depestre [...] ‘tentatively indicating that an important process of creolisation had taken place in Haiti’ [...]. The point is, that Depestre, despite Dessalines, despite Price–Mars, despite perhaps too Jacques Roumain, and the socalled revolution of 1946, was still (if Dash is right) having to set out tentatively on his own to discover himself and his culture [...] a journey which culminated in Arc-en-ciel (1967).61

Depestre’s journey, Brathwaite believes, was incomplete: his ‘ikons’ (which I called “idols” above), which are still those of the New-World Afro-elite – Mozart, Van Gogh, Helen – do not include any mention of Charlie Parker, Erzulie, Nok Sculpture, to pick a few at random from Brathwaite’s lists.62 The concept of nasyon, as distinct from nation-state, is not carried in the language or culture of the colonizer, nor is it simply a transfer, intact, from Africa to the Americas. While Africans also combined ideas across ethnic groups, the process of creolization in the Americas – especially as African languages that migrated there were sometimes lost or, at best, not retained intact – rendered rich and varied cultures which were not carbon copies of Old-World ones. Slow to acknowledge the creolization process, Depestre, Brathwaite insists, should have taken a huge step and written in nation language, the language needed to reflect the cultural reality or realities that produced it. Instead, he seems to have decorated his work with folk materials pertaining to nasyon, but kept at least one foot in the imposed culture. Indeed, the word and the context in which ‘nation’ and its variants appear in the Caribbean continue to carry specific cultural matter. In reference to Haiti, Lois Wilcken notes that the “word nasyon, variously pronounced nachon or

61

Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre,” 45, citing Michael Dash, Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1981): 176. It is notable that the rainbow is symbolic of Damballah, the old pre- and post-Dânxom͇an spirit, Dan. In Haiti that symbol becomes associated with a metaphorical bridge to Guinée. 62 Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre,” 46.

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nanchon in some parts of Haiti, peppers the song repertory of Haitian Vodou.”63 She goes on to “re-center” the concept, however, in the metropole, seeming to skip over crucial details of its history: “both English and Haitian Kreyòl (Creole) adopted the French nation, which the last derived, in turn, from the Latin nasci, to be born.”64 Yet, contrary to what Wilcken asserts, nasyon, nachon, and nanchon were born neither in imperial Rome nor in the Caribbean; and here enters the confusion of political status with multiple and, I would venture, deeper identities. Wilcken correctly states that “enslaved Africans of colonial Haiti adopted the concept into their evolving spiritual beliefs and practices and adapted it for their own revolutionary ends,” but she would benefit from locating that process more precisely, not solely in the Caribbean: “Successive generations of Vodou practitioners, largely descendants of the enslaved black laborers, have refined the word nasyon.”65 Indeed, Haitian devotees used the image of St Patrick to represent the spirit, Dan (who then gradually became Damballah), and thus protected their Old-World – in some cases pre-Dânxom͇an – beliefs.66 In what is now Bénin, Dânxom͇an beliefs were themselves ‘creolized’, in the sense of representing combined beliefs from the Yorùbá (called Nagô if living in Bénin) and the Alladanou, before and after Fon conquests by Tegbesu’s predecessor, King Agaja, as well as under Tegbesu.67 In Abomey itself, otherwise incongruent symbols or phrases were sometimes modified and reshaped to fit the need to adapt a practice, to fit the understanding of one or another group, or to protect concepts which would otherwise alarm masters and other powers. The worship of pre-royaume Sakpata was ameliorated by the inclusion of concepts of Shosanna, a less politically threatening incarnation of the same spirit in Yorùbá terms, the symbolic purchase of enemies’ vodun after the latter’s defeat (Hu, the sea spirit of the Huedans, comes to mind), and the adaptation of the myth of the ancestral king as offspring of a leopard and an Allandonou princess.68 Cultural borrowing and

63

Lois Wilcken, review of Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism, by Michael Largey, Latin American Music Review 28.1 (Spring–Summer 2007): 161. 64 Wilcken, review of Vodou Nation, 161. 65 Wilcken, review of Vodou Nation, 161–62. 66 That is, beliefs retained from the period before Dânxom͇ was consolidated as a kingdom under Fon kings. I am thinking, in particular, of Tegbesu. 67 Bay, Wives of the Leopard, 56–60. 68 Wives of the Leopard, 82, 84 & 92; Robin Law, Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892 (Athens: U of Ohio P & Oxford: James Currey, 2004): 90. Law dates this from his own fieldwork there in 2000.

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incorporation of other nasyon’s symbols, icons, and practices had been going on – and are still going on – in the Old as well as the New World. Perhaps the definition of ‘nation’ slips once more through our fingers: Michael Largey (the author whose book Wilcken reviews) conflates nasyon with class in the case of “free mulatto proprietors,” a statement that Brathwaite, above, flatly contradicts.69 However, Wilcken is correct in stating that ‘nation’ carries a religious inflection, and her review suggests that aspects of Vodun, “Vodou music,” served as a focus of resistance to colonialism. She herself seems to suggest disagreement with Largey’s association of nasyon with free mulattos: she refers to a neo-colonialist occupation on the part of the U SA (1915–34), where the U S marines actively collaborated with mentally colonized Haitians to suppress Vodou practice at the time of U S occupation, especially in collusion with Roman Catholic members of the ‘mulatto’ class.70 Let us conclude by mentioning another René Depestre novel in which the more familiar nation-state features as a key referent. Published in 1979, Depestre’s Le mât de cocagne (in a later, English version translated as Festival of the Greasy Pole) deals with the resistance of the fallen ‘mulatto’ politician Henri Postel to the regime of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier (1957–71). Central to that resistance is Postel’s climb up a thinly disguised poteau mitan (the centre-pole in a Vodou temple) with the aid of the powerful Vodou spirit Iroko (who also figures to this day in Béninois Vodun belief and practice). The pole is simultaneously read as the central pole on the Haitian flag, topped with the cap of Haitian revolutionaries (one wonders to whom the head beneath belongs). No doubt, as a Marxist and, as Brathwaite has indicated, a French-educated intellectual, the writer was ambivalent about what the Bajan author has called “vodoun” culture;71 yet, in his creative work, Depestre did not seem to be able to refer to Haitian nationhood without it. With his mulatto protagonist, like Largey’s suggestion of a mulatto nasyon, Depestre stops short of mentioning West Africa: was he even aware of how deeply the roots of his “vodoun” images reached? (All the way back to Dânxom͇ and before, in my view.) Depestre published this book well after the first stirrings of the 1960s’ African independence movements, with their attendant 69

Wilcken, review of Vodou Nation, 162. Jana Evans Braziel, “Re-membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile as Revolutionary Lieu de Mémoire,” Small Axe 9.2 (September 2005): 74. 71 Brathwaite, “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre,” 34. Brathwaite first introduces the idea of ‘vodou’ as a culture on this page, but he scatters the concept throughout the essay. Brathwaite also uses the spelling ‘vodoun’ throughout his piece. I use the quotation marks to indicate that it is an alternative spelling as, currently, and as indicated earlier, ‘Vodun’ is used in West Africa, and ‘Vodou’ in Haiti. 70

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concepts of modernism and, in several cases, discomfort with – and rejection of – such traditions as Vodun. Although Depestre was hardly opposed to independence for African nations, what Brathwaite suggests is that his lack of awareness, if genuine, was part of the obliterating effect of colonial French education and its claim on its subjects’ allegiance to the French nation over nasyon. I suggest that these issues plague the postcolonial world to this day and demand further discussion.

W OR K S C I T E D Allen, Jonathan. Interviews with author. Department of Political Science, Northern Michigan University (July–August 2011, 13 January 2012). Bay, Edna G. “Belief, Legitimacy and the Kpojito: An Institutional History of the ‘Queen Mother’ in Precolonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 36.1 (1995): 1–27. ——.Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics, and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 1998). Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. “Helen & The Tempest-Nègre: René Depestre’s A Rainbow for the Christian West,” Caribbean Quarterly 30.1 (March 1984): 33–47. ——.History of the Voice: The Development of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon, 1984). ——.Kumina (Savacou Working Paper 4; Mona: University of the West Indies, 1982). ——.[as Kamau Brathwaite]. “An Alternative View of Caribbean History,” in Brathwaite, The Colonial Encounter: Language, ed. Anniah Gowda (Mysore: U of Mysore, 1984): 44–45. ——.[as Kamau Brathwaite]. “History of the Voice, 1979–1981” (1984), in Brathwaite, Roots (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1993): 259–304. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Re-membering Défilée: Dédée Bazile as Revolutionary Lieu de Mémoire,” Small Axe 9.2 (September 2005): 57–85. Carr, Greg. “Translation, Recovery, and ‘Ethnic’ Archives of Africana: Inscribing Meaning Beyond Otherness,” P ML A 127.2 (March 2012): 360–64. Césaire, Aimé. Une tempête (Paris: Seuil, 1969). Dash, J. Michael. Literature and Ideology in Haiti 1915–1961 (London: Macmillan, 1981). Depestre, René. The Festival of the Greasy Pole, tr. Carol F. Coates (Le mât de cocagne, 1979; tr. Charlottesville & London: U P of Virginia, 1990). ——.Rainbow for the Christian West, tr. Joan Dayan (Un Arc-en-ciel pour l’Occident chrétien, 1967; Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1977). Fennell, Christopher C. Crossroads and Cosmologies: Diasporas and Ethnogenesis in the New World (Gainesville: U P of Florida, 2007). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1993).

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Gomez, Michael A. “African Identity and Slavery in the Americas,” Radical History Review 75 (Fall 1999): 111–20. Herskovits, Melville J, & Frances S. Herskovits. Dahomean Narrative: A Cross-Cultural Analysis (Evanston IL : Northwestern U P , 1958). Hounhoungan Guendehou (Bally Flemomiti). Interviews with author, Cotonou, Bénin (March–June 2008). Khoury Césaire’s Shakespeare,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6.2 (Fall– Winter 2006): 22–27. Krise, Thomas W., ed. Caribbeana: An Anthology of English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999). Law, Robin. “Ethnicities of Enslaved Africans in the Diaspora – On the Meanings of ‘Mina’ (Again),” History in Africa 32 (2005): 247–67. ——.“Ideologies of Royal Power: The Dissolution and Reconstruction of Political Authority on the ‘Slave Coast,’ 1680–1750,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 57.3 (1987): 321–44. ——.“ ‘My Head Belongs to the King’: On the Political and Ritual Significance of Decapitation in Pre-Colonial Dahomey,” Journal of African History 30.3 (1989): 399–415. ——.Ouidah: The Social History of a West African Slaving ‘Port’ 1727–1892 (Athens: U of Ohio P & Oxford: James Currey, 2004). Mann, Kristin. “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture,” in Rethinking the African Diaspora: The Making of a Black Atlantic World in the Bight of Benin and Brazil, ed. Kristin Mann & Edna G. Bay (London & Portland O R : Frank Cass, 2001): 3–21. Matory, J. Lorand. “ ‘The English Professor of Brazil’: On the Diasporic Roots of the Yoruba Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 41.1 (January 1999): 72–103. Morton–Williams, Peter. “A Yoruba Woman Remembers Servitude in a Palace of Dahomey, in the Reigns of Kings Glele and Behanzin,” Journal of the International African Institute 63.1 (1993): 102–17. Mudimbe, V.Y. Parables & Fables: Exegesis, Textuality, and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991). Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey & Nairobi: Heinemann, 1986). ——.“Europhonism, Universities, and the Magic Fountain: The Future of African Literature and Scholarship,” Research in African Literatures 31.1 (Spring 2000): 1–11. ——.Something Torn and New: An African Renaissance (New York: BasicCivitas, 2009). Renan, Ernest. “What is a Nation?,” in Renan, The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and Other Studies, tr. William G. Hutchison (Qu’est-ce qu’une nation, 1882; tr. London: Walter Scott, 1896): 61–83, repr. in Nations and Identities: Classic Readings, ed. Vincent P. Pecora (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 162–76. Shakespeare, William. The Tempest, ed. G.B. Harrison (1611; London: Penguin, 1995). Thompson, Robert Farris. Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, 1983).

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Torres–Saillant, Silvio. “The Trial of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite,” World Literature Today 68.4 (Autumn 1994): 697–707. Viroli, Maurizio. For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). Walcott, Derek. “A Frowsty Fragrance,” New York Review of Books 47.10 (15 June 2000): 57–61. Warner–Lewis, Maureen. “The Rhythms of Caribbean Vocal and Oral-Based Texts,” in Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul (Kingston, Jamaica: U of the West Indies P , 2007): 54–75. Wilcken, Lois. “The Sacred Music and Dance of Haitian Vodou from Temple to Stage and the Ethics of Representation,” Latin American Perspectives 32.1 (January 2005): 193– 210. ——.Review of Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism, by Michael Largey, Latin American Music Review 28.1 (Spring–Summer 2007): 161–65. Wilentz, Gay, “Nation Language,” in Encyclopedia of Latin American and Caribbean Literature: 1900–2003, ed. Daniel Balderston & Mike Gonzalez (New York: Routledge, 2004): 379. Yaï, Olabiyi Babalola. “African Diasporan Concepts and Practice of the Nation and Their Implications in the Modern World,” in African Roots/American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas, ed. Sheila S. Walker (Lanham MD : Rowman & Littlefield, 2001): 244–55. ——.“Introduction,” African Studies Quarterly 1.4 (1998): 1–2. ——.“The Path is Open: The Herskovits Legacy in African Oral Narrative Analysis and Beyond,” PAS Working Papers 5, ed. Jonathon Glassman, Jane I. Guyer & Mary F.E. Ebeling (1999), http://www.africanstudies.northwestern.edu/docs/publications-research /working-papers/yai-1999.pdf (accessed 2 April 2015).

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Refugees and Three Short Stories from Sri Lanka S IMRAN C H A D H A

T

of words such as ‘refugee’, ‘asylumseeker’, ‘migrant’, and ‘internally displaced person’,1 among others, has made these terms such a normal part of our daily lives that we tend to ignore the manner in which these categories speak to us of societies fast succumbing to ethnic and racial profiling. Moreover, most theoretical writing on refugee situations does not do much to bring home to readers the very personal and subjective experience of alienation and cultural disorientation among those uprooted from their familiar surroundings, or to generate the sort of empathy and tolerance that such crises call for. While, on the one hand, majoritarian policies of home governments have led to refugees’ disempowerment and emigration, on the other, these individuals are treated with suspicion and perceived as disruptive of cultural mores in host countries which grant them asylum. In fact, in these countries they are frequently stigmatized as economic burdens and parasites on available social amenities. The most daunting aspect of being a refugee, however, is what Hannah Arendt terms the “civil death” of the citizen,2 now a refugee: HE FREQ UENT OCC URRENC E

The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinion significant and action effective. [...] They [people deprived of human 1

While the categories listed are technically different from one another, the term ‘internally displaced person’ stands out on account of its singularity and merits an explanation, as it refers to civilians forced to leave their homes and relocate into camps set up by the state. Not having traversed international borders, they are refugees, but within the nation’s boundaries. The military offensive in the Jaffna peninsula, for instance, led to the relocation of Tamils from their villages to state-run refugee camps, referred to as welfare camps. This action was undertaken as part of the state operations to wipe out the Tamil separatist insurgency. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; Cleveland O H & New York: Meridian, 1958): 302.

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rights] are deprived, not of the right to freedom, but of the right to action; not of the right to think whatever they please, but of the right to opinion.3

This article is part of the academic effort that responds to the need to better inform and educate public opinion on the ethics of refugee-care and to show this as necessary if reconciliation and forgiveness are to follow. The three texts that I will discuss here, “Dear Vichy” by Neil Fernandopulle, “The Journey” by Jean Arasanayagam, and “My Motherland” by S. Panneerselvam,4 are short stories that provide insights into the political realities of the Sri Lankan civil war from the perspective of asylum seekers and internally displaced persons.5 The northern region of the Indian subcontinent, where this researcher is located, is an area that has been subject to multiple partitions following decolonization. The partitioning of India into the nation-states of India and Pakistan in 1947 was followed by the partitioning of East Pakistan into Bangladesh in 1971.6 In India, while this was followed by the creation of new administrative states from 1960 to 1999, the demand for separate nation-states has led to brutal violence, as witnessed in the Khalistan movement and in the ongoing insurgency in Kashmir. These territorial partitions, enforced in order to uphold religious and linguistic homogenization, ensured an easy-going cognizance and

3

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 296. Neil Fernandopulle, “Dear Vichy,” in Fernandopulle, Shrapnel: A Collection of Short Stories (Nugegoda: Sarasavi, 2000): 109–16; Jean Arasanayagam, “The Journey,” in Arasanayagam, All is Burning (New Delhi: Penguin, 1995): 1–21; S. Panneerselvam, “My Motherland,” in Dreamboats: Stories from the Sri Lankan Plantations, ed. & tr. M.S. Annaraj & Paul Caspersz (Kandy: Satyodaya Centre for Social Research & Encounter, 2004): 15–19. While the first two short stories are originally in English, the third, by S. Panneerselvam (the first name of this author is designated by the initial ‘S.’, as is, for instance, ‘T.S. Eliot’), has been translated from the Tamil by M.S. Annaraj, one of the editors of the collection published as Dreamboats. 5 According to a study conducted by the University of Bangalore (2009), when the state offensive against the L T T E (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) was at its peak, the number of internally displaced persons in Jaffna amounted to 300,000. The figure refers to the civilian population in welfare/refugee camps. Citizenship and legal rights for internally displaced persons are nonexistent. See The Saga of Agony in Sri Lanka, ed. M.G. Krishnan, Louis Prakash, Paul Newman, Kusul Perera & E. Deenadayalan (Bangalore: Bangalore U P , 2009). 6 The figures for this flow of population during Partitions, justified on grounds of ethnicity and language, have been estimated as nearly fourteen million. Needless to say, the effects of the Partitions of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh reverberated across the subcontinent. For further research details, see Ritu Menon, “Birth of Social Security Commitments: What Happened in the West,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 152–81. 4

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acceptance of the term ‘refugee’ in northern India. However, they also set the trend for contemporary politics which continue to be dictated and dominated by affiliations based on communal identity. The latest addition to this discourse has been the rich, highly evocative, and (to the ‘other’ identity group) tendentious sets of narratives that have emerged in the last quarter-century based on the intertwining of nationalist sentiment with Islamic radicalization in the valley of Kashmir. The resulting exodus of the Pundit community from the valley has led to the creation of a Kashmiri–Pundit diaspora scattered all across India and reaching foreign shores. Since the time of the (official) Partition of Punjab and the creation of the nation-state of Pakistan on the basis of religion, the number of separatist movements seeking to establish a unitary relation between cartographic space and religious identity has escalated unrelentingly. In such situations, refugees are metonymic for all persons who find themselves on the wrong side of such exclusivist ethnic determinants of national identity. The unsurprising result of this homogenization is that the subcontinent has become replete with memories of brutal violence performed on the basis of religion. Partition memories, however, are also deeply interlaced with heartrending nostalgia for abandoned homes, lands, and cultures. Living in northern India, therefore, has meant assimilating personal narratives of betrayal and loss, as senior family members often recount the manner in which freshly demarcated territorial and ethnic boundaries were negotiated. At the same time, it has also meant being acutely aware of the fragility of citizenship rights and identity conferred by national and/or state-belonging. Sri Lanka – the focus of this article – was a colony of the Portuguese, Dutch, and British. Ceylon, as the island was then known, was celebrated for its exemplary cosmopolitanism, exhibited in its racial multiplicity and hybrid cultures. With the entrenchment of electoral democracy, revivalist trends that favoured ethnic and racial purity lent substance to the idea that Sinhala should be declared the official language of Sri Lanka and Buddhism its national religion. The collateral damage of this monochromatic nationalism is amply manifested in the civil wars that raged through the island for over three decades, leading to the assassination of three heads of state7 and the jettisoning of minorities as refugees from the island nation.8 Part of these cataclysmic changes was the mass

7

Sri Lankan Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, assassinated by a Buddhist monk in 1959; Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, assassinated by a Sri Lankan suicide bomber in 1991; and President Ranasinghe Premadasa, assassinated by a suicide bomber in 1993. 8 The island was in a state of war from soon after independence in 1948 until 2009. May 2009 is marked as the day that the L T T E were completely vanquished by the Sri Lankan armed forces.

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exodus of the Burgher community from Sri Lanka in 1956, following the passing in Parliament of the Official Language Act, also referred to as the ‘Sinhala Only’ Act.9 The insurgencies of 1971 and 1987–89 were a manifestation of this majoritarian ethnic trend,10 while, on the other hand, the Tamil separatist movement showed its resistance to this marginalization and even exclusion. With the accretion of the number of Sri Lankans, particularly Tamils, seeking asylum on (hopefully) more tolerant shores, the assessment by the U S Committee for Refugees that refers to Sri Lanka as an “Island of Refugees”11 cannot be dismissed as the economic evaluation of a Third-World culture by a capitalist nation. In this article, I will address narratives of the experiences of persons and groups who are compelled to leave their homes on account of ethnic persecution and conflict. I will do so by exploring three stories which evoke the deeply painful traumas of displacement among the Tamil community of Sri Lanka. A particularly poignant facet of their experience which these stories bring to light is that the subjects of displacement often find that they are not even recognized as refugees. This recognition is a matter of imminent concern, for, as B.S. Chimni, a distinguished scholar of refugee law, points out, it determines “the difference between life and death for an individual seeking asylum.” 12 The stipulations regarding the granting of asylum have time and again been revisited and drafted anew to keep abreast of changing political scenarios. For instance, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees was drafted on account of the politics initiated by the Cold War. It was later supplemented by the 1969 Organisation of African Unity (OAU ) Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, which was followed by the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees. Equally significant were the Bangkok Principles

9

The Sri Lankan Burghers are a community distinguished by intermarriage between the colonizers and the indigenous people of the island; they are an English-speaking people. The ‘Sinhala Only’ act that precipitated their exodus declared Sinhala the national language, and was subsequently used for all official educational purposes. 10 These were the insurgencies conducted by the pro-Sinhala group, the ‘Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’, or J V P . After the 1971 insurgency, this party was proscribed. The second J V P insurgency, between 1987 and 1989, is often referred to as the period of terror in Sri Lanka and was, rather, conducted in the form of guerrilla attacks on those considered anti-national by the Sinhala nationalists. 11 See V. Suryanarayan, “Sheltering Civilians and Warriors: Entanglements in the South,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 322. 12 B.S. Chimni, “Who is a Refugee?,” in International Refugee Law: A Reader, ed. B.S. Chimni (New Delhi: Sage, 2000): 1.

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adopted by the Asian African Legal Consultative Committee in 1966, and the Arab Convention of 1992.13 Nations of the Indian subcontinent, however, are not signatories to the above-mentioned international stipulations regarding refugee care. 14 This makes the refugee policy in these territories rather a matter of administrative decisions taken at state level. It is with reference to this ambivalence that Ranabir Samaddar points out that the refugee policy in the countries of the subcontinent, despite being “the most-observed,” continues to be “the least comprehended political conduct of our times.”15 This is a matter of concern, given the active flow of population between these territories. In the absence of a clearly outlined regime for asylum, however, a refugee is perceived not as “a legal entity or concept with rights and boundaries, but an ‘alien’ who can be there as the shadow, but who must not become a part of the self in its own right.”16 It is this dismal treatment of refugees in the host country and the absence of legal rights for them that prompted Jacques Derrida to express concern similar to that of Chimni and Samaddar in his essay “On Cosmopolitanism.”17 The stories selected for discussion afford insight into this aspect of state jurisprudence and civil society. However, before we embark on the analysis of the texts, a brief assessment of the term ‘refugee’ is needed. While its familiar senses usually imply a person or group of people not domiciled in the region but granted rights of residence, a refugee may be defined as a person in search of an escape from perceived injustice or fundamental incompatibility with her home state. She distrusts the authorities who have rendered continued residence in her country of origin either impossible or intolerable, and desires the opportunity to build a new life abroad.18

When this is applied to Sri Lanka, we find that most of those seeking to leave the island during the civil war(s) often did not qualify for asylum or meet the norms required for cross-country migration. This article deals with the narra13

Chimni, “Who is a Refugee?,” 2 & 9. Samaddar, “Introduction – Power and Care: Building the New Indian State,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Samaddar, 52. 15 “Introduction – Power and Care: Building the New Indian State,” 25. 16 “Introduction – Power and Care: Building the New Indian State,” 52, italics in original. 17 See Jacques Derrida, “On Cosmopolitanism,” tr. Mark Dooley, in Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, tr. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, 1997; tr. London: Routledge, 2001): 16. Derrida speaks about the abysmal change that has occurred regarding hospitality in the contemporary world owing to the abandonment of the practice of what should be a basic human virtue by adhering to an elaborately drawn code of ethics. 18 Chimni, “Who is a Refugee?,” 12. 14

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tives of persons who have been displaced by governments in this manner – by majoritarian violence, economic deprivation, social disentitlement, and political marginalization – whether or not they qualify technically as refugees, migrants, asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons or any other related juridical or official category. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind that the criteria for the recognition of a person as a refugee or as qualifying for asylum are generally drawn up by international organizations, such as the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, on the basis of approval by their member states. Officials of the state thus come to determine who qualifies for asylum and who does not. As mentioned above, this article does not adhere strictly to such official categories; rather, I propose to deal with the subjective experiences of those who see themselves as being in need of refuge, asylum, and assistance. Refugees from Sri Lanka inevitably belong to communities marginalized by the post-independence drive to reclaim an indigenous Sinhalese identity. This meant transforming the essentially hybrid island of Ceylon into the Sinhala–Buddhist nation of Sri Lanka.19 Refugees from the island, then, either as asylum-seekers or as internally displaced persons, are people seeking to escape persecution by either the separatists or the government. Their narratives bear testimony to the victimization that this process of ethnic homogenization and exclusion entails. In Neil Fernandopulle’s short story “Dear Vichy,” the setting is the northern district of Mannar, a site of violent conflict between the Tamil Tigers and the government of Sri Lanka.20 The female narrator, a British passport holder and student of sociology, is a volunteer with the refugee camp set up in Mannar on account of the war. The camp’s location, in a church built 450 years ago by the Portuguese colonizers, serves to juxtapose the imperial past with the postcolonial present. Structured in the form of an exchange of letters between the unnamed narrator and her friend Vichy, the story focuses on one of the women refugees. It is her story that conveys the effect of the war and the devastation it has wrought on individual lives. As a camp volunteer, the narrator finds her attention is taken up with this individual who stands apart from the rest: one day I met a woman who came up to me and spoke in English, in good crisp English. I made it a point to speak with her again later. She had a son of about seven or eight [...]. Her husband, who was an engineer or something, had died, killed by the terrorists or the Army, she wasn’t 19

On internally displaced people in Sri Lanka, see Joke Schrijvers’ essay “Internal Refugees in Sri Lanka: The Interplay of Ethnicity and Gender,” Nivedini 6 (1998): 134–75. 20 The district of Mannar was recaptured by the Sri Lankan armed forces in 2009.

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quite sure. For that matter, she wasn’t sure of anything. She didn’t seem to have any other family or friends, just the boy.21

The disparity between the woman’s education and the squalor of her life in a space partitioned by cardboard boxes continues to haunt the narrator and is reinforced by the awkwardness which she feels in having to reduce this woman to another statistic. The self-reflexivity this dilemma induces in the narrator makes her question academic theories, solutions, and state policy postulated on the basis of collective groupings and purporting to address universals: “I with my Sociology, and Classics and English, trying to study her, who might have read the same books that I have read” (“DV,” 112–13). Memory lapses and the woman’s inability to focus on details are clear indications of her trauma, as is her listlessness. The narrator finds her oblivious of her surroundings, sitting around the porch of the church, “taking her two suitcases wherever she went” (“DV,” 112). The narrator’s inability to disregard this refugee stems largely from her sense of affinity with her – an affinity in terms of education and sensibility, unaffected by their differences in skin-colour or race and ethnicity. This makes the narrator wish to step out of the objectivity needed by her role as a researcher and ask the woman questions which may be deemed personal, such as what she felt about her education and her present state. I wanted to ask her if there is anything in Plato’s “Republic” which resembles the dreams she is dreaming on the steps of the church, or did she see anything similar to her predicament in Euripides’ plays or maybe Sophocles. I wanted to talk to her, because she was so different. She was so different from all of us. She was living her education. I wanted to get her to talk, but I couldn’t approach her. I felt scared. Vichy, I really felt terribly scared. (“DV,” 113)

The woman’s recollection of the cause of her displacement subverts any belief one may entertain regarding the notion of justifiable or legitimate use of violence by the state. Clearly, as a refugee she attributes the violence perpetrated on her in equal measure to the insurgents and the state army. In her reckoning, the difference between the two is invalidated, as is any investment in the idea of the former as terrorists and the latter as the protective state apparatus. Since the collateral damage and death-count caused by the state army is similar to that unleashed by the insurgents, they are no longer manichaean opposites in her thinking. As the woman, now a refugee, reiterates, her husband could have been killed by either one of these bodies – “she wasn’t quite sure” (“DV,” 112).

21

Fernandopulle, “Dear Vichy,” 111–12. Further page references are in the main text after “DV.”

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In a similar vein, the narrator’s experience in the war-zone has led her to doubt her hitherto unquestioned assumption regarding right and wrong or terrorists and saviours in this civil war: I was working in a place called Madhu (I was in Mannar only for about two months), and the terrorists attacked with mortars, oops, I’m, not supposed to use the word terrorists – I mean “Tigers” attacked – all this bloody diplomatic jargon. (“DV,” 110–11)

While the narrator is aware of the humanitarian anomalies occurring on this tiny island, particularly with the heavy censoring of news coverage by the government, she is taken aback by the realization that, despite the trauma and displacement, age-old forms of cultural domination, power, and hierarchy persist. The caste system, for instance, is assiduously followed among the refugees. As the narrator notes, They say that the caste system does not operate in Sri Lanka, at least not as badly as in India, but you could see the whole bloody caste system before your eyes in the camps. If I was a high caste person, I wouldn’t shit in the same lavatory which was used by a low caste, even if I had to shit on the road or under some tree, that’s how it is. And they’ve got the most outrageous castes out here. (“DV,” 110)

Along with caste discrimination, gender exploitation is an insidious and not so subtle presence in this group of displaced persons. One of the inmates, Mugudan, has established a stronghold over the distribution of food-rations and he uses this acquired position of power to deprive the woman refugee of her share of rations: What does a woman who has a university degree in English, Sociology and Western Classics give, to a man, a horrid, filthy man, in return for a packet of milk for her son? In the refugee condition she has only her body to offer. (“DV,” 114)

Personal details such as these, however, are superfluous for the project report the narrator is working on: We just sit in our little office rooms and write reports and do surveys and stats, observation studies, on post-traumatal behaviour [...], file them all in boxes and send them to H Q . [...] things that are never written down in our reports, in our surveys, because I suppose, it’s not our business. We have nothing to gain from learning the inner workings of a person like that. One person doesn’t make a social phenomenon. (“DV,” 113–14)

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Similar undocumented histories, in this case of illegal immigrants from the island nation, form the subject-matter of Jean Arasanayagam’s short story “The Journey,” On account of the armed conflict in the Jaffna peninsula, illegal immigrants from the island were, more often than not, either former cadres of the LTTE ,22 Tamil parents trying to protect their children from a future as child soldiers, suicide bombers for the LT TE ,23 or even civilians seeking a life free of the persecution unleashed by government policies established to stamp out terrorism. From the south of the island, asylum seekers are those who have been former members of anti-state groups, such as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP ). As the narrator of Arasanayagam’s story, a Sinhalese man in his twenties, opines, asylum-seekers are not an unusual occurrence, considering that the island has been blighted with “Conflict”: Ethnicity. Massacres and assassinations. Revolutions. Human rights violations. Disappearances, torture, death. [...] And now, ethnic cleansing, so that the reclaimed territory rests on a foundation of skeletal remains: bones that branch out like a subterranean forest, the flesh nourishing the soil yet its poisons creeping through the still veins to create a monstrous foliage.24

As part of a group of sixteen illegal immigrants – all Tamil – the narrator, who does not speak their language, remains preoccupied with his thoughts for most of the journey. It is his stream of consciousness, as exemplified in the above passage, that recounts the conflicts that this island, once known as Serendip, has been embroiled in since independence. However, as the narrator in “Dear Vichy” points out, news regarding the “huge humanitarian disaster” transpiring in Sri Lanka is heavily censored (“DV,” 113). The civil war(s), which lasted for over three decades with collateral damage resonating through generations, continue to be among the lesser-known or even unknown conflicts of our time. It is significant, therefore, that Arasanayagam’s collection of stories about the wars on the island is entitled All is Burning. As suggested by one of the book’s epigraphs, this title refers to ‘The Fire Sermon’, the third sermon delivered by the 22

The L T T E established an interim mode of administration and governance on the peninsula from approximately 1990 till 2009. The movement of inhabitants was restricted and monitored by the L T T E administration. On the Tigers, see M.R. Narayan Swamy, Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerillas (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2007) and The Tiger Vanquished: L T T E ’s Story (New Delhi: Sage, 2010). 23 For child soldiers and suicide bombers of the L T T E , see, respectively, Tamara Herath, Women in Terrorism: Case of the L T T E (New Delhi: Sage, 2012), and Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia U P , 2005). 24 Jean Arasanayagam, “The Journey,” 5. Further page references are in the main text after “J.”

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Buddha after his enlightenment, in which he speaks about the causes of human suffering and advocates the need to cultivate detachment. In this regard, the narrator’s categorizing of the military action carried out in the north and east as ‘ethnic cleansing’ resonates with the politics of identity that has dominated post-independent Sri Lankan society.25 This military retaliation, undertaken ostensibly in the quest for peace, as the narrator states, has exacerbated the suffering of the civilian population, particularly the Sri Lankan Tamils: Armies of occupation in their soil. Their sons, and daughters too, martial women who have their own regiments, have gone against all the traditions of their society, joining the militant movements. Fighting for a cause. Families broken up. For them, seeking political asylum is often a matter of life and death. (“J,” 7)

While the above reasons validate the need for political asylum for those belonging to the Tamil community of Sri Lanka, the narrator is wary of being granted asylum on similar grounds, since he belongs to the ethnic denomination of the majority. Furthermore, he disavows any association with the antistate JVP movement by defining himself as a “peaceful kind of person” who does not “rave and rant against the exploitation of [his] own people by multinational and vested interests” (“J,” 7–8).26 The narrator’s reason for seeking asylum, however, is the fact that he wishes to lead a life in a land not blighted by ethnic discrimination and its resulting suffering, as he has witnessed on the island. His journey in this regard is an evolutionary step, as it entails transforming the feelings engendered by ethnic conflict – “hatred, enmity, violence” (“J,” 9) – into humane compassion and respect for the humanity of those he has hitherto been taught to consider “strangers, even enemies [...] people who were trying to divide the country, claim territory for themselves” (“J,” 8). This journey enables the narrator, born and raised as a Sinhala Buddhist, to transcend the rigidity of ethnic conclaves that enforce divisions in a land torn apart by racial conflict. In this regard, choosing the identity of an ‘asylum seeker’ or a ‘refugee’ is to tread the path of the Bodhisattva and strive to attain a level of consciousness like the Buddha or the enlightened being (“J,” 8).27 It is significant that the epigraph Arasanayagam 25

This refers to the armed conflict between the Tigers and the G O S L , termed the ‘Eelam Wars’, four in all, dated 1983–87, 1990–95, 1995–2002, and 2006–2009. 26 In keeping with the dictates of the J V P , it was the pro-capitalist stance of governments that was anti-national, hence deserving of decimation by violent means. 27 Both the Theravada and the Mahayana branches of Buddhism advocate the capability of every human being to strive and attain a state of enlightenment akin to that of Gautama Buddha.

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chooses for this short story regarding refuge from conflict consists of lines from a Buddhist text, the Dhammapada: “oneself is one’s own protector (refuge); what other protector (refuge) can there be? With oneself fully controlled, one obtains a protection (refuge) which is hard to gain” (“J,” 1). The destination of the group of refugees is Berlin, a city with a past not free from the violence of ethnic cleansing. Attempts to overcome the narrowness of the mind-set that led to the Holocaust of the Jews is evident in the manner in which Berliners reach out to embrace cultural heterogeneity and in the cosmopolitanism present on the streets of the contemporary metropolis. In a decisive move towards overcoming divisions, the Wall that separated East Germany from the West has been demolished: There’s no East, no West any longer. No Wall. [...] Berlin has known defeat. The defeat of two World Wars. It is a city that seems to be seeking a new identity, one made up of many nationalities and races, not just pure Aryan alone. (“J,” 18)

Cosmopolitanism, however, even when a desired state of civil society, is a process never accomplished in its entirety. Ugly acts of racial discrimination, as the narrator knows and has learnt through media reports, are a recurring phenomenon in Germany, as also in other parts of an otherwise cosmopolitan European society. Racist acts by groups such as the neo-Nazis and skinheads cannot be wished away. However, in the spirit of Berlin, striving towards a more compassionate and evolved manner of existence, the narrator and the other immigrants, too, wish to adapt, evolve, and shed their former labels of identification, earned by acts which associated them unilaterally with death and violence: “terrorists, militants, subversives, misguided youths” and so on (“J,” 6). It is in this regard that the narrator juxtaposes this illegal journey, traversing national borders without visas and passports, with the spiritual passion associated with a pilgrimage. Like a pilgrimage, this journey is undertaken in the hope of cleansing and purifying the human spirit, weary of the violence in which it has hitherto been made to partake. Paid guides lead the group across the Siberian desert into the German capital. The text describes the moments of terror, hardship, and humiliation this journey entails. To avoid detection, the group is made to travel through forests covered with frozen ice; they are stacked above crates in transport containers for hundreds of miles and even packed behind rows of frozen meat carcasses. On account of both the silence necessitated by this journey and the language barrier between the narrator and the other immigrants, the narrator’s mind wanders across space and time. He recollects the historic experience of the

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plantation workers transported from South India two centuries ago by the colonizing British. These workers were deployed as bonded labour to cut down the forests of the hill country and prepare the land for coffee, tea, and rubber plantations. This community of workers was made to endure inhumane hardships as they travelled across “thick, animal-infested jungles [...]. So many died on the way of cholera, dysentery, malaria” (“J,” 4). Once the group arrives in territories designated “no man’s land,” the guide instructs the refugees to destroy all documents connecting them to the identities by which they were known on the island: “from now on, no identity. No identity. You understand that?” Any record pertaining to identification which could link the travellers with their ‘national origins’ and ethnicity, such as “passports, letters, diaries,” must be destroyed (“J,” 12). Ironically, it is the same norms of the nation-state which deemed their journey ‘illegal’ that now enables them to enact an annihilation of their previous identity and adopt newer modes of being by accepting new names on their passports, as inhabitants of another nation. The act acquires symbolic significance, considering that it is ethnic denominations which determine inclusion or exclusion from economic privileges in their country of origin. The civil war on the island was carried out on this account. Identity was the burning issue of the day and appeared insurmountable. Arasanayagam shows the constructed nature of such divisions, as, with the crossing of national borders, those ethnic denominations which hitherto held the power of life or death have now ceased to exist. The narrator juxtaposes this bureaucratic performance with the symbolism of rebirth. Mentally, too, the escapees have shed the burden of their previous identities which labelled them as terrorists and subversives. Crossing man-made borders, especially conflictzone demarcations, is akin to being born anew. Among the group are a woman and her child – a boy of seven or eight. The narrator describes her as a “tough woman. Only tender towards the child” (“J,” 2). She may have been a former fighter with the women’s wing of the Tigers or, then again, perhaps she escaped the peninsula to protect her boy from forced enrolment in the Tigers.28 Arasanayagam highlights the moments of empathy which draw the narrator towards this mother and her son. On seeing the boy shiver, the narrator reaches out for his sweater and later even offers to share his 28

Strict injunctions were chalked out regarding liaisons between L T T E cadres. Female sexuality, in this regard, was closely monitored and controlled by this code of conduct deemed sacrosanct by the movement. The penalty for disobedience was often death. In this regard, the need for asylum by the ‘mother’ in Arasanayagam’s story could be a choice between life or death – for herself and her boy. On the female cadres of the L T T E , see Anne Adele, Women and the Struggle for Tamil Eelam: Freedom Birds of Tamil Eelam (Jaffna: Sri Lanka Publications Section, L T T E , 1990).

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food, strictly rationed, with the little boy. No longer in the war-zones of the island, the Tamil and Sinhala communities may shed their alienating barriers and reach out to each other with humane compassion. In return, the boy’s mother offers the narrator refuge at a critical moment when, shortly after arriving in Germany, he has nowhere to go. The foreignness of the new land connects these ‘warring’ ethnicities on account of their shared past. Ethnic affiliations, however, as the text demonstrates, run deeper than bureaucratic documentation.29 Once the journey is over, the immigrants prefer to move into the insulation offered in their own conclaves, so showing the efficacy of Sri Lankan cultural and linguistic boundaries in terms of social formations. The narrator is glad to be accepted back “among [his] own,” and the mother and child are “welcomed by their own people” (“J,” 20). At the same time, the narrative has also implied the altered nature of ethnic belonging in this new territory. It is multiculturalism and not ethnic conflict that prevails. The journey, moreover, has asserted the humanity that binds the group together and the ability to surmount the narrow boundaries that separate its members from others. The two texts discussed so far point to the manner in which state policy in Sri Lanka has engendered modes of belonging and exclusion. Those excluded are slotted into categories which can be broadly classified as refugees, and these people may either be located in the homeland itself – as internally displaced persons – or seek asylum abroad, perhaps even illegally. The common denominator of these categories implying exclusion is the fact that they consist of communities diverging from the desired national image. The case of the plantation workers of Sri Lanka demonstrates yet another aspect of the victimization resulting from the move to transform the plural and inclusive cultural ethos of Ceylon into a society which is ethnically monolithic. The plantation workers of Ceylon were bonded labour, drawn from the lower castes of South India and deployed for labour-intensive tasks on the island. In this regard, they were integral to an economy that thrived, and continues to thrive, on the cash crops produced on the plantations. This pioneering group of workers came to be known as Hill Tamils, as life in the plantations located in the hill-country enabled the community to develop a cultural ethos distinct from that of the Tamils of either India or Sri Lanka. Emphasizing their distinctness, M.S. Annaraj, a retired Assistant Director for Education in Sri Lanka, specifies: 29

On the formations and development of ethnic communities, see Ethnic Groups and the State, ed. Paul Brass (New Delhi: Sage, 1985).

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Like all other communities in Sri Lanka, the plantation Tamil community too has a separate and distinct identity, a culture and a way of life that is entirely different from that of the other communities, including the other Tamil-speaking communities in Sri Lanka. Their songs, dances, dramas, music and traditions are their very own. [...] For a long time they lived in isolation on their estates by design or by necessisity and hardly interacted with the rest of the people in the country. They were born, they lived and died as workers on the estates, leaving their bones to fertilize the soil of the plantations.30

On account of their low status in the caste hierarchy, the Tamils settled in Jaffna and in Colombo distanced themselves from this group of plantation workers, who subsequently came to be referred to as Indian Tamils, as opposed to the appellation used to denote the category – Sri Lankan Tamils.31 Stigmatized as outsiders, the plantation workers or Indian Tamils, who had contributed significantly to the economic growth of the island, were disenfranchised soon after independence by the Sri Lankan parliament. After two hundred years of living in Ceylon (or Sri Lanka, as it came to be called after independence), members of this community were repatriated to the regions of South India to which they originally belonged.32 However, the ancestral links they once shared with the communities of South India had long been severed and the Sri Lankan plantation workers, as they were referred to in South India, experienced debilitating degrees of alienation in India. Shunted between the two nations, India and Sri Lanka, and subjected to marginalization in both countries, the plantation workers or Indian Tamils – a community that should have been offered the 30

M.S. Annaraj, “Introduction,” in Dreamboats: Short Stories from the Sri Lankan Plantations, iii. The fraught status of this community is illustrated by the fact that they faced communal violence in 1977, 1983, and 2000, on account of their Tamil ethnic affiliation. Expressing this dilemma, Jagian Morgan, a field officer at the estate, states: “The Tamils, they think we are not like them, and the government does not help us because ethnically we are Tamils.” See Melanie Gouby, “Sri Lanka’s Forgotten Tamils,” Open India (16 March 2010), http://www.opendemocracy .net /openindia/melanie-gouby/sri-lankas-forgotten-tamils (accessed 1 May 2015). 32 The parliamentary moves enabling disenfranchisement were the introduction of the Ceylon Citizenship Act in 1948 and amendments to the Parliamentary Election Act. This was also a breakaway from the universal franchise recommended by the Donoughmore Commission in 1928. The political anxiety motivating this parliamentary legislation was based on the weakening of the Sinhala base in the hill country on account of the large number of Indian Tamil residing there. Disenfranchisement would further reduce the threat of Marxist infiltration from South India into the estate trade unions. This was also seen as a protective measure regarding the economy, as plantation cash crops were and continue to be the mainstay of the Sri Lankan economy. See K.M. de Silva, A History of Sri Lanka (1981; New Delhi: Penguin, 2005). 31

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choice of belonging to either of the two countries – were confronted with the damning prospect of statelessness.33 Comparing stateless people and refugees, B.S. Chimni has shown that, although stateless people are technically considered a category apart from refugees, the trauma endured by people in either of these categories, on account of acts of governance, is much the same. This issue is addressed from the point of view of one such plantation worker in S. Panneerselvam’s story “My Motherland.” The narrator, a senior bureaucrat posted in the hill country, is disturbed by the spectacle of a drunken vagabond imploring the inhabitants of this hillside town to pay heed to his story: “Why are you going on as if you haven’t seen or heard me? Wouldn’t at least one of you stop awhile and ask me about my plight?”34 After office hours, the narrator returns to find the derelict, who, in a rare moment of clarity and coherence, recounts the cause of his situation. He informs the narrator that he was born on the island, which he considers his “motherland” (“MM,” 15). He was ten years of age when his parents were repatriated to India: “suddenly the Prime Ministers of the two countries signed an agreement. Every human feeling was squeezed out of this agreement” (“MM,” 17). The plight of the derelict, as the bureaucrat realizes, is that of the community of plantation workers. The plantation worker, now reduced to being a vagabond, describes the blighted, homeless condition and sense of alienation that result from being ousted from the newly nationalized countries: we were frightened to speak in our mother tongue [...] we were humiliated as kallathonies (illegal immigrants), thottakarans (estate people) and stateless people. We were looked down as Indian Tamils. We didn’t even have the right to vote. [...] Wherever I went I was branded a refugee. [...] I have carried the burden of life in two countries, two generations and lakhs of people.” (“MM,” 17)

The attachment to the land illustrates the weight of a semiotic bonding akin to that between mother and infant as conceptualized by the French feminist Julia Kristeva. The semiotic, according to Kristeva, is the prenatal, pre-lingual communication that exists between mother and child. Contrapuntal to this is what Kristeva refers to as the Law of the Father or the realm of the Symbolic, which

33

The Sirimo–Shastri Pact of 1961 led to the repatriation of 60,000 persons of Indian origin to India and 375,000 were accepted as citizens of Sri Lanka. See Subbiah Muthiah, The Indo Lankans: Their 200 Year Saga: A Pictorial Record of the People of Indian Origin in Lanka from 1796 (Colombo: Indian Heritage Foundation, 2003). 34 Panneerselvam, “My Motherland,” 15. Further page references are in the main text after “MM.”

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consists of acquired societal behaviour, including communicable language and the unwritten codes of power as they operate in any given society.35 In the context of Panneerselvam’s text, this sense of hectoring is evident in exclusionary policies practised by the nation as it veers towards cultural nationalism. The plantation community was not spared the violence incurred because of their Tamil affiliations despite the fact that they were disenfranchised on the grounds that they could not be considered Sri Lankan Tamils. As the vagabond explains to the officer, the plantation workers have as a matter of routine been subjected to mental and physical torture by the state authorities on account of their Tamil affiliations. Rejected by civil society formations of both nations – Sri Lanka and India – the plantation Tamils are unanimously referred to as refugees in both countries. The term resonates with the pejorative and parasitical associations it has come to acquire over the years. Again, what is obfuscated are the politics between nations that have brought about this change. The easy use of this slur for people who have contributed significantly to the communities in which they have been living shows how populations are being increasingly balkanized, depending on the ethnic group that commands the majority. This is all the more insidious for societies that are essentially multi-ethnic, such as those in South Asia. To be labelled a ‘refugee’, as the texts discussed have shown, is psychologically traumatic apart from the loss of civil rights. It is an experience that may perhaps be explained by referring to Kristeva’s concept of the ‘abject’, which she describes in The Powers of Horror as essential for human existence. The abject, according to Kristeva, exists on the edge of nonexistence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me. There, abject and abjection are my safeguards. The primers of my culture. [...] Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage, and muck.36

Refugees and internally displaced persons are not just the ‘other’ of those who are legitimately part of the nation but are, rather, the abject of the nation-state – the part that belongs there and yet is dismissed in abjection as the nation seeks to define its cultural limits and set its ethnic boundaries.

35

Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982): 2. 36 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, 2.

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W OR K S C I T E D Adele, Anne. Women and the Struggle for Tamil Eelam: Freedom Birds of Tamil Eelam (Jaffna: Sri Lanka Publications Section, LT TE , 1990). Annaraj, M.S. “Introduction” to Dreamboats: Short Stories from the Sri Lankan Plantations, ed. & tr. M.S. Annaraj & Paul Caspersz (Kandy: Satyodaya Centre, 2004): iii–iv. Arasanayagam, Jean. “The Journey,” in Arasanayagam, All is Burning (New Delhi: Penguin India, 1995): 1–21. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951; Cleveland O H & New York: Meridian, 1958). Bloom, Mia. Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror (New York: Columbia U P , 2005). Brass, Paul, ed. Ethnic Groups and the State (New Delhi: Sage, 1985). Chimni, B.S. “Who is a Refugee?,” in International Refugee Law: A Reader, ed. B.S. Chimni (New Delhi: Sage, 2000): 1–81. de Silva, K.M. A History of Sri Lanka (1981; New Delhi: Penguin India, 2005). Derrida, Jacques. “On Cosmopolitanism,” tr. Mark Dooley, in Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, tr. Mark Dooley & Michael Hughes (Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, 1997; London: Routledge, 2001): 3–24. Fernandopulle, Neil. “Dear Vichy,” in Fernandopulle, Shrapnel: A Collection of Short Stories (Nugegoda: Sarasavi, 2000): 109–16. Gouby, Melanie. “Sri Lanka’s Forgotten Tamils,” Open India (16 March 2010), http://www. opendemocracy.net/openindia/melanie-gouby/sri-lankas-forgotten-tamils (accessed 1 May 2015). Herath, Tamara. Women in Terrorism: Case of the L TTE (New Delhi: Sage, 2012). Krishnan, M.G., Louis Prakash, Paul Newman, Kusul Perera & E. Deenadayalan, ed. The Saga of Agony in Sri Lanka (Bangalore: Bangalore U P , 2009). Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tr. Leon S. Roudiez (Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection, 1980; New York: Columbia U P , 1982). Menon, Ritu. “Birth of Social Security Commitments: What Happened in the West,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 152–81. Muthiah, Subbiah. The Indo Lankans: Their 200 Year Saga: A Pictorial Record of the People of Indian Origin in Lanka from 1796 (Colombo: Indian Heritage Foundation, 2003). Narayan Swamy, M.R. The Tiger Vanquished: L TTE ’s Story (New Delhi: Sage, 2010). ——.Tigers of Lanka: From Boys to Guerillas (Colombo: Vijitha Yapa, 2007). Panneerselvam, S. “My Motherland,” in Dreamboats: Short Stories from the Sri Lankan Plantations, ed. & tr. M.S. Annaraj & Paul Caspersz (Kandy: Satyodaya Centre for Social Research & Encounter, 2004): 15–19. Samaddar, Ranabir. “Introduction – Power and Care: Building the New Indian State,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 21–68. Schrjvers, Joke. “Internal Refugees in Sri Lanka: the Interplay of Ethnicity and Gender,” Nivedini 6 (1998): 134–75.

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Suryanarayan, V. “Sheltering Civilians and Warriors: Entanglements in the South,” in Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947–2000, ed. Ranabir Samaddar (New Delhi: Sage, 2003): 321–54.

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Gateway to the Unknowable The Kala Pani in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies and Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès J O H N C. H AW L EY

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of novels dealing with the kala pani, Brinda J. Mehta defines the term as “black water,” referring to “the crossing of the Indian and Atlantic Oceans by thousands of economically disenfranchised Indian agricultural workers under a pernicious system of indentured labor that lasted from 1838 to 1917.”1 The system of indenture became a useful substitute for the slavery that was officially abolished by the British in 1838, and by the French in 1848. Since Mehta argues that anglophone treatments of the kala pani have dominated the discussion, shortchanging those that reflect on experiences in the French colonies, I seek in this essay to address that imbalance by comparing the anglophone Sea of Poppies and the francophone Bénarès, and, in the process, I will describe the parallactic view of the kala pani to which the texts in question serve as companion doorways. Ghosh sets his novel Sea of Poppies in 1838 India, with all eyes facing the challenge of the kala pani that lies ahead of them.2 Pyamootoo sets Bénarès in the late-twentieth century, focusing on the descendants of the sort of journey that Ghosh’s characters are about to make.3 If Ghosh’s protagonists cannot foresee their future, Pyamootoo’s are even less capable of retrieving their past. The moment of setting off across the black water, in the case of Sea of Poppies, or living in the aftermath of that journey, in the case of Bénarès, offers readers two contrasting views of Homi Bhabha’s notion of liminality, the “interstitial passage between fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of 1

N HER DI SC USSION

Brinda J. Mehta, “Indianités francophones: Kala Pani Narratives,” L’Esprit Créateur 50.2 (2010): 1. Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). 3 Barlen Pyamootoo, Bénarès and In Babylon, tr. Will Hobson (Bénarès, 1999; tr. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). 2

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a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”4 For Sea of Poppies, the kala pani presents the border of known reality, and thus stands as a doorway to something terrifying but potentially liberating. In the process of crossing over, “the boundary becomes the place from which something begins its presencing in a movement not dissimilar to the ambulant, ambivalent articulation of the beyond.”5 Yet, if Bhabha’s analysis nicely describes the experience of Ghosh’s characters, one is initially hardpressed to see how it might be relevant to the lived reality of Pyamootoo’s. While less immediate than those of a sea voyage, the terrors of Bénarès are real and similarly liminal: Pyamootoo’s characters are gazing across the doorway from the other side, looking into their past as overdetermined rather than into an open-ended future. Their gateway skews toward the temporal, whereas that of Ghosh’s characters appears to be initially spatial. Pyamootoo’s plot foregrounds the delimitation of connectivity with India produced by the transportation across the kala pani generations before, and insulates his characters from a larger sense of self in the grand scheme of ‘history’. Their colonization years before, as the novella partly reveals to them, has calcified their place in the world as minor actors. Both texts exemplify the salient tropes of the genre of the kala pani crossing that Brinda J. Mehta describes: Questions of identity and (non)-belonging in diaspora and in relation to India; resistance to cultural assimilation; gender ideologies; sexuality; negotiations of race and ethnicity within dominant Afro-centered paradigms; the exilic symptoms of migration and plantation life; cultural memory; religious authenticity; and accommodations of creolization.6

As the first in a proposed trilogy,7 Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies is by definition a work under construction. As one critic observes, Sea of Poppies is a novel of preparation. Much of its narrative energy is expended in ground-clearing, in elaborating the contours of the habitats within which to house and position the characters [.. .]. Most of the people of the novel embody cultural legacies, [...] accretions of varying densities.8 4

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994): 4. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 5, italics in original. 6 Mehta, “Indianités francophones: Kala Pani Narratives,” 1. 7 Completed by River of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011) and Flood of Fire (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015). 8 Bibhash Choudhury, “‘Fraught with a Background’: Identity and Cultural Legacy in Sea of Poppies,” in Amitav Ghosh: Critical Essays, ed. Bibhash Choudhury (New Delhi: P H I Learning, 2009): 164. 5

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In short, Ghosh is laying a foundation for all that will follow in his planned trilogy. The reader’s experience of waiting for the full story to unfold is part of this essay’s undergirding subject-matter: the aesthetics of anticipation, the explication of narrative structure, and the sense of an ending that can typify fictions we describe as realist – these function, in the public reception of planned trilogies, as principal attractions that draw readers to the ‘construction site’. Readers share an expectation that plot details lead eventually to a conclusion less random than the incidents in their own lives may appear to them to be. As Ghosh’s story unfolds, it becomes clear that he is bringing together on board a ship called the Ibis characters drawn from a broad spectrum of Indian life and caste in 1838, just before the Opium Wars, and sending them off to Mauritius for work on a plantation. As anticipated for the first book of a trilogy, the vector of incident and the accretion of characters suggest an unfolding destiny and fateful coincidence of lives reminiscent of a Dickens rather than a Beckett. Among the characters is Deeti, an uneducated and unassuming woman married to an infertile husband, Hukam Singh. We learn that Hukam’s brother is the actual father of Deeti’s daughter, Kabutri. When Hukam dies after working in the opium factory, Deeti has the choice between sati and flight. She chooses the latter, and is aided in her escape by the low-caste Kalua; they both aim to become indentured servants and ship to Mauritius. Another protagonist, Neel Rattan Halder, is a rajah who refuses to sell his estates to a Mr Burnham to pay his debts, and is then falsely accused and condemned for forgery, and sentenced to indentured servitude in Mauritius. Zachary Reid, second mate on the Ibis, is an American with a white father and slave mother. Ah Fatt is another important character on board the ship, an opium addict and friend to Halder. Paulette flees from Burnham, who had adopted her, and runs away with her friend (or brother?) Jodu. Although each is drawn to the ship for a different reason, the Ibis functions for these colourful characters as a utopia, a no-place, a man-made island that offers freedom from the shackles of colonization and caste, a temporary respite from the fixed social positions that threaten to reassert themselves once Mauritius comes into view. Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, by contrast, is set at the end of the twentieth century on Mauritius itself, the same island to which Ghosh’s Ibis heads, and seems to be the very opposite of a gateway for the author’s characters. Mayi (a fisherman) and Nad (a garage mechanic) are driven from Bénarès to Port Louis by their cabbie friend, Jimi, seeking a couple of prostitutes. This is Mayi’s first trip to the capital and, it appears, is to be his first sexual experience. They convince the two women they contact, Zelda and Mina, to take the trip back to Bénarès with them, though it takes some persuading, since the two women

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have never been there and are not sure whether it is worth the effort. The comparative stasis of Pyamootoo’s fictive world offers an entry point into a metaphorical journey inward, one that no doubt plays a role in Ghosh’s novel but that here assumes greater prominence in the comparative paucity of incident. As with any island, there is little physical geography to travel, and arguably more incentive to look more intently within. Although the novel’s title suggests to most readers a tale probably set in the great holy city in India, in fact it soon becomes clear that the site in question is a tiny city in Mauritius without much importance in the larger scheme of things; in fact, the faux-parallel between the two cities in Mauritius and India presents polar opposites in the universe of significance. Pyamootoo’s choice of this remote Mauritian version of the Indian city seems intentionally ironic: the author might, for example, have chosen as the book’s title Port Louis, the Mauritian capital. And though Bénarès was published eleven years before Sea of Poppies, Pyamootoo’s setting can now be read for its rhizomatic connections with a colonial history unknown by most of his characters, as a postmodern evisceration of the apparent telos for Ghosh’s wanderers. Described by Pyamootoo as a literal no-place, it metonymically colonizes and dessicates the cultural richness that was left behind in India: despite the remarkable resonance of the village’s name, it does not appear on the official Mauritian website,9 which instead highlights the island’s shopping venues and beaches, the estate of Bertrand–François Mahé de La Bourdonnais (governor of Mauritius in 1735, then known as l’Île de France), and Maheswarnath, the large Hindu temple built in 1819. Pyamootoo’s characters set out on a much smaller journey of one night’s duration, travelling from Port Louis to Bénarès, but their off-handed and naive questions about the island’s history crazymirrors the ironic escape from cultural chains that is Ghosh’s subject. The spare novella echoes Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in its emblematic use of slight action and flat characters to suggest broader existential questions. In Bénarès it is the subject him/herself that is under apparent construction, but the classic quest journey is so abbreviated and most of the characters are so oblivious to anything so grand as a ‘quest’ that the reader quickly senses that there is nowhere for them to go, and that one reason for this entrapment is their lack of imagination. Their gateway, both external and internal, opens onto a bleak ghost town. The two texts can be read as logical bookends on the panorama of colonialism, with Ghosh’s characters heading off to Mauritius and Pyamootoo’s in Mauritius wondering vaguely where they themselves have come from.

9

Discover Mauritius, http://www.mauritius.net (accessed 29 September 2013).

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These two works suggest another metaphorical gateway: the point of entry into the fictive world on offer, constructed for the reader using as blueprints the formal requirements we have for the genre we expect the two works to represent (the novel, in the case of Ghosh, and the novella in the case of Pyamootoo). Amitav Ghosh is categorized as a chronicler of South Asia and its colonial history, but Barlen Pyamootoo is an unknown quantity. We pick up Bénarès as a curiosity, but his national origin and the title of the novella trigger expectations similar to those we bring to our reading of Ghosh’s book. These two contemporary texts show a spectrum in the demands readers make of form when they approach postcolonial fiction, expectations made canonical by academics. As Neil Lazarus notes with disapproval, such readings look for and inevitably find (because the purview dismisses those works that do not fit the paradigm) certain predictable characteristics: the instability and indeterminacy of social identity, the volatility and perspectivalism of truth, the narratorial constructedness of history, the ineluctable subjectivism of memory and experience, the violence implicit in the universalist discourse of the nation, the corresponding need to centre analysis on the notions of migrancy, hybridity, diaspora, ‘inbetweenness’, ‘translation’, and ‘blasphemy’ (as anti-hegemonic forms of transgression), and so on.10

Sea of Poppies employs the tropes that Lazarus finds predictable. Bénarès is arguably painted with broader strokes, but Pyamootoo also uses the text to explain how the island gains its meaning from the larger colonial history in which it is situated. With Pyamootoo, readers begin reading a novella reminiscent of existential works such as Sartre’s No Exit or Beckett’s aforementioned Waiting for Godot until midstream in the work. Readers find it necessary to adjust their expectations, finally recognizing a postcolonial/postmodern hybrid that, unlike Sea of Poppies, has very little in common with a nineteenth-century novel. For Ghosh’s characters, the island is overdetermined as a brave new world, and the novel is peopled by characters that Virginia Woolf would have found to be unnecessary echoes of an earlier age, while for all but one of Pyamootoo’s protagonists Mauritius exists initially as a blank canvas. When its naive characters have a brush with ‘history’ because one of them knows a bit more than the others (or takes a brush to history), it is as though they have left the Garden of Eden and lost their prelapsarian innocence: the ‘postcolonial’ characteristics of fiction that Lazarus finds stultifying come to the fore as residual effects of Mauritius’s troubled colonial past in a text that otherwise might 10

Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011): 22.

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have impressed Pyamootoo’s readers as simply postmodern. In this sense, the two texts speak to each other as more and less ‘postcolonial’, and as stylistically anachronistic (Ghosh) and cutting edge (Pyamootoo). Perhaps because critics knew what to expect from Amitav Ghosh and had no frame in which to view Barlen Pyamootoo, their two kala pani works (if we can broaden the term to include texts peopled by characters whose ancestors have already crossed the dangerous waters) had vastly different receptions. Sea of Poppies is surely one of the best-reviewed novels of 2008. It was selected as a best book of 2008 by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Washington Post, the Economist, New York magazine, the Christian Science Monitor, and Publishers Weekly, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Shashi Tharoor, writing in the Washington Post, typifies the enthusiasm: At times, Sea of Poppies reads like a cross between an Indian Gone with the Wind and a Victorian novel of manners. And yet Ghosh has managed a sharp reversal of perspective. His ship, with the author’s fine feel for nautical niceties, sails in Joseph Conrad territory, through waters since romanticized by the likes of James Clavell. But whereas those writers and so many others placed the white man at the center of their narratives, Ghosh relegates his British colonists to the margins of his story, giving pride of place to the neglected subjects of the imperial enterprise: colonialism’s impoverished, and usually colored, victims.11

Adam Mars–Jones follows suit, describing the novel as “a remarkably rich saga [...] which has plenty of action and adventure à la Dumas, but moments also of Tolstoyan penetration – and a drop or two of Dickensian sentiment.”12 Furthermore, as John Thieme notes, the seaboard sections rival those of Melville and Conrad, but the scenes ashore are equally gripping and one leaves this long page-turner wishing it could continue. One waits eagerly for its sequels. Sea of Poppies is a tremendous novel [...] his ‘Ibis’ trilogy will surely come to be regarded as one of the masterpieces of twenty-first-century fiction.13

11

Shashi Tharoor, “Soldiers and Victims of the Opium War,” Washington Post (19 October 2008), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR2008101603324.html (accessed 1 August 2011). 12 Adam Mars–Jones, review of Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, The Observer (8 June 2008), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/08/fiction1 (accessed 1 August 2011). 13 John Thieme, review of Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, Literary Review (2008), http://www .penguinbooksindia.com/amitavghosh/sea_of_poppies.html (accessed 3 June 2011).

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These reviewers are eager to anchor the novel firmly in the Western canon. One review concludes, for example: This is a deeply old-fashioned novel, unburdened by post-modern trickery and driven by plot devices that Robert Louis Stevenson would have loved. Grudges must be avenged, debts paid off, pasts hidden. As love, greed and ambition hasten the pace, more nuanced themes of faith and ideology languish, though boundaries of class, caste and race blur subversively once the Ibis leaves the dock for Mauritius.14

Such reviewers assure readers that they’ll not be distracted by a lot of postmodern folderol in Ghosh, and they’ll find in Sea of Poppies in particular a highly readable continuation of the nineteenth-century realist novel. And, of course, such reviews are accurate. By contrast, Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, published in French in 1999 and in English translation in 2004, has come and gone with barely a ripple of interest from reviewers, despite the fact that the author subsequently made it into a film.15 It is not surprising that he would have a difficult time bringing his work to the screen, since, in contrast to the graphic complexities of Sea of Poppies that cry out for grand visualization, swelling music, ornate costumes, and complex settings, Bénarès suggests a quiet, simple, flat, and undetermined landscape; a good number of independently-produced films that do not aim for a mass audience would also fit such a description. This was, in fact, the first Mauritian feature film made by a Mauritian and using Mauritian actors, and Binita Mehta writes that “the characters evoke memories of Banaras, India, sing songs from Hindi commercial films, and communicate with each other in Mauritian creole.”16 In Mehta’s view, the film offers Pyamootoo an opportunity to reclaim the island: Pymootoo’s film shows the realities of failure. He is not interested in depicting the Mauritius of the luxury hotels and beach resorts seen in travel brochures, choosing instead to portray the rich countryside of the economically depressed towns and villages of the interior.17 14

Hephzibah Anderson, “Opium Addicts, Beheaded Traders Crowd Ghosh’s Shipboard Trilogy,” Bloomberg News (10 October 2008), http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive& refer=book&sid=aiNJGM48IsSM (accessed 1 August 2011). 15 Pyamootoo’s film Bénarès (2005) is not to be confused with the 2006 Bollywood film Banaras: A Mystic Love Story, directed by Pankaj Parashar, or the 2009 Banaras, a Malayalam musical film by Nemom Pushparaj. 16 Binita Mehta, “Memories in/of Diaspora: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999),” L’Esprit Créateur 50.2 (2010): 48. 17 Mehta, “Memories in/of Diaspora,” 56–57.

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One might say he is doing much the same in the novella, removing from the readers’ consciousness anything they may know about contemporary Mauritius as a tropical getaway. The cartography of the novella, like its plot, is not memorable, as if the characters and their island should not be possessed too completely by interlopers (including readers). Indeed, Ghosh’s novel is a far more substantial work, with Pyamootoo’s mere 59 pages of large print overshadowed by Ghosh’s 550 pages, followed by second and third volumes of similar length in the trilogy. The relative impact on readers is less one-sided or predictable, though. If Ghosh’s novel is marked by plenitude, Pyamootoo’s technique embraces the minimalism of much existentialist fiction. But if Pyamootoo broadly hints at the absurdism typifying much of that genre, some readers will find Bénarès ultimately more haunting than Ghosh’s work in its stark realism and very partial portrayals of less scripted characters. For example, the narrator, Nad, smokes a cigarette and muses over his job, worrying about the time they were taking off for this trip: He’ll be pissed off with me, he could even threaten me with the sack. Oh well, he can just sack me then, can’t he? I’ll find another garage or else I’ll change job [...] I was quietly mulling over some questions about being a plumber [...] when suddenly there were a succession of cries outside that sounded like squeals, short and piercing. A wounded animal probably, crying or calling for help. I thought of a dog that had been run over, and I thought how that must feel, to be crushed, then abandoned. 18

The parallel with Nad’s own position in society is passed over in silence. Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies imagines an Indian Ocean history that before now had been overlooked by most of his readers, and perhaps because it sets as a goal the materialization of people and incidents that had effectively been erased before he had set about the writing of this trilogy, his story does not threaten readers as personally as Bénarès may do. Ghosh asks the meaning of received history; Pyamootoo asks more broadly the meaning of life. The existential overtones that ring throughout Pyamootoo’s short narrative seem best embodied in Nad, who at one point in the characters’ evening journey suggests that “stories must be what we travel for, to have something to tell the people we love” (45). 19

18

Pyamootoo, Bénarès, 57. Further page references are in the main text. Nad’s insight rings true to the underpinnings of existentialist psychology. See, for example, Gary Kenyon, “The Meaning/Value of Personal Storytelling,” in Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development, ed. Gary Kenyon, James E. Birren, Jan–Erik Ruth, Johannes J.F. Schroots & Torbjörn Svensson (New York: Springer, 1996): 21–38. 19

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What is it, then, that each novelist wishes us to take away from his book? The chosen form is itself a signal: a matter, analogously, of comparing one of Shakespeare’s dramas with one of his sonnets. In the case of Shakespeare the playwright versus Shakespeare the poet, there is something to be said for the force of narrowing the lens and thereby bringing an emotion into sharper focus. What is gained in that sharper focus is a lasting resonance and identification with the clearly reproduced emotion; what is gained in the longer work is an actual reconstruction of the period being described. Pyamootoo offers a gateway to a personal encounter with the results of colonization in the lives of those who do not even know the history of that event; Ghosh both retrieves and creates a history of that colonization that is otherwise an abject non-event for those who have been victorious beneficiaries of the forgotten events. One senses that the fifty-odd pages of Bénarès, and the more than 1,500 pages of Ghosh, have in common a desire to present a narrative connecting the postcolonial to the colonial, and yet their purpose in making that connection does not seem to be the same: Ghosh has an eye on more typically postcolonial themes (injustice, hybridity), and Pyamootoo instead either moves directly to Ur-philosophical questions (why do I, personally, exist at this time and in this place?) or suggests the kind of secondary colonization that one might see was all for naught in the ‘hinduization’ of Mauritius. Judging from the depiction of his characters, the citizens of Mauritius are adrift in the Indian Ocean without any philosophical or religious anchor, their indentured servitude having obliterated their cultural heritage almost as effectively as had slavery in other realms of the various eighteenth-century empires (and, indeed, among the descendants of enslaved black Mauritians). Even on so small a landscape as that of Mauritius, Zela and Mina, the two women who accompany the narrator of Pyamootoo’s novel on his journey, have never heard of ‘their’ Bénarès, a place they fear is too far a trip for one night’s work, but which Nad assures them is “not as far as all that” (7). He explains to them that there is another Benares in another country (generally spelled Banaras, and nowadays called Varanasi), and that it is considered sacred “because Hindus believe they’ll go to paradise if they die in Benares” (41). For centuries, he tells the two women, it has been the case that lots of people head there as soon as they feel the first signs of death. They leave their homes and their families and embark on what are sometimes very long, arduous journeys just so they can die in Benares and be sure of going to paradise. (41)

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‘Postcolonial’ readers might immediately ask whether or not the narrator perceives “the first signs of death” in his companions, but in any case they do not take his cue to move along the same reflective path that he superimposes on their spontaneous evening mapping of the island. Zelda finds the Hindu beliefs that Nad describes to be unfair to the good people who do not get to Benares in time, especially as bad people must sometimes successfully make the trip. The narrator responds that “it’s only cruel if you believe in paradise,” and he tries “to make her understand that dying’s not about paradise,” that, in fact, “it’s not about anything at all” (42) – but she won’t listen. He, it seems clear, has long since given up on the concept of paradise, and his narration is nothing if not imminent and secular to its core, despite his wistful allusions to the sacred city on the shores of the Ganges. Pyamootoo is writing something akin to a mock epic, a most abbreviated quest without a chosen object (no Holy Grail), but one with a seriocomic teleology nonetheless: procuring a (first) sexual experience. Seeming much less traditional than Ghosh in his expectation of the sense of a satisfying ending in one’s narrative or one’s life, Pyamootoo raises the question of whether or not there is, in fact, anywhere to have ‘come from’ or to be heading towards. Even this dumpy local version of the far grander Benares in India strikes Pyamootoo’s women as frightening and inaccessible, and the form in which the author presents the tale suggests that he does not want to make any grand claims for the significance of these women’s lives. The time of heroes and of pilgrimages seems to have ended.20 Pyamootoo constructs a confluence of secularity and postcolonial aftermath here, since his protagonist has earlier remarked on how Bénarès and the rest of the island is now populated by tourists from Germany, France, Italy, and elsewhere – folks, one assumes, who are seeking a tropical paradise – and he remarks how strange it felt being surrounded by all those whites who spoke so kindly to him; he’d never come across that before, people who asked so many questions. ‘It’s strange,’ he murmured, and he wiped his forehead pensively with his handkerchief, ‘it’s like being on another planet...’ (14)

20

Binita Mehta claims that “the long return trip to Bénarès in the novel replicates the transoceanic journey of the coolies across the Kala Pani and also the land journey of Hindu pilgrims to the holy city of Banaras” (49). This, it seems to me, is wishful thinking: Pyamootoo’s parallels with the kala pani trip and the pilgrimage to Banaras are only convincing as indications of how empty of resonance the Indian cultural heritage has become (at least for his characters) in Mauritius.

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This is an interesting comment; perhaps not completely reminiscent of the Stockholm syndrome (in which the victimized identifies self-protectively with the interests of the victimizer), but indicative that he, like the two women, has not asked a lot of questions of his homeland. Tourists want to know the history much as they want snapshots, as laying partial claim to the property; the locals seem to be indifferent to the trappings of colonization. ‘History’, perhaps, appears far too grand a concept, suggestive of an invader’s nominalist agenda; suggestive, even, of a narrative that might envision a conclusion beyond this world, this island. The spectre of death and one’s journey towards it quickly comes into view in Pyamootoo’s brief fiction, with its hollow and ominous ending. As they turn a corner and the village comes into view, Jimi calls out “Bénarès!,” and Nad tells us that “it sounded like the end of a game, or when rehearsals have finished” (58). Here, at the entrance to Bénarès, the group pauses in front of the imposing, newly restored colonial sugar-mill chimney, and Mina instinctively gets it right: “It really is just like a war memorial,” she says, adding, with a quaver in her voice, “It sends shivers up my spine” (59). Nad takes a more defiant tone, suggesting how the locals reclaimed the property: ‘This is where we play football,’ I said, ‘and before we start a game we sweep up all the straw that blows in from the fields,’ and I pointed out the goalposts. Behind one of them you could see all of Bénarès. (59)

Thus, the physical, metaphysical, and aesthetic come together in these suggestive final lines of the novella: the goalposts through which you can see all of Bénarès, the Mauritian counterpart of the sacred Indian city where the fortunate go to die. Here, that grand symbol is made an ambiguous object toward which the narrator used to kick a ball – nothing any more portentous than that, much like the text itself. Pyamootoo chooses this symbol to end his novella, the mockingly resonant conclusion of a carnivalesque night oddly without debauchery and a novella mostly without incident and certainly without important characters. Pyamootoo conjures up, like some latter-day Caliban who has picked up Prospero’s abjured book, an island without magic that offers a grim aria da capo for the descendants of the Ibis and ships like it, but that also offers a site for diasporic re-creation. The stark difference between Pyamootoo’s and Ghosh’s works is suggested in the ends to which storytelling is put in each. As the Ibis of Ghosh’s novel casts anchor “at the last place from which the migrants would be able to view their

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native shore,”21 Deeti, the central female character, sings a narrative song, and the book’s narrator remarks: Neel, ever the obedient son, had allowed the language to wither in his head, yet, unbeknownst to him, it had been kept alive – and it was only now, in listening to Deeti’s songs, that he recognized that the secret source of its nourishment was music: he had always had a great love of dadras, chaitis, barahmasas, horis, kajris – songs such as Deeti was singing. Listening to her now, he knew why Bhojpuri was the language of this music: because of all the tongues spoken between the Ganges and the Indus, there was none that was its equal in the expression of the nuances of love, longing, and separation – of the plight of those who leave and those who stay at home. (389)

The romanticism of these lines, imposed on his characters by the migrant Ghosh, builds upon an essentialist understanding of languages, but this melancholia is certainly missing in the characters one encounters in Bénarès, where one looks in vain for the “nuances of love, longing, and separation” (389) in the conversation of the novella’s principals. Underscoring his point, Ghosh continues with Neel’s musing: How had it happened that when choosing the men and women who were to be torn from this subjugated plain, the hand of destiny had strayed so far inland, away from the busy coastlines, to alight on the people who were, of all, the most stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga, in a soil that had to be sown with suffering to yield its crop of story and song? It was as if fate had thrust its fist through the living flesh of the land in order to tear away a piece of its stricken heart. (389)

Very portentous words, indeed, fully committed to narrative direction as a metaphor for life’s ultimate seriousness and the significance of even the lowest of the low, those whom “fate” had come in search of and of whom “destiny” expected much. In the world of Bénarès, though not of the Indian Benares, that all seems a bit silly and overblown, a popular novelist weaving a familiar pattern of connections, intentions, and ultimate meaning. Some might say, in fact, that the romanticization is counter-productive, emphasizing these characters’ significance so blatantly that the more sceptical reader might briefly lose the fight against disbelief. One senses this recoil in Toby Lichtig’s generally laudatory review of Ghosh’s novel, when we read the concluding caution: Its characters remain more ‘colourful’ than believable. We don't really get under their skin, and this affects our ability to empathise. When one 21

Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, 386. Further page references are in the main text.

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man receives a pitiless lashing, we shrink in physical more than emotional horror. We get a memorable and sweeping sense of 1830s southern India, but not of what it might have felt like to live in it: as a hopeful coolie, a fallen raja, a corrupt judge or an amorous memsahib. Siddhartha Deb recently accused epic Anglo-Indian fiction of succumbing to “the megalomania of the Borgesian map.” And this is Ghosh’s problem. His fiction is more than mere cartography; but it is not immune from cartography’s dimensional limitations.22

And now, in Pyamootoo’s version, it is two hundred years later and the descendants of this chosen population on Ghosh’s lyrical ship, once so “stubbornly rooted in the silt of the Ganga” (389), have little or no memory of their history or their rootedness. Indeed, one gets the sense from the novella’s comparative insubstantiality that no one in Mauritius can be firmly rooted, as if the vast ocean could at any moment reclaim the tenuous landscape – or the brief novella that represents it. Pyamootoo’s narrator vaguely notes that “it happened a long time ago, over two hundred years,” then he “looked away slightly and lied, ‘It’s too long ago for anybody to remember properly’.” He “slumped down in [his] seat, [...] felt exhausted, drained and sad all of a sudden, like you do at the end of something” (51). This moment spells the end of the indentured servitude and empire that journeys like that of the Ibis supported, but the sudden sadness suggests the narrator’s unanticipated recognition of the end, as well, of the dreams of those of his predecessors, like the characters whom Ghosh painstakingly assembles over the course of 550 pages. It is intriguing that Pyamootoo chose to include Bollywood touches in the film he directed, since in the novella he quite definitively puts paid to the romantic notion of Indian (let alone Hindu) roots being transplanted to Mauritius. In his classic work on rites of passage, Arnold van Gennep speaks of liminal zones between two areas, often with a neutral zone in between. He writes that “whoever passes from one to the other finds himself physically and magicoreligiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds.”23 He subdivides the category as follows: the rites of separation from a separate world, preliminal rites, those executed during the transitional stage liminal (or threshold) rites, and the ceremonies of incorporation into the new world post-liminal rites.24 22

Toby Lichtig, “Sex ’n Drugs ’n Folderol,” New Statesman (1 May 2008), http://www.new statesman.com/books/2008/05/amitav-ghosh-poppies-sea-raja (accessed 1 August 2011). 23 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom & Gabrielle L. Caffee (Les rites de passage, 1909; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1960): 18. 24 Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, 21, italics in original.

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Since there was no actual ritual performed by Ghosh’s characters, their preparation for (preliminal) crossing the kala pani, their actual days travelling the Indian Ocean (the liminal), and the landing on Mauritius (the post-liminal) must be read as rites of passage only in a metaphorical sense, but the passage has real consequences. The migrants, writes Binita Mehta, mostly Hindus, lost not only their caste status but their history and identity by crossing the treacherous waters and had little idea of what landfall would be like. There was no going back for these indentured laborers, and the future was unknown. They had to create their own history.25

We might add that the preparation for, and then the writing of, the novel is another step removed from an actual rite of passage, but can be seen (consider the long history of divine afflatus) as another rite of passage, this time for the writer. The journey that Pyamootoo’s characters make to Port Louis and then the return home to Bénarès is less substantial, and thus less immediately convincingly described as a rite of passage or an entry into the liminal. Nonetheless, it is suggestive to learn that Pyamootoo himself describes the men’s trip as an initiation – an entry into the world of sexuality, since at least one of them is a virgin.26 For the women, it is arguably an initiation into a wider world, and even to the whole concept of a spiritual realm: thus, for the women, the brief trip to Bénarès is something much closer to a traditional rite of passage, a crossing of liminal space into a sacred (though greatly disguised) space. Visiting the Mauritian Bénarès is an initially scary concept for them, but the Indian Benares that they hear about opens up a potentially far more life-changing world. Pyamootoo’s novella ends too soon for us to see what difference this new knowledge of a larger world might make in the lives of Zelda and Mina. In a surprising move, and one that Ghosh would surely endorse, Pyamootoo holds out hope for storytelling, for imagination, even in the lives of what some would call a subaltern class. Pyamootoo’s narrator, in fact, goes so far in his decision to make meaning in the face of little evidence for it that he lies to the women and tells them he has visited not only the Mauritian Bénarès but the Indian one as well; and on that imagined trip to India he claims to have fascinated the Indians (as he now fascinates the Mauritians) by telling them of the ‘other’ Bénarès so far away in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And the effect on the Indians was, he claims, significant: the Indian listener

25 26

Mehta, “Memories in/of Diaspora,” 48. “Memories in/of Diaspora,” 61, fn11.

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felt proud to live in one of [the Benares’s], maybe because it gave him the feeling of opening up to the world, of becoming part of some sort of network which must have seemed pretty vast and mysterious, which he’d never suspected existed until then… (49)

In his tale-telling, Nad never describes the Indian Benares as historically prior to the one in Mauritius, suggesting an even greater equivalence between the two sites; it is as if the dream of identification with the people who have found a gateway to paradise that he is weaving for Zelda and Mina is as available as a phone-call away. But, as he admits to a querulous Mayi, he is not conscious of why he is making up such a story and connection with a place he has never actually visited. In fact, he undercuts the very notion of names’ meaning anything at all, mocking Jimi, their driver, for doing so: Jimi was telling Mina and Zelda the name of every village we drove through [...]. The houses seemed empty, abandoned years ago [...] the night is filled with ghosts. It was an absurd thought, but no more so than Jimi’s litany of names. When we were driving between the villages, he’d lean out of the window and watch the mountains gliding gently by from left to right. Maybe he was looking for the meaning of the name he had just said. (55)

Thangam Ravindranathan nicely isolates several of these issues, noting that Pyamootoo’s narrator resists the neat closure that historical rationality might provide, but without, for all that, offering in its place a recoupable counterhistory. Rather, it is the very concept of history, the assumed privilege of anteriority that finds itself re-interpreted, re-appropriated – if that is, indeed, the term for something that seems to borrow the forms of a dispossession, a forgetting.27 But the act of creation gives Nad ownership over the other Benares, of particular value to someone who has little ownership of the Bénarès in which he

27

Thangan Ravindranathan, “Politics and Poetics of the Namesake: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, Mauritius,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. John C. Hawley (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2008): 189. Ravindranathan goes on to note that “if there is something like postcolonial allegory at work here, it is [. . .] in the specific sense in which Stephen Slemon discusses this modality, whereby ‘history as fixed monument [is refocused] into a concept of history as the creation of a discursive practice, and [thus opened] to the possibility of transformation’” (189). In the last part of this passage, Ravindranathan is quoting from Jeannie Suk, Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001): 6.

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lives – its property, even its heritage.28 This semi-conscious relationship with naming and claiming is very much of a piece with Homi Bhabha’s discussion of “the ‘newness’ of migrant or minority discourse,” which, he writes, has to be discovered in medias res: a newness that is not part of the ‘progressivist’ division between past and present, or the archaic and the modern; nor is it a ‘newness’ that can be contained in the mimesis of ‘original and copy’ [...]. In the act of translation the content or subject matter is made disjunct, overwhelmed and alienated by the form of signification, like a royal robe with ample folds.29

Nad is creating a third space, living as he does on the threshold of hybridity where as much is coming into being as has been lost forever. In conclusion, then, if we allow these two works to speak to each other, with Ghosh’s novel an apparent gateway to a life of greater potential for his besieged characters, and with Pyamootoo’s suggesting a more ominous well of nihilism, we are reminded of the ongoing value of stories in the writing of history, or as substitutes for history for those who have no hand in writing it, offering glimmers of hope for both the powerful and the powerless. Perhaps all of this otherwise random sequence of events is, in fact, not merely a shambles but actually a narrative that remains doggedly under construction. Those who choose to write historical fiction demonstrate that ‘history’ consists of imagined half-truths, multiple layers of artifacts that later generations seek to unearth and interpret, and into which they seek to find gateways for their own entrance and participation in the story that suggests a larger meaning. Pyamootoo’s narrator lies about his trip to India because he remains fascinated by the fact that there exists another Benares far away from Mauritius and he can imagine that the Indians would be equally fascinated to hear about the existence of a Mauritian Bénarès (as, of course, most of his readers are). Thus, we stand ironically outside the hope of Pyamootoo’s narrator for connection with the something larger symbolized for him by India’s sacred city, its gateway to death and to rebirth. Perhaps we can try to be optimistic, as Binita Mehta does, and conclude with her that “the village may be dead, the gods may have abandoned it, but paradoxically they [Mayi and Nad] are bringing new life and vigor to it.”30 As a post28

Binita Mehta observes that the town was given its name “during French colonial rule before the arrival of the British and Indian indentured labor” by two Frenchman in 1799 who had earlier been administrators in India (“Memories in/of Diaspora,” 54). Thangan Ravindranathan makes a similar comment (“Politics and Poetics of the Namesake,” 192). 29 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 227. 30 Mehta, “Memories in/of Diaspora,” 53.

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colonial fiction, though, Bénarès indisputably stands as a short piece of evidence of the colonial trauma that has truncated the imaginations of many descendants of the hopeful migrants portrayed in Sea of Poppies, and the nostalgia for goalposts that Bénarès/Banaras both mock and enable.

W OR K S C I T E D Anderson, Hephzibah. “Opium Addicts, Beheaded Traders Crowd Ghosh’s Shipboard Trilogy,” Bloomberg News (10 October 2008), http://www.bloomberg.com/apps /news? pid=newsarchive&refer=book&sid=aiNJGM48IsSM (accessed 1 August 2011). Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot, tr. Samuel Beckett (En attendant Godot, 1952; New York: Grove, 1982). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). Choudhury, Bibhash. “‘Fraught with a Background’: Identity and Cultural Legacy in Sea of Poppies,” in Amitav Ghosh: Critical Essays, ed. Bibhash Choudhury (New Delhi: P H I Learning, 2009): 164–77. Discover Mauritius, http://www.mauritius.net (accessed 29 September 2013). Ghosh, Amitav. Flood of Fire (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015). ——.River of Smoke (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011). ——.Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Kenyon, Gary. “The Meaning/Value of Personal Storytelling,” in Aging and Biography: Explorations in Adult Development, ed. Gary Kenyon, James E. Birren, Jan–Erik Ruth, Johannes J.F. Schroots & Torbjörn Svensson (New York: Springer, 1996): 21–38. Lazarus, Neil. The Postcolonial Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011). Lichtig, Toby. “Sex ’n Drugs ’n Folderol,” New Statesman (1 May 2008), http://www.new statesman.com/books/2008/05/amitav-ghosh-poppies-sea-raja (accessed 1 August 2011). Mars–Jones, Adam. Review of Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, The Observer (8 June 2008), http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jun/08/fiction1 (accessed 1 August 2011). Mehta, Binita. “Memories in/of Diaspora: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès (1999),” L’Esprit Créateur 50.2 (2010): 46–62. Mehta, Brinda J. “Indianités francophones: Kala Pani Narratives,” L’Esprit Créateur 50.2 (2010): 1–11. Parashar, Pankaj, dir. Banaras: A Mystic Love Story (Setu Creations, India 2006; 122 min.). Pushparaj, Nemom, dir. Banaras (Kashi Films, India 2009; 65 min.). Pyamootoo, Barlen. Bénarès and In Babylon, tr. Will Hobson (Bénarès, 1999; tr. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2004). ——, dir. Bénarès (Pyramid International, India 2005; 75 min.). Ravindranathan, Thangam. “Politics and Poetics of the Namesake: Barlen Pyamootoo’s Bénarès, Mauritius,” in India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms, ed. John C. Hawley (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2008): 181–99.

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Sartre, Jean–Paul. No Exit and Three Other Plays, tr. Stuart Gilbert (Huit clos, 1947; New York: Vintage, 1958). Suk, Jeannie. Postcolonial Paradoxes in French Caribbean Writing: Césaire, Glissant, Condé (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001). Tharoor, Shashi. “Soldiers and Victims of the Opium War,” Washington Post (19 October 2008), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/16/AR 2008 101603324.html (accessed 1 August 2011). Thieme, John. Review of Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh, Literary Review (2008), http: //www.penguinbooksindia.com/amitavghosh/sea_of_poppies.html (accessed 3 June 2011). Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage, tr. Monika B. Vizedom & Gabrielle L. Caffee (Les rites de passage, 1909; Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1960).

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Postcolonial Literature in the Time of World Literature D E E P IK A M AR Y A

Introduction: Worlding and Reconceptualizations of Difference

L

I T E R A R Y S C H O L A R S M A Y S C O F F A T I T , but worlding as an expansion of horizons, to begin with, has been about gold, silver, spices, silk, tea, textiles, the weather, and, more recently, about gasoline, democracy, and whatever else has driven the West and its empires to the limits of the globe in search of the impossible desires that have surfaced and continue to emerge in the European imagination.1 The argument being made is that for long the world was a product of this imagination and its imperial ambitions and these shaped the master-topos of worlding. This constituted the spirit of the Enlightenment that rationalized the relationship of the West to the non-West through grand narratives in which Europe was at the centre of its own discourse, even though this often lacked space for other imaginaries that may have contradicted its ascendancy. Thus, worlding as an imaginary and political concept became a way of claiming the world, in which European structures, validated as central referents in ways both asymmetrical and unequal, were carried forward and applied through a belief in Europe’s universalizing representations. To lexicalize the rest of the world through a unifying method means transcending the comparativist frameworks that are considered the leitmotif of world literature.

1

‘Worlding’ is a reference to the construction of the world through a geopolitical economy that enables us to configure and determine the shape of that world. As discussed by Martin Heidegger, it is a critique of the world as a totality and is a radical severance from linear history. See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 1950), tr. Albert Hofstadter (1977), repr. in Heidegger, Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 139–212. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak resituates the term in postcolonial discourse to describe imperial cultural representations in which worlding can be called the epistemic violence that continues to shape the Third World. See Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985): 243–61.

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While the extraordinary influence of European modalities cannot be underestimated in early attempts to read and understand the ‘native’, this essay is an attempt to wrench postcolonial worldings away from their European home to contest colonial imaginings and thus make world literature a site for worldings that can stretch the imagination and make visible the periphery of Europe. To theorize world literature away from its European origins and the legacy of colonialism requires expanding the epistemic anchors beyond eurocentric categories and interpreting a postcolonial world through different orders. Such an attempt should take into account how ‘Asia’ and ‘Africa’ can help ground the inquiry and create a debate marking a theoretical shift in world literature from exchanges primarily between European literatures to a world literature that speaks to the logic of worlds and worlding. This might encourage questions such as: do we know this world? Or how do we approach this world? World literature, which is a frame of inquiry constituted by a history of struggle, of resistance and dominance, takes the shape of a story that begins from the periphery and inserts itself into a discussion that has been controlled by European humanism. As a new complex of geographies and histories waits to be reimagined, world literature can rethink its scope by reconfiguring the world to which it refers. This means turning attention to those whom Fanon has called “the wretched of the earth,” a category and a space that has been overwhelmingly excluded from globally unifying projects such as world literature. By opening the discussion about worldings through the category of the postcolonial, one assumes freedom from all domination, and not just European colonization, thus revising an understanding of postcoloniality, stripped of its earlier affiliations. Moreover, world literature can be a corrective to the discourse of that other worlding called globalization, in which the concept of the world as unified has introduced various new abuses that call for new forms of global solidarity. To explore another global approach, as Frantz Fanon envisioned it, away from institutional forms, is to undertake a project shaped by equality and justice.2 Erich Auerbach in “Philology and Weltliteratur” locates world literature as “a point of departure, a handle, as it were, by which the subject can be seized,”3 interpreting it as a temporal state with unlimited horizons. As an historical 2

See Fanon’s discussion in the Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; New York: Grove, 1991), where he outlines an agenda to reorganize the postcolonial world by revising what we mean by emancipation and liberation. See the chapter titled “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” 148–205. 3 Erich Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur” (“Philologie der Weltliteratur,” 1952), tr. Edward W. Said & Maire Said, Centennial Review 13.1 (1969): 14.

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rather than geographic experience, world literature for Auerbach was about the capacity of languages and literatures to interact in the European context. This form of exchange, Auerbach argues, does not create any real capacity to read across asymmetrical relationships between Europe and its others unless we subtract global (Western) economic networks and organize the discussion of literatures of the world in ways that would create a crisis for European unity. And yet, the centrality of Europe cannot be underestimated, or its codes of power remain unmodified in its becoming the apparatus for the unity Auerbach perceived as the inner history of Weltliteratur. These overlapping histories and narratives, initially encountered as cultures of empires, are redesigned as new forms of worlding to allow alternate collectivities. They re-imagine, for example, Africa in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1970) and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1981), or democracy in a village in India in Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari (2003).4 These novels will be discussed later in this essay. To regain the terrain once common to colonizers and colonized is an impulse of once ‘language-less natives’ who now articulate new interpretations.

Colonizing Perspectives in World Literature In spite of political decolonization, this essay notes, the grand narratives of postcolonial discourse and world literature have continued to be conceptualized through select categories symptomatically defined through nation-states. Their attempt to explore literatures beyond the discourse of global empires does not acknowledge contingent worlds that apparently contradict these constructions. One question to be asked is: what conceptual undertakings will help bridge the gap between dominant frameworks and ever-expanding contexts to offer a different kinship between literatures and to enable the imagining of a world that seeks independence from imperialism? To wrench world literature away from its eurocentric roots is a start, for this can make room for an entire world and its experiences to emerge. It also calls into question René Wellek’s theorization of world literature, where “the only right conception seems [...] a resolutely ‘holistic’ one which sees the work of art as a diversified totality, as a structure of signs.”5 Wellek grounds his inquiry in frameworks that construe universality 4

Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson–Davies (Mawsim al-hijrah ilá al-shamal, 1966; tr. Oxford: Heinemann, 1970; repr. New York: New York Review of Books, 2009); Thomas Mofolo, Chaka, tr. Daniel P. Kunene (Chaka, 1925; Oxford: Heinemann, 1981); Shrilal Shukla, Raag Darbari, tr. Gillian Wright (Raag Darbari, 1968; New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003). 5 Rene Wellek, “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1963): 294.

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through a European consciousness and introduces a concept of world literature that unlinks literature from its contexts and focuses on the inner life of a literary work formalized through a centralized aesthetic. By relying solely on the structures of signs for his reading of literatures and by withdrawing from life, time, and praxis, Wellek excludes the social and political world from his interpretations. The ‘world’ from which he derives meaning is the text, only the text. As a survivor of two world wars, Wellek provides a literary practice that can be read as a response to them, full of historical and worldly validity and justified as a “diversified totality” that approaches comparative readings through structures ordered by rules, sets, and groupings that he identifies and sees as canonical. With the decolonization of Asia and Africa, and the displacement of old forms and universals, a global discourse anchored in world literature jettisons such structural methods. Wellek’s presumptions of shared literary trajectories for comparative study no longer provide a common ground. It was Fanon’s genius to understand the “narrow world” of eurocentric traditions and the need to displace them by worlding through liberating methods, based on which “a decolonized society will be reorganized.”6 Introducing a study of world literature through a postcolonial lens in the spirit of an ethical response must include the understanding that all literary traditions, languages, and cultures have access to literary methods of interpretation. By viewing literary method less as a disciplinary act and more as worlding, readings of Fanon might reinforce David Damrosch’s claim that the work of world literature “should be acknowledged as different in kind from work within a national tradition” and be an agent of regeneration not limited to statehood.7 Postcoloniality – that is, liberation from colonial structures – reminds us, ironically, of vanishing moments of emancipation that have turned into new points of regulation and control. Consequently, the idea of the world is configured through mimetic replication: nation-states do not break open the code and allow for the radical restructuring that seeks unity beyond their current order. The vanguard subject who is ready to substantiate the hope implicit in this freedom represents a new world, a new lexicon, but not a new order articulating the promise of emerging constellations. The latter is the hope for the present and future that aims at approaching world literature geographically and historically. To spatialize a literary method can help frame resistance as a path that needs to remain an abstraction even though some resemblance to external reality persists. A visualization of spatial dispensation marking postcoloniality 6 7

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 36, 37. David Damrosch, What is World Literature? (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2003): 286.

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and world literature as anti-imperialist projects requires metaphors of radical displacement and mobilization, confronting formalisms in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass: Alice’s passing through the mirror to the other side is marked by the transfiguration or interruption of the ‘proper’ which releases her from controlling structures.8 The open-ended possibilities on the other side of the mirror consist of apertures leading to new formations.

Accommodating Subaltern Space/ Postcolonial Voices in World Literature In summary, decolonization is a complex battle where different histories and geographies interact. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels draw attention to the very fabric of history by exposing the coercive nature of capital and its bourgeois expansion as a history-forming force. However, they reverse this and affirm the need to reconceptualize capital by looking at history from the bottom up.9 This ‘historical turn’ was replete with idealizations and gave substance to a new global reality. The asymmetrical relationship between the bourgeoisie and workers signalled the need for re-telling the story of capital as a reminder throughout the imperial world of the need to decolonize and seek new transnational realities of modern economic and political formations, to provide openings for different universals. Marx’s reaction to imperialism is particularly important in discussing alternative ways of decolonizing and conceiving world literature by breaking down barriers. Following Marx, world-system theorists such as Immanuel Wallerstein have addressed the need for new trajectories to liberate the imagination, using them to explain reversals and refusals to participate in world systems.10 Wallerstein’s framing of world systems acknowledges a space of struggle between the marginal and the universal, and emphasizes the intellectual’s role in calling for antisystemic global movements and increasing the free-flow of factors of produc8

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), repr. in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013): 103–208. Space in Carroll’s work is real and imaginary when reflected in the mirror and is thus rooted in experience and the imagination. 9 Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, tr. Samuel Moore (Das Kommunistische Manifest, 1872; tr. New York: International, 2011). 10 Wallerstein’s argument about world systems claims that the West’s dominance over the rest of the world is a system that defined the story of the world ultimately under colonization, and that needs deconstructing if we are to find a different way to unify as a world. Such critical understanding asks that we question global systems tied to capital. See Immanuel Wallerstein, World System Analysis: An Introduction (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2004).

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tion to mobilize against inherent inequalities. Influenced by Frantz Fanon, Wallerstein’s perspective on global systems took account of liberation movements in Africa that also emerged as a “struggle [...] into a better world-system,” where state power underpinning the idea of nation-states was called into question.11 The compelling image of democratic movements as “whole populations conjured out of the ground” was the challenge of the moment for nations and the world at large.12 The decentralized, denationalized argument of Marx and Engels for a global community anticipates Wallerstein’s anti-systemic programme to realize the “struggle for an egalitarian world” without the authority of specific models.13 This, however, is not an easy task, Damrosch points out, for “it is far from clear how to proceed if we want to broaden our focus beyond one or two periods or national traditions: who can really know enough to do it well?”14 To say the least, worlding of literatures is a complex phenomenon, for while it is an invitation to represent literatures of the world through plural unfoldings, the limited sphere in which some theorists have engaged fails to account for the world in a way that challenges general patterns of metropolitan experience. While cosmopolitanism is a referent for a literary and cultural map without the primacy of cultural or social foundations, Pascale Casanova’s claims to cosmopolitanism without addressing the vectors of power refer to a framework without historical authentication. Casanova’s search for a new paradigm in the World Republic of Letters establishes independent stakes by charting Paris as a cultural territory rather than as a centre of colonization. I suggest that Casanova does not really give us a different system of exchange. In spite of her rejection of the contemporary comparativist models associated with the formalist readings developed by René Wellek and Northrop Frye (in Anatomy of Criticism) – excellent tools insofar as reading only Western literatures is required – Casanova reterritorializes European triumphalism and recodes Paris without the promise of overcoming the processes of imperialism. To take an example, she turns to Irish modernist authors, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to re-imagine them and rediscover their status by stripping away Ireland and Irish history. This is partly the tragedy of Casanova’s method, which only recovers those forms and works that infiltrate her vision. Ireland is a blank space here in which she reinscribes Joyce and Beckett through a new trope of cosmopolitanism. The con11 12 13 14

Immanuel Wallerstein, “Reading Fanon in the 21st Century,” New Left Review 57 (2009): 125. Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 14. Wallerstein, “Reading Fanon in the 21st Century,” 123. David Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 284.

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sequence of her method is that it engages only with the singularities of individuals and accelerates totalizing patterns, creating encyclopaedic but unverifiable data by connecting up only the most visible dots. Without any close readings of texts, she explains how Beckett’s and Joyce’s works are independent of Ireland’s colonial history, although this deeply informed their writing. Such a “distant reading” can only legitimize selected frameworks that reflect global (Western) identifiers, limiting the scope of any reading of the whole world.15 Although an attempt to find a wider unity than previously, Casanova’s method ends up functioning as the literary arm of a cosmopolitanism that reoccupies the same territory that was previously designated as part of a global capitalist system.

Goethe and the Origins of World Literature The early nineteenth century, when Goethe was reflecting on Weltliteratur, witnessed two historic uprisings: the French and Spanish revolutions. These made him aware that historical forms and concepts, no matter how seemingly stable, change with time, leading to unpredictable outcomes and new horizons. The longing for the stability of historical institutions, including nation-states, must have seemed like literary fiction and not history to Goethe, who was keenly aware of their temporal nature and continual evolution. R.K. Dasgupta points out that “elements in a national literature which are universal and are, therefore, capable of being appreciated by other nations” lead to infinite possibilities.16 Universalism as a conceptual space where world literature might be said to have its proper home was, according to Goethe, also a site of struggle because, despite his imagining worlding conceptually, both history and economic life had mutated from the universal into a hegemonic system. However, in the temporal dimensions of historical evolution where “national literature is no longer of importance,” Goethe found reconciliation between the desire for conceptual unity and an unlimited idealized consciousness.17 While he was drawn to the idea of nationalism as natio, a community of people, Weltliteratur was an 15

See Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on a World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000): 56–57. The term “distant reading” is Moretti’s, who relies on reading literatures through totalizing methods that assume all interpretations can be definitive. Its authoritarian patterns justify Casanova’s foreclosing of the “Irish Paradigm” and only addressing canonical writers. 16 R.K. Dasgupta, Goethe on Indian Literature (New Delhi: Delhi U P , 1965): 22. 17 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On World Literature” (“Weltliteratur,” 1827), in Goethe, Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Geary, tr. Ellen von Nardroff & Ernest von Nardroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986): 224.

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endorsement of a post-national society, because of transitions that would liberate, using the familiar alongside aporetic forms. 18 World literature was Goethe’s call for a post-hegemonic globe claiming universality for all. His was a vision that had much in common with that of Marx, who also gives an account of world literature as much more than a world market, while also recognizing that a world market was only the first mode of unification to break the boundaries of national exclusions. Yet it created global exchange by bringing together the European and the non-European, not through mutual desire but by the imposition of one half of the world on the other. However, the gestalt of world literature, as Marx imagined it, is a landscape where “from the numerous national and local literatures [...] a world literature,” and a “universal interdependence of nations” would emerge.19 Marx’s post-national longing was inscribed in the desire to transcode nation-states with their propensity for asymmetrical opportunities. The idealism in this vision was in endorsing transgression as the means to access the world, to liberate people from the burden of national or regional alliances into a worldwide expression. To instrumentalize a new vision, it was imperative to globalize in a non-hierarchical manner to erode the security of deeply rooted institutions that had legitimized inequality. Fanon’s injunction on anti-colonial, post-nation-state autonomy also comes to mind here, for he repudiates nation-states not only for their complicity with institutional power but also, in his view, because the dialectic between colonization and a decolonizing movement does not allow unencumbered freedom and offers only limited options for the reprieve of moral reason. To be truly liberated meant global emancipation and unity for all disenfranchised, since the decolonized nation-states had not offered this as a future.20

Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North and Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka Edward Said’s strategy of the contrapuntal has been an attempt at articulating worlding by distilling the spirit behind the idea and creating and re-creating worlding through displacements. As historical contextualization, the contrapuntal is an epistemological displacement that permeates dominant narratives, and ruptures them to recover suppressed voices. With contrapuntalism, Said 18

See Michael Löwy & Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, tr. Catherine Porter (Révolte et mélancolie: Le romanticisme à contre-courant de la modernité, 1991; Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001): 54–56. 19 Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 13. 20 See Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 148–206.

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provides us with a tool for decolonizing narratives: that is, making room for all narratives in the name of humanism. The logic of reading contrapuntally is, therefore, a lesson in pointing out what is at stake.21 A contrapuntal reading will ideally not limit the extent of inquiry, because it suggests total accountability, including all challenges and improbabilities, in order to present a narrative from alternate perspectives. It offers a decolonizing experience that does not set limits on the discussion. To read Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North contrapuntally as a narrative that informs the reader of the impact of colonization in the former Empire and the socio-psychological impact of colonization in the West is to assume that the colonization of Africa continues in different forms beyond the nation-states. The plot connects Mustafa Saeed’s early life in a Sudanese village to his attending university at Oxford, enabling a breakthrough in his experience as a colonial subject. However, Saeed’s journey from being a colonial subject in Africa to a postcolonial subject in England is marked by sovereign and non-sovereign forms of experiences that exoticize his presence in the West, and this othering only ends when Saeed returns to his village. As a product of the European Enlightenment and reflecting its epistemic continuity between Europe and its colonies, Saeed joins Europe’s intellectuals as part of a fraught history of imperialism. A contrapuntal reading of the novel points to this epistemic continuity, in order to think through the ideological closures that are handed down by Europe, and it offers an opportunity to critique worldings that have been abusive and acknowledge the ways nation-states have failed their citizens. From this perspective, Saeed is a reminder of Europe’s history in the colonies, and his success in Europe is a dismantling of power based on the have/have-not model, its arguments and implementation. The contrapuntal in this case can be read as the displacement of old forms of power and control and the disempowerment of non-sovereign subjects in newly created nations. It highlights the paradoxical nature of postcolonial autonomy and the contradictions articulated in continuities between European universalisms and colonial particulars. Salih’s novel exposes the limits of the transhistorical parity that allows postcolonial subjects to become equal participants in the future. Thus, Mustafa Saeed’s transformation in British society from an intellectual to a ‘savage’ African who deserves to be severely disciplined brings together different strands of shared histories. Decolonizing assumptions about who is African and who European occurs either with shifting current epistemological 21

Edward Said articulates the contrapuntal as a dialectical mode that enables us to rethink beyond binaries. It is a useful concept in a global reading, for the contrapuntal formalizes transnational crossings. See Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993): 62–79.

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investments or by underwriting new commitments that follow the marginalized, and point to cracks in traditional models. It is only then that we can claim to speak as ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ to our contexts, as Salih does by articulating the multiple negative and positive ways the West exerts an impact on Mustafa Saeed’s life. Contrapuntalism returns to the colonized the agency that has been lost through colonization while acknowledging the postcolonial subject’s historical relationship to colonial institutions; it suggests the certain kind of worlding that comes with a postcolonial consciousness committed to dismantling the colonial relationship in order to bring about a more equitable world. Arguably, we are being urged to let the global unfold, and develop world literature by including epistemological universes that are not controlled by the “cultural logic of late capitalism.”22 To carry this out and broaden our focus, literary framings should be developed as part of the dynamic of history rather than duplicating reliance on domesticated spaces such as nation-states. The implication is that worldings should not just be thought of as inevitable, as they appear, say, in Thomas Mofolo’s novel Chaka, in which differences are subjugated and reshaped by universal categories so that colonial knowledge and local religious practices collude. Mofolo interprets the use of supernatural and sorcery by the Zulu king, Chaka, through the religious lens the writer adapted after he converted to Christianity. Meanwhile, the religious pantheon of the Zulus is simply broken down and reinterpreted in order to dissolve native authority. The interpretation of sorcery is thus redirected so its diverse meanings, attributed to the loss of colonial power, retain control over the native’s frame of reference, specifically where it clashes with the European lexicon. Larry Bellamy points out that sorcery and magic were traditionally deployed for political purposes across African nations and the practices were highly sought out and continue in today’s “political and legal life.”23 Because the origins of the colonial state are closely tied to imperial culture, Mofolo succumbs to these colonial structures; he crosses the barrier between national and international and the worlding that exists under the imperial shadow, while acknowledging native difference as discursivity. The non-Western and ‘superstitious’ practitioners of black magic in Mofolo’s novel are part of Enlightenment’s teleology, which unfolds as the moral ethic when Inusi the sorcerer becomes the conscience that will revolt against the king’s desire in order to become invincible at all costs. 22

See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991). 23 Larry A. Bellamy II, “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Academic and Local Change in East Africa” ( M A thesis, Miami University, 2004): 38, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1083875 240 (accessed 15 May 2015).

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When differences between European and native discourses are made invisible by colonial hegemony, how do we access the latter and scrutinize their truth, value, and reality, and bring justice to them? More importantly, what must we attempt to access? The postcolonial critic can choose to return to native difference and the adjudicatory claims of the postcolonial state to normalize the outlines of the new state. In the transition, as Bellamy points out, local practices may be decoded as part of the triumph of decolonization, as sorcery is officially recognized in many African nations.24 This normalization of modern states with native practices points to a complicity that necessitates the creation of tolerance and humanist pluralism to retain modern state structures at the centre and to emasculate local practices. The desire for emancipation means unlearning the complicity embedded in universal frameworks, the dismantling of colonial/hegemonic practices, and the challenging of nation-think in order to meet the goals of postcoloniality. Strategies for world literature, then, can be more than “a mode of reading: a form of detached engagement,” to assist in bringing back awareness using vanguardist instruments.25 Vanguardism is an ethical reminder that we must allow the new postcolonial intellectual to lead the project of world literature after colonialism has been deconstructed. Fanon inscribed subalternity as a strategy for vanguardism that can lead to the creation of postcolonial agency, and envisioned it as de-nationalized, free of patriarchal control, enabling the subaltern to unpack and educate the world in the subaltern definition of worlding.26 In this site of conflict, world literature might take on the role of parabasis – that is, mourning for what is lost due to violent proscriptions. Parabasis, a position that cannot speak for others, implies the impossibility of releasing the subaltern condition from subordination through universal frameworks. As a persistent moral presence, it can be acknowledged as interrupting narratives that lead to invisibilities, and as a counter-hegemonic position it offers a transnational critique of globalizations that have endorsed universalized conventions in postcolonial states. It leaves us with the task of imagining what has become invisible to global discourse and tracing that discussion in the margins of the state.

24

Bellamy, “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Academic and Local Change in East Africa,” 38. Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 281. 26 See Stefan Kipfer, “The Times and Spaces of (De)colonization: Fanon’s Countercolonialism, Then and Now,” in Living Fanon: Global Perspectives, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 93–104. 25

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World Literature and Democracy: Shrilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari It thus follows that we ask whether world literature can be a vanguardist force that prises open spaces to expose the imprint of an unfinished decolonization. World literature is a planetary destructuring and “making present,” to borrow from Heidegger, and reveals a process that is always becoming and without a definite horizon.27 This becoming can be in solidarity with the experience of the world and thus with how it is defined, so as to overcome the domination of normalized definitions. Since definitions are part of phenomenology, they are ever evolving and all meaning is reconstructed in the light of particulars. Thus, what is universal and totalizing about definitions is the result of selectiveness that essentializes experience and grounds it in a limiting history. A necessary step in expanding a given lexicon is to make it generative rather than prescriptive, with a non-paradigmatic meaning, and to introduce unexamined details. The lexicon may supplement the work of history so that seemingly contradictory responses on the surface introduce a way of learning more about shortcircuited symbols. Taking the example of defining democracy, one could follow a telescoped vision aligned with contemporary politics where the state prescribes what democracy looks like; alternatively, one could read against the grain democracy’s basic dictate that people should not be excluded from its definition. Thus, to democratize a concept such as democracy one needs to consider Western liberal templates for defining the term and the variety of ways it has been translated, only some of which have been validated. To take an example: Shrilal Shukla’s novel Raag Darbari may at first seem like a leap of faith, since it ignores the norms of democracy inscribed by the determinations of civic-states when aligned with global structures. As a reconstellation of power among the elite, democracy the world over has been inflexible in not including cultural understandings that belong to the spectrum of democratic practices. In spite of disciplinary constraints, Shukla values definitions that provide an analysis of practices reflecting social biases, to indicate a dynamic model of democracy outside its institutionalized form. Shukla’s imaginative restructuring of democracy occurs in an Indian village, Shivpalganj, where the elite reconstellate democracy as their paternalistic responsibility rather than as equality for all citizens. According to the logic of competing social institutions,

27

Heidegger discusses the temporality of time as an ontological category that cannot be defined other than as a singular moment; thus, it does not provide us with a permanent set of meanings. See Heidegger, “Being and Time: Introduction,” tr. Joan Stambaugh in collaboration with J. Glenn Gray & David Farrell Krell, in Heidegger, Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 71.

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definitions are not a science that allows for abstract meaning, because they are in fact grounded in and attached to histories and social particularities. Defining democracy by recognizing specificities such as caste, which have yet to be renegotiated with the socio-political imaginings of a modern democratic state, is intrinsic to worlding’s systematic critique of globalized framings. In Raag Darbari, when a new representative for the village cooperative is to be elected, caste is the crucial category informing the decision. The elite – the upper caste – call for a vote among their cohort for the next leader of the cooperative, since village affairs had been in their control long before democracy became the framework for nation-think. This transgression of institutionalized democracy, by ignoring dominant perceptions that persistently undermine local power, occurs on the margins, outside metropolitan influences. It points to the need for a dialogue within the globalization of the concept, for to discover the idea of democracy in its entirety is impossible. In spite of the good will in including outposts in order to diversify understanding of how a concept is enabled by imperialism, our practice must nevertheless speak of definitions that are not controlled by borders or hegemony. For the pragmatic formula, ‘one person one vote’, reflecting a ‘common’ good, is a liberal message that works the way capitalism works, by perpetuating an exclusionary universalizing lexicon. Fanon emphasizes the limitations in the colonizer’s use of language in serving the greater good of humanity. The real contradiction, he points out, lies in the impossibility of establishing an objective truth in the face of the coercion and constraints on freedom that come with colonization or other apartheid-like conditions that divide people while sharing the morphology of a language.28 But the colonial encounter or pre-civil-rights America also limits the cultural function of languages and disenfranchises the emancipatory possibility of words. Toni Morrison finds that the figure of the African American is missing in the circulation of the idea of democracy. In Playing in The Dark, her collection of literary-critical essays, she points out that she cannot bridge the social dichotomy between African Americans and whites to discover a shared language that will represent the experience of both communities: What Africanism became for, and how it functioned in, the literary imagination is of paramount interest because it may be possible to discover, through a close look at literary ‘blackness’ the nature – even the cause – of literary ‘whiteness’.29 28

See Ato Sekyi–Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1996): 157–235. Toni Morrison, Playing in The Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993): 20. 29

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Morrison here demonstrates how “whiteness“ has become a default mode for democratic values because of the monologue of a segregated society. The normative value of words and their ontological function communicate the monopoly of the shared language that must be transformed to convey democracy as a right for all nationals. One learns to read languages by anthropologization so they remain embedded in people and their reality. To experience a language organized through people’s sovereignty is a challenge to universality and the construction of standard meaning in the face of organized distortion as the embodiment of national expression. Let language embrace anarchy of meaning, as Fanon has argued, so that “the voice of the Revolution with the fundamental truth of the nation [...] open[s] limitless horizons.”30

Conclusion: Reclaiming the Margins “An essay in definition, a celebration of new opportunities,” is how David Damrosch describes world literature, which, he finds, offers the potential to transpose worlding beyond celebrating the story of humanity, to contested possibilities that have not yet been expanded upon.31 To support these histories, perhaps in the mode of what is to come, we must instrumentalize ourselves as readers in the hope of a new world that will claim them. World literature and postcoloniality are not about preserving norms or rationalizing secured positions. On a geopolitical level, their roles can include an epistemic change – one that will make the invisible multitude a presence that will lead to reading world literature not as a given record but as evolving narratives of insurgency. In her conclusion to Death of a Discipline, Gayatri Spivak asks a question: “how many are we?” – an inquirywhich invokes a humanity that remains unaccounted-for while solemnly challenging our assumptions about the globe, who speaks for the world, and our responsibility to imagine a future that assures the survival of the weak and vulnerable. She tasks her readers and critics to visualize the world beyond all ‘posts’,32 to a place of loss that is buried. Let world literature be that voice and space, an agent of freedom where it is possible to begin to claim unclaimed narratives.

30

Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An cinq de la révolution algérienne, 1959; New York: Grove, 1967): 97. 31 Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 36. 32 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia UP , 2003): 102.

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W OR K S C I T E D Auerbach, Erich. “Philology and Weltliterature” (“Philologie der Weltliteratur,” 1952), tr. Edward W. Said & Maire Said, Centennial Review 13.1 (Winter 1969): 1–17. Bellamy, Larry A. II. “Witchcraft, Sorcery, Academic and Local Change in East Africa” (MA thesis, Miami University, 2004), http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num =miami1083875240 (accessed 15 May 2015). Carroll, Lewis. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), repr. in Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, ed. Donald J. Gray (New York: W.W. Norton, 2013): 103–208. Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2007). Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2003). Dasgupta, R.K. Goethe on Indian Literature (New Delhi: Delhi U P , 1965). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les Damnés de la terre, 1961; tr. New York: Grove, 1991). ——.A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An cinq de la révolution algérienne, 1959; New York: Grove, 1967). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 2000). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. “On World Literature” (“Weltliteratur,” 1827), in Goethe, Goethe’s Collected Works, vol. 3: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Geary, tr. Ellen von Nardroff & Ernest von Nardroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986): 224–28. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” 1950), tr. Albert Hofstadter (1977), repr. in Heidegger, Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 139–212. ——.“Being and Time: An Introduction” (Sein und Zeit, 1927), tr. Joan Stambaugh in collaboration with J. Glenn Gray & David Farrell Krell, in Heidegger, Basic Writings: Ten Key Essays, Plus the Introduction to Being and Time, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993): 41–87. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991). Kipfer, Stefan. “The Times and Spaces of (De)colonization: Fanon’s Countercolonialism, Then and Now,” in Living Fanon: Global Perspectives, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011): 93–104. Löwy, Michael, & Robert Sayre. Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, tr. Catherine Porter (Révolte et mélancolie: Le romanticisme à contre-courant de la modernité, 1991; Durham N C : Duke U P , 2001). Marx, Karl, & Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto, tr. Samuel Moore (Das Kommunistische Manifest, 1872; tr. New York: International, 2011). Mofolo, Thomas. Chaka, tr. Daniel P. Kunene (Chaka, 1925; tr. Oxford: Heinemann, 1981). Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on a World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000): 54–68.

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Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York: Vintage, 1993). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Salih, Tayeb. Season of Migration to the North, tr. Denys Johnson–Davies (Mawsim alhijrah ilá al-shamal, 1966; tr. Oxford: Heinemann, 1970; repr. New York: New York Review of Books, 2009). Sekyi–Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1996). Shukla Shrilal. Raag Darbari, tr. Gillian Wright (Raag Darbari, 1968; tr. New Delhi: Oxford U P , 2003). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia U P , 2003). ——.“Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243–61. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Frantz Fanon: Reason and Violence,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 15 (1970): 222–31. ——.“Reading Fanon in the 21st Century,” New Left Review 57 (2009): 117–25. ——.World System Analysis: An Introduction (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2004). Wellek, René. “The Crisis in Comparative Literature,” in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1963): 282–95.

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III. T HE B ORDER : W AL L O R G AT EWA Y ? 

“Die Mauer is no joke!” The Berlin Wall in Cilla McQueen’s Berlin Diary and in the Works of Kapka Kassabova C LAU DIA D UP PÉ

Burdened with the weight of history and in constant search for its identity, there is no other city than Berlin manifesting the instabilities of ideology in such a dramatic way.1

A

S T H E B L U R B F O R T H E U R B A N A R C H I T E C T S Kenny Cupers and Markus Miessen’s book Spaces of Uncertainty suggests, the identity of the city of Berlin was shaped, marked, and scarred by world history and politics. Between 1961 and 1989, Berlin was physically divided by one of the most famous political and ideological landmarks of the twentieth century: the Berlin Wall. After its fall, one primary focus of urban planning lay on giving the reunited city a new architectural identity, thus attempting to bridge the gap between East and West left behind by the former death-strip. According to the geographer Karen Till, this endeavour was not new, as Berlin had long been used to change and architectural facelifts; in her view, these are part of an integral desire to constantly create a “new Berlin that symbolises the nation state and a modern German society.”2 This reinvention, Till concludes, has been part of the city’s cultural makeup ever since the late-nineteenth century. More than two decades after the Wall came down, 1989 is still celebrated as the year of a worldwide paradigm shift – a fact that emphasizes once again the Wall’s political significance. It was understood that the ideological barrier had come down thanks to the force of the people, who broke free of their shackles.3

1

Kenny Cupers & Markus Miessen, Spaces of Uncertainty (Wuppertal: Müller + Busmann, 2002). Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2005): 39. 3 The drama of the historical events is related in the final chapter of Frederick Taylor’s The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989, fittingly headlined “The Wall came tumbling down” 2

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Today it is all but gone, apart from a few memorial segments. Most of the Wall became rubble, its pieces kept by locals and tourists alike as palpable mementoes of history. As quickly as the physical evidence was disseminated all over the city and all over the world, the Wall became part of a collective cultural memory that is not Germany’s alone. From a strictly urban-planning point of view, the dismantling of the Wall provided Berlin with a lot of fallow space in the heart of the city. In the years after 1989, and especially after the German government decided to move its seat back to Berlin, the city became Germany’s biggest building-site, and was marketed as ‘Schaustelle’ or “Showcase Berlin” 4 both to tourists and to locals. The German filmmaker Wim Wenders once compared the understanding of empty and open spaces in a city to reading between the lines of a text, stating that “they encourage us to fill them up with ourselves.”5 As the Wall no longer exists, it has turned into a cultural text that harbours the potential to become a universal trope for the negotiation of cultural contact zones. In this respect, the analysis of writings from Aotearoa New Zealand6 dealing with the Berlin Wall seems like a promising undertaking. Indeed, New Zealand writers can be seen as outsiders to the German discourse of partition and reunification, and they are thus far less heavily invested in the ruling East/West discourse in which the Wall is usually placed. In many ways, the New Zealand texts can be seen to reflect the gaze of the tourist as an accomplice of cultural production,7 a perception that I consider highly beneficial to the estimation of the crosscultural dimension of the Berlin Wall both before and after 1989. (London: Bloomsbury, 2006): 404–28. 4 Till, The New Berlin, 33. 5 Wim Wenders, “A Sense of Place: Wim Wenders in Conversation with Allesandra Casu and Ilene Steingut,” Arch+ 180 (2006): 110–15. 6 In accordance with many current cultural critics, not least Cilla McQueen herself, I employ ‘Aotearoa New Zealand’ as the country’s name throughout this essay, fully aware that, officially speaking, the name of the country in international contexts is ‘New Zealand’. I refrain from hyphenating it, or inserting a slash, as this would erect a barrier between the Mǒori and Pǒkehǒ cultures, running counter to the intention of transcending this divide. 7 My understanding of the tourist as an accomplice of cultural production relies on the theory formulated by Dean MacCannell in The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976), which is discussed by Georges van den Abbeele in his essay “Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist,” Diacritics 10.4 (Winter 1980): 2–14. In van den Abbeele’s words: “For MacCannell, tourism is to be understood in terms of the ‘cultural production’ around which it is organized: a sight, a marker, and a tourist. [. . .] Sightseeing can be understood as a process whereby the tourist moves from marker to marker until reaching the sight. [. . .] So sightseeing constitutes a kind of basic narrative sequence” (“Sightseers,” 4).

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This essay investigates the representation of the Berlin Wall in Berlin Diary (1990) by Cilla McQueen (born 1949), who spent a few months in Berlin in 1988– 89 before the Wall came down, and also in selected poetry and prose by Kapka Kassabova (born 1973), a Bulgarian émigrée who became part of the New Zealand polyglot and cosmopolitan literary scene of the 1990s. While McQueen had come to New Zealand as a small child, Kassabova grew up in Eastern Europe, ‘behind’ the Iron Curtain. To her, the Wall had been part and parcel of her upbringing. Hence, her return to the unified Berlin as New Zealand Writer in Residence in 2002 triggered memories of her childhood in Bulgaria. In this essay, the comparison of the pre- and post-1989 perspectives found in texts written by two New Zealand writers of different generations and biographical backgrounds, interrogates how the Berlin Wall is used as a literary trope and how its discursive presence reflects back on the representation and negotiation of the cultural environment(s) it stems from.

Two Writers in Residence, Two Biographies, Two Perspectives on Berlin The history of New Zealand artists in residence in Berlin began in 1983, when James McNeish was a guest of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD .8 This exchange was continued with the cooperation of the Goethe Institute in Wellington, and, in 1999, Creative New Zealand introduced the “Creative New Zealand’s Writers Residency in Berlin,”9 aimed at giving an experienced writer the opportunity to “work on an approved project while in a new environment.”10 In 1988, Cilla McQueen, who later became Aotearoa New Zealand’s Poet Laureate for the period 2009–11, came to West Berlin on a Goethe Institute scholarship to learn German. It was during this time that Berlin Diary was written, thus capturing the atmosphere in West Berlin in the months preceding the historic event of 9 November 1989, when the Wall came down. In 1991, Berlin Diary (1990) won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry; it is seen as a “major departure“11 in McQueen’s oeuvre, not least with

8

Michael Herd, “Neuseeländische Autoren in Berlin,” in Dies ist eine wahre Geschichte: Neuseeländische Autoren in Berlin, ed. Barbara Richter (Berlin: D A A D , 2002): 108. 9 Herd, “Neuseeländische Autoren in Berlin,” 108. 10 “Berlin Writers’ Residency,” Creative NZ, http://www.creativenz.govt.nz/en/getting-funded /find-funding-opportunities/berlin-writers-residency/general-info (accessed 24 April 2012). 11 Paul Millar, “McQueen, Cilla,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 325.

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regard to its experimental character and fluid sense of genre – it is, indeed, written in a mix of prose and verse. As a good friend of the Mǒori poet Hone Tuwhare, who spent a full year in Berlin in 1985, McQueen was undoubtedly acquainted with the poems written by her compatriot during his stay in Germany;12 in fact, she makes reference to his persona in the opening and closing passages of Berlin Diary.13 Tuwhare’s translinguistic poems stand as a literary landmark of the New Zealand–Berlin exchange. The Mǒori writer excelled in his command of the German language, digging deeply into its idioms and cultural references so as to be able to translate “‘the richness of [his poems’] sense of location, and their highly inventive use of New Zealand demotic idioms’ [...] to the German location and to the inventive use of German demotic idioms.”14 Few have managed to see beauty in the German language and ‘feel themselves’ into Berlin with quite the same ease as Tuwhare. McQueen, in the opening passages of her Berlin Diary, describes not only the translocation from Aotearoa New Zealand to Germany, but also the difficulty of learning German. As the diary progresses, she evocatively records the transition from feeling foreign to becoming a local in Berlin and getting used to the reality of the Wall as its decisive borderline and “concrete metaphor.” 15 Cilla McQueen has won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry three times16 and has always received high praise for her poetic work. Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeves, for example, state that “she has remained an evocative voice of reason and nature, a unique teller of images, thought and history,”17 qualities that are all prominent in Berlin Diary. A child of Scottish migrants, 12

Hone Tuwhare, Was wichtiger ist als Sterben: Ausgewählte neuseeländische Gedichte englisch– deutsch, tr. Irmela Brender (Straelen: Straelener Manuskripte, 1985). 13 Cilla McQueen, Berlin Diary (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1990): 5, 23. Further page references are in the main text after “BD.” 14 Peter H. Marsden, “‘Er war ein Berliner!’: Hone Tuwhare in Germany,” Ka mate ka ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 6 (September 2008): 98, http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz /kmko/06/ka_mate06_marsden.asp (accessed 17 April 2011). In the first part of this quotation, Marsden quotes from Terry Sturm, “Hone Tuwhare,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 551. 15 Cilla McQueen, Nick Ascroft & Richard Reeve, “‘ A Walk Upstream’: An Interview with Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeve,” Glottis 9 (2004): 17–21, repr. as “Cilla McQueen Interview with Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeve,” N Z E P C (1 April 2006), http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors /mcqueen /glottis.asp (accessed 30 April 2012). 16 For Homing In (published in 1982, New Zealand Book Award in 1983), Benzina (published in 1988, New Zealand Book Award in 1989), and Berlin Diary (published in 1990, New Zealand Book Award in 1991). 17 Ascroft & Reeves, “‘A Walk Upstream’.”

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McQueen shares ‘typical’ biographical patterns with other Pǒkehǒ New Zealanders of her generation. As a writer, she is acutely aware of the fact that she lives in a postcolonial society in which the “historical dimension resonat[es] in the present and influence[s] the course of events.”18 The self-perception of Aotearoa New Zealand as a bicultural country19 is part and parcel of her cultural topography. Her writing career started during an eventful and fruitful time in her country’s literature, when the Mǒori Renaissance was in full swing, raising awareness of Mǒori grievances under colonial and post-colonial rule as well as highlighting the viability of Mǒori culture in Aotearoa New Zealand. One of the leading figures of the movement was, incidentally, Hone Tuwhare, arguably the most accomplished Mǒori poet at the time, who was strongly involved in the country’s politico-cultural struggles. Legal changes such as the Treaty of Waitangi Act of 1975 and the Mǒori Language Act of 1987 were intended to rectify ǒori grievances. It is in this climate of re-negotiation that Cilla McQueen developed her sensitivity to the contested cultural territory of her home country, which she has frequently expressed by using the metaphor of the meniscus for the politico-cultural contact zone of Pǒkehǒ and Mǒori. The establishment of the Writers in Residence Programme of Creative New Zealand in 1999 signalled a new confidence in New Zealand literature and coincided with the arrival of a new generation of writers on the national literary scene. The work of such authors as Sarah Quigley and Kapka Kassabova, to name but two of those who held the Berlin residency, is not necessarily focused on Aotearoa New Zealand as a bicultural country. In their writings, cultural allegiance is negotiated on a more global level, which is owing not least to the different social realities that started to emerge at the turn of the millennium. The poetic imagination has indeed taken a turn towards the more broadly ‘transcultural’, a term which is still highly debated and scrutinized in the context of modernity.20 Unlike McQueen, Kapka Kassabova did not spend her childhood in Aotearoa New Zealand, but in Bulgaria; she only moved to Aotearoa New Zealand in 1991, at the age of eighteen, as no other country would grant a visa to her entire 18

“‘A Walk Upstream’.” Bill Willmott, “Cultural and National Identity,” in Cultures and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. David Novitz & Bill Willmot (Wellington: G P , 1989): 1–20; Rob Steven, “Land and White Settler Colonialism: The Case of Aotearoa,” in Cultures and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. David Novitz & Bill Willmot (Wellington: G P , 1989): 21–34. 20 For a philosophical investigation, see Wolfgang Welsch, “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage 1999): 194–213. 19

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family. At the time of her immigration, Kassabova spoke three languages (Bulgarian, French, and Russian). English was added as a fourth and is now the language she writes in. Kassabova did not grow up with the discourse of biculturalism that dominated Aotearoa New Zealand in the 1980s and 1990s, nor has she embraced it as her own; rather, she considers herself a transmigrant or cosmopolitan who negotiates multiple cultural affinities.21 This was the crucible out of which her poetry was born or, to clothe it in her own words: the embrace of English as her literary language helped the writer to overcome “the transitional muteness of the immigrant.”22 Kassabova’s first book, All Roads Lead to the Sea (1997), won New Zealand’s Jessie McKay award for best first book of poetry. As an immigrant, the author constantly tries to negotiate between ‘here’ and ‘there’, but ‘there’ – i.e. her home country of Bulgaria – was not a desirable place. Hence, much of her work is driven by the question of where to go from here (i.e. Bulgaria). Her experience as a Writer in Residence in Berlin in 2002 further fed into the poetry of Geography for the Lost (2007), as well as into her journalistic prose and her novel Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (2008).

Cilla McQueen’s Berlin Diary Cilla McQueen’s Berlin Diary captures the atmosphere of West Berlin in a highly perceptive manner, predicting that the Wall would come down. In an interview McQueen describes this as follows: The Wall was an excellent concrete metaphor. I was thinking about permeability and flow as well as opposition and complementarity. It wasn’t long before the Wall came down. I’d known it would, it had to. I went in person to the concrete metaphor and had a good opportunity to consider

21

Transnational migrants, or “transmigrants,” can be defined as “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured for more than one nation state.” See Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch & Christina Szanton Blanc, “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Soziale Welt 12.3 (1997): 121. This is particularly true of Kassabova, who lives and publishes in Britain and Aotearoa New Zealand alike. Without wanting to put too much political emphasis on the word, I see Kassabova’s status as a transnational in cultural terms. It has shaped and influenced her affinities with all the cultures in which she has participated. Kassabova’s insistence on the fact that she partakes of a global cosmopolitan mindset mirrors definitions discussed and provided by social theorists. See, for instance, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec & Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). 22 Kapka Kassabova, Geography for the Lost (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2007): 67–68.

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these themes, especially polarity, both political and poetic; also personal in terms of my north–south transposition.23

This play with geographical opposites, as well as with notions of fluidity and permeability, enables McQueen to enrich the metaphor of the concrete Wall and transpose its significance to the New Zealand context. The complexity of the poetics as well as the trans-generic character of Berlin Diary prompted the reviewer Charles Croot to praise it as the “highlight of the poetry year 1990/91.”24 He assumed that her time away gave McQueen an opportunity to review her own life and to see her own country from an outsider’s perspective. Her triumph is to have made this intensely personal experience not only accessible but indeed extremely real and moving for a wide range of readers. The quality of the verse [...] is very well sustained, and the admixture of ‘prose’ passages, which provide a perfect match in style along with a well-judged change of pace, makes for an undemanding but highly rewarding read in a work whose very careful craftsmanship is never obtrusive.25

One might say that Cilla McQueen’s text draws its strength from Berlin’s ambiguities, which required constant re-negotiation. McQueen approaches the Wall and the Berlin of 1988–89 by sensing the city’s lack of self-assuredness and thus the potential for permeability, despite the concrete boundary embodied by the Wall. Berlin Diary succeeds in establishing a “mirrrorskin” – to use McQueen’s own word – between the struggles of divided Germany and that of her home culture, where the seemingly clear-cut categories of Pǒkehǒ and Mǒori had started to dissolve. In the first section of Berlin Diary, McQueen makes repeated use of street names and points out landmarks when leaving her apartment, e.g., “cross Derfflingerstrasse, cross Kurfürstendamm at the lights / then back along Einemstrasse to the no. 19 bus stop,” and upon return “retrace steps Nollendorfplatz, Einemstrasse, Kurfürstenstrasse, Jetlag” (BD, 19, 21). The mantra-like recital of street names allows the poet to find a sense of orientation in the maze of a highly urbanized space which stands in stark contrast to an Aotearoa New Zealand city- and landscape. In geographical terms, McQueen establishes her own mental map of the city. These passages are elliptical and accumulative, thus capturing what she calls the “Berlin pace, a rapid heartbeat” (BD, 22). 23

McQueen, in Ascroft & Reeve, “‘A Walk Upstream’.” Charles Croot, “Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry in 1990,” J N Z L : Journal of New Zealand Literature 12 (1994): 53. 25 Croot, “Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry in 1990,” 53. 24

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As such standard tourist reconnaissance suggests, the opening sequence of Berlin Diary bears witness to the poet’s confrontation with her own cultural and linguistic foreignness. McQueen narrates a distinct sense of being cut off from her home country, while being reminded of its smallness and insularity. In West Berlin, she realizes that “Berlin is indeed an island, deep in East Germany. Claustrophobic” (BD, 22). This sense of claustrophobia stands in stark contrast to her antipodean perception of islands in the open space of the Pacific. On the European continent, the enclave of West Berlin sticks out like an island on a map of the German Democratic Republic (GDR ). In McQueen’s words, the GDR compares to “an unknown ocean” (BD, 30), a phrase which resonates in a geo-political as well as a cultural sense. The repeated reference to the city map paired with the island image seems to suggest that the locality of reference is a primary concern, one that is highly coloured by McQueen’s own cultural topography: On the wall of the corridor Is a large map of the world Right down the very bottom Is little Aotearoa New Zealand Now I’m as far away As I can get. (BD, 18)

In instances like this, McQueen looks at the map from a eurocentric perspective in which the phrase “little New Zealand” seems to echo Katherine Mansfield’s “little island cradled in the giant sea bosom.”26 However, unlike Mansfield, who perceived Aotearoa New Zealand as a cultural backwater, McQueen senses that her own roots are located on the islands “right down [at] the very bottom” (BD, 18) of the map, an affinity that prompts her to reflect upon Aotearoa New Zealand’s emerging bicultural identity, despite being half a world away. Berlin Diary thus remains a New Zealand text that participates as much in the New Zealand politico-cultural discourse of the late 1980s as in the European, specifically German, zeitgeist of the late-Cold-War era. Despite McQueen’s frequent reference to maps, both on a global scale using a map of the world and a regional scale when describing West Berlin’s location within the GDR , she refrains from using an actual city map when exploring the urban environment. This aligns her with many other intellectuals of the twentieth century, including Siegfried Kracauer, a German intellectual, friend, and 26

Katherine Mansfield, “To Stanislaw Wyspianski,” in An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry, ed. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 474.

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mentor of Theodor Adorno, whose prerogative was to perceive urban space as ‘terra incognita’, as an allegory of a place rather than as points on a map.27 McQueen tries to assume a neutral position to begin with, while inviting the life of the city to resonate inside her. As a foreigner, she feels most troubled by the city’s division, and this causes her to return to the Wall time and again – rewriting and re-producing the image of the Wall as the diary progresses. At first, it is simply the Wall, the sight and landmark, which represents the physical and ideological border that contains the life of West Berlin. Soon, this reality assumes a figurative function, and the Wall becomes a metaphor for cultural conflict as well as contact: Thought stops at the wall a barrier reef by force of will even when the iron within has rusted and dissolved away * Die Mauer is no joke. (BD, 24)

Through this simple phrase, decisively located after a moment’s pause, the monstrosity of the Wall, and the cultural and ideological conflict it represents, hits the reader with full force. McQueen begins to sound the metaphorical depth of the Wall, which assumes a menacing presence that the poet expresses through the image of a constrictor snake: “Always die Mauer / The whole bustling city contained by a concrete python” (BD, 33) that “snakes along the shore behind the tress” (BD, 40). The Wall becomes a palpable evil and represents a malicious enemy with a life of its own. With images of the island in the grip of the snake and the comparison to a cage (BD, 88), McQueen succeeds in narrating an intense feeling of being imprisoned, strongly felt after a trip into the forbidden territory of the GDR to visit the cultural sites of Potsdam across the border from West Berlin. This sense of imprisonment runs counter to the contemporary perception of West Berlin as the representative of the free world and can be seen to twist the city’s status proclaimed by Western politics. In addition, the experience of stepping onto the other side leaves the poet “scarred in the heart” upon return. In this passage, it is revealing that McQueen uses the term ‘scarred’ rather than ‘wounded’, as a scar refers to an earlier injury, inviting a reading that specifically includes her own cultural environment. The earlier injury might refer to a wound inflicted by the colonial history of Aotearoa New Zealand, which is deeply embedded in the 27

Siegfried Kracauer, Die Straßen in Berlin und anderswo (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1987): 400.

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writer’s cultural memory. The sense of entering the forbidden territory of the GDR can be transferred to Aotearoa New Zealand, where the historical legacy of

two peoples, Pǒkehǒ and Mǒori, was undergoing a thorough re-negotiation at the time McQueen was writing Berlin Diary. The ‘wall’ between the two may not be a physical one as in Berlin, but it did exist and was deeply embedded in the way Pǒkehǒ and Mǒori treated each other. The privilege of stepping into the other’s private or public domain, in crossing New Zealand’s cultural divide, was not always common practice but by the 1980s people were beginning to open up to biculturalism, as the following statement by McQueen illustrates: my encounters with Kai Mamoe and Waitaha descendants in my life in Bluff give me a [...] privileged glimpse into the ways colonisation affected this part of the world, and another strand of my ancestry, the St. Kildan one, gives me another example of what flows from such contacts with vectors of change.28

From a strictly German point of view, McQueen’s assessment of the Berlin Wall’s impermanence reads like a vision, when she states that The Wall is crumbling and falling down all by itself The iron within is corroding Soon large cracks will appear (BD, 53)

And fall it did, on 9 November 1989. However, it is not only the German Wall that McQueen saw crumbling, not only the frontier between socialism and capitalism, and not only the lifting of the Iron Curtain. In line with my earlier observation, the question McQueen poses in the German/German (East/West) context can also be transposed to the Aotearoa New Zealand situation where the Mǒori Renaissance and the 1980s debate on biculturalism initiated a renegotiation of Mǒori/Pǒkehǒ relationships, and inaugurated the proclaimed ideal of the two peoples as equal partners in New Zealand society. Cilla McQueen’s figurative language calls for readings in different cultural and historical contexts. Following Wim Wenders’ argument, Berlin Diary can thus be read as much as a metaphorical construction site as a text. Through her interlacing of different perceptions of Berlin, McQueen combines the sense of history and heritage in the manner of layers deposited on Berlin’s cultural topography. She jumps from providing the opinion of young people “who don’t see 28

McQueen, in Ascroft & Reeve, “‘A Walk Upstream’.” Bluff, McQueen’s current domicile, is the port of Invercargill, the southernmost city of the South Island; St Kilda is both part of the Hebrides (to which island her ancestors were colonized) and, piquantly, an inner suburb of Dunedin, where McQueen lived for a time.

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Berlin as a divided city. To them, West Berlin and East Berlin are two contiguous cities, and foreign to each other” (BD, 39) – to metaphoric images indicating the transgression of boundaries: Kites fly From the summit of Teufelsberg Some hang high and motionless Some stray on the wind Into forbidden air Some like bombers and buzzards Circle and whine, menacingly (BD, 30)

To a European readership, the mention of “bombers” immediately triggers the historic reference to the American supply operation to West Berlin in 1948 when ‘raisin-bombers’29 helped the isolated population to survive. McQueen only hints gently at such historic events. Most often, the historical dimension of the city’s past is conveyed through single words bearing the potential to spark off an entire historical discourse. Yet, McQueen chooses to keep these references well contained, as exemplified in the following passage, written in a more narrative style: During all the wars and repeated destruction, people have doggedly kept on living in Berlin. Here are their relics, here are their yellow stars and dolls’ houses, here are their toy clothes and ration books, their saucepans guns and furniture. Little makebelieve houses full of comfortable cushioning What the surface bore while the river flowed beneath (BD, 49)

The prose-poetic character of the passage, a narrative interrupted by line breaks, supports the impressions of layers of history, politics, and everyday life that have accumulated in Berlin like sediments of time. Again McQueen only hints at grievances of the First and Second World Wars – the Holocaust being ever so slightly called to mind here by the reference to the yellow stars.30 The fluid transition between saucepans and guns, emphasized by the absence of a comma, might be interpreted as a reference to the pacifist movement of the 29

This is a word-by-word translation of the German Rosinenbomber, a term used by the local population of Berlin to describe the American aircraft that supplied the population of West Berlin not only with the basic necessities but with a few luxuries, such as raisins, during the blockade of the late 1940s. See Taylor, The Berlin Wall, 56–58. 30 The haunting presence of National Socialism and the Holocaust in Berlin Diary is not the focus of this essay, but it deserves to be addressed in a separate analysis.

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GDR during the 1980s, which derived its motto from the Biblical phrase of turn-

ing “swords (guns) into ploughshares” (Isaiah 2:3–5). In the light of such references, the history of Aotearoa New Zealand might seem far away, but McQueen is acutely aware of interconnected cultural patterns, most poignantly when she talks of Mǒori death and mourning: Invisible dead, like bells, chimerical. I found the same resonance in Dunedin, at the old pa site on the headland at Purakanui. Where violent death and grief have been, the place retains a resonance long afterwards. (BD, 76)

It is through juxtaposing peoples’ grievances and historical events through time and space that McQueen powerfully conveys the interconnectedness of human history. Through the imaginative tracing of the stories behind history, the second layer of the text, its mirrorskin, is revealed and illuminates the metaphorical potential of the Berlin Wall as a cultural contact zone.31 I argue that McQueen, in analogy to geology, perceives the complex historical web of Berlin in stratigraphic layers of culture, an interpretation that offers itself because of the metaphoric language of erosion and sedimentation that she employs to capture the tides of time: The city’s time is stacked in layers, unevenly, swirling like the grain of wood or wind, its currents shifting time past cast momently to light then sucked deep down again, invisible. (BD, 93)

As Berlin Diary progresses, the Wall becomes less a Berlin landmark or the physical manifestation of the Iron Curtain than a symbol of cultural conflict and contact. Thus, it is not the actual Wall as such that McQueen mainly investigates. She is most interested in the permeability of the borderline, which she expresses in her image of the meniscus, the “proposition [being] that if this barrier (at times permeable and at others impenetrable) fails to hold, chaos results.”32 McQueen uses the image repeatedly to refer to the Wall as Berlin’s shoreline. In my view, she clearly subscribes to the elemental power of water, 31

On the “contact zone,” see Mary Louise Pratt, “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone,” in Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992; London: Routledge, 2008). 32 Paul Millar, “McQueen, Cilla,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 325.

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which is not least apparent in her re-visiting of Berlin Diary in 2009, twenty years after the Wall came down: If West Berlin is an island, die Mauer is its shoreline. From Berlin my thoughts often turn back to the New Zealand shoreline. “Infinitesimal meniscus, the tiny coastline of sandgrains, fractal, shifting with the tide’s pulse” [BD, 39]. The natural shoreline alive, entirely organic, in the hydraulic balance of nature minutely adapting to continuous change. Just as imagery in interaction with its text creates multiple layers of meaning, the meniscus of water in interaction with the land creates the everchanging constant of the shore.33

It is thus the power of subtle change in which McQueen believes. The fluidity of cultural contact zones, the changing outline of the meniscus at the water’s edge (BD, 79) is what interests her most, as it comes closest to a coastline – what she describes as “a ring of energy produced by water’s complicated molecular dance, [which] is unfixed but constant, a mobile, energetic circuit which both joins and divides sea and land.”34 McQueen’s concept of the meniscus can thus be called one of the primary driving forces of her poetic investigations of cultural contact zones. Throughout Berlin Diary, McQueen tackles the binary character of the East/ West discourse manifested in the Wall and manages to dissolve it in the description and metaphoric image of the Wannsee, which straddles the border between East and West Berlin – the artificially divided lake is both ridiculous and yet “no joke”; it is a fluid yet concrete boundary, as elusive as it is real: Look! The Wannsee itself is divided in two! Invisible boundary, indicated by buoys. The Wall goes through water. Division between two halves of the brain. Yet water flows through the boundary wherever the current will. On the surface the rules must be obeyed on pain of death. (BD, 40)

Yet water cannot be held back; it is moving freely between the artificial dividing line, illustrating the permeability of the barrier despite the menacing presence of “the Wall [that] snakes along the shore behind the tree” (BD, 40). It is in the water’s movement that McQueen sees the potential of shifting the boundary and creating the fluidity of the contact zone. The continuation of the Wall as 33

Cilla McQueen, “‘Was ist aus Barbra Streisand geworden?’ Cilla McQueen Revisits her 1988 Berlin Diary,” N Z S A Bulletin of Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 2 (2010): 206, italics in original. This text was first presented at the 2009 Conference of the New Zealand Studies Association, held in Frankfurt, Germany, around the theme “New Zealand, Germany and the (Post) Colonial Pacific.” 34 McQueen, “‘Was ist aus Barbra Streisand geworden?’,” 209.

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material presence does not work in the same way with the lake, as the binary opposites so carefully crafted by the East/West discourse cannot be distinguished visibly. The water remains the same on both sides of the border, which in effect dissolves the ideological architecture of the discourse. In reference to McQueen’s understanding of the power of poetry, the element of water produces the writer’s much sought-after chaos, which provides the fertile ground for new growth. Her extensive imaginary tracing of the Wall confirms her conviction that poetry can become “a powerful anarchic means of expression which [brings] into question our whole intellectual, spiritual and social system.”35

Kapka Kassabova and Berlin Post-1989 After 1989, texts about Berlin become more fragmentary and less cohesive. The Wall is no longer the physical landmark of the city – its twenty-eight years of existence have entered the realm of history. At the dawn of the new millennium, Berlin is re-designing itself as the New Berlin36 with the goal of becoming one of Europe’s most vibrant political and cultural centres. In The New Berlin (1990), Karen Till describes how “city planners developed a series of what they call ‘black plans’, or snapshots of built-up areas (at different times of Berlin’s history) in black [...] and non-built-up areas as white,”37 photographs which came to be known as the building memory of its residents. Such a mapping of Berlin uncovers different historical layers of the city, each bearing a different geographical and chronological reality, thus revealing a postmodern fragmentation of the urban space. Kapka Kassabova captures the sense of Berlin’s fragmentary identity vividly in her poetry collection Geography for the Lost (2007), which expands on the sketches of places and people found in her unpublished travel journal “Back to Berlin.”38 In the following analysis, I include passages from this unedited sketch, which reveals the writer’s cultural predicament as much as those of the characters she describes. The comparative reading of selected poems from the aforementioned collection Geography for the Lost (2007) and of excerpts from Street Without a Name (2008) will hopefully illuminate the distinctive perspective of

35

McQueen, in Michael Harlow, “Interview with Cilla McQueen,” English in Aotearoa 13 (November 1990): 95. 36 Till, The New Berlin, 39. 37 The New Berlin, 46. 38 I wish to thank Kapka Kassabova for kindly making this as yet unpublished journal available to me.

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this transmigrant Bulgarian-turned-New-Zealand writer who currently lives in Edinburgh.39 In the preface to “Back to Berlin,” Kassabova reflects on the changed circumstances upon returning to the German capital in 2002 when the Cold-War era had long turned into history – a history that is part of her innermost cultural makeup: What happened to me [...] was a kind of fusion of my inner and outer worlds, as I surrendered to Berlin’s low winter skies and pot-holed buildings, weekend flea markets where I picked out anonymous old photos and imagined the stories behind them.40

The Berlin of 2002 triggers many memories in Kassabova, who spent her childhood and teenage years in socialist Bulgaria, an upbringing which erected a “mental Wall” inside her.41 At the age of eleven she first came face to face with the Berlin Wall, an encounter she describes as follows: Like most people on our [the Eastern] side, I had internalised oppression. The Wall was already inside me, the bricks and mortar of my eleven-year-old self. The Wall wasn't a place or even a symbol any more. It was a collective state of mind, and there is something cosy, something reassuring in all things collective. Even a prison.42

Unlike McQueen, whose reference point is Aotearoa New Zealand, a nation whose history she is keen to address, this passage from Street Without a Name reveals that Kassabova rejects the embrace of her Bulgarian cultural heritage. She describes it as a part of her “which she tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory.”43 As I have argued elsewhere, the reluctance to acknowledge Bulgarian culture as part of her life might be due to the challenges that such a

39

In a personal interview, Kassabova herself stressed that she preferred the adjective ‘currently’ rather than the adverb ‘now’ to refer to her momentary place of residence. This is in line with her transmigrant identity according to the description of Glick Schiller, Linda Basch & Szanton Blanc in “From Immigrant to Transmigrant,” 121–40. See also Claudia Duppé, “Tourist in Her Native Country: Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Eva Ulrike Pirker & Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010): 430. 40 Kassabova, Preface to “Back to Berlin,” n.p. 41 Kassabova, “Back to Berlin,” 2. 42 Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello, 2008): 67. 43 Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 2.

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recognition posed to her cosmopolitan identity.44 Confronted with the re-united Berlin in 2002, she cannot escape the memories (or ghosts) of her Eastern European past: I reached Brandenburg Gate. I could even touch it, there were no barriers. Behind it opened up the green expanse of Tiergarten, the city’s biggest park, planted with one million trees in 1949. One million trees that belonged to the West – how ordinary they seemed now that they belonged to everyone. Where the wall had stood, there was nothing. And a little to the right – a line of small plaques, with the names of those who died trying to cross. The last one, unluckiest of men, met his death on 5 May 1989, only months before the Wall became a collectible item. I was standing in a drafty graveyard full of invisible graves. I had ignored the Wall when it was there. Now that it was gone, I sensed it like a phantom limb.45

To Kassabova, the absence of the Berlin Wall causes her physical pain, as if a part of her had been amputated. When comparing this passage to the “bricks and mortar of [her] eleven-year-old self”46 in Street Without a Name, one might go so far as to say that this part of her identity has been crippled. Kassabova finds herself unable to mourn the loss of her “phantom limb.” Instead, she describes a Berlin that is hollowed-out, and just as deprived of a sense of identity and direction as she is. In Kassabova’s sketches of the various areas of Berlin, personal memories and history melt into each other, prompting her to trace forgotten (hi)stories in an attempt to compensate for the missing limb. In the travelogue Street Without a Name, Berlin remains a divided city best expressed by the line she draws “between the bright, cosmetically enhanced, unified Berlin, and mousy self-deprecating East Berlin [which] was like the watermark of a tide frozen in time.”47 This stands in stark contrast to the fluidity of McQueen’s meniscus. In Kassabova’s Berlin, the dynamic of the undercurrents that McQueen perceives before the Wall came down are petrified as one layer of Berlin’s history. The city is represented as a patchwork of individuals’ disillusionments; the fall of the Wall left people dislocated and suspended between systems and ideologies. Thus, the Russian salesman in Charlottenburg “with the small limp of the eternally downtrodden” is just as disillusioned as the “tiny ancient woman” whom Kassabova encounters on a bench “clutching her 44 45 46 47

Duppé, “Tourist in Her Native Country,” 426. Kassabova, “Back to Berlin,” 3. Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 67. Kassabova, “Back to Berlin,” 9.

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worn bag in her lap [... upon] hearing all this Russian speech around her.”48 The same goes for the cycle of poems in Geography for the Lost around “Mister Hu,”49 whose loneliness and “gestures of longing and loss”50 are acted out against the canvas of a featureless Berlin cityscape. Berlin as a recognizable place with streetnames, sights, and landmarks disappears and the lives of its inhabitants lose all sense of direction. The fate of the nameless “Woman in Berlin 60 Years Later” in the eponymous poem illustrates this disillusionment and loss of orientation: Nobody knows me, I’m disguised as a survivor, invisible among more recent ruins swept-up leaves, and streets with names of those born at the wrong end of time.51

This is reminiscent of the description of Berlin by Karen Till, who observes that the city remains haunted by past visions for the future and contemporary desires for the past. It is a city where temporalities collide in unexpected ways through the actions of individuals and groups – living, deceased, and not yet born – as they make places in their search for what it means to be German. In the process, people evoke ghosts [...] and debate how the past should be remembered, for whom, where, and in what form. [...] Modern Berlin, as a concept and a place, is simultaneously haunted by past and future lives and presences, and shaped by the tourist gaze.52

Kassabova’s Berlin is postmodern, in both the aimlessness and the disenchantment with which it is represented in her musings. The significance of the Wall recedes into the background and becomes part of the city’s fragmented historical fabric: “The Wall was Berlin’s natural boundary,” said Fanna, a Bulgarian painter who’d lived in Berlin for twenty five years. “The new Berlin was big and alien, full of places I didn’t recognise. I hadn’t gone anywhere, and yet I’d suddenly found myself in a foreign city. Part of my past was missing. But that was just a visual reaction. You get used to things. Now it seems crazy that we lived with the Wall for so long.” 48 49 50 51 52

Kassabova, “Back to Berlin,” 5. Kassabova, Geography for the Lost, 17–20. Geography for the Lost, 17. Geography for the Lost, 21. Till, The New Berlin, 195.

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But it wasn’t just a visual reaction. For those on the East side, like Fanna, who had lived a lifetime in divided Europe, the tears of a confused nostalgia for something which you hated but which is nevertheless irrevocably lost blend with the grey dust of the city, to form the bittersweet paste, the sludge of loss that is building the new Berlin.53

This passage not only reveals Kassabova’s dual position as chronicler and critical commentator, but it also strongly points to her own background as a transnational migrant and child of the former Eastern bloc. The sense of “grey dust” and “bitter-sweet paste, the sludge of loss” reappears with bitter irony in her autobiographical travelogue Street Without a Name when Kassabova retrospectively describes her neighbourhood in Sofia as a “dystopia of concrete and mud,” illustrating the dilapidated and ill-functioning infrastructure of the socialist state.54 Despite those personal undercurrents, Kassabova’s sketches of the new Berlin fit hand in glove with Karen Till’s description of the city in transition where the locals are mere spectators of change: The object of their gaze was not the contemporary city but a moving spectacle of past and future landmarks. They watched from the vantage point of the future, remembering a dreamscape in transition, awaiting the next scene. This New Berlin reframed the city by detaching existing places from their known, everyday experienced spaces and times.55

Those who should be locals of the place have lost all sense of the present, as the passage from “Someone else’s life” so hauntingly conveys: The street was deserted and dim. Shrapnel wounds blossomed in walls. There was no proof of the current decade, and I could not recall the names of faces that I knew the smell of places where I’d lived56

As this passage suggests, the city’s history before 1961 has become more visible since the Wall came down. This is partly owing to the lack of restoration and renovation, particularly in East Berlin. At the same time, the focus of the public lay on Berlin as the reunited country’s new and old capital, which might have drawn attention to the many “shrapnel wounds” still visible in the walls of the houses. The shift in discourse with regard to the erection of memorials and the 53 54 55 56

Kassabova, “Back to Berlin,” 7. Kassabova, Street Without a Name, 30. Till, The New Berlin, 194. Kassabova, Geography for the Lost, 23.

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acceptance of social and political responsibility for the past is another factor contributing to the excavation of Berlin’s historical layers.57 This history is laid open when buildings are torn down to develop new building-sites; at other times, the past might resurface in the form of a memory plaque on a house wall indicating the deportation of Jewish citizens.58 The tension between wanting to create something new and taking painful historical legacies into consideration is palpable in the poem “Berlin Mitte,” where the speaker retraces the history of the Jews in Berlin through a kind of absence présente: I look for clues around the house. But the walls are whitewashed. The ceilings are too high. The floor has been treated with the polish of this new, confident century. I sit by the narrow window To remember those I never knew, for there is no one to remember them. No one remembers numbers on a plaque.59

The binary contrast between past and present, the times of the Holocaust and “the new, confident century,” is painted in crude strokes claiming that the culture of communal memory needs developing. It illustrates Kassabova’s desire to imaginatively trace the forgotten past and give the names and numbers on the plaques faces and personal histories. In this regard, her motivation to invoke the memory of the Holocaust is comparable to that of Cilla McQueen, who also senses “vacancies” in the “present [which] appears to have been wrenched askew” (BD, 79).

Conclusion The analysis of the two literary perspectives before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall illustrates the political paradigm shift that took place in 1989, and,

57

Till, The New Berlin, 63–154. Length does not permit further elaboration along these discursive lines which will be addressed in a separate essay. 58 In many German cities, the deportation of Jewish citizens is remembered by way of putting a memory plaque on the wall or copper cobblestones on the pavement in front of their former homes. These memory plaques usually show the person’s name, date of birth, and date of death together with the name of the concentration camp in which he or she died. 59 Kassabova, Geography for the Lost, 22.

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even more significantly, it reveals the various reverberations of the Wall in different politico-cultural contexts. Cilla McQueen’s Berlin Diary unpicks the cultural fabric of Berlin before the Wall came down. The author demystifies the concrete metaphor with a skilful play of double entendres and a pinch of poetic anarchy. Her thorough investigation of the island image illuminates conflicting political and cultural realities. Through her poetic soundings, the Wall is eventually transformed into a cultural signifier that transcends the East/West German/German context and becomes a mirrorskin to Aotearoa New Zealand’s cultural struggles at that time. In my view, McQueen’s Berlin Diary is one of the most extensive poetic explorations of the Berlin Wall to date. It is a monument in itself. When Kapka Kassabova came to Berlin in 2002, the Wall had disappeared and Berlin was no longer an enclave in the GDR but the united Germany’s capital and a European city in the making. In Kassabova’s writing, Berlin features as an allegorical cityscape of the twenty-first century in which migrants and refugees try to negotiate their respective cultural affinities and deal with the ghosts of their pasts. The title of Kassabova’s collection of poems, Geography for the Lost, could therefore serve as a kind of guiding motto of the author’s endeavour to provide orientation to those in search of it. As an artist, Kassabova traces those (hi)stories hidden from view during the twenty-eight years of the Berlin Wall’s existence and interlaces them with her own memories and experiences. The Berlin Wall has certainly left its mark, both in McQueen’s Berlin Diary and in the writing of Kapka Kassabova. In the work of both writers, the wall has been shaped as a trope which illuminates different cultural contact zones reaching from Pǒkehǒ and Mǒori in New Zealand to multicultural affinities of Bulgaria and New Zealand, offset against the urban environment of Berlin at the dawn of the new millennium.

W OR K S C I T E D Ascroft, Nick, & Richard Reeve. “‘A Walk Upstream’: An Interview with Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeve,” Glottis 9 (2004): 17–21, repr. as “Cilla McQueen Interview with Nick Ascroft and Richard Reeve,” N ZE P C (1 April 2006), http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac .nz/authors/mcqueen /glottis.asp (accessed 30 April 2012). “Berlin Writers’ Residency,” Creative NZ, http://www.creativenz.govt.nz/en/gettingfunded/find-funding-opportunities/berlin-writers-residency/general-info (accessed 24 April 2012). Croot, Charles. “Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry in 1990,” JNZL : Journal of New Zealand Literature 12 (1994): 45–54.

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Cupers, Kenny, & Markus Miessen. Spaces of Uncertainty (Wuppertal: Müller + Busmann, 2002). Duppé, Claudia. “Tourist in Her Native Country: Kapka Kassabova’s Street Without a Name,” in Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture, ed. Barbara Korte, Eva Ulrike Pirker & Sissy Helff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010): 423–36. Glick Schiller, Nina, Linda Basch & Christina Szanton Blanc. “From Immigrant to Transmigrant: Theorizing Transnational Migration,” Soziale Welt 12.3 (1997): 121–40. Harlow, Michael. “Interview with Cilla McQueen,” English in Aotearoa 13 (November 1990): 93–95. Herd, Michael. “Neuseeländische Autoren in Berlin,” in Dies ist eine wahre Geschichte: Neuseeländische Autoren in Berlin, ed. Barbara Richter (Berlin: D AA D , 2002): 103–109. Kassabova, Kapka. All Roads Lead to the Sea (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1997). ——.“Back to Berlin,” draft made available to the author by the writer. ——.Geography for the Lost (Highgreen: Bloodaxe, 2007). ——.Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello, 2008). Kracauer, Siegfried. Die Straßen in Berlin und anderswo (Berlin: Das Arsenal, 1987). MacCannell, Dean. The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken, 1976). McQueen, Cilla. Benzina (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1988). ——.Berlin Diary (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1990). ——.Homing In (Dunedin: John McIndoe, 1982). ——.“ ‘Was ist aus Barbra Streisand geworden?’ Cilla McQueen Revisits her 1988 Berlin Diary,” N Z S A Bulletin of Aotearoa New Zealand Studies 2 (2010): 199–210. Mansfield, Katherine. “To Stanislaw Wyspianski,” in An Anthology of Aotearoa New Zealand Poetry, ed. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory O’Brien & Mark Williams (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 474. Marsden, Peter H. “‘Er war ein Berliner!’: Hone Tuwhare in Germany,” Ka mate ka ora: A New Zealand Journal of Poetry and Poetics 6 (September 2008): 88–101, http://www .nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/kmko/06/ka_mate06_marsden.asp (accessed 17 April 2011). Millar, Paul. “McQueen, Cilla,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 325. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Introduction: Criticism in the Contact Zone,” in Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturalism (1992; London: Routledge, 2008): 1–12. Steven, Rob. “Land and White Settler Colonialism: The Case of Aotearoa,” in Cultures and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. David Novitz & Bill Willmot (Wellington: G P , 1989): 21–34. Sturm, Terry. “Hone Tuwhare,” in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, ed. Roger Robinson & Nelson Wattie (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1998): 549–51. Taylor, Frederick. The Berlin Wall: 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006).

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Till, Karen E. The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2005). Tuwhare, Hone. Was wichtiger ist als Sterben: Ausgewählte neuseeländische Gedichte englisch–deutsch, tr. Irmela Brender (Straelen: Straelener Manuskripte, 1985). Van den Abbeele, Georges. “Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist,” Diacritics 10.4 (Winter 1980): 2–14. Vertovec, Steven, & Robin Cohen, ed. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2002). Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality: The Puzzling Form of Cultures Today,” in Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World, ed. Mike Featherstone & Scott Lash (Thousand Oaks C A & London: Sage, 1999): 194–213. Wenders, Wim. “A Sense of Place: Wim Wenders in Conversation with Allesandra Casu and Ilene Steingut,” Arch+ 180 (2006): 110–15. Willmott, Bill. “Cultural and National Identity,” in Cultures and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. David Novitz & Bill Willmot (Wellington: G P , 1989): 1–20.

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The Wall as Signifier in Ivan Vladislaviđ’s Works 1 C AR ME N C ONCILIO

QUINC E Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisbe says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall. SNO UT You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom? BOTTO M Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-cast about him, to signify ‘wall’; and let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisbe whisper.2

I

S H A K E S P E A R E ’ S A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the wall is a made-up sign to ‘signify’ both a barrier and a bridge. It works as an obstacle yet also as a way for communication to take place; it separates and somehow unites Pyramus and Thisbe, the two mythical lovers of Ovid’s Metamorphoses whose story is being retold by Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’ during the rehearsal of their play. In this essay, the transformative nature of the wall will be studied in relation to South African literature, particularly to the writings of Ivan Vladislaviǰ. Indeed, the wall is a massive presence as an icon that works as 1

N

An earlier version of this essay was published as “The Wall as Signifier in Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s Works,” in Carmen Concilio, New Critical Patterns in Postcolonial Discourse: Historical Traumas and Environmental Issues (Turin: Trauben, 2012): 21–37. 2 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream I I I .i.54–66, in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988): 320.

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a shifting and metamorphic signifier in South African literature and society, though here the wall tends to be a tool of separation rather than of union. The wall is such a rooted icon in South African writing that it characterizes with remarkable continuity the history – and, consequently, the literature – of the country from its early colonial origins to its present post-apartheid condition. This study will focus on Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s representations of the wall as a powerful symbol of the present-day urban context of Johannesburg. My analysis will take as a point of departure Sarah Nuttall’s assumption that recent South African urban narratives seem to explore “an emergent ethic of hospitality in the city.”3 Furthermore, the dialectic between hospitality and hostility will also be considered here, as it seems that the two concepts are respectively loosely translatable with reference to the categories formulated by Heidegger of “Mitsein,” or the capacity of being together, and “Dasein,” or the anguish of being thrown into the human condition of loneliness, self-alienation, and absence of communication with other human beings. Such Heideggerian terms will be connected with the icon of the wall as a signifier assuming a variety of significations in the South African context. To begin with, the wall – quite conventionally – produces images of fortification. “Journal of a Wall,” for instance, is an eloquent prose fragment about the wall as signifier in Vladislaviǰ’s work Missing Persons: Stories.4 This is a short narrative about a couple of newly arrived neighbours who, for no apparent reason, commit themselves to the construction of an anonymous, dull brick wall around their property and who, soon after the completion of the structure, put the property up for sale and move somewhere else. Despite the fact that the wall appears to them – albeit just for a moment – “not so much as a barrier between us, but as a meeting-point,”5 it soon becomes again, in the eyes of the first-person narrator, the high and sombre barricade it was meant to be. Jurij Lotman has theorized, in his essay on culture, that space can be divided between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ that establish the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’, or ‘here’ and ‘out there’.6 Vladislaviǰ’s narrator perfectly translates Lotman’s theory: “The wall. They knew it from one side, I knew it from the other.” When he tries to establish contact while asking for some sugar, he is denied 3

Sarah Nuttall, “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2008): 214. 4 Ivan Vladislaviǰ, “Journal of a Wall,” in Vladislaviǰ, Missing Persons: Stories (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989): 23–44. 5 Vladislaviǰ, “Journal of a Wall,” 39. 6 Jurij M. Lotman, “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture” (“O metaiazyke tipologicheskikh opisanii kul’tury,” 1969), Semiotica 14.2 (1973): 97–123.

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hospitality: “he stepped towards the door, as if to block my path. I was disappointed. I had hoped to gain access to the house, to measure their space against my imaginings.”7 Not only Lotman but also Derrida seem to be put to the test here, for this denial of hospitality abandons all the characters to their own solitude. In the words of Hillis Miller, Jacques Derrida is unusual, if not unique, in explicitly denying that Dasein is Mitsein. His concepts of ethics and of community are consonant with this assumption of each ego’s inescapable solitude. According to Derrida, I remain alone, on my own, however much I may be open to the ethical demand each other, though wholly other, makes on me.8

Vladislaviǰ shows how these “solitudes” live separately according to an individualistic drive to close up against the external world, other people, and their demands. The wall as a feature of urban life, with its practical function of a barrier, thus becomes a self-referential signifier whose meaning reflects unspoken paranoia, consisting in the almost pathological and unconscious need to fence off one’s property and protect oneself from the external world. The wall as signifier thus acquires here a clear meaning of hostility and rejection. Another representation of the wall as fortress is to be found in Hilton Judin and Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s catalogue Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After. The volume starts with an essay on the “Fort ende Thuijn,” a tradition introduced by the first Dutch settlers at the Cape: In 1649 two officials of the Dutch East India Company drew up a report recommending the establishment of a ‘Fort ende Thuijn’ at the Cape of Good Hope for the benefit of the Company’s shipping between the Netherlands and Batavia. The ‘fort’, as they described it elsewhere, was to accommodate a garrison of sixty to seventy men, and was obviously needed for protection [...]. As far as the proposed ‘thuijn’ of the memorandum is concerned, this may be translated conventionally as a garden. [...] In this particular context and period, however, the word might also mean a fence or palisade, an enclosure rather than the area so enclosed. [...] Shelter, enclosure, keeping together, shutting out, protecting, defending, establishing a presence and ensuring its survival – the ‘Fort ende Thujin’ envisaged by the Company seem potent images, encapsulating much of what was to be attempted in South Africa by white settlers over the following three centuries and more.9 7 8 9

Vladislaviǰ, “Journal of a Wall,” 39. J. Hillis Miller, “Derrida Einsled,” Critical Inquiry 33.2 (Winter 2007): 248. Karel Schoeman, “ ‘Fort ende Thujin’: The Years of Dutch Colonization,” in Blank____: Archi-

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This idea of garden-cum-fortification seems to have survived to this day, so that the wall remains a self-referential Lotmanian signifier of radical exclusion and a symbol of visible hostility. Certainly, it is interesting that the word ‘thuijn’ may be visualized both three-dimensionally (garden) and two-dimensionally (fence). Thus, both the denotative and the connotative values of the word change dramatically. This reduction implies that one signifier stands for conflicting meanings, and the tension generated by the ambiguity reigns. In the postcolony – as Achille Mbembe defines the new South Africa – walls proliferate everywhere; above all, they enclose gated communities that present themselves as class-bound dwelling sites, fortified citadels in defence of private villas, gardens, swimming-pools, and a suburban life-style that are often advertised as Tuscan-like villages. “Villa Toscana,” the setting of one of Vladislaviǰ’s short chapters in the novel The Exploded View (2004), is just such a fortified enclave in North Johannesburg. Its fake-medieval heavy wooden gates, its similarly inauthentic fortified guardhouse, make up this “city-state” and create a “fortress-like atmosphere”10 with its “boundary wall laced with electric fencing.”11 Apart from the surrounding high wall that also protects the suburb from the noise of traffic, this kind of island, like many other northern suburbs, is connected with or plugged into the city only through the N3, a large motorway. Quite strikingly, speaking about a similar suburban island, Melrose Arch, the architect Linda Bremner claimed: Should the security situation change, we will pull down the perimeter fence and connect back into the surrounding fabric. This development aims to become part of the city.12

Bremner’s observation seems to go in the opposite direction of Vladislaviǰ’s pessimistic depiction of isolation. Or, better, Bremner’s model is projected onto a future of hope while Vladislaviǰ’s model seems stuck in a stagnant present. Nevertheless, and in spite of the fact that gated communities exist in other parts of Africa and elsewhere, in South Africa they seem to inherit and reinforce that ancient ‘Fort ende Thuijn’ logic of the mid-seventeenth century. Thus, here, too, the wall becomes the Lotmanian signifier for “shelter, enclosure, keeping together, shutting out, protecting, defending, establishing a presence and ensuring its survival.”13 tecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin & Ivan Vladislaviǰ (Rotterdam: Nai, 1999): 34. 10 Ivan Vladislaviǰ, The Exploded View (Johannesburg: Random House, 2004): 9. 11 Vladislaviǰ, The Exploded View, 35. 12 Linda Bremner, Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (Johannesburg: S T E , 2004): 124. 13 Schoeman, “‘Fort ende Thuijn’: The Years of the Dutch Colonization,” 34.

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From a different perspective, the wall might be analysed in its role as artwork. In one of his narrative fragments in Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (2006), Vladislaviǰ discusses with his brother and a Chinese artist friend, Jeff Lok, the possibility of building a kind of democratic, transparent memorial wall in Johannesburg, encapsulating small objects donated by all the people living there. A project of inclusiveness, showing the life of a community working together with the conscience of being and living with others (Mitsein), “The Great Wall of Jeff” would be a challenging dream to preserve both the collective and the individual memory of the City of Gold, as Johannesburg is called: The city is saturated with death, Jeff said, it is passing away even as we speak .... We must build to commemorate, while there is still time, not just the famous or the fallen, but.... everyone. Every person in the Greater Johannesburg area, identified by the voters’ roll, must be required to donate an object to the artist for use in the work. This object shall be no larger than a standard brick and shall be enclosed in due course in a transparent resin block of those very dimensions. These object-enclosing bricks will be used in turn to construct a wall. The Great Wall of Jeff.14

This passage confirms that the wall is transparent: i.e. penetrable by the gaze; it is intended as an explicit sign of communication, a deliberate work of art. Furthermore, it is meant to commemorate the living, not the dead. This is an oxymoron that challenges a certain perception of art as memento mori: the celebration of the present, not of the past, of life, not of death. For these reasons, this project sounds utopian, particularly because of its inclusiveness. The three creators start questioning the problems of costs and fund-raising, sponsorship, materials, realization. Their comments catch our attention. Vladislaviǰ’s brother Branko asks: “how on earth will you get people in this greedy town to give things away?” The answer, although similarly striking, is a reference to the social contradictions of a metropolis like Johannesburg: “ ‘But we’re not looking for diamond rings and krugerrands,’ said Jeff, ‘although I’ll bet we get a couple of them’.” And then, the author adds: “ ‘Why a wall? Half the city has already vanished behind walls’.”15

14

Ivan Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (London: Portobello, 2006): 43; also in Ivan Vladislaviǰ, “Memory I: The Great Wall of Jeff,” in Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin & Ivan Vladislaviǰ (Rotterdam: Nai, 1999): 311. 15 Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 45.

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The reasoning about this hypothetical project moves from day-dreaming to conjectures about the monetary value of objects in one of the most depleted capitalist societies in the world, and to realistic considerations of the reinforced segregation of private spaces behind walls. This last observation attributes a specific meaning to the wall as signifier – the wall becomes a measure of the present continuum with apartheid-bound feelings of fear, paranoia, and segregation that materialize in the mushrooming of walls. The exasperation of the Dasein philosophy, this sense of the individual’s alienation from others, seems to prevail. The exclusiveness implied by walls created around individualism, privatization policies, and protection of one’s own space seems to banish the idea of a possible plural community of beings. Nevertheless, this Great Wall of Jeff, this work of art on paper, only imagined and only existing in a piece of fiction, becomes real in the work of another local artist, Sue Williamson, as reported in another prose fragment by Vladislaviǰ: Mementos of District Six is a cabin made of resin blocks. Enclosed in each block is an object or fragment that the artist Sue Williamson collected among the ruins of District Six after the removals: a shard of pottery, a scrap of wallpaper, a hairclip, a doll’s shoe.16

No matter how minimalist those objects are or, rather, precisely because of this quality, they catch the attention of a woman friend, who claims: It was just so moving, standing there like a kid in a Wendy house surrounded by these relics, worthless things made to seem precious, glowing like candles. As if each trinket and scrap had been a treasure to someone.17

This exchange reinforces the preceding passages, because the objects in this case seem much more precious than before. Being representative of the violent vanishing of an entire world, the by now mythical world of District Six, these mementoes signify the absence of a community of people, the material destruction of not so much their houses as of their homes. The mementoes also stand for their private lives, their own inner feelings and moods; they hint at dignity despite poverty and at a violent subtraction of meaning from the lives and world of a whole community. If, in the previous case, greed was mentioned in the shape of diamond rings, gold coins, and price tags indicating the value of the objects, here the few objects named are valueless from a commercial point of view, and yet symbolically they are much more meaningful. Their meaning 16 17

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 77. Portrait with Keys, 77.

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lies in the aesthetic translation of a traumatic memory that triggers the connection of these material objects to the real black and Coloured people who had suffered the forced removals of the 1950s and 1960s. In these two passages, the wall as artwork becomes a welcoming structure of hospitality, for it ideally encapsulates a whole possibility of Mitseienden, of ‘Being with others’. In the sequel to the prose piece, Vladislaviǰ imagines a whole community of people working together to build the wall, hanging their own objects and personal names on its transparent surfaces in celebration of an imaginary hybridity of architectural styles. The inscription of proper names is a sign of democratic participation and collective authorship, and hints at opposing the work of art celebrating the living (“The Great Wall of Jeff”) to the work of art celebrating the anonymous dead (“Mementos of District Six”). Nowadays, there is an even more striking way in which the wall becomes – through the irony of Vladislaviǰ’s narrative – a self-referential signifier, as well as a sort of self-generating, encroaching, and outgrowing complex security system, sometimes even with aesthetic ambitions: Walls replace fences, high walls replace low ones, even the highest walls acquire electrified wires and spikes. [...] A stone wall is heightened with prefab panels, a prefab wall is heightened with steel palisades, the palisades are topped with razor wire. Wooden pickets on top of brick, ornate wrought-iron panels on top of plaster, blade wire on top of split poles. These piggyback walls (my own included) are nearly always ugly. But sometimes the whole ensemble achieves a degree of elaboration that becomes beautiful again.18

Johannesburg seems to explode into an apotheosis of more and more elaborate walls mirroring one another, creating a maze of self-reflective and constantly multiplying similar, silent, and hostile surfaces. Actually, verticality is hinted at here. Walls become higher and more elaborate. These vertical outgrowths or layers create almost artistic effects. Yet their dreadful and threatening appearance is not dissimilar to the prototypical wall-plus-razor-bladed wire of Nadine Gordimer’s gruesome short story “Once Upon a Time.”19 For “electrified wires” and “spikes,” “steel palisades,” “razor wires,” “wooden pickets,” and “split poles” certainly clash with the adjective “beautiful.” Gordimer’s fable speaks of the happy middle-class white family whose fortified wall as security system fails to protect them from external enemies, accidentally killing their little son. 18

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 170. Nadine Gordimer, “Once Upon a Time” (1989), in Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 1991): 23–32. 19

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Sometimes the wall can become a silent script. An instance in which a wall ends up silencing history through its anonymous dullness is provided by Vladislaviǰ in another series of short narratives. Fragments number 10 and number 40 in Portrait with Keys record the metamorphosis of a neighbouring garden wall in Blenheim Street no. 10: Not long after Minky and I came to live in Blenheim Street, new people moved into the house at No. 10. And not long after that, they employed a woman to paint a Ndebele design on their garden wall. As I was passing by one morning, I saw her marking out the pattern with a felt-tip pen on the white surface, and over the following days I went up the road regularly to watch her progress. When she had finished the pattern, an immense maze of black lines six or seven meters long and two meters high, she began to fill it in with paint – mainly blue and grey, if memory serves me correctly.20

Vladislaviǰ matches this enterprise with a new craze in the South Africa of the 1990s, the explosion of murals and graffiti, either with decorative patterns or political messages, evenly distributed between tolerance and racism. 21 Here, he takes sides in favour of what he considers an attempt at creatively decorating and embellishing the wall as a sort of artwork. He is stubborn in his enthusiasm, despite being aware of the inauthenticity of such an attempt and of the appropriation of indigenous art. Actually, we do not know whether the woman who was hired to do the job is Ndebele or not: There was a fad for Ndebele painting at that time. A woman called Esther Mahlangu had been commissioned to coat a BMW 525 in Ndebele colours as part of an advertising campaign. Or was it an art project? Either way, it was a striking symbolic moment in the invention of the new South Africa, a supposedly traditional, indigenous culture laying claim to one of the most desirable products our consumer society had to offer.22

20

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 22–23. See Elisabeth Deliry–Antheaume, “Leggere la città a muri aperti: Graffiti e murali del nuovo Sudafrica,” Africa e Mediterraneo 1 (1999): 22–27. 22 Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 23. In 2007, on the occasion of an exhibition of contemporary African art in my hometown, Turin, Mahlangu reproduced similar patterns on a Fiat 500, one of the symbols of Turin as the home of Italy’s car industry. For an image of Mahlangu standing next to this car, see “Mud Brick and the Automobile,” Earth Architecture (28 January 2009), http: //www.eartharchitecture.org/index.php?/archives/989-Mud-Brick-and-the-Automobile.html (accessed 10 December 2013). See also Why Africa? La Collezione Pigozzi (Turin: Electa Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, 2007). 21

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Vladislaviǰ’s friend, Liz, is vehemently critical of such an operation. She believes that the Ndebele fashion is kitsch. One of her arguments concerns the fact that Ndebele wall painting is no more than a few decades old. Thus, it is not an ancient, indigenous artistic practice. Besides, it is constantly changing, and full of contemporary references. Furthermore, Liz believes the wall is “so cheerful that it looks a fake and ‘you’ white people like it right because it is nice and tidy.”23 What Liz is expressing here is not a criticism of Ndebele art but of the whites’ taste for colourful and apparently simple geometrical shapes, which seem not to require interpretation while providing aesthetic pleasure. In contrast, Vladislaviǰ’s fear that “some racist would deface it” is confirmed some three years later by the determination that a new dweller in the house shows while erasing that improvised and naive work of art: He went to stand on the other side of the street. Like a woods-man sizing up a tree, just before he chopped it down. I couldn’t watch. [...] He had started on the left. He was hacking into the pattern, obliterating it with extravagant swipes of the roller. Standing back from time to time, to admire his handywork. As if there was anything to see but an act of vandalism. The man must be a brute, I thought. It would be a man, too, the very antithesis of the woman who had painted the mural. The new owner was remaking the place in his own style. Ndebele murals are an acquired taste, after all. [...] They [the new owners] painted it a lemony yellow with green trim, a petrol-station colour scheme. It took a couple of coats; after the first one, you could still see the African geometry developing, like a Polaroid image, as the paint dried.24

The story of the “Ndebele wall” in a white suburb of Johannesburg is again symbolic of the tendency to re-establish and reinforce the wall as a dull and selfreferential signifier that does not project or produce any signification. The passage quoted shows contrasting images. The “tree” is a reference to the natural world, and chopping it down is evidently a violent erasure. The result of this operation is the transformation of what might look like a natural, indigenous environment into a wall, the green colour of a “petrol station.” The attempt at signification provided by the “employed woman,” as unauthorized author of otherwise ‘authentic’ African art, was a way – neither innocent nor neutral – to rewrite the history of South Africa and re-inscribe it in

23 24

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 24. Portrait with Keys, 57.

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the urban and architectural landscape of Johannesburg, from which it had been violently expunged and exiled in the past. The traditionally racist, patriarchal, or patronizing attitude of the white male owner simply erases that gesture. The result is deadening, anyway, and confirms that Johannesburg is still living under the evil spell of apartheid’s legacy, one that negates and erases history and any reminders of indigeneity. Later, in fragment No. 66, the author redeems the man who erased the painting (“He is a sensitive man, not a butcher [...] a pragmatist”)25 and defines his action as a “pentimento” or second thought.26 It is possible that the final message inscribed here is that history is inevitably a palimpsest. However, this gender-biased erasure of a woman’s work also deserves further consideration. Vladislaviǰ did not see the painted wall as a sentimental attempt to retrieve the past and lost traditions of indigenous South Africa. He was, rather, looking ahead at a future when people might consider the painted wall as an ‘authentic’ artwork: “Who’s to say what will be regarded as ‘authentic’ a generation from now?”27 The memory of the paint and the pattern remain as a trace of the palimpsest, looming beneath that wall, once more anonymous, blank, and dull-coated. In Portrait with Keys, there are more attempts, although anonymous, at making suburban walls speak a new language. Vladislaviǰ becomes the spectator of a neighbour’s artistic enterprise: he decided to put all the leftover pots of paint in his garage to good use by painting a mural on his garden wall. It is the ugliest mural in the whole city: a basket of flowers; a dog with mad eyes and spiky whiskers; a dim-witted sun, with a wry mouth and a set of stiff rays standing out like a bad haircut; a bird of paradise perched on one of the sunbeams; a red brick wishing-well.28

Here the kitsch effect is mitigated only by the friendship that the first-person narrator has established with Eddie, his neighbour, representative of one of the rare human exchanges that appear in the book as sincere, as an example of Mitsein, of ‘Being with others’.

25

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 85. Vladislaviǰ writes: “In her book Pentimento, Lillian Hellman took this process as a metaphor for the writing of a memoir. The appearance of the original conception and the second thought, superimposed within the same frame, is ‘a way of seeing and then seeing again’” (Portrait with Keys, 85). At the end of this quotation, Vladislaviǰ cites from Lillian Hellman, Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (Boston M A : Little, Brown, 1973): 3. 27 Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 23. 28 Portrait with Keys, 37. 26

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In another fragment, the author’s narrative alter-ego notices a little toy encased in a diamond-shaped hole in a wall. He automatically grasps it and brings it to his work-desk. There it stands, the tiny zoo-keeper, for a couple of days, before he returns it, where it mysteriously remains out of place for a month, unnoticed or forgotten, until he grabs it again and keeps the toy as a guardian over his own writing. Like the valueless objects to be donated for the memorial wall, the little toy is here first encased in a wall and then in the writing of Vladislaviǰ, thus becoming an anomaly, a speaking – if childish – memento.29 References to walls as signifying and speaking surfaces often remind us of the apartheid memorials which occur frequently in Portrait with Keys, as well as records of new signs and signposts, billboards and painted plaques on which Vladislaviǰ practises his skills as a professional text editor and proofreader, by stressing innumerable spelling oddities and mistakes. This feature of the new South Africa becomes a sign of hospitality, because it shows how Johannesburg has developed as a democratic space, where the ever-growing ‘informal economy’ and private enterprise flourish everywhere through a creative plurality of languages and idioms, thanks to the new (and sometimes illiterate) migrants: this can be inferred from reading The Restless Supermarket (2001), a novel dedicated to the corruption of the language, where “restless” literally means a supermarket that is open twenty-four hours a day.30 Johannesburg has been compared to Belfast and Berlin, yet it could also remind us of Nicosia, Beirut, or Jerusalem as an emblem of all cities divided along racial, ethnic, religious, linguistic or caste and class lines. Nadine Gordimer committed herself to pointing out the significant affinities between the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of apartheid in 1990. With her son Hugo Cassirer, a film director, she collected video interviews of writers of the ex- GDR and writers who had been victims of the apartheid regime. The documentary The Wall in the Mind was presented at the International Literary Festival in Berlin in 2001 and was warmly received.31 The historical connections are too obvious to be listed here. However, what Gordimer took to be important was 29

See Sally–Ann Murray, “Ivan Vladislaviǰ and What-What: Among Writers, Readers and ‘Other Odds, Sods and Marginals’,” Current Writing 21.1–2 (2009): 138–58. 30 Ivan Vladislaviǰ, The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001). 31 Hugo Cassirer & Nadine Gordimer, The Wall in the Mind: A Journey with Nadine Gordimer through Two Cities: Johannesburg and Berlin (New York: Felix, 1999). For more on this film, see Carmen Concilio, “‘ Il muro nella mente’: Nadine Gordimer tra vecchia e nuova censura,” Antropologia 2.2 (2002): 115–37, and Carmen Concilio, “Johannesburg–Berlin: The Wall in the Mind,” interview with Nadine Gordimer in Le tradizioni del moderno: Memoria e oblio, ed. Valeria Gianolio (Turin: Tirrenia, 2002): 127–34.

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the fact that the material demolition of walls has not led to the destruction of mental walls of prejudice, racism, suspicion, individualism, and pessimism. The obliteration of memory through simple amnesia at that time was of paramount concern to Gordimer. Her works show how walls obsessively reappear in South African literature and culture, and Vladislaviǰ seems to pick up from Gordimer this obsessive response to the emblem. From these examples it seems that any wall can become a sign – a juncture between signifier and signified, acquiring a variety of meanings depending on whether it is viewed from the inside or the outside. A wall means both inclusion and exclusion, denying or allowing access, erecting and demolishing. Furthermore, it allows the layering of yet more meanings by encapsulating mementoes or erasing them. It can be deaf and mute, even anonymous, and it can host scripts and signatures. It is a persistent and resistant icon of hostility as opposed to hospitality in South Africa today, as it was in the past. It is true, moreover, that although there are not many cross-racial encounters in Vladislaviǰ’s works, there is ethnic and class fragmentation, exasperated individualism to the point of “becoming fields of disparate beings, according to my friend Leon, the dotcom man, and we no longer need the proximity of others, the press of elbows and shoulders, to confirm our belonging.”32 And yet, the need for a philosophy of Mitsein seems to underlie his still predominant Dasein. Vladislaviǰ’s narrators are always looking for eye-contact, a gesture, a simple greeting, a word from neighbours, acquaintances, shopkeepers, security guards with the hope for communication, openness to others, and renewal of more humane forms of behaviour.

W OR K S C I T E D Bremner, Linda. Johannesburg: One City, Colliding Worlds (Johannesburg: S T E , 2004). Cassirer, Hugo, & Nadine Gordimer. The Wall in the Mind: A Journey with Nadine Gordimer through Two Cities: Johannesburg and Berlin (New York: Felix, 1999). Concilio, Carmen. “ Johannesburg–Berlin: The Wall in the Mind,” interview with Nadine Gordimer, in Le tradizioni del moderno: Memoria e oblio, ed. Valeria Gianolio (Turin: Tirrenia, 2002): 127–34. ——.“ ‘Il muro nella mente’: Nadine Gordimer tra vecchia e nuova censura,” Antropologia 2.2 (2002): 115–37. ——.“The Wall as Signifier in Ivan Vladislaviǰ’s Works,” in Concilio, New Critical Patterns in Postcolonial Discourse: Historical Traumas and Environmental Issues (Turin: Trauben, 2012): 21–37. 32

Vladislaviǰ, Portrait with Keys, 127.

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Deliry–Antheaume, Elisabeth. “Leggere la città a muri aperti: Graffiti e murali del nuovo Sudafrica,” Africa e Mediterraneo 1 (1999): 22–27. Gordimer, Nadine. “Once Upon a Time” (1989), in Gordimer, Jump and Other Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 1991): 23–32. Hellman, Linda. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (Boston MA : Little, Brown, 1973). Lotman, Jurij M. “On the Metalanguage of a Typological Description of Culture” (“O metaiazyke tipologicheskikh opisanii kul’tury,” 1969), Semiotica 14.2 (1973): 97–123. Miller, J. Hillis. “Derrida Einsled,” Critical Inquiry 33.2 (Winter 2007): 248–76. “Mud Brick and the Automobile,” Earth Architecture (28 January 2009), http://www .eartharchitecture.org/index.php?/archives/989-Mud-Brick-and-the-Automobile.html (accessed 10 December 2013). Murray, Sally–Ann. “Ivan Vladislaviǰ and What-What: Among Writers, Readers and ‘Other Odds, Sods and Marginals’,” Current Writing 21.1–2 (2009): 138–58. Nuttall, Sarah. “Literary City,” in Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis, ed. Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe (Durham NC & London: Duke U P , 2008): 195–218. Schoeman, Karel. “‘Fort ende Thuijin’: The Years of Dutch Colonization,” in Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin & Ivan Vladislaviǰ (Rotterdam: Nai, 1999): 33–39. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Shakespeare, The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells & Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988): 311–33. Vladislaviǰ, Ivan. The Exploded View (Johannesburg: Random House, 2004). ——.“Journal of a Wall,” in Vladislaviǰ, Missing Persons: Stories (Cape Town: David Philip, 1989): 23–44. ——.“Memory I: The Great Wall of Jeff,” in Blank____: Architecture, Apartheid and After, ed. Hilton Judin & Ivan Vladislaviǰ (Rotterdam: Nai, 1999): 311. ——.Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (London: Portobello, 2006). ——.The Restless Supermarket (Cape Town: David Philip, 2001). Why Africa? La Collezione Pigozzi (Turin: Electa Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, 2007).

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Enclosed: Nature Carol Shields’s Textual Mazes V E R A A L E X AND ER

Human Frontiers in the Canadian Wilderness: Form and its Discontents

I

196 5 C O N C L U S I O N to a Literary History of Canada, Northrop Frye infamously observes that “Canada began as an obstacle, blocking the way to the treasures of the East, to be explored only in the hope of finding a passage through it.”1 Borders and limitations, respectively the lack of such, are a conceptual leitmotif in Frye’s essay, which discusses a generous number of limitations on Canadian literary creativity and productivity. Topographical obstacles give rise to corresponding psychological ones as Frye goes on to diagnose related ‘writer’s blocks’ among his fellow Canadians: N HIS

Small and isolated communities surrounded with a physical or psychological ‘frontier,’ separated from one another and from their American and British cultural sources: [...] confronted with a huge, unthinking, menacing, and formidable physical setting – such communities are bound to develop what we may provisionally call a garrison mentality. In the earliest maps of the country the only inhabited centres are forts, and that remains true of the cultural maps for a much later time.2

While one would like to think that the literary landscape of Canada has long outgrown such unflattering descriptions, worries about identity and limitations of selfhood do not go away with age. On the contrary, as the “gateways and walls” of the 2011 EAC LALS conference theme imply, its enquiry into borders,

1

Northrop Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada” (1965), in Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, intro. Linda Hutcheon (1971; Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1995): 213. 2 Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” 227.

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landmarks, and their functions suggests that the changing disciplines of Commonwealth and postcolonial studies are at a moment of mid-life crisis which confronts them with similar condundra regarding direction and mentality. This is why Frye’s somewhat dated gauntlet is worth picking up in the context of the theme of walls and construction as part of an ongoing process for exploring connections between human beings and their surroundings. Although barely compatible with present-day norms of political correctness and positive selfimaging, Frye’s challenges continue to play a role, particularly because the relationship between human beings and their ‘natural’ environment is becoming more and more critical. Frye’s disparagement is based on the notion that obstacles are undesirable, practically as well as metaphorically. They are hindrances that stand in the way of quick, linear progress and suggest the opposite of efficiency or sophistication. While it is rare for obstacles to span the width of an entire continent, whatever size, they cause loss of time and consequent irritation. As they enforce indirect rather than direct ways of proceeding, obstacles create potentially unwelcome changes of direction. Although obstacles display features in common with the concept of the border, the two have different emotional overtones. Frye addresses obstacles from within a human-nature discourse characterized by fear which conceptualizes ‘nature’ as something akin to an obstacle as it juxtaposes the Canadian wilderness to human culture. This topophobic attitude assumes human control of space marked by the desire to map passages and gain control over nature. This notion has come under critical scrutiny from ecocritics from the 1970s onwards,3 as have constructions of nature in general.4 However, to gain control over nature is not the same as to understand it, regardless of whether the tools employed are secateurs, romanticizing discourse, or a rhetoric of myth and mystification. In what follows, I will analyse some of the postcolonial ambivalences of human struggles to control nature in the context of persistent dichotomies of wilderness and culture.

3

See, for example, New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism, ed. Andrea Campbell (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008); Timothy Clark, The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011); The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000); Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (2003; Abingdon: Routledge, 2012); and The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty & Harold Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P , 1996). 4 See, for example, Kater Soper, What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2007).

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This essay explores images of obstacles as agents of formation through a reading of Carol Shields’s Larry’s Party, a novel which prominently features the motif of hedge mazes.5 These are living borders made up of walls and constructed obstacles that are both human-made and naturally growing. These properties ensure that the motif contradicts purely negative images of walls and obstacles and show that hindrances of some kind or other are essential for the definition of any identity, individual as well as collective. As they force people to rethink, retrace, and redirect their steps, walls and obstacles call forth subtler, more indirect, and, possibly, more intelligent procedures that may lead to discoveries about boundaries, their functions, and their use for human self-understanding. Living walls that make up hedge mazes do not just stand in the way, they constitute and frame the way. Both functions of a border, acting as gateway and as wall, come together as functional sides pertaining to a single object, the green walls of the hedges indirectly acting as gateways leading maze visitors into a state of confusion, along enforced detours, inviting impasses, dead ends, loops, and other deceptive pathways. As the title of Shields’s novel indicates, there is something celebratory about how obstacles are resolved in the life of her protagonist. Mazes are costly to grow and constitute luxury playgrounds: enclosed leisure spaces where people, children as well as adults, submit to a sense puzzle which enacts the process of finding one’s way through life itself. Mazes spatially translate the course of a human life into a quest, a life narrative which employs the chronotope of a journey.6 Similarly, Shields’s novel tells a life story in several instalments and along concrete geographical coordinates. Larry’s Party gestures towards life writing in various ways and on different levels, as well as incorporating and subverting elements of a bildungs- or künstlerroman.7 The novel 5

Carol Shields, Larry’s Party (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). While less ‘hyped’ than The Stone Diaries, Larry’s Party was well received. Critical discussions mostly turn on the novel’s structure, its portrayal of masculinity, the struggle for Canada’s national identity in relation to the U K and the U S A , its postmodern revaluation of the ordinary as a source of beauty, and its writing-back to feminist criticism as well as the genre of the bildungsroman. Its contribution to a resituating of social and natural environments remains to be fully appreciated. 6 See, inter alia, The Labyrinth, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Infobase, 2009); Adrian Fisher & Howard Loxton, Secrets of the Maze: An Interactive Guide to the World’s Most Amazing Mazes (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997); Dee Goertz, “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. Edward Eden & Dee Goertz (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 230–54; and Kristin Veel, “The Irreducibility of Space: Labyrinths, Cities, Cyberspace,” diacritics 33.3–4 (2003): 151–72. 7 See Georgiana M.M. Colvile, “Carol’s Party and Larry’s Shields: On Carol Shields’ Novel Larry’s Party (1997),” Études Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 49 (2000): 86.

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traces the creative growth of a maker of mazes as he acquires the ability to shape his environment but struggles to make sense of his life. The book’s frontispiece presents readers with the photograph of a baby whom the protagonist later identifies as himself, suggesting that Shields’s character is a person who actually lived. The narrative thereby blurs the boundary between fiction and the real as it plays with different levels of fictionality and the reader’s experiential reality. In following and mentally reliving the protagonist’s experiences, readers make their way through a set of textual mazes, becoming aware of the ‘maziness’ of all texts and life stories. This process raises the question of what the real goal of any quest ultimately is: 

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to get to whatever treasure is at the centre of the maze – a fountain perhaps, or a bench for lovers, or a particularly valuable tree, perchance a party?, or to appreciate and enjoy the twists and turns of the puzzling journey as a goal in itself, or to confront the insuperable otherness of one’s environment, its power and elusive ways of communicating, that is to say, the ‘unenclosability’ of ‘nature’, or simply to get through, or a combination, or all, or none, of the above.

The human life that serves as an example in Larry’s Party is the fictional life of one Larry Weller, a Canadian maze-maker. Born in Winnipeg in 1950 to parents of English origin, Larry, a flower-shop assistant, moves out at age twentyseven, marries his first wife, Dorrie, and, during their honeymoon in England, falls in love with hedges in general and the maze at Hampton Court in particular. To his wife’s dismay, Larry loses (or, in a metaphorical sense, finds) himself in the maze at Hampton Court, in what constitutes, to him, a critical moment of discovery and rapture. Larry’s marriage breaks up, spectacularly symbolized by his wife’s destruction of a budding maze Larry has planted around their house. He has two other significant relationships over the twenty years chronicled in the novel, in the course of which he becomes a well-known maze designer who moves to the U SA and eventually back to Canada. After years of professional success and moderate personal fulfilment, the end of a major project coincides with both his ex-wives’ being in town, and so Larry and his partner arrange the eponymous dinner-party which brings together nine people, including all three love interests, present, past, and, it turns out, future, as this party brings Larry and Dorrie back together: lost and found. Curtain.

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Larry’s Party models a technique of subtly decentering themes and structures. Shields’s protagonist challenges the way ordinary and extraordinary lifeworlds are constructed: he is an Everyman said to have a “smooth, non-agenda face”;8 yet his unusual profession makes him an obstacle professional. Not only does he make a living from artfully constructing obstacles, he also leads a life where they are celebrated, individualized, and put on display. His job is a complex and somewhat eccentric version of being a garden architect, somebody who designs recreational show spaces around dwellings. Where most gardens present a painterly ensemble of plants, paths, water, and perhaps sculpture, the maze adds to this a pronounced dimension of living walls that may be obstacles or gateways. Whether they are the one or the other is not clearly visible, and the process involved in finding out and learning the decorative geography of a maze celebrates a triumph of human control over nature. Shields is not the first writer to have used the maze as an image that dramatizes human life in its pathways of trial and error. From the Renaissance on, the allegorical potential of the maze has been exploited for moral and pedagogical purposes in such works as John Norden’s The Labyrinth of Mans Life, Or Vertues Delight and Enuies Opposite (1614). But the maze seems to have particular resonance in the context of Canadian writing. Despite its artificial origin, a maze shares significant features with “the wilderness,”9 notably the experience of confusion as a playful version of the risks of nature’s vastnesses, of human beings overshadowed and dwarfed by natural growth.10 As well as allocating mazes a highly visible and symbolic plot function, Shields tells Larry’s life story with the help of formal maze patterns. She prefaces each chapter with maze drawings which “function not only as metaphors but also to diagram certain aspects of her protagonist’s subjectivity”;11 as such, they develop from square

8

Carol Shields, Larry’s Party, 156. Further page references are in the main text. Like ‘nature,’ this concept’,“signifying nature in a state uncontaminated by civilisation,” requires a marker to prevent any preconceptions about the wilderness referring to anything but a human construct. Garrard, Ecocriticism, 66. Garrard outlines the specific, “almost sacramental” significance of the wilderness in the North American context. 10 The wilderness as a formidable counterpart to human endeavour constitutes a particularly poignant theme – even, to some, a myth – in Canadian poetry, fiction, and life writing. Shields’s mazes surely qualify as one of the pseudo-wildernesses discussed in Heather Murray, “Women in the Wilderness,” in A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, ed. Shirley C. Neumann & Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton, Alberta: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986): 74–86. 11 Christina Ljungberg, “The Bell Jar, the Maze and the Mural: Diagrammatic Figurations as Textual Performance,” in Signergy, ed. Jac Conradie, Ronél Johl, Marthinus Beukes, Olga Fisher & Christina Ljungberg (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010): 51. 9

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geometric structures to more organic forms. Thanks to these designs, the narrative mirrors some of the functions of real hedge mazes, leading readers astray in an enclosure where the border between the real and the imagined is blurred. Each chapter is designed as a little maze in itself, a self-contained unit dealing with a specific theme in Larry’s life.12 The highlighted chapter divisions break the novel into episodic chunks, making Shields’s text more like a cycle of short stories13 full of flashbacks, prolepses across unmediated gaps of time, and aporias. Story elements are reiterated as if told for the benefit of a rotating audience that needs constant re-orientation: “a ‘reversible’ novel that shifts at will from ordinary story to extraordinary quest.”14 The reader watches Larry from above, as it were, looking over the shoulder of the god-like narrative mazemaker as he goes through his life with its wrong turns, detours, and attempts to retrace or correct steps. By being uneventful and ordinary, Larry’s life story not only subverts the grandeur of the ‘Life and Times of’ a famous hero who significantly shaped his environment, but it also exposes him as a template, a lab human from whose behaviours conclusions are to be drawn that fit other life routes, too. Larry’s maze-making shapes his environment, subverting any rigid distinction between nature and culture, or art. But while this process celebrates obstacles and problems, it exposes him as unable to make sense of his story, suggesting that human progress vis-à-vis the environment may take a circular shape of merely turning nature into complicated living art, imprinting human problems on the face of the earth.

Gardens as Representations of (Human) Nature In combining the idea of a life journey and rootedness, Shields’s maze novel contains elements reminiscent of both travel writings and gardening books. Both genres challenge any clear and decisive borderline between fiction and reality. Chapter Eleven, for instance, titled “Larry’s Search for the Wonderful and

12

Dee Goertz, “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” 253. This technique serves to reintroduce the plot and characters over and over again. This has been read as a technique that foregrounds postmodernist experiments with form – see, for example, Coral Ann Howells, “Larry’s a/Mazing Spaces,” in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvoˀák & Manina Jones (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 119 – but it is also an alienating device that prompts readers to keep adjusting their expectations about the necessity of making progress in the narrative. 14 Patricia–Léa Paillot, “Pioneering Interlaced Spaces: Shifting Perspectives and Self-Representation in Larry’s Party,” in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvoˀák & Manina Jones (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 157. 13

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the Good, 1992,” where her fictional characters travel in search of Europe’s most famous real mazes, reads like a travel guide through France, Spain, England, and Scandinavia. Balancing the protagonist’s journey through life with a reading progress hampered by repetitions and unnecessary turns, readers are induced to question the relationship between spatial progression and a learning process, such as reading. But whereas Shields’s use of mobility imagery can easily be connected to travel writing, the presence of roots as presented by her leitmotif of hedge mazes makes for a contradictory element less easily accounted for. Much has been made of Shields’s penchant for playing with genres which may be subsumed under the contested umbrella term of life writing in several works,15 but her subtle mode of weaving gardens into life stories has not attracted much attention.16 Since Larry’s Party lends such iconic significance to a topic related to gardening, it is worth exploring how far the novel may be contextualized with garden writings. Gardens have constituted an important concern in her earlier works such as The Box Garden (1977), through the flower motif prevalent in The Stone Diaries (1993), and in her short story “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” (1985). Gardens as heterotopic locations that approximate human idea(l)s have given rise to a variety of writings ranging from philosophical or theological meditations to coffee-table tomes, garden histories, and hands-on advice. However, these refuse to coalesce into a clear genre. While most gardening writings are self-help books on how to rear and tend plants and are thus devoid of stories or subtext, many have as much to say about the gardener making and writing the garden as about the living space in question. Thus, human life stories tend to sprout from between the lines of such works, raising questions about human relations to nature, the transitory effect of human work, and the motives that drive humans’ attempts to control their environment.17 15

See, for example, Neil K. Besner, Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Prairie Fire, 2003). 16 Shields has described biography as her “consuming passion” – quoted in Wendy Roy, “Autobiography as Critical Practice in The Stone Diaries,” in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. Edward Eden & Dee Goertz (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 113. Most critical discussions of Shields’s biographical focus centre on Swann: A Mystery (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987) – for example, Heidi Hansson, “Biography Matters: Carol Shields, Mary Swann, A.S. Byatt, Possession, Deborah Crombie, Dreaming of the Bones,” Orbis Litterarum 58.5 (2003): 353–70. 17 Examples include Henry Mitchell, The Essential Earthman (1981; London: Bloomsbury, 1997); Eleanor Perényi, Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981; New York: Vintage, 2002); Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (London: Bloomsbury, 1996) and his The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (London, Berlin & New York: Bloomsbury, 2001); Celia Thaxter, An Island Garden (Boston M A & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894); and Margery Fish,

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Gardens are ambiguous spaces, not only with regard to their complex interlinking of ‘art’ and ‘nature’ – they highlight the problems inherent in the very idea that art and nature may be juxtaposed. On the one hand, gardens are positively connoted leisure sites, beautiful spaces which inspire contemplation and uplifting reflection and which calm the nerves despite the often back-breaking labour involved in maintaining them. With regard to gardens, little seems to have changed since 1685 when William Temple observed: “God Almighty esteemed the life of a man in a garden the happiest He could give him, or else He would not have placed Adam in that of Eden.”18 At the same time, the idyllic pastoral has a darker shadow in the context of postcolonial writing, as gardens echo imperial strategies of plant-hunting, transplantations, and the destruction of indigenous ecosystems. Shields takes the uncanny side of the garden into consideration: in Larry Weller’s family history, gardens are not innocent spaces, either. Larry’s mother is traumatized because as a newly-wed she accidentally poisoned her mother-in-law with a dish of ineptly preserved home-grown beans, a catastrophe that led to the family’s exodus to Canada. For Larry, to regain some kind of garden paradise while in England adds mythic, even biblical, echoes of a circle of expulsion and return. Like (auto)biographical writing, the garden contests any rigid division between what is fictional or imaginary and what is referential: gardens are material objects as well as ideal spaces onto which utopian hopes have been projected. Larry’s Party explores the close connection between gardening as a set of activities that can be compared to the writing process, which makes for a selfconscious metafictional element in many of Shields’s works. Many garden writings are episodic, journal-like, thus tracing the progress of the year and its seasonal changes in weekly or monthly chapters, a structure which we find echoed in Shields’s novel. Acts of writing about gardens reflect on the specific creative challenges involved in trying to realize ideal notions of a “felicitous space”19 while using living materials and contending with the elements.

We Made a Garden (1956; London: B.T. Batsford, 2002). A prominent example of such writing in Canada that comes to mind is Elizabeth Smart and her Autobiographies (Vancouver: William Hoffer & Tanks, 1987), which abounds with references to the garden as a way of measuring change and the passing of time. 18 William Temple, “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or... of Gardening in the Year 1685,” Epicurus.info: Epicurean Philosophy Online (nd), http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/gardening.html (accessed 15 October 2013). 19 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (La Poétique de l’espace, 1958; New York: Orion, 1964): xxxi.

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Gardens are etymologically defined by enclosure. The garden space functions as a border and celebrates notions of walls and gateways practically and conceptually. Being locations at once everyday and mythic, gardens problematize a clear juxtaposition of nature and culture, inside and outside, fiction (or utopia) and reality as binary concepts. Hedge mazes playfully complicate ideas of borders as articulated by the garden: here, boundaries are present not just on the outside but inside, too. They become a centre and plot in their own right. The function of the hedge as boundary causes a paradigm shift for Larry on his honeymoon: through hedge mazes, the boundary becomes that which is central, dislocating all previous divisions of inside or outside, centre or margin: But it was the hedges of England, even more than the trees, that brought him a sense of wonderment. Such shady density, like an artist’s soft pencil, working its way across the English terrain. Why hadn’t his parents told him about this astonishing thing they’d grown up with? The hedges were everywhere. Out in the countryside they separated fields from pasture land, snaking up and down the tilted landscape, criss-crossing each other or angling wildly out of sight, dividing one patch of green from another, providing a barrier between cattle and sheep and flocks of geese. [...] – they were every bit as effective as stone walls or barbed wire, and some of them had roots that were hundreds of years old. In the towns the clipped hedges served as fences between houses, a stitching of fine green seams, and gave protection and privacy to tiny garden plots. Luxurious and shapely, they seemed pieces of tended sculpture, and now, late in a mild winter, their woody fullness was enveloped by a pale furred cloud of green. Buds in March. It seemed impossible. Young leaves unfolding. (27–28)

The discovery of walls made up of living, rooted matter, walls as actors that tell a story, awakens the artist in Larry, as the emphasis on painting and sculpture as well as processes of creation underlines. In returning to the mother-country from which his parents have emigrated, Larry is reborn as an artist. As in many artist novels, his awakening leads to conflict with the mundane. Larry’s comparison of hedge mazes with stitching stresses that to him the function of mazes is to hold structures together, and the analogies with painting and sculpture point up that this is where their artistic value lies. In writing about garden mazes, Shields underscores the material parallels between gardens and books, respectively, gardening and writing, “these two ways of rendering the world in rows.”20 Shields’s protagonist spells out similar parallels between writing, drawing, and maze making when he mentally classifies them as “a scribble, a 20

Michael Pollan, Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, 5.

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doodle on the earth’s skin with no other directed purpose but to wind its sinuous way around itself” (152).21 This metafictional overlapping of gardens and writings is the location of a sharp contrast between gardens and the wilderness. The most pervasive image of Canadian nature, the wilderness is more than a mere setting or motif. The trope of landscape as an uncontrollable force immeasurably larger than humans recurs throughout Canadian writing,22 where it is depicted as a non-human or inhuman adversary locked in a power-struggle with human beings. Pioneer writers such as Susannah Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill spent their days trying to civilize it after the male pioneers had cleared it. To force nature to recede or to submit to human landscaping is one dimension of this powerstruggle; to poetically capture its impact and effect is an even more pervasive but ultimately less successful one. Less than a century years ago, British Columbia’s most famous painter, Emily Carr, was criticized for her paintings of forests, since the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest were deemed to be unpaintable and unworthy of artistic consideration by her contemporaries, whose tastes were shaped by European ideals of landscaping. The wilderness cannot be a motif, as it is invested with prevailing idea of unrepresentability. The challenge problematized here, of doing justice to ‘nature’ in human media of communication, continues to vex, as in today’s environmentalist questioning of the validity of language and human forms in representing nature. As a literary topic, so-called ‘nature spaces’ dominated by growing matter present the double challenge of having to be tamed materially and through representation. Despite the advantages and positive connotations of living walls and gateways in a garden maze, their disadvantage lies in their being subject to growth and decay: “Gardens are ephemeral. Made of natural materials and in need of maintenance, their existence is short-lived, their marks on the land quickly obliterated.”23 If untended, the maze, like the garden, will sooner or later cease to be recognizable: 21

Shields’s juxtaposition of the act of writing with mazes echoes Jorge Luis Borges’ 1941 story “The Garden of Forking Paths” – see Paillot, “Pioneering Interlaced Spaces,” 160. The analogy between maze-making and writing is also suggested by the fact that Larry’s best friend and neighbour, Lucy Warkenten, is a book-binder. The connection between their work, and the contrast between the longevity of books as compared to the shortlivedness of flowers, is explored in Chapter Five, “Larry’s Words, 1983.” 22 A concise overview of literary reflections on the Canadian wilderness can be found in Faye Hammill, Canadian Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2007). 23 Kenneth I. Helphand, Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (San Antonio T X : Trinity U P , 2006): x.

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The garden is merely a boundary between us and the wild, a tamed sphere that always wants to revert to wilderness. It is sexy and fecund, prone to chaos and pests, but controlled (we hope) into beauty and order.24

Like the garden, the maze is “always unfinished, telling a long tale of immigration and connection and transformation.”25 Any attempt to translate this kind of space into human terms comes up against the incomplete, temporary, and unfinished nature of all human containment strategies.

Mazes and Codes Garden mazes do not just physically seem to write on the face of the earth, they carry some of the symbolic baggage of garden images. Some of these are collective, but an encounter with a maze has a deeply personal ‘message’. Coral Ann Howells highlights the personal confrontation inherent in the maze encounter: The most extraordinary feature of mazes is their sense of enclosure, for being inside a maze is a sort of personal exclusion zone, a space for selftranscendence. It is a space created by art on the earth, rooted in the earth but not of the earth, a space of wonder at the conjunction of art and nature. That location in the living world is itself paradoxical (as Lefebvre points out), for the sacred space “continues to be perceived as part of nature” even though art has “wrenched the area from its natural context,” creating a simulacrum of the natural through the artificial means, which is exactly what a maze does.26

This illusion is created through the instrument of language, one of the key sites where the otherness of nature is located, as nature (represented by spaces, animals or plants) does not communicate with verbal language; even to express nature’s events in terms of behaviour or communication is an anthropomorphization of nature’s otherness which domesticates, reduces, and eliminates that which is Other. In confrontations with natural materials and nature’s spaces, human beings encounter a language-less being whose otherness consists in an inability to share and express human sentiments:

24

Jenny Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening (London: Vintage, 2004): 2. Uglow, A Little History of British Gardening, 2. 26 Coral Ann Howells, “Larry’s a/Mazing Spaces,” 127. The work by Henri Lefebvre quoted from here is The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Production de l’espace, 1974; tr. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 234. 25

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natural processes are entirely indifferent to our existence and welfare – not positively indifferent, of course, but incapable of caring about us – and are complex in a way that rules out the possibility of our wholly mastering and transforming them.27

In bending natural materials to human will, creating forms on the ground that resemble writing, Shields’s maze motif both contests and underlines the elusive relationship between human characters and non-human nature. Shields’s novel assigns a prominent place to language as one of Larry Weller’s chief conundra in life. For Larry, the world of lexical expressions is a key area of growth: he thinks about words constantly and tests various ways of giving meaning to forms and patterns governing his and other lives. Through most of the novel, Larry’s attempt to decipher the code of life in mazes is played out by his conscious efforts to acquire more words. Language is something he thinks of in terms of limitation, both his own and his memory’s, and in terms of the limits of language itself: “It strikes Larry that language may not yet have evolved to the point where it represents the world fully” (95). It does not even represent himself fully: “These words aren’t really me, they’re just the clothes I wear” (91). Clothes, textiles, and threads are used as a related motif in the novel to signpost moments of conflict between change and continuity in Larry’s story. Like textile fabrics, language is represented as a maze in its own right: it can enable communication, but it may just as well turn out to be a confusing jungle full of double entendre and misunderstandings. In his confrontation with the language-less plants, Larry experiences, and Shields metafictionally reports, that language marks a frontier of human understanding, especially in relation to nature. Perhaps real meaning lies beyond words. What if there is a non-verbal language encoded in nature which speaks to individuals through the geometry of plants and emerges through the vehicle of symbolic spaces? The symbolism of mazes and labyrinths offers ample room for interpretation, and their presence in the novel would be enough to make New-Age devotees swoon with delight. Jill Purce suggests that they can represent at once the cosmos, the world, the individual life, the temple, the town, man, the womb – or intestines – of the Mother (earth), the convolutions of the brain, the consciousness, the heart, the pilgrimage, the journey, and the Way.28

27

John Passmore, Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974; London: Duckworth, 1980): 212. Jill Purce, The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980): 29, quoted in Goertz, “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” 252. 28

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Larry’s Party explores the meaning of mazes in a variety of ways, attributing to them symbolic value and the capacity to visually encode aspects of language, the passing of time, the aging of the human body, the mutual influence of human beings and their environment, and sometimes even a spiritual significance: “Through her extensive use of the maze in this novel, Shields dramatizes the search for the transcendental moment that reveals the pattern in the universe.”29 And, one might add, the utopian search for a benign plan. To look for meaning in the governing patterns of life, to try and understand their purpose, and the need for order as well as for beauty and leisure – all this makes maze constructions into a metaphor for creativity. But the maze foregrounds mystery, concealment, and secrecy. This is illustrated by one of Larry’s clients, an old lady dying of cancer, who hires him to design a maze as a legacy for her community: this may sound whimsical, but I’ve felt all my life that I was a kind of maze myself, my body I mean. There was something hidden in the middle of me, but no one could find it, it was so deeply concealed, and I don’t just mean by fat cells. (175)

Her desire to be commemorated in the shape of a maze renders transparent the structural disorder caused in the ‘maze’ of her own body by the workings of cancer. In doing so, the maze is turned into a human monument which celebrates the puzzle and the human being who meets the challenge of the maze. The novel gestures towards biblical retellings to suggest that a hedge maze outdoes the garden as a reflection of utopian longings for paradise. The path of the maze is suggestively compared to a serpent by Larry’s first wife Dorrie, who resents mazes as a sort of rival to her husband’s attention: “It drives her crazy, sitting in the middle of a writhing forest. Mazes remind her of a bunch of snakes, and she hates snakes” (92). The ‘serpent’, moreover, is a technical term in maze patterns, as readers gather from one of the more didactic passages: He used to be fun, he used to make her laugh, but now all he can talk about are such things as: turf mazes, shepherd’s race, Julian’s bower, knot garden, Jerusalem, Minotaur, jeu-de-lettres, pigs-in-clover, frets and meanders, the Trémaux algorithm, pavimentum tessellatum, fylfot, wilderness, unicursal, topiary, nodes, the Mount of Venus, maisons de Dëdalus, Troy-town, cup-and-ring, ocular or spiral, serpent-through-waist, chevron. (84–85)

29

Goertz, “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” 233.

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The sinuous structure of the maze is in other places likened to “a coiled snake, the birthing process” (156), spelling out the significance of time as well as space in maze structures. The maze-as-serpent-image conflates two crucial elements of the biblical narrative of the serpent in the garden: the serpent and the garden become a single, complex entity, thereby eliminating the idea of the invasion of a pristine, ideal space. In Dorrie’s jealous imagination, it is the overly cultivated ‘nature’ space of the maze itself which becomes the malevolent intruder that dispels order and the power of the ordinary. And it also becomes the seducer, given that Dorrie preserves the undemolished half of Larry’s handiwork as a sanctuary and develops a degree of affection for the castrated maze. Dorrie’s response projects human characteristics and even agency on nature, trying to match human and natural affairs. Mazes require a readiness to deal with abstract form, structure, and patterns. In this they resemble literature – the maze motif has analogies with life writing as well as short-story cycles in highlighting formal considerations, the importance of patterns, boundaries defining inside and outside, and the endless attempt to find, locate or attach meaning to form. The emphasis on maze forms in Larry’s Party is part of a postmodernist plot to obfuscate other boundaries: those of sequence and chronology, fiction and referentiality, seriousness and irony. In questioning these divides, the novel reveals their instability. In Larry’s Party, the maze device is used to highlight myriad aspects of bafflement and confusion, puzzlement, disorientation, perplexity, and surprise. In a story where everything but the maze-making profession is quite ordinary, the maze motif explores the human tendency to create obstacles as a way of rendering life’s mysteries tangible, of generating a sense of containment. Given the popular tendency to treat mazes and labyrinths as synonymous, it is suggestive that Larry should make a careful distinction between the two: A labyrinth is a complex path. That’s it. It’s not necessarily something complicated or classical, as you might think. The overpass out on Highway 2 is a kind of labyrinth, as Larry will be happy to tell you. [.. .] A maze, though, is different from a labyrinth, at least in the opinion of some. A maze is more likely to baffle and mislead those who tread its paths. A maze is a puzzle. A maze is designed to deceive the travelers who seek a promised goal. It’s possible that a labyrinth can be a maze, and that a maze can be a labyrinth, but strictly speaking the two words call up different ideas. (81–82; italics in original)

In Larry’s distinction, the maze is meant to confuse, whereas this is more of a side-effect in a labyrinth. Etymological comparison suggests that ‘labyrinth’ lays emphasis on space and how this is shaped and used, whereas ‘maze’ focuses on

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a human reaction. The highway example suggests that labyrinths are placed in a utilitarian, practical context, whereas the maze is an artwork with which visitors consciously establish a contract: to enter a maze is to sign a contract to let oneself be confused, to enter a heterotopic play-space of enclosure. This sense aligns the maze with computer games and tours in cyberspace. 30 Anchored in art and rooted in nature, hedge mazes conjure up symbolic answers to the big questions in life, about what drives human beings, what gives them orientation, and how their problems are affected by their changes in attitude in the course of life, as Larry ponders in the following passage: What a wonder, he thinks, that the long, bitter, heart-wrenching history of the planet should allow curious breathing spaces for the likes of mere toys and riddles; he sees them everywhere. Games, glyphs, symbols, allegories, puns and anagrams, masquerades, the magician’s sleight-of-hand, the clown’s wink, the comic shrug, the somersault, the cryptogram in all its forms, and especially, at least to Laurence J. Weller’s mind, the teasing elegance and circularity of the labyrinthine structure. (152)

The answer, as the novel’s combination of biography and gardens suggests, lies in an artfully contrived return to nature, perhaps in the shape of a search to balance work and play. Any strict boundary between work and play dissolves before the novel’s strategy of making Larry’s work seem easier and much more systematic than the hard, confusing, painful, and uncertain business of life itself. Larry feels very lucky in his job: the whole of Chapter Four, “Larry’s Work, 1981,” is devoted to his sense of contentment in dealing with plants and mazes. Dee Goertz notes that work is represented less as a source of wealth than as a necessity: “Shields shows work as a way to create order and pattern in the world: to create meaning.”31 Larry’s art in making mazes consists in creating an illusion which essentially hinges on the contrast between walls and gateways, as his choice of materials for one of his most prestigious projects shows: the maze will incorporate the essential lost-and-found odyssey of a conventional maze, but will allow the maze walker to forget that the shrub material is a kind of wall and think of it, rather, as an extension of a dreamy organic world, with the maze and maze solver merging to form a single organism. (289)

30

See Kristin Veel, “The Irreducibility of Space: Labyrinths, Cities, Cyberspace,” and Jeffrey Gray, “‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (Jorge Luis Borges),” in The Labyrinth, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009): 29–36. 31 Goertz, “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” 245.

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In order to arrive at this effect Larry replaces “the stiff, formal plantings of traditional mazes – holly, box, yew” with dense but informal hedges – such gently sprawling plants as five-leaf aralia [...], amur maple, honeysuckle, ninebark, which bears up against wind and cold, winterberry for its bright red berries and dark leaves, Russian olive, rose of Sharon, caragana because of its feathery lightness, winged euonymus, and forsythia. (289)

Larry’s new maze is one acclimatized to Canada in more than one way, whereas many of his former projects constituted little foreign islands of alien space, as with the Elizabethan knot garden which is fêted in headlines such as “Bald Prairie Transformed to Quaint Elizabethan Garden” (150) and other oddities that his rich and quirky clients stipulate. As he transfers to the Canadian context an art form he associates with England, his mazes carry echoes of an acquaintance with incommensurability. What distinguishes mazes from labyrinths in Larry’s Party is the anticipation of a reaction to their structure, the amazement and, suggestively, bewilderment. Mazes artfully achieve an effect similar to that of uncontrolled nature. They are a processed wilderness, extricating the horror of the sublime and replacing it with a game of trial and error. This play-character is all the more obvious as maze visitors have the possibility to ‘learn’ the winding paths of particular mazes: they can take repeated tours until the mystery fades, thereby playing at growing up.

Other Closures Shields’s novel breaks the dual pattern of what Patricia–Léa Paillot terms “closure and disclosure”32 in life writing by adding to these the environmental aspect of ‘enclosure’ as a playful regression from the real wilderness that is life: And now, here in this garden maze, getting lost, and then found, seemed the whole point, that and the moment of willed abandonment, the unexpected rapture of being blindly led. (35–36)

The status of the wilderness as menacing undergoes a transformation and perspectives on ‘savagery’ and danger shift meaning to something that romanticizes the wilderness: For centuries the garden, which in its earliest form was simply an oasis or a marked-off area in the wilderness, represented the paradisal place, while mountains, unhabitable and inaccessible, were considered blemishes on earth; but the romantic revolution created a positive feeling for 32

Paillot, “Pioneering Interlaced Spaces,” 158.

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mountains, for wild rather than cultivated places, for expanse rather than enclosure. [...] Primitivists have sought the wilderness for purity and eschewed the garden because of its corruption.33

While Shields is at least partly ironic in her multiple uses of the maze, the title I have chosen for this essay emphasizes the irony involved in trying to delimit or define or envelop ‘nature’, whether in the deceptive simplicity of a nature– culture binarism or in textual representation. Her protagonist illustrates the paradoxical predicament of being able to form, train, and transform, even sell, his environment without gaining any real understanding of or communion with it. His constant search for language and new words, the second great obsession of his life, provides him with a surface layer of vocabulary, but words do not take him below the surface of meaning. The novel exposes his attempt to wrap words around the maze as futile, utopian, and romanticizing. Any search for meaning is and remains a purely human endeavour. Changes occur only in how this human endeavour is evaluated. Mazes, like other topographic plans with suggestive postcolonial connotations,34 are imagined from a stereoscopically superior vantage point, as Gibson Burrell and Karen Dale point out: Mazes could only be understood from the point of view of the superior – the one who looked down in the knowledge of its grand plan. They symbolically represented the long and arduous journey to Jerusalem and, on arrival, the likelihood of salvation.35

This notion of superiority has a double meaning, as it also implies an ethical or moral high ground, here represented within the parameters of the navigatio vitae motif which represents life as a pilgrimage toward heavenly reward. For Larry, however, looking from above does not equal comprehension, or real influence. It highlights, rather, a helplessness vis-à-vis the unfolding of events, reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history: Glancing up from his book (something new off the press, perhaps, about formal gardens), Larry is most often swamped by the golden unreality and goodness of the scene he and his wife occupy. (209)

33

Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse N Y : Syracuse U P , 1984): 36. More than with any other garden structure, the gardener is a god-like creator, a superior being who knows the outcome of things, whereas the visitor to the maze is lost. See Denis Wood, The Power of Maps (New York & London: Guildford, 1992); Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996). 35 Gibson Burrell & Karen Dale, “Utopiary: Utopias, Gardens and Organization,” in Utopia and Organization, ed. Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 114. 34

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The Otherness of nature space remains elusive, but the mysteries in which it is shrouded are perceived as a form of containment. In mazes, human beings construct a wilderness which is bewildering without being truly wild and menacing. Nature materials are seemingly brought under human control, but what the process reveals is less a taming of the Otherness of nature than the discovery that human nature is part of the uncontrollable Otherness. Emotions and the courses of a human life will always partially elude one’s grasp, irrational and emotional acts will occur, and whatever sense is made of events is subjective and transitory. Shields’s textual mazes illustrate the ambivalence of walls and gateways, as they both enable and obstruct access to nature. Gardeners gain an insight into some of the workings of nature. While Larry gains control over the organic materials that garden mazes are made up of, as represented by the technical terms he learns in his professional career, the mazes he tends to have a life of their own, and how this form of life relates to human lives is a question that eludes his searching intelligence. No maze symbolizes this more clearly than the half-demolished first one, which even Dorrie the Destroyer comes to like. While Larry’s human environment thus becomes more manageable and ultimately fits around his dinner table, ‘nature’ as represented by the growing mazes outside remains a riddle. However, at the end of the narrative, the two are separate and Larry avoids substituting one for the other. Shields’s novel ends in a somewhat escapist manner which in many ways contests the idea of an ending. Readers face new twists of bewilderment as the novel format breaks down into dramatic dialogue, culminating in long passages of text without inquits to tell apart the nine speakers who come together for Larry’s eponymous party. Confusion is also the topic of the dinner conversation which moves from mazes to a more general characterization of Canadian society in the late 1990s: “Confusion is the natural climate – the only climate for the post-feminist age” (321). The dinner party domesticates mazes into a topic of unmediated dialogue as it dissolves into a roundtable on postmodernity. Through this gesture of containment, the challenges of the hedges are redefined. At the centre of Larry’s personal maze, the party, the achievement he celebrates is thus a maze construction in its own right, but one that is made up of human beings. Despite the absence of plants, this ploy breaks the novel’s anthropocentrism: Larry and his associates become the material of which mazes are made. Human nature and other forms of nature are on a par. Safe within the garrison of the dinner party and satiated with food and wine, the characters let go of the need for a quest, for trying to understand everything rationally and tie it to human terms.

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While it is tempting to echo Frye and read such a mentality as a mere obstacle en route to a more affirmative self-image of postcolonial creativity, it is instructive to revisit his reprimands in the context of the breaking of fixed ideas about nature and the wilderness. Shields’s formal emphasis on mazes as well as her thematic focus on maze-making suggest that gardening, garden architecture, and horticultural design form a template for a revision of human-nature relations: human beings come to terms with the wilderness not by taming it but by creating new, artful wildernesses of their own and incorporating some of nature’s otherness into their lives. These translate the idea that nature with its codes and obscure functionings is a maze that permanently outgrows human mapping skills. Human visitors going through the maze of life in its bewildering turns have to come to terms with the paradox of being both inside the maze and outside, actors and architects, a part of nature and its antagonist. They are not meant to find a way out.

W OR K S C I T E D Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (La Poétique de l’espace, 1958; New York: Orion, 1964). Besner, Neil K. Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life (Winnipeg, Manitoba: Prairie Fire, 2003). Bloom, Harold, ed. The Labyrinth (New York: Infobase, 2009). Borges, Jorge Luis. “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Borges, Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (“El Jardín de senderos que se bifurcan,” 1941; tr. New York: Viking, 1998): 119–28. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996). Burrell, Gibson, & Karen Dale. “Utopiary: Utopias, Gardens and Organization,” in Utopia and Organization, ed. Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002): 106–27. Campbell, Andrea, ed. New Directions in Ecofeminist Literary Criticism (Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2008). Clark, Timothy. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2011). Colvile, Georgiana M.M. “Carol’s Party and Larry’s Shields: On Carol Shields’ Novel Larry’s Party (1997),” Études Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 49 (2000): 85–96. Coupe, Laurence, ed. The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2000). Fish, Margery. We Made a Garden (1956; London: B.T. Batsford, 2002). Fisher, Adrian, & Howard Loxton. Secrets of the Maze: An Interactive Guide to the World’s Most Amazing Mazes (London: Thames & Hudson, 1997).

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Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada” (1965), in Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination, intro. Linda Hutcheon (1971; Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1995): 213–51. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism (2003; Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). Glotfelty, Cheryll, & Harold Fromm, ed. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology (Athens: U of Georgia P , 1996). Goertz, Dee. “Treading the Maze of Larry’s Party,” in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. Edward Eden & Dee Goertz (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 230–54. Gray, Jeffrey. “ ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ (Jorge Luis Borges),” in The Labyrinth, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Bloom’s Literary Criticism, 2009): 29–36. Hammill, Faye. Canadian Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2007). Hansson, Heidi. “Biography Matters: Carol Shields, Mary Swann, A.S. Byatt, Possession, Deborah Crombie, Dreaming of the Bones,” Orbis Litterarum 58.5 (2003): 353–70. Helphand, Kenneth I. Defiant Gardens: Making Gardens in Wartime (San Antonio T X : Trinity U P , 2006). Howells, Coral Ann. “Larry’s a/Mazing Spaces.” Carol Shields and the Extra–Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvoˀák & Manina Jones (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 115–35. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space, tr. Donald Nicholson–Smith (La Production de l’espace, 1974; tr. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). Ljungberg, Christina. “The Bell Jar, the Maze and the Mural: Diagrammatic Figurations as Textual Performance,” in Signergy, ed. Jac Conradie, Ronél Johl, Marthinus Beukes, Olga Fisher & Christina Ljungberg (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010): 47–72. Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse NY : Syracuse U P , 1984). Mitchell, Henry. The Essential Earthman (1981; London: Bloomsbury, 1997). Morton, Timothy. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2007). Murray, Heather. “Women in the Wilderness,” in A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, ed. Shirley C. Neumann & Smaro Kamboureli (Edmonton, Alberta: Longspoon/NeWest, 1986): 74–86. Norden, John. The Labyrinth of Mans Life, Or Vertues Delight and Enuies Opposite (London: Iohn Budge, 1614). Paillot, Patricia–Léa. “Pioneering Interlaced Spaces: Shifting Perspectives and Self–Representation in Larry’s Party,” in Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvoˀák & Manina Jones (Montreal & Kingston, Ontario: McGill–Queen’s U P , 2007): 151–71. Passmore, John. Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974; London: Duckworth, 1980). Perényi, Eleanor. Green Thoughts: A Writer in the Garden (1981; New York: Vintage, 2002). Pollan, Michael. Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education (London: Bloomsbury, 1996). ——.The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (London, Berlin & New York: Bloomsbury, 2001).

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Purce, Jill. The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul (New York: Thames & Hudson, 1980). Roy, Wendy. “Autobiography as Critical Practice in The Stone Diaries,” in Carol Shields, Narrative Hunger, and the Possibilities of Fiction, ed. Edward Eden & Dee Goertz (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2003): 113–46. Shields, Carol. The Box Garden (Toronto: McGraw–Hill Ryerson, 1977). ——.Larry’s Party (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). ——.“Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass,” in Shields, Various Miracles (1985; Toronto: Vintage, 1995): 7–18. ——.The Stone Diaries (Toronto: Random House, 1993). ——.Swann: A Mystery (Toronto: Stoddart, 1987). Smart, Elizabeth. Autobiographies (Vancouver: William Hoffer & Tanks, 1987). Soper, Kate. What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). Temple, William. “Upon the Gardens of Epicurus, or... of Gardening in the Year 1685,” Epicurus.info: Epicurean Philosophy Online (nd), http://www.epicurus.info/etexts /gardening.html (accessed 15 October 2013). Thaxter, Celia. An Island Garden (Boston MA & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1894). Uglow, Jenny. A Little History of British Gardening (London: Vintage, 2004). Veel, Kristin. “The Irreducibility of Space: Labyrinths, Cities, Cyberspace,” diacritics 33.3– 4 (2003): 151–72. Wood, Denis. The Power of Maps (New York & London: Guildford, 1992).

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An Ethics of Mourning Loss and Transnational Dynamics in The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh 1 G OLNAR N ABIZ ADEH

A

G H O S H ’ S The Shadow Lines (1988) is a thoughtful, contemplative novel that weaves a complicated tapestry between the past and present through the eyes of an unnamed narrator – the son of a Bengali family– as he grows from childhood into adulthood. The novel offers a story that seems preoccupied with an ethics of memory, with what persists in the face of political upheaval, and with what it means to translate memory and incomplete knowledge across space and time. At the heart of the story, there is the painful loss of a treasured family member, whose agonizing absence irradiates throughout. Cast across a transhistorical arc, Ghosh’s novel offers a radical imaginary that addresses the intricate relationships between narrative constructions within personal and communal spheres, storytelling, and problems of the ‘political’. In this article, I suggest that the novel maintains a tension between the refusal to forget, on the one hand, and imaginative, fictional productions of loss, on the other. I also suggest that this tension in itself testifies to the demands of loss and its complications. The Shadow Lines is the second novel by Amitav Ghosh, who was born in Calcutta in 1956, and grew up in India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Shifting between different places – Calcutta, London, and Dhaka – the novel connects people, places, and spaces through the bonds that persist in ‘the shadow lines’. These elements appear to be sustained outside the official discourse of nationhood, and spill over, as it were, into a nether or shadow world, where alternative meanings are produced. The novel spans a broad temporal range – from 1939, thirteen years before the narrator is born, through the Partition of 1947 and the 1

MIT AV

The author would like to thank Tony Hughes–d’Aeth for his insights in response to earlier versions of this essay.

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Muslim–Sikh riots in Dhaka of 1964, to his recollection of these events many years later. The narrator’s insistent queries about the past, such as “how could you forget?” and its corollary “do you remember?,”2 demonstrate his refusal to forget people, places, and events, and specifically his second uncle, Tridib, who was killed in the 1964 riots. Yet far from privileging memory as a source of authentic knowledge, Ghosh problematizes what it means to remember through both official (public) and unofficial (private) regimes. The narrative is destabilized, in particular, by the porous boundaries between the narrator’s perspective and what he can determine of Tridib’s. The narrative fluidity between past and present, and the rapid shifts in viewpoint, gradually introduce a deeper ontological uncertainty on the structural level of the narrative. In turn, this instability forms the central ethical concern of the novel, which draws attention to how narratives are stitched together, and whose voices are heard or, alternatively, remain silent in this process. These groupings produce a story that is dialogic in structure, where past and present speak through one another, triangulated as they are between loss, grief, and imagination.3 The novel provides an imaginative account about what it means to speak for the absent other, literalized in the character of Tridib. The trauma surrounding Tridib’s death stands not only as a central loss in itself but also as a metonym for the trauma that the 1947 Partition inflicted on Indian and Pakistani populations. His absence is inextricably bound up with questions of how national and postnational identities are constructed through difference and separation. Indeed, the trauma associated with his loss also calls into question the intersections of private mourning and cultural grief and the complicated ways in which loss is negotiated in both spheres. The narrator struggles to understand Tridib’s fate in the context of Partition; as a child, he is only able to partly grasp the significance of both events. As an adult, the narrator can only comprehend the full impact of Tridib’s death by locating it within a broader understanding of communal violence, figured in the Muslim–Sikh riots of 1964. Establishing the link between the personal and the communal is not straightforward, and the narrator can only hesitantly piece together the events leading to Tridib’s death. To do so, he sifts through a variety of personal memories and public records that offer competing accounts of how his uncle died. In this way, the tragedy that befell Tridib

2

Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988): 19, 220. Further page references are in the main text. 3 Suvir Kaul, “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines,” in Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: Educational Edition (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988): 286.

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is configured against the transnational turmoil of Partition, and the societal tensions that arose in its wake.

The Politics of Desire and the Enchantment of Lines The production of ‘others’ by means of political, international, economic, and social forces forms the driving thematic concern in The Shadow Lines. Within the novel, the complexities that emerge from the cleft of separation are represented by chaotic and contradictory social, nationalistic, and sexual forms of desire. The narrator recalls Tridib’s emphatic insistence on the importance of desire: one could never know anything except through desire, real desire, which was not the same thing as greed or lust; a pure, painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of one’s mind to other times and other places, and even, if one was lucky, to a place where there was no border between oneself and one’s image in the mirror. (29)

From this decisive passage in which the narrator explains Tridib’s conception of desire, we can infer something of the latter’s fundamental psychodynamics, where the mirror operates as an instrument of both division and unification, with each relation serving desire in different ways.4 In Tridib’s conception, desire is positioned as a force that can broach difference, which he locates in the difference between “oneself and one’s image in the mirror” (29). Practically, this finds expression through the multiple amorous relationships in the novel, such as those between the narrator and Ila, Tridib and May, Ila and Nick Price, and even Tha’mma’s teenage desire for a political revolutionary in her class. These narratives of desire provide alternative forms of knowledge, which are rarely contained or permitted within sanctioned stories of nationhood. As Suvir Kaul observes, the novel describes no sexual or romantic relationship between two people who share an obvious identity of nationality, race or cultural experience – desire originates, and finds its object, across borders.5

The trope of the mirror permits the exploration and articulation of the desire to see oneself simultaneously as ‘I’ and as other. As Tridib explains, the 4

For further discussion of the trope of mirrors in the novel, see Meenakhshi Mukherjee, “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines,” in Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: Educational Edition (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988): 255–67. 5 Kaul, “Separation Anxiety,” 271.

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relationality of the mirror’s reflection and its referent provides a model for a space “where there was no border between oneself and one’s image” (29). In this space, the ‘I’ becomes the other, and vice versa, and this imaginary permits an exploration of the very conditions of alterity. In his version, desire operates as a reparative force, seeking to somehow re-integrate the misrecognized self. This does not, however, mean that the narrative simply privileges a utopian transnational imaginary that floats untethered to any boundaries. Nor are geographical lines discarded as unnecessary. Rather, throughout the novel there is a dialectical relationship between the topography of maps and the way imagination can supplant topography with its own territories of desire. For example, the narrator actively sustains his own romance with lines – he memorizes the coordinates of a map of London and later locates their physical counterparts to flaunt his knowledge of them. The significance of lines and delineations is also evident in the childhood game of ‘Houses’ he plays with Ila, where the imagined domestic space of the game is with each mark drawn or erased in the dust where the children play. And this is where the real dilemma of the novel resides: in the tension between the need to mark difference and the very fragility of that mark. This sentiment can also be discerned in Ghosh’s article about the attack on the World Trade Center Towers on 11 September 2001. In describing the impact of this traumatic event, Ghosh accesses the pain of an earlier trauma – the 1947 Partition and its belated repetition in the present. Ghosh locates the grief of Partition not within the movement of division itself but, rather, in that particular species of pain that comes from the knowledge that the oppressor and the oppressed were once brothers. It is this species of pain, exactly, that runs so poignantly through the literature that resulted from the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947.6

Paradoxically, the narrator loves maps as much as he loves using his imagination. While there is tension between the visual medium of maps and the structures of the imagination, they inherit qualities from each other, and inflect how each text is ‘read’. For example, when the narrator arrives in London and meets Nick Price – the son of English family friends – he begins to “show off,” locating Solent Road in a relational network against West End Lane, Sumatra Road, and Mill Lane (55). The narrator has also memorized page 43, square 2F of the London AtoZ and uses this internalized map hesitantly, but correctly, to locate 44 Lymington Road (58), the Prices’ residence. Yet, in this cartographic exercise, 6

Amitav Ghosh, “The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness,” Kenyon Review 25.3–4 (Summer–Fall 2003): 92.

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he encounters some difficulties in mapping the present space onto his memories of the London Blitz, which he has formed second-hand through Tridib’s stories. For example, rather than seeing Tridib’s “bombed-out Solent Road,” the narrator encounters an “old lady walking her Pekinese” (57). Yet this incompatibility does not erase the past, and the narrator decides that, despite the “clear testimony” before his eyes, he sees something “truer still” in Tridib’s description of Solent Road made almost two decades earlier in Calcutta (57). Despite Tridib’s death fifteen years earlier (218), the narrator’s loyalty to his vision means that his imagined “bombed-out Solent Road” (57) takes precedence over the immediate visual record before him. The narrator’s refusal to privilege the present of the narrative enables a palimpsestic engagement with the past so that it is enfolded into the present. In this way, the narrator refuses a teleological consolation of past losses, holding, rather, onto the past melancholically, as he visualizes it in the same space as the present.

Narrative Haunting The narrator’s insistence on remembering ghosts of the past can be understood in terms of the pain associated with loss, such as Tridib’s death. Yet, in the case of the narrator at least, his melancholic manoeuvres are not entirely successful in keeping Tridib’s memory ‘alive’. In his essay “Fors,” Derrida analyses the fraught position of the melancholic, where the goal of reappropriating the lost object often remains elusive. As he suggests, “the more the self keeps the foreign element as a foreigner inside itself, the more it excludes it.”7 This entombment of the lost object seals off the loss from any kind of productive mobilisation, thereby calling into question the success – as well as the ethics – of melancholic misery. The persistence of melancholy finds one of its most poignant examples in the relationship between Tridib and May Price, the daughter of an old family friend, Lionel Tresawsen. Tridib recounts the story of Tristan und Isolde to the narrator and Ila as children. Tridib himself was told the story as a nine-year-old, by a close friend of May’s grandfather, Snipe (182), and the repetition of the story produces a melancholic incantation. In Tridib’s re-telling of the story, he explains to the children:

7

Jacques Derrida, “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” (“Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” 1976), tr. Barbara Johnson; Georgia Review 31.1 (Spring 1977): 72.

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It was an old story, the best story in Europe, Snipe said, told when Europe was a better place, a place without borders and countries [...]: it was the story of a hero called Tristan, a very sad story, about a man without a country, who fell in love with a woman-across-the-seas. (186)

As a “very sad story,” the legend resembles not only Tridib’s death but also his attenuated relationship with May, another woman “across-the-seas.” Moreover, the nostalgic reference to Europe as a better place “without borders and countries” also hints at a yearning for a time before the violence of Partition and the carving-out of new borders and countries. Indeed, Tridib’s recounting of the story acquires special pathos as we learn that it was “the last story Tridib ever told [the narrator]” (186). Tridib-as-Tristan occupies a tragi-romantic role as a visionary “without a country,” and the re-telling of this legend stitches together incongruous moments from the past. Years later, as Ila and the narrator sit in the same cellar, he sees the story in ghosts that surround him; “of Snipe, telling it to Tridib, of Tridib telling it to Ila and me [...]: I see myself, three years later [...] leading [May] into that underground room” (185–86). Many years later, when the narrator visits May in London, she looks at him in the mirror before recounting the first time that she and Tridib were alone together: “all I remember, she said, is him saying – you’re my love, my own, my love-across-the seas; what do I have to do to keep you with me? But it’s just a whisper” (175). May’s recollection maintains Tridib as a ghostly presence, and this spectral imagining calls into question what it means to remember ghosts of the past. Tridib is carved out from the space of his physical absence into a vibrant, albeit spectral, figure, most markedly through the narrator’s recounted memories and descriptions of photographs. The mystery surrounding Tridib’s loss is elevated, as it is not until the end of the novel that the narrator understands for the first time the events that led to his death. This absence plays a significant part in the way that the narrator’s ‘melancholic ontology’ is configured: namely, the latter repeatedly accesses his memories of Tridib to produce his sense of the world. Crucially, however, Tridib’s gift of imagination to the narrator means that the latter produces his own renditions of the past, rather than remaining entirely faithful to the former’s descriptions. Consequently, the reader can discern elements of introjection in the way in which the narrator recasts the past anew in the present. At the same time, the porousness of the narrator’s consciousness lends itself to what Kate Mitchell describes as embodied memory, through which “the lexicon of spectrality is transferred to the body, which becomes a medium for the repetition of the past, its unbidden persistence in

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the present.”8 The narrator’s embodiment of Tridib’s ideals recalls Walter Benjamin’s statement that the purpose of a story is not to “convey a happening per se,” but to embed in the story “the life of the story-teller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.”9 It is as though the narrator himself acquires ghostly qualities – like an archive – to embody Tridib’s legacy.

Photographic Emanations and the Trace of Loss Susan Sontag suggests that “photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement.”10 Sontag’s statement attests to the polyvalent potentialities of photography in the construction of cultural memory as both an indexical register of a past and its creation. For example, when the narrator visits Ila in London, she has married Nick Price. After she and Nick have returned from their honeymoon, she meets the narrator at St Martinin-the-Fields. In the following passage, the narrator borrows a photographic effect, that of a ‘delayed exposure’ – a term that describes the prolonged exposure of a photographic plate to light over time. In this passage, the ecstatic vision through which the narrator sets the scene for his encounter with Ila speaks of the strength of his feelings for her: The clouds in the sky parted, as if to my command, and a great, golden shower of sunlight poured into the square. The traffic became a blur, a frame for the white canvas of the square; for the tourists’ clothes as they sat eating their sandwiches and feeding the pigeons at the foot of Nelson’s Column [...]. In exultation, the organ of St Martin-in-the-Fields boomed out the first rising notes of a Bach toccata. (179)

In his melancholic desire for Ila, the narrator seeks to memorialize this moment through a majestic vision. Indeed, the biblical allusions in this passage, such as the parting clouds, the “golden shower of sunlight,” and the “exultation” of the organ allude in no uncertain terms to the depths of the narrator’s affective intensity in that moment. This passage infuses a ‘memory image’11 –with reference 8

Kate Mitchell, “Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories: Photography, Spectrality and Historical Fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights,” Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1 (Autumn 2008): 94. 9 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936; tr. Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2008): 611. 10 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979): 165. 11 Siegfried Kracauer states that the memory image is one that retains “what is given only insofar as [it has] significance.” Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, tr. Thomas Y. Levin (Das Ornament der Masse, 1927; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1995): 50.

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to a photographic image, and vice versa. Far from being an objective medium of historical representation, photographs are used as a prosthetic mnemonic tool to memorialize the present, as the narrator does in this scene. In another meditation on the relationship between memory and photography, Elizabeth Edwards writes that photography, “with its reproductive and repetitive qualities, is a form of externalized memory par excellence, fulfilling the inscriptional and performative qualities of memory and cultural habit.” 12 In The Shadow Lines, photographs act as externalized yet select memories of the past, their particularities enhancing the preciousness of their narrative content.

Conclusion: Between Words and the World Turning back to Ghosh’s essay from 2003, we have a sense of the shock and disbelief that attend trauma on a national scale, in particular in relation to the way in which unexpected splits are produced where previously there was unity. Ghosh writes: far from being primordial, the enmities that have led to the sufferings of the present are new and unaccountable; that there was a time once, when neither protagonist saw the other as an adversary.13

Indeed, the repetition of this change in Ghosh’s own writing testifies to the emotional upheaval produced by the violence of large and small-scale partitions. It is onto the transnational turmoil of this catastrophe that the narrator attempts to map Tridib’s death, his endeavours largely thwarted by the rhetoric of nationhood as found in different narrative sources. For example, late in the book, the narrator struggles to locate Tridib’s death among conflicting and contradictory newspaper reports, which are produced in different locations: There was not the slightest reference [...] to any trouble in East Pakistan, and the barest mention of the events in Kashmir. It was, after all, a Calcutta paper, run by people who believed in the power of distance no less than I did. (227)

The narrator identifies the convenience of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation, and his comments reaffirm the difficulty of locating within the semiotic realm that which cannot be imagined within the spatial realm. He explains:

12

Elizabeth Edwards, “Photography, ‘Englishness’ and Collective Memory: The National Photographic Records Association, 1897–1910,” in Locating Memory: Photographic Arts, ed. Annette Kuhn & Kirsten Emiko McAllister (New York: Berghahn, 2006): 72. 13 Ghosh, “The Greatest Sorrow,” 92.

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I believed in the reality of nations and borders; I believed that across the border there existed another reality. The only relationship my vocabulary permitted between those separate realities was war or friendship [...]. And things which did not fit my vocabulary were merely pushed over the edge into the chasm of silence. (219)

As he explains, it is for this reason that he struggles to articulate the events leading to Tridib’s death, and the silence around this event is “not a presence at all; it is simply a gap, a hole, an emptiness in which there are no words” (218). Yet, this gap is critical to producing the narrator’s imaginative regime, which speaks of both Tridib’s loss and his unrequited love for Ila. Yasmine Khan picks up on this gap or silence in her discussion of the hesitant declarations of the leaders of the different groups of the Partition, explaining that on its declaration, the speeches themselves “were oddly flat,” and she goes on to note that of all the factional leaders, including the English and Indian Prime Ministers, only the Muslim League leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, spoke of ‘Pakistan’ as a new formation.14 In the concluding pages of the novel, the narrator recalls May asking why he has never enquired of her how Tridib died. He responds that he had not known how to ask: “I had not had the courage to breach her silence without a solid bridgehead of words” (250). Finally, the reader understands the impact of an early promise made by the narrator to his father never to mention Tridib’s death to anyone, and how that intersects with the haunting of Partition itself. The narrator explains: I do not know where within me, in which corner of my world, this silence lies. [...] when we try to speak of events of which we do not know the meaning, we must lose ourselves in the silence that lies in the gap between words and the world. (218)

It is in this gap between “words and the world” that the narrator attempts to unearth the facts surrounding Tridib’s death. This takes place as he spends hours in a Calcutta library, sifting through multiple newspaper broadsheets to find some mention of the riot in which Tridib was killed. Tridib’s death is mediated through a piecemeal assortment of conflicting newspaper reports, produced in difference locations, some of which omit the riots altogether. The narrator’s struggle to narrativize his experience of Tridib’s loss can be understood in relation to Veena Das’s commentary on Partition, where she notes the absence of a public space in which communal mourning could take place.15 In 14

Yasmine Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven C T : Yale

U P , 2007): 3. 15

Veena Das, Critical Events (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994): 192.

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other words, there is an impasse in the transmission between mourning private losses and their commemoration in public spaces. Earlier in the narrative, the narrator explains that he was never able to successfully explain to Ila Tribid’s effect on him: Tridib had given me worlds to travel in and he had given me eyes to see them with: she [...] could never understand what those hours in Tridib’s room had meant to me, a boy who had never been more than a few hundred miles from Calcutta. (20)

For the narrator, “those hours” include locating place names in Tridib’s “tattered old Bartholomew’s Atlas,” names that acquire the potency of “magical talismans” through the sanctity of this event (20). With his newly acquired knowledge of the circumstances leading to Tridib’s death, the narrator performs his own cartographic explorations with a compass and the atlas. The conditions under which Tridib acquired his atlas, which become apparent only later in the novel, also lend gravitas to the talismanic qualities of this activity. Tridib was given the atlas for his ninth birthday, which fell on 25 September 1940. The occasion of this birthday is particularly significant because it takes place during the London Blitz, which began on 7 September 1940. It is on this birthday that their family friend Snipe tells Tridib the “proper Middle English” story of Tristan und Isolde, under blackout restrictions and with war-rationed treats supplementing the occasion of the latter’s birthday (183). The “tattered” atlas thereby not only signifies the passing of time but also stands as a testament to survival. Moreover, the survival of the atlas provokes the anguished recognition that its previous owner has indeed perished. In the final pages of the novel, the narrator repeats the process of cartographic discovery into which his uncle initiated him many years before. As he encounters the unexpected compressions of space that the compass arcs reveal, he feels Tridib watching over him as he “tries to learn the meaning of distance” (232). In this sense, the gift of imagination functions as a trace of Tridib, a creative product that fills the void of his loss. Throughout the novel, this creativity is found in the narrator’s – and other characters’ – iterations of imagination and desire. Desire, in particular, conveys the intensity of loss bound up with Tridib’s death and the death of other family members. The role of desire seems particularly critical for the characters as they respond to traumatic events that blur the distinction between the domestic-familial and public domains. These responses hint at an ethics of melancholy, whereby the past and its contents are not forgotten but are repeatedly brought into contact with the present through memories and creative excursions into the past. In

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this way, an ethics of remembrance is embedded in the structure of the novel as it frequently slips into the past, questioning what it means to forget and to remember loss.

W OR K S C I T E D Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, tr. Edmund Jephcott (Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936; tr. Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2008). Das, Veena. Critical Events (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1994). Derrida, Jacques. “Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok” (“Fors: Les mots anglés de Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok,” 1976), tr. Barbara Johnson, Georgia Review 31.1 (Spring 1977): 64–116. Edwards, Elizabeth. “Photography, ‘Englishness’ and Collective Memory: The National Photographic Records Association, 1897–1910,” in Locating Memory: Photographic Arts, ed. Annette Kuhn & Kirsten Emiko McAllister (New York: Berghahn, 2006): 53–80. Ghosh, Amitav. “The Greatest Sorrow: Times of Joy Recalled in Wretchedness,” Kenyon Review 25.3–4 (Summer–Fall 2003): 86–99. ——.The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988). Kaul, Suvir. “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines,” in Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: Educational Edition (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988): 268–86. Khan, Yasmine. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven CT : Yale U P , 2007). Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, tr. Thomas Y. Levin (Das Ornament der Masse, 1927; tr. Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1995). Mitchell, Kate. “Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories: Photography, Spectrality and Historical Fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights,” Neo-Victorian Studies 1.1 (Autumn 2008): 81–109. Mukherjee, Meenakhshi. “Maps and Mirrors: Co-ordinates of Meaning in The Shadow Lines,” in Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: Educational Edition (New Delhi: Oxford U P , 1988): 255–67. Sontag, Susan. On Photography (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979).

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IV. G ENDER ED G AT EWA YS AND W AL L S 

The Mirage of Europe in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street E L ISAB E T H B E K ER S

“I

A M A O N E - Y E A R - O L D M A N who walks with heavy steps.” With these dispirited words the African refugee Solomon Bartholomew, protagonist of Caryl Phillips’s 2003 novel A Distant Shore, sums up his life in the North of England.1 Although he has managed to enter Fortress Europe and create a new identity for himself in Britain, the thirty-year-old Solomon, formerly known as Gabriel, is finding it increasingly difficult to bear the erasure of his African past and the racist provocations of his English neighbours. Life in Europe is not easy, either, for the four African women who, in Chika Unigwe’s second novel On Black Sisters’ Street (2009), have likewise circumvented the guards at Europe’s gateways, only to find themselves trapped in prostitution in Belgium.2 Victims of a callous women’s trafficker, the protagonists have been lured away from their African homes by an idealized image of Europe that has turned out to be nothing more than a fata morgana, as the telling title of the novel’s Dutch translation has it.3 In their novels, Phillips and Unigwe address one of the most topical concerns of our age, a period characterized by Edward Said as “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.”4 Issues of migration and relocation are “an increasingly familiar part of our individual lives,” as Phillips notes in A New 1

Caryl Phillips, A Distant Shore (2003; London: Vintage International, 2005): 266. Further page references are in the main text. 2 Chika Unigwe, On Black Sisters’ Street (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). 3 Chika Unigwe, Fata morgana, tr. Hans van Riemsdijk (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Antwerp: Manteau, 2007). As Chika Unigwe was living in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) at the time she wrote her novel, the book appeared in Dutch translation before the English original was published by Jonathan Cape in 2009. 4 Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 174.

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World Order, and feature prominently in the public debate on these topics.5 They also have generated much theorizing, some of which has attracted criticism for relying on all-too-narrow or clichéd conceptualizations of migration and for ignoring the concrete social, economic, and political circumstances of displaced people. Whether by romanticizing the experience of relocation, exoticizing the postcolonial situation, orientalizing the figure of the nomad, or by taking an exclusively culturalist interest in the “in-betweenness” (Bhabha) or “nakedness” (Glissant) of migrants, postmodern and postcolonial theoretical reflections on human migration have tended to sidestep the actual, lived experiences of those who are displaced.6 In this article I will show how, in contrast, Phillips and Unigwe reveal the advantages of writing fiction as opposed to theory: they home in on concrete experiences of displacement and give the readers of their novels insight into the actual motivations and predicaments of Africans who have left their homes for the mirage of Europe. These novels are representative of what Stephen Clingman describes as a “new literature of belonging: a literature of fragmentation, of migration and exile of so many different kinds.”7 The authors’ own lives, too, are marked by (multiple) experiences of migration. Phillips moved to Leeds from the West Indian island of St Kitts with his Afro-Caribbean parents in 1958, when he was only a few months old, and since the 1990s he has made the U SA his professional home, teaching at academic institutions in the northeast, including at 5

Caryl Phillips, A New World Order (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001): 132. See, respectively, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994), and Édouard Glissant, Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). Admittedly, Glissant himself uses the term “naked immigrants” not to refer to modern-day migrants but to the millions of slaves who were abducted from Africa and robbed of all they had, “their instruments, their customs and their Gods.” See Glissant, in Landry–Wilfrid Miampika, “Migration and Mondiality,” interview with Édouard Glissant, Africultures (1 May 2003), http://www.africultures .com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5677 (accessed 1 July 2007). For critical theorizings on migration and displacement, see, for instance, Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1996); Patrick Holland & Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998); Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001); and Perspectives on Travel Writing, ed. Glenn Hooper & Tim Youngs (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2004). For criticism of the nomad figure in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s work, see Christopher Miller, “The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority,” diacritics 23.3 (Autumn 1993): 6– 35; for criticism of the nomad in Rosi Braidotti’s thinking, see Inge Boer, Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis (G E N U S 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006). 7 Stephen Clingman, “ ‘England Has Changed’: Questions of National Form in A Distant Shore,” Moving Worlds 7.1 (2007): 57. 6

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Columbia and, currently, at Yale. Unigwe was born in Enugu, Nigeria, in 1974, but moved to Europe with her Belgian husband at the age of twenty-one. With the exception of prolonged stays in Canada and the U SA , she spent the next two decades living in Belgium; currently, she resides in the U SA with her husband and four sons. Although Phillips’s and Unigwe’s own lives in Europe have not been trouble-free, in A Distant Shore and On Black Sisters’ Street the writers explore the migratory experiences of black characters who are faced with greater adversity, before and after landfall in Europe. Both writers respond to the growing media and non-fiction interest in today’s human trafficking and bondage,8 but also evoke an analogy between their novels’ events and the displacement of millions of Africans during the three long centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, as my discussion will clarify. In their contemporary variations on the historical slave narrative, however, Phillips and Unigwe move beyond the conventions of the genre.9 They do not uphold the “conventional teleology of [authentic slave testimonies], wherein the slave progresses from bondage to freedom.”10 Neither do they idealize or 8

This interest is supported by the publication of contemporary slave narratives such as Francis Bok & Edward Tivnan, Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003); Mende Nazer & Damien Lewis, Slave: True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (London: Virago, 2004). By comparison, fiction about contemporary modes of human trafficking and slavery remains a marginal subcategory of migration literature, although the issue has been explored in works such as Sembène Ousmane, Voltaïque: La Noire de. . . et autres nouvelles (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962), Amma Darko, Beyond the Horizon (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995), Patricia McCormick, Sold (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2006), and Akachi Ezeigbo, Trafficked (New York: Lantern, 2008). 9 On slave narratives, see, for instance, Frances Smith Foster, Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (1979; Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1994). Although the two novels somewhat resemble the historical slave-narrative genre, to which I will return presently, they are not generally regarded as neo-slave narratives. Even if the latter label is no longer reserved for contemporary novels that assume the conventions of the historical ante-bellum slave narrative and even if the genre now includes texts that adopt a wide diversity of styles and are set at any time from the period of transatlantic slavery up to the present-day, the interest of neo-slave narratives lies essentially with the historical enslavement of Africans. A Distant Shore and On Black Sisters’ Street, by contrast, focus on present-day modes of human trafficking and bondage. For more information on the emergence and development of the genre of the neo-slave narrative, see, for instance, Bernard W. Bell, The Afro–American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1987), and Valerie Smith, “Neo-Slave Narratives,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (New York: Cambridge U P , 2007): 168–85. 10 María Lourdes López Ropero, “Irony’s Political Edge: Genre Pastiche in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge,” in Beyond Borders: Re-Defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, ed. Ramón Plo– Alastrué & María Jesús Martínez–Alfaro (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002): 135.

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sentimentalize their black protagonists, as, for instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the novel that turned American opinion against slavery and was allegedly hailed by President Lincoln as the book that caused the American Civil War. Instead, Phillips and Unigwe take care to portray their trafficked characters with verisimilitude. Although their novels can be read as evocative of the historical pre-abolition enslavement of Africans 11 or as emblematic of the present-day predicament of migrants in Europe, or even the contemporary “human condition everywhere in the world,”12 their protagonists do not appear as allegorical types but as individuals of flesh and blood with complicated pre-passage histories and complex post-migration predicaments. Phillips’s and Unigwe’s determination to render their protagonists’ lives in realistic detail does not prevent them from taking issue with what Bénédicte Ledent describes as the “limitations” and “shallowness of a purely factual approach.”13 While the “fact-checking” immigration lawyer in A Distant Shore is just “trying to establish dates, not state of mind” (101), Phillips and Unigwe are clearly more interested in the latter. They help their readers put “a human face on the scourge of human trafficking”14 by bringing to life some of the anonymous victims of Fortress Europe whose tragic fates attract widespread press coverage but whose life histories remain unknown. 11

Some detect parallels between Phillips’s protagonists and the eighteenth-century former slave and autobiographer Olaudah Equiano, others with another of Phillips’s fictional characters, the slave Cambridge in the eponymous novel, who is based loosely on Equiano. See, for instance, Bénédicte Ledent, “Family and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s Fiction, in Particular A Distant Shore,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 29.2 (2007): 71; Sandra Courtman, “Dorothy’s Heart of Darkness: How Europe Meets Africa in A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca (Cross/Cultures 146; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 271; Lucie Gillet, “Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism: Race and Gender Oppression in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips, ed. Ledent & Tunca, 321–28. Parallels between the slave trade and Chika Unigwe’s presentation of women’s trafficking are noted in Daria Tunca, “Redressing the ‘Narrative Balance’: Subjection and Subjectivity in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street,” Afroeuropa 3.1 (2009): np. 12 Bénédicte Ledent, Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2002): 80. Ledent’s comment is made with reference to Phillips’s novel Cambridge (1991), but similar readings exist of A Distant Shore as evocative of the postmodern human condition. See Gillet, “Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism,” 322; Thomas Bonnici, “Negotiating Inclusion in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips, ed. Ledent & Tunca, 283, 287. 13 Bénédicte Ledent, “‘Of, and Not of, This Place’: Attachment and Detachment in Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore,” Kunapipi 26.1 (2004): 156. 14 Anon., review of On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, Kirkus Reviews (1 February 2011), http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chika-unigwe/black-sisters-street (accessed 26 March 2014).

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In my discussion, I will show how Phillips and Unigwe employ remarkably analogous narrative strategies to give expression to their protagonists’ experiences of displacement and the effects these have had on the characters’ current disposition. Notwithstanding the striking resemblances between A Distant Shore and On Black Sisters’ Street, in particular their use of a fragmented narrative structure, I will argue that Unigwe offers a fascinating gendered reflection on stories of migration such as the one presented in A Distant Shore and underlines the double oppression suffered by her female protagonists. I will also demonstrate how, quite paradoxically, Unigwe’s female black Atlantic narrative is ultimately more optimistic than Phillips’s male refugee narrative.  The African protagonist of A Distant Shore has fled his unnamed, war-torn country after having witnessed the merciless slaughter of his parents and sisters by government soldiers.15 The events leading up to Gabriel’s hasty migration to Europe nevertheless make clear that he is not to be regarded exclusively as a victim. In a striking ten-page autodiegetic passage in the middle of the novel, Gabriel owns up to the less than pretty part he has played in his country’s civil war and sheds light on events that have made him “flee for his life” (100). Gabriel’s family have been massacred by soldiers avenging the atrocities performed by the drug-influenced adolescent rebels under Gabriel’s command; Gabriel himself has unhesitatingly abandoned his fatally wounded mother, and he has murdered and robbed his friend and former employer in order to secure the 2,000 dollars that he needs to pay for his passage to Europe. Gabriel’s firstperson account, narrated in the past tense, is inserted into the novel’s second chapter, in which a heterodiegetic narrator details, in the present tense, the horrors of Gabriel’s turbulent journey to Britain entirely through the latter’s eyes. As Gabriel is able to offer only vague cartographic information before reaching Paris, Phillips compels his readers to share the disorientation and uncertainties of his focalizer–protagonist and to concentrate on the arduous nature of the journey. Gabriel’s passage through an extensive network of traffickers who are more concerned about their own profit than their human cargo’s welfare is evocative

15

In an interview with Jill Morrison, Caryl Phillips discloses that Gabriel’s country is not based on any particular African nation but that he “did have in mind Rwanda, Liberia, the Congo, and Sierra Leone.” See Jill Morrison, “A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” in Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Renée T. Schatteman (Jackson: U of Mississippi P , 2009): 136.

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of the Middle Passage.16 Like the African victims of this infamous middle leg of the historical transatlantic triangle who were shipped to plantations in the Americas, Gabriel and his fellow travellers are exposed to extreme temperatures, hunger, and thirst, kept in the dark about their exact itinerary, and switched from one uncomfortable mode of transportation to another. Their exodus begins in the nation’s capital, Gabriel’s home town, in the back of a truck, “under the oppressive weight of the heavy tarpaulin” (84). At an airstrip in the African bush, two days later, they are crammed into a plane that will carry them “out of Africa” (89), and the heterodiegetic narrator emphasizes their commodification by noting how “to Gabriel’s eyes” the aircraft’s seatless interior resembled “a large tubular warehouse” (88). Upon landing, the analogies with the Middle Passage experience persist when, under the watchful eye of armed men who “look upon them without respect,” “the new immigrants are ushered through a narrow door” (89) that is reminiscent of the Doors of No Return in the slave forts along the West African coast, the narrow port-facing dungeon exits through which countless Africans were forcibly dispatched from their continent of birth. Like his enslaved predecessors, Gabriel loses his name and identity on his passage out of Africa; by the time he comes to settle in Britain, he is “no longer ‘[Major] Hawk’,” as he was nicknamed by his rebel troops, “no longer [his] mother’s Gabriel” (264). These historical parallels sharpen the readers’ awareness of the tangible suffering of the twenty-first-century refugees in A Distant Shore, as does the novel’s variation on Jules Verne’s classic adventure in Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). In Phillips’s gruelling, nightmarish version of Fogg’s fastpaced journey, Gabriel is taken from the airport to the coast by bus and ferried “across some water” to Italy; he rides a darkened and “cramped train compartment” (92) to Paris, where another bus takes him to an unnamed refugee camp near the Channel Tunnel, presumably at Sangatte.17 Having witnessed others risk the dangerous jump from a railway bridge on top of a passing Eurostar, Gabriel opts for a free but equally hazardous route and crosses the Channel 16

Other critics have noted this similarity, too – see, for instance, Jenny Sharpe, “The Middle Passages of Black Migration,” Atlantic Studies 6.1 (2009): 98; Bonnici, “Negotiating Inclusion in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore,” 285; Petra Tournay–Theodotou, “Strange Encounters: Nationhood and the Stranger in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips, ed. Ledent & Tunca, 294. 17 For Phillips’s description of his visit to this notorious refugee camp in 2001, see “Strangers in a Strange Land,” The Guardian (17 November 2001), http://www.theguardian.com /uk/2001/nov/17 /immigration.books (accessed 23 January 2015), repr. in Caryl Phillips, Colour Me English (London: Random House, 2011): 281–88. Riots forced the French government to close the camp in 2003. For a brief comparison of the essay and the novel, see Ledent, “‘ Of, and Not of, This Place’,” 156.

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clinging to the side of a boat. Eventually he makes it by train to London, where he hitches a lift from an Irish lorry driver who helps him settle in the North of England. It is there, a year later, that the readers meet Gabriel at the beginning of Phillips’s non-chronologically narrated novel. Having reinvented himself as Solomon Bartholomew to facilitate his plea for asylum, he is working as a handyman-cum-watchman on a small, newly developed estate on the outskirts of the former mining village of Weston. In A Distant Shore, Gabriel’s life story is presented alongside that of his co-protagonist, his white English neighbour Dorothy Jones, a retired music teacher and divorcée. She introduces him as a “somewhat undernourished coloured man,” the only neighbour with whom she has regular contact (12), and does not take long to inform the reader of his death by drowning (41). In the second and fourth chapters, however, Gabriel’s year in Britain is presented through his own eyes, from his wrongful imprisonment for sexual assault in the coastal town where he disembarked to his asylum application process and the subsequent loss of his newly made friends in the aftermath of his Irish benefactor’s fatal road accident, and finally to his isolated life in xenophobic Weston. With this highly detailed narrative of an individual refugee, to which the above summary barely does justice, Phillips counters the typecasting of refugees in the popular imagination. The word “refugee,” Edward Said notes, has become “a political one” and suggests “large herds of innocent and bewildered people requiring urgent assistance.”18 Alex Rotas further specifies the stereotype by postulating “an emerging refugeeicity which is the condensation of everything to do with refugees, from barbed wire to detention centres to clothes handouts and food tokens.”19 Gabriel, too, is confronted with such stereotypes in A Distant Shore. Upon arrival in London, he is told, notably by a fellow homeless person: “‘You’re one of those refugee blokes, aren’t you? [...] Coming into this country to sponge off the welfare state. That’s what they say about you lot’” (151–52). Phillips, however, undermines such typecasting by presenting a refugee who fails to answer to the stereotype. Gabriel’s work-ethic jars with the preconceived notions that the British – “they” in the quotation – have of refugees and Dorothy 18

Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 181. She is adapting Roland Barthes’s famous statement about “Italianicity [not being] Italy” but only “the condensation of everything Italian from spaghetti to painting.” See Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (“Rhétorique de l’image,” 1964; tr. London: Fontana, 1977): 48, quoted and adapted in Alex Rotas, “New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling: Ibrahim El Salahi and Mohamed Bushara as ‘Asylum Artists’ in the U K ,” in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 22. 19

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is suitably impressed with Gabriel, whose immaculate sartorial appearance and overall gentleman-like behaviour make him stand out among the self-centred and abusive men in her life. In A Distant Shore Phillips, moreover, locates the biases against his refugee protagonist on a continuum of prejudices that pervade British society, prejudices against foreigners and people of other races but also against any other type of newcomer, against homosexuals, working-class people, double-income couples, women, and introverts. In the traditional village of Weston, an African refugee is not much less welcome than an English divorced townswoman or a Jewish woman doctor and her family (9). Not only newcomers feel alienated in Britain. As the mantric repetition of the opening observation that “England has changed” (1) highlights, autochthonous Britons have been made to feel displaced in their own country, whether as a consequence of the permissiveness of the reigning sexual mores, of Britain’s absorption into Europe, or of the waves of migration that have reached its distant shores. In this sense, Weston, which Phillips situates five miles from an unidentified larger town that “boasts neither cathedral nor university” (179), is a small-scale version of British or even Western society at large.20 Phillips’s fictional town, then, has been appropriately named. Etymologically meaning ‘Western town’, Weston has over sixty namesakes across the U K and the U SA . However, intolerance is not seen as an exclusively Western trait. Ethnic prejudices have driven Gabriel’s home country into an extremely bloody and irresolvable civil war between the once ruling ethnic minority, to which Gabriel belongs, and the ethnic majority that have seized power. And although Gabriel is more tolerant than his warring countrymen and does not condone his troop’s ethnic aggression, he too has his prejudices, notably against Asian immigrants in Britain and English teenagers, and he regards the behaviour and dress code of the latter as immoral. In A Distant Shore discriminatory thinking is a universal harbinger of conflict and violence, even in a small provincial village such as Weston. Paradoxically, victims are also perpetrators and perpetrators also victims. In Phillips’s view, the despised Other and the cherished Self are more akin than either would like. Phillips also challenges the stereotype of the displaced Other through the narrative structure of his novel. He inverts the marginal and inferior social position of real refugees – and their poor representation in literature – by granting Gabriel a similar amount of narrative space as Dorothy, his English co-protagonist, and making him serve as focalizer in the chapters devoted to his life

20

See also Tournay–Theodotou, “Strange Encounters,” 296.

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story.21 In a quarter of these pages, Gabriel even takes over from the third-person narrator to tell his own story, as in the autodiegetic passage described earlier. Phillips draws attention to his protagonist’s ordeal as a refugee not just by conveying Gabriel’s perceptions and voice but also by presenting his experiences in a non-linear fashion. The readers have to piece together Gabriel’s life story, initially from the few details Dorothy provides in the first part of the novel, and later from the more elaborate but wholly disordered Parts II and I V . Here, Phillips’s presentation of Gabriel’s life as Solomon in England is disrupted by numerous non-chronologically arranged flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, and dreams. This structural fragmentation makes plain to the reader just how much Gabriel is torn between his memories of Africa and the new life he has slowly been building for himself in England.22 In narratives about migration, Phillips explains, “fracture and dislocation” on the level of the narrative are “inevitable” if you wish to avoid “an unsatisfactory tension between the form and the subject matter.” If you are writing about “people who leave places, people who cannot depend upon yesterday leading comfortably to today, and today leading comfortably to tomorrow,” he argues, “you can’t write a conventional, traditional, 19th-century narrative of beginning, middle and an end with all the security about society that that implies in the narrative form.”23 With his postmodern approach, Phillips challenges the “linear model of history underpinning postEnlightenment narratives of progress,”24 including the traditional slavery-to21

Gabriel and Dorothy are each the protagonist and focalizer of two of the four longer parts of the novel. Parts I and I I I as well as the much shorter fifth and final section are devoted to Dorothy. Part I I presents Gabriel’s life story up to his departure from London; Part I V focuses on his life as Solomon Bartholomew in the North of England. In total, some 120 pages of the novel are devoted to Gabriel and 134 to Dorothy. On the poor literary visibility of refugees, see Ledent, “ ‘ Of, and Not of, This Place’,” and Elisabeth Bekers, “The Lives and Strange Surprising Adventures of Classic and Contemporary Travellers in Fiction in English,” in Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings, ed. Lars Eckstein & Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: W V T , 2009): 267–78. 22 To illustrate the complex chronology in Part I I (the first part of Gabriel’s life history): it starts with Gabriel’s imprisonment in Britain and in the space of a hundred pages (67–170) there are no fewer than fifteen shifts in time, all flashbacks, but these retrospective passages are not presented in chronological order and they take the reader back to different moments in the past. For one of these flashbacks, Phillips switches from a third-person (heterodiegetic) to a first-person (autodiegetic) narrator. 23 Caryl Phillips, “Conversation between Caryl Phillips and Abdulrazak Gurnah,” moderated by Radhika Jones, P E N World Voices Festival (28 April 2007), http://www.pen.org/event/2007/04 /28/conversation-caryl-phillips-abdulrazak-gurnah-radhika-jones (accessed 23 January 2015), my transcript. 24 Sharpe, “The Middle Passages of Black Migration,” 99. Stephen Clingman further observes how, in Dorothy’s section, “the order of the narrative – its disjunctions, its shifts, its jumps in time

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freedom sequencing of historical and contemporary slave narratives, and is able to enhance his readers’ understanding of the extent to which his refugee protagonist is troubled by the nightmares of his past and of his present life in a racist Britain. Phillips’s non-chronological mode of narration in A Distant Shore does not just ensure a mirroring of the content in the form. The suspended revelation of Gabriel’s life history and former identity also forestalls the prejudiced reactions readers may have when reading about a refugee. They join Dorothy in wondering about the background of the kind black gentleman who has designated himself as her volunteer driver: He washes his car, he drives me to the hospital, he stays at home behind his blinds. At night he patrols the culs-de-sac. He smiles nervously in my direction, as though apologising for his inability to answer my question.

The question she has just put to him (“‘But what about you, Solomon? I hardly know anything about you’”) and her close attention to his body language (“I look across at him, and he suddenly seems very tired,” 30) reveal Dorothy’s growing compassion for her neighbour. The atypical impeccable appearance of Phillips’s refugee and his tragic demise also draw the reader’s empathy, as does the internal perspective adopted in the chapters focusing on Gabriel. Since Gabriel’s trauma and failings are presented through the characters’ own eyes, it is easier for readers to sympathize with his plight and initial reaction to “banish all thoughts of his past existence” (84). Even though they already know that Gabriel’s intention will be thwarted by his untimely death, they are likely to understand his “grim determination”25 to move “to a new place and a new beginning” and “live again” in Europe (84). Gabriel’s nightmarish retrospections also reveal the heavy price he is paying for his transformation into Solomon. His growing desperation over the fictionality of his life in England and the prospect of “forever navigating who [he was] with who [he is]”26 become so unbearable that he resolves to confide in Dorothy: This is a woman to whom I might tell my story. If I do not share my story, then I only have this one year to my life. I am a one-year-old man who walks with heavy steps. I am a man burdened with hidden history. (266)

– is also a function and expression of her mental condition, her alienation, separation from the normal flows and continuities of the self” (Clingman, “‘England Has Changed’,” 52). 25 Phillips, “Strangers in a Strange Land,” 288. 26 Caryl Phillips, in Elvira Pulitano, “Migrant Journeys: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” Atlantic Studies 6.3 (2009): 383.

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In Phillips’s pessimistic account, however, this unburdening never takes place. Instead, Phillips emphasizes how Gabriel’s violent death in a racist attack by local skinheads not only destroys the refugee’s dream of Europe but also affects the British. It damages the image of Britain as an ‘enlightened’ nation and the reputation of Weston as a peaceful backwater; it confronts Dorothy’s piano student Carla with the destructive magnitude of her friends’ racist taunts; and it prevents Dorothy from ever really knowing her neighbour: I worry over who will look after his car, or tell his family. I don’t even know if he has any family. The poor man may as well have been living on the dark side of the moon. (52)

Significantly, the realization that Gabriel’s murder has destroyed their chance of exchanging their life stories and developing a meaningful relationship intensifies Dorothy’s feelings of alienation and accelerates her nervous breakdown. Her internment in a mental asylum at the close of the novel evokes a parallel with Gabriel’s incarceration upon arrival in Britain and highlights the similarities between the bleak conditions of white Britain and its black migrant population. The only glimmer of hope to break through in Phillips’s dark narrative is its potential effect on its readership. Unlike Dorothy, readers of A Distant Shore are rewarded for their uneasy feelings of sympathy by being given insight into Gabriel’s actual predicament. With his fragmented mode of narration and strategic use of a trafficked refugee as focalizer and narrator, Phillips impresses, at least on his readers, the fundamental importance of retrieving and sympathizing with the actual experiences of his displaced protagonist, a concern that is shared by the author of On Black Sisters’ Street.  Chika Unigwe likewise explores concrete experiences of human trafficking through the eyes of four displaced women, characters who are “experiencing globalization from below.”27 With her literary interest in the plight of African prostitutes in Antwerp, Belgium’s largest port city, Unigwe is responding to Caryl Phillips, who some years earlier had appealed to non-white writers in Flanders to tell the untold story of Antwerp’s black sex workers.28 By dealing 27

Sarah De Mul & Thomas Ernst, “Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Contemporary Prose in Flanders: The Writings by Chika Unigwe, Koen Peeters and Benno Barnard,” Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, ed. Wolfgang Behschnitt, Sarah De Mul & Liesbeth Minnaard (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013): 293. 28 Caryl Phillips, “The Silenced Minority,” The Guardian (15 May 2004), http://www.theguardian .com/books/2004/may/15/society.politics (accessed 23 January 2015), repr. in Caryl Phillips, Colour

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exclusively with African women, Unigwe is also countering the typical “malegendering of black Atlantic narratives,”29 including A Distant Shore and its account of a male diasporic African. Phillips’s readers have to make do with the token presence of a single black female refugee, Amma, who travels with the novel’s trafficked protagonists as far as France, where she and her young child suddenly disappear from the story. On Black Sisters’ Street, by contrast, gives a proper face to trafficked women and weaves together the bitter life stories of three Nigerians and one Sudanese who have ended up sharing a shabby house in Antwerp’s Schipperskwartier (Seamen’s Quarter). Like Phillips’s Gabriel, they have passed through the hands of human traffickers, but Unigwe eschews the stereotypical images of refugees secretly smuggled into Europe in cramped conditions: her protagonists fly directly from Lagos to Brussels on scheduled flights and enter Europe smoothly on forged passports. Although she, too, evokes an analogy with the victims of the historical transatlantic slave trade when describing her trafficked protagonists as “cargo with a tag: Destination: Unknown,”30 what fascinates Unigwe is not so much the hardship of her characters’ migration as the gender predicament that has prompted them to leave their homes in the first place. On Black Sisters’ Street expands on an earlier short-story by Unigwe entitled “Dreams,”31 which gives a sympathetic account of an impoverished Nigerian widow who turns to prostitution in order to provide for herself and her two

Me English (London: Random House, 2011): 313–21. Phillips was seeking to kill two birds with one stone. In 2004, virtually no writers with migrant backgrounds had been published in Flanders, Belgium; they constituted no less a “silenced minority” than the black sex workers in the Antwerp red-light district. Phillips had visited the area in the company of a Flemish journalist who in 1992 published a widely recognized book on his under-cover investigation into an international women’s trafficking network: Chris De Stoop, Ze zijn zo lief meneer: Over vrouwenhandelaars, meisjesballetten en de bende van de miljardair (Leuven: Kritak, 1992); They Are So Sweet, Sir: The Cruel World of Traffickers in Filipinas and Other Women, tr. François & Louise Hubert–Baterna (Manila: Limitless Asia, 1994). When Unigwe’s first novel appeared in Dutch translation in 2005, she was hailed as the first writer of African descent to publish a book-length work of fiction in Flanders. For more information on Unigwe’s life and oeuvre, see Elisabeth Bekers, “Chika Unigwe,” in Dictionary of African Biography, vol. 6, ed. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong & Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2011): 101–103; for a discussion of the emergence of writers of African descent in Flanders, see Elisabeth Bekers, “Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia: African Writing in Flanders, Belgium,” in Transcultural Modernities, ed. Bekers, Helff & Merolla, 57–69. 29 Sharpe, “The Middle Passages of Black Migration,” 105. 30 Unigwe, On Black Sisters’ Street, 233. Further page references are in the main text. 31 Chika Unigwe, “Dreams,” Eclectica Magazine 8.1 (2004), http://www.eclectica.org/v8n1 /unigwe_dreams.html (accessed 26 March 2014).

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young daughters. The novel diversifies the story’s plot by showing how four women in different situations are driven to prostitution out of economic necessity. Whereas Phillips’s Gabriel disparages the secretaries he used to encounter as a messenger clerk for accepting the promise of “a cosmetics shop of their own, or a half-dozen sewing machines, in exchange for their agreeing to lie back clumsily like upturned buses” (123), Unigwe describes her protagonists’ plight with more sympathy and in more detail. As with Gabriel, the women’s relocation to Europe is not much of a choice, even though they all, bar one, voluntarily enlist the services of a trafficker.32 Interestingly, Unigwe reinforces her critique of human trafficking by also giving the latter a face. In A Distant Shore, the traffickers, with the exception of Gabriel’s uncle, remain anonymous agents in a network that bridges Africa and Europe, but they do not appear to be involved in any other forms of illegality. Unigwe’s women, however, are “thrown together in a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele” (26), a shrewd Nigerian businessman who specifically targets women. Senghor Dele does not merely organize their illegal transportation from Lagos into various European countries but also forces his female clients into prostitution by making them pay off their 30,000-euro travel debt in monthly instalments (34) so that he can maintain his own luxurious lifestyle in Nigeria, which includes a villa in an affluent Lagos suburb. In a phallocratic capitalist world, human trafficking, to borrow Harriet Jacobs’s observations about pre-Civil War slavery in America, “is far more terrible for women,”33 and women’s desire for a better life makes them vulnerable to financial as well as sexual exploitation. While in A Distant Shore Gabriel escapes the ethnic war raging in his homeland and obtains asylum in Britain, where at least he is granted a new beginning, Unigwe is from the onset more pessimistic about her protagonists’ supposedly new life in Europe. True, Belgium, which is the women’s diasporic location by chance rather than by design, embodies the promise of a better life, one that resounds for them even in the country’s name: “Bell. Jyom. Something that tinkled and ushered in dawn, clear as glass” (84). Nevertheless, their time in Antwerp is clearly not yet part of their auspicious new life, nor do the women regard it as such. No “castles and clean streets” (84) await them, only a grotty 32

In an interview Unigwe notes: “Yes, it is a choice they’ve made, but they’ve only made it because they didn’t have alternatives available to them. [. .. ] Perhaps Alek [the Sudanese character in the novel] was indeed forced into prostitution, but the other girls were also forced into it by circumstances. In a way they’re all as much victims as Alek.” See Daria Tunca, Vicki Mortimer & Emmanuelle Del Calzo, “An Interview with Chika Unigwe,” Wasafiri 28.3 (2013): 55. 33 Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Lydia Maria Child & Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1987): 77.

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neighbourhood in a country festering with violence and racism.34 Here the women are held in bondage with the help of other Nigerians, a local madam (“Kate” to Dele, but “Madam” to the girls) and her bodyguard Segun. Madam not only charges rent for their living and professional accommodation, she also confiscates their passports and insists that they go through the futile process of applying for asylum (as pretend-refugees from Liberia), so that she can remind them of their illegality and poverty and force them into accepting their situation: “All you need to know is that you’re persona non grata in this country. You do not exist. Not here. [...] Now you belong to me” (182). Although in Antwerp the women’s status is comparable to that of “a commodity for sale, a slab of meat at the local abattoir” (182) and the “auction” of trafficked women held in Brussels (278) is reminiscent of the historical slave trade,35 Unigwe does not opt for a melodramatic portrayal of trafficked women as down-trodden victims. Her protagonists simply regard it as a means to an end and take their suffering in their stride: the men [they] slept with were, like Dele, just tools [they] needed to achieve [their] dream[s]. And [their dreams were] expansive enough to accommodate all of them. (169)

With a great sense of nuance, Unigwe shifts the focus of her narrative to the protagonists’ pasts to show how the women have been ‘pulled’ by their illusions about Europe as a land of plenty and opportunity as much as they have been ‘pushed’ by their desperation to improve their own and their children’s lives. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is acquainted only with the ‘new’ identities the women have created for themselves in Antwerp: they live and work together, bicker over household chores and borrowed make-up, and throw a 34

In a discussion about the state of Belgium in the novel, the women make reference to two murderous events that shocked the nation in the space of a month in the spring of 2006. On 12 April 2006, the seventeen-year-old schoolboy Joe Van Holsbeeck was stabbed to death at Brussels Central train station because he refused to surrender his MP3 player to two juvenile thugs; barely a month later, on 11 May 2006, the eighteen-year-old skinhead Hans Van Themsche shot down three people in the old town of Antwerp, killing a Malian nanny and her two-year-old ward. According to the date provided in the title of the first chapter of On Black Sisters’ Street, one of the novel’s characters is murdered on 12 May 2006, the day following Van Themsche’s racist shootings; alternatively, the date can also be regarded as a fictional combination of the dates on which the reallife murders took place. What is more, Unigwe’s characters are living in the quiet cobble-stoned street with gabled houses where the nanny and her ward were killed. I will return to the street’s name later in the essay. 35 For a more detailed discussion of the auction scene, see Tunca, “Redressing the ‘Narrative Balance’.”

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party in commemoration of a deceased relative of one of them. However, Unigwe’s women initially do not know what really makes their housemates tick (and neither, by extension, do the novel’s readers). Like Gabriel (and Dorothy) in A Distant Shore, the four women “live side by side, wary of invading the other’s life.”36 They are simply biding their time until they have raised enough money to “catch [their dreams] and live them” (105) and they can finally “resurrect” (104) the former selves they have “airbrushed out of existence” (44). In the course of the novel it turns out that Chisom and Alek, now known as Sisi and Joyce, “relinquish[ed]” their names upon entering “into a new world” (103), just as the slaves lost theirs on the Middle Passage to the New World (and much as Gabriel did in A Distant Shore, as discussed above). Alek has buried her Sudanese past; Efe has denied being a mother; Ama has lied about her parents’ death; and Chisom has been wandering in the old city centre, pretending to be an American tourist by taking photos and shopping for souvenirs. However, whereas the protagonist of Unigwe’s short story “Cotton Candy” takes apparent pride in the lies that she is spinning about herself,37 in On Black Sisters’ Street Unigwe is intent on exposing the tragic reality that is masked by this pride. The catalyst for this uncovering is Chisom’s brutal murder, which makes her housemates decide that “today na de day for confessions” (180), even if, at first, they are reluctant to talk even about their friend’s death, “as if by skirting around it, by avoiding it, they could pretend it never happened” (26). As in Phillips’s novel, the fragmented narrative structure of On Black Sisters’ Street reflects the protagonists’ broken lives, the fracture running between their present experiences in Belgium and their former lives in Africa. The women’s communal life in Antwerp, including the conversation engendered by Chisom’s death, is presented in the novel’s narrative frame; contained within this framework are the women’s individual life histories. These narrative layers and strands are interwoven into a complex tapestry. Although the events in the narrative frame are related in chronological order, flashbacks to the pasts of Sisi/ Chisom, Efe, Ama, and Joyce/Alek, presented in eponymously titled chapters, repeatedly interrupt the frame story, so that the latter is spread over no fewer than nine chapters, all named “Zwartezusterstraat” after the street on which the women live. The three surviving women’s life stories, which are narrated in one or two long flashbacks, are complemented by twelve (non-chronologically arranged) retrospective chapters dealing with Chisom/Sisi’s history, including 36

Bénédicte Ledent, “Caryl Phillips: A Master of Ambiguity” (2005), The Caryl Phillips Bibliography, http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/phillips/cpambiguity.html (accessed 1 July 2007). 37 Chika Unigwe, “Cotton Candy,” in Transcultural Modernities, ed. Bekers, Helff & Merolla, 421–29.

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her death. Even though the narrative frame suggests that the living women are relating their own stories, in the text all four protagonists’ accounts are presented by a heterodiegetic narrator whose chronicling is prompted by the women’s newly developed interest in each other’s histories, including Chisom’s: “We think our stories are sad, but do we even know hers? Where did she always slink off to?” (115). As in A Distant Shore, however, the protagonists are functioning as focalizers of their own life stories and giving the readers access to the reflections and experiences of the displaced. The displacement of the protagonists of On Black Sisters’ Street, however, differs crucially from Gabriel’s, in that they are not political refugees, and do not obtain asylum or find reprieve in Europe. In her gendered fiction, Unigwe underlines the fact that the women’s current entrapment in prostitution is merely a prolongation of the double oppression they had already suffered in Africa as a result of their inferior socio-economic and gender status. When the teenage Efe falls pregnant in Nigeria, she is abandoned by her affluent married lover, who has been taking advantage of her desire for material comfort. Forced to get by without financial support from her own father for her baby son L.I., the motherless Efe sees Dele’s offer to work in Europe as the only means for a single mother to provide for her son and her sister Rita. Ama, for her part, runs away from an incestuous relationship in Enugu, disgusted not only by her preacher– stepfather’s hypocrisy but also by her mother’s willingness to accept her daughter’s abuse in exchange for material security; she also quits a demeaning job in Lagos, in the hope of “see[ing] the world” (159) and gaining respect (169). Alek is a victim of the genocide in Sudan and the only protagonist who is lured to Belgium under false pretences. She mistakenly believes her Nigerian ex-lover has secured a job for her as a nanny, whereas Polycarp is efficiently getting rid of a girlfriend who is not marriage material in the eyes of his Onitsha relatives. The University of Lagos graduate Chisom is marginally better-off than the other women, in that she has not suffered sexual abuse prior to her departure. However, after two years of trying to find employment, she is so desperate to fulfil her parents’ and her own materialistic dreams that there is “no way she was going to turn [Dele’s job offer] down. Not even for [her boyfriend] Peter” (23). The knowledge of what her schooling – a girl’s, to boot – has cost her father only adds to the pressure and makes her, too, easy prey for women traffickers operating between Nigeria and Belgium. Unigwe’s gendered echo of A Distant Shore is most strikingly visible in the scene in which Alek’s family is murdered, in circumstances quite similar to Gabriel’s family, but in which the protagonists are positioned rather differently. Alek, too, witnesses the slaughter from a hiding-place in a cupboard, but she

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cannot restrain herself from confronting the Janjaweed militiamen that raid her home. Unlike Phillips’s male protagonist, who is a passive eyewitness to his relatives’ murder and his sister’s rape, Alek does not escape physically unscathed from her country’s civil war. She pays dearly for protesting against the ethnic violence in which she, unlike Gabriel, has had no part: her frenzied reaction to the Janjaweed provokes her brother’s murder and her gang-rape. Although aid workers at the U N refugee camp later listen to her story, they do not take the time to acknowledge Alek’s defilement as gendered (ethnic) violence, and even Alek herself cannot (yet) bear to listen to the stories of the other women at the camp. The gendered dimension of Chisom’s death remains similarly unrecognized. While Phillips is critical of the fact that Gabriel’s murder is officially regarded as an accidental death and its underlying racism is denied, Unigwe points to the disavowal of trafficked women’s particular predicament. Chisom’s violent murder is dismissed as “a possible racist attack” (111) by the police, who are not only oblivious to the circumstances in which Chisom was hammered to death but also accept Madam’s bribes to ignore the plight of Chisom’s housemates. Although the latter do not learn of the true circumstances of Chisom’s death, Unigwe reveals to the reader that Chisom has been liquidated by Madam’s bodyguard Segun, on Madam and Dele’s orders, as punishment for having dared to escape from her double oppression as sex slave. Instead of ending her novel pessimistically with the murder of her protagonist, Unigwe shifts her attention to the growing bond between the surviving women. Before Chisom’s death, the housemates had been “bound in a sort of unobtrusive friendship, comfortable with what little they know of each other, asking no questions unless prompted” (26), but the news of their friend’s murder makes them bond more deeply in the knowledge that they are “all the family [they have] in Europe” (41). They realize that if they do not share their life histories they will be “homeless spirits whose pasts exist only in their dreams,” 38 their lives as unreal as the fata morgana in the novel’s Dutch title. While, in Phillips’s novel, Gabriel’s resolution to open up to Dorothy comes too late, so he is never able to fully realize “a common bond with another person who has shared a similar experience of (dis)placement,”39 Unigwe’s women manage to escape from oblivion by coming together to mourn Chisom/Sisi and talk about

38

Laura Ciolkowski, “Charting the Emotional Terrain of Longing, Belonging,” review of A Distant Shore, by Caryl Phillips, Boston Globe (25 January 2004), http://www.boston.com/ae/books /articles/2004/01/25/charting_the_emotional_terrain_of_longing_belonging (accessed 22 January 2008). 39 Tournay–Theodotou, “Strange Encounters,” 304.

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their experiences. Although Chisom had once remarked that her co-workers’ past was “None of my business. We all come with our stories and who cares which version is the truth” (120; italics in original), she is proven wrong by her housemates later. “It sounds like a homecoming. Like the origin of life” (180), the narrator remarks when Alek finally plucks up courage to reveal her real name and embark on her life story. Here the double meaning of the novel’s title, On Black Sisters’ Street, becomes apparent. A reference to the name of an actual street on the edge of Antwerp’s red-light district, the title phrase also captures the growing bond between the three remaining women in the house on Black Sisters’ Street, the fact that now “[they] are sisters” (290), as Ama proclaims. That this second meaning is crucial to Unigwe is clear from the way in which she chooses to misspell the street’s name. In the text and in chapter titles, she adopts the spelling of the Dutch phrase “black female siblings” (zwarte zusters) rather than the standard spelling of the Belgian religious order (zwartzusters), as is used in the original Antwerp street name.40 The fact that this alteration was maintained in the 2009 English edition, even though one of the most prominent reviews of the 2007 Dutch translation noted that it was inconsistent with the spelling of the Antwerp street,41 confirms that the lexical ambiguity is not to be dismissed as an editorial oversight. If Gabriel in A Distant Shore can be described as ultimately a “sadly defeated individual,”42 Unigwe in On Black Sisters’ Street, more so than in any of her short stories, gives her characters’ lives positive endings, without disneyfying them. Stimulated by their new sisterhood – which they have acquired, quite tellingly, through the mediation of one whose (adopted) name means ‘Sister in Shona’ (44) – the three surviving women have gained not only a voice but also agency. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator discloses that they are “preparing for the future, after Dele” (278). Efe, rather than quit prostitution, will end up running her own “fleet” of girls in Belgium (279); Ama will open her own boutique 40

The street owes its name to the Belgian order of Augustinian or Cellite nuns, who are also known as the Black Sisters (Zwartzusters) after the colour of the habit they wear (as with their better-known counterparts, the Blackfriars) and whose mother house was until October 2013 located in the Zwartzustersstraat in Antwerp. Although the nuns are also referred to as ‘Zwarte Zusters’ (with ‘e’) and in street names the spelling varies (e.g., ‘Zwartezustersstraat’ in Ghent and Ronse; ‘Zwarte Zustersstraat’ in Aalst and Dendermonde), in Antwerp, as in Leuven, the official spelling is ‘Zwartzustersstraat’ (without ‘e’). 41 See, for instance, Mark Cloostermans, “Hoerenlief en hoerenleed,” review of On Black Sisters Street, by Chika Unigwe, De Standaard der Letteren (28 September 2007): L8. 42 Tournay–Theodotou, “Strange Encounters,” 306.

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in Lagos and employ her friend Mama Eko to manage it; and Alek will return to Nigeria to establish a school in Yaba, “mainly for young women” (279)” and, although only readers learn of Chisom’s life before Antwerp, Alek will name the school after her friend and help girls who likewise cannot afford the tuition fees. Even the murdered Chisom is allowed some type of closure. At the moment of her death, she is musing about her new life in the suburbs of Greater Antwerp; she has just quit Zwartzustersstraat to set up house with her Belgian boyfriend, whom she has met at one of the African Pentecostal churches that are blossoming in Antwerp. Upon dying, Chisom is more successfully granted agency: her soul leaves her body and flies back to Africa, where she makes some last calls on her journey to the other side. A more spiteful soul than Tashi, who in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy proclaims the novel’s motto that resistance is the secret of joy, Chisom’s soul, rather, bears some resemblance to the revenant of the murdered slave child in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), who returns to haunt her mother and her surviving siblings. Chisom’s soul, too, halts at her parental home to expose to the reader the depths of her parents’ materialism, in particular her father’s (who accepts her money with increasing greed but does not wish to know how his daughter is making a living), before making a final stop at Dele’s house to curse his two teenage girls so that they may bring grief upon their father. Admittedly, the four women’s future lives are not wholly unproblematic: Efe is making a living by “buying” and exploiting other women (278); Mama Eko and the shop’s owner “would never talk about Ama’s years in Europe” (279); education is no guarantee that the girls at Alek’s school will not end up like either Chisom or Madam, both of whom are Business Administration graduates; and Chisom potentially harms Dele’s daughters. Nevertheless, the women do manage to rise above their past and present oppression, making Unigwe’s outlook ultimately less bleak than Phillips’s.  In a way, the trafficked protagonists who stealthily cross the walls of Fortress Europe in A Distant Shore and especially in On Black Sisters’ Street can be said to be fata morganas in the literal sense of the phrase. As contemporary versions of King Arthur’s despised half-sister Morgan Le Faye (La Fata Morgana in Italian), who kept her brother’s medieval court on its toes by constantly reminding the knights of Camelot of the courtly ideals to which they claimed they aspired, Phillips’s and Unigwe’s protagonists, too, can be seen to test whether their communities, and by extension their readers, live up to the ideals of humanity. Although in both A Distant Shore and On Black Sisters’ Street the European and African communities sadly fail such a test, the novels themselves may function

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as “books that raise awareness,”43 on both continents, about the plight of trafficked people. If Phillips is primarily concerned to “tell [his readers] that, whether economic or political migrants, these people’s lives are broken and they are simply looking for a chance to begin anew,”44 Unigwe brings the aspect of gender into the debate by showing how her trafficked protagonists became trapped in prostitution in Europe. By zooming in on the concrete predicaments of displaced men and women in their fiction, Phillips and Unigwe contribute to the debate on refugees and human trafficking and, in so doing, parodoxically counter in their fictional texts some of the fictionalization found in other discourses on displaced people, whether in real-life testimonies, the public debate, or contemporary theorizing.

W OR K S C I T E D Anon. “On Black Sisters Street, by Chika Unigwe,” Kirkus Reviews (1 February 2011), http: //www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/chika-unigwe/black-sisters-street (accessed 26 March 2014). Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image, Music, Text, tr. Stephen Heath (“Rhétorique de l’image,” 1964; London: Fontana, 1977): 32–51. Bekers, Elisabeth. “Chika Unigwe,” in Dictionary of African Biography, vol. 6, ed. Emmanuel K. Akyeampong & Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2011): 101–103. ——.“Chronicling Beyond Abyssinia: African Writing in Flanders, Belgium,” in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 57–69. ——.“The Lives and Strange Surprising Adventures of Classic and Contemporary Travellers in Fiction in English,” in Anglistentag 2008 Tübingen: Proceedings, ed. Lars Eckstein & Christoph Reinfandt (Trier: W V T , 2009): 267–78. Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P , 1987). Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Boer, Inge. Uncertain Territories: Boundaries in Cultural Analysis (G E N U S 7; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006).

43

Unigwe is here explicitly referring to the role her novel may play in Nigeria, where a cheaper edition is planned that will make the book even more widely available. See Maaike Floor, “Ik kan die meisjes een stem geven,” interview with Chika Unigwe, Gazet van Antwerpen (9 July 2009): 42. 44 Phillips, “Strangers in Strange Land,” 288. Phillips is here silently addressing the Cheshire man who has been voicing extremely racist opinions on the refugees flocking towards the nearby Sangatte refugee centre, but by extension it is also the message he has for the readers of A Distant Shore.

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Bok, Francis, & Edward Tivnan. Escape from Slavery (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003). Bonnici, Thomas. “Negotiating Inclusion in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca (Cross/Cultures 146; Amsterdam & New York: 2012): 283–92. Ciolkowski, Laura. “Charting the Emotional Terrain of Longing, Belonging,” review of A Distant Shore, by Caryl Phillips, Boston Globe (25 January 2004), http://www.boston .com/ae/books/articles/2004/01/25/charting_the_emotional_terrain_of_longing_belo nging (accessed 22 January 2008). Clingman, Stephen. “ ‘England Has Changed’: Questions of National Form in A Distant Shore,” Moving Worlds 7.1 (2007): 46–58. Cloostermans, Mark. “Hoerenlief en hoerenleed,” review of On Black Sisters’ Street, by Chika Unigwe, De Standaard der Letteren (28 September 2007): L8. Courtman, Sandra. “Dorothy’s Heart of Darkness: How Europe Meets Africa in A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca (Cross/Cultures 146; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 265–83. Darko, Amma. Beyond the Horizon (Oxford: Heinemann, 1995). De Mul, Sarah, & Thomas Ernst. “Multiculturalism and Multilingualism in Contemporary Prose in Flanders: The Writings by Chika Unigwe, Koen Peeters and Benno Barnard,” in Literature, Language, and Multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the Low Countries, ed. Wolfgang Behschnitt, Sarah De Mul & Liesbeth Minnaard (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2013): 283–312. De Stoop, Chris. Ze zijn zo lief meneer: Over vrouwenhandelaars, meisjesballetten en de bende van de miljardair (Leuven: Kritak, 1992); They Are So Sweet, Sir: The Cruel World of Traffickers in Filipinas and Other Women, tr. Francois & Louise Hubert–Baterna (Manila: Limitless Asia, 1994). Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003). Ezeigbo, Akachi. Trafficked (New York: Lantern, 2008). Floor, Maaike. “Ik kan die meisjes een stem geven,” interview with Chika Unigwe, Gazet van Antwerpen (9 July 2009): 42. Foster, Frances Smith. Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Ante-Bellum Slave Narratives (1979; Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1994). Gillet, Lucie. “Omnipresent and Everlasting Imperialism: Race and Gender Oppression in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge and A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips: Writing in the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca (Cross/Cultures 146; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 321–28. Miampika, Landry-Wilfrid. Introduction à une poétique du divers (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). ——.“Migration and Mondiality,” interview with Édouard Glissant, Africultures (1 May 2003), http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=5677 (accessed 1 July 2007).

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Holland, Patrick, & Graham Huggan. Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P , 1998). Hooper, Glenn, & Tim Youngs, ed. Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 2004). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, ed. Lydia Maria Child & Jean Fagan Yellin (1861; Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 1987). Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement (Durham NC & London: Duke U P , 1996). Ledent, Bénédicte. Caryl Phillips (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2002): ——.“Caryl Phillips: A Master of Ambiguity” (2005), The Caryl Phillips Bibliography, http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/phillips/cpambiguity.html (accessed 1 July 2007). ——.“Family and Identity in Caryl Phillips’s Fiction, in Particular A Distant Shore,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies 29.2 (2007): 67–73. ——.“ ‘Of, and Not of, This Place’: Attachment and Detachment in Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore,” Kunapipi 26.1 (2004): 152–60. López Ropero, María Lourdes. “Irony’s Political Edge: Genre Pastiche in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge,” in Beyond Borders: Re-Defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries, ed. Ramón Plo–Alastrué & María Jesús Martínez–Alfaro (Heidelberg: Winter, 2002): 131– 37. McCormick, Patricia. Sold (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2006). Miller, Christopher. “The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Footnotes of A Thousand Plateaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority,” Diacritics 23.3 (Autumn 1993): 6–35. Morrison, Jill. “A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” in Conversations with Caryl Phillips, ed. Renée T. Schatteman (Jackson: U P of Mississippi, 2009): 135–38. Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1987; London: Vintage, 1997). Nazer, Mende, & Damien Lewis. Slave: True Story of a Girl’s Lost Childhood and Her Fight for Survival (London: Virago, 2004). Phillips, Caryl. Cambridge (London: Bloomsbury, 1991). ——.“Conversation between Caryl Phillips and Abdulrazak Gurnah,” moderated by Radhika Jones, P E N World Voices Festival (28 April 2007), http://www.pen.org /event/2007/04/28/conversation-caryl-phillips-abdulrazak-gurnah-radhika-jones (accessed 23 January 2015). ——.A Distant Shore (2003; London: Vintage International, 2005). ——.A New World Order: Essays (London: Secker & Warburg, 2001). ——.“The Silenced Minority,” The Guardian (15 May 2004), http://www.theguardian .com/books/2004/may/15/society.politics (accessed 23 January 2015), repr. in Caryl Phillips, Colour Me English (London: Random House, 2011): 313–21.

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——.“Strangers in a Strange Land,” The Guardian (17 November 2001), http://www.the guardian.com/uk/2001/nov/17/immigration.books (accessed 23 January 2015), repr. in Caryl Phillips, Colour Me English (London: Random House, 2011): 281–88. Pulitano, Elvira. “Migrant Journeys: A Conversation with Caryl Phillips,” Atlantic Studies 6.3 (2009): 371–87. Rotas, Alex. “New Labels, But It’s Still Labelling: Ibrahim El Salahi and Mohamed Bushara as ‘Asylum Artists’ in the U K ,” in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 215–38. Said, Edward W. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge MA : Harvard U P , 2000). Sembène, Ousmane. Voltaïque: La Noire de... et autres nouvelles (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1962). Sharpe, Jenny. “The Middle Passages of Black Migration,” Atlantic Studies 6.1 (2009): 97– 112. Smith, Valerie. “Neo-Slave Narratives,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (New York: Cambridge UP , 2007): 168–85. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852; New York: Oxford U P , 2007). Tournay–Theodotou, Petra. “Strange Encounters: Nationhood and the Stranger in Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore,” in Caryl Phillips: Writing the Key of Life, ed. Bénédicte Ledent & Daria Tunca (Cross/Cultures 146; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2012): 293–307. Tunca, Daria. “Redressing the ‘Narrative Balance’: Subjection and Subjectivity in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street,” Afroeuropa 3.1 (2009): np. Tunca, Daria, Vicki Mortimer & Emmanuelle Del Calzo. “An Interview with Chika Unigwe,” Wasafiri 28.3 (2013): 54–59. Unigwe, Chika. “Cotton Candy,” in Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe, ed. Elisabeth Bekers, Sissy Helff & Daniela Merolla (Matatu 36; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 421–29. ——.“Dreams,” Eclectica Magazine 8.1 (2004), http://www.eclectica.org/v8n1/unigwe _dreams.html (accessed 26 March 2014). ——.Fata morgana, tr. Hans van Riemsdijk (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff & Antwerp: Manteau, 2007). ——.On Black Sisters’ Street (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009). Verne, Jules. Around the World in Eighty Days, tr. & intro. William Butcher (Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours, 1873; tr. Oxford: Oxford U P , 1995). Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy (London: Vintage, 1992).

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Desexing the Crone Intentional Invisibility as Postcolonial Retaliation in Ravinder Randhawa’s A Wicked Old Woman and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices D E V ON C A MPB E L L –H A L L

I

R A V I N D E R R A N D H A W A ’ S A Wicked Old Woman (1987) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices (1997), the two youngish protagonists exercise the somewhat eccentric choice of appearing as crones.1 Such a decision arguably resists their patriarchal objectification as exoticized commodities ripe for Western sexual consumption. It is as if these women were, by their very decision to appear culturally invisible, choosing to inhabit an empowered sort of borderland. Avtar Brah suggests a need to N BOTH

distinguish between ‘difference’ as a process of acknowledging specificities of the social and cultural experience of a group, ‘difference’ as a contestation against oppression and exploitation, and a situation where ‘difference’ itself becomes the modality in which domination articulates. 2

I would like to suggest that the actions of these fictional women not only resist the sorts of phallocentric representation through which the cultural vulnerability of female characters has long been exploited, but that they positively embrace their manufactured crones’ exteriors as successful tools with which to interrogate such oppression and exploitation. This supports Hélène Cixous’s contention that new representations of women are needed to “hail the advent of a new, feminine language that ceaselessly subverts these patriarchal binary schemes where logocentrism colludes with phallocentrism in an effort to op1

Ravinder Randhawa, A Wicked Old Woman (London: Women’s Press, 1987); Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices (1997; New York: Anchor, 1998). 2 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 2002): 176.

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press and silence women.”3 To actively choose the invisibility of ageing women is, I am suggesting, an ingenious way of challenging enforced silence. I have entitled this piece “Desexing the Crone” rather than “Desexualizing the Crone” because the title characters – the ‘wicked old woman’ and ‘the mistress of spices’ – take the active decision to appear as ‘desexed’ rather than passively to be identified as ‘desexualized’, which suggests an objectification reeking uncomfortably of colonial patriarchy. Through the canny use of shapeless, secondhand clothes, crumbling make-up, and a redundant walking stick, Randhawa’s stubborn protagonist in A Wicked Old Woman, Kulwant, convincingly adopts the posture and outward shell of a disabled, elderly woman. A secondgeneration Asian Briton, Kulwant resists not only the signifiers of youth but also the weight of cultural and social expectations thrust upon her as a young woman of the Indian diaspora. Randhawa writes of the women in her novel: “Women weren’t women only, they were also their colours and their national fears.”4 Kulwant represents not only a woman who is resisting the patriarchal gaze but a young Asian-British woman who resists the prospect of having a life resembling those of her mother and aunties. Indeed, she challenges Toril Moi’s contention that “in so far as women are defined as marginal by patriarchy, their struggle can be theorized in the same way as other struggles against a centralized power structure.”5 Randhawa has created a character who resists not only patriarchy but also the dominant ideology of her family’s expectations of how a good Indian girl should behave. Divakaruni’s Tilo in The Mistress of Spices also challenges her Indian family’s expectations with her decision to reject her heritage and instead to embrace the otherworldly existence of a Mistress of Spices. Urbashi Barat suggests that, like most diasporic novels, Divakaruni’s book is concerned with the shifting boundaries of nation, culture and self that immigrants constantly deal with, and it focuses primarily on the woman’s experience as the traditional site of national/cultural contests and a metaphor for the marginality and the dislocations of the diasporic condition.6

Arguably, when the sense of where one stands culturally shifts – as does that of the characters in Randhawa’s and Divakaruni’s novels – so, too, can one use 3

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; London: Routledge, 2002): 103. Randhawa, A Wicked Old Woman, 49. 5 Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 163. 6 Urbashi Barat, “Imagining India: M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey, and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,” in Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty & Pier Paolo Piciucco (Johannesburg: S T E , 2004): 100. 4

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these seismic changes to decentre oneself as the object of the culturally specific male gaze. It is precisely the fact that these women’s experiences are indeed culturally dislocated that enables the characters to pick and choose the façade of themselves they actively wish to display. The characters select their mode of performing their new roles, and manage to elegantly combine the convenience of sexual invisibility with an almost theatrical performance of old age that ensures they are never really perceived as politically threatening. Through a magical-realist transformation, Divakaruni’s determined young protagonist Tilo commits to becoming a Mistress of Spices, so opening herself to the possibility that when she walks through Shampati’s fire to wake up in a new city in her fully stocked spice shop, her chosen destiny may well include inhabiting an elderly ‘second skin’. For Tilo, a somewhat vain, first-generation Indian migrant living in beauty-worshipping California, this is particularly poignant. Kulwant’s and Tilo’s decision to reject the physical beauty of youth and commodification of the exoticized, ‘othered’ Eastern female body by presenting themselves as culturally invisible older women can be read as a highly political decentering of the self as subject. These rebellious choices arguably resist Graham Huggan’s notion of the ‘postcolonial exotic’, in which “marginality is deprived of its subversive implications by being rerouted into safe assertions of a fetishized cultural difference.”7 By choosing ‘othered’ external appearance, whose only fetishization is that it resists the traditionally valued signifiers of ‘femininity’, these young diasporic women reclaim power and agency. The willing substitution of young, healthy flesh for the appearance of ageing, disabled flesh is a trope of transformation that prompts questions. Why is the desexualized otherness of elderly, disabled bodies so often negatively fetishized? Why is it that so many othered female bodies – particularly when they are no longer young or perceived as physically healthy – exist in the liminal zones that Gloria Anzaldúa describes as ‘The Borderlands’? Although she does not specifically refer to elderly, disabled female bodies in her discussion of this phenomenon, Anzaldúa does contend with the cultural and social instability – even disabling nature – of living between worlds. She argues: Cuando vives en la frontera // people walk through you, the wind steals your voice, you’re a burra, bue, scapegoat, forerunner of a new race // half and half, both woman and man // neither, a new gender [...] To survive the Borderlands // you must live sin fronteras // be a crossroads.8 7

Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001), 24. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco C A : Aunt Lute, 1987): 194. 8

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In the context of this discussion, I would like to consider how the visibly aged crones in A Wicked Old Woman and The Mistress of Spices actually subvert Anzaldúa’s idea, and use their supposed desexualized invisibility to trumpet their own voices and ensure they are heard without any undercurrent of sexual objectification. Arguably, this between-worlds existence implies that the title characters lack a fixed identity within a single tradition. Jogamaya Bayer highlights how “Randhawa shows that the imposition of a moral code on young immigrant women – a moral code that has no contextual validity – could lead to emotional disruption.”9 By refusing to be pigeonholed as mere Orientalist stereotypes, the protagonists in these novels reject this disempowering set of guidelines: in both cases, a set of unwritten rules specific to first- and second-generation Asian Britons and Asian Americans. Both wish to break free of the shackles of their diasporic identity, and, by appearing older than they really are, they inhabit a borderland of their own design, in which they are not sexualized but find selfdetermining agency. The carefully disguised crones under discussion hover in their own borderlands, as they have rejected the commodifiable culture of youth, specifically because of society’s obsessive focus on depoliticized, exoticized sexuality. Through the ‘spectacles’ of feminist theory, we can consider perceptions of the disposability of the signifiers of ageing, non-white, female bodies with reference to Judith Butler’s notion of ‘bodies that matter’, in which she asks why society decides which are “bodies that matter, ways of living which count as ‘life,’ lives worth protecting, lives worth saving, lives worth grieving.”10 Butler explores the question of how and why society values certain bodies more highly than others by asking how the materialization of the norm in bodily formation produce[s] a domain of abjected bodies, a field of deformation, which in failing to qualify as fully human fortifies those regulatory norms.11

Butler is apparently arguing that it is the very materiality of the ‘normate’ physical body and its creation that necessarily defines the characteristics of its opposite, the ‘abject’ body. Both A Wicked Old Woman and The Mistress of Spices serve as highly political examples of contemporary fiction that radically critiques the reductive notion of the ‘normality’ of young, healthy bodies as both desirable and absolute. 9

Jogamaya Bayer, “Ravinder Randhawa,” in Writers of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1993): 338. 10 Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993): 16. 11 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 16.

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In the light of all that precedes, this is the question that needs to be asked: can the aged, female bodies in these two novels serve to interrogate the idea of commodified, exoticized femininity that is a consequence of cultural imperialism? The performed elderly disability of these characters serves to release these fictional women from the binary restraints of dominated other/dominant self. In the chaotic, unstructured space in between stereotypes, their decision to appear invisible is powerful, dangerous, and profoundly political. Ato Quayson arguably reflects Butler’s contention when he suggests that “corporeal difference is part of a structure of power, and its meanings are governed by the unmarked regularities of the normate.”12 Furthermore, as Mitchell and Synder suggest, “narratives turn signs of cultural deviance into textually marked bodies.”13 I would like to consider Quayson’s idea of the representation of ageing, less than fully mobile female flesh as the point of interaction with other people. Does this crossing point serve to interrogate the commodification of the exoticized female body in these novels, or do these characters simply serve as examples of the authorial rejection of colonial patriarchy? It would be useful to begin by considering the significance of skin, particularly as it reflects identity. Claudia Benthien “investigates the question of the body surface as the place where identity is formed and assigned.”14 If, indeed, identity is in part constructed via the acutely visible surface of our physical bodies, our skin, then it is logical that we should perceive the identity of others as reflected in their visible skin. The body itself becomes the site of cultural inscription, a location in which history plays an inescapable role. Yet it is not simply the blatant visibility of skin that renders it essential to identity-formation. Skin is vulnerable, soft, and requires protection from the elements and potential damaging onslaughts such as burning, scarring, cutting, and bruising. In her photographic cycle Lustmord-Zyklus (1993, cited in Benthien, Skin), the American artist Jenny Holzer “conjures the theme of skin as a boundary, a fragile parchment unable to protect against violence.”15 The violence to which Holzer refers could just as easily suggest aggressive physical attacks such as the insidious, subtle violence of racism in which the colonial binary of ‘us’ and

12

Ato Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia U P , 2007): 17. 13 Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 26. 14 Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Haut: Literaturgeschichte – Körperbilder – Grenzdiskurse, 1999; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 2002): 1. 15 Benthien, Skin, 3.

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‘them’ is clearly defined through the colour – and the exoticized sexual connotations – of one’s skin. Benthien suggests that skin is “continually read and interpreted in all social situations, that human beings have understood and misunderstood it as an expression of depth, of soul, of inner character.”16 This highlights skin’s inability to serve as an accurate guarantor of interiority. Yet, pervasive stereotypical notions of a relationship between brown, Asian, female skin and exoticized ideas of orientalized femininity still abound. The two novels under discussion suggest that the possibility persists of gaining intimate knowledge of one’s inner character from interpreting the significance of the epidermal surface. Is there still an assumption of a sexualized, male, colonial gaze upon that which is perceived as culturally ‘other’ when the object of said gaze – as happens in the two novels under discussion – is indeed Asian, but neither young nor traditionally beautiful? Perhaps the signifying practice of relating ‘Indianness’ to commodified sensuality is rather more culturally present than we like to admit, particularly when the ‘Indian’ characters under discussion are seen as migrant imports. This is problematized further by Tilo’s half-Native American admirer, Raven, who sees through the fleshly signifier of her crone’s exterior into her signified self. Interestingly, Raven’s insistence on the instability of the signifier resists Codell and MacLeod’s contention that the gaze is primarily characterized by the “desire for the exotic or erotic, the dangerously sublime, for difference itself, for visual and experiential novelty.”17 Codell and MacLeod discuss how the exoticized ‘other’ represents an element of the forbidden in which the object of the colonizing gaze is often young, eroticized Indian women. Here, it is the halfAmerican side of Raven’s heritage that would be expected to view Tilo through a sort of ‘colonial gaze’, although it may be more helpful to consider this simply the gaze of the dominant cultural hegemony; that of a young, wealthy, visibly white, American professional male. The cultural and social space between the hegemonic white – and generally patriarchal – gaze and the actual identity of the objects of such a gaze could be identified as what Codell and MacLeod describe as a “charged distance between colonised and coloniser that is constantly inscribed and re-inscribed by the inherent instability in the imperialist project.”18 Instability enters the situation through Raven’s heritage as half-Native

16

Benthien, Skin, 11. Julie F. Codell & Diane Sachko MacLeod, “Introduction: The ‘Easternization’ of Britain and Interventions to Colonial Discourse,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Codell & MacLeod (Aldershot & Burlington V T : Ashgate, 1998): 3. 18 Codell & MacLeod, “Introduction,” 3. 17

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American, and it can thus be argued that both his gaze and Tilo’s crone exterior resist the ‘postcolonial exotic’ as described by Huggan. By virtue of its very visibility and universality, the skin of both Tilo and Kuli becomes a form of public property, open to inept, ignorant interpretations by those for whom skin colour is inseparable from colonial history. Skin is so powerfully – and dangerously – received as a guarantor of interiority that individuals, such as the novels’ protagonists Tilo and Kulwant, who wish to free themselves from the historical implications of their skin colour, necessarily enter a battleground in which cultural loyalty and national identity come under intense scrutiny. Due to the destabilizing influence of choosing to appear both elderly and disabled, traditional colonial assumptions about the colour/tint of brown and skins are inverted. The supposedly ageing, disabled crones’ skins of Tilo and Kulwant are textually represented as having both choice and agency, because of their rejection of the ‘postcolonial exotic’. These characters adopt what I suggest is a ‘second skin’, which is imbued with cultural codes and clues to the formation of an identity that is actively chosen rather than passively accepted by cultural diktat. The second skin grants permission to behave outrageously, as if it – rather than the original – assumed responsibility for the wearer’s actions. Benthien’s notion of coloured skin, as opposed to light skin, as a “culturally marked epidermis [...] a skin that departs from the neutral norm”19 can be taken ever further if we consider how the protagonists’ skin in these novels is not only visibly Asian but also visibly elderly and disabled. In A Wicked Old Woman, Randhawa uses the idea of a second skin to provide an ‘othered’ alibi. The eccentric, thirty-something protagonist Kulwant chooses to attire herself in the second-hand clothes of an elderly matriarch, complete with crumbling face powder and a redundant walking stick, as the comment on the back cover of the edition used for this essay states: [masquerading] behind her old woman’s disguise of NHS spectacles and an Oxfam coat, taking life or leaving it as she feels inclined, seeking new adventures or venturing back into her past.

It is only when adequately armoured with her ‘othering’ second skin that Kulwant truly comes into her own as a woman. She liberates herself from perceptions of both acceptable femininity and Indianness through her rebellious action. Not only is she divorced and a ‘bad’ mother but she also chooses to deny her sexual attractiveness as a youngish woman, thus freeing herself from

19

Benthien, Skin, 148.

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the burdens of others’ cultural expectations. Kulwant chooses instead temporary empowerment by adopting a guise which manipulates the way in which others are able to visually construct her identity. She controls the gaze, and thus successfully destabilizes the colonial power structures that Huggan alludes to when he argues that “the exoticist rhetoric of fetishised otherness and sympathetic identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the discourse could not function.”20 Kulwant manoeuvres her womanness, her Asianness, her very brownness into an empowered rebellion against the status quo and so reclaims her identity from her oppressors. She sees her second skin not as an accurate guarantor of interiority but as a commodity of power. It is their faultlessly executed masquerade as crones, a determination to separate their ‘womanness’ from stereotypes of female gender performativity, that enables both Kulwant and Tilo to maintain their stronghold. Butler denounces the cultural assumptions that ‘gender’, ‘woman’, and ‘sex’ are unhelpfully taken to be synonymous.21 Toril Moi argues that “the result is that women are divorced from their bodies, and that ‘woman’ is turned into a discursive and performative effect.”22 While they reject sexual objectification, they embrace what they believe to be the empowering benefits of being an older woman in a society obsessed with youth. It is their very invisibility through the disguise of age that enables Kulwant and Tilo to reach their personal goals and empower many of the women they encounter in the course of the narrative. While Kulwant can cast off her second skin on a whim, for Tilo to do so would mean to temporarily lose her magical powers as a Mistress of Spices. Tilo can be either young, beautiful, and politically disempowered or she can appear as a desexed crone and acquire the supernatural ability to help the Indian diasporic community in Oakland, California. Without her disguise of N H S spectacles and shabby clothes, Kulwant is, suggests Bayer, “caught in the conflict between two different value systems” in which she “lives in permanent fragmentation of her self.”23 The moment Kulwant decides to cast herself visibly as a desexed crone, her power evolves from her social invisibility as just another eccentric old Asian lady. The performativity of the crones’ adopted exterior is reminiscent of Bakhtin’s idea of the ‘carnivalesque’, which Wolfreys describes as an “ongoing strategic interruption of social norms, in ideological containment, 20 21 22 23

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 14. See Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 178. Sexual/Textual Politics, 178. Bayer, “Ravinder Randhawa,” 340.

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and in corporeal order and propriety.”24 This supports my idea that Kulwant’s intentional invisibility – through donning the second-skin of a desexed crone – interrogates the traditional trajectory of the postcolonial exoticism that is a consequence of long-term British cultural imperialism. Kulwant’s rebellion can be read as reflecting Ato Quayson’s idea of “the Machiavellianism of the deformed protagonist.”25 What Kulwant’s community sees as her selfishness defies the cultural obedience expected of a youngish – albeit divorced – Indian migrant. Tilo’s adoption of a crone’s exterior in The Mistress of Spices departs significantly from that of Kulwant in A Wicked Old Woman. When Tilo makes the decision to become a Mistress of Spices, she knows that the possibility of appearing in the fully stocked spice shop in the youth-craving city of her choice – Oakland – is likely to mean she will appear elderly and possibly less than fully able-bodied. Christine Vogt–William describes the Indian spice shop as “a transcultural space of intersection, meetings, and cultural interaction and negotiation.”26 Tilo is denied the intimacy of physical connections in such negotiations, but simply enables them to happen. She must maintain distance, but the magical realism of the novel suggests that she has access to the thoughts and feelings of her customers, and thus, as Vogt–William suggests, can “live vicariously through certain experiences thanks to her magical ability to maintain mental contact [...] gaining access to their [her customers’] personal life-spaces and realities.”27 Tilo is thus able to experience spiritually and intellectually what she denies herself physically. Her decision to devote her life to the spices by becoming a magically empowered Mistress necessitates rejection of a physically attractive appearance to those who visit her spice Bazaar. Sacrificing her vanity proves her devotion to her art and prevents her or her customers from being distracted by commodifiable, exoticized beauty. Tilo’s ‘diaspora identity’ is necessarily fluid, as Stuart Hall suggests in his definition of the concept: Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference [...]. It is because this New World is constituted for us as a place, a narrative of 24

Julian Wolfreys, Cultural Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004): 28. 25 Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 27. 26 Christine Vogt–William, “Smells, Skins, and Spices: Indian Spice Shops as Gendered Diasporic Spaces in the Novels of India Women Writers of the Diaspora,” in Shared Waters: Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Cross/Cultures 118; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2009): 151. 27 Vogt–William, “Smells, Skins, and Spices,” 158.

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displacement, that it gives rise so profoundly to a certain imaginary plenitude, recreating the endless desire to return to the ‘lost origins’. 28

Tilo’s customers come to her Spice Bazaar for advice and to try to understand with their second-generation mentality the longings of their first-generation parents for the tastes and smells so redolent of ‘home’. Yet she is bound by the rules of the island and the Great Mother. Urbashi Barat points out that Tilo is really a young woman who has to disguise herself as an old one as per the rules of her Order, who has to repress her sexuality and her selfhood; she is not allowed to look at herself in a mirror, nor can she think of her own needs and desires. She has to become [...] the conventional Indian woman, who negates herself, her body and her soul, for others, who must bear the burden of caring, ministering, sacrifice. She may be a Mistress of Spices, but not a mistress of her own life.29

Tilo chooses her crone’s guise as a clear act of decentering the self as both subject and object; by desexing herself, she can more easily resist the temptations of the flesh and focus on the diasporic crises faced by her customers. In this, she differs profoundly from Kulwant, who chooses her elderly second skin as a self-indulgent enabler of misbehaviour. Furthermore, Tilo stubbornly insists on maintaining her inner sense of self, even while her exterior skin appears dusty and forgettable. It is this sense of holding on to the vestiges of a self-constructed identity that enables Tilo to take the risky, forbidden path of not only leaving the shop but also abandoning her crone’s exterior. She reduces the transgression by choosing to clothe herself in frumpy, unfashionable clothes from a modest department store, but her half-Native American admirer, Raven, instantly sees through this irrelevant disguise. Instead, he presents Tilo (even as she still appears to have ageing, crêpe-like flesh) with a garment that most accurately reflects what he suspects to be her true self: “Look.” He is opening a package. “I brought you something.” It spills across the counter, gossamer and spiderweb, spangled like dew [...]. The loveliest dress I have seen. [...] “I can’t wear it,” I say. “Why not?” “It’s too fancy. A young-woman dress.” “No,” he says. “A beautiful-woman dress. And you are that woman.” 28

Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 235–36. 29 Barat, “Imagining India,” 101.

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“Can’t you see,” I cry. “I’m ugly. Ugly and old. That dress on me would be a mockery. And you and I together, that too is mockery.” “Put on the dress,” he says. “This body, I know it’s not the real you.” “How do you know? You, the one who earlier said it’s not easy to know the real self one is.” He smiles. “Perhaps we can see each other better than we can ourselves.”30

What both Tilo and Raven seem to forget is that other people cannot see beyond visible signifiers of outward appearance into the signified identities of their interiority, in the way that they can of each other. This is highlighted when an insensitive onlooker comments, “‘Some people – I guess there’s no accounting for taste. It’s pathetic what some women will do to look young’.” 31 Although the half-Native American Raven insists he can see beyond the physical into Tilo’s true, young, beautiful inner self, Tilo herself gives in to the temptation of using her spice-magic to temporarily regain youthful beauty. Yet the guilt induced by this single forbidden act not only disrupts Tilo’s diasporic, spiritual identity as one who rejects the signifier for the signified, but also reduces her to embracing the idea of the postcolonial exotic. As suggested by Vogt–William, this rejection of cultural loyalties appears to “permit dynamic female selfpositioning [...] for Indian women in diasporic spaces.”32 Tilo must actively ignore her cultural programming as a Mistress of Spices in order to be able to appear young and beautiful. The implications of this are problematic, as they appear to suggest a clear opposition between Eastern and Western cultural values in which there is no room for a new, hybridized, diasporic identity that would allow her to inhabit both a physically beautiful form and serve as a culturally loyal Mistress of Spices in her newly adopted country. My aim in this essay has been to encourage us as readers and postcolonial scholars to consider how the decision to represent young, healthy women who choose disabled, elderly skins can, as Quayson suggests, “lift our eyes from the reading of literature to attend more closely to the implications of the social universe around us.”33 These tough, migrant protagonists embrace the selfempowerment released by resisting the postcolonial exotic, yet they both eventually relent and decide to re-adopt their real, youthful bodies. Arguably, the very nature of diasporic identity is fluid and ever-changing. Their decisions serve as cynical reminders that the attempt to escape culture and history is 30 31 32 33

Divakaruni, The Mistress of Spices, 191–93. The Mistress of Spices, 221. Vogt–William, “Smells, Skins, and Spices,” 164. Quayson, Aesthetic Nervousness, 31.

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rarely successful. We can read these as positive efforts to renegotiate the space inhabited by young, migrant women in which resistance to erotic objectification is not only necessary but also encouraged. Interestingly, these transgressions of ‘biological certainties’ are often later reversed in fictional narratives, as they are ultimately coded as part of the imaginative bubble that enjoys subverting the norm. Bakhtin reminds us that, within the performativity of the carnivalesque, “life is subject only to its laws, the laws of its own freedom.”34 The performative actions of Tilo and Kulwant to appear publicly as desexed crones reflects this anarchic freedom and surely result in an increase in the protagonists’ political agency. Finally, I would like to suggest that, in A Wicked Old Woman and The Mistress of Spices, the conservative, disempowering decision to re-embrace beautiful physical bodies can be read as a new dynamic in the continual negotiation of what it actually means to be young, beautiful, and sexually desirable as opposed to elderly, ugly, and ‘abject’ in today’s profoundly consumer-oriented society.

W OR K S C I T E D Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco C A : Aunt Lute, 1987). Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia i Renessansa, 1965; tr. Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984). Barat, Urbashi. “Imagining India: M.G. Vassanji’s The Book of Secrets, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices,” in Indias Abroad: The Diaspora Writes Back, ed. Rajendra Chetty & Pier Paolo Piciucco (Johannesburg: S TE , 2004): 89–103. Bayer, Jogamaya. “Ravinder Randhawa,” in Writers of the Indian Diaspora, ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (Westport C T : Greenwood, 1993): 337–42. Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, tr. Thomas Dunlap (Haut: Literaturgeschichte – Körperbilder – Grenzdiskurse, 1999; tr. New York: Columbia U P , 2002). Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 2002). Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993). Codell, Julie F., & Diane Sachko MacLeod. “Introduction: The ‘Easternization’ of Britain and Interventions to Colonial Discourse,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of

34

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, tr. Hélène Iswolsky (Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaia kultura srednevekovia i Renessansa, 1965; tr. Bloomington: Indiana U P , 1984): 7.

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the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Codell & MacLeod (Aldershot & Burlington VT : Ashgate, 1998): 1–10. Divakaruni, Chitra Banerjee. The Mistress of Spices (1997; New York: Anchor, 1998). Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990): 222–37. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (1985; London: Routledge, 2002). Quayson, Ato. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation (New York: Columbia U P , 2007). Randhawa, Ravinder. A Wicked Old Woman (London: Women’s Press, 1987). Vogt–William, Christine. “Smells, Skins, and Spices: Indian Spice Shops as Gendered Diasporic Spaces in the Novels of Indian Women Writers of the Diaspora,” in Shared Waters: Soundings in Postcolonial Literatures, ed. Stella Borg Barthet (Cross/Cultures 118; Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009): 151–66. Wolfreys, Julian. Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004).

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The Burden of Possessions A Postcolonial Reading of Letters from Bessie Head, Dora Taylor, and Lilian Ngoyi 1 M.J. D A Y M ON D

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written by the South Africans Bessie Head, Dora Taylor, and Lilian Ngoyi that is presented here is part of a sustained correspondence which these women conducted from within their homes. Bessie was writing to a friend, Paddy Kitchen, in England; Dora to her daughter Sheila in Zambia; Lilian to Belinda Allan, a friend who lived first in Beirut and later in Switzerland. While the writers were all deeply opposed to apartheid, their letters are not always overtly political, especially when their attention is on their ordinary daily lives. Even here, however, the impact of public power on their private world is immanent. This means that in the act of writing from and about ‘home’ they opened up the concept and the place into a creative and powerful site of utterance, eschewing the idea of an inside–outside boundary between private and public life. Rather than perpetuating barriers of privacy, these women’s letter-writing reveals their will to establish daily family life as a base from which they could reach out to interact with the world around them. That Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi wrote about their domestic lives at all is something of a triumph, in that private, family life was severely jeopardized for most black people under apartheid, particularly by the separation of families and the inadequate living conditions that went with migratory labour. Comparably, Dora Taylor’s letters indicate that, as for all active white opponents of the regime, her privacy and family life were under the constant threat that came

1

ACH OF TH E LETTERS

An earlier version of this article was given as the Anna Rutherford Memorial Lecture at the Triennial Conference of E A C L A L S held at BoȪaziçi University, Istanbul, in 2011. My thanks to the Association and to the conference organizers.

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from surveillance by the secret police.2 Being marginalized and denied the customary rights of citizenship in a nation is, as Caren Kaplan puts it, to be chosen by “deterritorialisation”: “to be cast out of home or language without forethought or permission.”3 So, for these women to counter-assert or desire their homes to be their own productive territory was in itself a defiant and courageous response to the state’s denying them a settled domestic life. The state’s actions meant that they had diminished access to the social privilege and power that arise from having a secure home, and to the sense of identity and belonging that comes from knowing the community and the nation as home. In the face of this loss, possessions become, in various ways, a burden or a refrain in the letters that will be presented here. Possessions represent not the materialism of bourgeois life but the cherished objects which affirm individual identity in a life of modest counter-assertion. As Bessie Head recounts her delight in the building of the first home she had ever called her own, her larger theme is its capacity to provide a locus in which she can bring her personal history to bear on her present self and world. Within that theme she observes that her newly built house gives her a place to store her favourite books, which are among her most treasured possessions. The loss of a valued home that once functioned as an actively productive centre is the subject of the letter from Dora Taylor that is examined here, and this loss is crystallized in her mourning the little household objects that were gifts from people she has loved. Although Lilian Ngoyi’s circumstances had never afforded her a fulfilled sense of home, her letter demonstrates that, for her, ‘home’ and ‘self’ are nevertheless isomorphic. When the material condition of her home is, as it seems to her, miraculously restored, she rejoices by saying that she is now a new woman, and she celebrates her four-day-old stove because it generates a warmth which enables her to overlook the fact that the interior of her tiny house is bare, cold concrete. In most scholarly work, letters are used as a source of information – as in studies of domestic life under empire, or, in the case of literary letters, perhaps as the location of a writer’s declaration of intent that illuminates what we once called the primary text. What is implicit in this article is that letters themselves

2

See Gillian Slovo, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (London: Little, Brown, 1997); Hilda Bernstein, The World That Was Ours: The Story of the Rivonia Trial (London: S A Writers, 1989); M.J. Daymond, “From a Shadow City: Lilian Ngoyi’s Letters, 1971–1980,” Moving Worlds 5.1 (2005): 49–68, and “‘ Home’ and the Loss of a Home in Hilda Bernstein’s The World That Was Ours,” Kunapipi 34.2 (2012): 84–92. 3 Caren Kaplan, “Deterritorialisations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 191.

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have become the primary text.4 A meeting in personal letters between the writer’s construction of experience, thoughts, and feelings, and the recipient’s knowledge of such matters – giving a secondary reader the opportunity to tease out what is being shaped in the intimacy of mutual knowledge – is a major reason for studying letters in their own right. They are often considered a subspecies of autobiography, but the presence of mutual knowledge, either already established or under construction, means that letters, while they might record a life story piece-meal, are different in their address to a reader and therefore different in kind. They are dialogic,5 an exchange between two actual people who are constructing themselves as well as each other as threshold presences during their correspondence. For us, as secondary readers of letters, there is always a mediating, actual, primary reader over whose shoulder we peer as we read, and the non-textualized but implicit drama of the shaping expectations and responses of this reader is something we are obliged to infer and imagine as we read. When only one side of the exchange is available, we are positioned like eavesdroppers with access to only half of the dialogue. As letters have to be “time-travellers,”6 we also have to remember that they offer a much slower exchange than a face-to-face conversation. This understanding of epistolary correspondence lends itself to the consideration of single, complete letters rather than to the assembly of significant extracts from several texts. It also brings forward for consideration the stylistic features of letters such as their sometimes seemingly incoherent (to outsiders) 4

A focus on letters as primary texts began roughly a decade ago in Southern African studies. Anthony O’Brien, Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2001) and Desiree Lewis, Living on a Horizon: Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining (Asmara & Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2007) have discussed Bessie Head’s letters as a genre in their own right rather than consulting them for supporting information. Liz Stanley has theorized letter-writing and a writer’s epistolarium, “The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences,” Auto/Biography 12.3 (2002): 201–35, prior to publishing a co-edited volume of Olive Schreiner’s letters: The World’s Great Question: Olive Schreiner’s South African Letters, 1889– 1920, ed. Liz Stanley & Andrea Salter (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2014). Meg Samuelson has published articles on letters as a form of communication across the Indian Ocean, see “A Community of Letters on the Indian Ocean Rim: Friendship, Fraternity and (Af-filial) Love,” English in Africa 35.1 (2008): 25–41, and “Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community of Letters Across the Indian Ocean,” in Print, Text and Book Histories in Southern Africa, ed. Andrew van der Vlies (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2012): 87–108. 5 Stanley, “The Epistolarium,” 202. 6 Goolam Vahed & Thembisa Waetjen, “Editors’ Introduction,” in Dear Ahmedbhai, Dear Zuleikhabehn: The Letters of Zuleikha Mayat and Ahmed Kathrada 1979–1989, ed. Vahed & Waetjen (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009): 1.

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assembly of subject-matters and disregard for the custom, in most discursive writing, of keeping to a point; their repetitions from one letter to the next;7 their small variations in the style of salutation which might have had significance for the primary reader; the degree of self-exposure that the writer allows herself and her way of invoking and appealing to her primary reader. In the chosen examples of a letter from each of the writers, each represents a differently crucial moment in the life of the home, so that in their conjunction a spectrum of meanings that has accrued to ‘home’ emerges. Because these letters are taken from an intensely personal correspondence, their intimacy is acknowledged by the use of a first name only for each writer. My discussion of them is shaped by the particular historical circumstances confronting people who opposed the apartheid regime in South Africa, but after presenting and contextualizing these letters, I will change both my scale and my angle of approach to indicate very briefly what the intimate encounter offered by letters might bring to postcolonial studies more widely.

Bessie Head: Making Her Home Bessie Emery was born in a psychiatric hospital, Fort Napier, in Pietermaritzburg in 1937. Her mother was a white woman and her father an unidentified black man; Bessie believed that he had worked in the stables owned by her mother’s wealthy family and that her mother had been placed in the asylum because she was having an illegitimate child. For twelve years, Bessie was looked after by a foster mother, Nellie Heathcote, whom she believed to be her natural mother. Then one traumatic day the headmistress of the school in Durban to which she had been sent told her in anger that she was the illegitimate child of a mad woman. Bessie believed that her natural mother had been put away because she was pregnant by a black man, but since Bessie’s death it has been established that this, as well as some of the information she was given at school, was not accurate. Her mother had been hospitalized for some time before she conceived her child, and the family did not own stables.8 After training to be a teacher, Bessie successfully tried her hand at journalism, working on newspapers in Cape Town and Johannesburg. When her 7

A link between repetition and home life is proposed by Rita Felski in her consideration of the term ‘everyday life’. She writes: “The temporality of the everyday [. . .] is that of repetition, the spatial ordering of the everyday is anchored in a sense of home and the characteristic mode of experiencing the everyday is that of habit.” Felski, “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations 39 (Winter 1999–2000): 18. 8 See Gillian Stead Eilersen, Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995; Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2007): 8–25.

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marriage to Harold Head disintegrated, she decided that, if she was to become the writer she longed to be, she had to leave the country. When the South African government refused her a passport, she took an exit permit and arrived with her two-year-old son, Howard, in 1964, in Serowe, Botswana, where she had been offered a teaching post. The difficulties of life as a single mother and stateless refugee in a newly independent country that was dominated by South Africa, its more powerful racist neighbour, took their toll on Bessie and after a few months she had to leave her post quite suddenly. She moved to the refugee community in Francistown, where she wrote her first published novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1969); then she moved back to Serowe so that Howard could attend the Swaneng Primary School that is mentioned in her letter. She continued to write through a period of mental illness and went on to publish a further five books. Head is now an internationally celebrated writer and since her death in 1986, a novella, three collections of short pieces, and two volumes of her letters have been published.9 Bessie’s correspondent in the letter below is an English woman novelist, Paddy Kitchen.10 Their letter-writing began because Paddy, who had published a very enthusiastic review of Rain Clouds, was asked by the Times Educational Supplement in London to conduct an interview by post with the remarkable 9

The other works published during Bessie Head’s lifetime are: Maru (Oxford: Heinemann, 1971); A Question of Power (Oxford: Heinemann, 1974); The Collector of Treasures (Oxford: Heinemann, 1977); Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981); and A Bewitched Crossroad (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1984). After Head’s death, four more books were published: a novella, The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories (Cape Town: David Philip, 1993), and three collections of short fiction and autobiographical pieces – Tales of Tenderness and Power (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1989); A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990); and The Lovers (London: Heinemann, 2011). The latter is a re-editing and expansion of the 1989 volume of stories. The two volumes of correspondence that have been published are A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965–1979, ed. Randolph Vigne (London & Portsmouth N H : South African Writers/Heinemann, 1991) and Imaginative Trespasser: Letters Between Bessie Head, Patrick and Wendy Cullinan, ed. Patrick Cullinan (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2005). An edition of Head’s selected letters is forthcoming from Africa World Press, edited by Linda–Susan Beard. 10 The letters presented in this article are all published for the first time in Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi, ed. M.J. Daymond (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015). Bessie Head’s letters are held in the Khama I I I Memorial Museum in Serowe, Botswana and are © the Estate of Bessie Head. Permission to quote from them is granted by the Bessie Head Heritage Trust c/o Johnson and Alcock Ltd., and is gratefully acknowledged. Dora Taylor’s letters are privately owned; permission to quote from them is kindly given by Sheila Belshaw. Lilian Ngoyi’s letters are held in the William Cullen Library of the University of the Witwatersrand – the collection consulted, 1971–1980, is located in file A2551. They are quoted with kind permission of Melody Mphahlele.

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new writer living in a remote part of Africa. From the start, their exchanges were lively; they discovered rapidly that they had many interests and activities in common, and apart from one longish break when Bessie was ill, they continued writing until her death. The file of their correspondence was carefully assembled by Bessie herself, for she relied on her letters as a diary and a notebook for her fictional writing. The first few letters to Paddy have not survived, but in the first letter that has, Bessie mentions that she is building a house with money received for the American paperback rights for Rain Clouds. Here is the second of her surviving letters to Paddy; it gives a sense of what her home will mean to her, as well as her delight in the way it has been built: Poste Restante, S E R O WE , Botswana. (I don’t know the date, but nearly end of Nov [1969].)11 Dear Paddy, The upheaval in my life is too tremendous to mention. I impulsively ordered a name plate from a friend who wanted to give me a gift for the new house – part of the title of my book – Rain Clouds, but all the time I feel it should be H E AVE N . It is not so much a resting place for me as for some treasures I’ve carried around through years of a battered existence, number one being a collection of most of D.H. Lawrence who is the one great love of my life. I built a book shelf for him at last and the magazines and letters I can’t bear to throw away. A house is someplace to put things you love intensely but my house is more than that. The building of it was a conspiracy, at the right time, of some of the most lovely people on earth. You might have heard of Pat van Rensburg, the person mentioned in the dedication of Rain Clouds. He first started a high school, built on voluntary labour and donations. It is almost a town now, with electricity and water and my house is just a stone’s throw away, outside the fence of the school grounds. He gave me a tiny piece of unused school land. The school is not only a school but a village development workshop. Most of the staff are I.V.S. [International Voluntary Service] and Peace Corp volunteers but what concerns me just now is a part of the village development project, the Serowe Builders’ Brigade. A few years ago, it started to absorb primary school leavers who in former times worked for 11

The remark between regular brackets is Bessie Head’s. The addition of “[1969]” is an editorial intervention of mine, based on the Museum’s dating and supported by internal evidence in the letter.

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The Burden of Possessions any bugger for only three pounds a month. From a straggling beginning, it has shot up to one of the most highly organised and efficient of all the projects the school runs. I went through the whole rigmarole of getting a house built, as not even wild horses could drag me from the construction scene. A school goes on all the time the house is being built because an instructor quietly calls out: “K.B., change that to a continuous joint.” Even now that the house is complete, the instructors still walk over it for the purpose of making out progress reports and what not. While my house was being built, I joined the gardening section of the Serowe Farmers’ Brigade. The two differ. The Builders’ Brigade has Batswana men as instructors, qualified builders on a paid salary. The Farmers’ Brigade has both white men and women. They are a cut above the general run of white people but the atmosphere is pretty dismal. They, unlike the Batswana instructors, despise the material they are working with. They despise me too. They have a way of totally talking over your head when they are with a white comrade, clearly giving the impression that the black skin can’t understand anything, really. I hate working with them after what I saw on my building plot. Whatever I say about Africans and Africa, a black man or woman just never overlooks people. There is no high or low when people are working [...]. Just at this point I am trying to pull out of the Farmers’ Brigade to join people who are working on the beginnings of a vegetable garden. They are just poor villagers. The site is awful. Nothing is moving. I attended a meeting this evening. There is no money for a fence, I like such a situation because I have learned to pull tricks and poverty is my second name. I am at home in a situation where there is nothing and I force something to happen. To get back to my lovely house. A German I.V.S. volunteer was the only white man around the works [...]. He gave the impression of simply believing in goodness, in the simplest way, the way your old neighbour simply believed in the unchanging train service. I said to him, the day before he departed to Germany: “Karl, each person who built this house added a blessing to it because I have met so many wonderful people, all at once, at the same time.” I am touchy about this. I want it to be that kind of house where those kind of people enter. I am doing the last jobs myself to keep the memory of the way it was built and the people who built [it] and the serious, intense, concentrated expressions of the students for whom a whole new life of dignity has been created. The students at the Farmers’ Brigade have that same expression of concentration when they work but it totally escapes the eye of the shrill white woman. I don’t know what they want but those shadows and shades are the most important sign of progress. I

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think that’s why I just can’t get along with white people no matter how hard I try. They overlook the humanity in man. I can be driven to a point where I could commit murder, in a blood red rage, because of the shouting, the shrill assumption that white knows everything and black, god how they treat a black skin. You count the time: “I’ll get away from them but maybe I have to do this job.” I had some lovely dreams. Some white people whom I really loved used to appear as black people or with my complexion. I used to think this was a sign to me to overcome any dislike I might feel as far as they were concerned. I write freely about this because I feel you belong somewhere among that group and then, deeper still it is not really the black skin my dream indicates but the goodness of the heart of those individuals – that above all they are perfect already [...]. You asked me to mention books I’d like. Send me your novel coming out in January, I have a home for it, now.

Bessie’s delight in the manner of instructing the trainee builders and the “whole new life of dignity” that has been opened to them, as well as the contrast she draws with the “dismal” atmosphere in the Farmers’ Brigade, has behind it the history of racism across the world, and it speaks powerfully of her own reasons for having left South Africa. When she made this choice she believed that she would find in Botswana a way of life that she had long desired and would leave behind an inner emptiness in which she had been forced to live “without a sense of roots, without a sense of history.”12 When she first arrived in Serowe, however, Bessie did not immediately find the tranquillity and breadth of mind that she had hoped for but gradually, as she worked on the land and particularly once she had built her own small house, she could affirm that the “image of Africa, ancient and existing since time immemorial [was indeed present] in Botswana [...] everywhere – in people, in animals, in everyday life and in custom and tradition.”13 Having her own house played a pivotal role in what Bessie frames as her recovering the sense of tradition she needed. She sees her home as a treasure house in which she could store her own past life in tangible forms – such as the books she “love[d] intensely.” These memories she would transmute into the inner substance, the personal confidence, that enabled her to recognize and to go out and meet the ancient culture around her. But as a store for her treasures, 12

Bessie Head, “A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots,” in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, ed. Margaret J. Daymond, Johan U. Jacobs & Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 1984): 278. 13 Head, “A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots,” 278–79.

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her house was also unusual, in that it had to be porous rather than sealed-off and locked, hence her desire for congenial people to flow through her life in ‘Rain Clouds’. What went out of her home was as important to her as what came in. This desire to be reciprocally open to the world outside her home is evident in the relationship to Paddy that she is building up in this letter. Although Bessie knows very well that she is writing to a white Englishwoman (only later would she discover that Paddy’s first husband was Guyanese and that their son looked just like her own child, Howard), she is vehemently critical of white people’s assumption of superiority. But then, pausing to imagine how Paddy might be receiving her words, she amends her focus on skin colour to say that it is really “goodness of [...] heart” that matters. Even at this early stage in their correspondence she requires Paddy to receive her words with a matching openness of mind and clearly trusts her to be able to do so. Her assumption enables her to conclude her letter by offering a home to the latest of Paddy’s novels which will now join the other treasured possessions in which her life is stored. The early delight that these women took in their children, and in stories written for children, became, like their own fiction-writing, their love of jazz and their serious interest in growing vegetables, the multifarious basis on which their correspondence would flourish. The topic of gardening begins in this letter, and over the years led to the regular exchange of information and seeds, and to comparisons of how fruit and vegetables grew in different climates. For Bessie in particular, the challenge presented by the project known as the Boiteko garden became a life-line. It was sharing the seasonal routines of gardening with other women that eventually helped to persuade her that she should live the rest of her life in Serowe. Despite all the problems of being a stateless exile in a society which could easily disparage her for being single and insult her as racially inferior,14 she came, through her writing and through her work in the gardening project she first mentions here, to fulfil her early belief that it was in her house, ‘Rain Clouds’, that she belonged.

14

As a coloured woman, Bessie Head was sometimes derided, in Botswana, as being of San / Bushman (Masarwa) origin. As the comment at the end of Maru suggests, she felt the cruelty of such racism (Head, Maru, 126–27).

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Dora Taylor: Losing Her Home In the moment of personal crisis in which Dora Taylor wrote the letter below, imagining the responses of her daughter to her expressions of pain becomes a form of self-knowledge. Her temperament inclined her towards the selfless service of others; therefore, in this letter she tries valiantly to balance her personal, possibly selfish, grief against her knowledge that her daughter’s decisions about disposing of their family home and particularly their household goods were both necessary and practical. Born in Scotland in 1899, Dora Jack came to South Africa in 1926 after marrying Jim Taylor, whom she had met while a student at the University of Aberdeen. He had taken up a post in the Psychology Department at the University of Cape Town. Their socialist beliefs soon led them to join the weekly meetings of a Trotskyite circle in Cape Town. Among this intellectual group was I.B. Tabata, a Xhosa man originally from the Eastern Cape, with whom Dora Taylor would collaborate from the early 1940s. With Tabata, she became an early member of a radical political alliance known as the Non-European Unity Movement – she was its unofficial secretary, and in this capacity helped to formulate its policies. During this period Taylor wrote The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest (1952) under the pseudonym Nosipho Majeke, while Tabata produced an account of African political aspirations, The All Africa Convention: The Awakening of a People (1950), and Jim Taylor worked on his study of perception, The Behavioral Basis of Perception (1962). The three wrote alongside each other in the Taylors’ Claremont home, ‘Kintayre’, while Dora ran their busy family life. These were the years that she would remember with the greatest sense of fulfilment. When she had accepted that her home was irretrievably lost, she commented in a letter to her daughter, Sheila: I guess I’m sad about “Kintayre” because it could have been a ‘historic’ kind of house. There Daddy did his book on perception – original research on the mind. There T did his challenging writing for 2 years, and I played my part in that. Our way of life was a kind of dedication. Not to speak of “Kintayre” as your home with all its memories. Well, well, I’m romanticizing – sign of age! [20 Feb 1964]

Dora’s phrase “a kind of dedication” is central to her sense of home: intellectual work and family life actively belonged together rather than being a difficult conjunction that her role as housewife might have imposed on her. Against the modesty of her comment “I played my part” stands her work for the Unity Movement, her lectures to adult-education groups under its auspices, her published output of more than seventy essays of literary criticism and socio-

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political commentary, and her journalism in local newspapers. In addition, Taylor wrote plays, short stories, novels, and books of literary criticism, none of which was published during her life.15 In keeping with her energy, the Taylor home was a centre of activity: [it was] something of an open house, the centre of a number of overlapping groups, to which a regular stream of visitors came to discuss politics and art, hold play-readings, and listen to music.16

As with Bessie Head, it was obviously important to Dora that like-minded people should move freely through her home. By the 1960s, however, this home had calcified into a retreat from the world, and Dora’s letters convey a gentle regret about her seclusion. It seems to have been necessary partly because of her husband’s increasing physical difficulties, and partly because white as well as black opponents of the Nationalist regime were being driven underground or into exile. By this time, too, her daughters had moved away with families of their own, and Dora writes in order to sustain a now fragile web of connections, inquiring into and reporting on their scattered lives. In the following letter, Dora is reacting to the loss not just of the productive home of her treasured memories but also to that of the physical home of the present. She and Jim had gone on sabbatical leave to North America shortly after the massacre at Sharpeville, which was followed by a long period of state repression and intimidation.17 Amidst constant news of their colleagues’ imprisonment or flight, Jim and Dora Taylor were strongly advised by their friends not to return to South Africa. As it was too dangerous for Dora to go to Cape Town to close down ‘Kintayre’, Sheila volunteered to go from Zambia to do it. Letters of gratitude and practical suggestions came thick and fast from Dora. In them, she asked Sheila to keep a record of what happened to their possessions, particularly their books – what was sold, what given to others, what crated for future use. Then, when Sheila sent the requested record of the auction sale, the pain of her loss really hit Dora. 15

A collection of Dora Taylor’s short stories and her two novels appeared posthumously: Don’t Tread on My Dreams: Tales from South Africa (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008); Kathie (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008); Rage of Life (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2009). 16 Corinne Sandwith, “Dora Taylor: South African Marxist,” English in Africa 29.2 (2002): 19. 17 On 21 March 1960, in Sharpeville, a township outside Vereeniging in present-day Gauteng, demonstrators gathered in front of the police station, presenting themselves for arrest for their refusal to carry the hated ‘dompas’. Estimates of the gathering’s size vary, but as the crowd grew and tensions increased the police opened fire, killing 69 people and injuring 180. The dead and injured included women and children; many were shot in the back. Shortly after the massacre, the P A C and the A N C were declared illegal organizations.

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M.J. D A Y M O N D 30 Nov 1963. Hemel [Hempstead] My dearest Sheila, Your long, long letter was sent down to us at Poole after I had posted to you. Your letter brings home to me still more what a responsible job you carried out, what with deciding about auctioning, beetle trouble (alas!) and the neglected state of house and garden generally. I guess the sum total of expenses, esp. dispatching, will seriously lessen the assets, but is all part of the upheaval of wrenching away from S.A., no more than other folk go through. It’s only a disturbing expenditure as compared with the sober mode of living up to our modest income over the 34 years in the one house. One wonders why we accumulate “worldly goods” at all [Dora is quoting Jim]. We could all live much more simply than we do. Our uncertainty of abode from this time hence-forward makes me realize this. Possessions just become a burden [...] and even the books and music we need become hard to dispose of. [...] I’m surprised at you not taking the small book-case for ex. I’m quite sore at what I see in the ‘sold’ list, all of which, of course, is public robbery. I mean by that, my darling, that I can’t understand why you didn’t take (for ex.) electric clock, occasional tables, flasks, wall mirror, teapots, round stools. (You gave them to me!) I would gladly have kept these for myself even, (rather than sell). Mercifully, I retained no detailed picture of all these possessions in my mind, and with all the books and papers upper-most in my thoughts, I just couldn’t remember what to tell you to keep. It’s this devastating list that makes my heart bleed. I’d have given them all away, if you didn’t want them, rather than see a crowd of strangers snatching them [...]. My darling, don’t think I’m blaming you in any way whatsoever. I fully understand the need for the auction [...]. It’s just that my whole attitude to selling is confirmed by the legalized robbery of the auction. I really meant it when I said: Give away, rather than sell. I weep for example at the thought of a flask H. gave me. He himself might have used it. Or you. Oh, why were you not willing to take such a small but useful thing? And those small tables you gave me. How that hurts. They would not have been hard to pack. Dear Sheila, don’t be cross with me. I’m tasting the sorrow of the break up of a home, which usually happens after one is dead, and then it doesn’t matter. It’s not at all the small return for the things I cavil at. That is nothing. It’s the sacrilege of vulgar hands stealing things given to me, by you, by others. These are without price, indeed, outraged by selling. Oh, dear Sheila, my heart is too full to express it properly. I’ve lost a home and yet I’m most hurt over those little tables you gave me! [...]

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More anguished questions and comments on the disposing of her household possessions follow in the tiny writing of this long letter, the fourth in the month that Dora has written to Sheila. (Their more usual rhythm was one letter a month.) Then she turns briefly to news of Tabata’s escape from South Africa and the disaster that has befallen their household goods: Tabata, Jane Gool and N. Honono are in Dar-es-Salaam in (at present) very poor circumstances and we feel we have to help them. Jane’s furniture was put into hands of a firm that went bankrupt and their possessions are stranded in Jo’burg, also including the Oxford Dictionary and copies of my plays, presumably (which they stored at back of Encyclopaedia) and the little radio set (?). Also the money Jane had on retiral cannot be taken out of Swaziland to Tanganyika. Some way must be found.

Dora’s letter ends with her remembering that she had forgotten the approach of Christmas and apologizing for her failure to send presents for the grandchildren. She also asks after her other daughter in Zambia, Muriel. The margins of the last page are so filled with post-scripts that her customary signature, “Mummy,” has had to be crammed between the lines, and is almost invisible. While Dora laments the loss of household possessions, she knows they are not valuable in themselves and do not compare in importance with the papers that belong to their intellectual life (some of which were probably party records that she did not want the authorities to find). But the “little tables” that she mourns have become metonyms of the home that has been dismantled under duress. She was not at all a materialistic person, nor was she a snob, so her reaching for phrases such as “legalized robbery” and “the sacrilege of vulgar hands” when she tries to account for her feelings indicates the turmoil of grief in which she writes, as does her somewhat contradictory wish to dismiss “worldly goods.” Accompanying this anguish is her sense that she might be offending Sheila in giving rein to her grief and so, not usually demonstrative in her affection, it is the terms of endearment that she uses here that signal her trust that Sheila will understand that her lament is not a personal rebuke and that she is deeply grateful for her daughter’s help. Like ‘Rain Clouds’, ‘Kintayre’ is a treasure house in which Dora’s memories, embodied in possessions, are stored. Both homes were held open in order to attract like-minded friends, for this enabled each woman to interact productively with her world. Dora, however, is writing at the point when she realizes with shock that she has lost not only her cherished possessions but the life she had had in ‘Kintayre’, all that makes her the person she is.

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A year after this letter, Dora had recovered enough to be able to frame her experience in a larger perspective, to measure world and personal events on the same scale, and to regain her customary mode of reasoned explanation: But there is no one person or persons to ‘blame’. We are all at the centre of mighty forces that produced the 1st and then the 2nd world war with all its colossal destruction and the consequent upheavals ever since, all over the world [...]. All I know is, we as individuals are part of the big problems of transition. Our losing our home in S.A. is part of that. I try to be ‘brave’ by cherishing what is dear – you and the children. [14 Oct 1964]

But even as she used a global perspective on “transition[s]” that included the impact of colonization in order to give perspective to her own life, Dora foresaw that her horizons would now be limited to cherishing the lives of her daughters and their immediate families. She was right; she never recovered a site of independent, creative, and productive utterance and hers was indeed the emptiness of exile.

Lilian Ngoyi: Restoring Her Home Lilian Masediba Masebane was born near Pretoria in 1911 to Bapedi parents. There she enjoyed six years of formal education before she married Ngoyi.18 He died young; they had one daughter. In the late 1930s, she moved with her parents and child to Orlando in Soweto. She joined the African branch of the Garment Workers Union, and in the early 1950s her meteoric rise through the ANC ranks began. She was “a brilliant orator”19 and was soon elected President of the Women’s League and to the ANC National Executive. She went to the World Conference of Mothers held in Lausanne, and her extensive travels afterwards, during which she was introduced to poverty and suffering in several other countries, gave her perspective on her people’s difficulties and her own grief. Back home, she helped organize the historic 20,000-strong march by women on the Union Buildings in Pretoria. A month later Lilian was arrested in a dawn raid on her house. In December 1957 she was again arrested and charged with high treason; four years later she and the remaining defendants (charges having been dropped against most of the accused) were found not guilty. In the mass arrests following the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, Lilian was again taken 18

In an autobiographical letter, which Lilian Ngoyi wrote in 1972 at Belinda Allan’s request, she does not mention her long-dead husband’s first name (see Everyday Matters, ed. Daymond, 271– 84), and I and other researchers have not been able to locate an authoritative source for it. 19 Ezekiel Mphahlele, “Guts and Granite! Lilian Ngoyi” (1956), repr. in The Drum Decade, ed. Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 1989): 107.

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into custody, and then banned and listed as a communist. The banning order confined her to Orlando; she had to report regularly to the police; she was forbidden to meet with more than one person at a time, to go to public places, to make speeches or to be quoted in any form. At a stroke, Lilian’s political activities were ended, and so was her ability to work. She was the family breadwinner but, once banned, she could not work even from home. As with the other residents of Orlando, Lilian’s home had never been a product of her choices,20 and for some years her banning had ensured that it could not be the open kind of house about which Bessie and Dora write. Her family had been compelled to live in one of the tiny concrete shells which became known as the ‘matchbox’ houses of Soweto. Once she had been listed and banned, this house became virtually her prison, and because she could not work, she could not see to its maintenance, nor to that of her meagre possessions. At the time of her letters to Belinda Allan, beginning in the 1970s, she had known great loneliness as well as poverty for more than a decade. The correspondence with Belinda came about when a New York branch of Amnesty International assigned Belinda to send Lilian a small monthly donation. Each sum had to be acknowledged by a letter couched in personal terms and sent as if to an individual friend, making only coded reference to the money as a “parcel” or “gift.” When Belinda married and moved to Europe with Donald Allan, she continued to send money from her own pocket to Lilian, and their correspondence turned into one of genuine friendship. In it Lilian speaks of her life with an unfailing and uncomplaining dignity, seldom mentioning the sorrows of her home. This was the most she allowed herself: I lead a quiet life because of the banning Orders, and go out so little. I haven’t the opportunity of meeting other women, & have tea round a table & discuss as women. The hard hand has a grip on the back of my neck. But how wonderful I’m not alone. [20 Dec 1975]

Lilian’s home was literally disintegrating. Fortunately, Dr Beyers Naudé, the founder of the Christian Institute, was asked by a support group in Germany to visit in order to assess her needs. Here is Lilian’s excited account of his visit: 24th August ’77 My Dearest Mrs & Mr Allan, This is to thank you, for your letter of the 15 August which I received promptly. Lately [your] letters to me takes a month or a little less than a month. It always pleases me very much to read the family was together and that this pleases you in particular. You are a wife to be kept. I admire 20

See Daymond, “From a Shadow City,” 52–55.

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your sincerity to the children. [Lilian is referring to Donald’s children from a previous marriage.] May courage and peace throne you my love. Your expressions of saying you people are in hea[ven] makes me wonder if one day I shall speak the same language. God Bless you my love. Yes, chickens, cheese, mutton etc are lately the order in my fridge after years of severe starvation. You and my other friends [who] have kept the fire burning, are [all] the time asking me this question:– Is there any thing else we could help? I always felt embarrassed, because my needs were rather too much to mention. Until one [day] just after spring cleaning this match box house of mine – as I have already [told] you that it is cement on the roof, cement on the walls, cement on the floor. Now, [the] house is a fridge in Winter and an oven in summer. This is my story that very day a tall gentleman knocked at my door. Unlike the special-branch men, he smiled and I in turn smiled. He said, I would like to see Mrs Ngoyi. I said, Come [in] my Dear, and I said, You are talking to Ngoyi now. He then introduced him[self] and said he was sent to ask me my needs. I was ashamed to say, [so] he took a [notebook] & went to the kitchen. Yes, you need a stove. Bedroom: a bed. And [he] asked me what kind, shyly. I explained. [He said], I think blankets as well. I said Yes, but the most burning issue is my boy’s school uniform. Then I got a wonderful stove, it is only four days old, and my Dear, the Warmth! I have forgotten about the surroundings of cement. [I] am a changed woman. I now can in my budget include milk, fruit, vegetables. Then I got a note. The rest of my needs will be attended to by Barbara, so she has written to them to give her an address of where she must send them. Is this not marvellous? I’m happy it happened this way. Not forgetting that you kept the fire burning in all fields, books etc [...].

After brief mention of a book that she is looking for, Lilian then recounts a horrific incident in the school grounds opposite her home that she had witnessed shortly before writing: the police and their dogs attacking young children. It is almost a year after the first uprising in Soweto and the state apparatus is still jittery. By now, Lilian has very high blood pressure and her horror at what she sees brings on a collapse. She writes: The latest in our country is, the position is ugly. It is simmering, let me put it this way, it is like a Volcano which can erupt any minute. As it is now I’m just a pack of nerves, I was in bed for two solid weeks. My blood pressure is very high. This is what happened, one morning I was picking up papers in my garden, when I suddenly heard screams. When I lifted my head up, I saw women at the corner. As a banned somebody I stood aloof when I looked towards the school opposite, our Mzimhlope this is the name of my area. 4 Police trucks and each truck had two police dogs,

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chasing children from the lower Primary and biting them. I screamed to the top of my voice, helpless, and suddenly I lost consciousness. I was carried to my bedroom and a doctor summoned. After examining me he said, You better try and be Calm. I got more angry. I said, How on earth can I be calm when my children are bitten by dogs? Oh! Belinda my Dear, we are in an age between ages. Hell is loose here. I would not like [to] see the brutality of Hitler happening in any Country. You must pray for Southern Africa. Pupils are shot dead almost every day, dogs set on them in school rooms, right up to the grave yard. Schools are empty, students determined to oppose Bantu Education even if it cost their lives. Jails are full of our students, detentions without trial. Some die in detention. Oh! Donald my Dear, can you imagine war fought by students, and their parents standing and watching? Students with stones against guns, tear gas, and dogs. This is so simply [resolved], our government to meet the students and scrap Bantu Education. This will go on, and the scars on our children will create ever-lasting hatred between white and black. An unfortunate position, when our children will hate each other because of Colour. When there is a variety of colours, it is beautiful and, in other words, apartheid seems to challenge God for having created a black man. Any how, do not worry much about my health, I have really improved. Also I wish to thank you a million as always for the gift. You have always been a mother to this family. How is my Diana? I said so much. Love, Lilian.

Because she was banned, Lilian did not dare intervene in the police attack; all she could do was scream before collapsing. Her exclusion from active life has imposed an absolute boundary between life inside and life outside her home (a division which Bessie Head and Dora Taylor found it vital to resist), and this is reflected in the structure of her letter – the first half rejoicing that her possessions, her home, and she herself have been restored through the care of friends; the second protesting against the physical and psychological damage inflicted on children and parents by the state. Her initial joy perhaps gave shape to the unusual formality and inversion of the opening salutation: “My Dearest Mrs and Mr Allan” (on the outside, the blue aerogram is addressed only to “Mrs Donald B Allan.”) The formality is strange, for they have been on first-name terms for several years and in some letters Lilian’s affection is such that she addresses her friends as “My dear children.” Perhaps her formality indicates her own sense of having recovered her status, with the inversion of “Mrs and Mr” drawing attention to her particular wish to include Donald in her delight over her restored home. In the second part of the letter, the inversion is sustained

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when she addresses them separately and conveys her distress by disturbing customary gender lines. She speaks to Belinda in oratorical, biblical terms of the nation’s sorrows, but of the pain being inflicted on individual parents and children she speaks to Donald, and in domestic terms. Or perhaps her appeal to him is a conventionally gendered one, arising out of a man’s supposed knowledge of war? But if so, why does she refer to Hitler when addressing Belinda? It becomes necessary here to suppose an intimate mutual knowledge that allowed the correspondents to read the rhetoric accurately; the ambiguity that secondary readers may find is another indication of the multiple crossings that mutually constructed knowledge makes possible in these letters. Lilian Ngoyi’s health was already failing when she wrote to celebrate her restored home and to mourn the brutal destruction around her. Although a brief relaxation of her banning order would allow her to renew friendships with comrades, she died in comparative obscurity just three years later. Her letters to Belinda Allan continue until two months before her death.

Letters and Postcolonial Reading A possible connection between a secondary reader’s responses to personal, intimate letters and postcolonial studies rests on the mutual knowledge encoded in letters and on the politico-historical value of access to this genre with its very particular knowledge. Reading letters is a doubled act that must be performed partly in the present of reading and partly in the past of writing; in each time-frame, the secondary reader has to take into account, besides the writer, the shaping perceptions and expectations of the original reader. (Like household possessions for these letter-writers, letters signify, for the secondary reader, both the giver and the receiver.) This necessitates a particularity of attention to the framing that is peculiar to letters; other forms of writing might use a narratee but, even in epistolary fiction, that is an empty category to be deployed by the writer and filled by the reader according to the intentions of the text (and I am not simply overlooking arguments about textuality and language in invoking an intentional text.) The dialogue one enters into when reading letters is between two people who are simultaneously actual persons and self-creating textualized entities. Therefore, the interpretation of letters becomes an exercise in responsibility and even in humility that is unique to letters and perhaps peculiarly suited to a postcolonial critical undertaking for which the representation of alterity is central.

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For the letter-writers presented here, mutual knowledge seems to have engendered a trust in what could be said, and in what could remain unsaid.21 Trust enables each writer to exercise a ‘both/and’ relationship with her correspondent and thence with the world. Thus, Bessie’s writing of her anger at white arrogance leads her into a contrasting affirmation of her belief in Paddy’s general human goodness; Dora writes to her daughter both as a reassuring mother and as a grief-stricken dependent; Lilian writes both rejoicing in her new home and lamenting the brutal destruction of her people’s lives. Hers is the most divided letter, presenting first one subject and self, and then another. But she writes each half with a confidence about her reception that shapes both our sense of her primary reader and our responses to her. The subject-matter and circumstances of these letters may not transfer directly to other postcolonial contexts, but attention to the structure of the transactions in them should, in a politico-historical sense, be similarly rewarding. In their recent introduction to another set of letters (between a political prisoner and a Durban housewife), two South African historians have commented: The typically low resolution historiography of apartheid tends to elide the complexity of social divisions as well as some of the surprising solidarities between ordinary people in their daily interactions on the street, in the shops, in churches, on playing fields and in private spaces. Informal transgressions of various kinds of boundaries and their equally informal gatekeeping are often lost in the story of policy and law. [Through letters we can] identify moments in which the grip of power is less certain.22

If letters can destabilize socio-political boundaries, then their study might do something similar to conceptual boundaries in postcolonial criticism. In contexts of oppression, letters, with the co-presence of writer and primary reader, are a reminder that, like ideology, neither the power of the oppressor nor that of the (secondary) reader–interpreter can be complete and monolithic.

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The unsaid in personal letters is peculiar to letters by virtue of their dialogic nature. Silences in letters may be very obvious to the primary reader but not necessarily discernible or understood by the secondary reader. This makes epistolary silences unlike the signalled silences of a fictional text, on the one hand, and the discretionary silences of an autobiography, on the other. 22 Vahed & Waetjen, “Editors’ Introduction,” 11.

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W OR K S C I T E D Bernstein, Hilda. The World That Was Ours: The Story of the Rivonia Trial (London: SA Writers, 1989). Daymond, M.J. “From a Shadow City: Lilian Ngoyi’s Letters, 1971–1980,” Moving Worlds 5.1 (2005): 49–68. ——.“ ‘Home’ and the Loss of a Home in Hilda Bernstein’s The World That Was Ours,” Kunapipi 34.2 (2012): 84–92. ——, ed. Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head and Lilian Ngoyi (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2015). Eilersen, Gillian Stead. Bessie Head: Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995; Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2007). Felski, Rita. “The Invention of Everyday Life,” New Formations 39 (Winter 1999–2000): 15–31. Head, Bessie. A Bewitched Crossroad (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1984). ——.The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories (Cape Town: David Philip, 1993). ——.The Collector of Treasures (Oxford: Heinemann, 1977). ——.A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965–1979, ed. Randolph Vigne (London & Portsmouth NH: South African Writers/Heinemann, 1991). ——.Imaginative Trespasser: Letters Between Bessie Head, Patrick and Wendy Cullinan, ed. Patrick Cullinan (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2005). ——.The Lovers (London: Heinemann, 2011). ——.Maru (Oxford: Heinemann, 1971). ——.A Question of Power (Oxford: Heinemann, 1974). ——.“A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots,” in Momentum: On Recent South African Writing, ed. Margaret J. Daymond, Johan U. Jacobs & Margaret Lenta (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P , 1984): 278–80. ——.Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (Cape Town: David Philip, 1981). ——.Tales of Tenderness and Power (Johannesburg: Ad. Donker, 1989). ——. When Rain Clouds Gather (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969). ——.A Woman Alone: Autobiographical Writings (Oxford: Heinemann, 1990). Kaplan, Caren. “Deterritorialisations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse,” Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 187–98. Lewis, Desiree. Living on a Horizon: Bessie Head and the Politics of Imagining (Asmara & Trenton N J : Africa World Press, 2007). Mphahlele, Ezekiel. “Guts and Granite! Lilian Ngoyi” (1956), repr. in The Drum Decade, ed. Michael Chapman (Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 1989): 105–108. O’Brien, Anthony. Against Normalization: Writing Radical Democracy in South Africa (Durham NC & London: Duke U P , 2001). Samuelson, Meg. “A Community of Letters on the Indian Ocean Rim: Friendship, Fraternity and (Af-filial) Love,” English in Africa 35.1 (2008): 25–41.

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——.“Textual Circuits and Intimate Relations: A Community of Letters Across the Indian Ocean,” in Print, Text and Book Histories in Southern Africa, ed. Andrew van der Vlies (Johannesburg: Wits U P , 2012): 87–108. Sandwith, Corinne. “Dora Taylor: South African Marxist,” English in Africa 29.2 (2002): 5– 27. Slovo, Gillian. Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country (London: Little, Brown, 1997). Stanley, Liz. “The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences,” Auto/Biography 12 (2002): 201–35. ——, & Andrea Salter, ed. The World’s Great Question: Olive Schreiner’s South African Letters, 1889–1920 (Cape Town: Van Riebeeck Society, 2014). Tabata, I.B. The All Africa Convention: The Awakening of a People (Johannesburg: Peoples, 1950). Taylor, Dora. Don’t Tread on My Dreams: Tales from South Africa (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008). ——.Kathie (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2008). ——.Rage of Life (Johannesburg: Penguin, 2009). ——.(as Nosipho Majeke). The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest (Johannesburg: Society of Young Africa, 1952; repr. Cape Town: Apdusa, 1986). Taylor, James Garden. The Behavioral Basis of Perception (New Haven C T : Yale U P , 1962). Vahed, Goolam, & Thembisa Waetjen. “Editors’ Introduction,” in Dear Ahmedbhai, Dear Zuleikhabehn: The Letters of Zuleikha Mayat and Ahmed Kathrada 1979–1989, ed. Goolam Vahed & Thembisa Waetjen (Johannesburg: Jacana Media, 2009): 1–17.

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Gendered Gateways Australian Surfing and the Construction of Masculinities in Tim Winton’s Breath S ISSY H E LFF

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has a long history in the Pacific Islands and Australia. While there is no recorded history of the early beginnings of surfing, it is commonly understood that Hawaian royalty, by means of surfing, already demonstrated their aptitude, heroism, and superiority to their people more than a thousand years ago.1 Social status was reflected in the use of different equipment; thus, Hawaiian chiefs “used to ride huge ‘olo’ balsa boards” while the common man “had to ride smaller ‘alaia’ surfboards.”2 It is easy to imagine that such quixotic beach sport must have appealed to native and foreign watchers alike. Lieutenant James King’s travel diary A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean (1784) might be regarded as one of the first records notifying the Western world of the prowess of the Hawaiian surfers. King, who joined Captain James Cook’s third Pacific voyage, had taken over Cook’s task of recording the expedition after the latter was killed by resisting Hawaians on 14 February 1779. In an entry dated March 1779, King describes Hawaiian ocean pastimes and beach culture as follows: IDING WAVES

Whenever, from stormy weather, or any extraordinary swell at sea, the impetuosity of the surf is increased to its utmost height, they [the Hawaiians] choose that time for this amusement [...]. The boldness and

1

For detailed histories of the origins of surfing, see Murray Walding, Blue Heaven: The Story of Australian Surfing (South Yarra, Victoria: Hardie Grant, 2003); Matt Warshaw, The Encyclopedia of Surfing (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2004); Ed Jaggard, “Writing Australian Surf Lifesaving’s History,” Journal of Sport History 29.1 (Spring 2002): 15–23; and Ben Finney & James Houston, Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport (Rohnert Park C A : Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996). 2 Finney & Houston, Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport, 13.

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address, with which we saw them perform these difficult and dangerous manoeuvres, was altogether astonishing, and is scarcely to be credited.3

Obviously, King is full of praise for the skilled and brave Hawaiian sportsmen. Yet, despite King’s enthusiasm it would take another seventy years or so before the beach was thought of as a public recreation area and seaside resorts were established in the Antipodes. One of the first resorts opened in Botany Bay in the 1840s, and was followed by Swansea in Tasmania, which then became popular for its sea-bathing.4 It is commonly accepted that in Manly, New South Wales, the Vanuatu islander Tommy Tanna first shared his secrets about riding the waves and his techniques of bodysurfing, back then known as body shooting, with a number of adolescents in the 1880s.5 When, in 1907, the Surf and Lifesaving Association of Australia (SLSA ) was formed, members started to differentiate their aims eagerly from a Hawaiian life of supposed debauchery. Dissociating itself from such a way of life, surf lifesaving was based strictly on military-style drills, and surfboards seemingly became only acceptable to the SLS A after members proved their usefulness in rescue operations.6 The sports historian Douglas Booth summarizes the situation as follows: “By the 1930s lifesavers were the lords of Australia’s beaches and icons of masculinity, discipline and humanitarianism.”7 Consequently, the lifesavers were highly respected in Australian society, for it was they who readily risked their lives for the safety of the beach community. The iconic figure of the lifesaver defied the sea in general and the surf in particular, as was proven during the dramatic events of 6 February 1938. On that day, three freak waves hit crowded Bondi Beach during a surf race and more than three hundred people were eventually rescued by the heroes.8 Even today, this historic date, also known as ‘Black Sunday’, haunts Australia’s national imagination and echoes powerfully in oral folklore and national mythmaking. Such examples of ultimate male heroism might well explain why in the context of surfing even the slightest notion of pleasure irritated both young and older Australians, albeit for different reasons. The practice soon stirred a heated public discussion about the flawlessness of 3

James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 3 (London: G. Nicol & T. Cadell, 1784): 145–47, Internet Archive (nd), http://archive.org/details/voyagetopacifico03cook (accessed 15 May 2015). 4 Leone Huntsman, Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History (Melbourne, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2001): 37. 5 Douglas Booth, Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf , 36. 6 Booth, Australian Beach Cultures, 87. 7 Australian Beach Cultures, 65. 8 For a history of Bondi Beach, see BondiBeach.com (2015), http://www.bondibeach.com/history .aspx (accessed 15 May 2015).

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Australian beach culture, on the one hand, and correct behaviour in public, on the other. It was feared, particularly among the moralistic middle class, that hedonistic leisure would have lasting immoral effects on youth. Australian moralists, for example, condemned public bathing at the beginning of the twentieth century as an “affront to decency”; hence, “bare-chested men faced prosecution.”9 This debate was also reflected in particular dress codes: whereas bare-chested seamen or fishermen were commonly called adventurous, manly, heroic, and hard-working, surfers were generally considered immature boys. Surfing the waves for pure pleasure was thus an unforgivable waste of time. John Fiske, Bob Hodge, and Graeme Turner observe: “If the lifesavers are the heroes of this myth, then the surfers are its anti-heroes.” 10 In their influential study, the authors describe the beachscapes, in contrast to the somewhat radical ‘city/bush’ opposition, as transitional zones allowing different sections of society to find in it different ways of articulating, different ways of relating to, the deep biblical opposition between land and sea, or the basic anthropological one between culture and nature.11

Accordingly, the beachscapes were frequently seen as fresh communal spaces and “an ideal image of Australia – classless, matey, basic [and] natural.”12 This almost mythic connotation of the beach is commonly extended to the surf and might serve as an explanation of why the Australian beachscape has become a kind of national institution in Australian popular culture:13 The beach’s increasing centrality to Australian myths coincides [...] with an increasing urbanisation. As the free, natural, and tough bush existence became more obviously an anachronistic version of national identity, the figure of the bronzed lifesaver filled the gap.14

The socio-environmental transformation of the beach is also impressively reflected in a great many images of the Australian coastlines, ranging from E. Phillips Fox’s early, almost pastoral oil paintings depicting the first European landfall to the documentary photographs of onshore whaling, as we find them 9

Booth, Australian Beach Culture: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf, 190. John Fiske, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987): 65. 11 Fiske, Hodge & Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 72. 12 Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 58. 13 See also Anja Schwarz, “Beached Identities: Inclusion and Exclusion of Histories in the Formation of the Beach as an Australian Spatial Icon,” in Australia: Making Space Meaningful, ed. Gerd Dose & Britta Kuhlenbeck (Stuttgart: Stauffenburg, 2006): 125–38. 14 Fiske, Hodge & Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 54. 10

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in the Ed Smidt collection. The exhilarating imagery of suntanned bikini girls or sporty surfers at Bondi Beach by painters such as Charles Meere might be considered perfect examples of images of the beach as a popular communal and commercial space of recreation and leisure representing gender roles and hierarchies. This briefly sketched socio-historical background is imperative for understanding the great many Australian artefacts dealing with surfing.15 And it is precisely this context that confirms the narrative eloquence of Tim Winton’s award-winning Breath,16 a novel celebrating the surf, the beach, and riding the waves as important motifs of masculinity and nation-formation against which a boy’s growing-up in a changing Australia is depicted. Winton is a local author. His strong connection to Western Australia, the land, the beach, and the sea is reflected in his oeuvre, which takes the reader to mostly white, working-class settings, small coastal towns that have long since seen their heyday. It is this particularly Wintonian atmosphere that saturates many of his stories and animates Breath.17 Set in the fictional coastal town of Angelus, loosely based on Albany, the novel evokes a region that has already featured in his earlier work.18 Winton’s somewhat gloomy imaginary world of coastal regions and declining industrial zones, together with the motif of surfing, is negotiated as a means to sketch the reality of the changing socio-political landscape of white working-class communities in Australia during the 1970s. Winton revisits Australian beach spaces in general and Australian surfing history in particular, and extends the old discussion about ‘life saving’ versus ‘life wasting’ by introducing his main narrator–protagonist Bruce, a paramedic, 15

See, for example, Robert Drewe, The Bodysurfers (1986; Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2008) and his edited volume The Penguin Book of the Beach (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1993); Emma Hardman, Nine Parts Water (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2007); Nerida Newton, Death of a Whaler (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2006); and Andrew Taylor’s poem “Surf,” in Taylor, The Unhaunting (London: Salt, 2009): 77. 16 Tim Winton, Breath (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). 17 For a discussion of the representation of societal change in Tim Winton’s fiction, see John P. Turner, “Tim Winton’s Shallows and the End of Whaling in Australia,” Westerly 38.1 (Autumn 1993): 79–85, as well as several of the contributions in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, ed. Lyn McCredden & Nathanael O’Reilly (Crawley: U of Western Australia P , 2014). 18 For depictions of the fictional city of Angelus, see, for instance, Winton’s ecocritical novel Shallows (1984; St Paul M N : Graywolf, 1993) as well as his more recent The Turning (Sydney: Picador, 2004), a novel telling seventeen overlapping stories, as well as my essay “Sea of Transformation: Re-Writing Australianness in the Light of Whaling,” in Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, ed. Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers & Katrin Thomson (Cross/Cultures 121, A S N E L Papers 13; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 91–104.

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on his mission to save lives. However, when, in the opening chapter, Bruce arrives at the site of action he only finds the body of an adolescent who has accidentally killed himself while searching for the big thrill in a perilous bondage game. Whereas the assisting nurse sees nothing but a successful suicide, Bruce immediately understands that the boy was entangled in a deadly game of seeking a special shot of adrenalin and the electrifying feeling when a body is wrestling with death. Driven by the disturbing sight of the dead boy, Bruce revisits his earlier days of dangerous contests and the endless longing for ultimate thrills. It is in these embedded memory sequences that the reader first meets Pikelet, Bruce’s younger self, and Loonie, his friend, who both champion the art of holding their breath underwater. A few years later, the youngsters meet the ex-professional surfer Sando, who soon becomes their new role model of masculinity. In a paternal gesture, Sando teaches them how to ride the surf. In his hands they eventually become obsessive surfers riding dangerous big waves near the backwater settlement of Sawyer in Western Australia. The U S sociologist Michael Kimmel observes: Manhood is neither static nor timeless; it is historical. Manhood is not the manifestation of an inner essence; it is socially constructed. Manhood does not bubble up to consciousness from our biological makeup; it is created in culture. Manhood means different things at different times to different people. We come to know what it means to be a man in our culture by setting our definitions in opposition to a set of ‘other’ – racial minorities, sexual minorities, and, above all, women.19

Manhood and masculinity need to be understood as relational categories describing a fluid assemblage of behavioural patterns and socio-cultural experiences. The use of the plural form “masculinities,” then, hints at the great variety of differing gendered performances of identities which have always been and remain structurally organized according to hierarchical systems. While conceiving of masculinities in the plural certainly challenges gender hierarchies, this strategy at the same time involves imbalance – the fact that the various masculinities are never fully equal, particularly insofar as they are always to some degree bound to a national or transnational imaginary. Such linkages are important and should not be underrated, as the social geographer Tamar Mayer states. Taking her cue from Benedict Anderson’s influential work on the

19

Michael S. Kimmel, “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Feminism and Masculinities, ed. Peter F. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 182.

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construction and imagination of the nation-state, Mayer describes the latter as a mainly male hegemonic project: The nation has largely been constructed as a hetero-male project, and imagined as brotherhood [...] which has typically sprung [... ] “from masculinized memory, masculinized humiliation and masculinized hope.” [...] But because not all men, and certainly not all people, are created equal, this “horizontal comradeship” [...] remains gender, sexuality, race and class specific. [...] It is men, who are generally expected to defend the “moral consciousness” and the “ego” of the nation. Men tend to assume this role because their identity is so often intertwined with that of the nation that it translates into a “personalized image of the nation” [...].20

Charting similar theoretical territory, but with an explicit interest in reciprocal connections between masculinities and nations, the scholar of French cultural studies Todd W. Reeser takes the conceptualization of the nation a step further: The gender of a nation is imagined and constructed in a number of ways by the people who have an investment in that nation, but it is also possible to consider how the nation constructs its men to have or to propagate a certain style. National discourse may implicitly or explicitly teach its men how to be masculine, a leader may transmit what a man is or should be (or what he should not be), or he may pass on a certain national style of masculinity.21

In the context of Breath it is interesting to note that – in line with the novel’s male teenage protagonist – Winton’s Western Australia is represented as a ‘young’ hetero-male territory that is still preoccupied with coming to terms with itself and its search for a new – alas, almost exclusively white – masculine identity. No doubt Winton has a genuine interest in how masculinities and sports go together. Yet, the idea of scrutinizing performances of Australian masculinities in the context of surfing is not at all new. Some ten years earlier

20

Tamar Mayer, “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000): 6. The sources quoted by Mayer in this passage are, in order of appearance: Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: U of California P , 1989): 44; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991); and Miroslav Hroch, “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996): 90–91. 21 Todd W. Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Malden MA : Wiley–Blackwell, 2010): 180.

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the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell published her The Men and the Boys, which includes a case study of the Australian surf professional Steve Donoghue, who belonged to the small group of surfers competing in the Australian national championships.22 Interestingly enough, Donoghue’s story is full of nuances pointing to the ambivalent nature of being an elite surfer. By sharing his experience as a professional sportsman with the reader, Donoghue introduces us to lesser-known aspects of being a surf pro – the controlling systems of coaches and sport clubs. In a nutshell, Steve’s sexy, sound, strong, and healthy body seems strangely caged in a system that specializes in producing successful sportsmen and national icons. In a way, Steve’s story radically undoes stereotypes of the professional surfer as a free spirit or emblem of a subculture. By bringing into play the surfer’s own dependency and restricted lifestyle, the resulting narrative friction deconstructs the professional surfer as nothing but a clichéd masculine role model. Thus, Connell argues conclusively that “much of what was defined in his peer culture as masculine was forbidden him.” 23 Again, there is more to the link between masculinity and surfing than meets the eye. Todd W. Reeser, for instance, emphasizes the role ethnicity plays in a sportsman’s career and his construction of masculinity. His animating statement concerning this triad brings home to us the fact that the idea of muscularity, symmetry, and the perfect male body are implicitly linked to whiteness, meaning that non-white bodies do not theoretically reach such perfection or do so exceptionally.24

Reeser endorses this argument by pointing up the link between race and perfection, which, as he states, remains invisible if the white subject does not admit to racial coding. In this sense, whiteness and masculinity operate in the same manner when they are hidden as relational or constructed subjectivities. So white male subjects may be doubly motivated – to efface their contingent subjectivity.25

In Breath, as in his other creative works, Tim Winton once again shies away from any factor, such as indigenous or multicultural issues, that could complicate his exploration of Australian male selfhood.26 It seems to me that Win22

R.W. Connell, The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: U of California P , 2000): 69–85. Connell, The Men and the Boys, 63. 24 Reeser, Masculinities in Theory, 146. 25 Masculinities in Theory, 146. 26 For a critique of Winton’s strategic narrative escapism, see David Crouch, “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories,” J A S A L , special issue on “Spectres, Screens, 23

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ton, opting to play it safe, exposes too little to offer a fresh creative exploration of Australian masculinities. His young, white, working-class protagonists celebrate a nostalgic, almost surreal realm of male bonding which is rooted in a mutual enthusiasm for riding the waves: I will always remember my first wave that morning. The smells of paraffin wax and brine and peppy scrub. The way the swell rose beneath me like a body drawing in air. How the wave drew me forward and I sprang to my feet, skating with the wind of momentum in my ears. I leant across the wall of upstanding water and the board came with me as though it was part of my body and mind. The blur of spray. The billion shards of light. I remember the solitary watching figure on the beach and the flash of Loonie’s smile as I flew by; I was intoxicated.27

Yet, there is a distinctive difference between the boys’ approaches to surfing: whereas Pikelet later on becomes a life saver on land, Loonie decides to follow in Sando’s footsteps, making surfing his profession. The reader soon learns that travelling the world for the perfect surf and the special thrill that Loonie also finds in drugs and dubious deals never really pays off. Consequently, Loonie at last pays with his life for his earlier, hedonistic extravagance. At this point in the story, the cat is let out of the story-bag. Winton turns to the old antagonism between ‘life saving’ and ‘life wasting’, suggesting that surfing as an act of hedonism can only be tolerated so long as the surfer also invests in ‘serious activities’ such as lifesaving: My favourite time is when we’re all [Bruce and his grown-up daughters] at the Point, because when they see me out on the water I don’t have to be cautious and I’m never ashamed. Out there I’m free. I don’t require management. They probably don’t understand this, but it’s important for me to show them that their father is a man who dances – who saves lives and carries the wounded, yes, but who also does something completely pointless and beautiful, and in this at least he should need no explanation. (218)

Shadows, Mirrors” (2007): 94–105, http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article /view/333/469 (accessed 23 March 2010). In this article, Crouch stresses the significance of a nonexistent dialogue between white and Indigenous people when referring to Winton’s Cloudstreet: “there is no real negotiation between indigenous and non-indigenous characters. Nor is there an apparent attempt to animate a dialogue acknowledging the ghosts of our shared history [.. . ]. Winton’s work reflects a contemporary Australian postcolonial condition that appears within the structures of colonialism even as it is historically located beyond them.” Crouch, “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories,” 100. 27 Winton, Breath, 34–35. Further page references are in the main text.

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Certainly, compared to Bruce’s life-saving activities, Loonie’s indulgence in surfing seems rather meaningless; an evaluation which also translates onto the plot level. As a consequence, Loonie’s adult life is told only in passing, in a subplot. Admittedly, Loonie’s story is rather weak, mainly because it does not offer any convincing and fully-fledged plot, but also because it has no defining moments. Nonetheless, it draws on a well-known social phenomenon – the emergence of the global beach and surf community that features in popular culture, as in Kathryn Bigelow’s blockbuster Point Break.28 Bigelow’s film, starring Patrick Swayze as a violent surf maniac and Keanu Reeves in the role of an undercover F BI agent, is probably the best surfer feature film dealing with this concoction of masculinity, sport, and violence. Another interesting movie in this context is Sunny Abberton’s controversial documentary Bra Boys: Blood is Thicker Than Water, which tells the story of a notorious cocaine-smuggling and drug-peddling Sydney surf tribe.29 In a film review, Philip Martin rightly suggests that these “Hell’s Angels on surfboards” could only escape their hopelessly blue suburb “through the crashing surf.”30 The Bra Boys’ attitude to life and surfing is shared by many of Winton’s characters. Yet again, one would be mistaken to read their risky undertakings and extraordinary longings simply as manifestations of a death-wish. It is quite the contrary, as Pike remarks: Any game would do as long as it was dangerous. At each perilous undertaking – and with Loonie there were plenty of them – he always volunteered to go first. For a while I thought it was about honour, that it was his way of taking responsibilities for whatever stupid idea he’d come up with – something gentlemanly, perhaps, a mark of friendship – but eventually I saw that Loonie went first out of need; he was greedy about risk. (33)

There is a big difference between Loonie’s desires to escape by crashing the surf and Pike’s longing to dance the homely waves. While Loonie really surfs to challenge nature in order to overcome his own limits, Pike is more interested in experiencing freedom within a given social space: We talked about skill and courage and luck – we shared all that, and in time we surfed to fool with death – but for me there was still the outlaw

Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Point Break (Largo & J V C , U S A  Japan 1991; 122 min.). Sunny Abberton & Macario De Souza, dir. Bra Boys: Blood Is Thicker Than Water (Bradahood, Berkela, Australia 2007; 90 min.). 30 Philip Martin, “Review: Bra Boys,” ArkansasOnline (4 July 2008), http://www.arkansasonline .com/news/2008/jul/04/review-bra-boys-20080704/ (accessed 15 May 2010). 28

29

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feeling of doing something graceful, as if dancing on water was the best and bravest a man could do. (26)

Pike’s romantic search for an alternative way of life depicts a classic rite of passage that ironically comes full cycle when the reader finds the grown-up narrator–protagonist serving his nation and humanity as a forty-something paramedic who on his daily duty rescues lives. But before our hero is allowed to reach his goal, the fifteen-year-old Pikelet, in addition to being a courageous surfer, has to gain further experience of life. In the course of the novel, the boy embarks on a sexual relationship with Sando’s American wife Eva, who is also depicted as a tough sportswoman. Once a successful ski champion, Eva is still thrilled by dangerous games, always ready to take the lead. This trait, as well as the novel’s general character constellation, establishes a meritocratic atmosphere which might also explain why Winton’s search for a more holistic masculinity appears at times somewhat ponderous. The unfulfilled yearning evolves probably because Winton’s fictional world is strangely dominated by an overarching nostalgia for an all-too-absent mother-figure – and in this context the ‘mother country’ easily comes to mind. Whereas in most of Winton’s earlier work female characters usually struggle a great deal in order to come to terms with their narcissistic male lovers, fathers, or friends,31 the evolving narrative of Breath seems to thrive on a lack of, and hidden longing for, what might be stereotypically termed maternal care. This narrative manoeuvre is certainly fraught with problems; however, it is interesting that such a character-formation also opens an experimental narrative plane in terms of genre, since the storyline presents an overturning of well-known gender stereotypes. The novel’s representation of sex, love, and relationships challenges common ideas about gender relations in surfer literature. In contrast to popular surfer writing, which often “mingles accounts of mastering waves with ones of easy mastery of girls,” 32 Winton’s narrative depicts an older woman protagonist as the one who takes the lead. And whereas the male surfer is usually ‘hunting’ waves and females,33 it is the seductress Eva, acting according to her bodily needs, who uses Pike as a stopgap measure, a body that satisfies her sexual drive. Fittingly, it is not long before Eva’s initial sexual interest in the boy is used up and the woman introduces the teenager to rough sex games: From the bottom of the wardrobe she brought out a strap and a pink cellophane bag. The strap had a collar and a sliding brass ring. [... ] 31 32 33

See Winton’s Dirt Music (London: Picador, 2001) as well as his novel Shallows. Fiske, Hodge & Turner, Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 69. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture, 69.

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I don’t get it, I said. I’ll show you, she murmured. What if I don’t want to? Then I’ll be disappointed, I guess. [...] Come on, Pikelet, she said, soothingly. I’ve heard you guys talk. Spots, stars, tunnel vision. [...] Once we’d raised a sweat Eva disentangled herself, reached down beside the bed and brought up the cellophane bag. I wasn’t much of a partner in her game. I was mostly the audience, little more than a bit of bodyweight and a steady pair of hands. [...] At her signal I did what I’d been told to do. I lay on her chest. And then I gently throttled her. (182–86)

In this abusive act, the teenager is pushed to a point where he finds closeness giving way to obscenity. In the weeks of the ensuing love affair, Pike’s feelings of disgust constantly grow but he goes on satisfying Eva’s hunger for rough sex. Winton uses this initiation to underwrite the gender conventions found in surfer writing, only to reproduce those employed in narratives of formation. No doubt this story element of Breath reverberates strongly with Mike Nichols’s highly successful screenplay for The Graduate (1967), in which Mrs Robinson starts a love affair with her son’s friend Benjamin Braddock. In Winton’s book, the grown-up protagonist Bruce later wonders about how far his extreme, adolescent lifestyle was connected to the melancholy of suburban emptiness: More than once since then I’ve wondered whether the life-threatening high jinks that Loonie and I and Sando and Eva got up to in the years of my adolescence were anything more than rebellion against the monotony of drawing breath. (43)

Winton’s Breath bathes the reader warmly in melancholic and nostalgic tones. The text’s compelling creative combination of a dynamic narrative structure, a sympathetic narrator–protagonist, and a discourse that takes up well-known debates and antagonisms enables the author to chime with the zeitgeist. Having said that, it is important to emphasize that the narrative also cuts itself loose from common surfer writing traditions. This powerful mixture might, then, also explain why the reader may easily miss the fact that Winton has employed a somewhat conservative discourse about masculinities that loses sight of both race and ethnicity. It needs to be said that for Winton such approaches to masculinities in general and Australianness in particular are not really new. One could say, rather, that the author has once more stuck to his guns, which in the case of Breath is unfortunate, since the very subject-matter of sport and

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masculinities might have provided new narrative possibilities, in line with Todd Reeser’s recipe: Masculinities defined by sport might allow for a black or a white version, meaning that the double racial possibility is one constitutive element of the figure of the sportsman.34

While it is certainly true that Australia’s surf culture of the 1970s and early 1980s was mainly white, Breath, with its frame narrative, also takes the reader to the present, a fictional move that might have gained momentum by employing a more heterogeneous set of ethnically diverse frame-story characters. Certainly, Winton’s constellation of gender as represented in the embedded story sets out to destabilize the generic walls protecting conventional common surfer writing; on the whole, however, Winton’s Breath does not offer satisfactory imaginary gateways beyond culturally laden gender clichés.

W OR K S C I T E D Abberton, Sunny, & Macario De Souza, dir. Bra Boys: Blood is Thicker Than Water (Bradahood, Berkela, Australia 2007; 90 min.). Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991). Bigelow, Kathryn, dir. Point Break (Largo & J V C , U S A  Japan 1991; 122 min.). BondiBeach.com (2015), http://www.bondibeach.com (accessed 15 May 2015). Booth, Douglas. Australian Beach Cultures: The History of Sun, Sand and Surf (London: Routledge, 2001). Connell, R.W. The Men and the Boys (Berkeley: U of California P , 2001). Crouch, David. “National Hauntings: The Architecture of Australian Ghost Stories,” J A S A L , special issue on “Spectres, Screens, Shadows, Mirrors” (2007): 94–105, http: //www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/333/469 (accessed 23 March 2010). Drewe, Robert. The Bodysurfers (1986; Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2008). ——, ed. The Penguin Book of the Beach (Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin, 1993). Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics (Berkeley: U of California P , 1989). Finney, Ben, & James Houston. Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport (Rohnert Park C A : Pomegranate Artbooks, 1996). Fiske, John, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner. Myths of Oz: Reading Australian Popular Culture (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987). Hardman, Emma. Nine Parts Water (St Lucia: U of Queensland P , 2007).

34

Reeser, Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction, 146.

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Helff, Sissy. “Sea of Transformation: Re-Writing Australianness in the Light of Whaling,” in Local Natures, Global Responsibilities: Ecocritical Perspectives on the New English Literatures, ed. Laurenz Volkmann, Nancy Grimm, Ines Detmers, & Katrin Thomson (Cross/Cultures 121, A S N E L Papers 13; Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010): 91–104. Hroch, Miroslav. “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation: The NationBuilding Process in Europe,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (London: Verso, 1996): 78–97. Huntsman, Leone. Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History (Melbourne, Victoria: Melbourne U P , 2001). Jaggard, Ed. “Writing Australian Surf Lifesaving’s History,” Journal of Sport History 29.1 (Spring 2002): 15–23. Kimmel, Michael S. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity,” in Feminism and Masculinities, ed. Peter F. Murphy (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2004): 182–99. King, James. A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean, vol. 3 (London: G. Nicol & T. Cadell, 1784), http://archive.org/details/voyagetopacifico03cook (accessed 15 May 2015). McCredden, Lyn, & Nathanael O’Reilly, ed. Tim Winton: Critical Essays (Crawley: U of Western Australia P , 2014). Martin, Philip. “Review: Bra Boys,” ArkansasOnline (4 July 2008), http://www.arkansas online.com/news/2008/jul/04/review-bra-boys-20080704/ (accessed 15 May 2010). Mayer, Tamar. “Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Setting the Stage,” in Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation, ed. Tamar Mayer (London: Routledge, 2000): 1–22. Newton, Nerida. Death of a Whaler (Crows Nest, N S W : Allen & Unwin, 2006). Nichols, Mike, dir. The Graduate (Lawrence Turman, U S A 1967; 106 min.). Reeser, Todd W. Masculinities in Theory: An Introduction (Malden MA : Wiley–Blackwell, 2010). Schwarz, Anja. “Beached Identities: Inclusion and Exclusion of Histories in the Formation of the Beach as an Australian Spatial Icon,” in Australia: Making Space Meaningful, ed. Gerd Dose & Britta Kuhlenbeck (Stuttgart: Stauffenburg, 2006): 125–38. Taylor, Andrew. “Surf,” in Taylor, The Unhaunting (London: Salt, 2009): 77. Turner, John P. “Tim Winton’s Shallows and the End of Whaling in Australia,” Westerly 38.1 (Autumn 1993): 79–85. Walding, Murray. Blue Heaven: The Story of Australian Surfing (South Yarra, Victoria: Hardie Grant, 2003). Warshaw, Matt. The Encyclopedia of Surfing (Camberwell, Victoria: Penguin, 2004). Winton, Tim. Breath (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). ——. Cloudstreet (New York: Scribner, 1991). ——. Dirt Music (London: Picador, 2001). ——. Shallows (1984; St Paul MN : Graywolf, 1993). ——. The Turning (Sydney: Picador, 2004).

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Notes on Contributors

V E R A A L E X A N D E R is a lecturer in modern English literature at the Reijksuniversiteit Groningen. She is the author of Transcultural Representations of Migration and Education in South Asian Anglophone Novels and has edited books on Romanticism and the Indian diaspora. She has published extensively on issues of education and identity formation, postcolonialism, migration, diaspora, South Asian writing in English, life writing, and Canadian literature. She has recently completed a monograph on anglophone garden writing and relationality. E L I S A B E T H B E K E R S is Lecturer in British and Postcolonial Literature at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (V U B ), Belgium. Her research focuses on literature from the African continent and its diaspora. Currently she is working on a research project on Black British Women’s Writing and Criticism, with a special interest in neo-slave narratives, partially funded by the Flemish research council (FWO 2011–13). She is the author of Rising Anthills: African and African American Writing on Female Genital Excision, 1960–2000 (2010) and co-editor of Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe (2009) and of a special issue on Imaginary Europes: (Re)Perceptions of Europe from Afar for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (2015). For more information, see http://homepages .vub.ac.be/~ebekers/ D E V O N C A M P B E L L – H A L L is Course Leader of the BA English degree at Southampton Solent University. Her PhD focused on how Asian Britain is represented in contemporary anglophone literature. She has published various articles on the writings of Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje, Meera Syal, Zadie Smith, Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie, and Cauvery Madhavan in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and WL W E , and has produced book chapters for collections from Rodopi, Orient Longman, and Pencraft International, as well as reviews for Wasafiri. She has co-authored English Language, Literature and Creative Writing: A Practical Guide for Students (2014), and has presented research at conferences in India, Malta, Turkey, the U SA , and the U K .

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S I M R A N C H A D H A is an Associate Professor with the Department of English, DSC , University of Delhi. Her doctoral dissertation treated militant and cultural nationalism(s) in post-independence Sri Lankan Literature in English. She has published widely in the area of postcolonial literature and Bombay cinema. Her book Bollywoodising Literature Forging Cinema: Adaptations & Hindi Cinema was published in 2015. C A R M E N C O N C I L I O is Associate Professor of English and Postcolonial literature at the University of Turin, where she teaches and researches authors and literatures of the English-speaking world. Her latest publications include New Critical Patterns in Postcolonial Discourse (2012) and Image Technologies in Canadian Literature: Narrative, Film and Photography (2009), and she is the coeditor of J.M. Coetzee: Percorsi di Lettura tra storia e narrazione (2009). She has been director of the AI SCLI Summer School since 2011. M.J. D A Y M O N D is an Emeritus Professor and University Fellow at the University of KwaZulu–Natal. She has edited ten books, the most recent being Everyday Matters: Selected Letters of Dora Taylor, Bessie Head & Lilian Ngoyi (2015). Previously she co-edited Africa South: Viewpoints 1956–61 (2011), a collection of articles from the 1950s written by radical opponents of the apartheid regime and published in the magazine Africa South. Most of her research is on the writing of African women; she was a co-editor of Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region (2003) and edited South African Feminisms (1996). She was a founder editor of the journal Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, now in its twenty-sixth year of publication. Her most recently published article is on the South African writer Zoë Wicomb.

Born in Budapest and raised in Canada, M A R T A D V O \ Á K settled in France to teach Canadian and Commonwealth Literatures at the University of Rennes and then at the Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is former Editor of Commonwealth: Essays and Studies and was recently Visiting Fellow at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Focusing on the interactive relations between (post)modernist writing and postcolonial literatures in contexts of global circulation, her most recent books include Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue (co-ed. Diana Brydon, 2012), Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, and Canadian Writing in Context (co-ed. W.H. New, 2007), and Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai’s “In Custody” (2008). She is currently co-editing ‘Translocated Modernisms’, on the cross-fertilization between early European modernisms and the later peripheral modernisms which unfolded in other regions of the globe.

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C L A UD I A D U P P É is Head of Communication and Networking at the Catholic University of Applied Sciences, Freiburg, Germany. She holds a PhD in New Zealand literature and has focused professionally on academic communication and science management. She has worked for organizations such as the German Research Foundation and the Fraunhofer Association. E L E N A F U R L A N E T T O is a research assistant at the University of Duisburg– Essen, Germany. She graduated in English and American Studies from the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in 2009. In the same year, she started working and teaching as a PhD candidate in American Studies at the Technical University of Dortmund (2009–13). She completed her dissertation on Turkish-American literature in July 2015. Her research interests cover American and postcolonial literatures, the American perception of Sufism, the legacy of ancient Greek literature on American literature, and comparative Empire studies. G A R E T H G R I F F I T H S is Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia, and Professorial Fellow, University of Wollongong. His books include the coauthored The Empire Writes Back ([1989] 2002), The Post-Colonial Studies Reader ([1995] 2006), and Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies ([1998] 2007). He is also the author of A Double Exile: African and Caribbean Writing Between Two Cultures (1978) andAfrican Literatures in English (East and West) (2000), and he has co-edited the books Disputed Territories, Land, Culture and Identity in Settler Societies (2003) and Mixed Messages: Materiality, Textuality, Missions (2005). His recent research interests and publications focus on secular and sacral institutions and practices in colonized spaces. J O H N C. H A W L E Y was chair of the U S chapter of ACLALS and is professor of English at Santa Clara University. Author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction and editor of fourteen books (including India in Africa, Africa in India: Indian Ocean Cosmopolitanisms), he is associate editor of the South Asian Review. S I S S Y H E L F F is an anglicist with a broad range of interests in anglophone world literature, postcolonial and transcultural studies, visual culture, history, and politics. She has been working as a journalist for development matters and cultural diplomacy. She is one of the founding members of the cultural project Migration and Media (http://www.migrationandmedia.com). M A R I E H E R B I L L O N holds a ‘licence’ (four-year degree) in Germanic languages and literatures from the University of Liège (ULg), Belgium, where she also gained a master’s degree in translation (English–French) and another in English Studies. Initially an F NRS (Fonds National de la Recherche Scientifique)

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research fellow, she then worked as an assistant at the ULg, teaching literature in the English department. She has recently completed, under the supervision of Professor Marc Delrez, a PhD entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics” and focusing on the metaphor of linearity in the writings of this contemporary Australian author. D E E P I K A M A R Y A ’s research and teaching are in the areas of postcolonial studies, world literatures, modernity, and Third-World feminism. She has both published and presented in these areas. She has taught at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. B R O N W Y N M I L L S has an MF A from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a PhD from New York University – her dissertation, entitled “Caribbean Cartographies: Maps, Cosmograms, and the Caribbean Imagination,” was supervised by Kamau Brathwaite and Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o. A Fulbright Fellow in Bénin in 2007–2008, she has taught Caribbean and African cultures and literatures and, most recently, Latin American and Turkish literatures in translation at Kadir Has Universitesi, Istanbul, Turkey. Now an independent scholar, Mills publishes in these areas; she has also contributed to a forthcoming book on Haitian Vodou and has guest edited Spotlight on Turkey (Absinthe#19). She is a Senior Prose editor for theTupelo Quarterly and the author of Night of the Luna Moths and Beastly’s Tale (2011). Her Letters from H. and Canary Club are in progress. P A D M I N I M O N G I A has recently resumed teaching literature in English at Franklin and Marshall College, U SA , after two years at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She has published numerous articles on Joseph Conrad and on contemporary Indian writing in English. She is the editor of Contemporary Postcolonial Theory (1997) and is also the author of a children's book, Pchak, Pchak (2008). G O L N A R N A B I Z A D E H is an Associate Lecturer in European Studies at the University of Western Australia. Her main research interests are in the fields of trauma and memory studies and visual culture. She has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics with Mel Gibson and Kay Sambell on “Comics, Picturebooks and Childhood.” She has previously published in the Cultural Studies Review, and has forthcoming articles in the journals Adaptation and W S Q : Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her forthcoming monograph (2017) is entitled ‘Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels’.

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G E R H A R D S T I L Z , Professor of English, University of Tubingen (Germany), held teaching positions at the universities of Bombay, Stuttgart, Northern Arizona, Adelaide, and Halle/Saale. His book publications and research papers include English, Irish, Indian, Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and comparative topics. He is co-editor (since 1991) and executive editor of the ZAA quarterly journal (1995–2004) and ZAA monograph series (since 1997). He is also coeditor of German–Australian Studies (since 1990) and executive editor of KO AL AS (since 1996). He was chair of EAC LALS (1999–2002) and of the Gesellschaft für Australienstudien (1993–96). His recent books include Colonies, Missions, Cultures (ed. 2001); Missions of Interdependence (ed. 2002); Territorial Terrors (ed. 2007); South Asian Literatures (Postcolonial Literatures in English: Sources and Resources, vol. 1; co-ed. Ellen Dengel–Janic 2010). D A R I A T U N C A works in the English Department of the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research focuses on stylistics and African literatures, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Nigerian fiction. She is the author of Stylistic Approaches to Nigerian Fiction (2014), and she has recently co-edited several journal issues: Transition (2014) and Research in African Literatures (2015), with Bénédicte Ledent; the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, with Janet Wilson (2015). She also maintains online bibliographies of works by and about the Nigerian writers Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ben Okri (accessible via http://www.L3.ulg.ac.be/bibliographies). J A N E T W I L S O N is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. She has published widely on Australian and New Zealand writing and cinema, and has recently co-edited Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial (2013). Her current research interests are in diaspora writing and memory. From 2008 to 2011, she was chair of EAC LALS (European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), and she is currently vicechair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

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Index

Abberton, Sunny, & Macario De Souza, dir. Bra Boys: Blood Is Thicker Than Water 323 Abbey Theatre 76 Abbott, Tony 15, 16 Achebe, Chinua 64, 65; Things Fall Apart 77 Ackland, Michael 91, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104 Adele, Anne 140 Adorno, Theodor 191; & Max Horkheimer 88 Africa, independence struggle in 12 Africa Trilogy, The (drama event, Toronto) 69 Afro-Belgian literature 265 —See Chika Unigwe Age of Enlightenment 5, xiv, 3, 4, 39, 87, 88, 89, 91, 92, 96, 98, 104, 112, 165, 173, 174, 263 Akan language 118 Akbar 72 Aktar, Merve 24 Albany (WA) 318 Albee, Edward, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 69, 80 Algan, Bülent 29 Algeria, dress codes in 10–12, 14 “Algeria Unveiled” (Fanon) 10 Ali Pasha 48 All Roads Lead to the Sea (Kassabova) 188

Allan, Belinda 293, 306, 307, 309, 310 Allen, Jonathan 116 Almanya: Wilkommen in Deutschland (dir. õamdereli) 24 Almond, Ian 22 al-Shaykh, Hanan 80 AltƯnsay, Sabâ 56 Amnesty International 307 Anand, Mulk Raj 77 Anatolia 43 ANC 8, 303, 306 Anderson, Benedict 37, 38, 319 Anderson, Hephzibah 153 Andréadès, André M. 54 Annaraj, M.S. 130, 141, 142 Antwerp 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 272, 273 ANZAC campaign (Gallipoli) 49 Anzaldúa, Gloria 281, 282 Arab Convention 133 Arabic language 5, 81 Arasanayagam, Jean, “The Journey” 130, 137–41 Arc-en-ciel pour l’ Occident chrétien, Un (A Rainbow for the Christian West, Depestre) 119, 120 Arendt, Hannah 129, 130 Armenians 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 38, 47, 55, 56 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne) 260 Ascroft, Nick, & Richard Reeve 186, 189, 192

336 Ashcroft, Bill 70; Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin 6, 87 Atatürk, Kemal xiii, 5, 6, 7, 23, 26, 28, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 55 Auerbach, Erich 166 Australia xiv; and burqa xiii, 14–17; and surfing xvii, 316–26; restrictive dress codes in 4 Australian literature 87–105, 316–26 Bachelard, Gaston 226 Bail, Murray xiv, 87–105; Eucalyptus 87, 88, 96, 101; Holden’s Performance 87, 89; The Pages xiv, 87–105 Bakhtin, Mikhail M. xiv, 71, 77, 78, 79, 286, 290 Baldwin, Shauna Singh, “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit” 80 Banaras (India) 153, 155, 156, 163 —See also: Benares Banaras (dir. Pushparaj) 153 Banaras: A Mystic Love Story (dir. Parashar) 153 Bandaranaike, S.W.R.D. 131 Bangladesh 130, 241 Bantu languages 116, 119 Bantu people 309 Barat, Urbashi 280, 288 Barthes, Roland 261 Bascom, William 109 Bastard of Istanbul , The (Shafak) 21, 24, 25–33 Bay, Edna G. 110 Bayazitoglu, Ahmet S. 23 Bayer, Jogamaya 282, 286 Beckett, Samuel 75, 76, 78, 149, 150, 151, 170, 171; Molloy 76; Molloy Dies 76; Murphy 75; The Unnamable 76; Waiting for Godot 150, 151; Watt 75 Beethoven, Ludwig van 50 Behanzin (Dahomey king) 116 Beirut 215, 293

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Bekers, Elisabeth 263, 266 Belgium, dress codes in 6 Bell, Bernard W. 257 Bellamy, Larry A., II 174, 175 Beloved (Morrison) 273 Benares 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162 —See also: Banaras Bénarès (dir. Pyamootoo) 153 Bénarès (Pyamootoo) xv, 147–63 Bengal 241 Bengali (language) xiv, 71, 73, 74, 75 Benin, Republic of xiv, 108–25 Benjamin, Walter 247 Benthien, Claudia 283, 284, 285 Benzina (McQueen) 186 Berlin 139, 183–202 Berlin Conference 116 Berlin Diary (McQueen) 6, xvi, 183, 185– 95, 202 Berlin Wall 6, xii, xv, xvi, 53, 55, 139, 181, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 189, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209, 215 Bernstein, Hilda 294 Besner, Neil K. 225 Bewitched Crossroad, A (Head) 297 Bhabha, Homi K. x, xi, xviii, 70, 147, 148, 162, 256 Bigelow, Kathryn, dir. Point Break 323 Bismarck, Otto von 112 Black Book, The (Pamuk) 22, 24 black British-Caribbean literature 259 —See Caryl Phillips Black Sea xiii, 44, 48, 52 Blank____Architecture (Vladislaviǰ) 207, 209 Bloom, Harold 221 Bloom, Mia 137 Bodysurfers, The (Drewe) 318 Boehmer, Elleke 70 Bok, Francis, & Edward Tivnan 257 Bonatz, Paul 48

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Index

Bondi Beach 316, 318 Bonnici, Thomas 258, 260 Booth, Douglas 316, 317 Borges, Jorge Luis 228, 233 Bosphorus xiv, 41–56 Botany Bay 316 Botswana 297, 298, 300, 301 Box Garden, The (Shields) 225 Bra Boys: Blood Is Thicker Than Water (dir. Abberton & De Souza) 323 Brah, Avtar 235, 279 Brass, Paul 141 Brathwaite, Kamau 114, 117, 119, 120, 121, 122, 124 Braziel, Jana Evans 124 Brazil 108, 112, 113, 114, 115, 119 Breath (Winton) xvii, 318–26 Bremner, Linda 208 Buddhism 131, 134, 138, 139 Bugeja, Norbert x, xi, xii, 46 Bulgaria xvi, 47, 185, 188, 197, 199, 202 Burrell, Gibson, & Karen Dale 235 Bush, George W. 66 Butler, Judith 282 Byron, Lord, Don Juan 51, 53 Byzantium xiii, 41, 44, 45, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56, 71 “Byzantium” (Yeats) 49 Calcutta 63, 64, 241, 245, 248, 249, 250 Cambridge (Phillips) 258 Campbell, Andrea 220 Canadian literature xii, 219–37 Candomblé 119, 121 Cape Town 206, 215, 217, 295, 297, 302, 303 Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories, The (Head) 297 Carr, Emily 228 Carr, Greg 113 Carroll, Lewis 74; Through the Looking Glass 169

337 Casanova, Pascale 170, 171 Cassirer, Hugo, & Nadine Gordimer 215 Celtic Twilight 75 Césaire, Aimé 114, 161 ; Une tempête 113 Ceylon 131, 134, 141, 142 —See also: Sri Lanka Ceylon Citizenship Act 142 Chaka (Mofolo) 167, 174–75 Channel Tunnel 260 Chaudhuri, Amit 72, 73, 74 Chekhov, Anton, Cherry Orchard, The 72 Cherki, Alice 12 Cherry Orchard, The (Chekhov) 72 Chew, Shirley 62 Chimni, B.S. 132, 133, 143, 145 Choudhury, Bibhash 148 Chrisman, Laura, & Patrick Williams 67 Çiloglu, Fahrettin 56 Ciolkowski, Laura 271 Cixous, Hélène 279 Clark, Timothy 220 Clingman, Stephen 256, 263 Cloostermans, Mark 272 Cloudstreet (Winton) 322 Codell, Julie F., & Diane Sachko MacLeod 284 Colchis 43 Collector of Treasures, The (Head) 297 Colour Me English (Phillips) 260, 266 Colvile, Georgiana M.M. 221 Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels) 169, 170, 172 Concilio, Carmen 215 Connell, Raewyn 321 Conrad, Joseph 5, xiv, 59–66, 67, 152; “Geography and Some Explorers” 60, 63; Heart of Darkness 60, 62, 63, 258; “The Romance of Travel” 60; The Shadow-Line 63 Constantinople xiii, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54 Convention on the Status of Refugees 132

338 Cook, James 62, 315 Cornell, Drucilla 10 Costello, Moya 102, 105 Costello, Peter 17 “Cotton Candy” (Unigwe) 269 Coupe, Laurence 220 Courlander, Harold 109 Courtman, Sandra 258 “Cricket Match, The” (Selvon) 74 Croot, Charles 189 Crouch, David 321, 322 Cuba 108, 114, 119 Cupers, Kenny, & Markus Miessen 183 Dahomey 108–25 Damballah 122, 123 Damrosch, David 168, 170, 175, 178 Dardanelles 43, 44, 49, 51, 53 Darius 43, 47 Darko, Amma 257 Das, Veena 249 Dasgupta, R.K. 171 Dash, J. Michael 70, 81, 122 “Day of the Sheep, The” (Frame) 78, 79 Daymond, M.J. 294, 307 De Mul, Sarah, & Thomas Ernst 265 De Stoop, Chris 266 “Dear Vichy” (Fernandopulle) 130, 134–37 Death of a Whaler (Newton) 318 “De-Feminization of Turkish Culture, The” (Shafak) 28, 34, 35, 36 Delany, Martin 112 Deleuze, Gilles, & Félix Guattari 256 Deliry–Antheaume, Elisabeth 212 Depestre, René 119, 120, 121, 122, 124 ; Un arc-en-ciel pour l’ Occident chrétien, Un (A Rainbow for the Christian West) 119, 120; Le mât de cocagne (The Festival of the Greasy Pole) 124 Derrida, Jacques 133, 207, 245

UND ER CON ST RU CTI ON



Desai, Anita 73; In Custody 80 Descartes, René 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 104 Dhaka xvi, 64, 241 Dharwadker, Vinay 70 Dickens, Charles 149, 152 Dirt Music (Winton) 324 Distant Shore, A (Phillips) 255, 257, 259– 65, 267, 269, 270, 271, 273 Divakaruni, Chitra, The Mistress of Spices xvii, 279–90 Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde (Stevenson) 28 Don Juan (Byron) 51 Don’t Tread on My Dreams (Taylor) 303 Dos Passos, John 75 Douglass, Frederick 112 “Dreams” (Unigwe) 266 Drewe, Robert, Bodysurfers, The 318 Du Bois, W.E.B. 112 Dumas, Alexandre 152 Duppé, Claudia 197, 198 Durban 296, 311 Dutt, Michael Madhusudan 73, 74 Duvalier, François ‘Papa Doc’ 120, 124 Dvoˀák, Marta 69, 78, 80 East Africa, British, dress codes in 7 East Pakistan 130, 248 Edirne 45 Edwards, Elizabeth 248 Eelam Wars 138 Eilersen, Gillian Stead 296 Eliot, T.S. 75; Four Quartets 72 Enlightenment (Freely) 22 Enloe, Cynthia 320 Equiano, Olaudah 258 Erzulie 122 Eucalyptus (Bail) 87, 88, 96, 101 Exploded View, The (Vladislaviǰ) 208 Ezeigbo, Akachi 257



Index

Fanon, Frantz 9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, 166, 168, 170, 172, 175, 177, 178; “Algeria Unveiled” 10 Faulkner, William, Light in August 72 Felski, Rita 296 Fennell, Christopher C. 110 Fernandopulle, Neil, “Dear Vichy” 130, 134–37 Finney, Ben, & James Houston 315 Fischer, Michael M.J., & Mehdi Abedi 26 Fish, Margery 226 Fisher, Adrian, & Howard Loxton 221 Fiske, John, Bob Hodge & Graeme Turner 317, 324 Flanders 255, 265, 266 Flood of Fire (Ghosh) 148 Floor, Maaike 274 Fon people 108, 109, 110, 111, 115, 119, 123 Fongbe language 108, 115, 117, 119, 121 Foster, Frances Smith 257 Four Quartets (Eliot) 72 Fox, E. Phillips 317 Frame, Janet 77–79; “The Day of the Sheep” 78, 79; “Keel and Kool” 79; The Lagoon 77, 78, 79 France, restrictive dress codes in 6, 9–10, 12–14, 17 Francistown 297 Freely, Maureen, Enlightenment 22 French language 74, 76, 78, 120 French West Africa 116 Frye, Northrop 170, 179, 219, 220, 237 Fumagalli, Maria Cristina 76 Fuss, Diana 10 Ga-Adangme language 119 Gallipoli 49 Ganapathy–Doré, Geetha 73 Gandhi, Mahatma 8, 131 Garment Workers Union (SA) 306

339 Garrard, Greg 220, 223 Gascoigne, Bamber 72 Gautier, Théophile 46, 47, 51, 53, 54 “Geography and Some Explorers” (Conrad) 60, 63 Geography for the Lost (Kassabova) 188, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202 Germany 94, 139, 141; New Zealand writers in 183–202 —See also: Berlin; Berlin Wall Gesture of Belonging, A (Head) 297 Ghendehou, Hounhoungan 110 Ghosh, Amitav xiv, xv, xvi, 59–67, 147– 63, 241–51; Flood of Fire 148; River of Smoke 148; “The Greatest Sorrow" 244, 248; Sea of Poppies 6, xv, 59, 65, 66, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158–63; The Shadow Lines xvi, 63–64, 241–51 Gibbon, Edward 48, 49, 51 Gilles, Pierre 49 Gillet, Lucie 258 Gilroy, Paul 111, 112, 113 Gitanjali (Tagore) 75 Glissant, Édouard 161, 164, 256 Glotfelty, Cheryll, & Harold Fromm 220 Goertz, Dee 221, 224, 230, 231, 233 Goethe Institute 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von xv, 171, 172 Göknar, Erdag 23 Gomez, Michael A. 115 “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies” (Rushdie) 21 Gordimer, Nadine 215, 216; “Once Upon a Time” 211 Gouby, Melanie 142 Gray, Jeffrey 233 “Greatest Sorrow, The" (Ghosh) 244, 248 Greek Orthodox Church 45, 55 Griffiths, Gareth 5 Grillparzer, Franz 51

340 Grosvenor, Gilbert 60, 61 Guest, Diana 14 Hage, Ghassan 16, 17 Hagia Sophia 45, 46, 52 Haiti 108, 115–24 Haitian literature 119–25 Hall, Stuart 288 Hammerton, John 60 Hammill, Faye 228 Hampton Court 222 Hanson, Pauline 17 Hansson, Heidi 225 Hardman, Emma, Nine Parts Water 318 Harlow, Michael 196 Hat Law (Turkey) 5 Hawai‘i, surfing in 315–16 Head, Bessie xvii, 293, 294, 295, 296–301, 303, 309, 311; A Bewitched Crossroad 297; The Cardinals with Meditations and Short Stories 297; The Collector of Treasures 297; A Gesture of Belonging 297; Imaginative Trespasser 297; The Lovers 297; Maru 297, 301; A Question of Power 297; “A Search for Historical Continuity and Roots " 300; Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind 297, 299, 300, 301; Tales of Tenderness and Power 297; When Rain Clouds Gather 297, 298; A Woman Alone 297 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 60, 62, 63, 258 Heidegger, Martin 89, 165, 176, 206, 216 Helff, Sissy 318 Hellespont 43, 49, 53 Hellman, Lillian 214 Helphand, Kenneth I. 228 Hemingway, Ernest 75 Herath, Tamara 137 Herbillon, Marie 87 Herd, Michael 185 Hero and Leander 43

UND ER CON ST RU CTI ON



Herrin, Judith 45, 55 Herskovits, Melville J. 109, 117 Hill, Mike 18 Hindi language 71, 153 Hinduism 72, 73, 82, 150, 156, 159 Hindustani language 72 Holden’s Performance (Bail) 87, 89 Holland, Patrick, & Graham Huggan 256 Holocaust 139, 193, 201 Holzer, Jenny 283 Homer xiii, 43 Homing In (McQueen) 186 Hood, Anna 89 Hooper, Glenn, & Tim Youngs 256 Howard, John 17 Howard, Tim 88 Howells, Coral Ann 224, 229 Hroch, Miroslav 320 Huggan, Graham 70, 256, 281, 285, 286 Hughes–d’Aeth, Tony 241 Humphries, David 17 Huntsman, Leone 316 Hwangile (Queen Mother of Dahomey) 110 Iemma, Morris 17 Ileri, Selim 56 “Imaginary Homelands” (Rushdie) 24 Imaginative Trespasser (Head) 297 In Custody (Desai) 80 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Jacobs) 267 India 130, 131, 133, 141, 142, 143, 156; dress codes in 8; independence struggle in 12 —See also: Partition; Tamils Indian literature 147–63, 241–51, 279–90 Indian migration xii Indian National Congress 8 Indyk, Ivor 99, 105 Inkatha party 8 Innocents Abroad, The (Twain) 52



Index

Internally Displaced People (Tamil) xv Iraq, US invasion of 66 Irish literary culture, influence of 75–77 Irish Literary Revival 75 Irish National Theatre Company 75 Islam xvi, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 21, 22, 30, 45, 46, 49, 53, 55, 242, 249 Istanbul xiii, 27, 29, 33, 35, 36, 37, 41, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 55, 56, 69, 71 Jacobs, Harriet, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl 267 Jaggard, Ed 315 Jaipur 72 Jameson, Fredric 174 Jason and the Argonauts 43 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 249 Johannesburg xii, 8, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213, 214, 215, 297 John of Lydia 55 “Journal of a Wall” (Vladislaviǰ) 206, 207 “Journey, The” (Arasanayagam) 130, 137– 41 Joyce, James 170, 171, 269 Jussawalla, Feroza F. 77 Justinian 55 JVP Party 132, 137, 138 Kafka, Franz, “The Metamorphosis” 75 Kannada language 77 Kant, Immanuel 104 Kanthapura (Rao) 77 Kaplan, Caren 256, 294 Kashmir 130, 248 Kassabova, Kapka xvi, 185, 187, 188, 196– 202; All Roads Lead to the Sea 188; Geography for the Lost 188, 196, 199, 200, 201, 202; Street Without a Name 188, 196, 197, 198, 200 Kathie (Taylor) 303 Kaul, Suvir 242, 243

341 “Keel and Kool” (Frame) 79 Kemalism 22, 26, 38 Kenya 69 Kenyon, Gary 154 Khalistan movement 130 Khan, Yasmine 249 Khoury, Dina Rizk, & Dane Kennedy 22 Khoury, Joseph 22, 40, 113, 114 Kimmel, Michael 319 King, James 316 King, Michael 77 Kipfer, Stefan 175 Kipling, Rudyard 59, 60, 64, 65 Kitchen, Paddy 293, 297, 298, 301, 311 Konuk, Kader 22, 23 Kracauer, Siegfried 190, 191, 247 Kreyòl (Haiti) 119, 120, 123 Kristeva, Julia 79, 80, 143, 144 Lagoon, The (Frame) 77, 78, 79 Lakoff, George, & Mark Johnson ix Lamming, George 73 Landry, Timothy 119 Largey, Michael 122, 123, 124 Larry’s Party (Shields) xvi, 221–37 Law, Robin 109, 110, 111, 115, 118, 119 Lazarus, Neil 151 Ledent, Bénédicte 258, 263, 269 Lee, Hermione 88 Lefebvre, Henri 229 Lepanto, battle of 49 Lewis, Desiree 295 Liberia 259, 268 Lichtig, Toby 159 Light in August (Faulkner) 72 Lives of the Saints (Ricci) 77 Ljungberg, Christina 223 López Ropero, María Lourdes 257 Lotman, Jurij 206, 207 Lovers, The (Head) 297 Löwy, Michael, & Robert Sayre 172 LTTE — See: Tamil Tigers

342 Lucumí 115 Luminato (Toronto festival) 69, 81 Lutwack, Leonard 235 Lydon, Chris 59, 64, 65, 66 MacCannell, Dean 184 McCormick, Patricia 257 McCredden, Lyn, & Nathanael O’Reilly 318 McNeish, James 185 McQueen, Cilla xvi, 185–96, 201; Benzina 186; Berlin Diary 6, xvi, 183, 185–95, 202; Homing In 186 Mahé de La Bourdonnais, Bertrand– François 150 Makdisi, Ussama 35 Malayalam language 153 Mallios, Peter 61 Malouf, Michael 76 Mango, Andrew 22 Mann, Kristin 111, 118 Mansfield, Katherine 77, 190 Manson, Ross 69 ǒori Renaissance 187, 192 Marsden, Peter H. 186 Mars–Jones, Adam 152 Martin, Philip 323 Maru (Head) 297, 301 mât de cocagne, Le (The Festival of the Greasy Pole, Depestre) 124 Matory, J. Lorand 112 Maupoil, Bernard 109 Mauritian creole language 153 Mauritius xv, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162 Mayer, Tamar 320 Mecca 34, 38 Meere, Charles 318 Mehmet II 45, 46 Mehta, Binita 153, 156, 160, 162 Mehta, Brinda J. 147, 148 Melling, Anton 47, 48, 51

UND ER CON ST RU CTI ON



Melville, Herman 59, 60, 64, 65, 67, 152; Moby-Dick 66 Memories of a City (Pamuk) 46, 48, 53 Menon, Ritu 130 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 205 “Metamorphosis, The” (Kafka) 75 Middle Passage 260, 269 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 23, 24 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) 205; (dir. Supple) 69 Mikhail, Alan, & Christine M. Philliou 22 Millar, Paul 185, 194 Miller, Christopher 256 Miller, J. Hillis 207 Mistress of Spices, The (Divarakuni) xvii, 279–90 Mitchell, Henry 225 Mitchell, Kate 247 Moby-Dick (Melville) 66 Mofolo, Thomas, Chaka 167, 174–75 Moi, Toril 280, 286 Molloy (Beckett) 76 Molloy Dies (Beckett) 76 Moltke, Helmuth von 46, 47, 51 Mongia, Padmini 63 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 50 Moodie, Susannah 228 Moretti, Franco 171 Morrison, Jill 259 Morrison, Toni 177, 178; Beloved 273 Morton, Timothy 220 Morton–Williams, Peter 116 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 50, 122 Mphahlele, Ezekiel 306 Mphahlele, Melody 297 “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” (Shields) 225 Mudimbe, V.Y. 110, 111, 116 Mughal Empire 72 Mukherjee, Meenakshi 243 Murphy (Beckett) 75 Murray, Heather 223



Index

Murray, Sally–Ann 215 “Muse of History, The” (Walcott) 70 Muthiah, Subbiah 143 “My Motherland” (Panneerselvam) 130, 143–44 Nagô people 110, 112, 115, 119, 123 Naipaul, V.S. 62, 64, 65, 67, 74 Narayan Swamy, M.R. 137 Narayan, R.K. 77 National Geographic Society 61 Nazer, Mende, & Damien Lewis 257 neo-Ottomanism 22, 26, 36 Nerval, Gérard de 47, 51 New Life, The (Pamuk) 22 New World Order, A (Phillips) 256 New Zealand literature, in Germany xvi, 183–202 Newton, Nerida, Death of a Whaler 318 Ngoyi, Lilian xvii, 293, 294, 297, 306–10, 311 Ngˤƨɉ wa Thiong’o 113, 116, 117, 118 Nietzsche, Friedrich 104 Nigeria 69, 77, 109, 257, 266, 267, 270, 273, 274 Nine Parts Water (Hardman) 318 Non-European Unity Movement 302 Norden, John 223 Norwich, John Julius 55 “Nothing Must Spoil This Visit” (Baldwin) 80 Nuttall, Sarah 206 O’Brien, Anthony 295 Obama, Barack 66 On Black Sisters’ Street (Unigwe) 255, 257, 258, 259, 265–73 “Once Upon a Time” (Gordimer) 211 One Thousand and One Nights (dir. Supple) 70, 80 Opium Wars 149

343 Organisation of African Unity 132 Orientalism 50, 282 Osmanlis 45 Ottoman Empire 5, 6, 22, 23, 26, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 45, 49, 50, 53, 71, 116 —See also: Kemal Atatürk; Bosphorus; Constantinople; Istanbul; neo-Ottomanism; Turkey Ouidah 120, 123 Ousmane, Sembène 257 Ovid, Metamorphoses 205 Owen, Michael 15 Özgüven, Fatih 56 Özlü, Demir 56 Pages, The (Bail) xiv, 87–105 Paillot, Patricia–Léa 224, 228, 234 Pamuk, Orhan 22, 23, 24, 46, 47, 48, 53, 56, 64, 65; The Black Book 22, 24; Memories of a City 46, 48, 53; The New Life 22 Panneerselvam, S. “My Motherland” 130, 143–44 Parashar, Pankaj, dir. Banaras: A Mystic Love Story 153 Pardoe, Julia 51 Parker, Charlie 122 Partition (India/Pakistan) xvi, 130, 131, 241, 242, 243, 244, 246, 249 Partition (Pakistan/Bangladesh) 130, 131 Passmore, John 230 Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God (Schimmelpfennig) 69, 80 Perényi, Eleanor 225 Persian language 72 Phillips, Caryl 6, xii, xvi, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259–65, 266, 267, 269, 271, 273, 274; Cambridge 258; Colour Me English 260, 266; A Distant Shore 255, 257, 259–65, 267, 269, 270, 271, 273; A New

344 World Order 256; “The Silenced Minority " 265; “Strangers in Strange Land" 274 Playboy of the Western World, The (Synge) 76 Point Break (dir. Bigelow) 323 Pollan, Michael 225, 227 Porter, Roy 96 Portrait with Keys (Vladislaviǰ) xii, 209–16 Possessing the Secret of Joy (Walker) 273 Postel, Henri 124 Pound, Ezra 75 Pratt, Mary Louise 194 Premadasa, Ranasinghe 131 Pretoria 306 “Prodigal Son, The” (White) 88–90 Prohibited Garments law (Turkey) 5 Pulitano, Elvira 264 Purce, Jill 230 Pushparaj, Nemom, dir. Banaras 153 Pyamootoo, Barlen, Bénarès xv, 147–63; dir. Bénarès 153 Quayson, Ato 283, 287, 289 Question of Power, A (Head) 297 Quigley, Sarah 187 Qur’an 31, 32, 34 Raag Darbari (Shukla) 167, 176–77 Rage of Life (Taylor) 303 Rainbow for the Christian West, A (Depestre) 119, 120 Raj, British 8, 22, 40, 73 Randhawa, Ravinder, A Wicked Old Woman xvii; 279–90 Rao, Raja, Kanthapura 77 Ravindranathan, Thangam 161, 162 Reeser, Todd W. 320, 321, 326 Renan, Ernest 107, 111 Restless Supermarket, The (Vladislaviǰ) 215 Ricci, Nino, Lives of the Saints 77

UND ER CON ST RU CTI ON



Riders to the Sea (Synge) 76 Rifat, Serdar 56 River of Smoke (Ghosh) 148 Rodyunina, Ekaterina 88 Role of the Missionaries in Conquest, The (Taylor) 302 “Romance of Travel, The” (Conrad) 60 Rotas, Alex 261 Roy, Wendy 225 “Ruins of a Great House” (Walcott) 72 Runciman, Steven 45 Rushdie, Salman 5, xiii, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 73, 74; “Good Advice is Rarer than Rubies” 21; “Imaginary Homelands” 24; Midnight’s Children 23, 24; The Satanic Verses 23–34, 36–38 Russia xiii Rutherford, Jonathan 70 Rycaut, Paul 50 Said, Edward W. xiii, 49, 81, 173, 255, 261 “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats) 49 Saint of Incipient Insanities, The (Shafak) 33–36 Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the North 167, 173–74 Samaddar, Ranabir 133 õamdereli, Yasemin, & Nesrin õamdereli, dir. Almanya: Wilkommen in Deutschland 24 Samuelson, Meg 295 Sandwith, Corinne 303 Sartre, Jean–Paul 151 Sassanids 44 Satanic Verses, The (Rushdie) 23–34, 36– 38 Sawhney, Simona 25 Schimmelpfennig, Roland, Peggy Pickit Sees the Face of God 69, 80 Schoeman, Karel 207, 208 Schreiner, Olive 295



Index

Schrijvers, Joke 134 Schwarz, Anja 317 Sea at Dauphin, The (Walcott) 76 Sea of Poppies (Ghosh) 6, xv, 59, 65, 66, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 158–63 “Search for Historical Continuity and Roots, A" (Head) 300 Season of Migration to the North (Salih) 167, 173–74 Sekyi–Otu, Ato 177 Seldjuks 44 Selvon, Samuel, “The Cricket Match” 74 Septimius Severus 44 Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind (Head) 297, 299, 300, 301 Shadow-Line, The (Conrad) 63 Shadow Lines, The (Ghosh) xvi, 63–64, 241–51 Shafak, Elif xiii, 21–39; The Bastard of Istanbul 21, 24, 25–33; “The DeFeminization of Turkish Culture” 28, 34, 35, 36; The Saint of Incipient Insanities 33–36 Shakespeare, William 69, 73, 113, 114, 155, 205; Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 205; (dir. Supple) 69 Shallows (Winton) 318 Sharpe, Jenny 260, 263, 266 Sharpeville massacre 303, 306 Shields, Carol xvi, 221–37; The Box Garden 225; Larry’s Party xvi, 221–37; “Mrs. Turner Cutting the Grass” 225; The Stone Diaries 221, 225; Swann: A Mystery 225 Shine Your Eye (Wainaina) 69 Shklovskii, Viktor 76 Shukla, Shrilal, Raag Darbari 167, 176–77 Sikh riots xvi, 242 “Silenced Minority, The” (Phillips) 265 Silva, K.M. de 142 Sinhala language 131, 132, 134, 138, 141, 142 ‘Sinhala Only’ Act 132

345 Sirimo–Shastri Pact 143 Slovo, Gillian 294 Smart, Elizabeth 226 Smith, Valerie 257 Sontag, Susan 247 Soper, Kater 220 South Africa 7, 8 South African literature xvi, xvii, 205–16, 216, 293–311 Souza, Martine da 113 Soweto 306, 307, 308 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 70, 71, 165, 178 Sri Lanka xv, 129–44 Sri Lankan literature 129–44 Stanley, Liz 295 Steven, Rob 187 Stevens, Ray 60, 61 Stevenson, Robert Louis, Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde 28 Stilz, Gerhard 52 Stone Diaries, The (Shields) 221, 225 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 258 “Strangers in Strange Land" (Phillips) 274 Street Without a Name (Kassabova) 188, 196, 197, 198, 200 Sturm, Terry 186 Suk, Jeannie 161 Supple, Tim, dir. 69; One Thousand and One Nights 70, 80 Surf and Lifesaving Association of Australia 316 “Surf” (Taylor) 318 Suryanarayan, V. 132 Swann: A Mystery (Shields) 225 Swansea (Tasmania) 316 Switzerland 293 Synge, John Millington 76, 77; The Playboy of the Western World 76; Riders to the Sea 76 Szanton Blanc, Christina 188

346 Tabata, I.B. 302, 305 Tagore, Rabindranath 74, 75; Gitanjali 75 Tales of Tenderness and Power (Head) 297 Tamil people xv, 129, 130, 132, 137, 138, 140, 141, 142, 144 Tamil Tigers 130, 131, 134, 136, 137, 138, 140, 145 Tanna, Tommy 316 Taspinar, Ömer 22, 38 Taylor, Andrew, “Surf" 318 Taylor, Dora xvii, 293, 294, 297, 302–306, 309, 311; Don’t Tread on My Dreams 303; Kathie 303; Rage of Life 303 Taylor, Frederick 183, 193 Taylor, Jim, The Role of the Missionaries in Conquest 302 Taylor, Sheila 107, 127, 293, 297, 302–305 Tegbesu (Dahomey king) 110, 111, 117, 123 tempête, Une (Césaire) 113 Temple, William 226 Tharoor, Shashi 152 Thaxter, Celia 225 Theodosius 52 Thieme, John 152 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 77 Third Space (Bhabha) xi, xviii, 70, 162 Thompson, Robert Farris 110 Through the Looking Glass (Carroll) 169 Till, Karen E. 183, 184, 196, 199, 200, 201 Tolstoy, Leo 152 Torres–Saillant, Silvio 114 Tournay–Theodotou, Petra 260, 262, 271, 272 Traill, Catharine Parr 228 Treaty of Waitangi Act 187 Trojan War 43 Tunca, Daria 258, 268; Vicki Mortimer & Emmanuelle Del Calzo 267 Turkey xiii, 21–39, 41–56; dress codes in 5–7; literature in 21–39

UND ER CON ST RU CTI ON



Turkish-American literature xiii, 21–39 Turkish-German literature 23 Turner, John P. 318 Turning, The (Winton) 318 Tuwhare, Hone 186, 187 Twain, Mark, The Innocents Abroad 52 Uglow, Jenny 229 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe) 258 Unigwe, Chika 6, xii, xvi, 255, 256, 257, 258, 259, 265–74; “Cotton Candy” 269; “Dreams” 266; On Black Sisters’ Street 255, 257, 258, 259, 265–73 United Nations High Commission for Refugees 134 Unity Movement 302 Unnamable, The (Beckett) 76 Untouchables 8 Urdu language 72 Vahed, Goolam, & Thembisa Waetjen 295, 311 van den Abbeele, Georges 184 Van Gennep, Arnold 159 Van Gogh, Vincent 122 Van Holsbeeck, Joe 268 Varangians 44 Veel, Kristin 221, 233 Verger, Pierre 109 Verne, Jules, Around the World in Eighty Days 260 Vertovec, Steven, & Robin Cohen 188 Viroli, Maurizio 118 Vladislaviǰ, Ivan xii, xvi, 205–16; Blank____Architecture 207, 209; The Exploded View 208; “Journal of a Wall” 206, 207; Portrait with Keys xii, 209–16; The Restless Supermarket 215 Vodou/Vodun 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 124



Index

347

Vogt–William, Christine 287, 289 Volcano Theatre (Toronto) 69 Wainaina, Binyanvanga, Shine Your Eye 69 Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 150, 151 Walcott, Derek 70, 72, 76, 77, 118; “The Muse of History” 70; “Ruins of a Great House” 72; The Sea at Dauphin 76 Walding, Murray 315 Walker, Alice, Possessing the Secret of Joy 273 Wallerstein, Immanuel 169, 170 War on Terror 5, 13, 18 Warner–Lewis, Maureen 121 Warshaw, Matt 315 Watt (Beckett) 75 Wellek, René 167, 168, 170 Welsch, Wolfgang 187 Weltliteratur (Auerbach) 166, 167; (Goethe) xv, 171 Wenders, Wim 184, 192 West Africa xv; 107–25 Western Australia 318–26 When Rain Clouds Gather (Head) 297, 298 White, Patrick 88, 90, 103; “The Prodigal Son” 88–90 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (Albee) 69, 80

Wicked Old Woman, A (Randhawa) xvii; 279–90 Wilcken, Lois 121, 122, 123, 124 Wilentz, Gay 121 Williamson, Sue 210 Willmott, Bill 187 Winton, Tim xvii, 318–26; Breath xvii, 318–26; Cloudstreet 322; Dirt Music 324; Shallows 318; The Turning 318 Wolfreys, Julian 286, 287 Woman Alone, A (Head) 297 Wood, Denis 235 Woodhouse. Christopher M. 44, 55 Woolf, Virginia 81, 151 World Literature 6, xv, 165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178 World Trade Center Towers 244 Wyndham, Susan 89 Xhosa people 302; dress code of 7 Yaï, Olabiyi B. 107, 108, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118 Yeats, W.B. 49, 75, 76; “Byzantium” 49; “Sailing to Byzantium” 49 Yorùbá language 119 Yorùbá people 110, 111, 115, 119, 121, 123 Zambia 293, 303, 305 Zulu people 174; dress code of 8

