Glocal Narratives of Resilience [1° ed.] 0367261332, 9780367261337

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GLOCAL NARRATIVES OF RESILIENCE

GLOCAL NARRATIVES OF RESILIENCE Edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos

Edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos

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25-11-2019 20:47:16

Glocal Narratives of Resilience

Resilience discourse has become a global phenomenon, infiltrating the natural and social sciences, but has rarely been an object of study in the humanities. Understanding narrative in its broad sense as the representation in art of an event or story, Glocal Narratives of Resilience investigates contemporary approaches to resilience through the analyses of cultural narratives that engage aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping the notion of resilience. The book grounds its analyses of a wide range of narratives from the American continent, Europe, and India at the intersection of various theoretical strands, spanning western and Indigenous takes on resilience. Ana María Fraile-Marcos is Associate Professor in the Department of English Philology at the University of Salamanca.

Glocal Narratives of Resilience Edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Ana María Fraile-Marcos to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 9780367261337 (hbk) ISBN: 9780429291647 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Juan Luis and Andrés In memory of my father

Contents

Permissionsix List of figuresx Acknowledgmentsxi

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing

1

ANA MARÍA FRAILE-MARCOS

  1 The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty and Trans-Systemic Resilience

21

DANIEL COLEMAN

  2 “The Story You Don’t Want to Tell”: Decolonial Resilience in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle

39

SUSIE O’BRIEN

  3 Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design: Pre-Columbian Cultures and Resilient Strategies in Interactive Narrative Devices

56

DANIEL ESCANDELL-MONTIEL

  4 Between Vulnerability and Resilience: Exploring Motherhood in Emma Donoghue’s Room

73

MIRIAM BORHAM-PUYAL

  5 Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narratives of Sexual Violence Against Women in Indian Writing in English JORGE DIEGO-SÁNCHEZ

89

viii  Contents   6 Graphic Homelessness: Representations of Home Deprivation in Comic Form

103

MARÍA JESÚS HERNÁEZ-LERENA

  7 Building Collective Resilience: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being

122

KIT DOBSON

  8 Cultural Memory and the Construction of a Resilient Spanish Identity: Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina

135

JUAN CARLOS CRUZ-SUÁREZ

  9 Critical Dystopias in Spanish: Memory as an Act of Resilience

148

ANA MARÍA FRAILE-MARCOS AND FRANCISCA NOGUEROL

10 The Fetishized Subject: Modes of Resilience in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty

163

EVA DARIAS-BEAUTELL

11 Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

181

SARA CASCO-SOLÍS

12 Lies and Reparation: Palliative or Poison

192

ARITHA VAN HERK

Contributors204 Index209

Permissions

Photo Credits 1.1 Circle Wampum image by artist Raymond R. Skye, Tuscarora Nation, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. Reproduced with the permission of Raymond R. Skye 1.2 Courtesy of Rick Hill 1.3 Courtesy of Rick Hill Every effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors or omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

Figures

1.1

Circle Wampum, Teyonnityohkwanhakstha, “The Thing the People Use on an Ongoing Basis, to Wrap Around Themselves”26 1.2 Two Row Wampum Belt, Tekani teyothata’tye kaswenta26 1.3 Covenant Chain Wampum Belt, Tehontatenentsonterontahkhwa, “The Thing by Which 27 They Link Arms”

Acknowledgments

This book has developed organically in the course of over three years of deep collaboration among the members of the international research team “Narratives of Resilience: An Intersectional Approach to Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations” (FFI2015–63895C2–2-R; https://diarium.usal.es/resilience/) and with other international research projects and networks, principally, the members of our associate research project “Justice, Citizenship and Vulnerability: Precarious Narratives and Intersectional Approaches.” We wish to acknowledge the funding provided by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, which allowed us to create the synergies and knowledge ecologies that have crystalized in this collection of essays. Special mention to the Department of English and the Facultad de Filología of the University of Salamanca for hosting the international conference Narratives of Resilience and Healing (October 9–10, 2017), as well as the various seminars and workshops on resilience thinking that preceded and followed it. I must also acknowledge the support provided by the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies during my research stay at York University (Toronto, Canada) in 2016 under the auspices of the Lorna Marsden International Visitor Fellowship. It provided a vibrant forum for Daniel Coleman, Susie O’Brien, and me to present the project and our work in progress to an interested audience of faculty and students. Other relevant fora for the dissemination of our work have been facilitated by the Challenging Precarity Global Network, the Memory and Narration International Network, FLACSO, the TransCanadian Networks project, and the Canada and Beyond biannual seminars. My most heartfelt thanks to all the contributors to this volume for their intellectual acumen and generosity, as well as for their comradery and friendship; also to the reviewers for their insights, and to Martina Horakova and Heike Härting for their comments and lucid suggestions at the early stages of this work. I am also most grateful to the PhD candidates Sara Casco-Solís, Lidia Cuadrado-Payeras, and Lucía López-­Serrano for their valuable help with this volume’s edition. Finally, I thank my significant others for their love and encouragement throughout this project. This has been a thrilling period of discovery, creativity, and healthy transformation.

Introduction

Marcos

Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing Ana María Fraile-Marcos

Sketching Resilience Thinking and Discourse [R]esilience is a narrative, a collective fiction of the possibility for surviving present and future disasters. —Susie O’Brien, “Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise”

Our era is perceived as one of uncertainty, instability, and precariousness, accentuated by the current global hegemony of neoliberal capitalism and its collateral effects—the crisis of national sovereignty, the unbalanced impact of globalization, unequal access to instant electronic communication, unprecedented migration flows, humanitarian crises, global terrorism, accelerating urbanization, neocolonialism, the overexploitation of natural resources, climate change, widespread environmental damage, market volatility, and subsequent polarization of wealth and society. There appears to be no remote-enough region in the world to escape these phenomena or the pervasive “society of risk” (Beck) derived from them. Since we cannot just revert to a prior state—the Anthropocene testifies to the undeletability of the human imprint on the planet—we may as well stay “with the trouble,” as Donna Haraway recommends, rather than ignore or deny that something is wrong. Unsurprisingly, the discourse of resilience emerges at this juncture in a wide range of spheres as a desirable quality, even a virtue, to be admired and fostered. Etymologically, the term derives from the Latin verb resilire, meaning to leap back, rebound, or return to form. Resilience, therefore, is linked to the capacity of beings—human or nonhuman, individual or collective—to withstand adversity, to endure by being flexible, to adapt to conditions of crisis. This transformation may involve not only mere survival, but also flourishing in the midst of difficulties. Therefore, while scientific studies use the lens of resilience to analyze, for instance, the response of our planet’s ecosystems to the impact of human action, the adoption of resilience discourse infiltrates self-help publications aimed at strengthening individual sturdiness, and permeates

2  Ana María Fraile-Marcos discussions of finance and economic policy, as well as security responses to climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, and terrorism. Significantly, international institutions, such as the United Nations (UN), the International Monetary Fund, the European Union (EU) Commission, and the European Central Bank, offer resilience as a way to manage the various crises shaping our current living conditions, and individual world leaders praise resilience as a national value to be cherished.1 As a result, resilience has become “a pervasive idiom of global governance” (Walker and Cooper 144) denoting the capacity of nature and humans to withstand shocks by being able to adapt, renew, and even thrive in the face of adversity while keeping their essence. Noting the increasing popularity of the notion of resilience in the West, the Guardian proposed the term as the word of the year in 2012. In Spanish, the term resiliencia still rings as an anglicism, but it is perhaps the foreign quality of the word that made it the most looked up term at the online Diccionario de la Lengua Española during 2017. Tony Juniper traces the narrative shift from sustainability to resilience as he draws the parallels between the emergence of new concepts and the times they reflect, thus highlighting the relevance of historicizing these concepts. Juniper succinctly remarks that the notion of “conservation” in the 1960s and 1970s responded to the perceived need to reduce the human impact on nature and to set aside areas where it could be left unmolested, whereas in the 1980s, the prevalence of “sustainability” heeded the need to reduce poverty while meeting pressing environmental goals in an attempt to put the world back into balance. Reflecting a shift in priorities in an era shaken by global systemic and apparently endemic crises, resilience looks for ways to manage an imbalanced world. It signals a need to deal with inevitable major shocks, including those which are impossible to predict. And as economic difficulties have temporarily pushed sustainability down the agenda, resilience speaks more to the circumstances we face, where environmental objectives have been side-lined and price volatility and economic upheaval dominate the headlines. (Juniper) Although there is a generalized idea that the notion of resilience was first adopted and developed in the realm of the natural sciences, in fact, the concept emerged simultaneously in different fields in the second half of the twentieth century.2 The Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling was a pioneer in proposing resilience as a useful analytical category for ecology studies in the 1970s, noting that ecological resilience measures the ability of a given system “to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist” (Holling, “Resilience and Stability” 17). His view of ecological resilience challenges

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 3 traditional ideas of a harmonious balance in nature. Rather than persisting in a mythical state of equilibrium until something comes along to shatter it, the natural world is in a perpetual state of flux, in which continuity is maintained by constant adaptation. (O’Brien, “Resilience” 46) Concurrently, the term began to be used in the psy-disciplines in the 1960s and 1970s, as Philippe Bourbeau shows. Resilience research in the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and economics, for instance, has yielded important results. A significant development is the shift from the focus on individuals to their communities, and beyond them, to their more-than-human environments. Thus, although psychological resilience studies, for example, continue focusing on “the ability of individuals to adapt successfully in the face of acute stress, trauma, or chronic adversity, maintaining or rapidly regaining psychological well-being and physiological homeostasis” (Feder et al. 35), Michael Ungar reminds us that “the resilience of individuals . . . is dependent on the quality of the social and physical ecologies that surround them as much, and likely far more, than personality traits, cognitions or talents” (Ungar 1). Further, Boris ­Cyrulnik argues, “[r]esilience is not something we find inside ourselves or in our environment. It is something we find midway between the two, because our individual development is always linked to our social development” (284). Hence, originating in distinct epistemological communities, two main strands of resilience studies come into view: on the one hand, mind-body disciplines, principally psychology, adopt a person-community conception of resilience—what Marc Welsh calls “psycho-social resilience” (Welsh 15)—and on the other hand, “a biophysical environment-­community one (‘socio-ecological resilience’)” (15). While psycho-social resilience focuses on the resources of individuals and communities to adapt to change and maintain their mental and behavioral health and wellness, socio-ecological resilience studies rely on three key premises: the interconnection and interdependence of social and ecological systems, their interplay between conservation and transformation, and the capacity of a given system for self-organization (O’Brien, “Resilience” 46). Even though the various scientific approaches to resilience have not diminished “its popular appeal as the anchoring idea of a powerful story in which moralism and hope combine to produce a successful outcome” (O’Brien 45), resistance to the appropriation of the notion of resilience by certain ideological forces has produced a significant body of criticism. Therefore, complementing the individual psychological and social-­ ecological approaches, the analytical responses to resilience can be seen as taking either an optimistic/affirmative orientation or a skeptical/­critical one (Huebener et al. 2). An important strand of critical resilience thinking exposes the alignment of the discourse of resilience and neoliberal ideology. In their tracing

4  Ana María Fraile-Marcos of the genealogies of resilience, Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper point out that in the neoliberal reinterpretation, resilience does not consist in returning to a former “equilibrium after shock” (145) but in being able to permanently adapt to new circumstances of stress and crisis (156). As “an extension of neoliberal governance” (Evans and Reid 65), the ideology of resilience, Brad Evans and Julian Reid further explain, is grounded in a new “ethics of responsibility” that lays on the individual and their communities all the burden for overcoming, surviving and thriving through crises, even if these are due to systemic or structural forces that no individual can change on their own. Accepting this neoliberal ethos of resilience constitutes a colonization of the imagination (Neocleous 4). By obstructing the possibility of imagining other worlds, the embrace of the neoliberal ideology of resilience also thwarts the possibility of changing the circumstances that create vulnerability (Evans and Reid 78), thus contributing to the maintenance of the system that benefits from the vulnerable. In her discussion of the distinction between subaltern and creative resilience, Sarah Bracke further discusses how the inherent potential of all human beings to find creative responses to the crises that threaten their survival and well-being can be exploited by neoliberal ideology. Bracke makes the connection between neoliberalism and new forms of agency that mark a shift from resistance to resilience and to what Gayatri Spivak has called “the new subaltern.” Spivak first envisioned subalternity as the place from which the capacity to access power is radically obstructed, agency is unrecognized and the subject appears muted (Spivak, “Scattered” 477), concluding that resistance to power relies on making unrecognizable agency recognizable (477). She has recently noted, however, a shift in the location of subalternity in the world today. The “new subaltern,” she explains, is no longer totally cut off from upward social mobility (“New Subaltern”), since the centers of power create subalternity to integrate it within circuits of production. For instance, the center’s interest in rural and Indigenous populations, she argues, results in their incorporation within trade-related exploitation of their cultural and intellectual property. Agency, therefore, presents itself as a paradox, since, as Judith Butler notes, the agency required to resist power is also sustained by power (Psychic 18). Bracke then points out that the neoliberal “worlding” or worldmaking goes beyond political economy to enforce a cultural project that is “bent on reshaping the structure of social relationships and subjectivities” (Bracke, “Is the Subaltern Resilient?” 851). In this context, resilience is understood as a raw material that the wretched of the earth possess. Accordingly, as with any other raw material, it can be exploited, as history shows: Raw material invokes long-standing processes of colonization and international division of labour in which materials in the political

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 5 and economic margins of the world are extracted for manufacturing and other uses in the economic centres. Subaltern resilience, we might argue, crucially provides the infrastructure for global processes of economic production and consumption. (852) Thus, Bracke claims, neoliberalism does not just fetishize the resilience of those it profits from, but neoliberal economic and cultural policies also provoke the very shocks and traumas that call for subaltern resilience (852), thereby reinforcing and perpetuating the abjection of the oppressed. As Daniel Coleman explains in the first chapter of this book, the “recuperation of creative agency into renewed subalternity can become a kind of social Darwinism” (21). In their critique of the logics of neoliberal resilience, Evans and Reid also lament that vulnerability and precariousness are made to appear not only as endemic and inevitable but also as necessary steps toward social adaptability. Instead of the uncritical adaptation that leads to processes of transformation that only work to maintain the present conditions of life, including the economic and political systems that threaten them and the environment, Evans and Reid defend the refusal of resignation to the inevitability of risk, turbulences, and crises. Refusal, they say, requires agency, awareness, and learning (Evans and Reid 178, 190), along with the rejection of the naturalization of the neoliberal idea of “creative destruction” (Harvey) that resilience evokes. Although these critics compellingly illustrate many of the problems with the hegemonic neoliberal narrative on resilience, Susie O’Brien rightly points to the risks involved in their antiresilience critique. She is wary, for instance, that Evans and Reid’s refusal strategy may jettison “resilience science’s vision of planetary turbulence” and “reassert an older, romantic image of autonomous human agency as a force that is able to transcend the limits of the world” (O’Brien, “Resilience” 48). Moreover, she argues, “[i]n positing a critique that is based on a binary between compliance and refusal, antiresilience fails to apprehend the complexity of postcolonial ecologies and the place of human agency within them” (48). Also intent on unsettling preconceived binaries, Judith Butler bridges the gap between vulnerability and resilience from a feminist materialist theoretical perspective. Moving away from the essential passivity of notions of vulnerability, she questions the powerful/powerless binary traditionally undergirding notions of resilience and vulnerability. Butler highlights instead the political resistance, and thereby the agency, involved in the “deliberate exposure to power” of vulnerable bodies and subjectivities (Butler, “Rethinking” 22). Susie O’Brien’s notion of “broken resilience” or “compromised resilience” adds a further layer to the consideration of resilience through

6  Ana María Fraile-Marcos either the optimistic neoliberal lens or Evans and Reid’s “heroic refusal” (O’Brien, “Resilience” 53). Insisting that “human autonomy is subject to the social and natural world—a world that is itself dynamic, unstable, and characterized by diverse agencies and relations” (54)—when the connection between humans and their social and natural environments is broken, O’Brien reminds us, resilience is profoundly compromised or impaired. Then the capacity to rebound and thrive is eroded or thwarted. However, the term “compromise” also alludes to an agreement on how to go forward that is reached by different sides making concessions. If we stretch the meaning a bit, compromise describes a situation of interdependence in which the only way to go forward is through attentive engagement with and adaptation to the other elements, relations, and processes in a particular environment. (60) Unlike more affirmative views of resilience that rely on the belief that meaning can be made out of disaster and that progress and healing can be possible, compromised resilience makes no such assumptions, as “it is a mixed thing, an imperfectly negotiated pathway from a divided present to an uncertain future” (60). Nevertheless, O’Brien argues, compromisedresilience narratives whose telling rises as “a necessary but insufficient condition for moving forward” (61) can become “effective tools for selforganization and self-repair” (58). Whether resilience is affirmed or critiqued, and whether it is individual or collective, we wish to make the point in this volume that human resilience is always grounded in cultural specificity and its historical and spatial underpinnings. For instance, the neoliberal affirmative take on resilience is supported by the ideology of modern progress, which in turn is linked to the past of European colonization and imperialism, and its current forms of global resource extraction, labor, and capital mobility. The complex imbrication of the notion of resilience with a plurality of temporal, geographical, and cultural contexts requires that we consider this concept vis-à-vis other formulations of adaptation, survival, and persistence that stem from different positionalities and locations. The need to heed the specific contexts of resilience is at the basis of the construct of “cultural resilience” propounded by Joyce Strand and Robert Peacock to discuss the resilience of Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island—also known as North America. This approach “proposes the use of traditional life-ways to overcome the negative influences of oppression, abuse, poverty, violence and discrimination . . . in American Indian families, schools, and communities” (Strand and Peacock). Interestingly, despite Strand and Peacock’s use of the term resilience, and precisely in keeping with their call to use traditional cultures as the

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 7 basis for Indigenous resilience, Indigenous thinkers tend to use different terms arising from their specific contexts to talk about resilience. Thus, Daniel Coleman reminds us in the first chapter of this book that the term resilience rarely appears in Haudenosaunee thinking, even if modes of resilience are implied in their reflections on “resurgence, resistance, restoration, regeneration, traditionalism, condolence, requickening, refusal, and interruption” (35). Their theories constitute a counterpoint to hegemonic notions of resilience that both contest and affirm processes of adaptation, survival, and radical transformation. Resurgence, a concept that conveys “a rising again into life, activity, or prominence” (Webster Dictionary), has been on the rise in recent decades in connection to Indigenous decolonial resistance. At the global level, the resurgence of Indigenous peoples is best illustrated by the adoption of the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which establishes a universal framework of minimum standards for the survival, dignity, well-being, and fundamental freedoms of the indigenous peoples of the world. Joane Nagel traces the emergence of resurgence thinking in North America back to urban Red Power activism, which she considers the “progenitor of an American Indian ethnic rebirth” (113) during the 1970s. The offspring of the American Indian Movement, Red Power was a direct response to the U.S. federal assimilation policies of the 1950s and 1960s. Currently in Canada, Indigenous resurgence is not simply reactive to the oppression, dispossession, assimilation, and genocide of Indigenous people. As conceptualized by thinkers such as the Nishnaabeg writer and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, resurgence is encoded and practiced within Indigenous thought systems, and oriented toward “[r]emembering the affirmative Indigenous worlds that continue to exist right alongside the colonial worlds” (16–17). Refusing to be defined by the colonial narratives that hold victimization and grievance as the homogenizing cornerstones of Indigenous identities, Simpson’s project of “radical resurgence” is to a large extent in dynamic interaction with the concept of refusal. Like previous resurgence theoreticians, such as Gerald Vizenor, Lee Maracle, and Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel, Simpson decries the “politics of grief” and victimization deployed by the state, as it aims to avoid structural changes and accountability by focusing on individual trauma rather than collective, community, or nation-based losses, by truncating historical injustices from the current structure and the ongoing functioning of settler colonialism, by avoiding discussions about substantive changes involving land and dispossession in favor of superficial status quo ones, and by turning to “lifestyle choices” and victim blaming to further position the state as benevolent and

8  Ana María Fraile-Marcos caring. The state then manipulates and manages our collective grief into a series of processes that feeds into the structure of settler colonialism. The politics of grief are deployed to use our grief against us. (239) I see this process as linking to Judith Butler’s observations about the ambivalence of agency, as well as to Spivak’s notion of new subalternity. Furthermore, Simpson argues that the politics of grief can also “easily become the politics of distraction . . . distracting us with politics that are designed to reinforce the status quo rather than deconstruct it. Both the politics of distraction and the politics of grief are just enactments of the politics of recognition” (239–240)—understanding recognition in the Taylorian sense that she rejects. Thus, she asks, “what happens if we refuse, turn inward, and in concert engage in large-scale resurgent organizing on our own terms?” (240). Refusal of victimhood and of the frameworks set up by settler states to manage Indigenous existence is then an important aspect of radical resurgence and clearly differs from Evans and Reid’s use of the term. Whereas for them, the call for refusal entails the rejection of the naturalization of the neoliberal idea of resilience, the refusal envisioned as the foundation of Indigenous resurgence is deeply grounded in Indigenous thinking, geographies, and temporalities. Indigenous refusal is also rooted in anticolonial and decolonial struggles, which are firmly interconnected with the land and, therefore, attached to the specificity of place. Significantly, the tensions between the notions of resilience, refusal, and resurgence highlight the relevance of bearing in mind positionality and cultural specificity when approaching the analysis of processes of resilience. Despite their distinctiveness, each of these theoretical approaches constitute compelling narratives to think through when considering the possibility of surviving in our precarious present and uncertain future. “After all,” Michael Basseler claims, “the very notion of resilience, as the capacity to bounce back from stress and pain, rests intrinsically upon the narrative sequencing of events, responses, and adaptive processes” (26). The following section discusses the potential of cultural and literary narratives for advancing the theorizing on resilience, and inquires into the kinds of agency that reading narratives through resilience thinking paradigms may entail.

Glocal Narratives of Resilience [N]arrative is perhaps the major cultural and cognitive scheme through which notions of resilience are currently generated. —Michael Basseler, “Stories of Dangerous Life in the PostTrauma Age: Toward a Cultural Narratology of Resilience”

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 9 Despite the burgeoning interest in resilience in the natural and social sciences, little attention has yet been paid to the concept in the humanities,3 and more specifically in cultural and literary studies, a circumstance that this book aims to alleviate.4 Even if “there is nothing new about resilience stories” (O’Brien, “Resilience” 44)—for example, Angelo Giafrencesco demonstrates that resilience was a recurrent theme for nineteenth-century authors, ranging from Charles Dickens to Victor Hugo (qtd. in Cyrulnik, Whispering 106)—erstwhile stories of individual transformation through adversity bear little resemblance to contemporary ones (O’Brien 45). The term “glocal narratives of resilience” draws attention to a category of cultural narratives currently emerging all over the world and characterized by challenging the sense of polarity between concrete place and abstract space, the local, and the global, while staging the resilience discourse that has become a global phenomenon.5 Although, like general resilience narratives, glocal narratives of resilience are structured around a disruptive or traumatic event, in contrast with the typical focus on linear, individual psychological resilience, they usually navigate beyond the scales of the personal and the local to consider the regional, national, and global aspects that intersect in the production of disturbance and the triggering of resilience. Moreover, glocal resilience narratives challenge or exceed these models in their attendance to history. Thus, our approach brings together the concern with individual resilience and attention to the adaptive capacities of complex social-ecological systems, including those deriving from unfettered neoliberal global capitalism, ongoing transnational colonialism, global wars, international terrorism, major migration flows, global pandemics, patriarchal hierarchies and violence, and anthropogenic climate change, among other global-scale developments. Since these current global phenomena and their future projections need to be understood with reference to the historical developments of which they are a result, our study of glocal narratives of resilience is also significantly engaged in historicizing resilience and its cultural representations. Furthermore, many of these narratives engage aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping the received resilience discourses. Our analyses highlight the narrative techniques used to tell stories about overcoming crisis, and pay special attention to the ways in which resilience narratives represent new global and place-based vulnerabilities that result from the processes of adaptation to new conditions that require imagining renewed processes of resilience. Consequently, glocal narratives of resilience appear as relevant sites for the thorough examination and critique of the causes that produce the crises and the subsequent call to become resilient. Rather than attempting to cover all cultural contexts and approaches to narratives of resilience, something that falls outside the scope of a study of this length and scope, the contributors to this volume set out to probe the potential and the limits of resilience as a theoretical and

10  Ana María Fraile-Marcos analytical tool for the study of cultural and literary narratives by focusing on a selection of literary and other cultural narratives from India, the American continent, and Europe. The global character of these works is further enhanced when they engage processes of resilience that span beyond these regions to the Middle East, Japan, Vietnam, and Malaysia, as the chosen novels by Hage, Ozeki, Thuy, and Thien do. Besides, the selection of narratives in this volume brings together the Anglophone and the Spanish literary and cultural traditions, thereby underlining the multidirectional responses and effects of resilience narratives in these heterogeneous and distinct cultural contexts, which are rarely set in conversation with each other in scholarly works like this one. Bridging different spaces, cultures, languages, and times, our selection of narratives raises questions of a comparative nature regarding the trope of resilience. If as Michael Basseler suggests, “narrative is perhaps the major cultural and cognitive scheme through which notions of resilience are currently generated” (25), what are the ethical, political, and cultural notions of resilience produced by the selected texts? Are these narratives differentially critical or sanctioning of the processes of resilience they describe depending on the locale they emerge from? Who is asked to be resilient, resilient to what, and for what ends? What are the formal characteristics of glocal narratives of resilience? Do specific aesthetic forms accord with certain political or ideological notions of resilience? What knowledge do glocal narratives of resilience convey about the cultural assumptions of our age? Finally, we test the potential of glocal narratives of resilience for agency and worldmaking: can they contribute to the transformation of social and natural ecologies beyond the representational worlds they create? Our working premise is that glocal narratives of resilience, which are deeply rooted in the cultural ecologies from which they emerge, are a crucial ground not only to analyze the multiple aspects of resilience but also to elicit a better understanding of the processes underlying it and to produce the sort of knowledge that may prompt radical resilient ways of being in the world. This approach to narratives connects with Hubert Zapf’s understanding of language, and of literature in particular, as a “cultural ecology,” meaning that it maintains a systemic relationship with “the ecological processes of life that it both reflects and creatively transforms” (Zapf 4). While we may acknowledge Zapf’s important contribution to bringing storytelling into the limelight of cultural ecology, it is somewhat surprising, as Basseler notes, that he does not explore resilience as an important new discursive field within ecocriticism and the environmental humanities. Instead, Zapf focuses on the related concept of sustainability, arguing, “If sustainability in a biological sense means the ways in which living systems remain alive and productive over time, then the cultural ecosystem of literature fulfils a similar function of sustainable productivity within cultural discourses” (4). Yet, the key features

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 11 that he associates with “sustainable” text(uality)—“multi-layered forms of relationality,” “diversities,” and “patterns of connectivity” (25; emphasis in original)—are also the kernel of resilience thinking. What is more, the processes that subtend narratives of resilience coincide with Zapf’s assessment of the “generative potential and transformative function” (19) of literature and art, their “deconstructive and reconstructive” (95) ecological force within culture, which allows for the creative energy, empowerment, transformation, and “the constant renewal of the cultural center from its margins” (114). Deepening the concept of cultural ecology and its transformative potential, Michael Basseler suggests that resilience is a key element in the current reorientation of trauma narratives’ production and theorization. Shifting from the classical model that holds rupture and the unrepresentability of the sources of trauma as the aesthetic hallmarks of trauma narratives, Basseler suggests that looking at trauma through the lens of resilience allows for a focus on the “narrative possibility” (Luckhurst 89) and the meanings of trauma. Thus, Basseler argues, Speaking about resilience in a “post-trauma age,” therefore, does not imply the end of trauma, but . . . [it] means to foreground the values that are attached to trauma, as well as the meanings that can be (and frequently are) made of traumatic experience. (16–17) In other words, in contrast to the fragmentation and incoherence of broken trauma narratives, resilience narratives “typically present fairly coherent stories in which not the traumatic event or its dissociative cognitive repercussions, but the overcoming of trauma and a positive outlook take center stage” (28). Drawing on Ansgar Nünning’s notion of “cultural narratology”—an interdisciplinary approach that highlights the link between narratology and the study of culture by shifting the emphasis from formal aspects to the semantic dimension of narrative (Nünning, ­“Narrativist” 158)—­Basseler expresses the need to produce a “cultural narratology of resilience” ­(Basseler 21) that may expose the double agency of literary narratives as both aesthetic representations of the workings of resilience in the face of trauma and important mechanisms for the construction of resilience (15). The contributors to Glocal Narratives of Resilience share this vision, as well as the idea that, as “cognitive cultural forces,” narratives reflect and may influence “the unspoken mental assumptions and cultural issues of a given period” (Nünning 165). Furthermore, highlighting differential cultural approaches to resilience and their narrative representations, we propose to expand our focus beyond the hegemonic Western academic takes on resilience thinking. Consequently, a number of chapters in this book engage with the plural

12  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and distinct narrative traditions of many Indigenous peoples for whom story making and storytelling are consciously and explicitly at the center of their culture-specific processes of resilience. Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, for example, describes Anishinaabeg stories as “methods that teach us how to survive in an ever-changing environment . . . [T]hey are the greatest tools our people have to survive and live” (Doerfler et al. xxii). This notion is equally embedded in Gerald Vizenor’s definition of Indigenous survivance as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (Vizenor, Manifest Manners vii). Similarly, Leanne B. Simpson’s theory of “generative refusal”—“I refuse and I continue to generate” (Simpson 196)—is both embedded in Indigenous storytelling and put into practice by revalorizing these narratives, thereby turning inward to “the affirmative Indigenous worlds that continue to exist right alongside the colonial worlds” (16–17). Her idea of radical resurgence relies as much on renouncing colonization and victimhood as on creating new conditions for the resilience of Indigenous peoples that are rooted in traditional knowledge and narratives. I suggest that this strategy can be seen as a repatriation of resilience, as it involves “bouncing back” in the terms of her Nishnaabeg language and culture: “Biiskabiyang—the process of returning to ourselves, a reengagement with the things we have left behind, a re-emergence, an unfolding from the inside out—is a concept, an individual and collective process of decolonization and resurgence” (17). Simpson emphasizes the importance of stories as not only repositories of ancestral knowledge, but as agents of change: “Theory and praxis, story and practice are interdependent, cogenerators of knowledge” (20). In their respective chapters, Susie O’Brien, Daniel Coleman, and Daniel Escandell-Montiel further reflect on the foundational significance of stories for the resilience of Indigenous peoples and on their intertwining with global processes. Besides bringing forward the agency of narrative in processes of resilience, the cultural narratological approaches to the glocal narratives of resilience selected by the contributors to this volume reveal the interconnection between narrative structure (ingrained in Indigenous traditional artifacts, the novel, political discourse, video games, comics and graphic narratives, auto-bio-criticism, dystopian fiction, fictive memoirs) and resilience production around themes of current concern such as cultural epistemicide (see this volume’s chapters by Coleman; O’Brien; Escandell-Montiel), gender violence (Borham-Puyal; Diego-Sánchez), mental health, poverty and homelessness (Hernáez-Lerena), historical collective and individual memory (Cruz Suárez; Fraile and Noguerol), truth and reconciliation (Coleman; O’Brien; Cruz Suárez; Fraile and Noguerol), immigration, asylum, and humanitarianism (Darias-Beautell; Casco-Solís; van Herk). The various strands of resilience thinking that

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 13 the contributors to this volume engage with are presented in more detail in the following section.

The Contributions to this Volume Glocal Narratives of Resilience starts with three chapters that engage in contesting and reformulating conventional understandings of resilience by focusing on Indigenous thinking and narratives from the American continent. Thus, contributors Daniel Coleman, Susie O’Brien, and Daniel Escandell address in their respective pieces the tensions between distinct conceptualizations of resilience emerging from textual but also oral and visual narratives from both Western and Indigenous cultural traditions and ontologies. Their analyses reveal the imbrication of Western, settler(post)colonial and neoliberal conceptualizations of resilience and Indigenous thinking on resurgence, refusal, and survivance. In the first chapter, Daniel Coleman makes the case for a trans-systemic approach to resilience that highlights the dialogic interactions between Western and Indigenous knowledge ecologies as the basis for the resilience of both the Canadian settler state and Indigenous sovereignty. Borrowing the term “trans-systemic thinking” from the Chickasaw and Cheyenne legal philosopher James Youngblood Sákéj Henderson, Coleman presents as a case study of trans-systemic knowledges the Haudenosaunee narratives emerging from the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement that the Six Nations first made with the Dutch, then the English, and, subsequently, with Canada and the USA. Represented in artifacts such as the Circle Wampum, the Two Row Wampum Belt, and the Covenant Chain Wampum Belt, and preserved in the oral narratives that have been passed on from one generation to the next, this trans-systemic agreement emphasizes differentiated solidarity between the Haudenosaunee and the European settlers to “protect the people within their unified embrace” (Coleman 25). The Two Row-Covenant Chain tradition, Coleman demonstrates, “was conceptualized from the beginning in a trans-systemic way, and its explicitly dialogical form was meant to absorb changes and still persist” (25). This chapter probes the important implications that a better understanding of this ancient treaty may have for our times. Susie O’Brien offers another example of contending narratives of resilience emerging from Canada by setting the official discourse of postcolonial reconciliation vis-à-vis Indigenous narratives that aim at decolonization. Looking at recent instances of resilience discourse produced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, O’Brien argues that the official narratives on Truth and Reconciliation and cultural diversity that place Indigenous testimonies and stories at the center of resilience production, may easily work to privilege instead the resilience of the colonial settler state. In contrast, Indigenous storytelling such as that represented in the novel The Back of the Turtle by Cherokee author Thomas King works

14  Ana María Fraile-Marcos toward decolonial resilience. As the novel sets in conversation Western neoliberal capitalist ecologies of knowledge with Indigenous ways of knowing based on kinship and relationality, the reader is encouraged to contemplate resilience in the context of the trans-systemic thinking processes explored by Coleman in the first chapter. Engaging with interactive video game narratives, Daniel EscandellMontiel identifies Indigenous identity-building strategies that counter the frequent, stereotyping representations of Indigenous peoples and their cultures in video games. Heeding the plurality of voices now emerging in the area of game development, this chapter focuses on the analysis of three commercial, ludic, video games that reclaim the self-representation of the Iñupiaq peoples from Alaska, and the Tarahumara peoples from Mexico. Although these video games emerge from different contexts and have different goals, they all develop narrative strategies that build on a resilient sense of identity. Interestingly, while presenting the respective Indigenous peoples and cultures in their own terms, these video games share a nonconfrontational strategy to offer a ludic, antidiscriminatory experience to mainstream gamers. Most chapters in this volume negotiate the tensions between collective and individual processes of resilience. This is certainly the case of Chapter 4, where Miriam Borham-Puyal explores the role of maternity in individual resilience building through the analysis of Emma Donoghue’s acclaimed novel Room. Besides exposing the delicate balance between vulnerability and resilience that maternity entails, Borham-Puyal argues that the novel questions the idea that maternal resilience implies coping mechanisms that allow a return to a previous state of being. The novel highlights the role of narrative in producing individual or psychological resilience, as the survival of the protagonist and her son during their captivity depends on her capacity to create stories that transform their bleak reality of long-term sexual abuse, kidnapping, and imprisonment into a secure, warm, sheltered world for her child. Interestingly, their individual resilience is threatened by the narratives emerging from society once they are liberated. Jorge Diego Sánchez also deals in Chapter 5 with representations of women’s vulnerability and resilience in relation to sexual violence. He focuses on two Indian novels written in English—Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter—to analyze systemic acts of violence inflicted upon female characters by interlocking systems of social, political, religious, familial, and economic domination. Most relevant in these narratives is the activation of storytelling and writing as key mechanisms to build up resilience against the pervasiveness of systemic control over women by means of socially sanctioned psychological and physical violence. Further, the autobiographical component of Kandasamy’s When I Hit You, a novel based on the author’s own

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 15 experience of sexual violence within marriage, proves the therapeutic value of storytelling, showing that resilience is generated by the act and inventiveness of narrative. María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena’s chapter discusses the potential of the graphic novel to represent the challenges faced by the homeless to become resilient. Focusing on an array of recently published British, American, and Spanish comic books that show real-life attempts of desperate homemaking in the streets, this chapter brings to the fore questions about the relevance of narrative genres in the representation and construction of resilience. As image and text combine to disclose the physical and psychological barriers that foreclose resilience for the destitute, these intermedia works show how the meaning-making processes of the traditional narrative that conveys a moral lesson may not easily apply to experiences of home deprivation. O’Brien’s definition of compromised-resilience narratives fits many of these works, as they emphasize the diminished capacity of their homeless protagonists to be resilient and thrive at the same time as they stress the need for a compromise that, acknowledging the interdependence between socio-cultural environments and the destitute, reaffirms the latter’s possibility of adaptation. Like Diego Sánchez in the previous chapter, Hernáez-Lerena points to the (auto)biographical character of many of these works to underline their authority. Kit Dobson’s chapter is concerned with questions of time and resilience in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being. He discusses three main themes that emerge from this book, each pertaining to the tenses into which time is divided: past, present, and future. In concerning itself with the past, this chapter approaches the novel through an examination of the geological and geopolitical events that underlie the book, specifically the Fukushima meltdown in Japan and the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Underlining the Buddhist underpinnings of the novel, Dobson argues that readers are led to see everything in the book as existing in, or in relation to, the present that the paired protagonists Naoko Yasutani (Nao, i.e., “now”) and Ruth both inhabit. Finally, this chapter considers how the narrative structure of the book impinges on and shapes the vision of an ethical future, one where breaking the logic of the narrative—and the logic of time—might lead to a better world to come. All three of these threads point toward the argument that Ozeki’s novel foregrounds collective resilience in the face of individualistic oppression and alienation. Linking the past to the present and to projections of the future is also a central concern in Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez chapter. Situating the discussion of the best-selling novel Soldados de Salamina by the Spanish writer Javier Cercas in the realm of cultural and historical memory studies, Cruz-Suárez highlights the cultural specificity of this resilience narrative and its immersion in larger national narratives. In particular, this

16  Ana María Fraile-Marcos chapter presents Cercas’ novel as a resilience mechanism that offers new ways of envisioning the possibility of overcoming the ancestral crisis of national identity and belonging in Spain, derived from the violence and traumas of the Spanish Civil war, the subsequent dictatorship, and the pact of oblivion underpinning the country’s transition to democracy since 1975. This chapter, therefore, acknowledges the function of narrative to do resilience through its capacity to produce coherent discourses about the past and the present and to ethically engage in the construction of a future of social respect, solidarity, equality, and justice beyond Spain’s ongoing social and political cleavage. The following chapter by Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol also focuses on representations of memory as resilience. It offers an analysis of a wide range of recent “critical dystopias” (Tom Moylan) written in Spanish where memory is central to the recovery of the individual and collective self-esteem. The authors suggest that the genre of critical dystopias constitutes a paramount example of resilience narratives since, as manifestations of the utopic imagination, they are opposed to resignation. However, in contrast with utopias, which tend to offer solutions, these dystopias are more inclined to show a path to survival in contexts that are marked by oppression. The global character of the selected narratives is further highlighted at the aesthetic level by their adaptation of narrative techniques developed in dystopian fiction in English to the Ibero-American contexts. The focus on the interaction between memory and resilience is enhanced from various theoretical frameworks that include Ana María Amar Sánchez’s “ethics of defeat” (related to the creation of resilience through the preservation of officially silenced or suppressed memory on the part of those defeated ethical antiheroes who refuse to be subsumed into the hegemonic oppressive system), Svetlana Boym’s “reflective nostalgia” and Alain Badiou’s ethics of conviction, among others. The next three chapters bring the figure of the migrant and the refugee to the limelight in glocal narratives of resilience. The authors highlight the entanglements of globalization, time, mobility, and personal emotional responses to risk while underlining the interplay between agency and narrative structure. Eva Darias-Beautell offers in Chapter 10 an investigation of different modes of resilience in Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty, a complex text with a three-plot structure and two main temporal frames, moving between Vancouver and Amsterdam in the early twenty-first century and North Borneo, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Australia during and after World War II. Probing the novel’s contribution to the current debate over resilience and vulnerability, Darias-Beautell studies how the two main characters, Gail and Mathew, cope with life-threatening personal experiences, including extreme survival conditions, war trauma, forced migration, disease, death, and mourning. In the process, Thien’s text is seen as

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 17 articulating the difference between the subject of subaltern resilience and the subject of creative resilience. The chapter concludes by examining their exposure to fetishization, as well as the modalities of agency that they may produce or foreclose. Chapter 11 by Sara Casco-Solís, focuses on the resilience of destitute migrants in Rawi Hage’s 2008 novel Cockroach. She suggests that, based on the experience of refugees, the novel challenges the dominant and optimistic understanding of resilience, offering a critique of a neoliberal regime that construes the novel’s protagonist—and others like him—as passive and vulnerable. The book closes with a chapter by Aritha van Herk on Canadian Kim Thuy’s autobiographical migrant novel Ru. It examines how both historical and personal traces are brought into play while exploring the potential rebalancing possible with writing that engages the conflicted predicament of refugee resilience and healing. This fragmented text, van Herk argues, refuses to conform; refuses to serve as a threnody of discrimination, distress, and powerlessness; and refuses as well to succumb to cultural relativism. Thuy’s novel, in both style and form, evades the usual expectations adhering to stereotypical migrant narratives, instead detonating that complex experience through its performance of mediation and metamorphosis. Hence, van Herk’s comparative analysis of the migrant and refugee experiences plots an innovative differential understanding of the meaning and practice of resilience in a simultaneous global and microlocal context.

Conclusion By proposing the concept of glocal narratives of resilience as a singular cultural and textual category, we hope to start a new line of inquiry in the humanities, thus expanding the current scholarship on resilience. This book’s multidisciplinary focus goes beyond the frequent association of resilience with ecology, children’s psychology, or Indigenous knowledge production to discuss resilience as a global phenomenon that is being simultaneously registered and fostered by cultural narratives produced across the world. Reading resilience as a cultural and literary trope from comparativist, postcolonial, decolonial, and Indigenous perspectives, the various chapters probe the validity and limits of the concept as both a political and a critical literary category of analysis. Although the contributors’ close readings of the proposed glocal narratives confirm Susie O’Brien’s perception of resilience “as something we cannot not want” (“ ‘As Much Death’ ” 1), their various theoretical and critical approaches coincide, nevertheless, in questioning received ideas of resistance and survival and in highlighting the ambivalence of resilience, as well as its entanglement with the notions of refusal, resurgence, and memory, among others. Anchoring the study of resilience in the cultural,

18  Ana María Fraile-Marcos historical, and geographical specificity from which distinct notions of resilience emerge, this book also pairs the creativity and agency required in processes of adaptation and transformation with those of the cultural text, revealing how glocal narratives activate cognitive functions through their aesthetic and thematic grappling with resilience.

Notes 1. For instance, former U.S. President Barack Obama consistently appealed to the strength and resilience of the victims of natural disasters, such as the massive floods caused by Hurricane Sandy in New York City in October 2012 (McGreavy 1) or Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans (Obama). For his part, Canadian Prime Minister Justine Trudeau presents resilience as a national value in the face of disaster: “We are resilient, we are Canadians, and we will make it through this difficult time, together” (Trudeau, “Statement”). Significantly, he also mentions resilience as the quality underpinning his government’s diversity policy (Trudeau, “Diversity”). 2. I wish to thank Susie O’Brien for drawing my attention to this fact. 3. However, some intersectional approaches, such as those of the environmental humanities, are opening the path to considering the role of the humanities in the production of a nuanced critical discourse on the resilience paradigm. The scholarly journal Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, for example, has provided a forum since its creation in 2014 for conversations “about what the humanities contributes to living and thinking sustainably in a world of dwindling resources” (Resilience). 4. Whereas in 2015, the publications focusing on resilience in the field of medicine amounted to about 1,100, with 300 in ecology and 500 in the social sciences, the humanities produced less than 50 entries (Weiss et al. qtd. in Basseler 17). 5. For a discussion of glocality and its cultural and literary dimensions, see Ana María Fraile-Marcos, “Urban Glocality and the English Canadian Imaginary.”

Works Cited Basseler, Michael. “Stories of Dangerous Life in the Post-Trauma Age: Toward a Cultural Narratology of Resilience.” Narrative in Culture, edited by Astrid Erll and Roy Sommer, de Gruyter, 2019, pp. 15–36. Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Translated by Mark Ritter, Sage, 1992. Bourbeau, Philippe. “A Genealogy of Resilience.” International Political Sociology, vol. 12, 2018, pp. 19–35. Bracke, Sarah. “Is the Subaltern Resilient? Notes on Agency and Neoliberal Subjects.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, 2016, pp. 839–855. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford UP, 1997. ———. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability and Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, et al., Duke UP, 2016, pp. 12–27. Coleman, Daniel. “The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty and TransSystemic Resilience.” Glocal Narratives of Resilience, edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2020, pp. 21–38.

Introduction: Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing 19 Cyrulnik, Boris. The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience. Translated by Susan Fairfield, Other Press, 2005. ———. Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past. Translated by David Macey, Penguin, 2009. Doerfler, Jill, et al., editors. Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories. Michigan State UP, 2013. Evans, Brad, and Julian Reid. Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously. Polity Press, 2014. Feder, Adriana, et al. “Psychobiological Mechanisms of Resilience to Stress.” Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by J. W. Reich, et al., Guilford, 2010, pp. 35–54. Fraile-Marcos, Ana María. “Urban Glocality and the English Canadian Imaginary.” Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary, edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2014, pp. 1–20. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke UP, 2016. Harvey, David. “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction.” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 610, 2007, pp. 22–44. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 1–23. Huebener, Paul, et al. “Reworking Resilience: A Conceptual Framework.” Globalization Working Papers, vol. 17, no. 1, 2017, pp. 2–25. Juniper, Tony. “Will 2012 Be the Year of the R Word?” The Guardian, 14 Dec. 2011, www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/resiliance-sustainable-development/. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019. Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge, 2008. McGreavy, Bridie. “Resilience as Discourse.” Environmental Communication a Journal of Nature and Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–18, doi:10.1080/175 24032.2015.1014390. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press, 2000. Nagel, Joane. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. Oxford UP, 1996. Neocleous, Mark. “Resisting Resilience.” Radical Philosophy, vol. 178, 2013, pp. 2–7. Nünning, Ansgar. “Narrativist Approaches and Narratological Concepts for the Study of Culture.” Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture, edited by Birgit Neumann and Ansgar Nünning, de Gruyter, 2012, pp. 145–183. Nünning, Ansgar, and Vera Nünning. “Conceptualizing ‘Broken Narratives’ from a Narratological Perspective: Domains, Concepts, Features, Functions and Suggestions for Research.” Narrative im Bruch. Theoretische Positionen und Anwendungen, edited by Anna Babka, et al., Vienna UP, 2016, pp. 37–86. Obama, Barack. “Transcript of President Obama’s Katrina Speech.” Bruce Alpert Nola.com, 28 Aug. 2015, www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2015/08/tran script_of_president_obamas.html. Accessed 21 Oct. 2018. O’Brien, Susie. “ ‘As Much Death as We Can Manage’: Anti-Resilience and the Settler-Colonial State.” Unpublished paper delivered in the Departmental Colloquium series, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster, 15 Feb. 2017.

20  Ana María Fraile-Marcos ———. “Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal, and Compromise.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2–3, 2017, pp. 43–65. Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, www.resiliencejournal. org/. Accessed 9 Sept. 2019. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Spivak, Gayatri. “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 2005, pp. 475–486. ———. “The New Subaltern: A Silent Interview.” Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi, Verso, 2012, pp. 324–340. Strand, Joyce, and Robert Peacock. “Resource Guide: Cultural Resilience.” Tribal College Journal, vol. 14, no. 4, 2003, pp. 28–31. Trudeau, Justin. “Statement by the Prime Minister of Canada on Fort McMurray Fire.” Prime Minister of Canada, 6 May 2016, pm.gc.ca/eng/news/2016/05/06/ statement-prime-minister-canada-fort-mcmurray-fire. Accessed 21 Oct. 2018. ———. “Diversity Key to Resilience and Success: Trudeau.” India Today, 21 Feb. 2018, www.indiatoday.in/pti-feed/story/diversity-key-to-resilience-and-successtrudeau-1176789-2018-02-24. Accessed 21 Oct. 2018. Ungar, Michael. The Social Ecology of Resilience: A Handbook of Theory and Practice. Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance. U of Nebraska P, 1999. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation.” Security Dialogue, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 143–160. Welsh, Marc. “Resilience and Responsibility: Governing Uncertainty in a Complex World.” The Geographical Journal, vol. 180, no. 1, 2014, pp. 15–26, doi: 10.1111/geoj.12012. Accessed 22 Sept. 2019. Zapf, Hubert. Literature as Cultural Ecology: Sustainable Texts. Bloomsbury, 2016.

1 The Two Row WampumCovenant Chain Treaty and Trans-Systemic Resilience Daniel Coleman

We must admit that resilience has been deployed as readily to describe the tenacious adaptability of oppressive systems as the persistent creativity of those who are oppressed by them.1 In their separate surveys of resilience science in the fields of social psychology, sociology, international finance and economic policy, corporate risk analysis, psychology of trauma, international development policy, public health, and national security, for example, Jeremy Walker and Melinda Cooper and Jennifer Henderson and Keith Denny note that much thinking about resilience colludes in neoliberalism’s version of Darwinism by placing the onus for resilience on those who live with unpredictable adversity and, in the process, obscuring critical attention to the social, political, economic, and ecological contexts that produce the precarious conditions themselves (Henderson and Denny 4, 23; Walker and Cooper 156). Contributors to this volume, Eva Darias-Beautell and Susie O’Brien, likewise, have each linked the rise of interest in resilience to the rise in neoliberal thinking during a period of increasing globalization, wherein resilience has been turned into a justification for neoliberal political and economic philosophy, much like evolutionary theory emerged in the colonial period and was turned into a social Darwinist rationale for racial colonialism. Darias-Beautell borrows Sarah Bracke’s distinction between subaltern and creative resilience to highlight a dynamic and ambivalent tension between people’s creative capacity to exert adaptive agency under adverse conditions and the ways in which this creative potential can be recuperated under neoliberalism’s dogma of constrained individualism in such a way that the oppressed are expected and even required consistently and repeatedly to adapt to their subjection so that their adaptability becomes a condition of their subaltern status. This recuperation of creative agency into renewed subalternity can become a kind of social Darwinism. “But just as social Darwinism doesn’t undo the validity of evolutionary theory,” O’Brien writes in an essay not included in this volume, “the conversion of resilience into a celebration of boot-strapping individualism doesn’t negate the capacity of resilience theory to illuminate the way physical processes work, from ecosystem change to neuroplasticity” (“ ‘As Much

22  Daniel Coleman Death’ ” 3). Borrowing from Gayatri Spivak, O’Brien concludes, “I’ve come to think of resilience . . . as something we cannot not want” (“ ‘As Much Death’ ” 1). O’Brien’s use of Spivak’s double-negative highlights the ambivalence in these and other critical assessments of the concept of resilience that rises from the way it functions within what we might call an ecology of knowledge systems, a trans-systemic field of contending discourses and ideologies each of which harnesses the term within its own regime of value. In this chapter, I focus on the importance of that trans-systemic field itself for a repositioning of resilience that emphasizes rather than tries to resolve different ways of knowing and doing resilience. I will ground my discussion of trans-systemic thinking in a case study of the 400-year struggle of Haudenosaunee people (a.k.a. Six Nations or the Iroquoian Confederacy) to continuously reassert the legal precedence of an explicitly trans-systemic treaty agreement known as the Two Row WampumCovenant Chain agreement first made with the Dutch, then the English, and subsequently with Canada and the USA. The Six Nations today are scattered in 18 communities across northeastern USA and Canada. The largest community, Canada’s most populated Indigenous reserve, is on the Grand River, a half-hour’s drive from McMaster University, where I teach and write in Hamilton, Ontario. As a settler Canadian researcher and writer, one of my main efforts over the past ten years has been to come to a better understanding of the implications of this ancient treaty for our times. Indigenous peoples often appear in discussions of resilience but often as “objects” or subalterns of resilience whereby, for example, resilience research has targeted disadvantaged Indigenous mothers for social initiatives aimed at improving mother-daughter bonds in infancy and thus the resiliency of future generations of Indigenous children.2 My purpose in this chapter is to highlight Haudenosaunee ways of knowing as reflected in the history of the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement not so much to present Haudenosaunee people as “subjects” of creative resilience but, more importantly, to show how a trans-systemic approach to resilience can loosen our grip on the term itself so that it is not so readily metabolized by neoliberal ideologies. Before I turn to the Two Row-Covenant Chain treaty, however, I need to explain how I use the terms resilience and trans-systemic thinking. Canadian forest ecologist C. S. Holling’s article, “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” is commonly cited as foundational to the emergence of “resilience science.” As his title indicates, Holling distinguishes between stability—“the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium state after a temporary disturbance” (17)—and resilience—“the ability of these systems to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist” (17). Stability, according to Holling, is a category of analysis that emphasizes equilibrium and the persistence of stable relations within a local, fairly simple ecosystem, whereas resilience, by

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 23 contrast, emphasizes regional (as opposed to local), complex interactions between multiple, changing, unpredictable factors and forces. Hollings gives the example of how populations of budworms and the evergreens they eat may rise and fall in relation to one another (i.e., within a local realm) and thus demonstrate stability or instability, but when we widen our consideration beyond the predator-prey paradigm and take in wider regional variants, such as drought, human incursions, or unpredictable events such as lightning strikes, we are now considering resilience rather than stability (14). “The more homogeneous the environment in space and time,” Holling writes, “the more likely is the system to have low fluctuations [i.e., high stability] and low resilience” (18). That is to say, resilience as a category of analysis emerges as trans-systemic awareness. Especially important for our meditations here, Holling presents resilience as a different approach to knowing. Rather than being predetermined by a desired stability, resilience persists precisely in the unpredictability of a complex of systems and ways of knowing. It demonstrates itself within the contending circumstances of eco-regions—of forces, ways of living, and changing contexts. Unfortunately, as Walker and Cooper point out, the later expansion of his ideas during Holling’s work into the new millennium with the Stockholm Resilience Centre to develop “a general systems theory of ‘socio-ecological governance’ of direct use to policymakers in the field of development economics” (155) has tended to recapture the notion of resilience into the kind of managerialism against which he railed in the 1970s. Essentially, twenty-first century interests in complexity have metabolized resilience into governance systems (think of security regimes and their espousal of unending emergency preparedness) that aim to normalize and even capitalize on unpredictability. Deeply distrustful of these developments in the uses of resiliency, Walker and Cooper conclude, “In its tendency to metabolize all countervailing forces and inoculate itself against critique, ‘resilience thinking’ . . . must be contested, if at all, on completely different terms, by a movement of thought that is truly counter-systemic” (157). “Counter-systemic” suggests a radical alternative, somehow arising from a pure alterity, untouched by the system in question. I would suggest instead the term “trans-systemic” because it suggests that if resilience persists precisely in the unpredictability of complex systems and ways of knowing, then it must be engaged within, rather than outside of, an ecology of knowledges. More than this, attention to the ecosystem of epistemologies and discourses that take up resilience ensures that we keep the context—precisely what neoliberal renderings of resilience obscure—very much in view.3 I am borrowing the term “trans-systemic thinking” from the field of legal studies as presented in the work of the Chickasaw and Cheyenne legal philosopher James Youngblood Sákéj Henderson, research fellow at the Native Law Centre of Canada. According to Henderson, Canadians

24  Daniel Coleman will not be able to enact the provisions for Aboriginal and treaty rights enshrined in Sections 25 and 35 of the Canadian Constitution4 until Canadian judges, lawyers, scholars, and the wider public develop what he calls the trans-systemic capacity to engage intelligently with the episte­ mologies and cosmologies of Indigenous peoples in such a way that these can influence the courts’ (and public’s) understandings of what constitutes evidence, what narrative traditions inform the basis for ethics and law, and how the holism of Indigenous ecological thinking and spirituality can reshape Canadian interpretations of our own Constitution. Henderson writes that in the effort to repatriate Canada’s Constitution, “perhaps the greatest challenge governments and the public faced in the constitutional regime was transforming their knowledge and consciousness to conform to the emerging postcolonial order” (51), and he goes on to say, “Transsystemic synthesis . . . offers a way of being cognitively alive, conscious of the decolonization of past intellectual traditions in order to create a just Canada. It seeks to honorably converge and reconcile Aboriginal knowledge with Eurocentric knowledge” (67). Henderson’s work in the field of legal philosophy is germane to this essay because, in what follows, I will take as my case study of trans-systemic resilience the long-term struggle of Haudenosaunee people to assert and reassert the legal authority of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain treaty. Over the past ten years, I have been working with Haudenosaunee researchers at Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre, an archive and research center based at Six Nations Polytechnic on the Grand River Territory, to understand the history and philosophy of the Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain agreement. Much of what follows is drawn from Deyohahá:ge:’s archive of Haudenosaunee oral histories and written records, and I want to acknowledge especially the work of Dr. Rick Hill, Tuscarora artist, historian, and senior research coordinator at Deyohahá:ge:, whose friendship, conversations, public talks, and published works have been central to my ongoing learning about the Two Row-Covenant Chain tradition. To begin, I will summarize briefly from Rick Hill’s publication of the oral history of the Two Row-Covenant Chain treaty as it was recited in public multiple times by Cayuga chief and faithkeeper Jacob Thomas before his death in 1998 (see Hill, “Oral Memory of the Haudenosaunee”; “Linking Arms”). As Chief Thomas described it, Mohawk leaders from the easternmost nation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy met Dutch merchants when the latter first appeared on what became known as the Hudson River in 1609, the same year that Samuel de Champlain introduced firearms into their world and killed several of their relatives in the St. Lawrence River region. Wanting to avoid similar violence with the newcomers from the Netherlands who were arriving in their territory, the Mohawks arranged a meeting near present-day Albany, New York, sometime around 1613 at which they negotiated a treaty of friendship on behalf of the Confederacy.

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 25 At this meeting, the Mohawk leaders burned tobacco and explained that the Creator did not mean for people to live in fear and conflict, so they wished to link arms with the Dutch to form a human Covenant Chain and treat one another as family. The Dutch agreed and welcomed the Haudenosaunee as “sons” into their family, but the Mohawk leaders rejected the hierarchical parent-child metaphor and insisted they use the language of siblings and call each other “brothers.” These are all important concepts in the history of the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement, because they come from the Kayanere’kówa, the constitutional code of the Haudenosaunee alliance that had allied the Mohawks with four ­others—Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas—into five, and later six, confederated nations when the Tuscaroras joined the confederacy in 1722. In that code, known in English as the Great Law of Peace, the member nations called each other “brothers” to emphasize their equality, and their 50 designated chiefs linked arms in a great circle of solidarity that would protect the people within their unified embrace. This is represented by the Circle Wampum (Fig. 1.1).5 These legal and constitutional precedents from Haudenosaunee jurisprudence informed the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement the Mohawk negotiators were forming with the Dutch. The Dutch then said they would put this agreement in writing, while the Haudenosaunee suggested that paper would not last, and they must find more enduring symbols to record their treaty agreement, something that would endure as long as the grass stayed green, the sun rose in the morning, and the water continued to flow. They noted that the Dutch had arrived in a sailing ship while they used canoes to travel the river, so they would record the agreement by means of iconographical bead belts and strings known as wampum to symbolize a model for future relations based on their two distinct ways of travel: the Dutch would keep their beliefs, laws, and culture in their ship, and the Haudenosaunee would keep theirs in their canoe. Conscious of these differences in their ways of knowing and living, the two parties could share the river of life in equality and friendship. There is much to say about every detail of these wampum belts: the two rows, themselves made of two rows of beads (Fig. 1.2), remain parallel and never intersect; the three white rows that are each three beads wide, symbolize the peace, friendship, and respect that will allow the two vessels to share the River of Life; the rope or chain links the two human figures on the Covenant Chain (Fig. 1.3) so that when one is in need, he or she can tug on the rope to alert the other; as a mnemonic form of legal record keeping, wampum requires the two parties to meet regularly to dust off the beads and re-polish the covenant chain to keep it from rusting (Hill, “Oral Memory of the Haudenosaunee”; “Linking Arms”). The Two Row-Covenant Chain tradition was conceptualized from the beginning in a trans-systemic way, and its explicitly dialogical form was meant to absorb changes and still persist. As the discussion between the

Figure 1.1 Circle Wampum, Teyonnityohkwanhakstha, “The Thing the People Use on an Ongoing Basis, to Wrap Around Themselves” Source: Image and photo by Raymond R. Skye, Tuscarora artist, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory.

Figure 1.2 Two Row Wampum Belt, Tekani teyothata’tye kaswenta Source: Photo courtesy of Rick Hill.

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 27

Figure 1.3  Covenant Chain Wampum Belt, Tehontatenentsonterontahkhwa, “The Thing by Which They Link Arms” Source: Photo courtesy of Rick Hill.

Mohawk spokespeople and the Dutch merchants demonstrates, the two parties were very aware of translating between cultural codes and knowledge systems, a process that requires both differentiation (fathers and sons is not the right metaphor; you sail in ships, we travel in canoes) and equivalence (siblings is a better metaphor; the boats are different but serve comparable purposes). The two vessels remain distinct and the two human figures remain joined, but at two ends of a continuum, not to create cultural apartheid but to insist that healthy relationships recognize rather than suppress differences and that the impulse to overwhelm and absorb the other into a hierarchical understanding of family can chafe and destroy peaceful relations. The smoking of tobacco establishes this covenant in the presence of the Creator, so, as Oneida Faithkeeper Bob Antone has said of the Two Row agreement, the agreement involved three, not just two parties, with the third being the Creator (2016). This explicit ceremonial evocation of the sacred repositions modern concepts of law and treaty. First, it insists on a more-than-human time scale. The measure for how long the agreement should last is not keyed to human terms, whether they be how long the immediate negotiators live together in the region, how long the present authorities such as governments or fur trade companies last, or some generational measure of children’s children. The agreement to live in peace and friendship, sharing the river of life while respecting one another’s differences, is keyed to ecological time and the cycles of nature.6 All of these concepts and principles are informed by the teachings of the Kayanere’kówa, which emphasizes the importance of establishing the kind of well-reasoned order that sets the groundwork for peace. The global history of peace is uneven and uncertain, however, and such is the case with the Two Row-Covenant Chain treaty. The Dutch fell to English invading forces in 1664, and one of the first acts of the new English colonial regime of New York was to take on and interpret

28  Daniel Coleman the trans-systemic Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement the Haudenosaunee had made with their Dutch predecessors. Written records of the first British treaty councils are no longer available,7 but they were seen and referred to by Sir William Johnson, superintendent of Indian Affairs in a speech to Confederacy leaders on June 23, 1755: You well know and these Books testifie that it is now almost 100 years since your Forefathers and ours became known to each other. That upon our first acquaintance we shook hands & finding we should be useful to one another entered into a Covenant of Brotherly Love & mutual Friendship. And tho’ we were at first only tied together by a Rope, yet lest this Rope should grow rotten & break we ties ourselves together by an Iron Chain. Lest time or accidents might rust & destroy this Chain of Iron, we afterwards made one of Silver, the strength & brightness of which would subject it to no decay . . . You well know also that from the beginning to this time we have almost every year, strengthened & brightened this Covenant Chain in the most public & solemn manner. (National Archives of Canada, RG 10, Vol. 1822, p. 35, qtd in Williams and Nelson 94) As Johnson’s speech clearly indicates, the Covenant Chain of Friendship established between the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the British an enduring status as allies (“brothers”) and not as subjects (“sons”). But not long after Johnson’s speech, the American Revolution took place in 1776, and the Haudenosaunee had to consider which side of this conflict between Britons the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement aligned them with—the British loyalists or the emerging American patriots. A little less than a century thereafter, they had to consider a similar division when Canada emerged as a Dominion increasingly independent from Britain. The solutions to these unpredicted developments have not been obvious, and different groups among the Haudenosaunee have answered them differently. But consistently throughout these adversities, the Six Nations resiliently maintained the core principles of the Two Row-Covenant Chain, insisting that they were autonomous allies, not subjects, of whatever government they were dealing with. In treaty council after treaty council over the centuries, they reminded the British,8 American, and Canadian colonial officials that they had formed a treaty of friendship with each colonial power in which they both agreed to share the River of Life and retain their own laws and customs. Not only did the Haudenosaunee repeatedly insist upon its ongoing relevance, but the various colonial powers referred to it over and over again themselves. For example, George Washington commissioned the making of a wampum belt, clearly evoking the iconography of the Covenant Chain, to commemorate the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua, which reaffirmed the principles

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 29 of friendship and autonomy that were to guide relations between the newly emerged United States and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (see an image of this belt at www.onondaganation.org/culture/wampum/ george-washington-belt/), while in 1815, the British Colonel William Claus, deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs in Upper Canada, presented the Six Nations with the Pledge of the Crown Wampum (see an image of this belt at http://images.ourontario.ca/Partners/SixNPL/Six NPL002690749pf_0001.pdf), reaffirming the principles of autonomy-infriendship at the end of the War of 1812. These reaffirmations of the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement did not stop at any point in history. U.S., Canadian, and Haudenosaunee governments all continue to refer to the Two Row-Covenant Chain protocols today, when they wish to remind each other of the basis on which their relationships were formed. For example, the Crown-First Nations gathering of January 24, 2012, between Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Indigenous leaders from across Canada included a review of the Two Row-Covenant Chain Wampum as a way to suggest that the agreement of friendship needs repolishing (see a photo of PM Harper reviewing the Covenant Chain at www. afn.ca/uploads/files/cfng/sccpfb.pdf#page=1&zoom=auto,-99,792). Likewise, in his opening remarks at the Tribal Nations Conference held at the White House on November 13, 2013, President Barack Obama evoked the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement: The Iroquois called their network of alliances with other tribes and European nations a “covenant chain.” Each link represented a bond of peace and friendship. But that covenant chain didn’t sustain itself. It needed constant care, so that it would stay strong. And that’s what we’re called to do, to keep the covenant between us for this generation and for future generations. (www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/11/13/ remarks-president-tribal-nations-conference) So the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement is far from forgotten at the highest levels of our political order, even if its trans-systemic principles have been largely ignored and everyday British, American, and Canadian citizens have been taught a sanctioned ignorance about it. A good deal of that ignorance can be credited to what Canadian political philosopher James Tully has called the modern nation-state’s “empire of uniformity.” According to Tully, modern European constitutionalism was established on “the premise that the sovereign people who establish the constitution are already culturally indifferent members of one society who aim to set up a regular constitutional association with a single locus of sovereignty” (83). Tully argues that the monolithic assumption of modern constitutionalism left emerging nation-states in the colonies incapable of honoring the complex treaty constitutionalism on which they

30  Daniel Coleman had actually been founded. To return to the terms I quoted from Sákéj Henderson earlier, these colonial states abandoned the trans-systemic thinking and nation-to-nation treaty diplomacy between Indigenous and European legal and epistemological traditions that had made their fledgling presence in America possible in the first place. The processes of consolidation by which the 13 states united themselves into “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” and by which Canada negotiated its Confederation of 4 distinct British colonies enjoined a program of stabilizing homogenization that overwhelmed the actual French, Catholic, Indigenous, and other diversities of their colonial populations and asserted instead a widespread cultural imperialism within. To return to Holling’s terms, the emerging settler states aimed for homogeneous stability rather than heterogeneous resilience. The realpolitick of this brittle project of national consolidation involved the dismissal of treaties such as the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement with the Haudenosaunee. On the basis of this agreement, most of the Six Nations had reluctantly sided with the British during the Revolutionary War, and when the British lost, they were burned out of house and home by the Americans in 1779. They fled to the border of British North America at Buffalo and lived there as refugees until they were able to negotiate in 1784 for a parcel of land, about a million acres in their traditional beaver hunting grounds that were now in British territory. Desperate to reestablish themselves in their new home, the Haudenosaunee arranged to lease portions of their lands so that they could use the income to reestablish their Confederacy government, which could then build homes, schools, farms, and roads. Their key principle was that they arrived as self-ruling allies of the British, not sons or subjects. The story of the Six Nations in what became Ontario is a story of the people of the ship reducing the land base and eventually taking over control of the canoe. Between 1784 and the 1840s, the British colonial government expropriated and allowed the swindling away of 95% of Six Nations territory on the Grand River. The Six Nations Confederacy Council had placed the funds it had gained from land leases in trust with the British government, and these funds were pilfered and expropriated without Council’s permission when the British colonial government was replaced in 1867 by the new Canadian government (see Monture 124– 125; Susan Hill 167–169). Nonetheless, the Six Nations continuously reasserted the Two Row-Covenant Chain relationship, insisting upon their right to govern themselves independent of increasing Canadian aggression. The issue came to a head in 1923, when the Canadian threat against Haudenosaunee independence made the Confederacy Council send Deskaheh, a Cayuga chief, to London to ask the king’s aid in reestablishing the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement with Canada. When he was refused an audience there, Deskaheh went on to Geneva, where he spearheaded a campaign for the Haudenosaunee to become a member

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 31 state of the League of Nations (see A Basic Call to Consciousness 41–54). Insisting that his people were brothers and not sons of the Canadian and American states that had replaced the Dutch and then the British at the other end of the Covenant Chain, Deskaheh traveled to Switzerland on a Haudenosaunee passport, a practice many Six Nations people insist upon to this day. Although he was able to assemble a large audience in Geneva to hear his people’s concerns, he was ultimately denied a hearing in the League’s General Assembly. Deskaheh’s 1923 mission was not forgotten, and the Haudenosaunee repeated the journey to Geneva 50 years later, when they sent a delegation to the 1977 UN gathering of Indigenous peoples, once again traveling on their own passports (Basic Call to Consciousness, esp. pp. 9–25). It was this 1977 gathering that launched the 40 years of negotiations that evolved into the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous peoples. The effects of Canada’s intrusions in Haudenosaunee politics, administration, and finances continue to fester in the conflictual relations between Canada and Six Nations to this day. The imposition of Ottawa’s band council system, for example, has generated a division among people living at Six Nations between loyalty to the traditional Confederacy Council, which was robbed of its ability to fund basic services but continues to carry moral authority among the people, and reliance on the Ottawa-imposed band council, which funnels federal funding to necessities such as physical infrastructure, social services, and education. Onondaga scholar Theresa McCarthy’s book In Divided Unity examines in detail how divisions such as these have generated an oft-repeated aspersion of factionalism at Six Nations, which helps the Canadian nationstate to justify its continued manipulation of the Haudenosaunee canoe. The operations of this strategy become very clear in documents like the draft policy statement sent by the Government of Canada in 2009 to Confederacy Council negotiators during a dispute over lands situated between the Grand River territory and the town of Caledonia: We take the view that, whatever the nature of the early relations between the Hodinöhsö:ni and European societies, the relationship between Canada and the Six Nations of the Grand River has evolved into one between governments within a federal state. Canada does not believe that a protracted debate over the historical significance of the Covenant Chain or the Two Row Wampum would be constructive, since the historical record suggests that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for the parties to reach a common understanding of these symbols. (Hill, War Clubs and Wampum 70) Thus, persistent British and then Canadian interference in the Haudenosaunee canoe has created a story of hopelessly intractable divisions

32  Daniel Coleman within the canoe that provides an excuse for the imposition of monolithic Canadian sovereignty. Despite the unending barrage of this “empire of uniformity,” Haudenosaunee people resiliently insist not only on their autonomy as a Confederacy of people but also on their adherence to the trans-systemic agreement with the British and their political descendants as outlined in the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement. The traditional Confederacy Council still exists and commands widespread respect. During the negotiations with the governments of Canada and Ontario over the contested lands near Caledonia between 2006 and 2009, for example, the band council stepped back and agreed that the Confederacy Council should lead the negotiations. This arrangement followed in the wake of the nearby City of Hamilton signing a joint stewardship agreement with the Confederacy, not band, Council as part of the resolutions over the building of a highway through the ecologically sensitive terrain of the Red Hill Creek Valley, where Indigenous protestors and their allies had indicated sacred remains were buried. So the Confederacy Council has not only survived nearly a century of suppression but also experienced an upsurge of influence and authority over the past decade. In both campaigns, references to the trans-systemic nature of the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement remained prominent in public speeches, rallies, and discussions with various levels of government. Similarly, Six Nations communities in the United States have repeatedly reminded succeeding generations of Americans about the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreements made with their ancestors. In 2013, for example, traditional Confederacy leaders of the Onondaga Nation of upstate New York, along with non-Indigenous Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation, took the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the Two Row-Covenant Chain treaty to launch the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous people paddled parallel rows of canoes down the Hudson River for 13 days, arriving at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on August 9, the UN’s International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples. Along the journey, they invited thousands of spectators and interested people to sign a petition that begins with these words: “We the People, in the spirit of Truth, Condolence and Healing join with each other in the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign to “polish the silver covenant chain” that ties together the Native Peoples and Nations of Turtle Island (North America) with the people of the United States and Canada in a bond of peace, friendship and environmental responsibility” (see http:// honorthetworow.org/; also Hallenbeck). We could identify the Haudenosaunee 400-year insistence upon the Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement as an exemplary instance of resilience. Surely, it demonstrates resiliency’s capacity “to absorb changes of state variables, driving variables, and parameters, and still persist” (Holling 17). And academic critics could then engage in debates about

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 33 whether Indigenous resilience provides a model of incredible fortitude or if its decorum and civility provide an excuse for ongoing colonial abuse.9 But to harness Haudenosaunee history and experience as an exemplar of “resilience science” is to extract it from trans-systemic interaction within the set of terms used by Haudenosaunee thinkers themselves to describe their history and experience. For, despite 400 years of what English speakers would define as “resilience,” this word has not come to the fore in Haudenosaunee commentary or analysis. This is central to my point in this chapter: if we are to keep resilience from being metabolized by neoliberal complexity theory, we need to keep it animated within a trans-systemic awareness of an ecology of knowledges. In the present instance, this is not so difficult to do, for when I looked for the term resilience in the remarkable recent outpouring of books by Haudenosaunee scholars on Six Nations history, politics, and culture, including Rick Hill’s War Clubs and Wampum Belts: Hodinöhsö:ni Experiences of the War of 1812 (2012), Susan Hill’s The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River (2017), Penelope Kelsey’s Reading the Wampum: Essays on Hodinöhsö:ni’ Visual Code and Epistemological Recovery (2014), Theresa McCarthy’s In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (2016), Rick Monture’s We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River (2014), Audra Simpson’s Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (2014), and Paul Williams’ Keyanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (2018), the term never appears at all. Much more common are words such as resurgence to refer to the upswing in Haudenosaunee cultural vitality and political intensity during the past two or three decades;10 resistance to speak of the determined assertion of Haudenosaunee autonomy and rejection of the settler state’s efforts to control the Six Nations canoe;11 regeneration or restoration to evoke the movement among Haudenosaunee people to learn their languages, traditions, and culture after these were suppressed in the Residential School era;12 traditionalism to identify the return to Haudenosaunee protocols and ceremonies not just in longhouse ritual practices but also as conceptual models for contemporary scholarship and living;13 and, especially, the Haudenosaunee ceremonial practice of Condolence to describe the protocols for addressing grief so that people can be restored to the “Good Mind” and be requickened in their capacity to build peaceful relationships.14 In a summary statement about the history of Haudenosaunee conflict with settler colonialism, Onondaga scholar Theresa McCarthy writes, To me, this is a story about how a people stood their ground against seemingly insurmountable odds and against the relentless, often brutal attempts to force their acquiescence. It is about their adamant refusal to believe that the struggle for the return of their lands was

34  Daniel Coleman hopeless. It is about the reclamation of spaces that are both physical and political, and thus, it is a story about Haudenosaunee people’s responsibilities to each other, to the land, and to the coming faces. Most of all, it is about the reclamation of a place that the Haudenosaunee were never meant to be, and that place is the future. (xx) “Stood their ground,” “adamant refusal,” “struggle for the return of their lands,” “reclamation of spaces,” “responsibilities,” “reclamation of the future”—these phrases help us identify coordinates for a trans-systemic ecology of ideas that interrupts and resets our assumptions of what resilience is and how it relates to the complex systems within which we live. Attention to key terms such as these used by Haudenosaunee writers and thinkers themselves helpfully interrupts the discursive and conceptual assumptions that circulate within the domain of resilience science, reminding us that to understand resilience—as well as its l­imitations— requires trans-systemic thinking.15 I mentioned earlier that when the Haudenosaunee replaced the patrilineal metaphor of “sons” with the horizontal figure of “brothers,” they were following protocols that had been laid out in the Great Law wherein the member nations of the Confederacy were considered siblings in one family. What I did not mention at that point was that the Onondagas, Mohawks, and Senecas are often referred to in English translation as “elder brothers” or “uncles,” while the Oneidas, Cayugas, and the later adherents to the Confederacy, the Tuscaroras, Tutelos, Nanticokes, and others are “younger brothers” or “nephews.”16 Relational terms like these (mother, father, sister, grandparent, aunt, etc.) in the Haudenosaunee languages are elaborated from verbs, emphasizing the doing of the relationship rather than presenting it as a fixed identity so that a brother does “brothering,” while a sister does “sistering,” and so on. The action of these relationships is influenced by age so that the older brother, who has more experience of the world, is responsible to initiate the actions of brothering, while the younger, who has less experience, is responsible to receive brothering in a respectful way.17 On this basis, there is a long tradition of Haudenosaunee diplomats and council members referring to settler peoples as “younger brothers,” as newcomers whose responsibility is to receive brothering from their more experienced siblings who have lived in the region longer. The trans-systemic model of the Two Row-Covenant Chain shows us that the responsibilities and practices of the ship and the canoe are not identical. Each is to carry its own beliefs, laws, and culture, and they are to maintain their grip upon the shared covenant chain on which their communication depends. This is a trans-systemic as a counter-systemic form of engagement. The point, then, in the context of current debates about resilience is that mainstream researchers are not simply to abandon the

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 35 concept of resilience as hopelessly compromised and to try to appropriate Indigenous concepts in its stead. We cannot not want resilience. Rather, we are to hold our own conceptual frameworks and terminology with a trans-systemic awareness that there is a whole range of ways to think about the concept in contention with the “empire of uniformity,” the theories and systems assumed within the sailing ship. By keeping us alert to the recuperating power of single systems of thought, trans-systemic awareness enhances creative as opposed to subaltern resilience. As elder brothers with the responsibility to share their experience with younger brothers, Haudenosaunee scholars and thinkers have translated concepts from the canoe into sailing ship words such as resurgence, resistance, restoration, regeneration, traditionalism, condolence, requickening, refusal, and interruption. Our responsibility as adherents to North America’s oldest treaty is to rethink resilience through a dialogical awareness of the trans-systemic ecology of understandings in which it circulates.

Notes 1. This point is powerfully made in many of the chapters of this volume that take up the undeniable persistence and resilience of destructive stereotypes of various people and groups: Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez of Spain and Spaniards, Miriam Borham of self-sacrificing motherhood, Daniel Escandell-Montiel of Indigenous peoples, María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena of homeless people, and Sara Casco and Aritha van Herk of immigrants. 2. On resilience theory’s particular focus on Indigenous motherhood see Henderson and Denny 7, 13–14, and on its focus on motherhood more generally see Borham’s chapter in this volume. 3. Portuguese sociologists and World Social Forum activists Boaventura de Sousa Santos, João Arriscado Nunes, and Maria Paula Meneses write that “there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice” (xix) and that a broad-based “reinvention of social emancipation” must replace the “monoculture of [Western] scientific knowledge” with an “ecology of knowledges” (xx). For further reflection on developing an awareness of an ecology of knowledges specifically in dialogue between Indigenous and settler colonial epistemologies, see my “Toward an Indigenist Ecology of Knowledges for Canadian Literary Studies” (2013). 4. Section 25: “The guarantee in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed so as to abrogate or derogate from any aboriginal, treaty or other rights or freedoms that pertain to the aboriginal peoples of Canada” Section 35: “(1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.” 5. For a recent, detailed account of the Great Law, see Mohawk Confederacy lawyer Paul Williams’ Keyanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace (2018). 6. The connection between the ecological and sacred time scales features significantly too in Kit Dobson’s discussion in this volume of Buddhist understandings of temporality in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. 7. See Richter’s “Rediscovered Links in the Covenant Chain” on the disappearance in the early nineteenth century of the earliest records of treaty meeting minutes between the New York Commissioners for Indian Affairs, who oversaw relations between the British colony and Indigenous neighbors from

36  Daniel Coleman 1677 to 1723 (47). References to and excerpts from these minutes were rediscovered and published by Richter in 1982. 8. Historian John Parmenter records 15 council meetings in British colonial records held between 1656 and 1744, which reaffirmed the Two Row-­ Covenant Chain concepts. 9. As Dene professor at UBC Glen Coulthard has said of nation-to-nation models, such as the Two Row, “they assume the legitimacy of the ship—of the state’s economic, legal and political institutions that have destroyed the river and eroded the riverbank . . . In order to build a truly decolonized set of relationships grounded in respect and reciprocity we need to sink the ship” (np.) 10. Taiaiake Alfred writes, “The resurgence of this consciousness among our peoples is explosive in its potential to transform individuals and communities by altering conceptions of the self and of the self in relation to other peoples and the world. Its elements are the regeneration of an identity created out of the stories of this land, standing up for what is right, and restitution for harm that has been done so that we can wipe away the stain of colonialism” (Wasasé 131; see also Chapter 3 “Indigenous Resurgence,” pp. 179–282). 11. Tuscarora artist and intellectual, Jolene Rickard emphasizes the importance of reinvesting in an ancient Haudenosaunee imaginary as a distancing strategy from settler domination: “Tradition as resistance has served Indigenous people well, both as a response to contact and as a reworking of colonial narratives of the Americas” (qtd. in McCarthy 106). 12. See Rick Hill’s “Regenerating Identity: Repatriation and the Indian Frame of Mind” where he writes, “Leaders came to see the restoration of traditional cultural values as one of the most important avenues for enabling change. A stronger cultural base, it was thought, would provide Native people with a stronger sense of self, a stronger sense of place, and a stronger sense of destiny” (128). 13. Renowned Seneca thinker, John Mohawk, writes, “Traditionalism is not a ghost of the past; it is the wave of the future,” and goes on to explain, “It is a form of mobilization even when its motives do not seem to be overtly political, as in learning the language, learning to braid corn, or learning about the seasonal cycle of Longhouse ceremonies. . . . In today’s ongoing colonial context, any such work is a radical political act” (qtd. in McCarthy 19). Rick Monture concurs, “The Grand River Haudenosaunee are determined to resolve our differences with Canada, using our traditional philosophies to demonstrate the continued legitimacy of our principles” (217). 14. The condolence and requickening rituals are too elaborate and sophisticated to provide a proper account here. For discussions of these ceremonies and their ongoing impact in Haudenosaunee practices of mourning and renewal for leadership, see Taiaiake Alfred’s Peace, Power, and Righteousness, especially pp. xi–xxiii, and Rick Hill’s “The Restorative Aesthetic of Greg Staats.” Hill writes, “Through the Requickening, the grief of the past is laid to rest, the hearts and minds of the grieving are uplifted, and people can find their way back to a place of productivity” (2). 15. In a forthcoming essay, “The Ocean and the IKEA couch: Decolonizing Resilience,” Susie O’Brien discusses a range of Indigenous understandings (not just Haudenosaunee ones) that helpfully reposition the concept of resilience. Whereas neoliberal uses of resilience emphasize individual actions and capacities, she observes how Indigenous understandings of ecology place resilience within a more-than-human set of relationships. She examines a series of terms that recur in writings by Indigenous thinkers, including

The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 37 “resistance,” “rebellion,” “refusal,” and, especially, Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “survivance” (survival + resistance) (45–47). 16. About the reference to Confederacy nations as “older” and “younger” siblings or as “uncles” and “nephews,” Mohawk scholar Susan Hill writes, “It has also been suggested that the distinction between ‘older’ and ‘younger’ refers to the theory that the Oneidas were once part of the Mohawk Nation and that the Cayugas were once part of the Seneca Nation” (p. 256, note 55). 17. These reflections on the various concepts of “sibling” are drawn from a conversation I had with Tom Deer, Indigenous knowledge guardian at Deyohahá:ge: and fluent language speaker.

Works Cited A Basic Call to Consciousness. Edited by Akwesasne Notes, Native Voices, Division of Book Publishing Co., 2005 edition. Alfred, Taiaiake. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Oxford UP, 1999. ———. Wasáse: Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom. Broadview Press, 2005. Antone, Bob. “Rethinking the Two Row Wampum: Navigating the Space InBetween.” Webinar Presentation. Cultural Fluency Lecture Series, Number 5. Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre, Six Nations Polytechnic, 5 Feb. 2016, www.snpolytechnic.com/knowledge-centre/resources. Coleman, Daniel. “Toward an Indigenist Ecology of Knowledges for Canadian Literary Studies.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 37, no. 2, 2012, pp. 5–31. Coulthard, Glen. “ ‘Land is a Relationship’: In Conversation with Glen Coulthard on Indigenous Nationhood.” Interview by Harsha Walia. Rabble.ca, 21 Jan. 2015. Hallenbeck, Jessica. “Returning to the Water to Enact a Treaty Relationship: The Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign.” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 5, no. 4, 2015, pp. 350–362, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2014.1000909. Henderson, Jennifer, and Keith Denny. “The Resilient Child, Human Development and the ‘Postdemocracy’.” BioSocieties, advance online publication, 6 July 2015, doi:10.1057/biosoc.2015.24. Henderson, Sákéj. “Trans-Systemic Constitutionalism in Indigenous Law and Knowledge.” Critical Collaborations: Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Ecology in Canadian Literary Studies, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Christl Verduyn, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2014, pp. 49–68. Hill, Richard W. [Rick]. “Oral Memory of the Haudenosaunee: Views of the Two Row Wampum.” Indian Roots of American Democracy, edited by José Barreiro, Akwe:kon Press/Cornell UP, 1992, pp. 149–159. (Originally published in Northeast Indian Quarterly, vol. 7, no. 1 [Spring 1990]). ———. “Regenerating Identity: Repatriation and the Indian Frame of Mind.” The Future of the Past: Archeologists, Native Americans, and Repatriation, edited by Tamara L. Bray, Garland, 2001, pp. 127–138. ———. “Linking Arms: The Haudenosaunee Context of the Covenant Chain.” Mamow Be-Mo-Tay-Tah: Let Us Walk Together, edited by José Zárate and Norah McMurtry, Canadian Ecumenical Anti-Racism Network, The Canadian Council of Churches, 2009, pp. 17–24.

38  Daniel Coleman ———. “The Restorative Aesthetic of Greg Staats.” Greg Staats: Liminal Disturbance, McMaster Museum of Art, 2012, np, https://museum.mcmaster.ca/ wp-content/uploads/2015/02/staats_webbrochure.pdf. ———. War Clubs and Wampum Belts: Hodinöhsö:ni Experiences of the War of 1812. Woodland Cultural Centre, 2012. Hill, Susan. The Clay We Are Made of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River. U Manitoba P, 2017. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 1–23. McCarthy, Theresa. In Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River. U of Arizona P, 2016. Mohawk, John. “Prologue.” Iroquois Creation Story: John Arthur Gibson and J.N.B. Hewitt’s Myth of Earth Grasper, edited by John Mohawk, Mohawk Publications, 2005, pp. i–xix. Monture, Rick. We Share Our Matters: Two Centuries of Writing and Resistance at Six Nations of the Grand River. U Manitoba P, 2014. Obama, Barack. “Remarks by the President at Tribal Nations Conference.” The White House, 13 Nov. 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ the-press-office/2013/11/13/remarks-president-tribal-nations-conference. O’Brien, Susie. “ ‘As Much Death as We Can Manage’: Anti-Resilience and the Settler-Colonial State.” Unpublished paper delivered in the Departmental Colloquium series, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster, 15 Feb. 2017. ———. “The Ocean and the IKEA Couch: Decolonizing Resilience.” Unpublished paper, Jan. 2018. Parmenter, Jon. “The Meaning of Kaswentha and the Two Row Wampum Belt in Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) History: Can Indigenous Oral Tradition Be Reconciled with the Documentary Record?” Journal of Early American History, vol. 3, 2013, pp. 82–109, doi:10.1163/18770703-00301005. Richter, Daniel K. “Rediscovered Links in the Covenant Chain: Previously Unpublished Transcripts of New York Indian Treaty Minutes, 1677–1691.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, vol. 92, no. 1, 1982, pp. 45–85. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, et al. “Introduction: Opening Up the Canon of Knowledge and Recognition of Difference.” Another Knowledge Is Possible: Beyond Northern Epistemologies, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Verso, 2007, pp. xix–lxii. Simpson, Audra. Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke UP, 2014. Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge UP, 1995. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation.” Security Dialogue, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 143–160, doi:10.1177/0967010611399616. Williams, Paul. Keyanerenkó:wa: The Great Law of Peace. U of Manitoba P, 2018. Williams, Paul, and Curtis Nelson. “Kawswentha.” Jan. 1995. Research report prepared for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. For Seven Generations: An Information Legacy of the RCAP, Libraxus, 1997.

2 “The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” Decolonial Resilience in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle Susie O’Brien “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (King, Truth 92). Cherokee writer Thomas King’s often repeated statement from his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures echoes an idea shared by many Indigenous cultures about the foundational significance of stories to all of nature and, by extension, to the resilience of Indigenous people. Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark describes Anishinaabeg stories as “methods that teach us how to survive in an ever-changing environment . . . [T]hey are the greatest tools our people have to survive and live” (Doerfler et al. xxii). The concept of a fundamental connection between storytelling and resilience also informs Canadian nation building, including the project of reconciliation with Indigenous people. As “part of the linguistic capital of our nation” (Hare et al. 200), stories—including, and perhaps especially, Indigenous stories—are part of a liberal vision of Canada’s future in which cultural diversity provides resources for adapting to a rapidly changing global economy and environment. In this chapter, I consider the function of storytelling in two models of resilience: the dominant version, which works to manage the complexities of settler colonialism, and an alternative model, rooted in Indigenous knowledges, which supports struggles for decolonization. Both versions describe the capacity for individuals or systems to flourish in the face of change but with significant differences in their understanding of what or who persists in what kind of world. I read Thomas King’s 2014 novel The Back of the Turtle in conversation with his earlier comments about stories as a meditation on these contending versions of resilience and on the use and limits of stories for decolonization and planetary justice. In November 2017, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology to survivors of residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador.1 Accepting the Canadian government’s responsibility for “a dark and shameful chapter in our nation’s history,” he also praised survivors and their families, telling them, “Your resilience and your perseverance are evident through your actions every day.” He goes on to assert, By telling the story of Newfoundland and Labrador residential schools, we ensure that this history will never be forgotten. All Canadians

40  Susie O’Brien have much to learn from this story and we hope to hear you tell your s­tories—in your own way and in your own words—as this healing and commemoration process unfolds. Through this process, he asserts, “We will continue to advance the journey of reconciliation and healing together” (McIntyre). In Trudeau’s speech, the crucial mechanism for connecting and enhancing resilience and reconciliation is storytelling. In a way that is tenuously related to, but fundamentally distinct from, King’s and Stark’s theories of story, the discourse of postcolonial reconciliation ties storytelling and resilience together in a way that appears to (and in some instances might actually) cultivate the flourishing/well-being of Indigenous people, while also—I suggest primarily—working to secure the future of the settler-colonial state. Stories and storytelling perform this function in diverse ways: as tools in the psy-disciplines that emphasize individual healing over collective decolonization, as symbols of a stereotypical concept of Indigenous culture that likewise comes to stand in for political action, and, by extension, as resources for the project of (neo) liberal multiculturalism. In each of these modes, storytelling serves the conveniently capacious goal of resilience, which enlists Indigenous people in a settler-colonial vision of a prosperous Canadian future. In Trudeau’s speech, the content of “the story of Newfoundland and Labrador residential schools” seems to be straightforward and, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), at least superficially familiar. However, the assignment of agency is muddy: who is meant to be telling the stories? Who is meant to hear them, and to what end? The relation between storytelling and resilience in Trudeau’s account, and the role of storytelling in the nation’s “journey of reconciliation and healing,” raises questions about what, if anything, this process will accomplish for the Indigenous people of Newfoundland and Labrador who are—at least nominally—the addressees of the speech. This ambiguity is arguably not accidental: the power of stories, in Trudeau’s speech, lies in their capacity to suture together the resilience of storytellers (survivors), listeners (settlers), and the Canadian nation. The argument that storytelling fosters resilience for tellers reflects an understanding of trauma that distinguishes between negative events and how we respond to them. Simply put, “We do not need to be defined by the stuff that happens to us. What we do with that stuff will create the story of our lives” (Wener). The act of storytelling has emerged as a potent tool in adapting to adversity. Psychologist Boris Cyrulnik’s seminal work on resilience and trauma attests to the vital function of narrative “to give meaning to the sudden disaster as soon as possible in order not to remain in [a] state of confusion in which we can’t make any decisions because we don’t understand anything” (5). In sum, “Undertaking the task of resilience means once again shedding light on the world and

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 41 giving it back its coherence. The tool that makes this possible is called narration” (37). The suggestion that storytelling can promote resilience is not simply confirmation of the adage “mind over matter”; many commentators stress that the health boost storytelling provides has a physical component. Psychological research confirms the salutary effects of storytelling on the brain, and several health studies suggest that writing about traumatic experiences can work to strengthen the immune system (East et al.; Petrie et al.). In her much-publicized work on resilience after the unexpected death of her husband, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg compares resilience to a muscle and attests to the power of storytelling in building it. These accounts of storytelling and resilience all share a distinction between outward circumstances and inner resources. Resilience is the measure by which storytelling translates not only into a repertoire of positive feelings or mental strategies but also as a foundation for total fitness, a means of enlarging the self. Of course, as Trudeau’s speech suggests, the positive effects of stories are not confined to tellers. Some studies find that narrating past stressful experience, “even just to an unknown reader,” fosters resilience (Spiegel 1329). Others place stronger emphasis on the relation between the storyteller and their audience. Drawing on the pioneering work of sociologist Arthur Frank, practitioners of narrative medicine have argued that “storytelling is a method that can celebrate survival and contribute to the resilience of storyteller, listener and others who engage with the story in subsequent published accounts” (East et al. 23). Neuropsychological evidence of the ability of storytelling to effect change in the minds of listeners (Mar et al.; Yuan et al.) has, not surprisingly, been eagerly embraced by professionals in a number of contexts, particularly marketing and public relations (Aaker and Smith; Graves). To a markedly different end, belief in the transformative power of stories as an instrument of “intercommunal empathy” also underwrites processes of postcolonial reconciliation (Aiken 88). Canada’s TRC proceeded on the assumption of “the importance of stories in helping us to understand our shared histories” (Reconciliation Canada). In the framework of this project, “stories” signify more expansively than they do in the therapeutic context: more than painful personal testimonies whose expression may bring about healing for tellers and listeners, “stories,” broadly understood, operate as metonyms of the diversity of experiences and cultures that define multicultural Canada. In an essay on digital storytelling and reconciliation, a group of Indigenous and settler educators suggest that the TRC “demonstrates the power of stories to engage all Canadians in what defines and challenges us as a nation,” and go on to assert, “Indigenous storytelling and ways of knowing can play an important part in reimagining a multilingual Canada in the twenty-first century” (Hare et al. 200). This testimony to the cultural significance

42  Susie O’Brien of Indigenous storytelling resonates with Trudeau’s appeal to residential school survivors in Newfoundland and Labrador that “all Canadians have much to learn from this story and we hope to hear you tell your stories—in your own way and in your own words” (Trudeau qtd. in McIntyre). In this process, through which Canadians “will continue to advance the journey of reconciliation and healing together,” storytelling becomes an important resource for realizing the ideal of postcolonial nationhood (McIntyre). I have suggested that the subject of storytelling is slippery in Trudeau’s speech, moving between Indigenous tellers, settler listeners, and the Canadian people more broadly. This multivalence speaks to the different ways Indigenous storytelling is understood to cultivate resilience and reconciliation (and resilience through reconciliation) through healing, the cultivation of empathy, and the strengthening of multiculturalism. Another ambiguity in the speech occurs in the passage just quoted, where Trudeau shifts in the same sentence from talking about “this story” (from which “all Canadians have much to learn”) and “your stories—in your own way and in your words” (Trudeau, qtd. in McIntyre). Taken together with the slippage that joins Indigenous voices together with the project of postcolonial nation building, the casual substitution of “stories” with “story” highlights the colonial impulse that, under the banner of reconciliation, joins storytelling and resilience. The previous analysis points to the ambivalent implications of Western conventions of stories and storytelling. On the one hand, narrating experiences of suffering can be powerfully transformative for both storytellers and listeners, as several contributors to this collection have pointed out.2 And storytelling for marginalized groups can offer powerful correctives to official histories that ignore or deny their experiences. The truth and reconciliation process in Canada offered a mechanism for these positive functions of narrative. On the other hand, many critics have challenged the celebratory rhetoric that surrounds the concept of “sharing” personal testimonies. Aritha van Herk, drawing on Francine Prose, challenges the assumption that that “sharing pain will relieve sorrow or damage . . . as if ‘share’ were remedial, a curative for harm,” and goes on to suggest that “there is little reconciliation possible in that verb, an apportioning that does not measure reparation at all” (“Lies and Reparation,” this collection). More concretely, in relation to the TRC, Jeff ­Corntassel, Chaw-win-is and T’lakwadzi stress that “processes of restorying and truth-telling are not effective without some large, community-centred, decolonizing actions behind them” (Corntassel et al. 139). Of the truthtelling process itself, Paulette Regan observes that it can appropriate[e] survivors’ pain in voyeuristic ways that enable nonIndigenous people to feel good about feeling bad but engender no critical awareness of themselves as colonial beneficiaries who bear

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 43 a responsibility to address the inequities and injustices from which they have profited. (48) Allison Hargreaves similarly calls for a reassessment of the function of “the telling of painful stories” within reconciliation processes as “sometimes bolstering, rather than straightforwardly dismantling, white supremacy” (107). Focusing on the role of storytelling in feminist antiracist projects in particular, she acknowledges that, while telling stories can be empowering for racialized women and command attention to marginalized knowledges (108), the storytelling approach to anti-racist work “risks positioning Indigenous women and women of colour as objects of allegedly ‘authentic’ cultural knowledge whose experience of discrimination can be consumed as an educational exercise for the benefit of white interlocutors” (109). In this process, stories of marginalized others constitute a form of cultural capital for those who consume them, thereby contributing to the process of strengthening Canadian multiculturalism. The value attached to storytelling within the framework of reconciliation does not derive only from the psy-disciplines’ understanding of the role of narrative in fostering resilience; it also speaks to the humanist conception of stories as vehicles for moral training and the expansion of the imagination, and, increasingly, part of the (multi)cultural resource industry that shapes the Canadian liberal (and Liberal) brand and fosters its social and economic development.3 The settler-colonialist inflection of Canadian multiculturalism places special value on Indigenous culture in general and storytelling in particular. Superficially, this focus might look like an affirmation of the centrality of stories to Indigenous life; in practice, it arguably reinforces colonialism by simultaneously upholding stereotypes of traditional Indigenous culture and framing storytelling within neoliberal models of resilience. Both practices are evident in a 2003 Health Canada report, “Acting on What We Know,” which tackles the problem of Indigenous youth suicide. Highlighting the value of culture, the report favorably notes that “tak[ing] up traditional and modern legends, stories and songs . . . mak[es] [First Nations Youth] feel more competent and useful as a result” (Health Canada 91). Stories are instrumentalized in the report, disembedded from the human and nonhuman relationships they express and reduced to tools for enhancing productive capacity. The celebration of Indigenous stories is part of a discourse of cultural resurgence, which Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and others have described as distinct from, if not antithetical to, the project of radical resurgence associated with decolonization (Coulthard). “Cultural resurgence,” Simpson notes, can take place within the current settler colonial structure of Canada because it is not concerned with dispossession, whereas political

44  Susie O’Brien resurgence is seen as a direct threat to settler sovereignty. From within Indigenous thought, however, the cultural and the political are joined and inseparable, and they are both generated through place-based practices—practices that require land. (49–50) Official recognition of Indigenous culture, including storytelling, can operate not only as a distraction from continuing practices of land theft but also as a means of facilitating those practices. As an example of this dynamic, we can consider the mechanism for Indigenous participation in the 2012–2013 Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline, planned to carry diluted bitumen from Alberta to Kitimat, British Columbia. At hearings conducted by the National Energy Board to gather public input, Indigenous groups were offered the opportunity “to present evidence that doesn’t lend itself to written submissions, such as traditional stories spoken by elders” (Penner). Procedural directions (established without consultation with Indigenous groups), determined that such evidence could not include “technical and scientific information,” “opinions, views, information or perspectives of others,” or “any questions you want answered by the Applicant or the Panel or rhetorical questions” (Joint Review Panel 28755). Under the guise of validating Indigenous stories, the Joint Review Panel exemplifies the colonial framework that negates the meaning of those stories and the knowledges they express. At the same time as the directions deny aspects of storytelling fundamental to Indigenous traditions, such as an emphasis on collective experience (i.e., drawing on “opinions, views, information or perspectives of others”) and inviting responses from listeners, they also consign Indigenous culture to a “traditional” space outside and prior to other forms of knowledge.4 The rule barring references to “technical and scientific information” does not just limit the scope of information presenters can use to mount challenges to pipelines; it also reinforces a colonial stereotype of Indigenous stories as static, rooted in the past, and impervious to the world in which they circulate. The Northern Gateway Pipeline received government approval in 2014. Though they canceled the project shortly after their 2016 election win, following a campaign that featured the promise of a new nationto-nation relationship with Indigenous people, the Liberal government defended their approval of others, including the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline expansion,5 as essential to the nation’s future. The National Resources website explains, “The goal is to have a robust system that protects Canada’s rich natural environment, respects the rights of Indigenous peoples, and supports a resilient and sustainable energy sector” (Canada). While this conception of national resilience might appear to be at odds with the kind of resilience that Prime Minister Trudeau attributes to Indigenous storytelling, the two conceptions of resilience

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 45 are actually complementary: in the Liberal view of Canada, postcolonial reconciliation and multiculturalism (and the conviction that the former will enhance the latter) are central to economic growth. The reference to Indigenous peoples on the National Resources website reflects the process of the Joint Review Panel, whose perceived legitimacy depends on Indigenous stories—as long as their form, content, terms of delivery, and meaning conform to settler-colonial conventions. These conventions contribute in distinct but complementary ways to the subjectification of Indigenous people, who are interpellated in some contexts (e.g., the TRC) as liberal subjects, encouraged to speak their truths, and in others (e.g., the Joint Review Panel) as the bearers of an archaic culture whose only chance for preservation lies in its incorporation, in the form of artifacts such as stories, into the dominant culture. Thus, in the Enbridge judicial review, Indigenous stories are symbols of a world outside of and prior to capitalism, which can be harvested to soften, and thus to sanction, its power. Understood through this lens, the inclusion of Indigenous oral testimony in the Joint Review Process is not at odds but rather consonant with the expansion of the oil industry. *** In the remainder of this chapter, a reading of Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle will offer an alternative vision of the relation between storytelling and Indigenous resilience.6 One of the plots in this multistranded novel concerns a story. It is a story about the creation of a defoliant called GreenSweep that was designed to clear land to build oil pipelines, which caused the destruction of a British Columbia watershed. There is a question throughout much of the novel about whether the central actor in the story—Gabriel Quinn, the scientist who developed the product, which ended up killing his mother and sister, along with many of the other inhabitants of the town of Samaritan Bay and the Smoke River Reserve—will decide to tell it or not. The meaning of stories in King’s novel departs from the settler-colonial understanding discussed earlier in a number of ways. First, stories are not self-contained symbolic forms but rooted in the places and network of relationships (human and more than human) in which they are told. Second, stories are not static repositories of ideas or representations of events in the past. They work, rather, to bind history, present and future together, honoring ancestors and offering templates for navigating an uncertain future. Third, storytelling is a material practice that implicates listeners and readers in roles of active responsibility for the stories’ meaning. From these follow another important difference: in King’s novel, stories are not simply tools or resources to foster resilience; they are manifestations of it. At the beginning of the novel, Quinn has come to Samaritan Bay to commit suicide. He walks out into the ocean at low tide to a rock, where

46  Susie O’Brien he plans to sit, singing and drumming a death chant, until the water pulls him under. As the tide rises, the body of a girl brushes up against him, followed by others. He pulls them all up onto the rocks and they begin singing too, while clinging together in the fog. The tide turns again, and by the time he returns to the beach, the people have disappeared. Interrupted by the task of rescuing the mysterious drowning people, Gabriel finds his suicide plans repeatedly deferred by his growing entanglement with the lives of the few surviving inhabitants of Samaritan Bay: Mara, an Indigenous artist; Sonny, the son of the deceased motel manager, whose spends his days collecting salvage from the beach; Nicholas Crisp, a goatlike, red-bearded man of indeterminate age and archaic expressions, and Soldier, a dog who appears suddenly in Gabriel’s rented trailer and follows him around everywhere. The backstories of all these characters gradually emerge. Mara is mourning the deaths of her mother and grandmother, and the destruction of the Smoke River Reserve where she grew up; Sonny is grappling with the death (or disappearance) of Dad, whose collection of decrees Sonny struggles to makes sense of and to live by: “That which is to be, shall be. Life is a mystery. The only way to understand existence is through faith, not curiosity” (55). Dad was the brother of Nicholas Crisp, whose life is as lusty, joyful, and curiositydriven as Dad’s was apparently abstemious and rule bound. Soldier, the dog whose provenance is mysterious for most of the novel,7 offers solace, guidance, and opinions to different characters as needed. As the lives of these characters come together, gradually incorporating Gabriel, the question of whether he will follow through on his suicide plan gets tied to the question of whether the town itself will come back to life, whether other human survivors will return and whether plants and animals (particularly turtles) will flourish again. In counterpoint with the Samaritan Bay part of the novel in which stories work to knit together people and land, recalling the past and laying out a path for the future, is a plotline based in Toronto, focused on Dorian Asher, the CEO of Domidion, the company that developed GreenSweep. With that chemical’s accidental, catastrophic unleashing lurking uneasily in the past, the company’s current challenges are its leaking tailing ponds in the Alberta tar sands and a barge carrying toxic waste that, in its quest to find a place willing to accept its poisonous cargo, has somehow gone missing. Storytelling plays an important part in the management of Dorian’s and his company’s problems. Dorian’s view of himself as a strong and vigorous business leader draws (farcical) inspiration from action movie heroes like James Bond and the quintessentially masculine roles played by John Wayne and James Cagney. He also prides himself on being able to control his own narrative, which is inseparable from the Domidion brand and, in the current moment, focused on damage control driven by the mantra, “If you can’t convince them, confuse them” (440). The project of harnessing stories for profit finds institutional support in

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 47 the establishment of the Domidion School of Business and Media Communications in a local university, a “major partnership with the Humanities,” incorporating English, sociology, and psychology, and (pointedly) excluding the departments of philosophy, fine art, and history (57). This exclusion highlights the absence of ethics and aesthetics from the corporate model of storytelling, as well as its detachment from the material world (57). In contrast to the deracinated model of storytelling Dorian embraces, it is Gabriel’s journey to Samaritan Bay, and his eventual reluctant walk to the Kali Creek bed where the GreenSweep disaster began, that enables him to tell the story of his role in the events that came to be known as the Ruin. His story is not only a personal confession, whose meaning is enhanced by a return to the scene of the crime. Rather, the GreenSweep disaster is one part of a larger story involving Gabriel’s mistake of seeing himself as an autonomous agent, insulated from the world during his tenure as head of biological oversight at Domidion, by his perceived superior intelligence and “the quiet calm of numbers and symbols” (446). This story is connected to his alienation from family, place, and history— a relationship that can only be restored by the telling of another story: the creation story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky.” In this story, Sky Woman fell through a hole in the sky toward the earth, which at that time was only water. Because she was not a water creature, birds helped her to land on the back of a turtle. Safe for the moment, she also happened to be pregnant, and soon needed more space to accommodate her children (twin boys, one right-handed, the other left-handed). She was saved once again, this time by muskrat, who dove down into the water and returned with a ball of mud, which, together with the turtle’s back, forms the beginning of the land.8 The story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky,” which reverberates throughout the novel (beginning with its title) conveys the importance to its narrative of what Vanessa Watts calls Place-Thought. Drawing on the Haudenosaunee version of the Sky Woman story, Watts points to a vital aspect of Indigenous cosmology that settler-colonial culture fails to grasp: where European philosophy distinguishes between epistemology and ontology, legitimizing the abstraction of knowledge from materiality, in Indigenous thought, epistemology and ontology are inseparable: meaning is rooted in, and emanates from, the physical world. Place-Thought expresses the recognition “that land is alive and thinking and that humans and nonhumans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (Watts 21). Crisp confirms this principle in his observation that the Sky Woman story “comes with the land, and the two are forever wedded” (222). When Crisp and Mara tell this story at his birthday party, Gabriel claims not to know it (222), a lie that is in its own way as consequential as his silence about his complicity in the devastation of the land. In fact, he remembers the story well from his childhood, when his mother would

48  Susie O’Brien enlist him and his sister Lily in the telling of it. His pretense of ignorance is tangled up in his silence about his family, including his traumatic separation from his mother and sister, when he and his father moved to the United States. By the time he tracks them down to the Smoke River reserve at Samaritan Bay, where his mother grew up, and to which she had returned with Lily and Lily’s son, Riel, they have all been killed by the toxin that he created. Gabriel’s alienation from his family is tied to (perhaps precipitates) his detachment from the land and his participation in its ruin. His claim not to know the Sky Woman story emblematizes these layers of estrangement; his eventual, hesitant, participation in the telling along with Mara and Crisp is an important step in his accepting responsibility for what he has done, embracing his Indigeneity, and finding community in place. The story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” signifies in the novel as a form of traditional knowledge, passed on through generations, and bound up in more-than-human relations. However, unlike the concept of oral testimony sanctioned by the Northern Gateway pipeline hearing, which understood Indigenous knowledge to consist largely of “traditional stories spoken by elders,” uncontaminated by references to science, conversations with living people, or questions, the story in King’s novel, while rooted in the past, provides the spiritual scaffolding for navigating present struggles. Crisp emphasizes the foundational significance of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” by explaining to Gabriel: “We tell that story here each year as a reminder” (222). Mara highlights the ordinariness and contemporary relevance of the story by starting it with a segue: “It was on a night such as this” (223). Crisp echoes this opening later when he tells Gabriel “A day it was, much like today. That’s how it all began” (386). The day he is referring to is the day of the Ruin, but the story is oddly meandering. After starting, he corrects himself: “I’ve messed the story up again, for she don’t start on a day like this at all. She starts as life herself starts. In the water” (386). He then proceeds to describe an ill-fated adventure in which he swam out too far (“ ‘I let my pride rule my prudence. There it is. The fatal flaw’ ” (387) and is saved by what he thinks is a log but is actually a dog: Soldier. The reference to a fatal flaw obliquely alludes to Gabriel’s own weakness, while the story of being saved from the water recalls both Gabriel’s salvation on the rocks, when he meets the mysterious sea people, and the story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky,” in which she was saved by the birds and the turtle. Scattered references to castaways and fugitives (225, 489–490) invite a reading of that story focused not on creation but on rescue. The latter aspect comes into clearer focus when we learn that the mysterious sea people were not, as Gabriel imagined, ghosts of the First People, but the Taiwanese crew of the missing Domidion freighter, which has foundered in the stormy seas near Samaritan Bay. The hospitality Mara, Gabriel, and Crisp offer to them echoes an earlier Indigenous encounter

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 49 with foreigners that did not turn out so well. The story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” doesn’t promise a happy outcome; in fact, the birth of her twins, the right-handed one a force for order and the lefthanded a force for chaos, guarantees that things will be uneven. And there is enough ambiguity in the novel’s allusions to the creation story (is Gabriel the left-handed twin? Or is it Crisp, whose brother, Sonny’s Dad, resembles the Christian God? Or is Dad actually the embodiment of chaos and Crisp the force of creative order?) that mistakes are inevitable, and it is not clear where meaning lies, except maybe in the celebration of life which, by the end of the novel, is “pushing back, filling the vacuum as it has always filled the empty spaces in the world” (345) (though given the troubling fallout of historical projects to populate “empty spaces in the world,” we should be cautious about embracing even this idea as truth: morals, unlike stories, have a habit of hardening into dangerous orthodoxies). Further confounding the reification of the creation story is the way it flows, in the novel, into other stories and creative practices, including movie and literary references, traditional songs, and Mara’s paintings of the former residents of the Smoke River reserve. Most notably, the story of Sky Woman itself has shifted from its real-world location in the Haudenosaunee territory of the northeast to the west coast, where Mara and Gabriel are from.9 The novel invites us to read this shift not as a violation of Place-Thought but an amplification of it, to address a world in which the consequences of local actions (e.g., the unleashing of a toxic chemical) reverberates across the planet. In such a world, stories can play a role something like the tower Sonny builds on the beach out of salvage to summon the turtles home (292): they are beacons—guides for the lost—that are themselves composed of lost and broken things. Sonny’s confusion about the distinction between “salvage” and “salvation” (28) conveys the novel’s suggestion that the latter is a rescue not from the physical world but by it. The story of “The Woman Who Fell from the Sky” can thus be read as a template not for a long distant beginning, but for a dynamic of reciprocity, extending from the land and animals to humans.10 As noted earlier, this story (and stories in general) is not reducible to a message, or set of rules, conveyed in its content. As Sonny realizes when he is building his tower: “Once the foundation is straight and true and well laid, he can be creative with his materials. He can be artistic. Sonny realizes that there is no reason that the tower can’t be strong and functional and beautiful as well” (292). Stories are defined by their form as much as by their theme, and the form conveys creative movement within a set of aesthetic principles. Indigenous aesthetics, Simpson suggests, “Enact affirmative and generative forms of refusal” (200) and include elements of multidimensionality, which describes in part “an organization of time and space that’s different than the colonial world’s” (201)

50  Susie O’Brien and presencing: a process by which Indigenous artistic expression constitutes a physical intervention in the settler-colonial world (203, italics in original). The physicality of storytelling extends to the circumstances in which it happens, enlisting teller and listeners together in relations of mutual implication. These relations extend beyond the kind of therapeutic or reconciliatory process Trudeau alludes to in his description of the benefits of residential school survivor testimonies, which understands both (Indigenous) teller and (settler) listener as self-contained individuals for whom the story constructs a bridge of empathy. In The Back of the Turtle, stories don’t express or consolidate individual identities.11 Though telling the story of his role in the GreenSweep disaster is a necessary step for Gabriel to accept responsibility, it is, significantly, not his story: when he acquiesces to Mara’s request to tell her the story of why he came home by saying, “I’m the reason for all of this,” Mara responds drily “Rather ambitious, don’t you think? . . . Responsible for all of creation?” (447). Mara herself rejects such grandiose ideas of agency in her own art, which expresses her realization that “people weren’t single, autonomous entities. They were part of a larger organism” (189). The correlation of that fact is that “when her mother and grandmother were alive, Mara had flourished. Now that they were dead, she was diminished” (189). Like Gabriel, Mara was away when the Ruin happened. Her grief, like his, is compounded by shame, which is both singular and infused with the damage of colonialism. Storytelling in that context is not simply a recollection of a pure, precolonial past, nor is it a simple memory of pain or a confession of guilt. It is the articulation of brokenness within the embrace of a familiar form that is part spirituality, part aesthetics, and part hospitality to something new. This form finds concrete expression in the scene of Crisp’s birthday party, at which Crisp leaves out food for anyone who wants it, including those who take it quietly and disappear into the night. Crisp explains, “Each year on my birthday, I set the table and open the pools, and they come and go as they please, alone and in darkness.” “But they survived,” said Gabriel. “And that’s the sin they live with,” said Crisp. “So what are we supposed to do?” “Finish our story,” said Crisp. “There ain’t nothing to do but finish our story. Now where were we?” Mara slid back into the water. “On the back of a turtle.” (226–227) In The Back of the Turtle, storytelling helps to create the conditions for living on in the years to come, which start with responsibly inhabiting the devastation of the present. It offers a vision of resilience strikingly

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 51 different from the dominant conception, held by Dorion, which combines devotion to self-preservation with conviction in the inevitability of capitalist resource exploitation. His belief that “it is common knowledge that the body [is] very efficient at healing itself” (397) fuels frantic efforts to ward off illness through exercise, while he responds to Domidion’s oil spills with platitudes: “The river would eventually clean itself” (303), and “The price of freedom is energy” (307). Dorion’s conception of resilience is defined by freedom, from place, from the past, and from obligation to other people. It is consistent with his belief that “Everything we do, all of us, . . . is in pursuit of profit” (79). The novel offers an alternative view of resilience, rooted in Indigenous knowledge, in which the adaptive capacity of humans depends on the health of the land. The practice of storytelling, with the story of Sky Woman at its foundation, is part of the restoration of that capacity.12 This Indigenous-centered practice resists incorporation into the politics of recognition that informs the settler-colonial embrace of Indigenous storytelling—an embrace that encompasses, in different contexts, personal testimonies of residential school survivors and traditional stories —and maybe also novels that playfully skewer Western literary conventions.13 The Back of the Turtle highlights the more-than-human foundations of Indigenous resilience and the importance of stories in animating this connection. The novel also exposes the vulnerability of the land and those who live on it to ongoing practices of extractivism. Listening to Indigenous stories as an alibi for those practices—sometimes, as in the pipeline hearings, in the very process of their consolidation—has become part of the careful balancing act that defines the (neo)liberal vision of Canada. Undoing the dynamic of colonialism will require a different kind of listening on the part of settlers, attuned to hearing both more and otherwise than convention dictates. Hearing more in Indigenous stories means recognizing that they are not resources for individual or national empowerment but rather living embodiments of spiritual and material relations. Hearing more also means recognizing settlers’ own participation in stories about colonialism, as beneficiaries of ongoing practices of cultural, political, and economic displacement: as a tenured white academic in a Canadian university, I recognize my own role in this dynamic. At the same time, hearing otherwise, as a settler, means resisting the temptation to read Indigenous stories entirely through the lens of settler guilt so that I read myself as antihero (recall Gabriel’s self-important confession: “ ‘I’m the reason for all of this’ ” [447]). The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain, the focus of Daniel Coleman’s chapter in this collection, serves as a reminder to settlers that not all stories are about us or for us, though many may be freely shared. It is also important not to strategically misread Thomas King’s words: stories, in the settler-colonial sense, are not all we are; it is not enough to listen to them, however empathetically and respectfully.

52  Susie O’Brien Decolonial resilience can only be fostered through the restoration of the land on which Indigenous futures (and the future of all of life on earth) depends. This story has yet to unfold.

Notes 1. Though Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, had issued a formal apology to residential school survivors in 2008, the government at that time claimed that Canada’s responsibility did not extend to Newfoundland and Labrador, whose establishment of residential schools predated their incorporation into the Canadian Confederation in 1949. 2. Focusing on novels by Indian writers Meena Kandasamy and Anuradha Roy, Jorge Diego Sánchez demonstrates the role of storytelling in effecting healing and resistance for survivors of sexual violence, while Kit Dobson suggests, in his analysis of Ruth Ozeki’s novel A Tale for the Time Being, that “storying beings into being is a form of care, a form of collective resilience.” María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena explores the capacity of the generically hybrid form of the graphic novel to give voice and visibility to the experiences of homeless people. 3. The idea that “strength and resilience flow through Canadian diversity” reverberates through Trudeau’s speeches (Trudeau, qtd. in Campion-Smith et al.). 4. In an article that trenchantly analyzes these restrictions, Patricia AudetteLongo also highlights the capacity of prayer, which Indigenous participants were permitted to offer at the opening and closing of hearings, to subvert them. 5. Carrying crude oil from Alberta to refineries in British Columbia, the expanded pipeline would cross 15 Indigenous territories, including 518 km of unceded Secwepemc land (RAVEN). 6. The reading of the novel cannot stand in for a detailed discussion of what stories and storytelling mean in Indigenous cultures. Not only do practices differ significantly between cultures but also, even within cultures, there are different kinds of story. In Anishinaabe culture, for example, aandisokaanan (sacred stories) and dibajimowninan (personal stories) work in different ways and contexts to communicate ideas that are central to the culture (Simpson 32). 7. Soldier bears a not-coincidental resemblance to the boxer who appeared (and died) in King’s 2000 novel, Truth and Bright Water, while Sonny was a character in the short story, “The Garden Court Motor Hotel.” 8. This summary presents just the barest outlines of the story presented in the novel, an already simplified rendition of a narrative that, as Vanessa Watts notes, “can sometimes take days to describe” (21). 9. Thanks to Daniel Coleman for drawing my attention to, and prompting me to ponder the significance of, the story’s dislocation. 10. This view of stories resonates with Leanne Simpson’s view of how Nishnaabeg stories contribute to the project of radical resurgence, working “as algorithm, as coded processes that generate solutions to the problems of occupation and erasure and to life on earth” (As We Have Always Done 34). 11. In her chapter in this collection, Aritha van Herk offers an important qualification to the emphasis here and in other chapters in this collection (Dobson, Darias-Beautell, Cruz-Suárez) on the value of collective vs. individual storytelling for the cultivation of resilience. Noting that “[e]very life, at unexpected moments, endures body blows that can be both invisible and completely crippling” (193), Van Herk reminds us that “while critiques of neoliberalism rightly identify the dangers of individualism, there is danger

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 53 too in circumventing or obfuscating the specific and personal pain of humans who suffer and survive hurt and trauma” (193). 12. Though I am terming that capacity “resilience,” Daniel Coleman points out in his chapter in this volume that the word does not feature in the traditional thought of many Indigenous cultures. Rather, they conceptualize flourishing in a range of other ways that correspond more closely to English words such as “resurgence, resistance, restoration, regeneration, traditionalism, condolence, requickening, refusal, and interruption” (35). Perhaps the most potent counterpoint to resilience in the context of this paper is Anishinaabe writer and critic Gerald Vizenor’s concept of “survivance,” a principle of active being and becoming that is irreducible to mere individual survival and is connected directly to narrative. 13. In addition to winning the Governor General’s award and being featured on the CBC Canada Reads program, King’s fiction has been enthusiastically taken up by postcolonial literary critics in spite (or maybe because) of his stated suspicion of postcolonialism (“Godzilla”).

Works Cited Aaker, Jennifer and Andy Smith. The Dragonfly Effect: Quick, Effective, and Powerful Ways to Use Social Media to Drive Social Change. Jossey-Bass, 2010. Aiken, Nevin T. Identity, Reconciliation and Transitional Justice: Overcoming Intractability in Divided Societies. Routledge, 2013. Campion-Smith, Bruce, Alex Boutilier, and Alex Ballingal. “This Is Canada. This is Home”. The Toronto Star. 1 July 2017. Coleman, Daniel. “The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty and TransSystemic Resilience.” Glocal Narratives of Resilience, edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2020, pp. 21–38. Corntassel, Jeff, Chaw-win-is and T’lakwadzi. “Indigenous Storytelling, TruthTelling and Community Approaches to Reconciliation.” English Studies in Canada, vol. 35, no. 1, 2009, pp. 137–159. Cyrulnik, Boris. The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience. Translated by Susan Fairfield, Other Press, 2005. Doerfler, Jill, et al. “Bagijige: Making an Offering.” Centering Anishinaabeg Studies: Understanding the World Through Stories, edited by Jill Doerfler, et al., Michigan State U and U of Manitoba P, 2013, pp. xv–xxvii. East, Leah, et al. “Storytelling: An Approach That Can Help to Develop Resilience.” Nurse Researcher, vol. 17, no. 3, 2010, pp. 17–23. Fraile-Marcos, Ana María, editor. Global Narratives of Resilience. Routledge, 2020. Frank, Arther. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics. U of Chicago P, 1995. Graves, Christopher. “Brain, Behavior, Story: Why Public Relations Needs to Return to Its Scientific Roots.” Ogilvy Public Relations, Ogilvy and Mather, 2014. Hare, Jan, et al. “Digital Storytelling and Reconciliation.” Reflections of Canada: Illuminating Our Opportunities and Challenges at 150+ Years, edited by Phillipe Tortell, et al., Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Education, 2017, pp. 200–205. Hargreaves, Allison. “Compelling Disclosures: Colonial Violence and the Narrative Imperative in Feminist Anti-Violence Discourse and Indigenous Women’s Writing.” Canadian Women’s Studies, vol. 27, nos. 2–3, 2009, pp. 107–113.

54  Susie O’Brien Health Canada. Acting on What We Know: Preventing Youth Suicide in First Nations. The Report of the Advisory Group on Suicide Prevention. Health Canada, 2003, file:///Users/susieobrien/Dropbox/resilience/postcolonial%20 resilience/Acting%20on%20What%20we%20Know.pdf. Henderson, Jennifer, and Keith Denny. “The Resilient Child, Human Development and the ‘Postdemocracy’.” Biosocieties, July 2015, pp. 1–27. Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project. Hearing Order OH-4–2011. Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project, vol. 39, Bella Bella, BC, 5 Apr. 2012. King, Thomas, editor. All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction. McClelland, 1990. ———. “Godzilla vs. the Postcolonial.” World Literature Written in English, vol. 30, 1990, pp. 10–16. ———. Truth and Bright Water. Harper, 2000. ———. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi, 2003. ———. “The Garden Court Hotel.” A Short History of Indians in Canada. U of Minnesota P, 2013, pp. 90–99. ———. The Back of the Turtle. HarperCollins, 2014. Mar, Raymond. “The Neural Basis of Social Cognition and Story Comprehension.” Annual Review of Psychology, vol. 62, 2011, pp. 103–134. McIntyre, Catherine. “Read Justin Trudeau’s Apology to Residential School Survivors in Newfoundland.” Macleans, 24 Nov. 2017, http://cort.as/-JrKS. Million, Dian. Therapeutic Nation: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights. Arizona UP, 2013. Penner, Derrick. “Public Hearings on Enbridge’s Northern Gateway Pipeline to Begin Jan. 10.” Vancouver Sun, 4 Mar. 2012. Petrie, Keith J., et al. “Effects of Written Emotional Expression on Immune Function in Patients with Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection: A Randomized Trial.” Psychosomatic Medicine, vol. 66, no. 2, 2004, pp. 272–275. “Pipelines Across Canada.” Natural Resources Canada, 25 July 2016. www. nrcan.gc.ca/energy/infrastructure/18856. RAVEN. The People vs. Kinder Morgan (video). Bullrush. RAVEN (Respecting Aboriginal Voices and Needs) 2017. https://raventrust.com/2017/04/09/meet-thenations-fighting-kinder-morgan/ Reconciliation Canada. “Impact Stories.” Reconciliation Canada—A New Way Forward Society, n.d. Regan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada. UBC Press, 2010. Robin, Libby. “Resilience in the Anthropocene: A Biography.” Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities, edited by Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman, Routledge, 2014, pp. 45–63. Rose, Nikolas. “Psychiatry as Political Science: Advanced Liberalism and the Administration of Risk.” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 9, no. 2, 1996, pp. 1–23. Sandberg, Sheryl. “How to Build Resilient Kids, Even After a Loss.” New York Times, 24 Apr. 2017. Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

“The Story You Don’t Want to Tell” 55 Spiegel, David. “Healing Words: Emotional Expression and Disease Outcome.” Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 281, no. 4, 1999, pp. 1328–1329. Trudeau, Justin, Prime Minister of Canada. “Diversity is Canada’s Strength.” 26 Nov. 2015, Canada House, London. Speech. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Appendix 1: The Mandate of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Schedule N of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015, pp. 339–351. Van Herk, Aritha. “Lies and Reparation: Palliative or Poison.” Glocal Narratives of Resilience, edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2020, pp. 192–203. Vizenor, Gerald. “Gerald Vizenor: The Trickster Heirs of Columbus.” Interview with Laura Coltelli. Native American Literature Forum, vol. 2–3, 1990–91, pp. 101–116. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation.” Security Dialogue, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 143–161. Watts, Vanessa. “Indigenous Place-Thought & Agency Amongst Humans and Nonhumans (First Woman and Sky Woman Go on a European World Tour!).” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 2013, pp. 20–34. Yuan, Ye, Judy Major-Girardin, and Steven Brown. “Storytelling Is Intrinsically Mentalistic: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Narrative Production across Modalities.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, vol. 30, no. 9, 2018, pp. 1298–1315. Wener, Susan. “Resilience Through Storytelling.” The Walrus Talks Resilience, 13 Apr. 2016, Concordia U, Montreal. Talk.

3 Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design Pre-Columbian Cultures and Resilient Strategies in Interactive Narrative Devices Daniel Escandell-Montiel Introduction: Cultural Appropriation in the Video Game Industry The video game industry is one of the most globalized businesses in the world: current development of high-budget video games requires years of work with teams of hundreds of people all around the world. However, this is an entertainment industry that, in its history, has indulged in many instances of cultural appropriation and several controversies due to racial and cultural iconography. I will analyze how some Indigenous and current Latin American cultures have been represented in this industry, from xenophobic approaches to culture appropriation, and how, more recently, these minoritized groups have developed resilience strategies to reclaim control over how they are represented in public discourse. Certainly, there have been many debates over cultural appropriation, but sometimes these are artificial, pushed by political (but naïve) agendas pretending to be oversensitive. This only promotes poorly oriented backlash and fake anger in the theatrum mundi of digital late capitalism (Vives-Ferrándiz 187) instead of exploring the roots of cultural appropriation and its consequences. Recent social debate about video games has been, however, more focused on gender issues than cultural appropriation, but, as we will soon see,1 racial concerns have also arisen in recent years. Even in this context, however, most media, activists, and influencers have mainly ignored the Indigenous point of view. Developing video games that focus on Indigenous heritage or on the racism of current society enables creators to counter these adverse representations with accurate portrayals of their cultures (Beverley).2 Being resilient involves being proactive and developing empowerment activities. Resilience implies the ability to adapt and recover from adversity; in this case, it is understood as cultural colonization and appropriation of the discursive space of the video game industry. The proactive empowerment and prowess shown by independent developers to fight back in their right to rebuild their public image as Indigenous subjects in a positive,

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 57 more nuanced and accurate light is a slow but powerful resilient strategy that “focuses attention on positive contextual, social, and individual variables” (Zimmerman 381), thus resisting cultural appropriation and harmful public representation. I will focus on real gaming experiences directed at the mass market rather than on educative software. These video games exemplify how Latin American and Indigenous creators use their cultural backgrounds to become active players in this business, and have been developed in North America (Canada, the USA, and Mexico) with a focus on non-European, pre-Columbian identity, civilization, and heritage. However, they have used a positive approach, not a confrontational one, which has allowed them to be commercially successful, but not always perceived as a tool for political, subaltern resistance.3 Thus, there is a clear danger of not doing enough to reinforce their identity, visibility, and agency, even if those are good, popular games. In that case, adapting themselves to the entertainment industry might be a soft approach that can prove to be appropriate in the long term, but without clear results in the short or medium term, as nonconfrontational strategies advocate typically for slow-paced, but deeper, changes in society instead of promoting revolutions. Game developers with an Indigenous background have recently started to design real games (as opposed to edutainment) using their own culture, something that has allowed them to compete in a global market using the same ludic resources and goals as any other commercial video game. This strategy aims to bounce back from under- and misrepresentation, even if these strategies can be controversial (Castro and Murray 375–403) or claim only partial success in the long term. In recent years, some video games have been criticized for their racial representation of minorities,4 such as Latino or Afro-American gangs in the Grand Theft Auto series (Loftus).5 A huge outcry objected to the racial depiction portrayed in Resident Evil 5 (2009),6 set in Africa. This Japanese game suffered criticism for its depiction of black zombies, while previous games in the series set in the United States were criticized for lacking minorities (Schlund-Vials; Hsu).7 Both examples show that video games have a tendency to use stereotypes and all forms of myths, but also attract some degree of criticism no matter what they do. In a highly technological business, cultural representation is usually dependent on the location of big transnational corporations typically based in rich countries, such as the United States, Japan, or the United Kingdom (as proven by Newzoo data that will be discussed later)8 that can fund extremely expensive projects. Being people from distant cultures and countries, or even continents, in addition to a lack of cultural expertise on the part of the game developers (after all, they are not cultural researchers but programmers, designers, etc.), often leads to c­ultural misappropriation, stereotyping, or blatant misrepresentations of ethnic groups and their cultural backgrounds. For instance, some video games

58  Daniel Escandell-Montiel developed by Western game studies have used ninjas, samurais, and other popular characters from Japanese culture, completely misunderstanding their historical roles and values, but Japanese game developers have also trivialized their heritage. The same can be said about most European history and folklore: myths such as King Arthur or real characters such as Jeanne d’Arc appear as superficial, trivialized action heroes in games developed in both the West and the East. Japanese developers, for instance, even used historical books, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms,9 to develop highly successful, though historically inaccurate, video games. Some of the most banal uses of other cultures originated in the 1970s and 1980s, decades before the rise of the information and communication technologies (ICTs) that lead us to experience reality as the global village that Marshall McLuhan envisioned. Current market trends show that for most developers it is crucial to keep in mind both localization and global sensitivities if they are to avoid niche video games or huge costs related to changes.10 In other instances, game developers resort to settings based on other cultures, such as those of the Aztecs or the Incas, which have been underrepresented in video games beyond being portrayed as constitutive Others (Gumbrecht). Pre-Columbian deities have appeared in recent video games, such as Kukulkan in Smite (2014),11 and despite the growing trend of adding Latin American characters, these are as highly stereotyped as they were in the ‘80s and the ‘90s. The global game market shows that Latin America is suffering a competitive disadvantage, as it represents only 4% of the world’s business in 2017 (Newzoo, “Global Games”). Smaller markets develop weaker industries, as their original audience is initially dampened in comparison with the bigger ones: they have lower potential sales. This seems to be part of the structural and persistent inequalities still in existence in the continent (Gootenberg 371–392), and data regarding market size show that the bigger the market, the more game companies are established (see Table 3.1). The top-25 game companies (developers, publishers, distributors, etc.) in the world by revenue during 2017 (Newzoo’s “Top 25” list) are Table 3.1 Data Provided by Newzoo (“Global Games”) 2017 Global Games Market

Region

Market Size

Year on Year Growth Rate

Percentage (Global Market)

Europe, Middle East, and Africa Asia-Pacific North America Latin America Total

$26.2Bn

+8.0%

24%

$5.2Bn $27.0Bn $4.4Bn $108.9Bn

+9.2% +4.0% +13.9% +7.8%

47% 25% 4% 100%

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 59 dominated by corporations from China, Japan, and the USA; there are no companies from Latin America or Africa and only one from Europe. The number of editors, developers, and distributors is directly proportional to the market size, just as expected. Therefore, the biggest and richest markets are also the main content creators and have extensively explored their cultural heritage, but also exploited others.

Stereotypical Representation of a Homogenized Latin American Ethos in Video Games The main characters of video games often embody the prejudices and stereotypes that are usually associated with Latinos in the United States and other Western societies. After analyzing the characters from the corpus built by Lavandier in 2016, we can clearly identify a trend of Macho attributes in these characters who are frequently portrayed with indigenous clothes or accessories, such as feathers or “war paint” (even in contemporary, urban, settings), luchador masks from Mexican wrestling, or even as Latin lovers, perpetuating all these stereotypical and frivolous identity associations. For example, Spaniard police officers in Resident Evil 4 listen to Flamenco music, are incompetent and act like cowards12 conforming to the stereotype of the lack of professionalism in the Hispanic world. Moreover, in the very few instances where female Latin American characters appear, they are portrayed as seminude, highly sexualized warriors (like in the fighting game Killer Instinct 2).13 Specific national symbols from various nationalities also conflate in video games, blurring national, cultural, and geographical boundaries and extending stereotypes to all the Hispanic world. Characters from any place in Latin America, for instance, wear bullfighting clothes or red sashes as in the San Fermin Festival in Spain. This implies either these developers’ perception of all the Latin American continent and Spain as a unified whole or their strategic use of expected prejudices. Unfortunately, the sexist, colonial representation of a homogeneous Indigenous identity has always been common in video games. In the 1982 video game Custer’s Revenge (developed by Mystique for the Atari 2600), the player controls Custer, depicted as a man wearing nothing but a cavalry hat, boots, and a bandana, sporting a visible erection. Custer has to overcome arrow attacks to reach the other side of the screen. His goal is to rape a naked Native American woman tied to a totem pole, pictured as a religious and sacred object from an Indigenous nation in the game’s cover art. Pre-Columbian civilizations have only scarcely appeared in historical video games, even in genres such as real-time strategy. In the classic series Age of Empires,14 Aztecs only appeared in the expansion The Conquerors launched in 2000 for Age of Empires II. Even then their representation was partial, and the point of view was not theirs, as the action

60  Daniel Escandell-Montiel was focalized through the European conquerors of America. These video games reproduced the classical portrayal of indigenous people as the Others, the enemies of (proper) civilization, being nothing more than savages. The presence of the Aztecs was not different from the trivialization of the massacres of Native American peoples in cowboy films used to glorify the Anglo-Saxon conquest of a romanticized Far West. Despite the colonial point of view, the Aztecs were well researched for this video game. Their special units were modeled on the real ocēlōmeh (jaguar warriors) and cuāuhmeh (eagle warriors). Of all the Aztec warriors, they were the most feared, therefore their inclusion in the video game was fundamental from the gameplay point of view: key historical figures are special units, either because they are renowned or because they are quite unique (i.e., elephants as units in the Carthaginian army or the Viking Erick the Red). It is worth mentioning that in the most recent remake of this video game, jaguar and eagle warriors became even more prominent in marketing materials, whereas in the original edition they did not even appear on the cover art. However, these powerful symbols of the Aztecs were used as comic relief in the recent Guacamelee! (2013)—a game that draws its inspiration from traditional Mexican culture and folklore. One of the key enemies is Javier Jaguar (a jaguar-man named Javier) in reference to the ocēlōmeh, while the protagonist, Juan Aguacate (literally, “John Avocado”) is a now-dead Mexican wrestler who can obtain during the game a special suit as Pollo Luchador (“Chicken Fighter”), a reference to cuāuhmeh warriors. In this case, the humor and parody seen in the video game (entirely developed in Toronto, Canada) proves a well-researched knowledge of Mexicans and their cultural heritage and aesthetics. Comic relief does not undermine the value of their research and exposure of Pre-Columbian and Mexican culture, but it can be misunderstood due to cross-cultural perspectives (Yue et al.). In any case, this video game shows a different use of these cultural sources than projects closer to Indigenous creators.

Semionauts of the Cultural Heritage and Identity Japan is the biggest Asian market after China, and one of the most successful and relevant regions in the video game industry. Japanese companies have created video games combining both their history and their mythic past; therefore, it is possible to find series offering serious and faithful representations of their past and present and more relaxed approaches to their identity. This evocation of cultural heritage has enabled a process of recoding the national identity as portrayed in popular video games. Successful series, such as Dynasty Warriors by Koei Tecmo15 or Sengoku

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 61 Basara by Capcom,16 portray historical Japanese characters in massive action settings, mixing facts and fiction. Thus, video games build new myths and symbols, but also recode old ones with a contemporary perspective. A parallel process can be seen in Western video games, with characters with a mythical dimension, such as King Arthur, and real ones too. In that sense, Europe has extensively explored in video games different periods, such as the Hundred Years’ War and, of course, recent conflicts such as World War II. Obviously, there is a huge catalogue of video games inspired by Greek mythology, the Roman Empire, and other landmarks of Western civilization, as previously discussed. However, Pre-Columbian civilizations have not always enjoyed the same treatment, something we attribute mainly to the lack of a strong game development context in Latin American countries. Moreover, when this resemantization of the cultural heritage has been developed, it has been in the hands of non-Latino companies. This resemantization process is derived from semionautic strategies. Nicolas Bourriaud described semionauts as [those] who produce original pathways through signs. Every work is issued from a script that the artist projects onto culture, considered the framework of a narrative that in turn projects new possible scripts, endlessly. (18) Video games are a canvas that can be used to reflect the semionauts’ creativity in a transmedia reformulation of cultural heritage. That is part of a common process in the arts: Renaissance artists using characters from the Greek mythology in their paintings, nineteenth-century opera composers using Valhalla as the scenario for their lyric works, twentieth-­ century writers following the steps of Homer, and even comic writers seeking inspiration in ancient history. Video games can be used as a relevant cultural tool, but they might lose their entertainment purpose in this process. As a pop entertainment, when a video game uses references from high culture (as in cultural traditions), it mostly relies on this transformation to lower culture setups. However, this transformation also means that religious myths and folklore are de-dogmatized, as their icons, symbols, and references are resam­ pled in their new vessel. As a result, religious beliefs and other cultural traditions lend themselves to be not only portrayed, but also manipulated, and altered. In the Pre-Columbian context, video games such as Guacemelee! or Grim Fandango have done this de-dogmatization by the semionautic alteration of their cultural and religious references.17 Both video games

62  Daniel Escandell-Montiel offer visions of the afterlife from the Aztec point of view and respond to current Mexican customs and festivals (such as Día de los Muertos). To do so, game designers use symbols and icons, such as the calacas,18 and place them in other contexts: for example, in Tim Schafer’s Grim Fandango, they used calaca-like characters in a noir environment.

Reconquering the Video Game Space: Cultural Identity in Projects Related to Pre-Columbian Cultures In this context, video games can be used as a resilience tool for cultural reappropriation (that is, recovering the authority over one’s cultural identity and heritage). The current situation of the video game industry has led to a polarized game development strategy: games with huge budgets and indie games with very low budgets. This indie scene represents a return to the first decades of the industry, where small, independent teams could create worldwide successful video games for 8-bit computers. Nowadays, digital distribution and online platforms allow, once again, this kind of independent creative mind-set. Moreover, the global game market continues to grow and has already become a mainstream entertainment. This has allowed indie developers to flourish with creative games that offer quite different experiences with intriguing narratives, risky art styles, and sometimes complex topics. Obviously, it is possible to trace parallelisms with the processes that independent films and other arts underwent decades ago. Next, I will focus on three recent video games featuring Latino and/or Indigenous cultures. Two of them were clearly designed to use cultural heritage from Latin American pre-Columbian civilizations not only in a respectful way, but also showing deep knowledge of their religions and history to build their fictional worlds. The third one is the humorous Guacamelee!—a different approach to these civilizations. None of these video games were conceived to become edutainment: the resilient strategy to rebuild the Indigenous identities in video games tends to avoid confrontation with past misrepresentations and designs real video games, not edutainment. Never Alone (2014), also known as Kisima Innitchuna (“I am not alone”), is based on a traditional Iñupiaq tale.19 It was developed by Upper One Games in partnership with the Cook Inlet Tribal Council. Thus, it was one of the first successful video games designed and developed with direct involvement of Iñupiaq citizens from Alaska.20 In this case, Iñupiaq storyteller Ishmael Hope worked in conjunction with the developers and the education company E-Line Media. Upper One Games became the “first indigenous-owned video game developer and publisher in U.S. history” (Matos). The main objective was to share the tales and religion of the Iñupiaq nation as an entertainment, thus revitalizing interest in this people’s folklore.21 Even if the game was funded in

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 63 collaboration with an education company, it is, above all, a video game, not a masked lesson. Nevertheless, the presence of some contents in Never Alone, such as short video documentaries (although not inserted in an intrusive way and available for the users without further interference in their gameplay sessions) shows that there is a clear objective of cultural agency and a reclamation of their own identity in entertainment to send an underlying message to educate the users. As a Native American company in the United States, Upper One Games shows a clear consciousness of their objective to expand the awareness of Native American peoples and culture among a mainstream, worldwide audience. Contrary to this educational purpose, Mulaka (2018) has an approach focused on purely gameplay characteristics. In this case, the game has been developed by Lienzo, a team from Chihuahua (Mexico) whose first game was Hunter’s Legacy (2016).22 Mulaka draws its inspiration from the Tarahumara people23 and is focused on the shamans of the tribe, known as Sukurúame.24 The main character is a shaman, and one of his abilities is that he can run nonstop in the Samalayuca desert.25 This trait is culturally accurate: these Indigenous people are renowned for their long-distance running ability, and their shamans were believed to be able to run relentlessly for days. The player can use the athletic capabilities of the main character to explore the desert and fight all sort of creatures during the adventure, but none of these abilities are discussed or taught explicitly to the gamer. These are implicit cultural elements within the game design that have been chosen because of the cultural heritage and religion of the Tarahumara people. The art design uses low-poly graphics with a vivid color palette to represent the different environmental settings of the Tarahumara mountains:26 from the desert to the frozen high sierra. To explore this world, the user can transform the main character into animals based on the Tarahumara religion. Even the enemies are inspired by monsters from their classic tales and myths. Some key examples are the gigantic Ganoko,27 or the soul-eating Rusiwari,28 creatures that also illustrate how Tarahumara people give great importance to harmony with Nature. In addition to the game itself, the developers have produced a series of documentaries (a three-part video) where the developers discuss the Tarahumara culture and their myths. However, unlike Never Alone, these videos have not been included in the game, and the users should search for them on YouTube. What they do have in common is that both games, Never Alone and Mulaka, share a percentage of their proceedings with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) related to cultural heritage preservation focused on the people whose culture has been represented. Outside these initiatives, one of the most successful engagements with Indigenous cultures has been Guacamelee! by Canada-based DrinkBox Studios. This video game received international accolades, such as

Lienzo

Tarahumara

Mexico

Mulaka (2018)

Mexican (contemporary)

Systems

Shared Proceedings with NGOs or Other Initiatives

Action/ Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation No Platformer 3, PlayStation Vita, Playstation 4, (2D) Xbox 360, Xbox One, Wii U Action/ Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation Yes Platformer 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Wii U, (2D) iOS, Android Windows, macOS, Linux, PlayStation Yes Action/ Adventure 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch (3D)

Culture Portrayed Game Genre

United States Upper One Iñupiaq Game

DrinkBox Studios

Studio

Never Alone (2014)

Guacamelee! Canada (2013)

Country of Origin

Table 3.2 Main Relevant Production and Cultural Data for These Three Video Games

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 65 the Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Visual Art. The game enjoyed critical success and enough audience support to have a sequel in the making since 2017. DrinkBox Studios is a development company founded in 2008 and Guacamelee! was their third in-house game and the first one focusing on a specific culture. Its main references are contemporary Mexican pop culture, including wrestling fighters, calacas, charro aesthetics, and the Day of the Dead Festival.29 The game builds on the exploration of the netherworld according to generic Mexican traditions. The studio developed this video game without the collaboration of Mexican experts or authorities. In fact, the Mexican theme was an afterthought proposed by the main animator, who is of Latino origins: The theme of the game originated from our animator Augusto. He tabled the idea during one of our game brainstorming sessions. At first the entire team wasn’t sure, but once seeing concept art, and discovering the rich amount of Mexican folklore to draw upon, we kn[e]w it was a perfect theme. (McQuinn qtd. in Blair) Therefore, the project was not born from the idea of empowering Indigenous cultures or a Latino agenda but was sparked naturally during a brainstorming session. It is not a political statement, nor is there an intentional cultural activism strategy related to the game, as the team learned about Mexican contemporary Latin lore during the development of the game. Thus, these three video games (Table 3.2) remix cultural references and heritage to build new worlds inspired by myths and tales in a successful transmedia recreation of key identity elements.

The Decolonization of Video Games Development Both Mulaka and Never Alone are good examples of the main resilience strategies used by Indigenous and Latin American developers to decolonize video games and their cultures’ ethnic representation in this space. These projects have successfully claimed the authority to build their own cultural representations in the video game market and have proven that these groups can develop relevant entertainment using their own cultural heritage. Guacamelee! is a recent example of a video game developed without a cultural agenda or as a resilience strategy for developing agency and production of presence, but that, nevertheless, offers a positive representation of another culture with humor. Some of these teams (lead by Indigenous or Latin American developers) are in the process of creating games imbued with their heritage “in an attempt to explore and rescue the native identity that has been

66  Daniel Escandell-Montiel lost to European colonization” (Nixon).30 Past and continuing cultural colonization builds adverse conditions for Indigenous peoples across the Americas who face widespread prejudices and misconceptions. Moreover, their cultural heritage is commonly ignored or misrepresented, as Western misrepresentations have dominated their pop-culture inscriptions. These included relegating Indigenous peoples to the roles of plain villains and savages or to oblivion. Modern representations include Latino gangs, machismo clichés, and the trivialization of social problems, such as alcoholism, gambling, and other negative stereotypes projected on these groups. By developing video games as ludic entertainment, they are avoiding antagonistic attitudes, thus associating positive discourses with their activity and cultural identity. This strategy involves launching video games to add to the market, not to openly confront the market, as it allows them to stay away from potential harsh controversies. On the other hand, even if it allows these groups to improve the representation of their culture, it also implies reinforcing the neo-liberal, capitalist practices of the entertainment industry by not opening or taking part in the debate about what could be considered their neocolonialist actions. Nevertheless, some independent projects have also used video games as a platform to send belligerent or satirical messages, such as the Chilean free game No Mames, Trump (2017)31 created to “empatizar con nuestros colegas mexicanos con una mirada crítica sobre algo que nos afecta a todos,” as said by the developers (qtd. in González). In this game, we play as a Mexican who dodges the bombs and other objects that Trump throws at him from the top of the wall. Their resilient strategy is based on building game worlds using their own point of view and cultural framework to add their message to the shared, popular, and mainstream knowledge. The main goal is to grow in relevance and fill an empty space (sometimes occupied by others). This way, these content creators allow their own discourse to superimpose itself on the myriad of already existing voices to reclaim their own right to portray their cultures in a sensitive, knowledgeable way and to transmit this point of view to potential gamers all around the globe. That’s a different approach from the one used by Lienzo or Upper One Games: their goal is to create debate, but also mock and ridicule the claims of typical far (or alt) right discourses. In this case, it is cultural activism through entertainment, and it has a clearly defined, confrontational agenda as part of its broad set of strategies. Therefore, there are two main current strategies among subaltern postcolonial movements to reclaim identity and build their presence against hegemonic power structures. But, in both instances, these Indigenous and Latin American developers are offering a new perspective of their heritage and history in the video game industry, fighting with different but complementary strategies the neocolonial power of the transnational video game industry.

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 67 The game developing environment is enabling the previously silenced voices of these creators to be heard and reach mainstream platforms. They are using these already established spaces to apply their local knowledge and cultural heritage to create new products that allow growing spaces of opposition to the dominant hegemonic discourses focused on their own culture and in which others are treated superficially, sometimes portrayed as simplistic comic relief or for purely “exotic” and “shock” value, with no effort to truly understand their culture. This builds the mainstream perception of the other in an us vs. them construct. To regain an independent voice in the entertainment industry is a direct, efficient, and proactive, but pacifist, strategy (i.e., nonopposed to the capitalist ways) to improve agency and build positive and faithful portrayals of one’s own culture.

Conclusion Cultural resilience is closely linked to the subaltern strategies to regain the voice and social spaces usurped by the hegemonic powers. As such, the growing mainstream impact of video games as one of the most relevant entertainment industries is a discursive space and a popular canvas for contemporary content creators and narrators that aim to explore interaction, hypermedia, and ludic strategies. Video games, as a narrative and multiartistic creative space, have become a platform not only to entertain, but also to stage political discourses. In that sense, independent video games have not been afraid to openly critique governments, companies, and even individuals, but these are still mainly noncommercial endeavors. The works referred to in these pages show that independent developers are opening a new path to reconquer their rights over their own image and heritage in what nowadays is the biggest global entertainment industry with the ability to reach millions of players all around the world. An audience can now discover these civilizations and traditions, or even rediscover their own people, beyond the sometimes shortsighted point of view of developers exogenous to those cultures or oblivious to their real circumstances, sensibilities, and folklore. However, a question remains unsolved. Will this strategy pay off? A slow-paced, nonconfrontational approach that avoids clear political claims can be useful in the long term only if enough critical mass is produced to actually oppose the dominant discourse. By adopting the methods of the mainstream video game industry, the agency can be diluted in the mainstream mass. Moreover, there is also a huge possibility of creating a schism among these subaltern developers: those who advocate for openly critical software (e.g., No Mames, Trump) and those who advocate for becoming part of the mainstream market (e.g., Mulaka). The first group may perceive the others as accomplices of the mass media that is,

68  Daniel Escandell-Montiel still, colonizing and deforming their heritage; the second one might fear that escalating the political debate can only lead to more polarization and confrontation in an us vs. them oversimplification.

Notes 1. Using the “Gamergate” scandal (Campbell) as an umbrella, radical conservative and misogynist gamers promoted a harassment campaign against female developers and journalists (Chess and Shaw). 2. Indigenous peoples, as stated by Daniel Coleman in his chapter “The Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty and Trans-Systemic Resilience,” often appear as “objects” of resilience, thus making it necessary to develop strong strategies to become the subjects. 3. Creativity as a form of resilience, and its similarities and differences with subaltern resilience, is discussed in the chapter authored by Eva DariasBeutell entitled “The Fetishized Subject: Modes of Resilience in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” 4. A preliminary study in this area has been conducted by Cale Passmore (qtd. in CBC News). The study shows that lack of diversity in video games can cause negative mental effects as “one of the main findings of [this] research was that most people who play video games want to play as a character that reflects themselves” and the lack of proper racial representation lessens their ability to create bonds with the avatar persona. 5. Most games in the series are set in fictional locales modelled on cities and are focused on criminal activities. Gameplay focuses on an open world where the player can choose missions to progress in the overall story, as well as engaging in side activities. 6. A third-person shooter video game developed and published by Capcom. The plot involves an investigation of a terrorist threat by Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance agents in Kijuju, a fictional region of Africa. 7. Some of these critiques were biased and originated in edgy online communities, but others correctly claimed that games in the series set in U.S. towns had only Caucasian characters, and that the series’ main heroes and villains were only white. 8. Even in Europe, the presence of game companies is much more evident in countries with the strongest economies and industrial development, such as the United Kingdom or Sweden, than in countries with weaker economies, such as Spain, Italy, or Greece. 9. A series of turn-based tactical role-playing simulation grand strategy wargames produced by Koei since 1985. While the game’s title as it was released in English refers to the historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong, the title as it was released in Asia refers to the historical text Records of the Three Kingdoms by Chen Shou. 10. However, in recent times, game developers change character designs and dialogues in games from Japan due to what could be perceived in the West as the sexualization of young girls and boys (e.g., Lolita aesthetics). Also, in Japan, humor is not subject to as many taboos as it is in Western societies (dominated by the USA’s cultural colonization of mass media) and its Puritanism renaissance (Smyth) (in contrast to activities such as sexting or the always growing business of Internet pornography) (Ellison; Swindon). 11. A multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Hi-Rez Studios. Players control a deity or any other mythological figure and take part in team-based combat.

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 69 12. A third-person survival horror video game developed and published by Capcom. The story follows the U.S. special agent Leon S. Kennedy who is sent on a mission to rescue the U.S. president’s daughter whom a sinister cult has kidnapped. Traveling to a rural area of Spain, Leon fights hordes of violent, mutant villagers called ganados. These ganados wore stereotypical countryside, old-fashioned, poor clothes and berets and were mostly armed with farming tools, like pitchforks. Although the recorded voices for these characters were in Spanish language, the accent was from Central America. 13. A fighting video game developed by Rare in 1996. With a roster of 11 characters, this game introduced two female fighters: the East Asian ninja Kim Wu and the Amazonian warrior Maya. The original game had only one female character, B. Orchid, a spy and fighter. 14. A series of games originally developed by Ensemble Studios. The titles are mostly historical real-time strategy games focused on events in Europe, Africa, and Asia, spanning from the Stone Age to the Iron Age (first game)— an expansion explored the formation of the Roman Empire. The sequel was set in the Middle Ages, while its expansion focused partially on the Spanish conquest of Mexico. 15. A series of hack and slash action video games developed by Omega Force. The series is a spin-off of Koei’s turn-based strategy Romance of the Three Kingdoms series. 16. A series of video games developed and published by Capcom. Its story is loosely based on real events of the titular Sengoku era in the history of feudal Japan. 17. An adventure game developed and published by LucasArts in 1998. Its world combines elements of the Aztec afterlife with aspects of film noir to create the Land of the Dead, through which recently departed souls, represented in the game as calaca-like figures, must travel before they reach their final destination, the Ninth Underworld. 18. A figure of a skull or skeleton (usually human) commonly used for decoration during the Mexican Day of the Dead festival. Tracing their origins from Mayan imagery, calacas are frequently shown with marigold flowers and foliage. They are generally depicted as joyous rather than mournful figures. 19. Native Alaskan people whose traditional territory spans from Norton Sound (the Bering Sea) to the Canada-United States border. Iñupiaq people developed pictographic writing systems in the early twentieth century, currently known as Alaskan Picture Writing. Nowadays, there is a Iñupiaq culture-oriented institute of higher education in Barrow and several units offer lectures on their culture at the University of Alaska (ANKN n.d.). 20. The antecedents include projects like the transmedia experience Animism (2011), the social game Survivance published in 2011 (in collaboration with Wisdom of the Elders), the noncommercial game Skins (version 2.0 published in 2011), or the iOS game Arrival: Village Kasike developed by Raindrop Games in 2012 in collaboration with the United Confederation of Taino People. These projects, however, did not manage to cause an impact in the industry like the one created by Never Alone and its generally positive reception by consumers and critics, including the British Academy Award for Best Debut Game and the Game of the Year Award from the Games for Change organization. 21. Their tales, although perceived as part of their religion and main heritage, have been used without causing outrage in the Iñupiaq community. The video game has caused no perceived harm to their traditions. 22. A 2D action platformer starring Ikki, a fierce cat who must save the kingdom of Iripur. The game features a nonlineal design where the focus is on exploration and combat in an open world.

70  Daniel Escandell-Montiel 23. These Indigenous people live in the state of Chihuahua in Mexico. They are among the original inhabitants of most of the region who retreated to the high sierras and canyons on the arrival of Spanish invaders in the sixteenth century. Their language belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family. The Tarahumara word for themselves, Rarámuri, means “runners on foot,” and they are, indeed, renowned for strong athletic skills. Long-distance running is a custom in their culture and has both ceremonial and competitive aspects (Acuña 299–336). 24. These shamans could both cause harm and heal, and also recover the souls stolen by evil entities. They were both loved and feared within their communities (Acuña 245–298). 25. Ecological concerns and the connection with Nature are common topics when discussing Indigenous cultures, especially when dealing with devastation, as asserted by Kit Dobson in his chapter “Building Collective Resilience: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” 26. Low-poly aesthetic is deliberately blocky and lacking in detail. Nowadays, given the graphic capabilities of current-gen hardware, this is used with aesthetic goals and not because of hardware limitations. 27. An ogre-like creature from the Tarahumara mythology. These giant creatures were believed to live even before humans. Ganokos were created by the deity Onorúame, but they were dull and abused Nature, which led to their extinction. However, in the Tarahumara mythic past, they lived together and helped in agricultural activities in exchange for food. However, a drunk Ganoko was dangerous, as they abused women and ate children (Bourrillon). In the game, a Ganoko is one of the final bosses. 28. Malignant spirit entities that cause illness in humans and animals, stealing their souls (Vogt 863). 29. Charros are traditional horsemen from Mexico. The stereotypical Mexican charro is known for colorful clothing and their participation in rodeo activities. 30. Certainly, Nixon seems to approach all pre-Columbian, Indigenous cultures as a whole. From a Western, nonspecialized point of view, that is still an easy mistake to make: these cultures (this culture, as she says) are lost before the eyes of the mainstream Western viewer because of the dominance of their identity and culture over the subalterns. Thus, this is an invisibility problem caused by neocolonialism and the media, and Nixon is still partially blind. However, she is right claiming that occupying the entertainment industry with their own identity and heritage can help these cultures to regain control over their identity, or, at the very least, exploit their heritage in par with transnational corporations, which is a positive approach from a purely capitalist perspective. 31. Chilean developers Estudios Naicura launched No Mames, Trump in 2017. It is a satirical game on Donald Trump’s obnoxious determination to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. It is free and uses HTML5 technology (www.estudiosnaicura.com/sitio-web/juegos/no-mames-trump.)

Works Cited Acuña Delgado, Ángel. La construcción cultural del cuerpo en la sociedad Rarámuri de la Sierra Tarahumara. Ediciones Abya-Tala, 2007. ANKN. “Iñupiat Ilitqusiat.” University of Alaska—Fairbanks, n.d., ankn.uaf. edu/ANCR/Values/Inupiaq.html.

Subaltern Discourses in Video Game Design 71 Berverley, John. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Duke UP, 1999. Blair, Travis. “Guacamelee! Interview with Chris McQuinn of Drinkbox Studios.” The Zarf, 30 Mar. 2013, http://thezarf.com/guacamelee-interview-withchris-mcquinn-of-drinkbox-studios. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Lukas & Sterling, 2002. Bourrillon, Alain. Peuples de Legendes. Les Tarahumaras du Mexique. 10 Francs, 2003. Campbell, Colin. “Gaming’s Toxic Men, Explained.” Gamasutra, 25 July 2018, www. polygon.com/2018/7/25/17593516/video-game-culture-toxic-men-explained. Castro, Felipe González, and Kate E. Murray. “Cultural Adaptation and Resilience: Controversies, Issues and Emerging Models.” Handbook of Adult Resilience, edited by John W. Reich, et al., The Guilford Press, 2010, pp. 375–403. CBC News. “Lack of Diversity in Video Games has Negative Mental Effect on Players, Says Sask. Researcher.” CBC, 28 Jan. 2018, www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ saskatchewan/diversity-video-games-saskatchewan-research-1.4507753. Chess, Shira, and Adrienne Shaw. “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying About #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 59, no. 1, 2015, pp. 208–220. Ellison, Jo. “How the New Puritans Are Killing Comedy.” Financial Times, 29 Nov. 2017, www.ft.com/content/b5d4ae2c-d432-11e7-8c9a-d9c0a5c8d5c9. Finnane, Antonia. “ ‘Not Your Prom Dress’: Why a Chinese Dress Set Off a Cultural Debate About Identity and History.” The Conversation, 6 May 2018, theconversation.com/not-your-prom-dress-why-a-chinese-dress-set-off-a-cul tural-debate-about-identity-and-history-96020. González, Alberto. “Así es el juego de sátira política ‘No mames Trump’.” Vandal, 18 Apr. 2017, vandal.elespanol.com/noticia/1350690057/asi-es-eljuego-de-satira-politica-no-mames-trump. Gootenberg, Paul. “Desigualdades persistentes en América latina.” Repensando la subalternidad, Envión Editores, 2010, pp. 371–392. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence. What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford UP, 2003. Hsu, Jeremy. “For Better or Worse, Resident Evil 5 Exposes Racism.” Live Science, 12 Mar. 2009, www.livescience.com/3385-worse-resident-evil-5-exposesracism.html. Lavandier, Anna-Michelle. “¿Dónde Están?: Latino Characters and Video Games.” Medium, 28 June 2016, medium.com/the-nerd-castle/d%C3%B3ndeest%C3%A1n-latino-characters-and-video-games-76b3441fe70. Loftus, Tom. “Game Mocks Real Tragedy, Gang Experts Say.” NBC News, 11 June 2004, www.nbcnews.com/id/6409148/ns/technology_and_science-games/t/gamemocks-real-tragedy-gang-experts-say. Matos, Xav. “Sharing Legends with the World in Never Alone, a Game Inspired by Alaskan Native Communities.” Engadget, 19 Mar. 2014, www.engadget. com/2014/03/19/sharing-legends-with-the-world-in-never-alone-a-gameinspired-b/. Newzoo. “The Global Games Market Will Reach $108,9 Billion in 2017 with Mobile Taking 42%.” Newzoo, 20 Apr. 2017, newzoo.com/insights/articles/theglobal-games-market-will-reach-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42.

72  Daniel Escandell-Montiel ———. “Top 25 Companies by Game Revenues.” Newzoo, Sept. 2017, newzoo. com/insights/rankings/top-25-companies-game-revenues. Nixon, Sarah. “Decolonizing Gaming: Examining Indigenous Portrayals in Video Games.” Not Your Mama’s Gamer, 28 Nov. 2013, www.nymgamer.com/?p=4096. Nowak, Peter. “Ubisoft’s Global Workforce Now Develops Games Around the Clock.” Canadian Business, 9 May 2016, www.canadianbusiness.com/ innovation/ubisofts-global-workforce-now-develops-games-around-the-clock/. Schlund-Vials, Cathy. “Racism, Postcolonialism, and Neocolonial Zombies: Resident Evil 5.” In Media Res, 29 Sept. 2009, mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/ imr/2009/09/29/racism-postcolonialism-and-neocolonial-zombies-residentevil-5. Smyth, A. “Meet the New Puritans.” The Scotsman, 20 Aug. 2005, www.impact lab.net/2005/08/20/meet-the-new-puritans. Swindon, Peter. “The New Puritanism.” Sunday Herald, 1 Oct. 2017, www. pressreader.com/uk/sunday-herald/20171001/281981787788847. Vives-Ferrándiz, Luis. “La gran pantalla del mundo: la lógica barroca del capitalismo de ficción.” Caracteres. Estudios culturales y críticos de la esfera digital, vol. 3, no. 1, 2014, pp. 179–200. Vogt, Evon Z. Handbook of Middle American Indians vols. 7/8 Ethnology. U of Texas P, 1969. Yue, Xiaodong, et al. “To Be or Not to Be Humorous? Cross Cultural Perspectives on Humor.” Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 7, 2016, doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01495. Zimmerman, Marc A. “Resiliency Theory: A Strengths-Based Approach to Research and Practice for Adolescent Health.” Health Education & Behaviour, vol. 40, no. 4, 2013, pp. 381–383.

4 Between Vulnerability and Resilience Exploring Motherhood in Emma Donoghue’s Room Miriam Borham-Puyal Throughout history, mothers have played a key role in cultural, religious, and political narratives. From pre-Christian civilizations that worshiped the fecund maternal figure of the earth, to contemporary proclamations of the reign of the “bad” mother, maternity has been placed at the center of diverse discourses. Moreover, it has been mediated, shaped by different agendas to conform to specific role models or to challenge them. Thus, the idea of motherhood responds to its time and age and proves elusive to simple definitions or prescriptions in its complexity and its relationship with other areas of women’s lives and identities, as it intersects with the balance of domestic roles, the notion of women’s sexuality, their place in the workforce, their social class or their purchasing power. All these issues are essential in contemporary debates on and prescriptions of motherhood and cannot be contained easily in such popular models as the often high-class soccer mum, yummy mummy, or MILF (Mother I would like to fuck), just to name some examples, which become problematic in their simplistic approach to maternity and even women’s sexuality, as well as to work outside the home, consumerism, or class (Littler 230–232; McRobbie, “Yummy Mummies”). Motherhood is more than what is addressed in the numerous guides to “successful” maternity that flood the bookshelves nowadays, which convey the idea that there is an ideal to which women should aspire and attach the notion of failed motherhood to those who do not reach this “aspirational figure” (Littler 230). Responding to, yet overcoming, contemporary stereotypes and notions on motherhood, Emma Donoghue creates in her acclaimed novel Room (2010) a challenging portrait of a young mother who must make enormous sacrifices for the well-being of her child, but who also finds in him a reason to live. Through the character of Ma, Donoghue exposes the delicate balance between vulnerability and resilience that maternity entails: loving another being exposes Ma to pain, while it builds her resilience to adverse circumstances. In addition, the author explores the impact motherhood has on women’s identity and how maternal resilience does not necessarily imply coping mechanisms that allow a return to a previous

74  Miriam Borham-Puyal state of being—to a form of accepted pre-trauma “stability”—but rather implies change and even resistance.1 The result is a compelling analysis of society’s anxieties about mothers and their difficulties in facing the demands for “proper” maternity, whatever that may mean.

Maternal Citizenship and the Control of the Mother Figure In order to understand the context in which Donoghue places her approach to maternity, it is necessary to apprehend the importance of mothers in contemporary sociopolitical agendas, and how these have been at work for centuries. In her exploration of contemporary mediated maternalism, Angela McRobbie states that the figure of the mother present in most media is a “neoliberal version of past notions of ‘maternal citizenship’ ” in which “a number of socio-political processes can be seen at work” (“Feminism” 119). As every aspect of motherhood is open to representation and discussion—women’s appearance and body after giving birth, their lifestyle and childcare choices, their return or not to work, breastfeeding in public or not breastfeeding at all—, this new notion of the “maternal-feminine” merely prolongs the tradition of a prescriptive attitude toward maternity. From the desire to control unruly motherhood in classical contexts (Loraux), to the pedagogical attitude of the church in its creation of maternal role models based on the Virgin Mary (Valerio 99), the influence of mothers on society—and the need to regulate it— has constantly been acknowledged. In previous centuries, an ideal model of motherhood came to be developed as a political instrument. As politicians equated the family with the nation, what Anne Mellor termed the “family-politic trope” developed in the long eighteenth century (84). Consequently, women, especially in their role as mothers of legitimate heirs and educators of future citizens, were placed at the center of the political debate—with even their choice to breastfeed instead of hiring a wet nurse read as an ideological statement. Thus, the concept evoked by McRobbie, maternal citizenship, was developed both in the United Kingdom and North America. According to the more conservative discourse of the age, in England, women “should aspire to the ideal of ‘republican motherhood,’ a way of uniting public and private responsibilities for women” (Guest 65). As Kerber attests in her study of Revolutionary America, this notion of republican motherhood also existed across the ocean. Adopting the Roman republican model, the virtue of American women was set up as the moral barometer of the whole nation, and the nostalgic ideal of the Roman matron, an exemplary citizen in her roles of wife, mother, and philanthropist, was held as the mirror in which young American women should seek to find themselves (Bannet; Kerber). A century later, the same pressure was placed on British mothers:

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 75 In the provincial middle class, mothers bore and reared the next generation of manpower for the family enterprise and the household, while the emphasis on family life in evangelical religion gave a central place to the mother in creating a home. If a mother failed in the task of raising healthy, seriously minded and well trained children, she sent forth “damaged material.” (Davidoff and Hall 335) Often having to combine household duties with supporting the family business, motherhood was a “rigorous and time-consuming business,” while the progression toward a “model of full-time motherhood” became “a central part of middle-class gentility” (Davidoff and Hall 338). The intersections of class and gender are once more clearly drawn. However, despite these aspirations to ideal, intensive models of motherhood, at this time it was possible to perceive “glimmerings of restiveness on the part of mothers, particularly about the lack of time, energy and opportunity for a woman to develop her sense of self separate from domestic identities” (Davidoff and Hall 342). All these concerns about women’s identity and their impact on their children’s development not only echo more contemporary debates, but also find its response in fictions that expose or challenge this patriarchal view that mothers are solely responsible for the development of their children’s well-being and identities, and hence should focus their life and energy on maternity. Resuming many of these issues, North America and the United Kingdom in the 1980s saw the centrality of the “ideology of intensive mothering” as the “maternal ideal”—an ideal in which a good mother is “entirely responsible for the social, psychological and cognitive wellbeing of her children,” and a mother’s identity is reduced to her “maternal role” (Feasey, “Good, Bad” 6). In addition, this absolute dedication to motherhood in a ‘good’ mother is described as willing and fulfilling, never springing out of a sense of duty (6). While intensive mothering has also been challenged by popular media products, the unattainable ideal of the “good” mother “dominates the media marketplace,” and it is an image of motherhood that “audiences feel compelled to try to emulate, or to judge themselves by” (7). In this space, maternal reality is depicted and prescribed in manuals, novels, TV shows, and magazines, which state how to act, dress, and consume to be a ‘good’ mother. Motherhood is reduced to a formula that a woman can be coached into. In this sense, neoliberal motherhood redefines maternal failure and success in more contemporary terms, by means of what McRobbie calls “visual media governmentality,” a “regulatory space for the formulation and working through” of these ideas in the popular public space (“Feminism” 122). With notable exceptions, success is benchmarked in this space by the creation of an exemplary mother, a professional middle-class woman who successfully combines “work with motherhood . . . with professional

76  Miriam Borham-Puyal attention to duty, responsibility and all the skills required to ensure a stable upbringing for children” (124). On the contrary, the new rules of failure are symbolized in “the abject body of the ‘single mother’ and in the bodies of her untidy children” (122). In the representation of the abject maternal figure, “vulnerability and dependency” are equated not only with carelessness (122), but also with promiscuity and a reliance on benefits (125). Vulnerability is then understood in negative terms in a neoliberal context, while resilience, the ability to adapt to the new demands on professional mothers, could be considered a positive performance indicator. However, it is possible to shed new light on these terms and how they define motherhood.

Motherhood(s): Stories of Vulnerability and Resilience Contemporary popular culture has addressed both the vulnerability and the strength to be found in maternity. An example would be Adrienne Shelley’s Waitress (2007), in which Jenna, wife to an abusive husband, feels even more trapped in her hopeless marriage by her unexpected pregnancy. However, after giving birth, she finds in the love for her daughter the courage she needs to finally leave her spouse. Closer to the experience depicted in Room, in her autobiographical Unlikely Angel (2005), Ashley Smith recounts the hours in which she was kept hostage by a violent killer, Brian Nichols. In it, she emphasizes that she was able to escape because of two reasons: first, her ability to establish a relationship with him, opening up about her vulnerability and problems as a single mother, but, foremost, by doing everything in her control to make sure she could see her daughter again. Although fitting the aforementioned description of the abject or “bad” mother—alone, on drugs, reliant on help, having lost her daughter’s custody—motherhood appears in both the novel and the subsequent film adaptation as the most important driving force behind her will to escape and piece her life back together, while seeming both a source of vulnerability and strength. Traditional approaches to vulnerability have defined it as a liability to damage (Ganteau 59), and, as such, it has been considered the opposite of resistance or resilience (Anthony; Garmezy “Stress-Resistant”; Rutter). It has been associated with passivity and, moreover, a victimized female body (Butler 1, 3). However, new approaches have highlighted the value of vulnerability as a relational quality that enables to develop greater resistance. Motherhood fits this category of a relationship in which individuals are highly vulnerable given their interdependence, and yet build what Norman Garmezy (“Vulnerability”) defined as “resilience mechanisms” to cope with trauma and to remain functional individuals after it. Following in his train, research in the field of psychology has often focused on the figure of mothers and their impact on the healthy development of children exposed to what are termed “stressors” (Garmezy,

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 77 “Stress-Resistant”). Besides the obvious conclusion that motherhood can have a beneficial influence on an individual’s healthy emotional and psychological development, it is also possible to find numerous studies that link the hardships of growing under adolescent, drunk, or abusive mothers to the development of the said strategies or mechanisms. These studies expose how the lack of what would be considered “proper” motherhood triggers in some children the capacity for resilience, thus becoming able to adapt, survive, or blossom although exposed to severe stressors. However, less attention seems to have been paid to motherhood itself as the impulse behind the coping mechanisms of women in adverse situations or amidst the trauma of war, violence, or abuse. Nevertheless, in history and in fiction, the figure of the courageous mother—or madre coraje—has played a significant and recurrent role. From the mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo to the model of the strong, ­working-class mother described by McRobbie (“Feminism” 125), motherhood has proven a powerful force for resilience and resistance, as well as for healing and hope, and a recurrent presence in literature and popular media culture (Feasey, “Good, Bad”). In these factual and fictional cases, there are elements in common: first, motherhood is often presented as a homeostatic identity—that is, women identify as mothers first and foremost—and that is at the core of who they are; however, it is also what enables them to adapt to their surroundings and their circumstances without changing what is essential about them or their priorities as mothers. Second, this homeostatic quality makes it difficult to provide a clear definition or description of what a mother is or does. It derives that what motherhood implies and what it should be like escapes the often simplistic definitions provided by the aforementioned social scrutiny. In addition, motherhood provides a complex and contested identity in the context of resilience, for it makes women more vulnerable and more resilient at the same time—the children are the reason they survive, but they can be used against them or even threaten their own survival. Finally, it raises the notion that motherhood can also become a parasitic identity; that is, is a mother only a mother or must she build other faces to her identity? Does motherhood erase other aspects of the woman? And can resilience only be based on her maternity and her need to protect her children? Is motherhood selfish when it is a reason to survive? Avoiding oversimplifications and addressing these issues, Donoghue builds in her body of work interesting case studies on resilience emerging from motherhood, but also on maternity as a site of vulnerability and on the limitations it imposes on women’s agency. In all these cases, the author seems to engage in a dialogue with some of the predominant discourses on maternity in the context in which the action is set. A case in point would be the also highly successful Slammerkin (2000). As Marisol Morales has argued, using the abovementioned socio-historical context of eighteenth-century England, the author achieved in this novel

78  Miriam Borham-Puyal the creation of motherhood as a “symbolic space,” “responsible for the shaping of the protagonist’s life and for her dramatic ending” (107). Motherhood becomes in Donoghue’s novel a “determining force in the development of the self” (108), while the author distinguishes between motherhood as choice and as social expectation, “between the experience and the institution of motherhood” (109), both ideas that she further explores in Room. In this novel, she provides a more contemporary time frame—a time of “global economic and environmental crisis,” with “a new President” (288) in America—and a more recognizable setting—a typical backyard with a shed—and by so doing, she brings her approach to the symbolic space of motherhood closer to her American readership. Employing much of the discourse found in contemporary media concerning motherhood—evaluative language that divides mothers into “good” and “bad” examples, the debate on breastfeeding and mother’s choices with regard to their child’s education—Donoghue’s portrayal of maternity then moves from the margins and takes the center stage, becoming the main theme of her novel.

A Study on Motherhood: Emma Donoghue’s Room (2010) Room tells the story through the eyes of Jack, a 5-year-old who has lived all his life in Room with his Ma. Ma has made him believe that all that exists is their 11 x 11 world and has hidden the truth from him: she was abducted and imprisoned in the shed they call room; there is a world outside, and he needs to escape in order to survive and bring help. Once they are both liberated, Jack must adapt to the world outside Room, while Ma must come to terms with what has happened. In her story, Donoghue depicts a kidnapped and sexually enslaved woman who subverts traditional ideas of victimization through her relationship with her son. Making herself vulnerable by her love toward Jack and aware of the child’s own vulnerability, the mother not only builds resilience to their captivity but also finds strength for her moments of revolt against her captor and an impulse to attempt their escape. In addition, Jack’s attachment to his mother enables him to become resilient to his situation, as a product of rape and confinement who can nevertheless maintain “adaptative functioning in spite of serious risk hazards” (Rutter 209). Resilience, then, emerges from an interaction of systems rather than from a simple one (Holling), from collective relational vulnerability rather than individual resistance mechanisms (Butler). Nevertheless, this interdependence will also prove problematic, for the mother’s identity is lost, as she becomes markedly vulnerable and excessively identified with another, her son. In this sense, motherhood, even if reduced to the relationship between two people, proves a particularly complex emotional ecosystem, which destabilizes the certainty of this project of resilience by the heightened

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 79 codependence and hence vulnerability of mother and son, whose worlds are related but also different from each other. Jack and his mother, therefore, will need to build mutual autonomy in order to regain their individual identity and fully develop their resilience to trauma. Room revolves around this idea that motherhood escapes limiting definitions. Maybe the strongest claim about maternity in Donoghue’s novel is that it is a personal experience that depends on each woman’s circumstances, in contrast with a normative or institutionalized state. Ma herself embodies different experiences of motherhood: she was abandoned by her biological mother and adopted when she was 6 weeks old, which she explains by referring to the young age and circumstances of her mother (283–284); when she was 18 she herself had an abortion, which she does not regret (291), and states she cannot judge other women in their maternal experiences; her first child in captivity was stillborn and constitutes a trauma she can barely address (290); and, finally, she decides to keep Jack and raise him on her own. Ma’s own mother chooses to embrace Jack as her grandson in contrast to the attitude displayed by Ma’s father, who rejects him. The idea of parenting as a choice beyond biological ties is reinforced as Ma states that there was no relationship with Old Nick, their captor; therefore, there could be no parenting, no role as father, despite the biological connection (293). In addition, Ma refers to her unique circumstances in a television interview in which the journalist asserts contemporary upper-middle-class notions that it is difficult for a woman without “good help” to be an adequate mother (McRobbie, “Feminism” 126, 134). According to the journalist, “It takes a village to raise a child,” to which Ma responds that if you do not have one “then maybe it just takes two people,” the mother and the child (292). In the smaller and more simple world they inhabited, Ma could “control things” and protect her child (295); as they leave Room everything escapes her control and is open to debate. The interview in particular will serve to demonstrate how the media portray the “good mother myth” and perpetuate the stereotypes associated with it as the right or normative choices for mothers (Feasey, “Good, Bad” 8) and to what extent Ma’s experience defies those idealized notions. By challenging the oppression of stereotypical notions of motherhood and writing alternative narratives, Ma—and Donoghue—develop a creative form of resilience that counteracts the persistence of reductionist readings of women and mothers.2 In Room, maternity is not reduced to a formula, it proves complex and challenging. For example, motherhood serves a dual purpose: it gives strength to the mother and protects and nurtures the child. Above all, it enables Ma to develop a stronger will to survive her confinement and torture. Maternity gives purpose to her life, which had lost all meaning in the midst of her traumatic experience. In a flashback, Ma retells the birth of the first baby, a girl, who died during delivery and was buried by

80  Miriam Borham-Puyal the abductor. The death of the baby, which she blames on him, starts a revolt that culminates with the birth of Jack. Being stirred from her initial numbness by the pregnancy, Ma wishes to carry a second one to term and to hold on to the new child. After that, Ma is forced to take contraceptive pills to prevent new pregnancies; however, Jack’s arrival has already served the purpose of awakening Ma. In fact, the novel opens with a description of this effect of maternity. Jack states on the very first page that Ma was “all sad” until he happened in her tummy (3). His mother has told him the story many times: she cried until she had no tears left; she just lay down counting the seconds until she wished for a baby, and he came (3–4). In his words, “Before I came down from Heaven Ma left [the TV] on all day long and got turned into a zombie that’s like a ghost but walks thump thump” (13). Throughout the novel, the reader is often reminded that Ma was in a state of zombie-like trance, in a state between life and death, before the arrival of the baby. As she later explains, she felt “saved” by Jack’s birth, for now, “Jack was everything. I was alive again. I mattered” (291). Until Jack was born, her role had been that of a victim, of a sexual object controlled by her captor. However, motherhood means the regaining of her agency both as a creator of life and as sole guardian for the child. Such agency commences at the moment of birth in which she tells her captor to leave the room and she delivers Jack on her own. In a conscious decision, Donoghue wishes to refuse the captor any power over the narrative or the characters (Ue 104). Differently from other stories of isolated children, the paternal figures—the father and later the grandfather—will fade into the background (Rubik 143): they are not important. In fact, the little contact that Jack has with them proves traumatizing. They are threats from whom the mother must protect her child, so the central role now befalls on the maternal figure. When asked about the father’s relationship to Jack, Ma makes it clear: “Jack’s nobody’s son but mine” (293). As Jack’s sole parent and only human contact, Ma is literally responsible for his physical, emotional, and intellectual development and well-being. This extreme situation, then, seems to provide Donoghue with a scenario in which to explore the consequences of such responsibility—which society places on women almost exclusively—on both the mother and the child. For while maternity gives Ma the drive to survive, she must also fulfill the purpose of caring for her child sometimes at great cost to herself, by becoming more vulnerable in the traditional sense of displaying more passivity and subjecting her body to victimization. If up to that moment she had tried to hurt her captor, to escape violently, or to tune off the surrounding reality, she then starts to develop strategies of resilience to protect the baby and to find ways to make it possible for the child to thrive in such an environment. She becomes “more polite” with her rapist in order to “keep Jack safe” (291). She looks after herself more to be healthy in order to take care of Jack, stating that the

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 81 child needed her “to be OK” (292), and, more importantly, she shields him from the traumatic situation in which they live. Although vulnerable motherhood would seem to make her compliant with her captivity, it is also the reason behind her ultimate resistance. Her protective instinct leads her to guard Jack from all contact with their captor, Old Nick, regardless of the consequences. In fact, when he approaches the child, she revolts and becomes violent against him, which results in him almost chocking her. For Jack, she even regains hope of a rescue and starts sending signals through the skylight or playing a “screaming game” with the hope of being heard from outside. Finally, it is for his sake that she attempts an escape. When Old Nick threatens to cut their supplies of food and heat, she fears for the child’s life: “I brought you into Room, I didn’t mean to but I did it and I’ve never once been sorry. . . . I brought you here and tonight I’m going to get you out. . . . You’re the one who matters . . . just you” (160–161). Her selfless need to protect her child will also save her a second time, as he will bring help to the shed and finally achieve her liberation. Revealingly, once she is outside this protective instinct will not disappear, for it will have to adapt to the new circumstances. She will have to defend Jack’s mere existence, shield him from paparazzi and media attention, and help him adjust to the wider world. In the infamous television interview, the ensuing conversation takes place: “You must feel almost a pathological need . . . to stand guard between your son and the world.” “Yeah, it’s called being a mother.” Ma nearly snarls it. (296) Donoghue highlights the maternal protective drive and universalizes it, while also constructing it as something that goes beyond mere biological instincts. Maybe the most striking example of her “extraordinary act of motherhood” (Ue 102), as Donoghue defines it, is the fact that she can raise her “rapist’s child as happily as possible” (102), that is, the way in which she creates an alternative reality for Jack. She makes him believe the room they share is the world, and she makes it a happy environment for him. As a result of her efforts, “Jack is not mentally deficient or emotionally traumatized”; rather, “his linguistic and cognitive abilities are highly advanced,” and he is “quite happy and content” in his small universe (Rubik 141). While it is true that Jack must come to terms with the truth about Room and later about what is real and what is imaginary, Ma defends her deception in terms of concealing Jack’s traumatic circumstances and providing him with the happiest possible childhood in that context. When asked whether she ever felt “bad about deceiving him” (293), Ma questions if there was indeed a better alternative to creating

82  Miriam Borham-Puyal a fantasy. Her narrative has prevented Jack from becoming “shaped— damaged—by his ordeal” (295), as the interviewer phrases it, because “[i]t wasn’t an ordeal to Jack, it was just how things were” (296). In fact, Ma has achieved such a sense of safety that for Jack Room means certainty, it is the “security of the womb and is constitutive of his identity” (Rubik 147), and he insists on taking part of it with him when they leave their confinement. He sometimes misses his alternative reality. He must also learn to distinguish fact from fiction and to coexist socially, sometimes to great pain to himself, as when he tries to pat a bee or when he is smacked on the hand for touching his cousin’s pudenda. Resilience, then, understood as a particular way of telling the story of trauma in order to cope with it, is highly contextual: it is invariably shaped by its setting and time.3 As Ma and Jack escape from Room, the narrative that enabled them to survive shifts its temporal and spatial frame, and, consequently, is in need of a reappraisal. What was a story that made Jack resilient inside Room and gave Ma confidence that she was resisting Old Nick in that space, feels made up and deceptive when she has to explain it on the TV interview, which highlights how significant these time/space coordinates are in understanding a narrative or an action as building resilience or not. In Donoghue’s novel, Room is an alternative frame or discourse world, a crucible where resilience is developed and tested. However, once outside that frame, the change of context makes that resilience feel fake, inadequate, or even dangerous for Jack’s emerging sense of reality. And, of course, a threat to his required adjustment to his new social environment. Therefore, while Donoghue emphasizes the importance of the motherchild relationship in the development of Jack, she also exposes the blame placed on the mother for the creation of her narrative of resilience and for any trauma or shortcomings that society perceives in the child—expressed, for example, in how the former question is phrased: does she feel “bad” about what she did to protect him? (293). Guilt plays an important part in the proposal of aspirational models of maternity, for women can be pressured by it into conforming to “good” models that implicitly associate a greater interest in the child’s well-being with making the “right” choices regarding them. Donoghue problematizes this guilt-building in mothers in her novel. What are seen as Jack’s problems, his unique vision of the world, even his existence or his dependence on his mother, are subject to all forms of criticism toward Ma’s adequacy as a maternal figure. When questioned about her choices and the consequences they had on Jack, she can only answer: “All I did was survive, and I did a pretty good job of raising Jack. A good enough job” (emphasis added, 294). Although Ma is subjected to extreme circumstances, her predicament and her answer resonate with contemporary audiences: balancing jobs and households, children’s needs and the demands of ideal womanhood, precarious work and financial instability, sometimes mothers can only reject implausible and

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 83 unrealistic expectations, and reclaim the idea that to be “good enough” is, indeed, quite enough. These “good enough” mothers are women who “love their children, cherish their families but struggle with the financial, emotional, social or logistical reality of childcare,” women who “are not upholding the image of acceptable motherhood and they are either unable or unwilling to conform to the ideology of intensive mothering” (Feasey, “Good, Bad” 7).4 Nevertheless, these women are still holding “themselves up to the idealized standards” and the “acceptable maternal norms and approved familiar mores” that popular media continue to present for their audience (8). Ma’s defensive description of her maternal role as “good enough” indicates how her sense of inadequacy is growing as it is exposed to society’s models of acceptable motherhood. As stated earlier, an example of the latter is introduced by Donoghue with Ma’s television interview. Convinced to do it by the idea of earning money for Jack’s college fund, Ma is exposed to the journalist’s questioning attitude toward her motherhood choices. Mirroring very recent debates on the matter, the interviewer is surprised that Ma is still breastfeeding Jack. Their connection, physical and emotional, which goes beyond normative social standards, is exposed as strange and noteworthy, much to Ma’s exasperation: “In this whole story, that is the shocking detail?” (292), she cries. However, the interviewer then addresses once more Ma’s own sense of guilt by specifically implying her selfishness in keeping the baby. Referring first to the possibility of having put him to sleep, the interviewer then continues, “Did you ever consider asking your captor to take Jack away?” . . . I can see Ma swallow. “Why would I have done that?” “Well, so he could be free.” “Free away from me?” “It would have been a sacrifice, of course—the ultimate sacrifice— but if Jack could have had a normal, happy childhood with a loving family?” “He had me.” Ma says it one word at a time. “He had a childhood with me, whether you’d call it normal or not.” (297) Not only in this interview but also throughout her experience out of captivity, Ma feels the need to act defensively when her choices or Jack’s safety are questioned, and she must defend the job she did in protecting Jack against abuse (207) and raising him as normally as possible (243). She is not the only one: her own mother will be accused by a child psychologist of not taking good care of Jack because of a mild sunburn and a bee sting. Her answer is also revealing: “I raised two children, don’t give me acceptable standard of care” (343). Motherhood is represented as a defining quality that is always open to criticism, therefore, rendering

84  Miriam Borham-Puyal mothers particularly vulnerable and exposed to new trends, new models, whether they come from expert opinions or media gurus. Nevertheless, in Ma’s case, her guilt—over keeping Jack, over her resources to raise him, over the possibility that he might have been “damaged”—builds to such a point after the interview that she decides, in Jack’s words, to be “the most Gone she’s ever” or return to being an unfeeling “zombie” (312), to commit suicide in order to escape her vulnerable state and probably her failed identity as a mother. Ma defines herself primarily as such, which is also a trait of intensive maternity. Jack has become her world (282), she has built her identity on motherhood in order to survive, which triggers her vulnerability to censure and hinders her own adjustment outside Room. As Donoghue explains, when Ma takes the pills she is “recoiling from five years of being [Jack’s] saintly carer” (Ue 105), facing her own trauma as a woman. This identity crisis could be seen as elicited, first, by her own father’s inability to accept Jack and his wish that she had never become a mother. As Jack puts it, “He said I shouldn’t be and then Ma wouldn’t have to be Ma” (322). That questions who she had to become and who she is, it erases all sense from the last five years of her life: “He thought I’d be better off without you.” “Somewhere else?” “No, if you’d never been born. Imagine.” I try but I can’t. “Then would you still be Ma?” “Well, no, I wouldn’t. So it’s a really dumb idea.” (283) All Ma’s father can see is Old Nick and what happened to his daughter, which she refuses to do, stating that Jack reminds her “of nothing but himself” (294), once more erasing all traces of her rapist and strengthening her identity as mother of Jack and not as a victimized woman. However, her identity as a mother becomes increasingly problematic outside. Focalization comes through Jack’s voice, so, in spite of being told Ma has another name, the reader never knows it—only in the film adaptation does the audience hear it. In fact, Jack has problems picturing his mother as a daughter or a sister, because for him she cannot exist outside his idea of Ma: “I don’t think she is lying but it’s hard for it to be true that Ma was ever a kid” (247). Ma is Ma, her identity is linked to and shaped by her son, but outside she recovers the other parts of herself and must rebuild who she is: “I keep messing up. I know you need me to be your ma but I’m having to remember how to be me as well at the time and it’s . . .” But I thought the her and the Ma were the same. (277)

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 85 This reconstruction of the other sides of herself is difficult as Jack demands the same intimacy, the same dependency that they had in their own private world. In the author’s opinion, “the parent-child relationship [is] inherently unstable, bipolar; a constant push-and-pull to achieve a lively balance” (Ue 105), and that imbalance is more evident as Jack and Ma need to redefine their relationship in Outside. Jack, for instance, defines himself as “a me-and-Ma” (342); he does not like the idea that she can function without him, that she can be on while he is off (5); he does not conceive a “hers-not-mine” because in Room everything was theirs (275); he takes Ma’s tooth with him when he escapes to preserve his link with her, later swallowing it and thereby literally incorporating his mother (Rubik 142). Therefore, while Ma has given Jack the chance to develop emotionally and intellectually, their imprisonment has hindered the natural detachment process of the mother-child unit. This creates great separation anxiety in Jack, but it also demonstrates the challenge to woman’s identity that such intensive maternity, such homeostatic motherhood poses. In the novel, Donoghue depicts how Ma must recover her own sense of self; she must heal as a human and not only act as a mother. This is metaphorically achieved by severing the links of breastfeeding, which happens in the end. It is also expressed, literally, in her attempts of physical separation: while Jack insists they are one, Ma tries separate beds, separate rooms, and separate bodies. At one point, trying to get Jack off her to be able to leave the room, she violently pushes him away, and Jack hits his head. The trauma of separation is clearly depicted in all those scenes. Finally, she must overcome her own maladjustment in order to be able to take care of Jack again, but this time with boundaries. In her recovery, she regains her “own” space, much to Jack’s sadness (342), but she is never fully the same. As she tells her therapist, “It’s not how I remember myself.” “You had to change to survive.” Noreen looks up. “Don’t forget, you’d have changed anyway. Moving into your twenties, having a child—you wouldn’t have stayed the same.” Ma just drinks her coffee. (393) According to these experts in trauma, the young captive survived due to her transformation into a mother. However, exposed to the stressors of “normal” motherhood Ma would also have had to find coping and adaptation strategies, and her identity would have also become intertwined with the other in her relation of vulnerability and openness. This last generalization leads to Donoghue’s more universal depiction of maternity and its intersection with women’s other selves as daughters, wives,

86  Miriam Borham-Puyal friends, or workers. Apparently, under any condition motherhood always has this homeostatic quality: a woman’s identity will change; a mother will always be defined as such, placing her at the center of new forms of control involving shame, guilt, or a sense of inadequacy to which she must also become resistant.

Conclusion As a conclusion, it could be said that vulnerability as a relational quality becomes a strategy of resistance and a protective factor, both in the novel and its subsequent film adaptation in which Donoghue’s script reinforces the idea that maternity heightens the individual’s sense of vulnerability by the possibility of losing the object of affection, but at the same time impulses the mother’s resilience. Both works expound the complex nature of motherhood, the effects of the heightened vulnerability once the mother and the child are required to open to new surroundings and threats, and their building of resilience, understood in terms of their success in the face of adversity (Bartelt 98). Motherhood has an important presence in Donoghue’s works, but in Room, more than in her other novels, the author develops a comment on the sacrifices of motherhood, the delicate balance between dependency and strength, and how maternity gives impulse to a woman’s struggle for survival and meaning, while it also constrains her. Room becomes a novel and a film about motherhood and mother-child relationships, about women’s identity and about survival based on maternal love and instincts. Motherhood seems to provide resilience in the face of trauma and abuse, but it also requires adaptation strategies even in the less extreme context of stressors, such as growing social criticism and intrusion or the demands that come with maturity. Maternity appears as multifaceted, ambiguous, and unique to each individual—a biological urge, but above all a personal choice. It might be why motherhood can be the impulse behind some of the strongest coping mechanisms any human can develop and the inspiration for great storytelling.

Notes 1. As does Daniel Coleman in this same volume, I am drawing from C. S. Holling’s distinction between “stability” and “resilience” (17). 2. A similar analysis of stereotypes as a domain in which individuals try to develop creative responses to the resilience of oppressive powers can be found in the work of Ana Fraile-Marcos and Noguerol, Hernáez-Lerena, and Escandell-Montiel. Eva Darias’ chapter also helpfully distinguishes between “subaltern resilience” and “creative resilience,” which supports my use of the latter concept. 3. See Dobson’s, and Fraile-Marcos and Noguerol’s contributions in this volume. 4. On this topic see also Feasey (Happy Homemaker and “From Soap Opera to Reality Programming”).

Between Vulnerability and Resilience 87

Works Cited Anthony, E. J. “Risk, Vulnerability and Resilience: An Overview.” The Invulnerable Child, edited by Anthony and Cohler, The Guilford Press, 1987, pp. 3–48. Bannet, Eve Tavor. The Domestic Revolution. Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000. Bartelt, D. W. “On Resilience: Questions of Validity.” Educational Resilience in Inner-City America, edited by Wang and Gordon, Erlbaum, 1994, pp. 97–108. Borkowski, J. G., et al. Risk and Resilience: Adolescent Mothers and Their Children Grow Up. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2007. Butler, Judith, et al. Vulnerability in Resistance. Duke UP, 2016. Davidoff, Leonore, and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class. 1780–1850. Routledge, 2002. Donoghue, Emma. Room. Picador, 2010. Feasey, R. From Happy Homemaker to Desperate Housewives: Motherhood and Popular Television. Anthem, 2012. ———. “From Soap Opera to Reality Programming: Examining Motherhood, Motherwork and the Maternal Role on Popular Television.” Imaginations: Journal of Cross-Cultural Image Studies, vol. 4, no. 2, 2013, http://www3.cjs. ualberta.ca/imaginations/?p=4811. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. ———. “Good, Bad or Just Good Enough: Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal Role on the Small Screen.” Studies in the Maternal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–31. htttp://doi.org/10.16995/sim.234. Ganteau, J. M. The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction. Routledge, 2015. Garmezy, Norman Z. “Stress-Resistant Children: The Search for Protective Factors.” Recent Research in Developmental Psychopathology, edited by Stevenson, Pergamon Press, 1985, pp. 213–233. ———. “Vulnerability and Resilience.” Studying Lives Through Time, edited by Parke Funder et al., American Psychological Association, 1993, pp. 377–397. Guest, Harriet. “Eighteenth-Century Femininity: ‘A Supposed Sexual Character’.” Women and Literature in Britain 1700–1800, edited by Vivien Jones, Cambridge UP, 2000, pp. 46–68. Holling, C. S. “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, vol. 4, 1973, pp. 1–23. Kaplan, H. B. “Toward an Understanding of Resilience. A Critical Review of Definitions and Models.” Resilience and Development: Positive Life Adaptations, edited by Glantz and Johnson, Zluwer Academic Publishers, 1999, pp. 17–83. Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. U of North Carolina P, 1997. Littler, J. “The Rise of the ‘Yummy Mummy’: Popular Conservatism and the Neoliberal Maternal in Contemporary British Culture.” Communication, Culture and Critique, vol. 6, no. 2, 2013, pp. 227–243, doi:10.1111/cccr.12010. Loraux, Nicole. Madres en duelo. Abada Editores, 2004. McRobbie, Angela. “Yummy Mummies Leave a Bad Taste for Young Women.” The Guardian, 2 Mar. 2006, www.theguardian.com/world/2006/mar/02/gen der.comment?CMP=share_btn_link. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018.

88  Miriam Borham-Puyal ———. “Feminism, the Family and the New ‘Mediated’ Maternalism.” New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, vol. 80–81, 2013, pp. 119–137, http://doi.org/10.3898/newF.80/81.07.2013. Mellor, Anne K. Romanticism and Gender. Routledge, 1993. Morales Ladrón, Marisol. “The Representation of Motherhood in Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin.” Irish University Review, vol. 39, no. 1, 2009, pp. 107– 121, www.jstor.org/stable/40344325. Accessed 21 Mar. 2018. Rubik, Margarete. “Kaspar Hauser in the Twenty-First Century: The Feral Child in Emma Donoghue’s Novel Room.” Re-Thinking Literary Identities: Great Britain, Europe and Beyond, edited by Laura Monrós-Gaspar, Universitat de Valencia, 2017, pp. 135–148. Rutter, M. “Psychosocial Resilience and Protective Mechanisms.” Risk and Protective Factors in the Development of Psychopathology, edited by Masten Rolf, et al., Cambridge UP, 1990, pp. 181–214. Ue, Tom. “An Extraordinary Act of Motherhood: A Conversation with Emma Donoghue.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, 2012, pp. 101–106. http://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2012.639177. Valerio, Adriana. Mujeres e Iglesia. Una historia de género. Benilde Ediciones, 2017.

5 Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narratives of Sexual Violence Against Women in Indian Writing in English Jorge Diego-SánchezResilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives

Jorge Diego-Sánchez The entrenched systems of domination of and violence against women take multiple forms.1 Also numerous are the ways in which women denounce experiences of subjugation and violence and their healing strategies. This chapter deals with the representation of women’s resilience in two novels by Indian female writers: When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (2017) by Meena Kandasamy, and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter (2015). These two novels portray the resilient structures of power that limit the lives of women to domestic spaces. I argue that these texts highlight the agency of writing, which functions in both narratives as the main strategy used by their female protagonists to identify the resilient state biopolitics that control people and oppress women through the traditional structures of family and religion. At the same time, the individual testimonies emerging from the protagonists’ acts of writing work not only to build up their own resilience, but engender what Eva Darias-Beautell calls in Chapter 10 of this volume, a “collective endeavor” (163) aimed not only at mere individual survival but also at the transformation of the oppressive sociopolitical system. Furthermore, the novels themselves exemplify the impact of writing on society, corroborating the agency of testimonial writing and storytelling. Conventional approaches to the study of sexual violence have rightly considered the intersections of patriarchy, colonialism, neoliberalism, religion, and nationalism, but have tended to focus on victimhood and damage, conveying the idea that victims of sexual violence are passive and powerless rather than active subjects. Looking at sexual violence through the notion of resilience as an analytical tool (Bonnano; Hirsch) may challenge this approach, emphasizing instead the agency through which the victims achieve resilience and work toward processes of healing and empowerment. The vocabulary associated with resilience opens up ways to talk about identity, relationships, trauma, and transformation that explicitly avoid black-and-white value judgments in favor of a focus on pragmatic strategies for survival. This might be an idealistic picture, as the term itself has been co-opted by neoliberal forces that tend to maintain the sociopolitical imbalances that provoke all sorts of violence.

90  Jorge Diego-Sánchez Patriarchy, colonization, and capitalism are themselves resilient, and so it is important to supplement this resilience with social justice, gender equality, and subversive agency. A neoliberal reading of resilience demands adaptation through submission to a particular scheme of power that guarantees survival via commodification. Hence, resilience emerges as an individual exercise from the numerous self-help books in the market and the internet. Boris Cyrulnik has pointed at how readers have been “astonished by children who succeed in surviving terrible ordeals and making something of themselves even against all the odds,” and this takes place “because [they] have triumphed over an immense misfortune [where the] wonderful is already associated with misfortune” (8). This trend of existing in astonishing cheerfulness (Cyrulnik; Lahaye) is linked to what Sarah Ahmed calls a romantic “pursuit of happiness” (Ahmed, How 1), and it creates “social fairy tales” and “denial” of reality (Cyrulnik 8). I believe that this widespread attitude fosters resignation, or acceptance of reality, no matter what it brings, and prevents the possibility of social transformation. This can be countered by a set of “killjoy” actions aiming “to cause disturbance” (Ahmed, Feminist 251) in order to change the adverse circumstances that call for resilience in the first place. A critical take on resilience, then, presents an opportunity to assess sociopolitical “transformation,” “revolt” and “renewal” (O’Brien, “Edgework” 191, 195). Sarah Bracke has theorized on the limits and opportunities that resilience as a concept grants. She identifies a “nostalgic” reading of resilience that perpetuates “a subaltern resilience,” somehow keeping the subaltern as “the fetish of the margins” (Bhatt 98). However, there is a “creative resilience” that enhances “transformation” (Bracke 53) and goes beyond that neoliberal interest in romanticizing stories of self-survival and capitalist success. This process of “wonderfulization” is embroidered within interests of mercantilization. The interpretation of resilience as transformative struggles with the wonderfulization of individual survival because “you cannot be resilient all by yourself” (O’Brien, Interview). Indeed, sometimes resilience is simply looked at from the individual and “a static, one-dimensional state,” praising “success understood in traditional and conservative ways”. However, the success of resilient survival lies, as most authors in this volume conclude, in sustaining interactions within and between ecological systems, rather than on individual, isolated actions. An exploration of how resilience is constructed in literature reveals contemporary processes of commodification and/or transformative survival. The two novels proposed for analysis show the path toward the renewal of social rights that are currently neglected in India, where the Indian government (in power since 2014) enforces Hindu and other moralizing and oppressive structures of religious control. The female protagonists of Sleeping on Jupiter and When I Hit You unveil the potentials

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 91 of writing for transformative resilience and the possibility of healing as they struggle against the violence they suffer, questioning the oppressive patriarchy underpinning India’s so-called modern democracy. The main characters in Roy and Kandasamy’s novels are figures of transformative resilience because they manage to confront and subvert sexual violence by means of a feminist practice that addresses the “paradox of constitutionalism” and the “judicial void” (Menon, ­Recovering 4) that Indian women face in contemporary India. Menon, and Tharu and Lalita have already recognized the general lack of legal defense and political support faced by Indian women in the context of national state politics to eradicate sexual violence. This sociopolitical situation signals both the value and limits of resilience: it is good in its amplification of individual and collective agency, but it may prove itself unhelpful as it responds to political and legal interests of those power structures challenged by that agency. Roy and Kandasamy describe and denounce the control that the Indian state exerts over women in the private realm, as well as the growing role of religion in the Indian public sphere. Both protagonists experience sexual violence and fear as a consequence of the control and domination of the state and religion over their female public and private realms. In the following quotation, Kandasamy beautifully summarizes Roy’s political positioning on the government’s inaction in relation to sexual violence: Roy’s narrative raises many burning questions. Will it ever be possible to police the crimes committed against women in the name of divine sanction and initiation rituals in a society steeped in religiosity . . .? Can we even envisage a situation where an Indian woman can confront gender-based violence without having recourse to a lucky escape to the west? (Kandasamy, Sleeping) In tackling these issues, both narratives reveal the hidden face of Indian spirituality, which is usually sanctioned by the ruling powers of the country. Accordingly, both writers offer stories of resilience and healing, where characters unmask, contest, subvert, and decide how to live once they confront the patriarchal biopower of the Indian state. The sanctioned sexual violence against women in both public and private spheres is just an integral part of Indian biopolitics (Arundhati Roy, End of Imagination; Shiva, Manifestos). Both authors denounce how sexual violence is dealt with in the Indian legal system and religious spheres. As they assess the sociopolitical consequences of patriarchy and the ineffective legal reaction (or inaction) against sexual violence, these works also offer trans-systemic discourses that unveil and instigate possible new forms of living and healing within the practice of feminism (Menon) and the ecology of knowledges (Foucault; Gandhi; Arundhati Roy, Capitalism).

92  Jorge Diego-Sánchez Writing about these incidents turns out a performative act of righting the wrongs perpetrated against women.

Sexual Violence and the Public/Private Dichotomy Arundhati Roy defines Indian democracy as “a flawed democracy laced with religious fascism . . . pure arsenic . . . with a ruling party that’s hemorrhaging” (The End 66, my emphasis). Scholars have elaborated on the mirage of modern democracy in India. Kaviraj, for instance, explains that the adjective modern usually associated with Indian democracy, denotes “a capitalist industrial production . . . based on political institutions of liberal democracy based on individualism . . . and a gradual decline of communal forms” (98). Chatterjee proclaims that the structure of Indian democracy was simply a platform for India to be colonized after Partition (238) and Menon affirms that India is prey to a modernity that is based on “the paradox of constitutionalism” and a “judicial void” (Recovering 2, 41), where contemporary constitutionalism enforces “universal norms that marginalise, render obsolete and de-legitimise contesting worldviews and value systems [as if it were] the geopolitical location of Europe in the seventeenth century” (208–219). Roy (“He used the sari”) and Kandasamy (“Why,” “I am an Anti-National”) have railed against these problems associated with Indian democracy since the times of Partition and have pointed out that the current government elected in 2014 has enforced religious control over the female body. Arundhati Roy’s The Doctor and the Saint identifies how individual subjects and collectives who are not safeguarded by the Constitution (such as nonheterosexual individuals), are politically and legally disenfranchised in contemporary India because they are placed outside the traditional structures of family or state religion. Roy recognizes that these socio-cultural constructs are fostered by the current government on behalf of yet another modern India, which echoes colonial and postcolonial manipulations of democracy to maintain “a violent exclusion” (Baxi). Sleeping in Jupiter and When I Hit You are critical of the role and participation of women in the private and the public patriarchal Indian spheres, which are the inheritors of traditions of sexual and gender violence that have not yet improved. According to Menon, a politics of subversion is necessary because the “law is not enough,” there is an “increase of state control” and legal reforms are only promoted “by urban-based groups” (Recovering 5). This subversion of patriarchy is a “feminist practice” (Seeing 64) that defies both the intervention of the state in the private realm and of religion in the public sphere, as both religion and the state endorse the Hindu nationalist stereotype that dictates how Indian women in modern India should behave and look like. As a result, the country figures in position 108 out of 144 in the World Economic Forum’s “Gender Gap Report” (2017).

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 93 According to the “World Report on Violence and Health” (2002) by the World Health Organization, Sexual violence is defined as any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, unwanted sexual comments or advances, or acts to traffic, or otherwise directed, against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting, including but not limited to home and work. (149) The Indian Penal Code (IPC) recognizes the penalties for rape in articles 375 and 376, but sexual violence that does not include penis penetration (IPC 376) is not punishable by law. Nivedita Menon recognizes that the current Indian legal system “needs to be made more reflective of the reality of women’s experience” (Seeing 107), beyond “The Delhi Draft” of 1993 and 2000 and the “Amendments” added in 2013. In this sense, the need is to acknowledge that sexual assault is a crime of violence, not merely sexual intercourse. Agnes has used the term sexual violence to avoid a tendency that, in Hindu extreme-right politics, blames women for their own rape because of the clothes they wear or what is considered inappropriate behavior. She has reflected on how rape culture might be “an attempt to promote notions of chastity and virginity” (7). Rape is a sexual crime, but there are many other possible crimes of sexual violence in which, based on the lack of criminality found in the current IPC, “women stand outside the power equations between the state and the accused” (10–11). Menon asserts that Indian central legislation on rape, shaped by a dominant male discourse (Recovering 130; Seeing 127), positions women as subordinate to men and the law. She claims that a demand against sexual violence must be made, not so much on the basis of safety and protection but on the basis “of equality of risk” (Seeing 143). She adds, The feminist project should not be to protect women from attack, which is bound to feed into a narrative enforcing ‘safe’ behavior on the part of women themselves. Rather, the goal should be the certainty that if they are attacked, they would receive prompt redress, thus establishing the unequivocal rights of women to be in public spaces at all times of the day and the night. (143) If the state, and the interference of religion in state politics, encourages women to be afraid of the ever-present threat of sexual violence, then, when dealing with sexual violence, there is an enactment of “an apartness . . . inferiority . . . dependence [and] vulnerability” (Ahmed, Cultural 64), and so women occupy the position of the subaltern in that apartness,

94  Jorge Diego-Sánchez inferiority, and dependence. Fraile-Marcos describes how literature may elicit imaginative empathy that works as an effective way to make readers aware of processes of violence and cause a reaction against it. The protagonists in Kandasamy and Roy’s novels are narrative stimulators of empathy for the reader who becomes aware and entangled in a challenging and transformative cooperative spark of social change. Both novels show women as agents, or in Menon’s terms, “risk-taking subjects,” instead of “vulnerable objects” (Recovering 142–143). As the novels’ protagonists move from passively vulnerable subjects to enacting subversion through resilience, they also promote a modification of the patriarchal and (neo)colonial legal system, which would contribute not just to their individual survival but to social justice. It is here that Kandasamy and Roy dismantle the discourse of fear, separation, and vulnerability that the Indian state imposes upon women, because they talk back, reject guilt, and demand social change.

Sexual Violence, Resilience, and Healing Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter denounces the ways in which spiritual and corporeal violence against women has been consistently endorsed in India. Roy has explained that the novel is an attempt to represent gendered sexual abuse against, women as well as the social oppression that women experience as a result of abusive political and religious powers (Roy qtd. in Balakrishnan). Indeed, Roy’s fiction allows its protagonist Nomi to escape and come back to Jarmuli to challenge and finally subvert the pervasive structures of sexual violence that still exist in the town. The novel describes the return of “Nomita Frederiksen, female, age twentyfive” (Sleeping, 28) to the imagined temple town of Jarmuli on coastal West Bengal to shoot a documentary about the city. The assignment is an excuse for Nomi to face her roots (she was abducted from her family, abused in an ashram orphanage, and later adopted by a Norwegian woman). It also allows her to explore the possible routes that lie ahead for her if she challenges the engrained historical, religious, and social systems that enabled the violence perpetrated against her. Sexual violence is inflicted upon Nomi at crucial moments in her life.2 The first assault takes place after she is torn away from her father and brother as if they were “slaughtered pigs” (12). Nomi’s mother would later sell her (12), and a woman would pierce Nomi’s ears so that the burning pain accompanies her (14) when men “with cloth wrapped around their faces,” “holding a gun” and shouting “this is for your own good, this is for your motherland, this is for our mother tongue” transport her to the place where she has been sold (14–15). Isolation and lack of safety is, therefore, bred into Nomi’s psyche as she exclaims, “There I was in the line of girls, but I no longer felt like a coach in a train” (15).

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 95 Men take her to an ashram and then exercise their power and control over her after her father and brother are killed. Nomi tries to run away but is caught. As a result, the ashram’s guru, Guruji, further victimizes, limits, and controls her, assimilating Nomi to an insect: “You are like an insect . . . don’t drift to the outer boundary of the grounds” (Sleeping, 92). Afterward, he moves her hands toward his penis and tells her, “Hold this, it is magic. Say nothing. I do not reveal myself in this form to anyone else. You are the chosen one” (93). Notions of divine punishments haunt Nomi if she does not follow the ashram’s rules, which are shaped by misogyny and abuse. The evil against women and children disguised as holiness is therefore exposed. She faces the systemic evil against women in the place and she has three possibilities: give in, challenge it or escape. The following sexual attack takes place when Nomi is raped on her first menstruation: I was put away in the hut where every girl who got her first period was locked up . . . I remember how Guruji came in, locked the door, sat down and patted his thighs. How he stroked my legs as he spoke. How he told me I was a nun in the service of God. I was the chosen one . . . My body felt as if it would tear into two when he forced my legs apart . . . I remember my screams made no sound. There was blood. A burning between my legs. The sense that my body was split open. (172–174) This attack is used by Guruji to make Nomi dependent upon God and her master, a relationship based on fear, and this affect builds “an apartness . . . inferiority . . . dependence [and] vulnerability” (Ahmed, ­Cultural 63). Nomi is left divided, defenseless, abused, with seemingly no possibility of escape, with both her physical and spiritual body “split open” (Roy, Sleeping 174). However, Nomi does manage to escape. Later in her life, she returns to Jarmuli to shoot a documentary. Central to this trip is her own quest to discover and denounce the wrongdoings she went through in the ashram. On her return to India, Nomi faces two sexual assaults, but she speaks back and tries to challenge the structures of power that still exist. The first assault takes place on her way to Jarmuli, when she is physically and verbally assaulted as she gets off the train, but she fights off her attacker: [Nomi] . . . looked smaller and slighter among the men . . . and there is a man who got closer [and] brushed an arm against her breasts and [she] stepped backward and . . . flung the hot tea in the man’s face. She kicked his shin and his crotch as his hands flew to his face. (30)

96  Jorge Diego-Sánchez Although women in Nomi’s cabin witness the whole episode (28–31), nobody helps her, and she is left stranded at the station (30). The three older women look at the sign stating, “TO STOP TRAIN PULL CHAIN,” an action that could stop the possible aggression that Nomi is about to suffer. However, they seem to have second thoughts about taking this action when they continue reading, “Penalty for Use Without Reasonable and Sufficient Cause. Fine Up to . . .!” (31). The broken chain below the sign (31) functions as a metaphor for the political system in India, subtly suggesting that the brake mechanism on the train would never work anyway. This image also shows how sexual abuse is so normalized as not deserving to stop the train. The ineffective Indian legal system (Menon, Recovering 4) is equally exposed. Despite it all, fear does not paralyze Nomi because surviving her childhood ordeals has made her resilient. She is endowed with an awareness of the limits imposed upon her and a transformative power that encourages her to scream back, as she does when she is assaulted and when she rejects her cameraman, Suraj’s, sexual advances. Later, Suraj will beat Nomi’s head off the wall. Her legs are “splayed [and] a slow red trickle appeared from somewhere behind her ears . . . [while] she wasn’t moving” (Sleeping, 229), but then Nomi stands up and screams, “I’m going to tell them everything” and, as Suraj inches toward her, she calls out: “You don’t scare me . . . I don’t believe your bullshit” (230). This act illustrates her rejection of the fear and shame that she has been made to bear. Writing in her diary about her own “familiar terror” (34) allows Nomi to remember how she was harmed and how these experiences made her “sick in her stomach” (Roy, Sleeping 240). It also allows her to overcome fear. Writing, then, discloses what Ahmed calls “the ontology of insecurity” (76) that justifies extreme forms of state control: “it must be presumed that things are not secure, in and of themselves, in order to justify the imperative to make things secure” (Ahmed, Cultural 76). The abuses suffered by Nomi clearly align with the ontology of insecurity legitimating the idea that the world is inherently dangerous. Thus, Guruji’s control and rape of women’s bodies, for instance, paradoxically reinforces the idea of women’s dependence on men or the state for protection. Nevertheless, Nomi develops a resilience that allows her to challenge the power structures that let her suffer violence without any condemnation. Nomi’s resilience is “transformative” (O’Brien, “The Edgework” 191) in as much as it reaches beyond her individual experience to the community when she resolves to shoot a documentary on the violence she has suffered. The act of writing and researching on life in Jarmuli goes handin-hand with the resistant attitude that revolts against the IPC. Toward the end of the novel, Nomi is able to escape despite threats from Guruji. Through the act of writing her story, she also challenges and denounces the pervasive hypocrisies of contemporary India impacting on the lives of the female characters.

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 97 Denunciation and a resulting transformation also take place in Kandasamy’s When I Hit You. Kandasamy wrote her novel in the first person to fictionalize the sexual violence she coped with in her marriage (“I singe”). Taneja argues that When I Hit You deals with “the raw material of domestic abuse” and that it “leads to a meditation on writing and a searing examination of a woman’s place in contemporary Indian society.” I would like to add that, as in Kandasamy’s first novel The Gypsy Goddess (2014), the first-person narrator reclaims the story of individual women in Indian history and their subversion of the legal system. The novel exposes India as a “flawed democracy” (Roy, The End 66), a “judicial void” (Menon, Recovering 4) and a “Constitutionalist paradox” (2). The novel portrays sexual violence against women but also the current Indian State’s complicity with patriarchal structures embedded in the domestic realm. Equally, the first-person narration allows the audience to closely experience the process through which the narrator constructs resilience to reconcile her experiences and subvert the patriarchal system that traps her. The episode recounting the narrator’s anal rape constitutes just one instance of how the domestic sphere becomes a site for repeated sexual violence, a private space where violence against women is sanctioned by the Indian state: “I never understood rape until it happened to me. It was a concept— of savagery, of violence, of violation, of disrespect . . . but nothing prepared me for how to handle it”. . . . The man who rapes me is not a stranger who runs away . . . “He is the husband for whom I have to make coffee the following morning.” (Kandasamy, When 167) This scene unveils Kandasamy’s persona and the many other women who have preserved their dignity through a transformative resilience after having had their physical and spiritual bodies brutally abused. The narrator’s husband simply “covers himself with enough lubricant to slide past all [her] resistance” as the narrator becomes utterly subjugated and alienated, a fact signaled in her confession: “My legs go limp. I come apart” (167). Nomi’s rape had the same effect: “The sense that my body was split open” (Roy, Sleeping 174). Sexual violence emerges as a weapon to create alienation and isolation, and to implement control over the physical and spiritual bodies of women in both the private and social spheres. As the narrator recognizes, “rape becomes his weapon to tame” (Kandasamy, When I Hit 168). Since the IPC does not recognize that rape within marriage can happen, the victim lacks a legal system of protection. The situation worsens as most often victims are denied any support within the family sphere. In the novel, the narrator’s family dissuades her from reporting her husband’s abuse to the police (156–160). Later, they refuse to listen to

98  Jorge Diego-Sánchez her accusations (179). Her husband even convinces her that the less people know about her case the better, because “the bigger the circle of spectators, the more nuanced his portrait of [her] becomes and the less inclined people are to believe that there is no substance to his lies” (183). The unnamed narrator’s legal disenfranchisement exacerbates her anxiety: “How do I explain to anyone this savage rite? . . . How do I let another person know how it feels to be raped within a marriage?” (168). Kandasamy seems to answer these questions with the act of writing which, as in the case of Nomi, triggers the mechanisms that make resilience possible, as well as the kind of agency that engages in the transformation of reality. There are other cultural considerations that explain the narrator’s silence, as she has not only been wholly deprived of her own sexual pleasure in marriage but is to be considered “polluted” (179) if she denounces the sodomy her husband has just perpetrated on her. In her own words, “a body that is considered polluted can be punished as a man pleases,” because, using the “language” of both her husband and the hypothetical police officer filing her report, a “rape is defeat” and a “rape is also punishment.” Taneja praised the novel for tackling a specific “Indian form of toxic masculinity [that] is dissected by Kandasamy” and a “lineage of sexual repression from Gandhi to the current prime minister, to the narrator’s own first love [because] Regardless of ideology, the Indian politician must appear to be a bachelor, and women must be subjugated.” This is the logic supporting the notion that polluted women must be punished and feel guilty. This is clearly what her husband seeks when, after raping her, he confesses that it is his wish that she gets pregnant so that her vagina is not “recognizable” for her or for other men (Kandasamy, When I Hit 176). As she admits in the end of the chapter, this rape, not acknowledged as such in the IPC, represents “a man breaking his own wife. This is a man burning down his own house” (176). The chapter that follows this terrible scene opens with a question which, incidentally, Kandasamy asked herself, “ ‘Will you walk out of this marriage?’ ” (Kandasamy, “Why women” 179). The narrator readily rejects the idea, based on what she reads in the media: “Every day, newspapers smelling of fresh kill bring us morbidity from Central India. Defiant tribal women raped, mutilated and dressed up in combat gear for photographs” (When I Hit 179). Equally discouraging are her husband’s comments: “Nobody is going to save you . . . your fellow feminists, middle-class petit bourgeois women have found the freedom they needed by getting rid of their man” (180). The narrator, who has been deterred from using her laptop, and, therefore, prevented from accessing alternative information on the internet to that provided by the establishment media, only encounters dissuading news, such as “in India, a bride is burned every ninety minutes” (187). The abuse and sexual violence against the narrator diminishes when her husband’s desire for a baby intensifies, and they visit male “doctors

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 99 in front of which women appear helpless” (200). It is as if the husband’s urge to subjugate her manifests in her body bearing his child. Here, I used his and not their because the way she describes his attempts to impregnate her amount to a way of conquering a body and getting his own triumph. He is less violent only because he feels that if she bears a child, she would be more dependent and in need of protection. It is at this point that the mechanisms for individual resilience are activated, as the narrator decides to recover control over her own body: “If I want to be rescued, I’ll have to do it myself” (201). Even if the legal void, the family, and tradition coalesce to subject and punish women, the narrator learns “how to wrest back” (207) and discovers that her husband’s violence can “be forever directed against himself” (208). The same as Nomi tells Suraj, “You don’t scare me . . . I don’t believe your bullshit” (Roy, Sleeping 230), the narrator is able to scream at her husband, even when he becomes most brutal. “I’m not afraid” (Kandasamy, When I Hit 212). It is then that she gathers the necessary strength to face and overcome her shame and the social and family judgments: “Sometimes the shame is not the beatings, not the rape. The shaming is in being asked to stand to judgement” (219). Rejecting “to lend an appropriate color of goodness to [her] abuser” (225), the narrator eschews her position as a victim, and understanding that “the quest for justice does not lead anywhere” (230), she admits that “the only body [she feels] empowered to share is the body [she fashions] out of [her] own words” (240). It is at this moment that she finds her voice, and, like Nomi, she decides to tell her story. The act of writing the book makes her reconcile with her private sphere because, she writes, I am the woman who has tried to shield from the pain of the firstperson singular . . . I am the woman who stands in place of the woman who loathes to enter this story in any of its narrations . . . I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality . . . I am the woman who still believes, brokenheartedly, in love. (248–249) The narrator gathers enough strength to be able to heal in her private sphere and write about it so that, as in the case of Nomi, people can know what she endured and how to forge a new life.

Conclusion The act of narrating their stories becomes key for the female protagonists’ survival in both Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter and Kandasamy’s When I Hit You. However, their construction of individual resilience through narrative clearly defies the neoliberal understanding of resilience that, while

100  Jorge Diego-Sánchez praising individual endurance, aims to preserve the status quo. Instead, both Roy and Kandasamy defy the commodification of stories of gender violence survival, urging readers to collaboratively transform the political, cultural, and religious structures that intertwine us all in these terrible axes of power. While the writings of the novels’ protagonists reveal how they survive sexual and gender violence and describe their bouncing back as full subjects, they also reveal the patriarchal knots that link state and religious forces and tie up the public/private spheres in a continuum that reinforces the oppression and subjugation of Indian women. More significantly, the focus in both novels on the act of writing/narrating entails a key feminist transformative practice that elicits empathy and holds the potential for social, and not just individual change, demanding that the “flawed democracy” (Roy, The End 66) of the Indian state develops into a democracy that aims at a truly egalitarian and just society.

Notes 1. The research for this chapter has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the project Narratives of Resilience (FFI2015–63895-C2–2-R, MINECO/FEDER). Credit for the inspiration and some of the ideas in this essay must go to Susie O’Brien and Ana Fraile-Marcos. 2. Although these moments are analyzed according to Nomi’s vital chronology, they do not follow a chronological pattern in the narrative.

Works Cited Agnes, Flavia. Journey to Justice. Majlis, 1990. Ahmed, Sara. Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, Routledge, 2004. ———. Living a Feminist Life. Duke UP, 2017. Balakrishnan, Suneetha. “The Subject Disturbed Me.” The Hindu, May 2015, www.thehindu.com/books/literary-review/the-subject-disturbed-me/article 7164710.ece. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. Baxi, Upendra. “Constitutionalism as a Site of State Formative Practices.” Cardozo Law Review, vol. 21, no. 4, Feb. 2000, pp. 1184–1185. Bhatt, Chetan. “The Fetish of the Margins: Religious Absolutism, Anti-Racism and Postcolonial Silence.” New Formations, no. 59, 2006, pp. 98–115. Bonnano, George A. “Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events.” The American Psychologist Association, no. 1, Jan. 2004, pp. 20–28. Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience.” Vulnerability and Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, et al., Duke UP, 2016, pp. 52–75. Chatterjee, Partha. A Possible India: Essays in Political Criticism. Oxford UP, 1997. Chaudhuri, Amit. “Appendix 1. An Exchange of Emails.” Literary Activism. Perspectives, edited by Amit Chaudhuri, Oxford UP, 2017. Cyrulnik, Boris. Resilience: How Your Inner Strength Can Set You Free from the Past. Penguin Books, 2009.

Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Indian Narratives 101 Darias-Beautell, Eva. “The Fetishized Subject: Modes of Resilience in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Glocal Narratives of Resilience, edited by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Routledge, 2020, pp. 163–180. Flynn, Elizabeth A., et al. “Feminist Rhetorical Resilience—Possibilities and Impossibilities.” Feminist Rhetorical Resilience, edited by Elizabeth A. Flynn, et al., Utah State UP, 2012, pp. 1–29. Folke, Carl. “Resilience: The Emergence of a Perspective for Social-Ecological Systems Analysis.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 16, no. 3, 2016, pp. 253–267. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Penguin, 1991. Fraile-Marcos, Ana. “The Traffic of Affects in Michael Helm’s Cities of Refuge.” The Urban Condition: Literary Trajectories Through Canada’s Postmetropolis, edited by Eva Darías-Beautell, Vernon, 2019, pp. 31–51. Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism and the Politics of Friendship. Duke UP, 2006. Gender Gap Report 2017. “India.” World Economic Forum, pp. 176–177, www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2017.pdf. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. Gramsci, Antonio. Prison Notebooks. Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1998. Hirsch, Marianne. “Connective Histories in Vulnerable Times.” Prevention of Money Laundering Act, Presidential Address, 2014, pp. 330–349. Indian Penal Code, http://devgan.in/indian_penal_code/. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. Kandasamy, Meena. “I Singe the Body Electric.” Outlook, 19 Mar. 2012, www. outlookindia.com/magazine/story/i-singe-the-body-electric/280179. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. ———. The Gypsy Goddess. Atlantic Press, 2014. ———. “Sleeping on Jupiter by Anuradha Roy Review—Lays Bare the Treacherous Hypocrisies of Indian Society.” The Guardian, 27 May 2015, www. theguardian.com/books/2015/may/27/sleeping-on-jupiter-anuradha-roy-reviewhypocrisies-indian-society. Accessed 31 Jan. 2018. ———. “I am an Anti-National . . . Count Me Out.” Outlook, 17 Feb. 2016, www.outlookindia.com/website/story/i-am-an-anti-nationalcount-me-out/ 296655. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. ———. When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife. Atlantic Books, 2017. ———. “Why Women Stay in Abusive Relationships.” Times of India, 11 June 2017, www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/sunday-times/why-women-stayin-abusive-relationships/articleshow/59088114.cms. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Kaviraj, Sudipta. “Democracy and Development in India.” Democracy and Development, edited by Amiya Bagchi, St Martin Press, 1995, pp. 92–137. Lahaye, Jean-Luc. Cent femilles. Editions Carrère, 1985. Menon, Nivedita. Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. U of Illinois P, 2004. ———. Seeing like a Feminist. Penguin, Zubaan, 2012. Nortoni, Cherry. “Mumbai Set to Become Next Megalopolis.” Times of India, 3 Sept. 2001, www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/bombay-times/Mumbai-set-tobecome-next-Megalopolis/articleshow/1868837223.cms. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. O’Brien, Susie. “The Edgework of the Clerk. Resilience in Arundhati Roy’s Walking with the Comrades.” Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities, edited by E. DeLoughrey, et al., Routledge, 2015, pp. 180–206. ———. Personal Interview. 4 Oct. 2018.

102  Jorge Diego-Sánchez Roy, Anuradha. Sleeping on Jupiter. Hachette, 2015. ———. “ ‘He Used the Sari as a Noose’: Poverty and Despair in India’s Rural Rat Trap.” The Guardian, 3 July 2017, www.theguardian.com/global-develop ment/2017/jul/03/he-used-the-sari-as-a-noose-poverty-despair-in-india-ruralrat-trap-anuradha-roy. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018. Roy, Arundhati. Walking with the Comrades. Penguin, 2011. ———. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket, 2014. ———. The End of Imagination. Haymarket Books, 2016. ———. The Doctor and the Saint. Haymarket Books, 2017. Safi, Michael. “How India Is Battling Sexual Violence: Gender Classes for Delhi Rickshaw Drivers.” The Guardian, 25 Nov. 2017, www.theguardian.com/world/ 2017/nov/25/india-battling-sexual-violence-gender-delhi-rickshaw-drivers. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018. Selby, Daniel. “Despite India’s Anti-Rape Laws, Sexual Assault Is Still a Major Problem.” Global Citizen, 9 Nov. 2017, www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ india-rape-law-victim-justice-hrw/. Accessed 1 Feb. 2018. Shiva, Vandana. Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. South End Press, 1997. ———. Manifestos on the Future of Food & Seed. South End Press, 2007. Taneja, Preti. “When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy: Review.” The Guardian, 7 July 2017, www.theguardian. com/books/2017/jul/07/when-i-hit-you-meena-kandasamy-review. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Tharu, Susie, and K. Lalita, editors. Women Writing in India. Volume II: The 20th Century. The Feminist Press, 1993. Vanistendael, S. Clés pour devenir: La résilience. Les Cahiers du BICE, Bureau International Catholique de l’Enfance, 1996, p. 9. “World Report on Violence and Health.” World Health Organisation, 2002, www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6. pdf. Accessed 29 Mar. 2018.

6 Graphic Homelessness Representations of Home Deprivation in Comic Form María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena

Beggar Bum Derelict Drifter Guttersnipe Hobo Homeless guy Panhandler Streetie Tramp Transient Vagrant Wino —Jason Little, Preface to Borb [I]n some way we come to exist, as it were, in the moment of being addressed. —Judith Butler, Precarious Life

All societies possess persuasive labeling tendencies that penetrate all spheres and create a logic of exclusion and inclusion we are not always aware of. In the book Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Luc Boltanski claims, The misery of the unfortunate may simply be ignored and thus inspire no pity . . . the fortunate and the unfortunate can live in the same country without the former seeing the latter, either as the result of a kind of physical blindness arising from a subtle separation of the spaces within which they each move [and also] due to moral blindness, when the discrepancy between their respective conditions creates a gulf that prevents the class of “those who do not suffer” from forming an idea of the suffering of the unfortunate. (5; emphasis mine)

104  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena Sadly, homeless people qualify for these two categories of blindness that derive from spatial and existential separation. Although living in front of us, in places in the city we know, they are below our eyes, usually sitting or sleeping at ground or underground street level in public spaces of transit. If we have a home, homeless persons are usually our everyday blind spot; they occupy an opaque area of vision, a negligible space which may provoke moral blindness. We tend to ignore them because their sight disturbs us with an unarticulated claim that we do not have enough time or skill to respond to. Few passersby actually contemplate exchanging a face-to-face look or some words with them, as if we belonged to different dimensions of humanity. Projected stereotypes and lexicon choice may impede empathetic access to their marginal traumas. Even social workers need to revise the kind of identities that are being foisted on the homeless, Mike Seal demands. His insightful book Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures (2007) proposes a corrective for any defective ongoing agendas through a revision of current notions of indigence entertained by academics, social workers, institutions, organizations, homeless, ex-homeless people, and the wider society. The starting point is the attempt to reach an understanding of how we, the domiciled, have constructed identities for them because the way they are treated in public encounters shape their sense of self.1 The contemplation of homeless people reveals our visceral attachment to certain life patterns. In order to achieve a satisfactory life, most people need coherence and predictability, a set of meaningful daily activities, some comfort, a sense of safety, and a place of one’s own. In the absence of these circumstances, homeless people create a logic of their own that cannot partake of those certainties in any degree, and often the process of adaptation in the face of an incomprehensible future is self-destructive (Seal 3). What disturbs us about those who sleep rough is that their physical, psychological, and economic degenerative process is publicly shown, it happens before our very eyes. This daily exposure, often deemed shameful, makes their resilience difficult to admire and, in their breaking of the basic norms of “decency,” homeless people may be transformed, by the media and by our imagination, into unethical subjects. Their stance vis-à-vis a hygienic notion of resilience becomes problematic. The unshakable tinge of abjection associated with people who suffer from permanent rooflessness makes us aware that there are certain groups whose resilience we tend to consider less worthier than others. The display of this deterioration, the street dweller’s “invasion” of frequented public spaces and routes brings in us a sense of unease that, if looked upon, unearths a number of questions that go beyond our cursory considerations about the world’s economic inequalities: “What can I do about this?” “How far should I go?” This uneasiness also brings to the foreground the kind of rationalizations we normally assemble to look away: “This person may be dangerous.” “S/he may carry a disease.”

Graphic Homelessness 105 “Why is s/he not looking for a job?” “An institution should take care of this.” And so on. The unease, disgust, contempt, pity, or guilt that we may feel when witnessing extreme aimlessness and vulnerability in others also often makes us briefly revise the progress of our own lives. If meditated upon, this unwanted sight shakes the very foundations of the social and moral system that we think we form part of, it dismantles the myth of community. It is also a reminder of our own weakness, economic and bodily. According to Seal, “Our sense of self is fragile and to be confronted with people who are nakedly fractured can mirror our own insecurities” (113). As a result, we deal with this situation through disassociation, depersonalizing them in order not to be drained of our own energy to go on. Echoing Tormod Burkey’s blunt words, we may be concerned about what is happening but is not our full-time job (34). The physical encounter with the homeless person, as a source of embarrassment or shock, is very especially perceived as an invasion into our own lives because homeless people break the boundaries between public and private space by pursuing on the streets the activities that are normally carried out within a home (eat, sleep, drink, etc.). In her analysis of rough sleepers in Oxford, United Kingdom, Chantal Butchinsky describes that [r]ough sleepers had to endure difficult situations (for example, inclement weather, aggressive passers-by, and also their own emotional states and the exposure to others which they could not avoid); and they needed to be mobile, have ideas of where to go when it was no possible to occupy one place, and thus they needed to know the streets fairly intimately . . . “Place-making” for rough sleepers was a difficult endeavour that required them to oppose other rough sleepers used space as well as to employ ruses to appeal to passers-by and thus to “earn” money. . . . I think the key to understand how rough sleepers used space, is their ability to transform places, to reinterpret seemingly mundane, almost non-places (doorways, small stretches of pavement, a ledge on the outside of a shop, a bin area, for example) as sleeping places, socialising places, living places where talking, smoking, drinking, drug taking, eating, take place. (13) According to her, the stance of homeless people depends on their ability to develop resources to claim space in the face of continually unpredictable circumstances. Indeed, being homeless must require constant physical and mental effort, especially when not inhabiting derelict or abandoned sites and they have to share street space with the domiciled. With pitches located outside shops, for example, vendors of “The Big Issue” in England are required to place themselves at precise distances and angles

106  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena specified by the manager or shop assistant, in order not to “block the way,” “intimidate customers,” “scare children, or other such reasons” (Butchinsky 15). They are usually evicted for aesthetic demands. Mark Auge’s nonplaces of modernity (airports, bus terminals, malls, etc.), with all their negative connotations, can become, from the point of view of less affluent citizens, privileged spaces. The notion of nonplace indeed takes on much more sinister connotations when moving down on the hierarchy of space users. It is this sense of uneasiness produced by the exposure of homelessness in spaces of public transit that I would like to explore in this chapter, paying special attention to the potential of places and objects that would be otherwise irrelevant to passersby. For this study, I will use as a c­ orpus a type of book, the graphic novel, where spatial relations constitute the very physicality of the genre. According to Jill Bennett in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art, In constituting places of inhabitation and encounter, visual artworks have the potential to explore the differential terms on which were are “implaced.” But, more precisely, by actualizing a set of spatial relationships, art is able to examine the nature of the body’s relationship to space—and thus the very conditions of perception that determine various modes of inhabitation. (70) The genre’s visuality allows us instant access to scenes of dire situations, producing an immediate impact on the viewer, whose eyes can move around the page taking in information about a variety of elements with a degree of independence from discursive comments or explanations. The varying degrees of abstraction of the drawn image does not shield us from the shock for the real.2 Drawings liberate the event or situation presented from an excessive attachment to narrative conventions of continuity and progress. They may also produce dissonance when viewed in connection to the written text, creating a tense relationship between two ways of portraying the apparently same reality, which problematizes simplistic one-way interpretations. Besides this visual/written hybridity, the graphic novel’s stance in between fiction and journalism makes it a particularly suitable site, as in video games, for observing the representation of marginal realities. Unlike the novel, the graphic novel can pursue an unashamedly explicit pedagogical project and has lately been extensively engaged in the denunciation of breaches of human rights. It has become a relevant genre for the representation of social and war conflicts (Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby, Spiegelman’s Maus, Sacco’s Palestine, Bazambanza’s Smile Through the Tears, etc.), often addressed to those who need guidance (or ironic detachment) in traumatic situations, such as abuse, illness and

Graphic Homelessness 107 some other non-regulated realities (Bechdel’s Fun Home, David B’s Epileptic, Leavitt’s Tangles, Hayden’s The Story of My Tits, Hayes’s Not Funny Ha-Ha, etc.). Jared Gardner remarks about the rise of adult comics in the USA in the ‘60s and ‘70s that they “had the potential to open minds, to allow strange visions to emerge, fantasies unauthorized by constipated society” (121); the same impact is applicable today. Some of the mentioned graphic novels have had international circulation and continue to receive substantial critical attention to such an extent that the generic category “human right comics” is widely used nowadays.3 Significantly, besides its educational and informational value, the form offers sharp explorations of both real and imagined identities through appealing artistic designs that do not diminish the work’s literary dimension. When analyzing homelessness, comics may turn out to be an effective resource, especially when observing characterization of types of individuals, perceptions of environments, and structure of narrative plots. This kind of study can be thought of as complementary to other research on the issue of homelessness which combines the factual knowledge of institutions, firsthand experience with the homeless and the examination of the circulation of identities and stereotypes in society.4 Within the international rising tide of graphic novels that aim at stirring consciences about vulnerability, there have been a few interesting examples tackling the issue of homelessness. Their very publishing has foregrounded the difficulties involved in the authentic representation of the poor and of the insane, as well as contributed to redefining the status of the book itself as the product of ethical collaboration. In this chapter, I will make reference to some visual and textual strategies used in a sample of six graphic novels that I consider allow a fruitful examination of different attempts, on the part of their authors, to surmount the physical and psychological barriers that separate the destitute from the affluent. Two of these works were published in England: The Tale of One Bad Rat (1995) and Somewhere Nowhere: Lives Without Homes (2012); two in the United States, Borb (2015) and Pitch Dark: Don’t Be Skerd (2008); and two in Spain: Invisible (2003) and Miguel Fuster: 15 años en la calle (2015). They provide a fairly varied sample of the potential of the graphic novel to represent the particular dystopias of homeless people in a world that walks past them. Some of these books do not contain much textual comment or captioning (Borb, Pitch Dark), whereas the others may contain abundant areas of written space on the page. Some of them are nonfictionalized autobiographies (Pitch Dark, Miguel Fuster), whereas others are imaginary accounts of destitution (The Tale of One Bad Rat, Invisible). Somewhere Nowhere is designed as a multivoiced autobiographical graphic novel created out of a collection of interviews with homeless people in Stoke-on-Trent, United Kingdom.5 Homeless characters have had a traditionally easy narrative fit in fiction but may produce difficult and uncomfortable responses when actual

108  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena individuals are being looked at outside of those clarifying narrative patterns. There is a long novelistic and filmic tradition of representation of homelessness within romantic, tragic and satirical perspectives (see Allen 2003). Homelessness has usually been made to follow the recurrent plot of fall followed by either redemption or by total wreckage. Homeless cases can be made to accommodate into the outline of the bildungsroman by following a path of demarginalization, whether or not successful in the end. The beggar, as distinct from the rebel wanderer, has been characterized both as hero and as failure; he (for they are usually male characters) is both a wise and a deranged figure, and he depends on luck more than the rest of the mortals because of his inefficiency or because of his whimsical destiny. In most cases, even when the experience of freedom is romanticized, they are pigeonholed within analogous binaries to that of fall and redemption: chaos and order, strayed and returned—or homed—disaster and success (the order of the terms may be reversed). These conceptualizations, which form the basic plot of many narratives, are initially related to a religious understanding of human experience as hardship plus salvation or reward. This structure becomes a meaningmaking explanatory formula whose applicability we have internalized and can activate in our daily existence. It transforms experience into a satisfying cognitive and ethical construct. However, when unaware of this protective schema that seems to regularize misfortune, we see homeless individuals in actual encounters—in their lack of a home and in their lack of a narrative that we know—our sympathy and engagement may not be so fluid and they may occupy an ambiguous position in our scales of empathy, especially when categorized as non-deserving indigents. As a whole, their stance does not easily make them a collective deserving the treatment given to other victimized groups. They may not be direct victims of attacks and persecution, as in war, genocide, or racism. Although it may be increasingly the case, they do not necessarily relate to immigration and refugee crises. Their diaspora is restricted to short stretches of pavement, streets and city areas. Sometimes they may also be sent off to other cities as part of municipal policies, but unlike other diasporic groups, they do not seem to possess collective cultural value and are usually of no interest in cultural agendas promoting the preservation of memory, as it is usual with historical traumatic events of wider scope affecting larger groups of people. Their destiny seems to be flat and prearranged: either they manage to get out of their misery and integrate into society or they don’t. Branded as the unlucky other or as nut cases, we guess they have rejected or have been rejected by their families because of bad conduct. Being alcoholic or mental, they are institutional cases. Their resilience does not make them admirable or attractive but dirty and smelly. Indeed, difficult access to a bathroom, as shown by many graphic novels, is one recurrent obstacle. Their aimless status in the city is at the far end of the paradigm of

Graphic Homelessness 109 walking as art or as discovery as in flânerie; it rather amounts, we tend to think, to a numbing of their senses. Theirs does not seem to be an active and truly resilient attitude, one that faces up to circumstances and brings about improvement, but rather a let go, often at the expense of their dignity. Their physical grotesqueness may make us distrustful and fearful, and even when donating money, we want them at a distance. It is within this flow of possible interpretations, literary, popular and personal that we can assess the tools that artists and writers use in graphic novels to bridge this existential distance. The main tool, apparently simple but convincing, is the drawing of environments and peoples that retain a power to communicate despair. Dark, stained, streaky pages, blurred scrawly panels make us feel the texture of a filthy world. Sometimes panels full of color with close-ups of angry distorted faces or body parts of passersby, especially of the shoes and legs (the homeless person’s actual field of vision), also convey a sense of wrongness and limitation. Haunting faces and decaying bodies express physical and metaphysical squalor. In its bustle or its emptiness, the city, often depicted in tilted frames, becomes meaningless. The gutters, that is, the spaces between the panels, may either push us to read on, dragged by the allure of an inevitable tragic sequence, or they may force us to stay at a particular panel, thus driving our attention away from the written parallel narrative, which is usually centered on transporting the abject subject aboard a story line devoted to satisfying hopes for a better future.6 By making the reader—or viewer—pause on one graphic scene, the book cancels out the movement of the corresponding forward written narrative, which is usually explanatory, and makes us concentrate instead on an arrangement of visible physical features that depict a dismal situation. Most often our final interpretation and our sense of catharsis, if it is eventually produced, will come from the way in which the plot allies itself with a therapeutic teleology. Bryan Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat, for example, can be described as a healing narrative that conveys a belief in reward after suffering. In this story, a girl’s rooflessness is the result of her father’s sexual abuse. Her trauma is overcome when, after many ordeals, she becomes a graphic artist in the manner of Beatrix Potter. The positive outcome of the story comes about thanks to the notion of gained space; that is, it is produced when the girl, Helen, is able to find a place that gives her back a sense of what she wants to be, a place she can possess both in practice and in her imagination. The originality of the book lies in its blending the marginal (homelessness experiences) and the mainstream (classical storytelling) through the main character’s attachment to the beauty of a quintessential English geography, the Lake District. The girl’s strength to overcome dangers and loneliness, even to muster self-healing after abuse, comes from modeling her life under the example of Beatrix Potter. Beatrix Potter’s attachment to a particular place, to animals and to art, her oppressive childhood, become a solid reality in the girl’s mind

110  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena and is displayed accordingly in parallel strips. There is a sharp contrast between the book’s initial images of London and the last glimpse of the mountainous nature of the Lake District when we look at the girl gazing at the landscape, now liberated from the pressing look of passersby. The city was, for her, cold streets walled by inhospitable urban constructions, it was full of meaningless monuments and threatening people (including influential predatory men). After her journey, she gains the right not to be looked at. Her androgynous clothes are gone, and her blonde hair has grown long. No longer afraid of her femininity and no longer an indigent, her relationship with space has changed; she becomes an enthusiastic traveler and can pass off as another wandering tourist in Hill Top, Potter’s museum. The power of a mythic space has cleansed her past as an abused child and as a vulnerable she-beggar literally as falling rain. This metaphorical cleansing, which gives a much-cherished English storytelling tradition the power to dissolve the dark side of the institution of the family, is strengthened symbolically by the presence of a huge rat that accompanies the girl in her journey from city to nature. This rat is the girl’s only friend and addressee, first as her pet and, when it is killed, as a larger presence that only she can see. This animal alludes to Beatrix Potter’s rat, to whom she devoted a well-known story but, above all, it allows for a symbolic transformation of the dirty and dangerous into the sacred and wise. An immigrant taxi driver who helps Hellen enlightens her about the relevance of rats in other cultures: they are essential in Hindu philosophy because they are considered to be healers—they are worshiped in North Rajasthan—and they have many positive connotations in a number of other cultures. In a parallel way, through the drawings, we begin to associate the animal with both ostracism and friendship. The girl finds love in a creature most people reject. The meanings historically projected on the idea of rats (the animalization of the poor and dirty) are neutralized by the restoring effects of beauty and companionship and their connection to a specific awesome place that belongs to all humanity. We realize that the rat is the girl herself. It is worth noting that the real genesis of the story, as Bryan Talbot explains in his first-person epilogue “A Rat’s Tail,” lied in the mystique of the Lake District and in the incipient image of a teenager in a synchronic bond with Beatrix Potter. It was when he started to do research on the topic of children’s sexual abuse in the home that he decided to change both the story and the illustrative technique and made Helen follow the stages in trauma recovery he had studied in psychology books. He also based his dialogue on literal transcriptions of interviews with victims of abuse, in some of which he himself had participated. Additionally, Talbot, one of the most prominent figures in the panorama of the British graphic novel, published The Tale of One Bad Rat when a change in the reception of the graphic novel was being produced, as the comic for adults was barely underway then. Authors such as Art Spiegelman, Alan Moore, and Neil Gaiman were starting to publish graphic novels devoted

Graphic Homelessness 111 to adults rather than to teenagers who consumed particular genres. At the same time, sexual abuse had not been treated in the media openly, as Bryan Talbot attests to in his “A Rat’s Tail” afterword. In short, he was writing a graphic novel about sexual abuse at a moment when both his chosen topic and his genre were not established realities in our culture. His book has been used in many help centers all over the world, especially with teenagers, to give them a sense of catharsis. It is, according to him, a book for those who can identify with the situations and wish to find a way out of shame and into a community. The last pages of The Tale of One Bad Rat reproduce the drawings and written text of a book entitled “The Tale of One Bad Rat” allegedly written by Beatrix Potter in which Helen is the protagonist. This mise en abyme has Helen, as a rat, becoming a storyteller and illustrator after saving a rat community from a tyrant cat. The insertion of this book within the larger overarching narrative of Helen as a homeless person signals that her ordeal has come to an end. The graphic display of this secondary narrative corroborates her belief in the existence of a lifeline in the shape of a book that marks the beginning of her fulfilment. The story of the overcoming of indigence thanks to an absolute devotion to producing art is a recurrent existential experience (both imagined and real) in other contemporary graphic novels, although not a possibility in the next graphic novel under discussion, Somewhere Nowhere: Lives without Homes. Here, the narrative does not depend on the fictionalizing hand of the comic artist but on the experience of social workers and on unredeemed homeless people and, therefore, the book’s images, storylines and messages take a different route. Somewhere Nowhere is the result of social science research conducted at Salford University, whose illustrator was Sam Dahl and Philip Brown its principal investigator. Their purpose was to counteract caricatured representations by presenting the oftenneglected life stories of a number of homeless people as a whole and not just focusing on the most dramatic and sensational aspects of their experience. Based on interviews with 104 homeless people in Stoke-On-Trent, they selected five stories that were displayed in the form of chapters that included “the events they attribute as being significant in their lives and the meanings they attach to them” (foreword). In most of the cases, the victims identify the origin of the trouble in childhood, in lack of family care or family abuse, and all of them narrate their life on the streets following a string of causes originating in those childhood events. The retrospective sequence in which they tell their own lives follows a pattern that suspiciously resembles clinical and psychological accounts of personal disaster: childhood, worsening situation, deteriorating interpersonal relations, substance misuse, homelessness, hopes for the future. Consequently, this elucidative narrative and the language used to describe those events seem to come from elsewhere, as if these homeless persons had internalized a professionalized interpretation inculcated to them by their carers or by experts. Equally, the problem with textual

112  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena captioning in the book is that a too rigid a sense of cause-consequence is eventually produced. This makes the reader wonder whether these narratives actually originate in the interviewed person’s actual recount of events or are the result of a well-meaning imposition of a conventional plot onto their lives. Although Philip Brown claims that the words in the book are the people’s real voices, the stories unfold as neat and trimmed summaries articulated through ready-made unemotional expressions such as “sexual assault,” “step-dad figure,” “low-skilled work,” “self-harm” “lack of stable accommodation,” “prostitution,” “removing the baby from my care,” “I turned to crime to fund my drug habit,” etc. It seems as if the audience’s need to be educated in their problems overrides what would surely be more chaotic and less edifying first-person accounts of personal damage. The clinical statement muffles the psychological injury. The particular hybrid nature of the graphic novel is of much help here to counteract the distancing or appeasing effects produced by that detached narration. While narrative continuity and coherence claim part of our reading attention, terribly traumatic visual scenes like rape, abandonment, rough sleeping, drug addiction, or eviction happen in each individual frame, diminishing the relevance of an overarching narration moving forward to the future. This example of dissonance between text and image makes us realize the gap between narrative and raw event. The text carries the character along toward destiny while the images make us pause on the cruelty of single separate scenes, which hint at a lack of words, especially when the victim is a child. Relevantly, the design and color (or lack of color) of the pages impede distancing and closure. All the pages of this black-and-white book are thoroughly smudged: they are full of stains, drops of ink, fingerprints, blots, etc. The paper itself is smeared in illustrated pages as well as in the initial and final empty pages. This graphic dirtiness somehow de-hygienises the clinical record, it inscribes a dirty mark on the professionalized account. The page is a space that bears witness to the uncertainties, dirtiness, and darkness of the lives of the homeless by acquiring the very texture of their lived environment. Homes look ominous, both from the inside (when doors open, and the sexual abuser is about to enter the child’s room) and from the outside (when people do not have where to stay and look at houses from the street). Houses appear sinister when one is not an owner. Walls, dark windows, and straight lines denote hostility, and the mere depiction of a façade implies the character’s unbridgeable distance with those living inside. Long empty pavements in winterly streets, black buildings, condominiums in the background; the degree of abstraction in these drawings does not reduce their realism, on the contrary, it increases an impression of desolation. These people are seen sitting and sleeping in house entrances, ledgers, empty storehouses, living room carpets, pallets, prisons, hostels. Insults thrown against them are rendered as thick stained clouds coming from the mouth of authority figures: parents, teachers, partners, extended family. These ink patches reach the victims’ faces and turn

Graphic Homelessness 113 them into a blur. The book itself becomes, visually, a big dark stain. Later, in the epilogue, we contemplate these people in their current situation, but even here their profiles are smudged. They all wish to live independently, away from the hostel if they are living in one at the moment. Significantly, the book cover shows a streetlamp that seems to throw, not beams of light, but a viscous white substance that spills down unevenly on the street; it is under this kind of light that the book’s title is printed. Jason Little’s Borb and Youme Landowne’s and Anthony Horton’s Pitch Dark: Don’t Be Skerd, the American books that will be briefly examined now, develop different narrative and visual tropes to provide a sense of lost or gained space, the focus this time being on the restrictions of public space. Borb is a small-format comic book in which we see its homeless protagonist, Borb, already going down a spiral of mishaps. His body suffers a series of calamities due to exposure on the streets: losing teeth, breaking a leg, bug infestation, trench-foot, loss of clothes and consequent (unfounded) accusations of child molestation, prison, beatings, and loss of body parts because of cold and gangrene. While all this is happening to him, he says very few words, only utters some sounds of disgust and pain. It is the people who surround him that make appreciations about him: doctors, social workers, passersby, and policemen. Only they are allowed to make sense through language and reach conclusions about Borb’s life. Even we, the readers, are represented as users of the list of words that appears before the book’s title—whose letters are ingeniously shaped as broken bricks—quoted at the beginning of this chapter: “BEGGAR, BUM, DERELICT,” etc. It becomes clear from the beginning that Borb’s life will take place within these identity indicators which, through lexicon choice, position onlookers a priori outside the bonds of true sympathy and responsibility toward him. Borb can briefly stay in privileged spaces (both in reality and in his dreams), such as a free dental clinic, a garden, a sofa, a hospital stretcher, a bed, a prison cell, a rich mansion. The rest of the time he lives between garbage cans, next to locked doors, walls, dirty canals, derelict houses, park benches, cardboard boxes, the underground. He is in constant exile among these inhospitable surfaces and his ordeal, down to its most scatological stages, is not harnessed by its author with any redeeming any word or act, Borb’s or others, as it may happen in other graphic novels. Borb is finally confined to living in the railroad tracks, is hit by a train and dies. His resilience was not admirable because it was tainted by dirtiness. The cliché expressions used by members of the public to explain him away (“ah, he’s just a homeless guy”) define them as lazy and insufficient witnesses. Unavoidably, the reader is identified with this reaction of the passersby; after all, we are affluent user of street space, “normal” people who read books. The first and last pages of the book, where nothing should happen (they are blank in most books) are of utmost importance here. Discarded consumer objects strewn on the pavement become the center of our field

114  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena of vision for more seconds than we would wish for. A broken tape cassette recorder, an open garbage bin, some damp newspapers, an empty cardboard box, scattered chicken bones, a couple of dirty gloves. On these pages, the space is totally white and has no dimensions, but we know that it represents the street sidewalk, a blank space where those items take the spotlight and acquire a pressing relevance. At the end of the book, after the credits, other scattered objects occupy what would be otherwise, once more, a spotlessly white space: a shabby boot, a syringe, dog’s poo, vomit, a used condom, a discarded pizza box with some food left in it. Although most of the time Borb is lying or sitting on sidewalks, the perceptual positioning that this book creates in our encounter with him is not from high above but at eye-level, as the choice to look away becomes more difficult when confronting reality on an equal footing, so to speak. This strategy eliminates our privilege, as it is customary when walking on a street, to look away, to see these things from above or from the corner of our eye. In its extremity and its excess of caricature, Borb activates our field of vision by making Borb’s body an in-the-face presence that forces us to confront our own disgust. The homeless person is defined as a rotting body, sickeningly physical as well as irrelevant and ghostly that dosses around, aside or below. He remains most of the times in front of people but out of sight. Borb’s withdrawal from the world of the living and his forced ostracism among the underground tracks becomes the last step in his descent into hell and marks a recurrent motif that becomes, in many graphic novels, a symbol grounded in factual reality. The space under ground, populated by rats, is his physical and metaphorical destination. Pitch Dark Don’t Be Skerd by Youme Landowne and Anthony Horton goes further to elaborate on the spatial significance of the underground as a dense visual trope of this stance of non-existence and invisibility. The first and last pages of the book are nothing but a total darkness where we can dimly appreciate a tunnel and receding railway tracks and then a notice: “JUST CAUSE YOU CAN’T SEE DON’T MEAN AINT NOTHING THERE.” Then, a busy city and then, the underground, where an artist, Youme, comes across a homeless man, Anthony Horton. In their casual conversation, she discovers that he is also an artist and lives in the tunnels below the subway in New York. This man tells Youme about his life as an unwanted child and teenager, his life on the streets and his ending up in a shelter “HELL . . . WHEN THE REAL PAIN STARTED.” When out again, he is not allowed to stay in one place (park benches, subway cars) and, after being chased by the police, he jumps off the platform and goes deeper into the tunnels. There he comes across a frighteningly dark environment, six stories below the city, where he learns how to survive thanks to the tips of a few permanent residents that defend their own niche with teeth and claw. Anthony shows Youme how to behave in

Graphic Homelessness 115 that labyrinthine place, his “room” being twenty feet down the tracks. The caution in the book’s title “DON’T BE SKERD” (don’t be scared) is addressed to her. Unlike stories that revolve around the inevitability of self-annihilation like Borb, Anthony, a real man, has learned survival skills by turning filth, the garbage, to his own advantage. He can tell what there is in most bags just with a kick and learns that everything he needs can be found in the garbage: “FOR EVERYTHING YOU FIND THERE IS SOMEONE TO BUY IT. SOME OF THE CABS RUN SIDE BUSINESSES, SENDING WHAT WE FIND TO OTHER COUNTRIES. WE NAME BUYERS AFTER THEY THINGS THEY BUY MOST. RADIO MAN, WATCHMAN, SNEAKER MAN.” In addition to this survival strategy, we find in the book hopeful messages of resistance that appear as prophetic signs on underground walls and subway cars: “Si ves algo di algo,” “Civil rights and civil liberties for all.” Sometimes these announcements are only partially seen: “AND A ROAD TO CITIZENSHIP,” “MEJOR MANERA DECIR ES HACER” but, nevertheless, they outnumber other hostile urban messages that are on the streets or the underground: “NO PARKING MON-SUN EVER,” “DO NOT ENTER OR CROSS THE TRACKS,” “NO SPITTING.” One of the last pages features the city skyline and, the page opposite, a total darkness. We would think that the ink spreading all over the page bears witness to this story of invisibility. However, this darkness is not total. Before being submerged, again and, finally, in the tunnels, we are given the chance to see the photo of Anthony Horton, who stares at us, proudly. And once in the tunnels again, we can dimly discern lines here and there, and the railway tracks receding into the distance. Both the mainstream artist and the homeless artist, who draws pictures in the tunnels, find some redemption in this encounter, darkness being momentarily pierced by light: Youme is not scared to be led into the profundities of the city by an unknown person and Anthony is able to attract the interest of at least one person among those who, six stories above his crude residence, return to their homes. Some lines that read like a poem are posted on the walls of the subway platform as if they were advertising banners: “OUR MEMORIES/AND DREAMS/WALK BESIDE US,/ INFORMING EVERYTHING/WE THINK WE SEE./WE ARE SCAVENGERS/ OF STORIES./WE SEEK/HIDDEN MESSAGES/OF HOPE AND FIND THEM./WE GATHER EVIDENCE/OF RESISTANCE TO/OPPRESSION AND DESPAIR.” Still, the future of Anthony remains uncertain at the end of the book. We learn, if we search the web, that he was taken to prison just before the book’s publication. The invasion of black ink into the page becomes an even more tragic existential trope of home deprivation in the Spanish graphic novel Miguel Fuster, 15 años en la calle, where a former graphic artist tells his own story as a homeless person on the streets of Barcelona. His narrating

116  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena perspective avoids the stereotyped sequence of what took him there (success followed by alcoholism and vagrancy) by mainly focusing on people’s reactions to his indigence. He ponders upon certain experiences without a summary or a teleology, analyzing special painful moments of solitude and rejection. This book is a dramatic, intensely poetic monologue of someone who is waiting to find his human condition. With interspersed prose pieces written by himself and by people who know him—former colleagues and social workers—the volume becomes a treatise, it is a generic hybrid made up of autobiographical narration, essays on the condition of indigence, informational pieces on the work of a charity fighting homelessness in Barcelona (Fundación Arrels), and eventually a homage to Miguel’s contribution to the graphic novel and to his work for homeless people. His tribulations as a homeless person, though, become the main text and provide the book with a predominant ongoing narrative that revolves around a sense of shame provoked by the exhibitionism of his pain. This is a portrait of a clever, sensitive person in a terribly contemptuous society whose situation did not numb his senses, on the contrary. People’s reactions exacerbate his self-hatred and increase the pangs of conscience he is subject to when remembering his past life. The accounts of those who helped him emphasize that no past mistake or excess deserves homelessness. The wounds are emotional as well as physical. Drawings become almost impenetrable due to overlapping scratches that make it difficult to discern the figure of Miguel, buried below what it seems to be unending lines of barbwire. They become a trap that do not allow the figure beneath the layers to move, turning him into a ghostly, menacing presence that continuously stares at the reader. It is his face, his eyes, his blurred figure against a blurred background that continuously captures the essence of an identity in process of dissolution. The darkened quality of the drawings and his meditations on human meanness ensnare the viewer in each panel like a whirlpool of wire. Nonetheless, we are reassured of an eventual “happy ending,” because the book itself is the irrefutable proof that Miguel found the means to publish it, which means that he managed to get out of the streets and be productive. As in The Tale of One Bad Rat, the idea and the physical presence of a book becomes nurturing, an object that reaches our hands and attests to Miguel’s success in arousing our interest out of his helplessness and in creating something we could buy. While the main complaint in Miguel Fuster, 15 años en la calle is that they (the indigent) do not exist in people’s minds, negation of self-identity is reversed in Invisible by Jaime Martín, a book whose images and words develop an extended metaphor on invisibility but where the status of non-existence is constructed as a privilege. In Invisible, only the homeless person is really aware of society’s greed and absurdity. At the beginning of the story, we see a light coming out of a cave and, after seeing

Graphic Homelessness 117 someone looking at his own distorted image in a mirror, we accompany him as he traverses cities, malls, parties, restaurants, business districts, bars, the underground, violent demonstrations. The others, people that he encounters, are depicted as zombies. They have distorted and aggressive faces, sockets for eyes, sucked-in grinning mouths; only this solitary presence retains a human body and face. The narrative orientation of this book, like Miguel Fuster’s, is philosophical, each page containing a prose piece with a large image that represents, sometimes figuratively, sometimes allegorically, an apocalyptic message. In the first half of the book we hear the voice of someone going crazy, a skinless monster reflected in a mirror, someone who does not recognize who he is. There is no specific protagonist in the book, yet. Then we see someone sitting on the streets, looking at passersby, his field of vision restricted to their moving legs. We know he is the one who sees and speaks, he is the only human. After we have identified that begging figure as the narrator, we see a number of frenzied rituals through his eyes (people drinking, shouting, buying, walking, losing their jobs), and he always going in the opposite direction against an eerie crowd of zombies engaged in wild acts of consumerism. He feels the cold, the continuous and maddening skin itching (a condition common to people who sleep rough); he witnesses groups of homeless being beaten and burned by hooligans. It is then that he comes to the realization that the others, the other creatures—people? zombies?—need him in order to know how they would end up if they do not play their cards well. Without him, there would be total chaos. Although he is no longer afraid, he is aware that his body is anchored to “a place inhabited by beings that his mind does not understand” (Martin 56; my translation). The last page of the book contains two images in red and yellow tonalities: the first one of a group of zombies walking forward, and him moving among them, we can only see his back. In the other image, these figures walk away, and he walks toward the reader, a smile on his face. The living dead is a powerful trope for the social reality of homelessness in many novels, only that this time a zombie existence is projected on to mainstream lives, ours. Invisible dramatizes our plea, not theirs; the roles of beggar/onlooker are reversed. This contestation of social scripts relates back to Butchinsky’s (11) appreciation of homeless individuals as being able to play and alter the identity game imposed on them.7 In this graphic novel, the destitute person is not portrayed as going down the road of dejection and tragedy or as relegated and crushed by the images surrounding him but emerges as an arrogant dissonant identity overpowering social predominant storylines.8

Conclusion In “Critique of Pure Resilience,” Rhegezza-Zit and Rufat (215–216) examine the forceful injunction of the “adapt or perish” message

118  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena underlying recent uses of the concept of resilience. The stigmatization of those who do not adapt (without looking into the causes of their passivity or their resistance) pervades commonly circulated images we may identify with, even if they come for allegedly altruistic sources. The iconographic shift, in the UN’s campaigns, from an archetype of vulnerability (a black woman in distress) to one of resilience (a series of muscular men building a dam), is symptomatic. There has been since 2005 an ongoing glorifying narrative of heroes who emerge by themselves, usually after disasters. In connection to image patterns applied to the city, the same characteristics of heroification can be observed: “model cities, good practices and local leaders are showcased as champions of resilience” (Rhegezza-Zit and Rufat 216). Notions of spatial justice seem to be appropriated, Rhegezza-Zit and Rufat claim, by “econometrics and technical fixes,” whereas, in fact, they should form part of public discussion within political and social contexts.9 Also, within the cultural and artistic arenas, we might add. The analyzed graphic novels play their little part in a long multifaceted trajectory of sensitization about certain realities, or better, about certain identities. The replacement of the term “vagrancy” by “homelessness” is an example of lexicon modification that conveys changed attitude over time. Change in vocabulary, narrative pattern and imagery contribute to overcoming distrustful reactions and to rehumanizing individuals who are trapped in overly available limiting and distorting definitions. In the analyzed works we observed that homeless figures were charged with negative images, as well as became the recipients of severe invisibility, and this blindness generated both the narrative plot as well as the visual characterization. Commonly used linguistic spatial metaphors for the destitute (the lower class, the submerged tenth) are given, in these graphic novels, embodied existence through environments and objects associated with filth, coldness, solitude, and disgust; the underground becoming one of the most pervasive forms of exile, with a myriad of allegoric potentialities. Drawings of houses, inside and outside, of pavements, of shelters, of gardens, hospitals, railway tracks, tunnels. Portrays of faces, of body parts, of busy and empty cities, written reflections on life’s purpose, stories of addiction and despair, of survival and death in a city’s random spots. How do these narrative and visual patterns affect the perception of our surroundings and of the lives of those we occasionally encounter? Comics, as other forms of art, contribute to a refinement of our ethical considerations and challenge the “media’s evacuation of the human through the image,” as Judith Butler put it when she claimed that, in order to understand reality, we have to protect ourselves from its standardized representations, from normative patterns of intelligibility that produce ideals of the human “that differentiate among those who are more and less human” (Precarious 146), the latter, consequently, being effaced from public seeing

Graphic Homelessness 119 and hearing. When prejudices become available and generally accepted, ways of not thinking about others forcefully invade our thinking habits. These “modes of not thinking,” using Carolyn J. Dean’s term, are a “violent erasure” (104): their opacity needs to be dissipated through social and cultural articulations. According to Dean (99–105), bystander indifference has still not been sufficiently historicized because its banality is hard to grasp. By portraying city space from previously unacknowledged angles, representation is gained, and homeless irrelevance is counteracted. The activation of previously ignored fields of vision and a simultaneous connection of these sights to fragile bodies as well as to personal reflexive processes throw light on existing roles in street habitation and define our potential to embrace or reject invitations to come closer to marginal realities. These imaginatively engaging representations enlarge shallow definitions of who deserves to be considered resilient and, therefore, a target of empathy.

Notes 1. See Butler’s “On Linguistic Vulnerability,” Jurecic’s “Theory’s Aging Body,” Seal’s “Preface,” and Dean’s “Indifference and the Language of Victimization” for discussions on the hostile reactions produced in normal social processes of group identification. 2. Woo (175) and Round (194–196), for example, contend that the drawn image is subjective and highly coded but that its truth claim is, even in nonfiction comics, no less pressing than more referential visual modes like photography. 3. For a detailed explanation of the connections between comics and social action and between comics and education see Smith (61–72) Jüngst (11–65), respectively. 4. See, for example, Eungjun Min, Cameron Parsell, or Lindsey McCarthy. 5. Although the terms “comic” and “graphic novel” are sometimes used indistinctly, the comic is often serialized and generally has a more entertaining bent, whereas the graphic novel is usually published as an autonomous book with more serious artistic aspirations. 6. See Edward Said’s reaction to the discordant phenomenon image versus predictable narrative in the graphic novel Palestine (Woo 166), also Millington (207). 7. “[P]ublic perception and the prevailing practice of professionals, is to associate street dwellers with models of need and pathology—including illness and ‘bad character’. In contrast, the rough sleepers in my study seemed not to match these models but demonstrated talents, resourcefulness and aspirations to freedom” (Butchinsky 11). 8. Unlike Miguel Fuster 15 años en la calle, where, lacking resources to live his life meaningfully, the character experiences his life as over, as ended, the protagonist of Invisible discards any pre-scripted narrative of decline. He refuses to be relegated to the status of the living dead that society has arranged for him. For this character, loss of membership, one of the most tragic events in our lives, is not followed by a loss of the narrative of self-identity (Seale 41). For a detailed discussion of the social phenomenon of narrative foreclosure, see Freeman (81–91).

120  María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena 9. For a critical reflection on how this pattern of interpretation for disasters obliterates the real victims’ plight and allies itself with misleading moralizing discourses such as those of Japan or Haiti, see (Rhegezza-Zit and Rufat 212, 216).

Works Cited Allen, John. Homelessness in American Literature: Romanticism, Realism and Testimony. Routledge, 2003. Bamzambanza, Rupert. Smile Through the Tears: The Story of the Rwandan Genocide, 2005. Translated by Lesley McCubbin, Soul Asylum Poetry, 2009. Beauchard, David. Epileptic. (1996–2003). Translated by K. Thompson, Pantheon, 2005. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Bennett, Jill. Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art. Stanford UP, 2005. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Translated by Graham Burchell, Cambridge UP, 1993. Burkey, Tormod V. Ethics for a Full World: Or, Can Animal-Lovers Save the World? Clairview, 2017. Butchinsky, Chantal. “Identities of Rough Sleepers in Oxford.” Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures, edited by Mike Seal, Russell House Publishing, 2007, pp. 10–26. Butler, Judith. “On Linguistic Vulnerability.” Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, Routledge, 1977, pp. 1–41. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Cruse, Howard. Stuck Rubber Baby. Perennial, 1995. Dahl, Sam (Illustrator), Brown, Philip (principal investigator). Somewhere NOWHERE: Lives Without Homes. Salford Housing and Urban Studies Unit, 2012. Dean, Carolyn J. “Indifference and the Language of Victimization.” The Fragility of Empathy After the Holocaust, Cornell UP, 2004, pp. 76–105. Freeman, Mark. “When the Story’s Over: Narrative Foreclosure and the Possibility of Self-Renewal.” The Uses of Narrative: Explorations in Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies, edited by Molly Andrews, et al., Transaction Publishers, 2000, pp. 81–91. Fuster, Miguel. 15 Años en la Calle. Obra Completa, Chula Ink, 2016. Gardner, Jared. Projections: Comics and the History of Twentieth-First Century Storytelling. Stanford UP, 2012. Hayden, Jennifer. The Story of My Tits. Top Shelf Productions, 2015. Hayes, Leah. Not Funny Ha-Ha: A Handbook for Something Hard. Fantagraphic Books, 2015. Jüngst, Heike Elisabeth. Information Comics. Peter Lang, 2010. Jurecic, Ann. “Theory’s Aging Body.” Illness as Narrative, U of Pittsburgh P, 2012, pp. 92–112. Landowne, Youme, and Anthony Horton. Pitch Black: Don’t Be Skerd. Cinco Puntos Press, 2008. Leavitt, Sarah. Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me. FreeHand Books, 2010.

Graphic Homelessness 121 Little, Jason. Borb. Uncivilized Books, 2015. Martin, Jaime. Invisible. Edicions de Ponent, 2002–2003. McCarthy, Lindsey. “Homelessness and Identity: A Critical Review of the Literature and Theory.” People, Place & Policy Online, vol. 7, no. 1, 2013, pp. 46–58. Millington, Michael P. “Paneling Rage.” Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres, edited by Jake Jakaitis and James F. Wurtz, McFarland & Company, 2012, pp. 207–217. Min, Eungjun. Reading the Homeless: The Media’s Image of Homeless Culture. Praeger, 1999. Parsell, Cameron. “Homeless Identities: Enacted and Ascribed.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 62, no. 3, 2010, pp. 442–461. Rhegezza-Zit, Magali, and Samuel Rufat. Resilence Imperative: Uncertainties, Risks and Disasters. Elsevier, 2015. Round, Julia. “Be Vewy, Vewy Quiet: We’re Hunting Wippers”: A Barthesian Analysis of the Construction of Fact and Fiction in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell.” The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature, edited by Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest, McFarland & Company, 2010, pp. 188–201. Sacco, Joe. Palestine. Seattle: Fantagrafics, 2001. Seal, Mike. “Homelessness and Its Impact on Our Own Personal and Societal Identities.” Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures, Russell House Publishing, 2007, pp. 112–125. ———. “Introduction: Homelessness and Identity.” Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures, edited by Mike Seal, Russell House Publishing, 2007, pp. 1–8. Seale, Clive. “Resurrective Practice and Narrative.” The Uses of Narrative: Exploration Sin Sociology, Psychology, and Cultural Studies, edited by Molly Andrews, et al., Transaction Publishers, 2000, pp. 36–47. Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks.” Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, edited by Chaney, The U of Wisconsin P, 2011, pp. 61–72. Spiegelman, Art. Maus. Pantheon, 1992. Talbot, Bryan. The Tale of One Bad Rat, 1995. Jonathan Cape, 2008. Woo, Benjamin. “Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine. The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature, edited by Joyce Goggin and Dan Hassler-Forest, McFarland & Company, 2010, pp. 166–177.

7 Building Collective Resilience Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being Kit Dobson

This chapter is concerned with questions of time and resilience in Ruth Ozeki’s 2013 novel A Tale for the Time Being. In this piece, I discuss three main themes that emerge from this book, each one pertaining to the sense of time that the novel offers to us readers, specifically the three main tenses into which time is divided: past, present, and future. In concerning myself with the past, in my first pass through the book, I will approach the novel through an examination of the geological and geopolitical events that underlie the book, specifically the Fukushima meltdown in Japan and the growth of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. These are representative of and link to many of the other historical elements of the novel. Second, and very much thinking of the present—as well as of presence, if you will pardon the pun—I will examine the Buddhist underpinnings of the novel. These, I will suggest, force us to see everything in the book as existing in, or in relation to, the present that the paired protagonists Naoko Yasutani (Nao, i.e., “now”) and Ruth both inhabit. Third, and thinking of the future, I will consider the narrative structure of the book itself, because this novel projects itself into an ethical future, one where breaking the logic of the narrative—and the logic of time— might lead to a better world to come. All three of these threads point toward my argument that Ozeki’s novel foregrounds collective resilience in the face of individualistic oppression and alienation. This argument connects to those made across this volume. As with Susie O’Brien’s contribution, I concern myself with ecological catastrophes and their consequences. Among these consequences are intergenerational transmissions of grief, analyzed also by Aritha van Herk in her analysis of Kim Thuy’s Ru and in Eva Darias-Beautell’s reading of Madeleine Thien’s Certainty in this book. Finally, similar to both Miriam Borham and María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena’s chapters, I concern myself with abject bodies that subvert and challenge concepts of victimization. None of my colleagues’ arguments, however, are simple ones that can be reduced to such a simple shorthand, and, in turn, the oppression and alienation in A Tale for the Time Being requires careful scrutiny.

Building Collective Resilience 123 This oppression and alienation can be located in several places. A Tale for the Time Being is a complex novel told from two perspectives. One perspective, that of Nao, is a narrative concerning a young Japanese girl who was born in California to parents who returned to Japan after her father lost his lucrative Silicon Valley job. We learn about Nao through the diary that she writes, a sometimes-playful, sometimes-serious account of her time in Tokyo where she skips school to sit at the Lovely Apron Café and tell us her story. This story, in turn, links to her parents and her great-grandmother Jiko, a Buddhist nun, as well as her long-since deceased great-uncle Haruki. Haruki, we learn, was a young philosopher and reader of French who died in a kamikaze mission during World War II. His death led to his mother’s leaving the world for the monastery at which Nao arrives in her narrative. This diary-told story, in turn, is relayed to us by Ruth, our second protagonist. She is a character who appears to share many characteristics of Ozeki herself: she lives on a Gulf Island off the coast of British Columbia and is struggling to write her next book. (Ozeki divides her time between the Gulf Islands and Brooklyn and is a Buddhist nun; Rocío G. Davis analyzes the links between the novel’s character and its author in “Fictional Transits.”) One day, while walking on the beach, Ruth discovers a plastic bag washed up on the shore with a Hello Kitty lunchbox inside. It contains Nao’s diary, written inside a “hacked” version of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, that is, a notebook bound with covers from Proust. The bag also contains a watch and letters written in Japanese. Ruth reads the diary while searching for more clues as to how the package arrived on her island’s shores, suspecting the tsunami of March 11, 2011. As the stories unfold, the two narrative perspectives become enmeshed in each other, eventually overlapping and intersecting as both Nao and Ruth struggle to find resolution. Ozeki’s novel has begun to attract critical interest in particular because of how it responds to events that are connected across time and space. Guy Beauregard, for instance, situates the novel in relation to the tsunami and looks at the longer historical timeline. He argues, “Ozeki’s novel creates space for us to rethink how . . . anti-imperialist struggles are entangled with representations of Canada.” Masami Usui similarly situates the novel in relation to the tsunami, “one of the most terrible traumatic experiences since World War II.” Daniel McKay, in turn, reads the novel alongside Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts in order to investigate how Ozeki’s novel uses “an aesthetic of trauma that successfully humanizes the kamikaze pilot” (8). Looking somewhat differently at time, Marlo Starr examines the cross-temporal relationship between Ruth and Nao, finding that “the novel puts forward an alternative model of feminism” through the women’s “transnational relationship” (100). While I see the novel somewhat differently than Starr, who

124  Kit Dobson is concerned with thinking against the Buddhism with which this chapter more closely aligns, the solidarity that Ruth and Nao build is, in my view, an important way to witness dis-alienating forms of resilience. My reading is thus perhaps closer to Petra Faschinger’s eco-critical analysis, an analysis that argues that the novel “promotes environmentally inflected global citizenship” (54). That said, the criticism to date has not substantially examined the Buddhist roots of the novel and how these inflect the concepts of time in the novel, or the way that, as Ozeki puts it in an interview with Eleanor Ty, “Nao’s message calls Ruth into being” (166). What being might mean in this novel, I argue, is intimately tied to what it might mean to develop collective forms of resilience.

The Past: Ecological Devastation, the Tsunami, and the Meltdown The past provides A Tale for the Time Being with the background with which the characters must deal. This past stretches in many directions, such as Ruth’s partner Oliver’s interest in deep time, in ecological time, most visible in his tree-based installations, art projects that he is fighting to be able to do throughout the book. He does so all while having profound misgivings and doubts about himself. It is as if, Ozeki writes, “the forest were healing him” (60), but he has to fight for it. The island on which Ruth and Oliver live is an island with a mixed history, a history that is tied to Indigenous displacement, to Japanese internment, and to western settlement through the ecologically destructive practice of whaling. This history is also connected to the contemporary settlers who appear in the novel, settlers whom Ruth describes as slow-moving, personable, yet nosey neighbors like their frequent visitor Muriel. The island only sometimes exists in the present, too: Ruth’s difficulty, for instance, in accessing the Internet is a marker of the ways in which the island exists both in and out of time. Nao’s understandings of the past also inflect the setting of the novel. When we first meet her, she seems to be concerned only with the present and the near future. We are presented with a young character who does not see the point of school and who views old technologies as more or less pointless. Her distance from the adults around her is something that she perceives repeatedly, as in her following observation: “I hate it when grown-ups watch you like . . . a malfunctioning cyborg. Not quite human” (139). Over time, however, Nao, too, comes to experience deeper time through her great-grandmother, Old Jiko, as well as through learning about Jiko’s life in her Buddhist monastery in the countryside. This learning, I argue, renders Nao more fully human, or else begins to challenge her understanding of what it is that the human itself might be. As Nao’s present becomes Ruth’s past, moreover, at the time of Ruth’s reading the diary, Ruth comes to fear that the monastery may have been

Building Collective Resilience 125 lost in the tsunami and that Nao, too, may have succumbed to the same fate. Try as she might, Ruth is unable to determine precisely which monastery Nao discusses in her diary and the possibility that it was destroyed in the tsunami of 2011 remains. The tsunami, moreover, sharply marks the divide between Nao’s present and Ruth’s. Ruth tries throughout the novel to discover whether Nao has been affected by the tsunami, but the best she can do is find “pretty strong” evidence that she might have been at Jiko’s temple in Sendai prefecture on March 11 of that year (374). On that day, an undersea earthquake off the coast of Japan led to Richter scale readings of 9.1. It was the largest earthquake ever to hit Japan. The subsequent tsunami led to ten-meter waves, close to 20,000 deaths and disappearances, and the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, with explosions lasting for days and huge amounts of toxic waters released into the ocean. The levels of radiation and contamination from Fukushima were compared to the levels of the Chernobyl meltdown, yet these were two quite distinct events, particularly given the wastewater pollution resulting from Fukushima. Widespread evacuations from the region around the power plant followed, as well as country-wide reactor shutdowns. The island of Honshu moved about eight feet as a result of the earthquake and the earth’s axis of rotation was mildly affected (“2011 Japan Earthquake”). “Japan is coming here” is how Oliver puts it in conversation with Ruth, citing a different number—13 feet—than the one that I found (202). For a country with a long and complex atomic history—tracing back to World War II, about which Nao learns as well as the novel unfolds—these recent events have deeply affected Japanese society. Among the flotsam of the tsunami and Fukushima was over five million tons of ocean-borne debris. 70% of this debris is estimated to have sunk, leaving one-and-a-half million tons floating somewhere in the Pacific Ocean (“2011 Japan Earthquake”). The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been tracking where the debris from the tsunami has ended up, and their maps confirm that it is indeed possible for the debris that Ruth reports, the debris that includes Nao’s journal, to have washed up on the shores of B.C. This recent flood of debris takes us, in turn, into deeper historical issues connected to oceanic time. I would like to link Ozeki’s work on this score with that of U.S. based filmmaker and artist Chris Jordan. Jordan has for the past number of years been involved in projects that use garbage, and in particular garbage caught in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the gyre with which Oliver is concerned in Ozeki’s novel. Jordan’s work demonstrates in part how A Tale for the Time Being dramatizes oceanic time and its encounter with human time, or what ecologists are now calling the Anthropocene, the era during which humans have dominated the planet. Jordan’s examination of garbage has recently taken him to Midway Island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Midway is a small 6.2 square kilometer atoll and

126  Kit Dobson the site of a U.S. military landing strip. It is home to between 40 and 60 people at any given time. It is perhaps best known from the Battle of Midway during World War II. Jordan has traveled to Midway in order to witness how humans are impacting the environment thousands of kilometers away from home—how humans are transforming landscapes without ever setting foot on them. As Ruth thinks of the Fukushima meltdown in the novel, “You can’t hold on to water or keep it from leaking away” (198); human impacts happen, sometimes, far from where their actions take place. Midway is remarkable as one of the key sites where albatross breed. It is a massive nesting site. It is there, at a huge distance from any continental inhabitation, that Jordan finds persuasive, devastating evidence of human behavior. The albatross of Midway, as he documents in his film project Albatross, are dying because of ocean-borne plastics, which float near the surface and are mistaken by adult birds as a food source. They then regurgitate these plastics and feed them to their young, who subsequently starve to death, their stomachs filled with indigestible garbage. Jordan’s shots of the insides of the birds’ corpses’ desiccated stomachs are heart-wrenching, clear evidence of a world turned horribly awry (Jordan). The Great Pacific Garbage Patch—the twin gyres described by Oliver in Ozeki’s novel—contain as many as 750,000 pieces of microplastic per square kilometer and covers an absolutely huge portion of the sea, roughly 20 million square kilometers, which is about twice the size of Canada. My math puts that at up to fifteen trillion plastic pieces and particles in the Pacific Ocean. As Muriel puts it in the novel, “the sea is filled with plastic confetti” (94), though not the sort that might prompt celebration. Many of these plastics come from land-based activities, and they take about a year to get to the gyre from Japan and Asia, but more like six years from the west coast of North America (National Geographic)—and then longer to get back ashore, if indeed they ever do. “Drifters,” Oliver describes in the novel, “escaping the orbit of the Pacific Gyre” sometimes come ashore (13); their behavior is unpredictable. When we think of human activity in comparison to geological activity, we usually think of different scales: humans are small, while tectonic plates and oceans are huge. Nao’s diary and the Hello Kitty lunchbox are very small, while the tsunami was triggered by a massive seismic event. Ruth Ozeki, though, challenges us to look into the past of geological and anthropocentric time and see things differently: the earth’s past and humans’ pasts intertwine, and we’ve made a mess of both. “What is the half-life of information?” Ruth wonders (114), as she learns of the 600-year-old stones in Japan warning people against building their homes too close to the water, warning stones that were later ignored. Remembering how humans relate to the oceans and to the world, Ruth realizes, requires a deep understanding of how time works. As Nao’s lunchbox reaches across an ocean and across time to find Ruth on British

Building Collective Resilience 127 Columbia’s coast, and while Ruth wrestles with how to write a memoir about her mother’s Alzheimer’s and memory and loss, we are challenged to think about memory across different scales as being one and the same.

The Present and Presence in A Tale for the Time Being Thinking about memory and time differently, as Ozeki challenges us to do with A Tale for the Time Being, means that we need to think also about the present in a different manner. Ruth experiences the present in multiple ways; she notes of her wavering attention that “time interacts with attention in funny ways,” and she veers from intense attention online to “disengaged and fractured” time, which she describes as “time at its most granular, wherein moments hung around like particles, diffused and suspended in standing water” (91). As Nao and Ruth’s parallel presents unfold, we see Nao experience very severe bullying at school and outside of it, as well as sexual harassment and assault, while Ruth seems to be stuck in a melancholic state of grieving her mother’s death; both are moving in and through their present moments in a variety of ways. At the same time, the novel acts as a primer for Zen Buddhist thinking about time, something that Nao and Ruth come to share. This thinking provides a very fertile ground for understanding what it means to inhabit the present in the novel. Nao’s name may be pronounced as though it is in the present—she riffs on the idea of the “now” (98)—but getting to the now takes her some time. The idea of the present in the novel is couched in Buddhist thought, especially thinking around the concept of mindfulness. We can treat the novel as a primer on meditation but also on a particular strain of Buddhism, the Zen Soto Buddhism initially practiced and recorded by thirteen-century master Eihei Dogen. Both Nao and Ruth encounter Dogen’s ideas in different ways and at different times: Ruth from more of a remove, it seems, and Nao from learning about Jiko’s life. It is Jiko who introduces Nao to the parsing of Buddhist time—the concept that, for instance, there are 65 moments in the snap of a finger, or 6,440,099,980 moments in a day (62, 407–408). The challenge of understanding each passing moment as an ongoing iteration of the present is like a Zen koan, like the classic problem of the tree falling in the forest. If we snap our fingers in the present, how can that moment contain 65 moments? Why not more? Why not less? Jiko’s answer would likely be something along the lines of “more, less, same thing.” Yet the questions remain. Nao’s understanding of the present in the novel involves learning to experience her own presence, something that she manages to do by coming to know Jiko. She emerges from her early sense of herself, one that is seemingly complicit in her family’s unhappiness with having moved to Tokyo, returning to Japan from California in the wake of her father’s job loss. Not attending school and, eventually, falling in with the pimp

128  Kit Dobson at the Lovely Apron is something that Ruth figures out right away and that takes Oliver longer to understand as they begin to read the diary together. Nao herself does not initially seem to understand the stakes either; it is only as she begins to realize that by choosing to have compassion for herself that she can begin to have compassion for others like her father, and come to understand his unhappiness as a sacrifice that he was compelled to make because of his former employers’ actions. Similarly, she can come to understand her great-uncle Haruki’s decision to die in a kamikaze mission by flying his plane into the ocean as an act of heroism rather than one of treachery or cowardice. It is Nao’s emergent understanding of Jiko, however, that provides the clearest transformation of her young life. Jiko is Nao’s stated focus from the outset of her narrative: “This diary will tell the real life story of my great-grandmother Yasutani Jiko,” Nao begins (6). She was, as Nao puts it, “a nun and a novelist and New Woman of the Taisho era. She was also an anarchist and a feminist who had plenty of lovers, both males and females, but she was never kinky or nasty” (7). At first, Nao views Jiko as a bit of a mysterious relic or as something from the past. She appears to be someone whose presence Nao does not view as being compatible with her own modernity. In time, however, and even though she strays from telling Jiko’s story, Nao recognizes that the experience of modernity is part of what is responsible for her becoming alienated from herself and those around her, like Jiko. In this respect, Nao’s experience is not unlike her father’s concern that the weaponization of his programming simulations during his time in California—turning war into a video game— plays a fundamentally destructive role in the world. Jiko plays a role in separating Nao’s understanding from the present and from modernity, simultaneously delinking the two terms—modernity and the present—so that she becomes more able to determine her own values and concerns. Understanding Jiko, in turn, is something that we might do by looking to the Zen master upon whose life work she builds, that of Dogen. Nao, in fact, follows this same course of action. Dogen, who lived in the thirteenth century (1200–1253), is best known for his authorship of the Shobogenzo, a book that is mentioned repeatedly in A Tale for the Time Being. Nao, with youthful insouciance, notes that Dogen is “even older than old Jiko or even Marcel Proust” (24). It is Dogen who provides readers with an understanding of what it means to be a time being (with a brief tip of the hat, later in the book, to Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (325)). Ozeki’s book suggests that “to study the self is to forget the self” (398), in the sense that being and nonbeing come to be perceived as one and the same. Self and non-self become elements of inhabiting the time that the book pursues throughout. This understanding is derived from Dogen. Dogen, for instance, directly inspires Nao’s description of zazen meditation (181–183) with his piece “Recommending Zazen to All People,” a piece written on the basis of his years of travel in China

Building Collective Resilience 129 and long apprenticeship before returning to Japan and running the Eihei monastery. The main inspiration to the novel, however, a chapter called “The Time Being,” comes from the Shobogenzo and filters into the book in many ways. Dogen writes: “time itself is being, and all being is time” (104). Dogen asserts that all things are part of time, or, not even that, that all things are time; even that “doubt itself is nothing but time” (105). I’d like to look, for a moment, at a longer passage in that chapter. Dogen states, The way the self arrays itself is the form of the entire world. See each thing in this entire world as a moment of time. Things do not hinder one another, just as moments do not hinder one another. The way-seeking mind arises in this moment. A wayseeking moment arises in this mind. It is the same with practice and with attaining the way. Thus, the self setting itself out in array sees itself. This is the understanding that the self is time. (105) Typically cryptic, one can begin to see precisely how influenced Jiko is— and in turn both Nao and Ruth (as well as Ozeki)—by the thinking that Dogen sets out here. The thinking is both perfectly logical and also somewhat wrought. Dogen asserts that things themselves exist in time, and hence they are time, or time beings. Just as one moment cannot stop the next, things themselves proceed, in time, one way or another. Buddhist practitioners—those who seek the Buddhist path—can find themselves in this way, as emanations of time, and as such as time beings: they are selves who are time, who cannot exist separately from time. This understanding carries with it an ethical dimension, one that Dogen clarifies as follows: “each moment is all being, each moment is the entire world. Reflect now whether any being or any world is left out of the present moment” (105). What does that mean, to be left out of the present moment? I interpret the line as being contingent upon the urgent statement that precedes it, the demand that we should reflect upon the moment. To be left out of the present moment is not to be in the mind, or, put another way, to exist outside of mindfulness—or even not to exist because of not being perceived. Dogen implies that if we are not ourselves being mindful, we neglect other beings, we leave them out of our present and as a result we lose our own presence, our own being unto ourselves as time beings. “A tree is time, bamboo is time,” Dogen asserts (106), just as “mountains are time” and “oceans are time” (109). A Tale for the Time Being quotes both passages directly (30). Holding the pine tree, the bamboo, the mountain, and the ocean in our own present means being present as time beings. “If there were no time, there would be no mountains or oceans,” Dogen notes (109). This thinking is

130  Kit Dobson a factor in Jiko’s relinquishing her hatred: she does not hate anyone, she tells Nao, not even the political and military leaders who sent her son to his death in World War II. She acknowledges that she had to consciously relinquish her hatred in order to become present—in order to become a time being—and she shares that that was the moment at which she joined her monastery and when she became able to hold those leaders in her mind as other time beings. This thinking, in turn, allows young Nao to become present unto herself. She is able as a result to let go of her feelings toward her bullying, violent classmates and the Johns who hire her for sex. Her development of pity, and then compassion, for the suffering of others is tied to her ability to become a time being, to become present in her own life.

Building the Future by Breaking the Time of “Now” Becoming present in A Tale for the Time Being is one of the more challenging acts to undertake, however, in part because time is not linear in this book. We see this non-linearity most clearly in the novel’s ending, in which the novel both does and does not achieve some kind of resolution. What happens in the end? Is Nao killed in the tsunami? Does Ruth really step back in time in order to change the past, inserting Haruki’s lost French diary into the box that contains his last effects so that Nao can find it, thereby fulfilling her earlier desire to see “some piece” of her great-uncle “that really existed in order for him to be real” (247)? How can Nao’s diary end abruptly while Ruth reads it but then later on keep going when Ruth returns to it? The challenge in this ending might also be looked at through one of Dogen’s lines. He writes, “because flowing is a characteristic of time, moments of past and present do not overlap or line up side by side” (107). This passage can be interpreted in multiple ways, either to refer to the ways in which time does not occur simultaneously, or alternatively to refer to how time does not tend to be perceived as being as orderly as we might believe it to be. This blurring is very much true of Ozeki’s novel, in which the past, present, and future collide and rupture each other when the novel breaks the time of now and moves into what readers might imagine to be a better future than the one that was previously on offer. Ruth enters a seeming dreamscape in which she follows a Jungle Crow from Japan that has been hanging around her island back into the past. In that past, she prevents Nao’s father’s suicide and puts Haruki’s notebook into the box that Nao will later encounter. These actions, in turn, will lead to Ruth’s receiving the package on the beach that begins the action of the novel. Everything that follows in the book, however, still does not quite make sense. Nao’s diary now has more words in it, as she is able to understand what happened in her great-uncle’s past, and she is able also to begin to reconcile with her father prior to disappearing

Building Collective Resilience 131 online through the new technology that her father invents to erase one’s online presence. It appears on the one hand as a fantasy ending, in which Ruth manages to avert Nao’s planned suicide as well, but it is also portrayed as a real, everyday ending, even though it is one that is still filled with indeterminacy. My first temptation as a literary scholar is to read the ending of the novel as an instance of magical realism, that is, as magical events that are couched within an everyday, otherwise realistic frame. Indeed, some reviews read A Tale for the Time Being as magical realism; the blurb from USA Today on the inside cover of my paperback edition uses the term explicitly. I would like to suggest, however, that the bending time of the novel functions first and foremost in Buddhist terms. The appendix at the end of the novel that links Buddhist thinking and quantum mechanics offers both superposition and entanglement as possible solutions to the “truth” of the ending. These theories hint at how Ruth might be able to exist in multiple places and times at once. It follows from these theories that, as far as the novel is concerned, truth is perhaps better seen as a principle of conduct rather than having anything to do with “reality” itself. In this understanding of truth, I am guided by Stephen Batchelor’s analysis of the history of truth in early Buddhist texts. He suggests that, in an early Buddhist context, “truth is seen as an ethical practice rather than a metaphysical claim; it is something to do, not something to believe in, let alone be enlightened about” (118). Batchelor is at pains to clarify that this understanding of truth does not mean in Buddhist thinking that all truth is relative. Rather, he suggests that all truth is situated, and situated in those who are engaged in the act of perceiving. If truth, then, can be about action rather than belief, the ending of A Tale for the Time Being can be seen as actualizing Ruth’s own ethical actions in shaping the truth of Nao’s story. The initial ending—the abrupt finish with the incomplete hacked notebook of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—is not only unsatisfying, it demonstrates a lack of action on Ruth’s part to intervene in the story that she wishes to see end on a note other than that of despair. The novel suggests that the situation “made no sense” because “the pages had once been filled” but “now they weren’t” (343). When this piece of Nao’s time goes missing, Ruth becomes somehow able to fold the time in on itself, perhaps through quantum mechanics, or perhaps through a Buddhist understanding of truth similar to that which Batchelor posits. Oliver opines to Ruth that perhaps if Nao “stops writing to us, then maybe we stop being too” (344). This is an idea that irritates Ruth, but that also prompts the ending toward which the novel proceeds. Are Oliver and Ruth called into their role as time beings by Nao when she addresses them as readers? Is that suggestion any more bizarre than the way in which Ruth and Oliver believe Nao to be a true person as they read her diary? Whatever the result of such deliberations, instead of an ending in which Nao’s father

132  Kit Dobson manages to kill himself through his suicide club, and then Nao follows suit herself, Ruth is instead able to get the right message to Nao in time. Ruth thereby puts in motion the past needed in order to achieve some modicum of resolution in the present—but not so much resolution that the future too is not opened up as a space for further ethical acts. Everything is never quite solved, but events are set sufficiently to right so that Ruth will be able to go forward, and so too might Nao and her father. Ruth and Oliver’s neighbor Muriel suggests that what happened is that this crow from Nao’s world came her to lead [Ruth] into the dream so [she] could change the end of her story. Her story was about to end one way, and [Ruth] intervened, which set up the conditions for a different outcome. A new “now,” as it were. (376) The time lines are all messy and the novel states that Ruth isn’t “convinced” (394). Nao writes early on that “maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present, sitting here in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town. Or maybe it’s the other way around” (97). The relationship between a writer, her past, and her future readers is intertwined and cannot be easily sorted out. Yet it’s that messiness, the messiness of life, that allows time to interact with itself and to flow.

Conclusion In the end, we cannot truly divide Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being into past, present, and future because the novel shows us the artificiality of making any such divisions, or, even more than that, it shows to us that making these distinctions is part of a thought process that cannot hold up under scrutiny. As such, the novel makes the claim that we must understand all moments as one moment perceived in the present, or that time and being are one. And the novel itself is structured in four parts, not the three that I have used for this chapter. Dogen writes, “The time being has a characteristic of flowing. So-called yesterday flows into tomorrow, today flows into yesterday, yesterday flows into today. And today flows into today, tomorrow flows into tomorrow” (106). Becoming time beings, as we all are—beings bounded by time—is a liberating act when time can flow rather than proceed in the linear fashion that we might experience in daily life. A mindful approach to time, the novel suggests, demonstrates that time is more complex: we know, for instance, that how we remember the past has an impact on how we live our lives in the present. Our private and public acts of remembering as a result have profound consequences—ones that will also impact the future, or the present to which we will be present tomorrow.

Building Collective Resilience 133 Time is also very material in Ozeki’s novel. That is to say, time has material consequences. We can think back to the deep time of ecology, to the human impacts on the Pacific gyres in the form of ocean-borne microplastics, or to the weight, heft, and importance of the sky soldier watch that Ruth finds in Nao’s Hello Kitty lunchbox on the British Columbia coast. Critic Lara Okihiro writes that “the novel suggests that caring for things is one of the most meaningful ways to live, and that tending to things can help us learn how to have humanity” (2). As these things unfold and exist in time, we are reminded yet again that in the understanding that this novel builds for us, being and time are effectively one and the same; they are non-dual. In the same sense, things and people are all emanations of time too, and so I again hear Old Jiko both joking and not joking: being, nonbeing, same thing; people, nonpeople, same thing. At a minimum, Nao’s closing sentiment is that “at least until I finish writing [Jiko’s] story, I absolutely don’t want to die” (390). Storying beings into being is a form of care, a form of collective resilience, and learning that capacity is what drives not only the story but also the becoming of the time beings that Ozeki’s novel invokes. We might see that relationship in the quotation from Proust that opens part II of the novel: “in reality,” Proust writes in Le temps retrouvé, “Every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self” (qtd. in Ozeki 109). Telling stories is, then, a way of collectively telling ourselves into resilient beings, of becoming time beings.

Works Cited “2011 Japan Earthquake—Tsunami Fast Facts.” CNN.com, 5 Mar. 2017. Batchelor, Stephen. After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age. Yale UP, 2015. Beauregard, Guy. “On Not Knowing: A Tale for the Time Being and the Politics of Imagining Lives After March 11.” Canadian Literature, no. 227, 2015, pp. 96–112. Davis, Rocío G. “Fictional Transits and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Biography, vol. 38, no. 1, 2015, pp. 87–103. Dogen, Eihei. Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo. Edited by Kazuaki Tanahashi. Translated by Robert Aitken, et al., Shambhala, 2012. Faschinger, Petra. “Writing the Canadian Pacific Northwest Ecocritically: The Dynamics of Local and Global in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Canadian Literature, no. 232, 2017, pp. 47–63. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, 1927. Translated by Joan Stambaugh, SUNY Press, 1996. Jordan, Chris. “Albatross.” chrisjordan.com, 2017. McKay, Daniel. “The Right Stuff: The Kamikaze Pilot in Kerri Sakamoto’s One Hundred Million Hearts and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Melus, vol. 41, no. 1, 2016, pp. 6–26. National Geographic. “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” nationalgeographic.org. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017.

134  Kit Dobson National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. “Japan Tsunami Marine Debris Sightings, Marine Debris Program.” marinedebris.noaa.gov. Accessed 24 Oct. 2017. Okihiro, Lara. “The Ethics of Materialism: Caring for Things in Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Mikinaakominis: TransCanada 4 Conference, May 2017, U of Toronto. Conference Presentation. Ozeki, Ruth. A Tale for the Time Being. Penguin, 2013. Starr, Marla. “Beyond Machine Dreams: Zen, Cyber-, and Transnational Feminisms in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Meridians, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 99–122. Ty, Eleanor, and Ruth Ozeki. “ ‘A Universe of Many Worlds’: An Interview with Ruth Ozeki.” Melus, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 160–171. Usui, Masami. “The Waves of Words: Literature of 3/11 in and around Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being.” Procedia: Social and Behavioural Sciences, no. 208, 2015, pp. 91–95, doi:10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.11.184.

8 Cultural Memory and the Construction of a Resilient Spanish Identity Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez Cultural Memory in Spain Within the context of the Spanish memorialist discourses about the consequences of the Civil War and Franco’s subsequent dictatorship, there is no scholarship that links resilience to memory. I suggest that this absence is motivated by the strong disagreement still present in Spain with regards to collective memory. The opposition between the different dominant discourses on memory in Spain results in the impossibility of achieving social and political consensus about the meaning and consequences of the traumatic events that occurred during the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed. Moreover, the fact that Spain is a multilingual, multicultural and, from the standpoint of regional nationalisms, also a multinational country, makes the idea of a Spanish national identity highly problematic. Thus, the very idea of constructing a common national memory is thwarted by the seemingly unsurmountable disagreement between those who defend oblivion as the best means to overcome the traumatic past and those who support a consensual collective memory process as the only option to achieve a future reconciliation. This situation finds a parallel on the political arena, as the political and ideological fabric of public discourses about the past replicates the opposed stances assumed by the population. Acknowledging the coexistence of diverse forms of national identity within the country, this chapter aims to connect the notion of resilience to certain memorialist narratives that might reshape what Spaniards understand as their national identity, thereby guaranteeing its survival and preventing further social and political instability. While providing an account of these different perspectives on memory, I will also attempt to show how certain cultural texts unfold ethical formulations that help readers face the past and understand the dramatic episodes experienced by Spaniards during the Civil War and the dictatorship. A paramount example is Javier Cercas’ acclaimed best-selling novel Soldiers of Salamis about the Spanish Civil War. The novel was originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Soldados de Salamina and translated into English in 2004.1 I would like to argue that this novel constitutes

136  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez a narrative of resilience that could potentially help to create an inclusive national identity by promoting a new social understanding of the traumatic events suffered by the population on either side of the war. At the time of the novel’s publication in the new democratic era that began after Franco’s death, Spanish society continued to grapple with the idea of creating a new agglutinating national identity that would account for its conflictual past while allowing for the common endeavor of reinventing the nation as a modern state, respectful of all its constituents’ ideological sensitivities. The social adaptation to the new political conditions required a sincere dialogue between all parties in order to find a way for Spaniards to lay the foundations of their common future. In this context, national identity appears both as a process and as a social or collective task that is linked to certain narratives that might persuade people to move together toward the future. I suggest that Soldados de Salamina constitutes the sort of story that promotes understanding and the possibility of a consensual collective memory serving as the basis for the new integrative national identity. The social and political challenge it presents is for society to advance together in pursuit of their common well-being (Hall and Lamont 2). If connections with others are decisive in developing—or not—certain action strategies (Revilla et al.), memorialist narratives such as Soldados de Salamina epitomize the social dimension of art that brings people together and invites them to action. The ethical knowledge unveiled by the aesthetic process in Soldados de Salamina opens new strategies of adaptation for the community of readers in order to move forward. Against all odds, as Spaniards are still divided in their perception of the past, the novel promotes a sort of inclusive memorialist process that may help shape a consensual cultural memory.

The Possibility of a Consensual Cultural Memory in Spain The period now referred to as “The Transition” (1978–1986) was not only marked by Spain’s integration into the European Union but also by the slow building of a young and strong democracy that was supposed to reach its maturity in the emblematic year of 1992, when Spain commemorated the fifth centennial of the “discovery” of America, a feat that underpins the Spanish sense of national identity. The celebration of such ephemerides included hosting the Olympic Games in Barcelona, Seville’s World Fair (Expo ’92), and Madrid becoming Europe’s cultural capital. The Spanish government thought this a great opportunity to show the world the nation’s success in transitioning from a dictatorship to a new democratic society.2 Indeed, everywhere in the country the social atmosphere suggested a real overcoming of the traumatic past. Importantly, this was fostered by political institutions through a “pact of

Cultural Memory 137 forgetting,” which was generally believed to be a necessary strategy for the rapid adaptation to the new democratic and economic conditions of post-­transitional Spain and to avoid future social and political conflicts. Thus, society was asked to forget about the past in order to look forward toward the future. The financial crisis that affected the world some years later (1993– 1997) opened Pandora’s box. For the first time, Spain’s recent democratic memory appeared as one of the key foci of the political debate, as if—to paraphrase Boris Cyrulnik’s relevant study—the ghosts of the past still whispered.3 In order to confront the past and move on, civil groups were created for the recovery of the forgotten historical memory. Their efforts were directed toward searching for the thousands of civilians that went missing during and after the Civil War and to the excavation of mass graves all over Spain.4 As a result of the new collective interest in recovering the common past, films, novels, and other cultural productions emerged that engaged with this issue. The new cultural interest in the causes and consequences of the Civil War and the dictatorship gave traction to the idea of creating a cultural memory that was inclusive of all Spaniards, regardless of their background or political affiliation.5 Memory seemed to be the only possible way to start a process that would allow for a metanarrative of the nation that would be largely embraced by all Spaniards. For this new strategy of adaptation to work, both citizens and political forces needed to agree on initiating a restorative memorialist process that would promote a new social consensus. However, the social and political disagreement over how Spaniards should confront their past prevailed, resulting in the disaffection of a great part of society with the idea of a national metanarrative based on common memory. This has led to multiple stances on the subject, drawing what some specialists call the “map of the Spanish divided memories” (Bernecker and Brinkmann). In accordance with the two main political visions of the past that were well established in society, the new focus on memory was perceived either as an awakening of the ghosts of the past—also interpreted as the “revenge” of the victims against the perpetrators—or the emergence of a common cultural memory inclined to impart justice—or at least poetic justice, in Martha Nussbaum’s terms—and acknowledge and dignify the victims.6 In this interpretation, memory serves to raise questions, confront perspectives, and stir the collective conscience with regards to a problem deeply embedded in modern Spanish democracy. Literature, understood as a social and aesthetic discourse that contains the cultural and identifying features of a certain social group, also functions as a repository of memory (Bustillo 203–246). As such, it becomes a decisive part of the cultural memory processes developed by a particular community. The literary works devoted to memory constitute a sort of remedy against evil, as Todorov put it in his study on the subject, since memory projected through fictional artifacts promotes a deeper and more

138  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez intimate reflection on the past by raising public awareness of issues hidden behind the veil of official “history.” In this sense, literature becomes the point of departure of this memorialist process since its capacity to move the reader’s conscience can potentially activate solidarity7 and other ways of seeing and confronting the past. Accordingly, I suggest that this solidarity stimulates social recognition and may contribute to the reconciliation of all actors who participated in the conflict. If the process of reconciliation needs to begin with the act of recognition, in Ricoeur’s terms, this implies that the victimizer must recognize the suffering caused to the victims and be held accountable for the crimes committed. Recognition, then, should result in the complementary acts of apologizing and forgiving. Only then can the dead be mourned (Ibáñez Fanés 209–262). However, in Spain neither apologies nor forgiveness have yet been offered, and collective mourning continues to be shunned and deferred. As a result, the emergence of a collective process of social reconciliation continues to be postponed. Despite this, a number of recent Spanish novels have played an important role in the construction and institutionalization of cultural memory. Among them, Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina stands out, together with La mitad del alma (2004) by Carmen Riera; La voz dormida (2002) by Dulce Chacón; Enterrar a los muertos (2005) by Ignacio Martínez de Pisón; Mala gente que camina (2008) by Benjamín Prado; El corazón helado (2007) by Almudena Grandes and Isaac Rosa’s El vano ayer (2004); and Otra maldita novela sobre la Guerra Civil (2007).8 These novels have played a very significant role in speaking about the emergence of cultural memory in Spain. The increasing number of editions and new publications after the year 2000 mark both the public interest in this type of cultural production and the success of this particular topic for publishing houses. It is not coincidental that these facts run parallel to the emergence of civil groups devoted to drawing the map of Spanish contemporary collective memory and of political debate that focuses on the hitherto unsolved question of the social and political toll paid to build a democratic system after the dictatorship. In this scenario, memory became the axis around which different cultural products—including novels but also a very considerable number of films, art exhibitions (mainly of photography) and even performances—shaped the way in which the past was discussed. As a result of the interaction between distinct social discourses and cultural production, the focus on cultural memory was stressed with the emergence of mnemonic symbols, museums, and monuments that created meaning out of the empty spaces left behind by a silenced society.9 Thus, through “texts, icons, dances, rituals” (Assmann 127), cultural memory turns into an active process of mediation at all levels of the cultural expression of society (Erll). Interestingly, this abundance of symbolic cultural products also promoted a certain knowledge about the

Cultural Memory 139 Spanish common past that included those who clearly manifested their rejection of any type of memory processing.

Oblivion, Cultural Memory, and Memorialist Literature The pervading politicization of memory in Spain continues to shun a real reconciliation, as the involved parties still adhere to the divergent visions of the nation that led to the Civil War. In addition, the quest for a consensual memory after 39 years of dictatorship has been paradoxically confronted in Spain with a commitment to oblivion. As previously mentioned, “institutional oblivion” appeared as an unavoidable point of departure for the progressive democratic process known as the Spanish Transition, and was promoted after Franco’s death to avoid stirring dormant feuds or the possibility of “revenge,” and move on toward a peaceful and democratic future.10 Oblivion as a political practice contradicts all memory processes since memory as a dialectical and discursive phenomenon is based precisely on the recovery and activation of different types of discourses that break down silence—from individual testimonies and experiences to major collective memory products. This pact of forgetting may have worked for some time at the political level; however, it was hardly sustainable within the scope of individual memory and the experiences of the direct or indirect victims of the war and the ensuing dictatorship. Furthermore, the awakening of a new democratic conscience led a large part of civil society to question the Transition’s institutionalization of oblivion. This significant interest in the recent past brought not only social demands related to the location of mass graves and the exhumation of corpses (as the aforementioned civil groups requested), but in 2007, it also prompted a parliamentarian debate that concluded with the promulgation of the Law for the Recovery of Historical Memory—or Ley para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica.11 This political and social effort to keep delving in the past clashed with the position of other political agents still refusing to carry out a truly inclusive memorialist process for all, revealing the fact that memory continues to stir strong controversy today. Yet parallel to the emergence of civil associations and political initiatives, a large number of novels and many other cultural products have since the year 2000 given rise to a genuine memorialist boom, proving the currency of historical memory for Spanish readers, and producing what some specialists have called a “novelized memory.”12 I will not go into the already widespread debate about the limits of memory and history, but it is worth noting that the purpose of memory is not to make history since memory does not need fact or empirical data to create opinion or criticism.13 Memory is made of testimonies, narratives, individual and collective experiences subjectively communicated through different types of discourses. In this sense, the multiple works of fiction

140  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez generated since 2000 constitute a discursive paradigm that allows us to observe the exact dimensions of a highly dynamic cultural memory aimed to reflect and critique the Spanish traumatic past. The novelized memory emerging from fiction tended to contest official history and mainstream politics, thus intervening in the public political debate around historical memory, which became a recurring theme in the first decade of the twenty-first century (Hansen and Cruz-Suárez 21–42). The public’s interest also encouraged publishers to open their doors to a large number of works addressing this issue and betting on new narrative forms to tell those intimate stories that could potentially offer the reader a closer and affiliative (Faber 101–110) reading of their common past. Documentary and docufiction, the hybridization of genres, metafiction, self-fiction and fragmentation were and still are some of the most characteristic aesthetic forms of the Spanish memorialist novel since the new millennium (Hansen 83–104).14 These narratives do not just focus on the dictatorship and the general violent past of the country, thereby affirming their links with the sociopolitical culture of the moment, but they also make of memory—and the narration of it—a topic in itself. These new narrative strategies produced a metanarrative of memory by using the narrative process as the matrix through which the reader could potentially get drawn into the memorialist and fictional product. Given their success, these narratives must be considered as a cultural phenomenon that runs parallel to the efforts to build a shared cultural memory in Spain.

Soldados de Salamina. Between Ethics, Cultural Memory, and Resilience Usually, memorialist novels configure a discourse on memory that, once internalized or integrated in the public sphere, produces a dynamic, progressive, intermediated, and active cultural memory (Rigney; Erll) that can potentially generate a better disposition to understand and overcome traumas or conflicts still latent in the present. Soldados de Salamina is a good example of this type of memorialist narrative. From the very first moment of its publication, this novel generated a strong controversy,15 resulting from the perception that it defends the possibility of a politically neutral approach to Spanish collective memory. From my point of view, the novel suggests an alternative view on the thorny topic of the Spanish Civil War that eschews siding with either the Republican or the Nationalist visions predominant during and after the war. Soldados de Salamina revolves around a writer’s block and his quest to find inspiration to keep writing. The narrator—ironically named Javier Cercas16—is surrounded by a certain atmosphere of failure and strives to find a story that could be potentially worth telling. This is how he finally gets to hear a story about an event occurred during the Civil War relating

Cultural Memory 141 to the real-life fascist writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas.17 This historical figure was detained in Barcelona by the republican authorities when trying to escape to France. After some time in prison, he was driven to the sanctuary of Santa María del Collell to be executed along with other 50 prisoners. However, Sánchez Mazas survived the shooting, escaped, and hid in the forest. The novel relates how a few minutes after the failed execution, one of the firing squad soldiers discovered Sánchez Mazas in the brushwood. In the novel’s key scene, the two men remain silent looking at each other for a brief moment. While the soldier takes aim, the voice of one of his superiors is heard in the distance, asking him whether he has seen the fascist. After a few crucial seconds, the republican soldier replies that the prisoner was not there, letting Sánchez Mazas escape. As a result, Sánchez Mazas hides in the woods, where he manages to survive until the end of the Civil War. Consequently, Sánchez Mazas becomes a national hero and the soldier fades into history. This key encounter between the two men poses an ethical and moral dilemma that triggers the fictional writer’s interest in writing a novel related to this event. However, to give the story meaning, the writer understands that he must find this anonymous republican hero and ask him why he did not kill the fascist. Thus, he expects to unveil an essential truth, a sort of knowledge deeply hidden in the mind of a man who followed his conscience at a very dramatic juncture in his life. By unveiling what the soldier thought and felt in the very moment when he had Sánchez Mazas within his rifle sights, the writer delves into a memory process that suggests a way for Spaniards to face, understand, and accept the myriad, complex facets of their traumatic past. This key episode has already been widely discussed by critics. Some vehemently criticize the author’s alleged attempt at neutrality, rejecting the major ethical dilemma at the core of the novel, which, in my opinion, is central to understand why Cercas chose that specific episode. Rather than leveling victims and perpetrators, I claim that the novel aims to look at a human conflict in all its dimensions, outside the ideological codes of the current Spanish political spectrum (Cruz-Suárez, Memoria” 212–240). As I have suggested elsewhere, the relation “­ between individual ethics, free will and duty present in the novel can be understood through Kierkegaard’s ideas of the human assumption of responsibility, concerning the way in which the individual becomes the “responsible author of his/her own biography” (234–235), something undoubtedly represented in the novel through the actions of the republican soldier. His individual ethics brings forth one of the key questions unfolded in the novel: what is a hero? Conventionally, the notion of heroism is deeply linked to certain moral and ethical logics. The values of a certain community are often represented by individuals whose actions are taken as paradigmatic of the tenets shared by the community. In the case of the republican soldier,

142  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez his action does not represent the ethical values of his own political community since he let the fascist escape. So, how may his individual ethics acquire a social value for all Spaniards in the twenty-first century? In my opinion, the novel attempts to show how certain individual actions could potentially represent values that are beyond the circumstantial practices of the community. Following this interpretation, the individual must make certain ethical decisions, even when exposed to manipulation by the dominant ideology, the influence of a coercive power, or the pressure that certain social groups can exert on him to modify his will. Only from the watchtower of solid human ethics can we understand why a republican soldier—the enemy that Franco supporters must find and ­exterminate—does not shoot one of the masterminds of the dictator’s repressive and anti-democratic ideology.18 The soldier becomes the “writer of his own biography” by taking responsibility and acting according to his own ethics. He is aware of his duty as a soldier, but he is also aware of his own will in the moment that he must make a decision when he has Sánchez Maza in his sights. The question that should lead to the truth that the writer is looking for is not why that specific person did not kill Sánchez Maza, but why an armed soldier did not shoot the enemy when he had the chance, thus fulfilling his mission by annihilating the Other. The search for that anonymous hero is a quest to solve the paradox of being caught between free will and subjugation to the group’s tenets and demands. After a long process of investigation, the writer finally locates the republican militiaman in a nursing home in France. The expected encounter between both occurs by the end of the novel and the question that the writer had been grappling with for so long is finally posed. But, of course, the militiaman does not answer it, failing to reveal the truth that the writer expected to find. This narrative strategy redirects the ethical question to the novel’s reading community. Hence, the interpretation and understanding of this particular episode around basic humane, ethical behavior, rather than politics, promotes a memorialist narrative that aims to integrate and reconcile the opposed political and ideological perspectives and build a representative cultural memory for all Spaniards. The novel’s proposal allows for the possibility of envisioning a resilient national identity that, through the integration of the various strands of memory, proves well equipped to adapt to future sociopolitical challenges. Soldados de Salamina stands for a memorialist narrative that sets a non-exclusive and integrating vision of human ethics as the fundamental departure point for the understanding of the conflicting discourses developing from the transition to the present. This understanding does neither sanction nor justify the violence enacted by Franco and his regime. On the contrary, the book claims for the mobilization and implementation of a memorialist process that, based on an honest, unconstrained dialogue

Cultural Memory 143 among all social actors, may at last put an end to the current antagonistic model19 and lead to the reconciliation of Spanish society.

Conclusion Soldados de Salamina represents a kind of social discourse capable of generating a new collective vision about the violent past of contemporary Spain. In contrast with the permanent ideological confrontation and the immobility of most reactionary groups—who continue to defend that the only way to reconciliation is oblivion—Cercas is committed to placing the problem outside the limits of certain preestablished ideologies and hegemonic discourses about the past. Instead, the novel’s appeal to approach a human tragedy from an ethical perspective aims to suture a divided memory. This reconfigured memory may serve as the basis for a more coherent, consensual, and resilient national identity that may be better prepared to face new challenges, such as those of nationalist separatist movements. Furthermore, parallel to the creation and activation of comprehensive memorialist processes, in which literature has a central role, firm political and citizen determination is needed to rescue from oblivion the over 100,000 Spaniards who are still buried in mass graves in the country. Only then can the identity conflict still latent in Spanish society be replaced with a resilient national identity. Memory, therefore, can generate a new space for dialogue that is open to the voices of the thousands of repressed and missing victims of the dictatorship, which are generally absent from the country’s official history. Without their voices, our knowledge of the past will remain fragmented, and truth, justice, and recognition suspended.20 In other words, without a truly inclusive cultural memory for all Spaniards, the necessary processes of reconciliation and healing will continue to be deferred, and achieving a resilient national identity will remain an impossible endeavor.

Notes 1. Anne McLean’s English translation won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize for 2004. In this chapter, I will use the original Spanish title to refer to the novel. 2. Just one look at the Marca España web page shows the importance of the year 1992 in presenting the new democratic values to the international community: https://marcaespana.es/actualidad/sociedad/1992-el-a%C3%B1oque-cambi%C3%B3-la-imagen-de-espa%C3%B1a-en-el-mundo. 3. In The Whispering of Ghost: Trauma and Resilience, Cyrulnik focuses his research on victims of childhood distress and their ability to heal, move on and understand what happened back in time. Within the frame of this study we can assert that a resilient narrative such as Soldados de Salamina aims to look at the past in order to understand what caused the collective trauma and, in this way, open a process of adaptation to the new social and

144  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez political conditions given in the present and projected toward the future of the community. 4. The Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory) appeared in the late 1990s as the most important civil group aiming to locate and exhume the corpses of thousands of victims of repression under Franco. 5. The two factions confronted during the Civil War were the Republicans (ideologically linked to socialist, communist and anarchist thought) and the Nationalists (conservative and traditionalist, linked to the Catholic Church). Despite the new, multiple structure of the political situation, these two factions still (co)exist in the Spanish political scene. While Republicans still wish for a Republic to replace the system of parliamentary monarchy, the right wing still supports the Monarchy and a more “traditional” vision of Spain. 6. In the case of Spain, the philosopher Reyes Mate has explained and expanded the Benjaminian thought of “memory duty” (deber de memoria) as one of the foundations for the establishment of a relationship between memory, justice, and the dignity of the victims. 7. I am following here Richard Rorty’s ideas about literature and its capacity to move readers and bring about solidarity or even social commitment. 8. This brief list represents only a small portion of the most successful and reviewed novels devoted to this issue that have been published in Spain within the last 15 years. They explore the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship from different angles in the form of new memorialist narratives. Whereas some writers prefer a more neutral tone, a very significant number of them have chosen a radical critical voice. Almudena Grandes is a case in point when it comes to presenting the divide between Good and Evil in the context of the Spanish recent past (see Liikanen 43–54). 9. I refer here to Jan Assmann’s notion of “cultural memory”: “On the social level, with respect to groups and societies, the role of external symbols becomes even more important, because groups which, of course, do not ‘have’ a memory tend to ‘make’ themselves one by means of things meant as reminders such as monuments, museums, libraries, archives, and other mnemonic institutions. This is what we call cultural memory” (111). 10. Many critics, including myself, have asserted that this action was conceived to prolong certain sociopolitical structures inherited from the dictatorship and to prevent many of the still powerful actors of the previous regime from being held accountable for past abuses and crimes. The 1977 Amnesty Law (Ley de Amnistía) seemed to pave the way back to democracy by activating impunity. To pursue these different arguments further, see Tusell and García Cárcel. 11. The law was promulgated by the Socialist Party (PSOE) in 2007. After this political and legal “novelty,” the public debate focused on whether this law was really necessary, what its limits were and how it could be modified to make it more efficient in revealing the crimes of the dictatorship. See Pallín and Escudero Alday. 12. See Hansen and Cruz-Suárez. 13. As Pedro Milo suggested, memory does not look behind, it just looks inside; that is, it delves into the human experiences (“Memoria colectiva”). 14. The novels already listed before are good examples of this. 15. The public debate between the critic Arcadi Espada and Javier Cercas himself is a case in point. See Cifre. 16. This ironic self-representation is a metafictional strategy to ponder memory through different types of cultural productions.

Cultural Memory 145 17. Sánchez Mazas was one of the founders of Falange Española, a fascist party deeply related to the first period of Francoism. Sánchez Mazas was minister for a short time after the Civil War—that is to say, during the first period of the Dictatorship. 18. I am following Habermas’ use of Kierkegaard’s ideas about the importance of human decisions—free will—in order to provide the individual with a certain ethical conception of life (Habermas 95–96). 19. Anna Cento Bull and Hans Lauge Hansen (390–404) have alluded to a sort of antagonistic model as the way in which collective memory appears in social discourses—that is to say, a collective memory sustained by univocal discourses that operate to establish the limits between all kinds of opposed discourses. Instead of this antagonistic model, these critics suggest an agonistic memory model as a dialectic and reflexive process for finding new paths toward a possible mutual understanding within a certain political community. In this sense, Soldados de Salamina represents an agonistic narrative. 20. Recovering those silenced voices must happen at two connected levels: the anthropologic-forensic stage that entails the searching and opening of mass graves and the identification of the victims (Ferrándiz) and the discursive level, which implies looking back on the past through the recovery of testimonies and stories—fictional or not—that may reconcile Spaniards with their violent past. In addition, those voices are also representative of all the marginalized discourses promoted by independent citizen associations or individual initiatives that very often emerge within the public debate about Spanish collective memory.

Works Cited Assmann, Jan. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Walter de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 109–118. Bernecker, Walther, and Sören Brinkmann. Memorias divididas. Guerra Civil y Franquismo en la sociedad y la política españolas 1936–2008. Abada Editores, 2009. Bull Cento, Anna, and Hans Lauge Hansen. “On Agonistic Memory.” Memory Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 2016, pp. 390–404, doi:10.1177/1750698015615935. Cercas, Javier. Soldados de Salamina. Tusquets, 2001. Cifre, Patricia. “Configuración de la memoria en Soldados de Salamina.” Tropelías. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, vol. 18, 2012, pp. 216–230. Cruz-Suárez, Juan Carlos. “Memoria Ram.” Revista Caracteres. Estudios culturales y críticos de la esfera digital, vol. 2, no. 2, 2013, pp. 212–240. Cruz-Suárez, Juan Carlos, and Hans Lauge Hansen. “Literatura y memoria cultural en España (2000–2010).” La memoria novelada. Hibridación de géneros y metaficción en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo (2000–2010), edited by Hans Lauge Hansen and Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 21–42. Cuesta Bustillo, Josefina. “Memoria e historia. Un estado de la cuestión.” Revista Ayer, vol. 32, 1998, pp. 203–246. Cyrulnik, Boris. The Whispering Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience. Other Press, 2005. Erll, Astrid. Memory in Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

146  Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez Faber, Sebastian. “La literatura como acto afiliativo: la nueva novela de la guerra civil (2000–2007).” Contornos de la narrativa española actual (2000–2010), edited by P. Álvarez Blanco and T. Dorca, Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2010, pp. 101–110. Ferrándiz, Francisco. “Exhumating the Defeated: Civil War Mass Graves in 21st Century Spain.” American Ethnologist, vol. 40, no. 1, 2013, pp. 38–54, doi:10.1111/amet.12004. Fleming, John, and Robert J. Ledogar. “Resilience, an Evolving Concept: A Review of Literature Relevant to Aboriginal Research.” Journal of Indigenous Wellbeing, vol. 6, no. 2, 2008, pp. 7–23. Gallego, Ferrán. El mito de la transición. La crisis del franquismo y los orígenes de la democracia (1973–1977). Crítica, 2008. García Cárcel, Ricardo. La herencia del pasado. Las memorias históricas de España. Galaxia Gutenberg, 2012. Giddens, Anthony. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Polity Press, 1984. Habermas, Jürgen. Identidades nacionales y postnacionales. Tecnos, 1998. Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont, editors. Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge UP, 2013. Hansen, Hans Lauge. “Formas de la novela histórica actual.” La memoria novelada. Hibridación de géneros y metaficción en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo (2000–2010), edited by Hans Lauge Hansen and Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 83–104. Hansen, Hans Lauge, and Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez, editors. La memoria novelada. Hibridación de géneros y metaficción en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo (2000–2010). Peter Lang, 2012. Ibáñez Fanés, Jordi. Antígona y el duelo. Una reflexión moral sobre la memoria histórica. Tusquets, 2009. Liikanen, Elina. “Pasados imaginados. Políticas de la forma literaria en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo.” La memoria novelada. Hibridación de géneros y metaficción en la novela española sobre la guerra civil y el franquismo (2000–2010), edited by Hans Lauge Hansen and Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez, Peter Lang, 2012, pp. 43–54. Martín Pallín, José Antonio, and Rafael Escudero Alday. Derecho y memoria histórica. Trotta, 2008. Mate, Reyes. Justicia de las víctimas. Terrorismo, memoria, reconciliación. Anthropos, 2008. Milos, Pedro. “Memoria colectiva: entre la vivencia histórica y la significación.” Memoria para un nuevo siglo: Chile, miradas a la segunda mitad del siglo XX, LOM, 2000, pp. 43–76. Nussbaum, Martha. Justicia poética. La imaginación literaria y la vida pública. Bello, 1997. O’Brien, Susie. “Resilience Stories: Narratives of Adaptation, Refusal and Compromise.” Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, vol. 4, no. 2–3, 2017, pp. 43–65. Revilla, Juan Carlos, et al. “The Reconstruction of Resilience as a Social and Collective Phenomenon: Poverty and Coping Capacity During the Economic Crisis.” European Societies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2017, pp. 89–110, doi:10.1080/146 16696.2017.1346195.

Cultural Memory 147 Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. U of Chicago P, 2006. Rigney, Anne. 2005. “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory.” Journal of European Studies, vol. 35, no. 1, 2005, pp. 11–28. Rorty, Richard. Contingencia, ironía y solidaridad. Paidós, 1991. Todorov, Tzvetan. Memory as Remedy for Evil. Seagull Books, 2010. Tusell, Jesús. Dictadura franquista y democracia 1939–2004. Crítica, 2010.

9 Critical Dystopias in Spanish Memory as an Act of Resilience1 Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol

Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst Das Rettende auch —Friedrich Hölderlin, “Patmos”

The lines in the epigraph, “But where there is danger, / A rescuing element grows as well” (Hölderlin 71), highlight a quality of resilience that can be observed in the capacity of human beings for endurance and recovery when they find themselves under extreme pressure. The present chapter approaches the study of human resilience through the lens of memory and its centrality in the recovery of individual and collective self-esteem by focusing on a selection of recent “critical dystopias” (Moylan) written in Spanish. We suggest that the selected works can be understood as ascribing to the “ethics of defeat” (Amar Sánchez) and “reflective nostalgia” (Boym), at the same time as they investigate the potentiality of “cultural agencies” (Sommer) for the development of resilience. Furthermore, we argue that the chosen dystopian narratives reject the consensus ethics characteristic of contemporary writing (Rancière) and defend, instead, an ethics of conviction (Badiou). In L’éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal (1993) Badiou indicates the impossibility of an abstract ethics, as he claims that any ethical expression is defined by the context from which it emerges. He further explains that those who profess this “ethics of conviction” must maintain it in the face of adversity, even if this means to become alienated and relegated to the margins of society. For Badiou, the actual Promethean heroes are those people who embrace the idea of self-failure—which is a political category—rather than shunning the tenets—an ethical category—that underpin their identity as subjects. Hereby, to be faithful to a particular truth means to fight for the preservation of memory against the complacency offered by oblivion. Rancière follows this train of thought when he denounces in La mésentente: politique et philosophie (1995) that current thinking is

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 149 deeply influenced by consensus. As a result, controversial artistic and intellectual mechanisms are replaced by social mediation. Facing what he considers a misinterpreted “turn to ethics,” the French philosopher advocates in many of his later works—Malaise dans l’esthétique (2004), Politique de la littérature (2007), Le fil perdu (2014)—an understanding of art as the space from which to reinvent politics, resist the forces of neoliberalism and reveal the microstories of the defeated. Consequently, Rancière defends the radical aspects of certain “representations” of the unrepresentable, of evil, and of the “state of emergency,” in order to fully analyze the reality of contemporary societies.2 These radical representations are often found in the anticipatory fictions that Tom Moylan calls “critical dystopias” and which overlap with other current popular genres, such as gothic and crime fictions. They all share a desire to “linger in the terrors of the present even as they exemplify what is needed to transform it” (Moylan 198–199), thereby making us fully aware of our position in the world but also retaining a utopian impulse in the face of the bleakest dystopian scenarios. Typically, these works highlight the human ability to face adversity according to the twofold pattern that Stefan Vanistendael advanced in Resilience (1994): on the one hand, protecting human integrity and, on the other, adopting a positive vital behavior in the midst of hostile environments. The following analysis links Vanistendael’s understanding of resilience to the notion of humanist science fiction. Next, it undertakes the study of well-known critical dystopias written in Spanish where the role of memory is crucial for the construction of resilience.

Navigating the Inner Space Contrary to those who identify science fiction as an escapist genre aiming to mere entertainment, numerous contemporary critics stress its potential to inquire into the relationship between the individual and their environment. For Donna Haraway, for instance, the limit between science fiction and social reality is only an optical illusion (149). Lyman Sargent denounces the generalized misinterpretation of dystopias “[f]or rather than seeing eutopia and dystopia as equal subsets or varieties of Utopia, or social dreaming about alternative future societies, utopian texts are taken as the exemplar of Utopian thought and dystopias as their cowardly cousins” (9). On his part, Fredric Jameson defines dystopias as “masquerades under a dystopian appearance whose deeper libidinal excitement, however, is surely profoundly Utopian in spirit (as in most current cyberpunk)” (26). Consequently, he considers that dystopian writing is particularly valuable to elaborate a cognitive cartography of the present. This is also the approach that underpins much contemporary

150  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol dystopian writing in Spanish, as Edmundo Paz Soldán’s comments on his short story collection Las visiones confirms, Aquí quería explorar la mirada de los dominados. Es una colonización contemporánea, pero hay ecos de muchos otros períodos. Yo quería reflexionar sobre el presente . . . Para mí la ciencia ficción es un gran género político. La ciencia ficción que me interesa es aquella que habla de ideas políticas. (“Tanto cine” 3)3 Dystopian writing in Spanish also shows an inclination toward the subjective turn experienced by contemporary science fiction, where we find less and less science and, perhaps, also less fiction. In this, it corroborates James Ballard’s perception that the future of science fiction is to be found in the “exploration of inner space,” in contraposition with the outer space that constitutes the traditional sphere of the genre. This turn toward the interior allows for a novel analysis of the mind and its capacities that may contribute to reclaim a narrative that penetrates the human unconscious, the biggest universe to discover. The extent of Ballard’s influence on writing in Spanish is evident in Marcelo Cohen’s words prefacing the groundbreaking series Línea C de Ciencia Ficción (2004) that explicitly express the idea that science fiction needs to stop focusing on the outer space and the far future and focus on the near future and inner space. This approach is actually rather natural for Spanish-speaking authors who, following in the tracks of Borges, Ballard, and Philip K. Dick, have traditionally shown a certain proclivity toward “soft science fiction” and its characteristic emphasis on provoking ontological questions about the human condition. Bernard Goorden observes this tendency when he affirms that Latin American Science Fiction has mainly focused on humankind, the central concern of a progressive literature (8). Besides, Latin American writers are also concerned with the adaptation into Ibero-American realities of the concepts applied to the analysis of futuristic fictions written in English. As a result, they coin new terms that may better describe their fictions.4 The Chilean Jorge Baradit, for example, proposes the notions of “magical realism 2.0” and “cyberchamanism,” whereas Marcelo Cohen speaks about “ciencia ficción trucha” (bad quality or fake SF). Similarly, Spanish-speaking writers are successfully adopting the dystopian subgenre of cyberpunk to reflect on the everyday contexts of their distinct societies.5 Baradit, for instance, draws a parallel between cyberpunk and present-day Latin America. The Uruguayan Ramiro Sanchiz offers the term “trashpunk” to refer to the “third-world” version of William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk. If cyberpunk can be considered as a fictional space where the obsolete and state-of-the-art technologies coexist, in Latin America new technologies and technocratic

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 151 societies overlap with indigenous communities, and the gated communities of millionaires intersperse among the ghettos of the poor (qtd. in Muñoz Zapata 1).

Critical Dystopias Dystopias offer a critique of the present by imagining near-future societies where certain familiar policies, such as those deriving from unfettered neoliberalism, result in the increase of poverty, inequality, and exploitation among human beings, the blurring of the boundaries between man and machine, and the lack of freedom of choice. In these hopeless contexts, certain “eutopian” attitudes or enclaves emerge, to which some dissidents hold on to. These apocalyptic works proliferate in times of crisis and conflict and, as Camille Focant explains, their mission is to transmit to readers a message of resistance and bravery (38). Along the same lines, Tom Moylan coined the term “critical dystopia” as opposed to that of “classical utopia,” and defined it as “a textual mutation that self-reflexively takes on the present system and offers not only astute critiques of the order of things, but also explorations of the oppositional spaces and possibilities from which the next round of political activism can derive imaginative sustenance and inspiration” (xv). After the utopic 1960s, critical dystopias acquired relevance with the conservative ideological turn that began in the 1980s, “an era of economic restructuring, political opportunism, and cultural implosion” (186). If classical dystopias usually conclude with the idea that there is no way out (194), critical dystopias become new manifestations of the utopic imagination, as they are subversive, opposed to resignation, and epic in character. While utopias offer solutions, dystopias are more inclined to offer a path to survival in contexts that are marked by oppression. Thus, dystopian writings open “a space of contestation and opposition” (Baccolini 520) that offers the possibility of escaping, in Cohen’s words, the cycle of realist adaptation, of false dichotomies between what is said and what happened, between the realistic and the fantastic (“Como si empezáramos” 134). By playing with shifting structures, digressions and multiple references, as well as by frequently displaying a language that destabilizes readers’ expectations and drives them to a position of cognitive estrangement, dystopian writing enhances reality, since, according to Cohen, “ningún arte está mejor dotado para el realismo total” (“there is no art better equipped for total realism”; 134).6

Memory and Identity Over three centuries ago, John Locke defined memory as the foundation of personal identity: “In this alone consists personal Identity, i.e., the

152  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of the person” (335). The link between memory and identity established by Locke is also of paramount importance in dystopian narratives.7 A case in point is Blade Runner (1982), a groundbreaking cyberpunk film. Based on the short novel by Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), the film emphasizes the similarities between bioengineered individuals and human beings by replacing the term “android” of the original with “replicant.” In the world imagined by Dick, possessing memories of one’s own is synonymous with humanity, which explains the anguish experienced by the Nexus 6 when they have to face the Voigt Kampff test that is designed to reveal the spurious nature of implanted memories. Memory also manifests itself as the element that saves us from alienation. For this reason, the works analyzed in this chapter often insist on the madness brought about by oblivion, which can be provoked by different means. In Ray Loriga’s melancholic novel Tokyo ya no nos quiere (2014), forgetting is induced by the ingestion of psychotropic drugs. Other works resort to ingenious, though toxic, new technologies to enforce forgetting. Thus, in the film Strange Days (1995) the SQUID allows its user to enjoy the memories of others; in Paz Soldán’s Sueños Digitales (2000) the Bolivian government decides to use the latest digital technology to erase the most sinister memory of its recent past from the electronic media library. Eventually, the creators of the alternative digital realities cannot stand the situation and get lost, either in the virtual reality of video games, like Píxel, or in real life, like Sebastian; similarly, the characters in “Wonderama,” by the Mexican author Bernardo Fernández BEF, and those in the trilogy El Gen de Dios, written by the Cuban Juan Abreu, get stranded in the infernal consumerist heavens of the amusement park aesthetic, so pervasive nowadays. Frequently, dystopian works in Spanish are wary of the dangers of erasing from the annals of history situations of collective oppression. Tiempo Lunar (1991), by the Mexican author Mauricio Molina, is an example in point. In this thriller marked by the lunar eclipse that gives the book its name, the protagonist must solve the disappearance of his best friend, a photographer of off-limits areas, while he bears witness to how identities become interchangeable and the town suffers an uncanny transformation. In other instances, the critique against the suppression of memory emerges through the portrayal of cyborgs who undergo a surgical procedure in the cerebral cortex. This is the case of Baradit’s characters in Ygdrasil (2005) and those in Las islas (1998), by Argentinian author Carlos Gamerro. However, it is in Paz Soldán’s Iris (2014) and Las visiones (2016) where this topic is more extensively explored. In Iris the characters with recycled memories are common. They are usually soldiers hurt in combat—“shanz” in the estranged language of the

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 153 book—who, despite losing their human condition, continue functioning as war weapons. This is Xavier’s case: Entre los shanz en el heliavión también había reconocido a Xavier, pareja de la responsable de la bomba dentro del Perímetro. Un oficial explicó a todos que se le había borrado la memoria y no recordaba nada de su vida anterior. Las torturas le habían afectado el cerebro, escuchaba órdenes y las cumplía pero era incapaz de iniciativa propia. Un shan [sic] ideal. Debían tratarlo como una persona, porque lo era; se llamaba Marteen y no tenía nada que ver con Xavier.8 Another meaningful passage about implanted memories revolves around the characters of Chendo, Carreño and Reynolds: Queríamos inventarle un pasado a Reynolds mas era imposible. Los artificiales no tenían infancia ni adolescencia. Eran construidos así, nacían adultos. Les injertaban una memoria que les daba una historia, mas sabían tan bien como nos [sic] q‛‛esa [sic] memoria era artificial. La podían cambiar si alguna experiencia no les gustaba, algún trauma con el que no se identificaban. Decían que había un mercado negro pa [sic] las memorias de los artificiales. (Iris)9 Similar examples appear in the extraordinary short story “Artificial,” included in Las visiones and narrated by a young woman who laments the progressive loss of humanity exhibited by her mother, a soldier who was wounded in combat and subsequently rebuilt. The problem is introduced in the first lines: faced with her father’s cowardice, the daughter fights for her mother not to be branded artificial by the bureaucratic organism of reclassification. Her stance clashes with that of the office manager who, proving to be both pragmatic and heartless, claims not to understand so much effort just so the mother could continue being considered human: “Ser artificial podía y debía considerarse un ascenso, ellos tenían muchas más ventajas que los humanos, eran más eficientes y se les daban los mejores trabajos” (“Being artificial could and should be considered a promotion, they had many more advantages than humans, they were more efficient and they got the best jobs”; 91). The loss of humanity is accomplished in an aseptic manner, paying attention to the percentage of mechanical elements incorporated into the wound: “los reajustes numéricos elevaron la artificialidad al 48.78%. Mamá podía ser tanto humana como artificial . . . Solo un abogado nos dio esperanzas. Pidió que lo buscáramos cuando saliera del hospital. Iría a los medios, armaría un escándalo” (93).10 As the mother becomes aware that losing her memory is the same as losing her identity, her strategy of resilience focuses on not forgetting who she is (94–95).

154  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol

Memory as an Act of Resilience Although framed in the context of classical dystopias, critical dystopias stress the importance of preserving memories in order to endure traumatic situations and rebuild oneself. Ana María Amar Sánchez highlights this when she asserts that, as long as we do not forget, we are not defeated, since the preservation of silenced memories, especially through writing, gives meaning to a tragic experience. Thus, despite the apparent paradox, Amar Sánchez affirms that to be a defeated antihero, guarantees belonging to a superior group of victors: those who have resisted and ground their victory upon the proud acceptance of their defeat (25). Those who practice this form of resilience turn their writings into a political act to cope with trauma (Amar 77). Following the ideas of Theodor W. Adorno and Hannah Arendt, Amar similarly upholds an attitude of seclusion as a strategy to maintain freedom of conscience before the “consensual public life” (79–80). In the critical dystopias we analyze, the narration of that which is irrepresentable shuns melancholy and turns instead to memory and ­nostalgia— or, recovering the etymological meaning of the term, to the pain of what is known (118). However, far from focusing on what Svetlana Boym identifies as a damaging kind of nostalgia that she calls “restorative” because it is linked to nationalisms that reformulate the past through the fabrication of myths and the creation of thoughts based on conspiracy theories, critical dystopias seem to draw on “reflective nostalgia” to trigger processes of resilience that are taken up by those who assume the impossibility of rebuilding the past. Thus, Boym explains, Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholies. If restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and specialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and demoralizes space. (xvi) Assuming the value of memory, Amar holds a notion of history that resembles the theses proposed by Walter Benjamin, according to whom it is the task of the defeated to update the past and set the basis for utopian change. Along the same lines, Reyes Mate asserts: “sólo recuerdan los sobrevivientes . . . no es el recuerdo de los vencedores sino el de los vencidos el que crea la esperanza” (“Only the survivors remember . . . It

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 155 is not the memories of the victors, but the memories of the defeated that create hope”; 224). This sort of “cultural agency” that is characteristic of resilient individuals is at play in many of the selected dystopian works. For the narrator in Ricardo Menéndez Salmón’s dystopia El Sistema (2016), writing is not only a survival strategy and a way to preserve memory but also a privilege of the weak: “Porque contar ha sido siempre privilegio de los débiles. Porque el dueño de la narración ha sido siempre un anciano, un enfermo, un loco, un inútil o un triste. Un Ajeno en un mundo de Propios” (“Because storytelling has always been the privilege of the weak. Because the narrative’s owner has always been an old man, a sick person, a madman, a useless or a miserable person. A Stranger in a world of Fellow human beings”). On his part, Cohen creates characters that paradigmatically incarnate the many levels of association and belonging though which agency operates, often providing more than one anchor of identity for each subject. Interestingly, as Doris Sommer argues, the room to act up is often found “[i]n the contradictions among those anchors” (5). Withdrawn within their own society and unplugged from new technologies, Cohen’s characters practice conversation and walking as the means to counter state biopolitics. For example, Tálico and Multon, the protagonists of the short story “Cuando aparecen Aquellos,” reject Panconsciousness, a psycho-technological phenomenon used as a control device that generates an imposed memory shared among the world’s inhabitants. As the two men walk around the city, something unheard of in that society, they not only claim the spaces they inhabit but also succeed in momentarily transcending their dire present by casually talking about the plots of films and books or old biographic anecdotes. As a result, the book presents a defense of a conscience that owes its resilience, partly, to its link to memory: La conciencia, eso era lo que ellos querían, mostraba dichosamente su condición fluida, como si se sometiera a avalanchas y ciclones, suaves pero desordenados, para afirmar una estabilidad triunfal. Era como esa gente que prueba cosas repugnantes para proclamar que no le gustan. Pero no: a la conciencia ese lugar le gustaba, al menos a la de Tálico y Multon. ¡La conciencia! Esa emisora interior de pensamientos y preocupaciones, de recuerdos innúmeros y observaciones alarmantes, pagar el seguro del cocheciño, ese trabajo, demostrar más afecto a R., tomar el comprimido, adónde irá a parar mi vida, cuán feliz soy, qué insatisfecho vivo, qué interesante esto, qué pernicioso esto otro, cómo podría ser más bondadoso.11 Ricardo Piglia’s La ciudad ausente (1992) joins in the same effort to recognize the importance of memory, denouncing the silence of Argentinian society regarding the abuses that took place during the Dirty War

156  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol (1976–1983). In this dystopian novel, a journalist attempts to discover the origins of a machine-cyborg-woman that preserves, permutates and multiplies tales of violence in a context marked by a deliberate oblivion. The female cyborg infiltrates State institutions, such as the Museum, in order to discredit the official truths and reveal the authentic memories of the murdered people. In this way, we get to learn of the existence of “white nodes,” or the live matter where words were recorded (Absent 99). These white nodes come from hieroglyphic designs drawn over turtle’s shells. Because “[o]riginally, the white nodes had been marks on bones” (70), the turtle shells acquire a special meaning for those missing in Argentina. Piglia’s machine offers then a counter-memory that is resilient and raises over that what is hidden.12 Like Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993) and Cillian McGrattan’s Memory, Politics, and Identity (2013), Piglia’s novel insists that the “ghost” remains visible despite the attempts to erase it. In some of these dystopian narratives, the preservation of memory through writing is particularly effective. Ezequiel,13 the protagonist of Cohen’s novel Insomnio (1985), decides to stay in the dystopian Bardas of Krámer instead of escaping and finds his freedom in writing. In the face of adversity, Ezequiel shifts from melancholy to a kind of resilience grounded in what he considers an accepting vigil (184). The same attitude is adopted by Lear, one of the protagonists in Carmen Boullosa’s Cielos de la tierra (1997)—translated into English as Heavens on Earth. Lear defends literature as a strategy to preserve memory and language in L’Atlàntide. The title of the novel derives from a verse in Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana (1603) that also appears in the novel’s epigraph: “Indias del mundo, cielo de la tierra” (“Indies of the world, heaven on earth”). Thus, the blurb of the first edition presents the book as “Carmen Boullosa’s new utopia.” Yet the structure of the novel is marked by three historical dystopias or failed utopias. The first one is set in the colonial past and features Hernando de Rivas, a victim of the acculturation carried out by the Spanish priests who decided to create a learned elite of Indians from the indigenous nobility. Hernando de Rivas writes a book in Latin that, centuries later, will engage professor Estela Díaz in its translation into Spanish. Estela’s present-time dystopia is that of Mexico in the 1990s, which is further accentuated as she reminisces about the lost ideals of the 1970s. Finally, Lear lives in a future dystopian community made up of the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. She decides to recover Estela’s translation of Hernando’s writings with the objective of preserving literature in a world keen on forgetting the word and erasing the past in an act of rejection of those who provoked the destruction of the planet. However, oblivion only begets a violent society in L’Atlàntide. Devastated by this situation, Lear decides at the end of the novel that she can no longer stay in her community: “I’m going to try to transform myself into words and jump into the realm I can share with

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 157 Estela and Hernando” (Heavens 367). When facing the inevitable failure of utopian projects, the only option that remains is the preservation of memories through the act of writing: The three of us will inhabit in the same realm. The three of us will belong to three distinct times, our memories will be of three distinct ages, but I will know Hernando’s, and Hernando will know mine, and we’ll share a common space where we can look each other in the eyes and we’ll establish a new community. Ours will be the Heavens on Earth. (369)

Toward a Collective Memory In this section we would like to connect the concept of “community resilience,” coined by Néstor Suárez Ojeda (2001) with that of collective memory, arguing that collective memory has a mobilizing effect that allows for the reconstruction of communities after they have been hit by disaster, which is often the focus of critical dystopias. Suárez Ojeda establishes that community resilience is only achieved by proudly claiming the collective cultural identity through the compilation of traditions, language, songs, dances, and tales. Evidently, collective memory, understood as that which allows individuals to ascribe themselves to a group (Halbwachs), plays a key role in this process, and critical dystopias consistently echo this possibility. As Baccolini points out, In classical dystopia, memory remains too often trapped in an individual and regressive nostalgia, but critical dystopias show that a culture of memory—one that moves from the individual to the ­collective—is part of a social project of hope. (520) Edmundo Paz Soldán’s novels clearly exemplify the relevance of collective memory for the development of community resilience. Introducing in his dystopian universe multiple references to the Bolivian religious and anthropological imaginary, the despised and subjugated inhabitants of Iris manage to preserve their civilization and their identity by means of the preservation of ancestral rituals that connect people with their deities and nature. In this community, drugs are used to reach a sense of transcendence, in a similar way to that practiced in the Andean Altiplano. Significantly, too, the deities Xlött, Malacosa and La Jerere are reminiscent of Bolivian syncretic gods that have been venerated by miners within the Potosí region since the pre-Columbian period. In a situation of absolute vulnerability, the inhabitants of Iris gather and tell their stories in order to regain their dignity. Their success is such

158  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol that they even draw some of their dark-skinned enemies to their fight. Soji, for instance, falls in love with the local culture as she tries to understand the land she inhabits through Irisian legends: En los ratos libres, Soji recopilaba leyendas irisinas. Soñaba con una colección exhaustiva que no dejara una al margen. Ése debía ser el verdadero Palacio de la Memoria, no ese tonto museo con que pieloscuras de mala conciencia habían querido honrar el pasado irisino. No había montaña o arroyo, claro en el bosque o árbol en el valle que no remitieran a una leyenda. Hay que respetar lo que no se entiende, decía Soji. Interpretar lo interpretable, cubrir los silencios mas no forzar las cosas.14 In a novel in which four of its five parts tell the stories of the invaders Xavier, Reynolds, Yaz, and Katja, the inclusion of Irisian tales of violence and death becomes particularly meaningful. These harrowing microstories, abruptly inserted in the text and written in italics, follow in the tradition of the Bolivian “mining novel.” They contribute to the sense of estrangement that, according to Ranciére and Cohen, the chronicles of the defeated must produce. Through them, the people of Iris recover their self-awareness. Stories such as the following evoke, in an interesting paronomasic game, the possibility of turning the dystopian “iris” into an ideal collective rainbow, a transcending community:15 Conocen los pájaros arcoíris que cruzan el cielo, dijo una vez [Orlewen]. Cada pájaro dun [sic] solo color, al volar juntos forman el arcoíris . . . Vuelan guiados por un líder, el único pájaro que lleva en su plumaje los siete colores del arcoíris, mas ellos lo ven dun [sic] solo color, el suyo. Y cuando llegan a Malhado descubren que la sombra que crean al llegar al cruzar los lagos es el rostro de Xlötl. Eso es lo que somos. Nada cuando estamos solos, el Dios si estamos juntos. Un todo trascendente.16 To conclude, our analysis of contemporary Latin American dystopian narratives evidences a solid tradition of humanist SF writing in Spanish that combines the conventions developed in the English-speaking context with autochthonous cultural and geopolitical characteristics. Far from mere entertainment, these speculative fictions are firmly anchored in the present sociopolitical Latin American and global realities. Most relevant is their emphasis on representing ways of resilience that rely on the preservation of individual and collective memory, which is achieved in salient examples through the telling of stories. Hence, storytelling and writing are envisioned as forms of cultural agency that facilitate individual and collective resilience. Frequently privileging the memories of the defeated, these critical dystopias do not aim to reconstruct an imaginary idyllic

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 159 past but to instill a sense of hope (Mate) based on a reflective nostalgia that functions as a precondition for resilience and survival. Ascribing to the ethics of defeat, these works eschew resignation in the face of oppression and rise as influential cultural agents that offer a space to rethink and, as Rancière would have it, even, perhaps, reinvent politics.

Notes 1. Research for this paper has taken place within the framework of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations” (FFI2015– 63895-C2–2-R), graciously funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. 2. Carrying the banner for this position in the Hispanic world, the Argentinian writer Marcelo Cohen advocates the dismantling of “state prose” through texts that may unbalance, decodify and question the discourse of dominant power in our society (“Prosa” 1–8). 3. Where no published translation into English has been found for the works cited, translations are by this chapter’s authors. Translations longer than four lines are offered as notes. “Here I wished to explore the vision of the subaltern. It is a contemporary colonization, but there are echoes of many other times. I wanted to reflect on the present . . . For me science fiction is a great political genre. The science fiction I am interested in is that which speaks of political ideas.” 4. Juan Ignacio Muñoz Zapata addresses this topic in Le cyberpunk vernaculaire de l’Amérique latine. 5. Cyberpunk is a science fiction subgenre anchored in a dystopian future marked by repression and inequality, where the most advanced technology coexists with a low quality of life. 6. For more on this kind of aesthetics, see Francisca Noguerol’s “Barroco frío.” 7. See Martin Holz. 8. “Amongst the shanz in the heliplane I had also recognized Xavier, the partner of the woman who was responsible for the bomb inside the Perimeter. An official explained to us that his memory had been erased and he had forgotten everything about his previous life. The torture had affected his brain, he could listen to orders and carry them through, but he was incapable of taking the initiative. An ideal shan. We had to treat him as a person, because he was one; his name was Marteen and he had nothing to do with Xavier.” 9. “We wanted to imagine a past for Reynolds, but it was impossible. The artificials were never children nor teenagers. They were built like that, they were born adults. They had an implanted memory with a history of their ‘lives,’ but they knew as well as we did that the memory was artificial. They could change it if they didn’t like a particular experience, some trauma they didn’t identify as theirs. They said there was a black market for the memories of artificials.” 10. “The numerical adjustments raised the artificiality to 48.78%. Mom could be just as much human as artificial . . . Only one lawyer gave us some hope. He asked us to call him when Mom got out of the hospital. He would speak to the media and see about stirring up a scandal.” 11. “Conscience, that was what they wanted, happily showed its fluidity, as if it were subjugated to cyclones and avalanches, soft but disorganized, only to affirm a triumphant stability. But no; conscience liked that place, at least Tálico and Multon’s conscience. Conscience! That inner transmitter of

160  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol thoughts and worries, of uncountable memories and alarming observations, paying the car insurance, that job, showing more affection towards R., taking the pill, where will my life go, how happy I am, how unsatisfying my life is, how interesting this is, how damaging this other thing, how could I be a better person.” 12. La sonámbula (1998), a cinematographic dystopia by Fernando Spiner, with script by Spiner and Piglia, touches upon the same topics: the colonization of citizens’ memories on the part of a repressive state that inflicts both a deliberate oblivion and false memories, the use of science in the process of achieving this end, and characters that resist the collective lie. 13. Ezequiel himself notes the intertextual reference to the homonymous biblical prophet: “a long time ago they decided to name me Ezequiel and the name hid the hope of revelation” (154). 14. “In her free time, Soji compiled Irisian legends. She dreamed of an exhaustive collection that left no tale forgotten. That should be the authentic Memory Palace, instead of that silly museum where guilty conscience dark-skinned ones had tried to pay homage to the Irisian past. There was no mountain nor stream, no clearing in the forest and no tree in the valley without a legend. One must respect that which is not able to understand, Soji said. Interpret that which can be interpreted, fill the silences, but no forcing the issue.” 15. This idea is recovered in the tale “Los pájaros arcoíris,” included in Las visiones (59–68). 16. “You know the rainbow birds that cross the sky, said [Orlewen] once. Each of a different color, when they fly together they create a rainbow . . . Their flight is guided by the leader, the only bird that has the seven colors of the rainbow in its plumage, but the other birds only see the one color, their own. And when they get to Malhado, they discover that the shadow they create when flying over the lakes is the face of Xlötl. That is what we are. Nothing when we are alone, God if we are together. A transcendental whole.”

Works Cited Abreu, Juan. El Gen de Dios. Linkgua Literatura, 2011. Amar Sánchez, Ana María. Instrucciones para la derrota, narrativas éticas y políticas de perdedores. Anthropos, 2010. Baccolini, Raffaella. “The Persistence of Hope in Dystopian Science Fiction.” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 3, 2004, pp. 518–521. Badiou, Alain. L’éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal. Hatier, 1994. Ballard, James. “Which Way to Inner Space?” New World Science Fiction, no. 40, 1962, pp. 116–118. Baradit, Jorge. Ygdrasil. Ediciones B Chile, 2005. Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. Warner Bros Pictures, 1982. Boullosa, Carmen. Cielos de la tierra. Alfaguara, 1997. ———. Heavens on Earth. Translated by Shelby Vincent, Deep Vellum Publishing, 2007. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001. Cohen, Marcelo. “Como si empezáramos de nuevo. Apuntes por un realismo inseguro.” ¡Realmente fantástico! y otros ensayos, Kindle ed., Norma, 2003, pp. 129–155. ———. “Cuando aparecen Aquellos.” Relatos reunidos, Kindle ed., Alfaguara, 2014.

Critical Dystopias in Spanish 161 ———. Insomnio. Paradiso, 1994. [1985]. ———. “Prosa de Estado y estados de la prosa.” Otra parte, no. 8, 2006, pp. 1–8. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Galilée, 1993. Fernández BEF, Bernardo. “Wonderama.” BZZZZZZTT! Ciudad interfase, Times Editores, 1998, pp. 9–21. Focant, Camille. “El Apocalipsis de Juan. Género literario, estructura y recepción.” Los imaginarios apocalípticos en la literatura hispanoamericana contemporánea, edited by Geneviève Fabry Geneviève, et al., Peter Lang, 2010, pp. 35–52. Gamerro, Carlos. Las islas. Edhasa, 1998. Goorden, Bernard. “Nuevo Mundo, mundos nuevos.” Lo mejor de la ciencia ficción latinoamericana, edited by Bernard Goorden, A. E. Van Vogt y Domingo Santos, Editorial Roca, 1982, pp. 8–10. Halbwachs, Maurice. Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire. Albin Michel, 1994 [1925]. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin: The Fire of the Gods Drives Us to Set Forth by Day and by Night. Translated by James Mitchell, Ithuriel’s Spear, 2004. Holz, Martin. Traversing Virtual Spaces: Body, Memory and Trauma in Cyberpunk. Winter, 2006. Jameson, Fredric. “The Antinomies of Postmodernity.” The Seeds of Time, Columbia UP, 1994, pp. 1–71. La sonámbula. Dir. Fernando Spiner. Alameda Films, 1998. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford UP, 1975. Loriga, Ray. Tokyo ya no nos quiere. Alfaguara, 2014. Mate, Reyes. La razón de los vencidos. Anthropos, 2013. McGrattan, Cillian. Memory, Politics, and Identity: Haunted by History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Menéndez Salmón, Ricardo. El Sistema, Kindle ed., Seix Barral, 2016. Mohr, Dunja. “Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia.” Zeitschriftfür Anglistik und Amerikanistik, vol. 55, no. 1, 2007, pp. 5–12. Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Westview Press, 2000. Muñoz Zapata, Juan Ignacio. Le cyberpunk vernaculaire de l’Amérique latine: dystopies, virtualités et résistances. Université de Montréal, 2009. Noguerol, Francisca. “Barroco frío: simulacro, ciencias duras, realismo histérico y fractalidad en la última narrativa en español.” Imágenes de la globalización y la tecnología en las narrativas hispánicas, edited by Ángel Esteban and Jesús Montoya, Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2013, pp. 17–31. Paz Soldán, Edmundo. Iris, Kindle ed., Alfaguara, 2014. ———. Sueños digitales. Alfaguara, 2000. ———. “Tanto cine de superhéroes nos ha hecho ver la ciencia-ficción sólo como escapismo.” El día de Córdoba, 18 May 2016. ———. Las visiones, Páginas de Espuma, 2016. ———. “Artificial.” Las visiones, pp. 89–96.

162  Ana María Fraile-Marcos and Francisca Noguerol ———. “Los pájaros arcoíris.” Las visiones, pp. 59–68. Piglia, Ricardo. The Absent City. Translated by Sergio Waisman, Duke UP, 2000. ———. La ciudad ausente. Anagrama, 2003 [1992]. Rancière, Jacques. Le fil perdu, La Fabrique, 2014. ———. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Galilée, 2004. ———. La Mésentente: politique et philosophie. Galilée, 1995. ———. Politique de la littérature. Galilée, 2007. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, 1994, pp. 1–37. Sommer, Doris. “Introduction: Wiggle Room.” Cultural Agency in the Americas, edited by Doris Sommer, Duke UP, 2006, pp. 1–28. Strange Days. Dir Kathryn Bigelow, 20th Century Fox, 1995. Suárez Ojeda, Néstor. “Una concepción latinoamericana: la resiliencia comunitaria.” Resiliencia. Descubriendo las propias fortalezas, edited by Aldo Melillo and Néstor Suárez Ojeda, Paidós, 2008, pp. 67–82. Vanistendael, Stefan. Resilience: A Few Key Issues. International Catholic Child Bureau, 1994.

10 The Fetishized Subject Modes of Resilience in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty1 Eva Darias-Beautell

Almost sixty years have passed since then, and he lives here, in Canada, a country that considers itself young. Where he comes from was broken, reborn, North Borneo, now East Malaysia, reshaped and growing. He has seen the country recently in photographs, the glittering cities, the twin towers in Kuala Lampur rising above the skyline, eighty-eight storeys high. In speeches reported by the international press, the prime minister of Malaysia speaks of a multimedia super corridor, a futuristic business centre in the heart of the nation, taking the place of the palm oil, rubber and coconut plantations that he remembers so well. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty

Much has been written in the past few decades about the ubiquity as well as the high and low places of resilience. Associated with the qualities of elasticity and adaptation and defined in multiple contexts as the ability to bounce back to good shape after shock, trauma or stress, resilience is promoted by contemporary world organizations as a strategy to deal with the risks of political, economic, social, and ecological systems. While for some authors, resilience is understood as an individual trait, there is an increasing tendency to think of it as a process and a collective endeavor, which further opens the already wide spectrum of definitions of the term. Looking at resilience as a social process underscores “the capacity of groups of people bound together in an organization, class, racial group, community, or nation to sustain and advance their well-being in the face of challenges to it” (Hall and Lamont 2). If resilience is viewed as a cultural process, the emphasis is on the capacity to make sense of and produce a coherent narrative of life’s hardship and chaos (Southwick et al.). The notion has been subsequently extended to the Humanities and, specifically, to the study of literature, as a means to mobilize and reconnect the textual with the social and the political. But the power, prevalence, and versatility of the term in contemporary scholarship have also been matched by its complicity with the political and cultural hegemonies of neoliberal governmentality, within which the subject’s capacity for shock

164  Eva Darias-Beautell absorption has become the condition of her moral goodness. According to Sarah Bracke, for whom the rise of resilience as a keyword suspiciously coincides with the shift in political economy which we now know as neoliberalism, “[r]esilience has become a force to be reckoned within the realm of hegemonic ethics of and truths about the self.” The question is, “[w]hat modalities of agency does such a process of subjectivication produce and foreclose?” (Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 53). This article offers an investigation of the different modes of resilience in Madeleine Thien’s novel Certainty. The novel has a complex threeplot structure and two main temporal frames, moving between Vancouver and Amsterdam in the early twenty-first century, and North Borneo, Jakarta, Hong Kong, and Australia during and after World War II. This intricate narrative choice seems to mirror, at the level of form, the equally enmeshed stories of the protagonist Gail, a Vancouver radio documentarian, her father Mathew, an immigrant from North Borneo traumatized by the horrors of the war, and his childhood friend Ani. Specifically, I am interested in probing the novel’s contribution to the current debate over resilience and vulnerability by looking into how the two main characters, Gail and Mathew, cope with life-threatening personal experiences, including extreme survival conditions, war trauma, forced migration, disease, death, and mourning. I will argue that Thien’s text clearly articulates the difference between at least two different figures: the subject of subaltern resilience (Bracke, “Bouncing Back”) and the subject of creative resilience. I will further examine the position of those two subjects in the novel, their exposure to fetishization as well as the modalities of agency that they may produce or foreclose.

Bouncing Back? Bouncing Forward? Since Gail’s death, his whole body has begun to curve forward, his gait has slowed to a shuffle. In six months, he has aged a decade. . . . All his life, he has struggled to accept what cannot be changed, to hold fast to a core truth within himself. Judgment, goodness. The thread that would bind the two, and show him the way forward. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty

Certainty opens six months after the main character, Gail, dies alone and unexpectedly in a hotel room in Prince George, where she has gone to conduct an interview for the radio documentary that she is working on. Obsessed with making sense of the medical tests that should have shown what was wrong with Gail’s body but did not, Gail’s partner Ansel, a doctor in a tuberculosis clinic in Vancouver, struggles to wake up in the morning and go to work. The devastating failure of medicine to save

The Fetishized Subject 165 Gail’s life opens a narrative thread that links the three plots through the investigation of the nature of risk, absence, grief and loss. The story then jumps to North Borneo where Gail’s father, Mathew, grew up during World War II and where, as a child, he witnessed the destruction of his village and the murder of his own father by the Japanese soldiers. As a young man, he manages to emigrate to Australia, where he meets his wife Clara, and then, together, they move to Canada, where they live. But Mathew is tormented by the tragic events of his past life and needs to find out about the fate of his dear childhood friend and first love Ani. The slow revelation of what happened to Ani constitutes the novel’s third plot. The text unfolds gradually in nine parts, anticipating, then postponing the information about the enmeshed lives of Gail, Ansel, Mathew, Ani, Clara, and Sipke (as well as the lives of William and his daughter Kathleen through the investigation of an encrypted diary) in different locations all over the world. What all the characters in the novel have in common is that they are deeply affected by grief, their lives paradigmatic, in different degrees and scales, of the extreme vulnerability of those whose traumatic experiences are the result of global violence and imposed forms of precarity (Butler). But the narrative tension revolves around the character of Gail, obsessed with unlocking an encrypted prisoner-of-war diary from World War II, and her father Mathew, unable to speak about his traumatic past and subject to chronic melancholia and depression. The different modes in which father and daughter respond to their enmeshed life crises will elicit the central constituents of my discussion of resilience in Thien’s text. In his article “A Genealogy of Resilience,” Philippe Bourbeau questions the unifying dominant view of the term which locates its origin in system ecology (specifically in the work of the ecologist Crawford S. Holling), a view that has articulated resilience as a suspect term due to “its intuitive ideological fit with a neoliberal philosophy of complex adaptive systems” (Walker and Cooper 144). To such a dominant understanding, Bourbeau offers an alternative multidisciplinary genealogy that focuses on the transformational aspects of resilience and opens possibilities of agency in the field of international politics. Bourbeau proposes the following threefold typology: Resilience as maintenance, resilience as marginality, and resilience as renewal. Thus, resilience as maintenance captures the idea of seeking to maintain the status quo after a shock or a disturbance, of “bouncing back” in the face of adversity, resilience as marginality is characterised by responses that bring changes at the margins but that do not challenge the basis of a policy (or a society), while resilience as renewal implies the transformation of basic policy assumptions

166  Eva Darias-Beautell and encapsulates the idea of “bouncing forward” and the potential remodeling of social structures. (Bourbeau 30–31) Does Certainty relate to this typology? The text’s clear engagement with the issue of resilience seems to acknowledge its potentiality and then tiptoe around these three types, with the three respective plots slightly evoking the definitions at the individual level: maintenance (Ani), marginality (Mathew), renewal (Gail). Yet I would argue that Thien’s novel proposes a much more ambivalent approach. As I will explain later, Certainty articulates at least two modalities of resilience with different degrees of vulnerability and agency as well as divergent approaches to memory. In its general emphasis on the intergenerational effects of traumatic events, the novel tends to avoid the binary structures that determine resilience as an individual trait either present or absent in the subject, leaning toward a processual and relational notion of resilience that “more likely exists on a continuum that may be present to differing degrees across multiple domains of life” (Southwick et al. 2). Yet, if resilience must be future oriented inasmuch as it involves an active decision “to keep moving forward,” Thien’s text problematizes such a vision in a number of ways. Resilience’s orientation toward the future seems linked to language and narrative coherence, to the “ability to hang on to a sense of hope that gives meaning and order to suffering in life and helps to articulate a coherent narrative to link the future to the past and present” (Southwick et al. 6). Tied thus to the signifying capacity, “what matters to resilience is a sense of hope that life does indeed make sense, despite chaos, brutality, stress, worry, or despair” (6). I argue that Certainty seems to propose and then eschew such a project of coherence. As I will develop below, Gail’s desire for narrative coherence is thwarted by the eventual revelation of the POW diary’s surprising contents, her sideways move to elucidate the secrets of her father’s past, inevitably disappointing. Just before dying, she will succeed in making sense, but only partially, of what happened to Ani, who has died by the time Gail meets her partner Sipke, and, in so doing, she will also fill in some details of her father’s story. Mathew spends all his life in Canada struggling with a sense of intense grief and irreparable loss produced by his traumatic experiences during the war in Sandakan, North Borneo. Ansel’s attempts to trace the medical history that would have prevented Gail’s death are equally frustrated. Taking these stories into consideration, the title word certainty stands oxymoronic or antithetically in relation to the text it names, since the narrative actively dwells on the subject’s inability to make sense of the complex and hazardous interdependencies of life, death, disease and war violence. To the immense uncertainty produced by diasporic trauma, the narrative adds the contemporary instabilities of what Ulrich Beck has

The Fetishized Subject 167 called risk society, where scientific knowledge is constantly invoked and then revoked by accident, exception, contradiction or abstraction.

Subaltern Resilience and Melancholia: Mathew During those long hours when he cannot sleep, he tries to piece together every detail. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty Lying on his cot, watching, Mathew had felt his body cramp with fear and hunger. To drown out the words, he thought of food, meat cooked in sugar, and it started a rambling of pain so clean he no longer heard silence or sound. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty

Gail’s father, Mathew, suffers from melancholia, “a mental condition . . . characterized by extreme depression, bodily complaints, and often hallucinations and delusions” (“Melancholia,” Merriam-Webster Dictionary), or, simply, “a feeling of deep sadness” (“Melancholia,” Oxford Dictionary). The cause of this condition is found in the tragic events of his childhood: during the turmoil surrounding the events of World War II in Asia, and driven by the need to survive the harsh war conditions, his father had collaborated with the Japanese occupation forces only to be murdered by these same forces when they retreated. Mathew had been only seven when he witnessed the murder scene from his hiding place. Then, he and his mother had been forced to flee Sandakan in the middle of the night, leaving their few possessions and his friend Ani behind. Returning at the age of eighteen, he had thought “it was possible” after all, “if only he were strong enough. He could leave Sandakan, let Ani go, create for himself a different life, separate from the future he had once imagined” (Thien 47). But this separate life in Canada with Clara continues to be dominated by the ghosts of the past and the spectral return of what cannot be said: “What are you thinking?” his wife will ask him, seeing that he is lost. He is trying to hold on to his father’s voice, the face of his child, the days that marked the end of the war. Even now, too late, he imagines finding the way out. In his nightmares, he tries to tell his father that another path exists, that the centre of his self, the goodness that makes him whole, once lost, can never be recovered. But the words that Mathew speaks carry no sound, they are a rustling on the air. (Thien 47) Since Sigmund Freud described melancholia as a pathological form of mourning in which the reinvestment of the ego in a new object fails to take

168  Eva Darias-Beautell place, many scholars have challenged the distinction between healthy and unhealthy responses to loss. In the field of critical race studies, emphasis has been placed on unpacking and problematizing the pathologization of subjects whose losses have been imposed by past and present forms of racism. In those cases, “it is imperative . . . to challenge the positioning of melancholia as pathological, for, in so doing, we can challenge a construction of the racialized subject as ill [or] debilitated” (Kabesh, 222). According to Daniel Coleman, whereas recent theories of melancholia effectively displace its negative meaning, foregrounding instead its potential for subversion and agency, there are still spaces that such theories cannot address. Inspired by Lily Cho’s essay on this topic, “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature,” Coleman asserts that racial melancholia may be a double-edged sword, on the one hand, “reminding dominant cultural elites of the histories they would rather forget,” while, on the other “dooming the oppressed to perpetually reiterate their trauma as a permanent identity” (59). Striking a similar note, Y-Dang Troeung argues that Certainty “explores the value of forgetting in an age when the atrocities of recent history have become increasingly commodified and mechanically reproduced” (105–106). In Certainty, Troeung insists, melancholia is linked to vulnerability and to memory in ways that keep the possibility of retraumatization alive through discourse and representation; this points to the need to develop a politics of loss that includes the right to forget. I will return to the interconnection between memory and forgetting in my discussion of Gail. For the time being, my interest is in probing the relation between melancholia and resilience. The character of Mathew is definitely a case in point. Can his melancholy be thought of as racial? And, if so, could it be a sign of resilience? Is Mathew a paradigm of the ambivalence of those connections? David L. Eng and Shinhee Han define racial melancholia as an affect produced by conflicted “processes of immigration, assimilation, and racialization underpinning the formation of Asian American subjectivity” (670). They discuss the relation between mourning and melancholia vis-à-vis a collective experience of loss and continued suffering and describe such a process as a form of “suspended assimilation into mainstream culture” (672). In her article “Affecting Citizenship: The Materiality of Melancholia,” Lily Cho elaborates on this shift in focus from the individual to the collective, moving “the discussion from the psychic domain, where the individual psyche is still the informing model, to the domain of reproduction—food, the family, and the transmission of culture and memory” (109). For Cho, who looks at citizenship as an affective relation, “the psychic state of unresolved grief is also a deeply material process embedded within the difficulties of inhabiting racial difference,” and “these processes make citizenship in diaspora possible” (110). Despite the evidence that feelings of unhappiness and

The Fetishized Subject 169 continuing grief work against the expectations of citizenship, preventing the melancholic from entering into the larger body politic (Cho, “Affecting Citizenship” 114), this same refusal paradoxically becomes the condition of diasporic citizenship inasmuch as “the idea of a cure can function as a form of coercion. The injunction to ‘move on’ demands a forgetting” (Cho 116; see also Cheng). “In the case of racial melancholia,” Cho writes, [T]he refusal to be cured of sadness is an affect working against the lures of assimilation. And yet, in thinking through the relationship between grief and grievance, there is an emphasis not only on recuperating the psychic for discussions of race and difference, but also on that of the collectivity of grief, the modes of its transmission, and its emergence out of formations which extend beyond the individual psyche. (Cho, “Affecting Citizenship” 125) Cho moves on to read Madeleine Thien’s story “Simple Recipes” in this context, with a focus on the paradox of diasporic citizenship and thus on the contradictory formation of the racialized subject in the host land. In the case of Certainty, I would argue that the traumas of the past and the transmission of grief attached to them overwrite the processes of racialization in Canada. Yet Cho’s analysis of racial melancholia as a materiality “attendant upon the violence of the processes of social production and reproduction” (“Affecting” 120) seems relevant for Certainty, which presents personal trauma as a collective feeling, resulting in the transmission of unresolved grief across social groups and family generations (see Brennan). In fact, as Lisa Kabesh has argued, Certainty is structured around the loss of a partner and daughter; however, this supposedly private death—the death of a cherished family member—intersects with multiple and differing experiences of loss that cross geopolitical boundaries and what otherwise might appear to be discrete subject positions. In fact, much of the loss, trauma, and pain at work in Thien’s novel is connected to the postWW II period of decolonization in Asia and Africa. (Kabesh 221) Despite the novel’s absence of an explicit engagement with the processes of racialization attending the construction of diasporic subjects, and to return to my previous question, Mathew’s sadness does fit then into the definition of racial melancholia. It does so not only because of its collective projection but, also, because the traumatic events that have caused his melancholia are clearly located in the history of violence and racism intrinsic to the different layers of colonialism, both Japanese

170  Eva Darias-Beautell and British, that the novel discusses. In The Promise of Happiness, Sara Ahmed claims that the so-called freedom to be happy in contemporary western societies is predicated on a process of individuation that, for the melancholic migrant, entails self-erasure: This is how happiness becomes a forward motion: almost like a propeller, happiness is imagined as what allows subjects to embrace futurity, to leave the past behind them, where pastness is associated with custom and the customary. . . . To become an individual is to assume an image: becoming free to be happy turns the body in a certain direction. (Ahmed 137) From that perspective, Mathew’s inability to forget could be read as a refusal to forget and gestures toward the complexities of the relationship between melancholia and certain modes of resilience.2 Initially, it would seem that melancholia is the opposite of resilience: the more melancholic Mathew is, the less resilient he becomes. Moreover, in occupying the space of healing, his melancholy could be seen as the very source of his inability to bounce back. If, as Bourbeau identifies, there are key markers in the history of the word which “include Francis Bacon’s philosophical treatise on the nature of sound, Sylva Sylvarum, published in 1626, in which he uses the term resilience to illustrate the capacity of an echo to bounce back and to characterize conditions of the reflection of sounds (Bacon 1627)” (25), Mathew’s words carry no sound. Like with melancholia, failure to see resilience as a relational process may result in the stigmatization of the victim, “rendering injured parties responsible for not being able to react with resilience to a given shock” (Bourbeau 27). But Mathew’s silence prevents the therapeutic projection onto the family group, jeopardizing relationality and occluding the possibility of moving on. However, if we take into account the particular colonial, decolonial, and postcolonial contexts where he is inserted, Mathew’s silence calls forth at least two different ways of thinking resilience. On the one hand, his past life relates to a subaltern form of resilience, one that is bound to the very basic notion of survival or the preservation of bare life. On the other, Mathew’s inability to bounce back and join the body politic of his present life, after his experience of forced migration and implied discrimination once in Canada, signals a critique of resilience in the neoliberal use of the term. Significantly, these two approaches are related. The former type is what Bracke calls “the resilience of the wretched of the earth, which is born out of the practice of getting up in the morning and making it through the day in conditions of often unbearable

The Fetishized Subject 171 symbolic and material violence” (“Bouncing Back” 60). To the question, is the subaltern resilient? Bracke responds: There is, of course, a general and de-historicized sense in which resilience informs the condition of subalternity. Resilience as ways to ‘make do’ with the conditions one finds oneself in, ways to survive, is something the subaltern does until she does not, and ceases to survive. Yet resilience in a historicized sense, as a neoliberal virtue to be cultivated, is a different story. If the subaltern is resilient, it is because powerful places are eagerly, and greedily, bringing her under a regime of resilience. (Bracke, “Is the Subaltern Resilient?” 852) According to Bracke, while subaltern resilience is often fetishized by economic and political discourses of the Global North, in truth it forecloses any alternative: it is about losing everything and building a life back up again; it thwarts the imagination because it is incited by the very “dispossession it seeks to overcome” (“Bouncing Back” 63). In this sense, Bracke concludes, “resilience becomes a symptom of the loss of the capacity to imagine and do otherwise” (65). In his Marxist reading of the Freudian notion of fetish, John Lutz explains how failure is embedded in the mechanism of fetishism by placing the fractured ego in the arena of powerlessness and abjection: Fetishism is an act of substitution for something that is absent due to cultural (or to extend the implications in the direction of Marx’s use of the term, economic) limitations imposed by reality. In other words, fetishism is predicated upon lack; in fact, it is a psychic mechanism that affirms that lack even as it negates it. (428) Trapped in this perverse scheme, subaltern resilience becomes a deadend, the obligation of survival, the endless repetition of the attempt to overcome difficulties, to bounce back, to bounce forward. Seen in that way, and paradoxically, in his inability to disentangle himself from his childhood trauma, Mathew is the resilient subaltern per excellence: Matthew felt as if a stone at the bottom of his life had rolled loose, as if the contents of his memory could no longer be contained. They spilled into the air around him, vivid and uncontrolled. Why was this happening, he had wondered, when he had tried so hard, given up so much, to leave it behind? (Thien 284–285)

172  Eva Darias-Beautell Here the possibility of resilience is dialectically embedded in trauma, which resilience keeps mobilizing and “without which it cannot exist” (Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 59). Mathew had stood on the hillside, asking himself how it was possible to continue. At what point would he finally step forward, would he make, decisively, the shape of his life? When would the war be over for him? Sometimes, he said, one had to let go of the living just as surely as one grieved the dead. Some things, lost long ago, could not be returned (Thien 285)

It is precisely this repeated failure to let go of some things that the fetishized subject of subaltern resilience implicitly demands and promotes. Interestingly, Mathew’s inability to thrive once in Canada is also a refusal to reproduce “a neoliberal political economy and the subjects it requires” (Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 63), for, in this context, Bracke maintains, Resilience is part of neoliberal governmentality, one could argue, that is to say, part of the organized practices through which populations are governed. In terms of subject formation, resilience seems to have become a constitutive characteristic—a requirement even—of subjects in neoliberal times. This is where the connection with agency becomes clear: the ‘good subject’ of neoliberal subject formation is the one who is able to act in resilient ways. Resilience becomes the very stuff of which agency is made off in neoliberal times: structural pressure, including oppression, is expected to be met with individual elasticity, rebounding, and adaptation. (Bracke, “Is the Subaltern Resilient?” 851) As racial melancholia could be seen as a refusal to assimilate, so can a failure of resilience in Mathew be read as a refusal to comply with the demands of neoliberal governmentality. In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam suggests modes of “being in the world” that can dismantle the hegemonic logics of success and failure (3). Halberstam is not unaware that “failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair”; yet drawing on queer theory’s deconstructive strategies, Halberstam claims that failure “also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life” (3). In the case of Certainty, I would argue that Mathew’s failure to move on succeeds in drawing the reader’s attention to the tyranny of the very logics of resilience. Yet the question of agency remains since his is a position of extreme vulnerability that leaves no space for action. In Judith Butler’s account of grief and mourning, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, vulnerability allows for a shared sense of dispossession and this in turns facilitates the transformation of personal grief into social

The Fetishized Subject 173 and political action. Mathew’s grief, however, does not enter the body politic. He remains the figure of subaltern incommensurability, narcissistic, victimized, the fetish of the margins (see Bhatt). Instead, if the agency of resilience is to be salvaged, Thien seems to imply, it necessitates imaginative modes of being in the world that can resist neoliberal demands.

Creative Resilience: Gail Many times in her childhood, she [Gail] had woken to the sound of her father’s nightmares. A screaming in the dark, lights coming on in the house. . . . Once, unable to go back to sleep, she had found her way, in the dark, to the living room. There, she lay on the carpet, her arms open, as if to gather up the air, to hold the weight of the room. From where she lay, she reached out and turned on the antique radio. The panel glowed and, after a few seconds, music, something jazzy, began to drift through the speakers. Eyes closed, she pressed her hand to the wooden cabinet, drew the vibrations through her fingertips, all the way to her heart. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty

Through the character of Gail, paradoxically absent from the narration inasmuch as the novel opens six months after her sudden death, the text seems to articulate an alternative relation to mourning, grief, and loss. Gail’s centrality is marked by her ubiquity in this first part of the novel, “Chaos: Vancouver, Canada,” in which Ansel, Mathew and Clara attempt to cope with her sudden absence and make sense, through memory, feeling and conversation, of her untimely death, alone in a hotel room in Prince George, where she had gone to conduct an interview about the encrypted journal of prisoner-of-war William Sullivan. Born in Canada, Gail’s life has been marked by the traumatic events of her father’s youth in North Borneo and is actively engaged in the production of a narrative that makes sense of her father’s melancholy as well as her own. Her work as a radio documentarian, and more specifically, the documentary about the encoded journal, is clearly part of this project of signification: unlocking the secrets hidden in Sullivan’s diary becomes an obsession for Gail, who has failed to break her own father’s silence and, having inherited the family’s sense of irreparable loss, knows very little about the source of his continuous suffering. For some authors, exposure to risk and trauma is biologically measurable since it leaves physiological marks which are then transmitted through generations. If that is so, biomarkers may “help us understand the mechanisms through which risk and resilience leave epigenetic and physiological signatures on the body, which have developmental implications for young children and long-term health implications for adults” (Southwick et al., 9). Psychoanalytical scholars have also drawn attention to the physiological transmission of affects across generations (Brennan; Hirsch). According to Y-Dang Troeung, who reads Certainty as evidence

174  Eva Darias-Beautell of the double-forked function of dwelling in trauma, the burden of remembering may leave an imprint of this kind. Troeung argues that the impetus to keep certain wounds open and alive in the public sphere—to keep our gazes focused on a difficult past in order to combat historical erasure—must be tempered by a consideration of the psychic and material costs of such acts. (Troeung 93) Thien would warn the reader against these costs, expressing “the necessity, sometimes, of forgetting” (92). As Ansel’s speculations suggest the possibility that she may have suffered from an unknown inherited condition, Gail’s death is endowed with highly metaphorical meanings and may be read in this context as a warning against the potentially fatal effects of melancholia. The event of her death bespeaks a reciprocity between the physiological and the psychological effects of trauma. “The fragility of this psyche—and its vulnerability to retraumatization through discourse and representation—is not something we should forget or strive to move beyond in our efforts to develop a politics of loss,” Troeung concludes (106).3 From this perspective, the characters’ resilience would depend on their capacity to let go of memory, on their determination to forget. To be resilient is to forget. Yet I would argue that forgetting in the novel is not a question of choice: “How is it possible to forget pain?” Gail wonders as she is finally about to read the transcription of the Sullivan journal, “to be unable to recall something that was once so inescapable?” (Thien 220). As I have claimed, Mathew’s melancholy is in fact caused by his inability to forget, no matter how hard he tries. William Sullivan had forgotten the code that he himself had designed to encrypt his notes and without which the contents of the diary remained a mystery, but his failure to remember is not a liberation but a problem that troubles him all his life. While the novel does critique the fetishization of memory, it also offers conflicting approaches to forgetting, as becomes evident in the discussion of Sullivan’s diary. Obsessed with making sense of the journal’s encrypted notes, Gail asks her Amsterdam friend Harry Jaarsma, a mathematician, for help. Jaarsma eventually manages to break the code, yet his ruminations about cryptography undermine Gail’s expectations and anticipate the nonresolution of the book’s main plots: Cryptography is a kind of protection. Think of the Sullivan diary as a message from the past, but one that has been buried between many layers. Every language leaves its own unique footprint. Cryptography, you know, is a complicated profession. You are given something in code, someone says, “Break this.” And then it becomes a game, a chase.

The Fetishized Subject 175 Of course, you assume that there is something to be pursued, some meaning to be unravelled. It is exactly the kind of thing that can destroy a person. It is like a scent it is so strong, but there is no physical proof of it. What if you cannot, despite all efforts, find the way in? (Thien 104–105) Jaarsma’s skepticism stands in sharp contrast with Gail’s unrelenting desire for coherence, her belief that “a line could be drawn from beginning to end and a true narrative emerge” (Thien 216), as well as Kathleen’s need to know what had happened to her father in those camps: “There was so much violence in our lives,” she tells Gail. “And if it isn’t in the diary, then where did he keep those thoughts? What did he do with all those memories?” (204). That the code is finally broken only to crush their expectations about its contents does not, in my opinion, delegitimize this need to know, nor does it diminish the power of the desire for narrative coherence. Rather, the simultaneity between the revelation of the diary’s quotidian, uneventful notes and the encounter between Gail and Sipke Vermeulen, Ani’s partner from whom she learns what had happened to her father’s first love, sets the narrative temporality forward into a process of relay proper of creative modes of resilience. This relay, which reveals the multiple scales (spatial and temporal) of colonial and postcolonial violence, is presented visually in the narrative juxtaposition of the two events (Thien 220–223), with which the very narrative structure seems to rebound. In that context, I agree with Lisa Kabesh when she implies that the novel’s use of temporality manages to circumvent not only the melancholic trap but also the dilemma between memory and forgetting: While the novel opens six months after Gail’s death, the structure of the text configures her loss as either present . . . or about to arrive. Ansel’s memories of her death and the conditions surrounding it unfold as the narrative develops, and as a result, the reader is placed in a position of constant anticipation. (Kabesh 225) For Kabesh, “a discussion of the temporality of loss, and of Thien’s specific treatment of time and loss in Certainty, offers a framework by which to imagine the productive potential of multiple forms of loss, both for individuals and communities” (220). Kabesh joins a number of critics who have linked the character of Gail to Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory” (see also Troeung 99–101; Cuder-Domínguez 153), defined by Hirsch herself in the following terms: Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences

176  Eva Darias-Beautell of those who came before, experiences that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (Hirsch 106–107) That stress on creativity, according to Hirsch, allows the subject to engage with traumatic events while saving her from the compulsion to repeat the scene of trauma. Applying this notion to the character of Gail in Certainty, Kabesh argues that, while acknowledging “the effects of trauma and loss on subsequent generations,” postmemory recognizes “that these effects do not necessarily stem directly from the past.” That is so because “postmemory is an active engagement with a narrative of loss, or even with the absence of a narrative of loss” in the present (Kabesh 225–226). Moreover, I would add that, in Hirsch’s articulation, postmemory is a relational structure that, in its emphasis on the “inter- and transgenerational transmission of trauma” (Hirsch 107), brings forth a collaborative mechanism of the kind exhibited by Gail’s work methodology. Gail’s attempt to move forward is then articulated through collaboration and creativity, the very conditions of a mode of resilience that, in its dismantling of the individualistic drive, may perhaps provide an alternative path. To the extent that Certainty is made of conversations in which the different characters try to make sense of the world through life sciences, mathematics and technology, the novel as such could be considered an example of the collaborative work involved in creative resilience. Tania Aguila-Way, for whom these collaborations are the evidence of the novel’s active engagement with contemporary risk society across the global and local coordinates of diasporic experience, interprets these moments of “emphatic collaboration” as an indication that approaching interdisciplinary knowledge-making with an eye to the role that affect plays in knowledge production might help us to better account for the feelings of uncertainty, defamiliarization, and otherness that can arise when we are confronted with epistemologies that exceed or challenge our conceptual categories, as well as the feelings of wonder, delight, and hope that can emerge when we find unexpected points of commonality between seemingly divergent methods of inquiry. (Aguila-Way n.p.) Through her work method as a radio documentarian, collecting testimonies by means of her interviews and inserting them into wider scientific

The Fetishized Subject 177 fields of interpretation, Gail purposefully engages the collaborative strategies of creative resilience. Her project to break the code of the secret diary is perhaps the most paradigmatic of these interdisciplinary collaborative modes of knowledge production, eliciting some of the novel’s most interesting philosophical exchanges between Jaarsma and Gail, and inspiring, through the images of the Mandelbrot Set that hang on the wall of the mathematician’s Amsterdam apartment, imaginative takes on trauma and loss.

The Mandelbrot Set Any part of this edge, this carotid, no matter where, no matter how small, will, if magnified, reveal new points. And these, if further magnified, will also reveal new points, The . . . . ad infinitum.   The boundary encloses a finite area, but the boundary itself is infinite. No matter how much we increase the magnification, the same shapes appear and reappear in the border, though never quite the same. The image reveals a kind of symmetry, not of left and right, but of large scales and small ones. —Madeleine Thien, Certainty

A focus on the function of the Mandelbrot Set in the text reveals one such process of interdisciplinary collaboration, in this case, between Thien’s novel and its readers, who feel that the series of images and the mathematical notion behind them are crucial to the understanding of the story. According to Aguila-Way, that these important moments of collaboration are often prompted by the encounter with an artistic representation of a scientific concept (such as the image of the Mandelbrot Set) . . . suggests that the cognitive and affective challenges associated with the task of imagining the global call for creative responses that straddle the boundary between art and science. (Aguila-Way 33) The presence of these artistic-scientific exchanges, Aguila-Way continues, “might help diasporic communities to negotiate the landscapes of uncertainty produced by globality while continuously challenging themselves to cultivate more competent and ethical ways of approaching these unknowns” (34). Conversely, Pilar Cuder-Domínguez reads the reference to the Mandelbrot Set as proof “of the failure of the visible” in the novel, arguing that “[t]he Mandelbrot set is a representation of infinite time, of eternity, but in its endless repetition it displays a pattern dangerously close to the stagnation of trauma and its denial of agency” (162).

178  Eva Darias-Beautell For her, Thien’s text explores and discards the visual, putting forward the aural as the chosen privileged medium of representation in the text. I agree that Gail’s approach to knowledge production is less visual or even textual than it is aural. Yet the question of her agency remains, since, after all, she dies alone in a hotel room, failing to complete the documentary, just as the medical tests fail to save her life. The nonresolution of the novel’s central enigmas (Gail’s death, the Sullivan diary, Mathew’s insomnia) is mirrored by the message of the Mandelbrot Set. Moreover, given the uncertain and non-conclusive aspects of the narrative, the aesthetic embodiment of the mathematical notion of infinity comes across as a relief since it brings forth a sense of relay: Before she saw these images, Gail said, she had never been able to picture the idea of infinity. “The pictures open up slowly, each magnifying a small part of the preceding image. The shapes remain elusively familiar, scorpion tails and chains of spirals, evolving across generations.” (Thien 105) The narrative lives through the Mandelbrot Set, practicing a creative mode of resilience that, as such, is necessarily a collective project. I have already mentioned the collaborative strategies of Gail’s work methodology. After her death, Ansel reads and answers the emails that both Sipke and Jaarsma continue to send to her: “I know of course that you’re gone,” Jaarsma writes, “but your account is still open. These emails don’t bounce back. I miss you in very small ways” (105). Jaarsma attaches a series of images of the Mandelbrot Set, which Ansel opens and studies. This relay of information highlights the collaborative structure of Thien’s proposal. Does this creativity prevent or resist the global violence signified by the encrypted diary or the traumatic events of Mathew’s past? Does it make up for the failure of science, technology or fiction to deliver certainty? According to Eleanor Ty, through its web of intricate images and everyday details, “Thien balances the uncertainties of life with a Leifmotif of interconnectedness and patterns” (57) through which life makes sense in the end. My own reading is less optimistic, or more ambiguous. I believe that, by examining the diverse and highly creative possibilities of resilience and the role of social and cultural contexts in the diasporic subject’s response to crises, Thien joins other thinkers and writers in drawing attention to the danger of fetishization of certain positions while also, at best, shaking the dominant alliance between resilience and neoliberal models of citizenship. Rather than focusing on the battle between resisting or promoting resilience, the text shows important ways in which a resilient attitude is necessary and may work at the level of personal, social, and collective processes. In doing so, Certainty is evidence of what Gayatri Spivak has seen as the power of the aesthetic imagination to articulate the complex structure of multi-scaled colonial and postcolonial modes of violence (1–2). Yet much more conceptual and creative works are needed that tackle the modes and degrees of the resilient subject as well as her

The Fetishized Subject 179 relation to the enmeshed notions of agency, vulnerability, and resistance (Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 71–72).

Notes 1. This chapter is a revised and enlarged version of a paper originally presented at the international conference “Narratives of Resilience and Healing” held at the Universidad de Salamanca in October 9–10, 2017. The work is part of the larger research project Justice, Citizenship and Vulnerability: Narratives of Precarity and Intersectional Perspectives funded by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Gobierno de España) and FEDER (FFI2015–63895-C2–1-R). 2. In a medical study of the connections among resilience, stress, and racial discrimination in the context of First Nations communities, Spence et al. prove that racial discrimination is a social determinant of health. Applying this idea to Thien’s novel, it seems clear that racial melancholia is affecting Mathew’s health. 3. In his article “Rethinking Cosmopolitanism through the Figure of the Refugee,” Donald Goellnicht probes this argumentative line, wondering if the second generation has an obligation to the first: “Are they obliged to remember, to memorialize? And how to do so ethically, without abusing memory, without transforming it into commodity? Is remembering or forgetting a matter of psychological health?” Goellnicht reads Nam Le’s The Boat in this context to conclude that “remembering or forgetting may not be a choice at all” (219).

Works Cited Aguila-Way, Tania. “Uncertain Landscapes: Risk, Trauma, and Scientific Knowledge in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter.” Canadian Literature, vol. 221, 2014, pp. 18–35. Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010. Beck, Ulrich. World Risk Society. Polity Press, 1999. Bhatt, Chetan. “The Fetish of the Margins: Religious Absolutism, Anti-Racism and Postcolonial Silence.” New Formations, vol. 59, 2006, pp. 98–115. Bourbeau, Philippe. “A Genealogy of Resilience.” International Political Sociology, vol. 12, 2018, pp. 19–35. Bracke, Sarah. “Bouncing Back: Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience.” Vulnerability and Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, et al., Duke UP, 2016, pp. 52–75. ———. “Is the Subaltern Resilient? Notes on Agency and Neoliberal Subjects.” Cultural Studies, vol. 30, no. 5, 2016, pp. 839–855. Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Cornell UP, 2004. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford UP, 1997. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004. Cheng, Anne A. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief. Oxford UP, 2001. Cho, Lily. “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature.” Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007, pp. 93–109.

180  Eva Darias-Beautell ———. “Affecting Citizenship: The Materiality of Melancholia.” Narratives of Citizenship: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples Unsettle the Nation-State, edited by Aloys N. M. Fleischmann, et al., U of Alberta P, 2012, pp. 107–127. Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever.” Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, edited by Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012, pp. 53–72. Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar. “Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long for and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Crosstalk: Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue, edited by Diana Brydon and Marta Dvořák, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012, pp. 151–168. Eng, David, and Shinhee Han. “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia.” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, vol. 10, no. 4, 2000, pp. 667–700. Goellnicht, Donald C. “ ‘Ethnic Literature’s Hot’: Asian American Literature, Refugee Cosmopolitanism, and Nam Le’s The Boat.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 2012, pp. 197–224. Halberstam, Judith. “Introduction: Low Theory.” The Queer Art of Failure, Duke UP, pp. 1–25. Hall, Peter A., and Michèle Lamont. 2013. “Introduction: Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era.” Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, Cambridge UP, pp. 1–32. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103–128. Kabesh, Lisa. “Grieving Time: The Recollection and Reproduction of Loss in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Studies in Canadian Literature, vol. 36, no. 2, 2011, pp. 220–236. Lutz, John. “A Marxian Theory of the Subject: Commodity Fetishism, Autonomy, and Psychological Deprivation.” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009, pp. 420–434. Southwick, Steven M., et al. “Resilience Definitions, Theory, and Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives.” European Journal of Psychotraumatology, vol. 5, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1–14, https://doi.org/10.3402/ejpt.v5.25338. Spence, Nicholas D., et al. “Racial Discrimination, Cultural Resilience, and Stress.” The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 61, no. 5, 2016, pp. 298–307. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization. Harvard UP, 2012. Thien, Madeleine. Certainty. McClelland & Stewart, 2006. Troeung, Y-Dang. “Forgetting Loss in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Canadian Literature, vol. 206, 2010, pp. 91–108. Ty, Eleanor. “ ‘Little Daily Miracles’: Global Desires, Haunted Memories, and Modern Technologies in Madeleine Thien’s Certainty.” Moving Migration: Narrative Transformations in Asian American Literature, edited by Johanna C. Kardux and Doris Einsiedel, LIT Verlag, 2010, pp. 45–60. Walker, Jeremy, and Melinda Cooper. “Genealogies of Resilience: From Systems Ecology to the Political Economy of Crisis Adaptation.” Security Dialogue, vol. 42, no. 2, 2011, pp. 143–160.

11 Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times Rawi Hage’s Cockroach1 Sara Casco-Solís

In his speech at the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award ceremony, Rawi Hage reminds his audience that “the history of mankind is full of wars, divisions, the flow of blood, the flight of refugees and misery,” and expresses his wish that one day “we humans realize that we are all gatherers and wanderers, ever bound to cross each other’s paths, and that these paths belong to us all” (Hage, “Speech” 05:41–06:18). He also calls for the emergence of a network of global solidarity in the face of increasingly restrictive laws and policies that have in turn prompted heightened inequality and exclusion in cross-border travel. These reflections are pertinent for handling the challenges of a twenty-first-century world divided into two well-established categories of people: [U]s—Westerners, Europeans, humanitarians etc.—who are the cosmopolitans, the champions of justice, human rights and world order and them—the Third Worlders, the global poor, the ‘wretched of the earth’—the abject, the societies and subjects in crisis, the failed states in need of intervention. (Nyers, “Abject” 1073) This division, along with the economic, political, environmental, and cultural changes associated with the precarious and uncontrollable world we inhabit, are precisely the inevitable effects of globalization. Within this atmosphere of uncertainty, resilience emerges as the primary positive response for dealing with the disruptive challenges and global risks that force human beings to contend with an uncertain future. From the natural and physical sciences to the social sciences, the term resilience is frequently used to refer to “a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure” (Walker and Salt 1). The concept also emphasizes a sense of elasticity and malleability that allows individuals to “bounce back” from pain, disaster, or trauma. This psychological and individual connotation of resilience recognizes the strength of individuals to cope with life-threatening personal experiences. Yet, the questions that arise are the following: Is resilience a homogeneous

182  Sara Casco-Solís response? Or does the nature of the resilience response depend on the social-ecological factors that surround the individual? While pioneer studies in the field of psychological resilience consider it an inner ability of human beings to adapt to adverse conditions, recent scholarship in the field of social and cultural studies conceptualizes resilience as a social process that certainly encompasses the interaction between individuals and their social and ecological systems (Basseler 23). This social-ecological orientation allows scholars to study the phenomenon of resilience “as a contextually and culturally embedded construct” (Ungar 3) that undoubtedly underscores the interaction between human and nonhuman lives (O’Brien 44). Rather than fostering the transformation of the conditions that might create a given crisis, resilience conveys the idea of self-adaptation. According to MacKinnon and Derickson, this understanding of resilience is “inherently conservative insofar as it privileges the restoration of existing systemic relations rather than their transformation” (263). Seen in this light, resilience naturalizes the crisis conditions of any particular system, institution or organization and pressurizes individuals to manage challenges and adapt to permanent conditions of danger and risk. Jonathan Joseph reminds us that the way resilience works is “to move fairly swiftly from thinking about the dynamics of systems to emphasising individual responsibility, adaptability and preparedness” (49). Along the same lines, Walker and Cooper describe resilience as an “operational strategy of emergency preparedness, crisis response and national security” (152). It comes as no surprise, then, that the phenomenon of resilience has strategically been used within the political sphere as a means of protecting the nation-state while training individuals to be compliant in the face of adversity. This view of resilience has elicited skepticism and critique from various quarters, most significantly from those who point at the close connection between resilience and neoliberalism. Sarah Bracke, for example, argues that “resilience is part of neoliberal governmentality, . . . that is to say, part of the organized practices through which populations are governed” (“Is the Subaltern Resilient?” 851). In the same fashion, Brad Evans and Julian Reid remind us that “resilience is currently propounded by liberal agencies and institutions as the fundamental property which peoples and individuals worldwide must possess in order to demonstrate their capacities to live with danger” (2). Resilience, therefore, becomes part of the “moral code” every subject must follow in neoliberal times in order to achieve security (Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 62). This sense of resilience does not imply a transformation or possibility for future life—rather, as Neocleous states, “It effectively undermines the capacity to resist, and therefore should be resisted and rejected” (qtd. in Bracke, “Bouncing Back” 70). It is this sense of resilience embedded in a neoliberal form of governance that I would like to explore in this article, paying special attention to

Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times 183 the resilience narrative built by the nation-state to encourage ­refugees— one of the most precarious groups in our contemporary society—to withstand adversity and become more adaptable to social and cultural practices that produce insecurity and inequality. For that purpose, this article will analyze Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, a novel that portrays a refugee who arrives in Montreal from a war-torn city. Rather than feeling safe and welcome in the Canadian city, he feels trapped in a socially stratified system that constantly reinforces his sense of displacement and abjection. I will argue that Hage’s text offers a critical understanding of the concept of resilience and its connection with neoliberal demands. My main purpose is to bring to the forefront the role of literary fiction in dismantling the resilience narrative used by the state as a form of governance that pressures individuals to accept and adapt to the social, political, and economic powers that act on them. I will, therefore, explore the negative consequences that the rhetoric used by governments may have on refugees, paying particular attention to the feelings of abjection and displacement that lead destitute masses to a marginal reality.

Geopolitical Context: Canadian Multiculturalism Vis-à-Vis Neoliberalism Rawi Hage’s Cockroach raises important questions about the adverse consequences of resilience in our contemporary world. Approaching resilience from a social-ecological perspective allows us to understand the complexity of the concept in relation to the global risks that threaten our future. It is worth adding that the notion of resilience has different connotations depending on the geopolitical contexts in which it is used, as Bracke has noted (“Bouncing Back” 72). Thus, in order to provide an accurate understanding of the concept and its interconnection with neoliberal governance, it seems apt to offer an overview of the sociocultural Canadian environment that unquestionably forces Hage’s characters to make ethical actions that challenge the power of the sovereign nation-state. In his 2008 novel, Hage calls into question the cultural plurality of Canada by portraying the twenty-first-century city of Montreal as the setting for the clash between ethnicities. Since 1988, Canada’s officially sanctioned multiculturalism conveys the idea of “a social situation in which members of different ethnic communities are able to retain their ethnic identity, and yet participate to the full in national life” (Itwaru 16). It would seem, then, that the central tenet of multiculturalism is to preserve and recognize the cultures of minority ethnic groups without prioritizing one above the other. However, a close look at the Canadian Multiculturalism Act shows that the exaltation of otherness as the main trademark of Canadian national identity is one of the main pitfalls of the

184  Sara Casco-Solís Canadian ideal of cultural pluralities. Constructing a national identity based on the acknowledgment of ethnic differences contradicts the reality of a country with two official languages, the cultures of which inevitably become the dominant ones. In effect, this parameter has led many critics, such as Smaro Kamboureli, to voice their wariness concerning an act that recognizes the cultural diversity that constitutes Canada, but it does so by practicing a sedative politics, a politics that attempts to recognize ethnic differences, but only in a contained fashion, in order to manage them. It pays tribute to diversity and suggests ways of celebrating it, thus responding to the clarion call of ethnic communities for recognition. Yet, it does so without disturbing the conventional articulation of the Canadian dominant society. (Scandalous Bodies 82; emphasis added) As Kamboureli suggests, in spite of the celebration of the different ethnic groups that make up the Canadian mosaic, there is a dominant culture that holds cultural, social, political and economic power in Canada. Following Itwaru’s claim, “no ethnic group existing under the domination of a macrological cultural power different from itself maintains its traditional uniqueness for very long” (16). This reveals the irony of the law that intends to protect multiculturalism, but instead works toward the commodification of the different ethnic cultures. It is my contention that this interpretation of the law is intimately connected to the neoliberal articulation of the nation. I would, therefore, like to explore the interconnection between neoliberalism and the challenges to Canadian multiculturalism. Neoliberal governmentality has been described as a modern mode of governing that “relies on market knowledge and calculations for a politics of subjection and subject-making that continually places in question the political existence of modern human beings” (Ong 13). Kit Dobson, a contributor to this volume, believes that “in [a] neoliberal climate, the priority falls upon organizing bodies in terms of the market, and then in harshly excluding those bodies that are deemed to be less market-worthy” (“More or Less Human” 116). This understanding of the human body demands the clear boundaries of the nation-state and places the notion of Canadian multiculturalism at the heart of political discourses that question the rights and social recognition of refugees and migrants with precarious status. Bodies, and therefore human beings, are reduced to mere market values and are clearly defined by their economic productivity. In this context, the refugees’ precarious status leads them to be permanently possessed by the subjective emotion of fear—a fear that is enhanced by the alienation that they experience if they do not adjust to the economic, political, social and cultural paradigm of a particular nation. It is this sense of fear and uneasiness that intensifies the

Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times 185 pressing need of refugees to adapt to the social and political structures of a nation in order to survive. More specifically, it is the promise of thriving and flourishing that leads refugees to pursue resilience. As Bracke states, resilience ignites a sense of possibility which, according to Lauren Berlant, is nothing but “cruel optimism,” an optimism that “undermine[s] precisely the possibility of substantial transformation” (“Bouncing Back” 64). According to Arnold Itwaru, the process of self-adaptation experienced by ethnic minority groups in Canada does not necessarily result in their inclusion in the nation. In his own words, “the claim that a group can retain its ethnic identity and still participate to the full in national life, is a spurious one. Not only is it vague—full participation and ethnic identity are not defined—it is also a false statement” (16). Drawing on recent theories of resilience, this chapter studies how current processes of adaptation reinforce and perpetuate refugees’ sense of otherness. Underlying this study are the following questions: what are the ethical implications and limitations that the logics of neoliberal resilience entail? Are there any other alternatives to self-adaptation that apprehend the future of refugees as something more than survival?

Subverting Normativity: Exploring Resistance in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach Cockroach tells the story of an unnamed refugee who complains about the political and economic system that construes refugees as passive and vulnerable subjects. Refugees, and Hage’s unnamed protagonist in particular, are deeply aware of their marginality and vulnerability, especially given that the nation-state’s politics are articulated on the threat of pervasive violence towards “those who are less immediately economically productive” (Dobson, “Neoliberalism” 266). Certainly, the usually precarious economic status of refugees contributes to their perception in the host country as invaders who are ready to swallow up the resources of working-class people. Putting it in the terms Charles T. Lee borrows from Anne MacNevin, “undocumented immigrants are immanent outsiders who are incorporated into the political community as economic participants but denied the status of insiders” (62). The rhetoric of a mainstream media sector against immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees prompts the aversion and fear of citizens toward a collective who generally aspire to contribute to the wellbeing of the host nation. Hage responds to the current global humanitarian crisis by offering a critique of the social and economic system that pushes immigrants and refugees even further to the margins of society. From the first pages of Cockroach, the unnamed protagonist is deeply riddled by questions that entail his diasporic identity: “Where am I? And what am I doing here?

186  Sara Casco-Solís How I did end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time?” (9). The protagonist grapples with the inhospitable conditions of Montreal and with the emotions it incites as he constantly faces signs of rejection that prevent him from settling in the city and even from establishing any authentic relationships with other human beings. His sense of alienation is clearly reinforced when he is interrogated by the police after watching from the street a couple eating in a fancy store: “I was leaning on a parked car, watching a couple eat slowly, neither looking at the other . . . . Not even two minutes later, a police car came and two female officers got out, walked towards me, and asked for my papers” (86). Although the protagonist’s actions could be interpreted as voyeurism and, by extension, constitute a violation of the right to privacy in Western societies, the law does not appear to work in the same way when the protagonist notices that the couple is looking at him while the officers examine his papers. At that particular moment, the protagonist feels as if he “was part of their TV dinner, [he] was spinning in a microwave, stripped of [his] plastic cover, eaten, and defecated the next morning” (87). He recognizes that “the couple enjoyed watching [him], as if [he was] some reality show about police chasing people with food-envy syndrome” (87). The Other here appears as the product of a modern society in which refugees become “the fuckable, exotic, dangerous foreigner[s]” (Hage, Cockroach 199). This reality leads the protagonist to find himself trapped in a socially stratified system where “[he is] poor, [he is] vermin, a bug, [he is] at the bottom of the scale” (122) if he does not accept the cultural values of the country that apparently welcomes him. His self-image as an inferior other appears to be built upon the racialized discourse that aims to regularize the status of all migrants, defining their existence and therefore “constructing the immigrant as dangerous and diseased— to be screened, tested, monitored, and contained” (Nyers, “No One is Illegal” 136). It seems that the crisis of the human category is provoked by the state’s biopolitics, which clearly delineates the boundaries of belonging. Although the protagonist’s vulnerable situation encourages him to articulate strategies of resistance in order to change the system that oppresses him, as I will explain later, there are other characters who do not feel they have the power to battle against the abject conditions legitimized by the state due to their lack of legal and policy remedies. This is the case of one of the protagonist’s friends, Reza, an Iranian musician who gets a job at a restaurant. Reza considers that “playing at a restaurant was the worst kind of job for a talented, respected musician like himself” (65). Yet, anxious to accommodate into a world where he is a stranger, he accepts the status quo in exchange for being accepted into

Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times 187 Canadian society. This situation suggests that Reza is completely caught by the sense of possibility that the process of resilience conveys. However, this optimistic response paradoxically involves the preservation of the precarious conditions that place him and other refugees in an inferior position. Significantly, Reza is particularly aware of this inferiority as well as the strangeness and fear that otherness causes, but he does nothing to combat it. Rather, he is totally convinced that refugees should “participate within the parameters set by the script that binds them in place” (Lee 69) in order to avert the global discourse that construes them as potential threats to the Canadian polity. In his efforts to integrate into Canadian culture, Reza suggests that the narrator become invisible when he visits him at the restaurant where he works: “Sit at the end of the bar, and do not look at the women like that. People here do not like it when a bum like you is checking out their wives and daughters like that . . . Just wait and be invisible” (66). Reza’s anger is blatant when his friend asks the owner of the restaurant for a job: How could you do that? First you come in just like that, to this respectable place, dressed like a bum. And just look at your shoes. And then, then—he stuttered with anger—and then you ask the man for a job and you tell him to check with me as a reference. (69) As can be inferred from this passage, Reza certainly rejects his own vulnerability and precarious situation in order not to be seen as the unwanted Other. However, his understanding of vulnerability as giving him limited agency relates Reza to a subaltern mode of resilience, one that is tied to the mere notion of survival. Reza’s urge not to be identified as a vulnerable subject results in his inability to subvert the neoliberal discourse that turns refugees into passive subjects. From that perspective, Reza becomes the good refugee par excellence. Or in Bracke’s words, “ ‘the good subject’ of neoliberal subject formation,” that is, the one who is expected to meet any potential risk with individual elasticity and adaptation, including structural pressure such as oppression (“Is the Subaltern Resilient? 851). By embracing resilience, Reza paradoxically submits himself to a particular schema of power based on a neoliberal model that exercises a subliminal control over immigrants in order to transform and assimilate them according to specific national parameters. In contrast to the behavior adopted by Reza, the protagonist does not follow the “narratives that the seemingly benevolent Western nationstate asks of refugees” (Dobson, “Neoliberalism” 257). Thus, rather than adapting to the social, economic and cultural powers that act on

188  Sara Casco-Solís him, the protagonist resists the resilience discourse that promotes the reproduction of hierarchical power relations. His first act of resistance is represented in one interesting scene where he is refused a job as a waiter in a fancy French restaurant, Le Cafard, simply because of his skin color. “Tu es un peu trop cuit pour ça (you are a little too well done for that)! Le soleil t’a brûlé ta face un peu trop (the sun has burned your face a bit too much)” (29), Maître Pierre, the man who monitors employees at this restaurant, tells him. Such an unequal situation reduces refugees to what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”, that is, people with no political status who are perceived as a social threat. Instead of adopting resilience and preserving bare life, the protagonist subverts this submission by “throwing his apron in [Maître Pierre’s] face, [storming] out the door” (29–30). This action constitutes the protagonist’s first act of resistance against a biopolitical regime that subordinates refugees. Indeed, his refusal to accept the discourse on resilience that preserves and even reinforces his inferiority becomes his tool to regain and reaffirm his political agency. It is an act of resistance that, according to Judith Butler, destabilizes “these institutions that depend on the reproduction of inequality and injustice” (20). Resistance, therefore, stands in opposition to resilience as the latter demands accommodation “to capital and the state, and the secure future of both” (Neocleous 7). The capacity for resilience becomes a requirement that Hage’s characters must develop to withstand adversity and, more importantly, to survive in the midst of difficulties. Yet, this demand supposes a limitation for the characters as it does not consist in transforming the system that oppresses them, but rather, in being able to adapt to this subjection. Resistance, however, revolves around the concepts of agency and vulnerability. As Butler aptly explains in “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” where she undoes the opposition between vulnerability and agency, vulnerability is mobilized by forms of nonviolent resistance “for the purposes of asserting existence, claiming the right to public space, equality” (26). Similarly, Bracke maintains that vulnerability “brings us to the question of social transformation, while resilience further separates us from it, even though transformation might be part of its cruel promise” (“Bouncing Back” 70). Thus, although the protagonist soon reaches the conclusion that in order to be accepted “the exotic has to be modified here—not too authentic, not too spicy or too smelly, just enough of it to remind others of a fantasy elsewhere” (Hage, Cockroach 20), he is not “the one to follow this recipe for moderation and acculturation” (Kamboureli, “Unforgetting and Remembering” 65). Instead, he admits that the recognition of his abject condition and precarious situation is the first step toward asserting his agency as a political being. For that reason, he recognizes the precarity surrounding the refugee body when he refers to himself as “the scum of the earth in this capitalist endeavour” (Hage, Cockroach 123).

Resisting Resilience in Neoliberal Times 189 His self-representation is associated with what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject,” which is seen as a tangible menace to the well-being of the nation which must be radically excluded (2). As Kristeva argues, the abject manifests itself in the images associated with filth, waste, dung or food loathing (2). Refugees, seen as the alien body, complement Kristeva’s notion of the abject, for they clearly belong to the “world’s residual ‘remnants,’ dark, diseased and invisible,” as opposed to the “clean, healthy and visible world” inhabited by those who belong to the nation (Agier 4). Hage’s protagonist reinforces this abjection when he imagines himself transformed into a cockroach. Usually considered a despicable creature, the cockroach becomes a metaphor for the stereotype that nations construct of refugees, as well as of the protagonist’s identity. His morphing into such an insect metaphorically represents the protagonist’s refusal to “be a subordinate” (Hage, Cockroach 201) “in the cruel and insane world saturated with humans” (23). Indeed, his conviction that humanity is defined by its greedy nature—“humans are creatures of greed . . . [while] other creatures [cockroaches] only take what they need. That is not greed” (243)—leads the protagonist to eschew his own humanity and identify with cockroaches. In that context, I agree with Dobson when he considers that “this crisis of the category of the human is prompted by systems of regulation, by the biopolitical regimes that would force the body to appear in a certain way” (“Neoliberalism” 265). Therefore, the protagonist’s morphing into a cockroach can be seen as the culmination of his strategy of resistance to finally subvert the system that oppresses refugees. It metaphorically represents the protagonist’s rejection of the institutions and citizenship that do not provide the protection and security he needs as a human being. Instead, he will find this protection in the underground, a “space . . . where immigrants hide, like insects, seeking the safety and warmth that the institutions and citizens refuse to provide” (Molnár 64). Therefore, the underground becomes the space where he is able to move freely and to find protection from the inhospitable conditions of the city of Montreal. In light of what this chapter has analyzed, it can be concluded that Cockroach attempts to interrogate and denounce the limitations that encourage the process of resilience for refugees. It has been argued that resilience naturalizes the crisis condition of a system while placing on individuals the responsibility to become adaptable to the permanent risks and dangers of our contemporary world. By displaying the main protagonist’s refusal to accept and adapt to a system that oppresses refugees, I believe that Hage is shedding light on the challenges that destitute masses face in the wake of a global humanitarian crisis. In doing so, the novel raises awareness of the complex structure and the different meanings of the concept of resilience, depending on the socio-cultural environment in which it is used. Whether resisting resilience becomes a positive or negative process is not clearly specified in Cockroach, since

190  Sara Casco-Solís its open ending does not allow the reader to know about the future of the protagonist. Yet, it is possible to conclude that his acts of resistance not only bring to the fore the challenges and limitations that the logics of neoliberal resilience entail, but they also represent a critique of the neoliberal subject formation. Hage’s Cockroach thus demonstrates how literary fiction constitutes an important tool for interrogating the challenges of the precarious, globalized world we inhabit.

Note 1. The research carried out for the writing of this article is part of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations” (code FFI2015–63895C2–2-R), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The author is also thankful for the support of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities (code FPU16/06198). Acknowledgments should also be given to Ana María Fraile-Marcos for her valuable comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

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12 Lies and Reparation Palliative or Poison Aritha van Herk

It is customary now, in Canada, to begin every public occasion by acknowledging the traditional lands on which we immigrants or descendants of immigrants are settler guests. I live and work in the traditional territory of the people of Treaty Seven in Southern Alberta: the Blackfoot, including the Siksika, the Piikani, and Kainai First Nations; the Tsuut’ina First Nation; and the Stoney Nakoda First Nations, also home to Métis Nation of Alberta, Region III, on land adjacent to where the Bow River meets the Elbow River, Moh’kins’tsis, now called the City of Calgary. This long overdue tradition of admission is both necessary and beautiful, a combination of recognition and impossible reparation, for the lands are not likely to be restored to their original inhabitants, and the usurpations of time have led to a moment that contains a struggle between resilience and healing, reconciliation and the liability of colonial practices. The uneasy positioning of immigrant writing in a newly aware reading of what “immigrant” or “settler” or “ethnic” epithets convey enters a debate that has dodged through various blind corners of Canadian literature for years. Discussions have ranged from the analysis of immigration as a version of “exile” and identity crisis (Dahlie 1986) to the current problematization of Canadian multiculturalism and ethnicity because the national discourse dwells on “racial and cultural difference at the expense of other aspects of identity” (Jiwa). What is surely obvious is that the designation of “immigrant” is complicated by implied estrangement, notions of journey, interregnum, arrival, and reverberating colonial affect. “Ethnic” is no less loaded a term, and when deployed to indicate a “hyphenated” Canadian (mine Dutch-Canadian), exploits its minority aspect without distinguishing the differences between people and situations, subsuming race, and cultural particulars. Much critical attention has focused on race and ethnic “relations” (Padolsky 126); the tension between the two, and the desire to unpack their troubled ingredients in Canadian social and literary discourse is addressed at great length in works like Smaro Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies. That study examines the dangers of “cultural relativism” (Kamboureli 102) because of its inherent susceptibility to governmental regulation and

Lies and Reparation 193 manipulation. She contends that “sedative politics” (81) have quietly infiltrated the diversity of ethnicities within Canadian culture. Kamboureli addresses the issue of how “ethnic” has become an anodyne replacement for the term “immigrant” in Canada’s Multiculturalism Act: The assumption here is that immigrants are outsiders whose differences are defined by their origins, while the differences of ethnic subjects are defined by the surrounding climate. This (un)naming gesture reinforces the legal discourse that absorbs ethnicity into a formal and situational policy—one of the ways in which the [Multiculturalism] Act sets in place the technology that produces a disciplinary image of ethnicity. The ethnic subject becomes undifferentiated, and therefore essentialized. (Kamboureli 102) While a persuasive analysis, what Canadian culture has not reconciled is the off-balance position of the immigrant or ethnic writer who puts her own story on the line without falling into theoretical line. In terms of a burgeoning awareness of difference and colonization, reconciliation, and resilience are two concepts currently engaged in a skirmish of competitiveness. The unity implied by reconciliation drags behind it a tin can tail of mollification and rapprochement, as if it were possible to achieve harmony, or reunion, some balance of the motion that has tilted the axes of knowledge, power, ethics, and justice. In the various proceedings and processes of Canada’s official Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools, for example, what became strikingly obvious is the extent to which reconciliation itself—the language and the concept, both official and unofficial—can serve only as a form of verbal bandage if no further changes result. Justice Murray Sinclair’s summarizing words that “reconciliation is about forging and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship” (Sinclair) states an obviously ideal truism, but one that is far more difficult to achieve than to imagine. The question of the indeterminacy of ethnic or immigrant experiences and their expression parallels the extent to which indigenous experiences have in the past been repressed, have not found expression or utterance— either because the dominant discourse made no room, their suffering had no language to manifest itself, or they were not heard. This link is no mirror or duplicate of tension, but a dissimilar redaction because stationed beside resilience and healing are compounded histories of vulnerability and risk. Every life, at unexpected moments, endures body blows that can be both invisible and completely crippling. While critiques of neoliberalism rightly identify the dangers of individualism, there is danger too in circumventing or obfuscating the specific and personal pain of humans who suffer and survive hurt and trauma. The narrative trajectory accompanying repercussion—pain, denial, grief, and rage—accumulates in a

194  Aritha van Herk crucible that inevitably brings about and embraces change, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. With the best possible outcomes, that change results in resilience and healing, a not easily achieved movement. But the appeal of a positive curative to trauma and turbulence is perhaps too facile, lip service to an illusory and theoretical idea of recuperation, only too readily applied to a group as a panacea, especially with regard to Canada’s indigenous people and their history. Pain and shock leave aftertastes of betrayal, mistrust, and trepidation, which translate to the larger world as chronic wariness, incipient affront that cannot be comforted. The popular admonishments that extol vulnerability, uncertainty, and emotional exposure demonstrate the extent to which we valorize emotional risk and its discomforts but are not kind to its performance. Vulnerability is the first element we look for in others, but the least and the last we are eager to reveal to others. In apprehending the other, we read their exposure as speaking courage, meanwhile warily shielding our own exposure as weakness. This inconsistency has much to do with why resilience and healing are not easily achieved outcomes. The political, social, and aesthetic are still, at backbone, personal, and in seeking to totalize their conditions and their affect, we fail to take into account the interior, domestic, and bodily dimensions of what we load onto adaptability, which makes its enactment and designation entirely too glib. The textual resonance of pain and its management into the outcome we name as resilience exerts a heavy toll. With it comes the entire industry of risk management, the Pinkertonian weight of investigation, prevention, and precarity. Reversals and duplicity, blame and contradiction, lies and reparation, silencing and grievance are then magnified, become competitive, contribute to a hierarchy of suffering. Writing that fumigates this complication arrives from many corners, and the challenge of composing a depiction of this predicament sublimates multiple Canadian texts. Form is at issue here far more than is acknowledged: expressing this dilemma seems to require an unnamed genre that moves across misery memoir to “real life,” across story and prose-poetry to experiment and fragmentation, even while relying on the power of image and narrative. At one extreme, this writing’s end is proselytism, accusatory and reductive. But in a re-figuration of the fixity of genre, some chimerical texts grope toward a re-balancing that may not accomplish healing, but that speaks to the splinters and particles of the experience of damage and its precarious repair and in that shatter address both survival and its alternative erosion and erasure. It is useful to consider Kim Thuy’s Ru—is it a novel or a cross-genre memoir or a meditation or a long prose-poem?—as an example of such a text, a virtuoso performance of ignis fatuus, which in the process illuminates the conditional anxieties of the immigrant text, if not the immigrant experience. As a writer grappling with my own settler role and condition,

Lies and Reparation 195 I read Ru in counterpoint to my own narrative and how it en-texts me even while I am unable to confront the experience completely. As the first-generation child of immigrants, a settler-colonizer who benefits still from that migration, my detrition is an experience almost impossible to quantify, both determined and resistant, measuring both success and failure. I am a fortunate immigrant child, happy with who I have become and where I am, unwilling to reexamine the sandpapering that eroded the damage of adaptation. But Ru insists on a continuous autopsy of both the internalization and externalization of the migrant experience. First published in French in 2009 and in translation in English in 2012, Ru arouses all the perplexities that enter this uneasy plot of joy and acceptance, suffering and endurance. Narrator An Tinh Nguyen’s recounting of her zigzag flight, arrival in, and acclimatization to Canada throughout emphasizes the body (her body) and the body’s recording of its passage, as well as the contingencies of healing and the impossibilities of ever healing completely for one who has been dis-embodied and who seeks to gather the pieces of her corporeal splinter into some integrated narration. Thúy’s episodic account of her persona’s multiple transformations (Chinese, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Canadian, rich, poor, speechless, furious, passive, successful) negotiates the instabilities of multiple flights, refugee terror, migration and assimilation, each excising a shard of experience which might be read as resilience, but questions its own stance and outcome with every move, becoming thus a refusal of culmination. Discussions of Ru identify it as an immigrant novel, something of a misnomer, for in both form and substance, Ru inculpates its stateless status without resorting to stasis. The narrator, An Tinh Nguyen, born during the 1968 Tet Offensive in Saigon to privilege and wealth, is at the age of ten flung with her family into indeterminacy. They flee the Communist regime, boat people, “across the Gulf of Siam” (Thúy 2) to a Malaysian refugee camp. From there, they are sponsored to come to Canada, where they encounter both kindness and unpleasantness, racism and acceptance, a veritable miscellany of the multiple ways that immigrants and refugees are treated in a country that prides itself on tolerance but does not always perform that receptivity. Kim Thúy’s work has been critiqued for being too autobiographical and not autobiographical enough, too graphic, and not graphic enough, a dismissible story by a privileged immigrant, a life-changing account of survival and an overambitious exploration of how newcomer Canadians straddle multiple cultures and identities. Her fragmentary narrative combines lullabies with mass killings, flight, and escape with poetic meditation, history with invention, making for a novel that while much praised (winning multiple awards) has also been met with puzzlement and censure: Postcolonial scholars looking for a critical, matter-of-fact testimony of the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese immigrant experience will

196  Aritha van Herk find little material in this novel. The book is remarkable perhaps precisely because of the fact that it chooses to avoid explicit political or historical considerations—or at least to develop them in length. (Sanderson 5) In short, Ru refuses to serve as a lament for loss and displacement and instead plays with poetic intention and its curious capacity to sidestep both refugee and immigrant pain even in the process of recording that suffering. Pain is present, certainly, but it is mitigated by the deft touch of Thúy’s structure, her dance over the fragments of life survived and life dismembered. The novel opens by overtly referring to its structure with its content: I first saw the light of day in Saigon, where firecrackers, fragmented into a thousand shreds, coloured the ground red like the petals of cherry blossoms or like the blood of two million soldiers deployed and scattered throughout the villages and cities of a Vietnam that had been ripped in two. (Thúy 1) Beauty (“the petals of cherry blossoms”) and horror (“the blood of two million soldiers”) work in counterpoint throughout the story, and the fragment is the means by which Thúy engages with her narrator’s journey. Only in fragments can she evoke the physicality of crossing and re-crossing ever-shifting boundaries, demonstrated by her memory of the journey via boat when she and her family were escaping Vietnam: “The people sitting on the deck told us there was no boundary between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea” (3). Escape does not comprise a crossing of boundaries but a vanishment of demarcations, and thus the glissade of the text, from past to present and present to past, from happy memory to terror, is executed as a function of lightness without transition. The presence then of structural traversals, crossing barriers and walls which serve as metaphors for the divided nation of Vietnam, the division between “victor and vanquished,” the many divisions between both history and the present, is integral to Ru’s predisposition. This hybridizing of the two is what declares Ru fundamentally uneasy, and thus not readily categorized as the usual refugee chronicle. Critic Vinh Nguyen, in “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy’s Ru,” identifies the text’s winding process as “structureless structure” and argues that textual inscriptions of success and gratitude are necessary deployments for “post-refugee” subjects. Canadian culture has in the past virtually expected if not demanded the “gratitude” template of immigrant writing, texts of every genre inevitably concluding with a paean enthusiastically embracing Canadian opportunities and the potential of a “new” life. Critical apprehension of “success

Lies and Reparation 197 narratives” has identified how they serve an ideological function: they support the official promulgation of tolerance and opportunity, and they augment the nation’s official position of inclusivity and multiculturalism. Of course, stories of happiness and success are more palatable to mainstream consumers and legislators than stories of grief and frustration. That template has been appropriately and critically examined, but it is now heavily censured, and has been replaced with the inverse testimonial of exclusion and othering, difficulty and prejudice, a documentation of adversity accommodating little chance for transformation or resolution. Narratives of social, economic, and psychic struggle now overwhelmingly dominate works by minority and immigrant writers, and the mainstream audience’s avid desire to witness pain and prejudice appears to perform the inverse task of demonstrating the exclusive, intolerant, and fundamentally racist nature of the nation. This has become a prurient surmise, and the resultant plethora of accusatory and distress-drenched texts serves up a diet of gruel and systemic bigotry. It is necessary to identify some competing issues here: the Cicitrace school of newcomer writing almost engages in a rivalry with those indigenous writers who are finally able to pierce the fabric of the genocidal battue that they and their families endured, and who are, in fact, now writing for their lives. They do not need to be distracted by competition in a hierarchy of suffering. These elements together document the social construction of cultural domination and resistance, the binaries of misery and triumphalism, all of which have contributed to the negative critique of Ru: One could reproach Ru with its naïve view of the West as a land of generous “angels” (22) and unending abundance. The postcolonial scholar may be surprised to find little trace of discomfort about having to adapt to Western culture, and virtually no interrogation of the West as a welcoming Promised Land taking in the poor refugee of the broken East with open arms. At no point does the narrator wonder if Canadian families are inviting her out of pity, or curiosity; at no point does she explicitly question the consequences of Western presence in Vietnam; at no point does she seem to be longing for a little Vietnam in her new country. (Sanderson 4–5) Sanderson’s incisive appraisal is astute and germane, but I would argue that Ru is not “naïve,” but is determined to perform a different aggregation, a combination of fierce resilience and regret alongside the aesthetic portrayal of a horizon that simply enables “ordinary life” (Thúy 141). After the intense experience of fear that opens the novel (3), An Tinh’s unpredictable mélange of curiosity, gratitude, shame, privation, secrecy, silencing, privilege, satisfaction, and pain roll through Ru without

198  Aritha van Herk differentiation, refusing to hierarchize or rank those moments that the novel magnifies. Repudiating predictably voyeuristic desires to witness distress, Thúy’s Ru provides opportunity to examine how a subject makes an effort to integrate disparate parts of an erratic life-journey. In the process, it moves toward a fascinating experiential demonstration of resilience. Terminology aside—can any subject ever become a “post-­refugee”?—the narrator’s various choices in diction, in event, and in telling, that “structureless structure” of mélange/pastiche and retreat, ultimately achieve a double coda of critique and celebration. Neither is exclusive of the other, and the expectation that Thúy would foreground misery more than recuperation becomes its own accusatory construal of this particular chronicle. The “good refugee” and the “model minority” narrative can indeed be deployed as propagandistic instruments for the state and liberal nationalism, but Thúy’s story, while seeming to demonstrate that trope, nevertheless speaks to an interregnum, a disjunction that in its back and forth shifts between horror and joy, unfolding how immigrant or refugee texts struggle to unread the particular experience of a particular character in a particular place at a particular time. And so, recognizing our differential privilege, I read Thúy’s fractured array of moments as a palimpsest, as a story that touches mine, unalike as the two are. My body has never been in transit from one hiding place to another. It was born and is located squarely in Canada, safe as houses, as ignorant of displacement as peas and porridge, part of the great wash and many waves of settlers who occupy the lands of the indigenous people. But my body does carry the residual memory of my parents’ passage, despite their narrative of migration being inextricably connected to my own. Thúy’s text and mine, one immigrant text and another, coincide. The two form a lattice or web that ensnares the reader with its implausibility, the combined affliction and affirmation that occur in Thúy’s lyrically impossible book. Is Ru really a celebration of success, an affirmation of resilience and survival? Or is it an attempt to engage with the terrible difficulty of relaying complex experience, and how the bravery of claiming happiness is never enough: The narrator addresses this difficulty of transmitting what she has encountered, not only in her own retrieval practice, but in her metatextual chronicling of her experience to her Canadian-born children, particularly acute because they cannot fathom their mother’s strange metamorphoses and her conveyancing of both her story and her person, the terrible choices that other parents were forced to make, “abandoning their children” (Thúy 36). She tries to concretize the inheritance that she has passed on to her son, Pascal, one that she will continue to unfold, with whimsical fairytale-like drama, as he grows older. I tell him the story of the pig that travelled in a coffin to get through the surveillance posts between the countryside and the towns. He

Lies and Reparation 199 likes to hear me imitate the crying women in the funeral procession who threw themselves body and soul onto the long wooden box, wailing, while the farmers, dressed all in white with bands around their heads, tried to hold them back, to console them in front of the inspectors who were too accustomed to death. Once they got back to town, behind the closed doors of an ever-changing secret address, the farmers turned the pig over to the butcher, who cut it into pieces. The merchants would then tie those around their legs and waists to transport them to the black market, to families, to us. I tell Pascal these stories to keep alive the memory of a slice of history that will never be taught in any school. (37) When I encountered Ru’s passage about the pig and the lie performed as theatrical reparation for hunger, I was shocked by its conjunction with my own fragmented and yet repeated past, the same crazily surrogate strategy for survival. My parents, between 1940 and 1945, lived in occupied Holland, under the thumb of the Nazi regime. Farmers, they grew potatoes and beets, had chickens and dairy cows and pigs, made cheese and butter. But during the occupation, every egg and potato was counted, and most of what they grew or raised was confiscated to feed the German army. They managed to provide for my siblings and themselves, but at the end of World War II, in 1945, when the Germans blockaded Holland, they lived through the terrible famine of what became known as the “Hunger Winter.” To make matters worse, that winter was excessively cold (for with a shortage of food came a shortage of fuel), and the long darkness was made more interminable by chronic and pervasive starvation. At its height, people in the unliberated areas of the Netherlands were reduced to a diet of two slices of bread, two potatoes, and half a sugar beet each day. This is the winter that gave rise to stories about eating tulip bulbs, stories about boiling stones to make soup. Every edible potential, including not a few lap dogs, were consumed. My family’s litany of cleaning one’s plate made no reference to children starving in China but recounted over and over again the experience of the Hunger Winter. Which can only emphasize how strange that word is now, for famine, the excess of scarcity, its powerful threat of lack, are generally absent in an over-fed Canada. The inverse moral of that story for Thúy, and for all immigrants, is that what is seen is not what is seen, substitution itself metaphor for the recital that the migrant or refugee will be required to perform. Those who are watched all the time cannot be watched all the time because even if they are, they tread the boards of a role; knowing that survival is at stake, creative exchange occurs. If a pig or cow or chicken happened to die of some ailment or disease in the Netherlands during the occupation, the farmer was required to contact the German provisions commandant, who

200  Aritha van Herk would come, inspect the dead animal, revise the count of pigs the farmer owned, and watch the farmer bury the carcass. The farmer then, usually under cover of night, dug up the dead pig and transported it to another farmer, who would kill and butcher a healthy animal, share the meat with his neighbors, then call the provisions commandant and report a dead pig. This performance was repeated as many times as they dared, before, after a few days, the original dead pig was deader than dead, close to rank, and they dared not push the ruse further. But covertly butchering those three or four animals gave them just enough protein to carry their families through a few more months. Thúy’s pig in a human coffin, the mourning farmers, the fake funeral procession and recitation of grief in front of inspectors “too accustomed to death” (37) take on a resonance that articulates a genre of resilience, a slippery genre not easily encapsulated, but coded by the performance of a lie that enables the reparation of survival. This is the training that all refugees and immigrants have undergone, an a priori to reeducation, or its own opposite, performing loss to achieve survival. I was not, of course, present during my parents’ starvation days, although my older siblings were. I am an “anchor baby,” born in Canada some years after they immigrated, born before they became citizens, the first Canadian in my family, fat, never hungry, and spoiled by the palliative of immigration, my settler privilege, my Dutch inheritance, and my white skin altogether participatory fictions in the affirmative version of migration. But the story of the pig, and how it traveled from one potential discovery to another, suggests a connection I did not expect. When I wrote and published my first novel, Judith (about a woman pig farmer), I was asked over and over again why I had chosen to use pigs as the main animal characters. I gave mythical answers and agronomist answers and husbandry answers and riddles about impossibility—“When do pigs fly? Never”—but only on re-reading Thúy’s novel did I recognize the incipient trace of how personal history reaches into aesthetic intimacy whether we are prepared for that occupation or not. Of course, my story does not compare with Kim Thúy’s, for her experience demanded a level of survival and resilience that my family did not face in the same way, and that even imagined, I struggle to fathom. Her account of their escape on a boat, between Vietnam and Malaysia, for example, is simply terrifying, and becomes a means of cataloguing the visceral layers of fear: Hell . . . displayed our fears: fear of pirates, fear of starvation, fear of poisoning by biscuits soaked in motor oil, fear of running out of water, fear of being unable to stand up, fear of having to urinate in the red pot that was passed from hand to hard, fear that the scabies on the baby’s head was contagious, fear of never again setting foot on solid ground, fear of never again seeing the faces of our parents, who were sitting in the darkness surrounded by two hundred people. (3–4)

Lies and Reparation 201 What is arrayed in this list is a precision of details that register fear, but its jumble emphasizes how fear is a mélange that does not demarcate scale or consequence, but that melds together the small with the overwhelming. This blurring between categories is laid out as the formational device that Ru engages to unfold the refugee paradox. Deep inside the boat there was no distinction between day and night . . . The people sitting on deck told us there was no boundary between the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea. No one knew if we were heading for the heavens or plunging into the water’s depths. (3) This inciting incident records An Tinh’s fragmentation, the journey into a horizonless future coded by both necessity and desire, terror and relief resulting in the translation of her text’s own veer between positive and negative. Because of her traumatic journey, Ru’s narrator does not speak much, practicing a strategic “deaf-mute” (20) space, protection against her mother’s determination that she hone “tools” (20) for survival. One key tool that she develops is the protective colouration of ignorance, a not knowing that serves as a mechanism for camouflage. “Sometimes it’s best not to know everything” (24), she muses, and with that adaptive strategy incorporates the idea of misunderstanding as a subsidiary of transition. Taking on the carelessly dispensed designation of “boat person” (14), someone who came to Canada via the benevolence of the Canadian government, An Tinh is casually translated into Canadian history. Tiny and frail in Canada, so tiny that a classmate picked her up and carried her along with a football to score a touchdown (22)—in Vietnam she is told that she was “too fat to be Vietnamese” (77), her body a fragment of her tenuous uncertainty and fear, those thinning virtues. Here precisely resides the terrible dilemma of those desperate to escape brutality, those who search for a new home but never quite attain a sense of belonging, even when they accomplish the safety of a yearned-for “everyday life” (141). And it is those inconsistencies that score the turbulence of Ru’s structureless structure. Thúy deploys various metaphors of exchange to amplify the difficulty of An Tihn’s multiple accommodations. Her family’s resilience is tested even by kindness, and by what they are offered as gifts. Their sponsors take them to cheap second-hand markets to buy furniture and dishes, but the mattresses they buy are riddled with fleas. “We threw out the mattresses without telling our sponsors. We didn’t want them to be disappointed” (24). The dual coin of generosity and its expected gratitude resides in the metaphor of the fleas in the mattress bought in the flea market. An Tinh learns from her displacement to “acquire only those things that don’t extend beyond the limits of my body” (41). Her body, both

202  Aritha van Herk abstract and concrete, observes and is observed, developing its own memory and its own persistence, its own weightlessness. “When we’re able to float in the air, to separate ourselves from our roots—not only by crossing an ocean and two continents, but by distancing ourselves from our condition as stateless refugees” (137), the refugee/immigrant/migrant body can renew its contract with existence, can even laugh, celebrate, rejoice. That might be considered unforgivable to a spectator or analyst determined to witness pain and woe, but Thúy chooses to embody An Tinh Nguyen as a fragmented but indomitable spirit knitting together the disintegrated body and self of the refugee. Tied to the idea of a history coded on endurance is the expectation that the story will share the poison (51) that has been since drained, that a narrative of suffering will serve as emetic. But the insipid syrup of “share” contains its own poison; there is little reconciliation possible in that verb, an apportioning that does not measure reparation at all. The expectation that sharing pain will relieve sorrow or damage is entertained far too easily, as if “share” were remedial, a curative for harm. Francine Prose says, “Try as I might, I will never be able to bring myself to use this word to mean ‘to tell a story’ or ‘to make a confession.’ Thank you for sharing that sad account of your most embarrassing moment. In my view, the object of the verb should be a real or abstract commodity, not a narrative” (804). If fragmentation, scarring, and healing are difficult to accommodate in immigrant writing, has sharing become one path by which a collaborator to suffering can hide from the lie of redress? Is “sharing” traumatic experience one intervention with the occasion of resilience, or a preamble to the audience turning its back on a narrative that is presumed over, concluded? Sharing can symbolize exhibitionism, stripping naked (136) and witnessing. But does that telling, or informing, or bemoaning then subvert the expectation placed upon its uneasy performance by those who have little experience of what the hurt or fearful executant has undergone? Audience participation in such an exchange is suspect. Believing that in order to achieve integration an immigrant must merchandise their adverse experience is a mixed and not altruistic demand; having to share the story of hardship may be a form of poison blanket, another uneasy zone of unmediated mediation. No “sharing” of fear or anxiety or pain can conclusively evacuate or purge the poison that lingers from injustice. Narrator An Tinh Nguyen describes her father’s method of survival as a capacity for disconnection and detachment (64). This “letting go,” Thúy appears to surmise, enables the shift from one life to another, the layering of the garments of time (71). The difficult movement from lies and reparation to resilience and healing cannot be underestimated, but Thúy’s willingness to wrestle with “the unspeakable beauty of renewal” (140) challenges the expectations of both triumphalist and defeatist immigrant writing. Ru formally and stylistically enacts that challenge.

Lies and Reparation 203

Works Cited Dahlie, Hallvard. Varieties of Exile: The Canadian Experience. University of ­British Columbia Press, 1986. Jiwa, Fazella. “Expect Expectations: Reading ‘Ethnic’ Literature Through a Multicultural Lens.” Plentitude, 2013, http://plenitudemagazine.ca/expect-expecta tions-reading-ethnic-literature-through-a-multicultural-lens/. Accessed 2 Sept. 2018. Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Nguyen, Vinh. “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy’s Ru.” Contested Migrations, special Issue of Canadian Literature, no. 219, 2013, pp. 17–36. Padolsky, Enoch. “Ethnicity and Race: Canadian Minority Writing at a Crossroads.” Journal of Canadian Studies, vol. 31, no. 3, 1996, pp. 129–147. Prose, Francine. “Reflections: Share.” Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus. Oxford UP, 2012, p. 804. Sanderson, Candie. “Book Review: Ru, by Kim Thúy.” Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement, vol. 8, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–5, doi:10.7771/2153-8999.1063. Accessed 2 Sept. 2018. Sinclair, Murray. Canada’s Residential Schools: Reconciliation. The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, http://horizonscda.ca/ pdf/trresource.pdf. Accessed 2 Sept. 2018. Thúy, Kim. Ru. Translated by Sheila Fischman, Vintage Canada, 2012.

Contributors

Miriam Borham-Puyal holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Salamanca. She is an Assistant Professor at the English Department where she teaches British literature. She is the author of the monograph Quijotes con enaguas. Encrucijada de géneros en el siglo XVIII británico (2015) and has published extensively on British quixotes. She has also authored pieces on women writers from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, including Jane Austen, Jane Barker, Mary Hays, Charlotte Lennox, Hannah More, and Scarlett Thomas, as well as on children’s literature in English and Spanish. With Dr. Escandell-Montiel, she has coauthored several works on Digital Studies, including the recent article Quijobytes: Reflejos especulares del mito quijotesco en el ocio electrónico (2017). She is also the editor of a volume on rewritings of Frankenstein (2018), and the author of an article on monster mashups published in the prestigious Journal of Popular Culture (2018). Sara Casco-Solís is a Research Fellow at the Department of English Studies of the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she is currently engaged in writing her PhD dissertation on Canadian literature from the theo­ retical framework of vulnerability and resilience as well as trauma, memory, and transnational studies. She is the recipient of a research fellowship financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and a member of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Intersectional Perspectives about Literature and Other Contemporary Cultural Representations.” Sara Casco has been an Academic Visitor at the University of Toronto (2019) and the author of several book chapters dealing with her main field of research, namely, resilience, refugees, trauma, and transnational studies. Juan Carlos Cruz-Suárez is an Associate Professor at Stockholm University. He has also taught at the University of Aarhus (Denmark). He is the author of Ojos con mucha noche. Ingenio, poesía y pensamiento en el Barroco español (Peter Lang 2014) and has published several articles on the literature and culture of the Spanish Golden Age. He

Contributors 205 has coedited three collective volumes devoted to exploring the collective memory in Spain and Latin America as well as its relationship with literature and culture (Peter Lang 2012, 2013, 2015). He has been codirector and editor of the journal Diálogos Latinoamericanos (University of Aarhus), and he is currently co-editor of the digital journals Memoria y Narración (Oslo University) and Revista Caracteres (Editorial Delirio). He is also a member of the editorial board of the journals La Gaceta Literaria (Universidad de Salamanca) and Iberoamericana (Stockholm University). Daniel Coleman has long been fascinated by the poetic power of narrative arts to generate a sense of place and community, critical social engagement, and mindfulness, and especially wonder. Although he has committed considerable effort to learning in and from the natural world, he is still a bookish person who loves the learning that is essential to writing. He has written scholarly books about literature, masculinity, migration, and whiteness in Canada (Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in “New Canadian” Narratives; White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada), and he has written literary nonfiction books about his upbringing among missionaries in Ethiopia (The Scent of Eucalyptus:), about the spiritual and cultural politics of reading (In Bed with the Word), and about eco-human relations in Hamilton, Ontario, the postindustrial city where he lives in the traditional territories of the Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas of the New Credit (Yardwork: A Biography of an Urban Place). He has edited books on early Canadian literary cultures, postcolonial masculinities, race, Caribbean-Canadian literature, the state of the humanities, and the creativity and resilience of refugee-d and Indigenous peoples. Jorge Diego-Sánchez (PhD, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Salamanca, where he teaches English and postcolonial literatures. His research interests are postcolonial theory, gender and cultural studies in English with a focus on literature, cinema, and dance from India and its diaspora. He has published articles and book chapters on Aravind Adiga, Meena Kandasamy, Sarojini Naidu, Jhumpa Lahiri, Rokeya Hosain, and Cornelia Sorabji; filmmakers Deepa Mehta or Mira Nair; and TV shows such as Kumars on the No. 42. His current research centers on the representation of violence in non-urban areas and (non)normative masculinities in contemporary India, focusing in particular on how resilience and hospitality are represented (and misrepresented) in terms of social and literary activism. He has completed academic and teaching activities at Trinity College Dublin (Ireland), University of Hyderabad (India) and Jadavpur University (Kolkata, India). He has also been national coordinator of the nongovernmental organization Akshy India in Spain.

206  Contributors Kit Dobson is a Faculty Member at Mount Royal University in Treaty 7 territory in Canada. He is most recently the author of Malled: Deciphering Shopping in Canada (Wolsak and Wynn 2017). He is also the author of Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009); the editor of Please, No More Poetry: The Poetry of derek beaulieu (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013); the co-editor of Transnationalism, Activism, Art (U Toronto P, 2013); and, with Smaro Kamboureli, wrote Producing Canadian Literature: Authors Speak on the Literary Marketplace (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2013). He is a coeditor for the forthcoming volumes Dissonant Methods: Undoing Discipline in the Humanities Classroom and All the Feels/Tous les sens: Affect and Writing in Canada/ Affect et écriture au Canada, both with the University of Alberta. He is currently working on a project concerning landscapes and listening in northern Alberta. Daniel Escandell-Montiel is a Faculty Member at the Department of Spanish and Latin American Literature at the University of Salamanca. He has been a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University (United Kingdom) and in several Spanish Universities. His PhD thesis focused on digital literature, a field that he continues exploring in the contexts of Spain and Latin America. He is a member of the research groups IEMYR and Narratives of Resilience (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R). He is the founder and director of the journal on Digital Humanities Caracteres. Estudios culturales y críticos de la esfera digital, and has authored several books on digital studies, such as Escrituras para el siglo XXI. Literatura y blogosfera (2014) and Mi avatar no me comprende. Cartografías de la suplantación y el simulacro (2016). Ana María Fraile-Marcos is an Associate Professor and the Head of the English Department at the University of Salamanca, Spain, where she teaches English Canadian and postcolonial literatures. She is also the director of two master degrees in Creative Writing. Her research focuses mostly on literary representations of space, racialization, diaspora, refugees, and humanitarianism. Her publications include Literature and the Glocal City: Reshaping the English Canadian Imaginary (Routledge 2014), Planteamientos estéticos y políticos en la obra de Zora Neale Hurston (2003), Richard Wright’s Native Son (2007), and numerous chapters and articles in peer-reviewed journals. She is the principal investigator of the research project “Narratives of Resilience: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Literature and Other Cultural Representations” (FFI2015-63895-C2-2-R). María Jesús Hernáez-Lerena is an Associate Professor of the English Department at the University of La Rioja, where she teaches courses

Contributors 207 on Canadian, American, and other literatures written in English, visual culture, etc. Her research focuses on short story theory, testimony literature, narrative and painting, and the literature of Newfoundland. She has published several books on nineteenth century and contemporary American and Canadian writers and on the literature and culture of present-day Canada. Her essays have appeared in Spanish, English, and Canadian academic journals (Atlantis, Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, University of Toronto Quarterly, Canadian Literature, etc.) as well as in international publishing houses (Wilfrid Laurier UP, Peter Lang, Rodopi, Vernon, etc.). She currently belongs to the research team “Narratives of Resilience,” conducted by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, to which she contributes with her work on the representations of homelessness in comics. Francisca Noguerol is a Full Professor of Hispanic-American Literature at the Faculty of Philology, University of Salamanca, and has taught at various American and European universities (United States, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Chile, France, Italy, and Germany). She is the author of La trampa en la sonrisa: sátira en la narrativa de Augusto Monterroso (1995; 2nd ed. 2000) and has participated as author and editor in ten other monographs. Her most recent publication is Letras y bytes: escrituras y nuevas tecnologías (2015). Furthermore, she has authored over 180 research papers published in national and international journals. Her main focus of interest is on innovative aesthetic movements, ranging from the historical avant-garde to the recent narrative, cultural imaginaries, ethics, and their manifestation in the arts, as well as the relations between image and literature and hybrid genres. Susie O’Brien is a Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University, where her research and teaching focus on postcolonial and environmental literary and cultural studies. Her publications on subjects that include postcolonial literatures, slow and local food movements, scenario planning, resilience, and the temporality of globalization, have appeared in journals such as Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Globalizations, Cultural Critique, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is coauthor, with Imre Szeman, of Popular Culture: A User’s Guide (4th ed., 2016). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled “Unsettling resilience stories.” Aritha van Herk is the author of five novels, Judith, The Tent Peg, No Fixed Address, Places Far From Ellesmere, and Restlessness. Her nonfiction ranges from In This Place: Calgary 2004–2011 and Prairie Gothic (photographs by George Webber, words by Aritha van Herk) to Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta and The Age of

208  Contributors Audacity (a history of the University of Calgary). Her most recent work, Stampede and the Westness of West, melds poetry and placewriting. She is a Member of the Order of Canada, the Alberta Order of Excellence, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She has published hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays on Canadian culture. She teaches literature and Creative Writing in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, Canada.

Index

À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust) 123, 131 abject subject: homeless as 109; refusal of resilience and 189–190 “Acting on What We Know” (Health Canada) 43 “adapt or perish” discourse: resiliency and 117–118 Adorno, Theodor 154 Agamben, Giorgio agency: ambivalence of 8; cultural agency 155–157; motherhood and 77–86; state power structures and 91–100; of writing 89 Age of Empires video game series 59–60 Agnes, Flavia 93 Aguila-Way, Tania 176–177 Ahmed, Sarah 90, 169–170 Albatross (film) 126 Alfred, Taiaiake 7, 36n.10 All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction Amar Sánchez, Ana María 154–155 American Indian Movement 7 American Revolution: Two RowCovenant Chain agreement and 28–30 Amnesty Law of 1977 [Ley de Amnistía] 144n.10 Animism video game 69n.20 Anishinaabeg narratives 12, 52n.6 anti-racism work: storytelling in 43 Antone, Bob 27 Arendt, Hannah 154 Arrival: Village Kasike video game 69n.20 Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica [Association for

the Recovery of Historical Memory] 144n.4 Assmann, Jan 144n.9 Audette-Longo, Patricia 52n.4 Augé, Marc Aztec culture: in video games 59–60 Baccolini, Raffaella 157 Back of the Turtle, The (King) 13–14, 39–40, 45–52 Bacon, Francis 170 Badiou, Alain 148 Balbuena, Bernard de 156 Ballard, James 150 Baradit, Jorge 150, 152 Basseler, Michael 8–12 Bauman, Zygmunt Beauregard, Guy 123 Beck, Ulrich 1, 166–167 Being and Time (Heidegger) 128 Benjamin, Walter 154–155 Bennett, Jill 106 biomarkers of risk and trauma 173–174 Blade Runner (film) 152 Boltanski, Luc 103 Borb (Little) 107, 113–115 Borges, Jorge Luis 150 Borham-Puyal, Miriam 14, 73–86, 122 Boullosa, Carmen 156–157 Bourbeau, Philippe 3, 165 Boym, Svetlana 154 Bracke, Sarah 4–5, 21, 90, 170–172, 182, 187–188 broken resilience 5–6 Brown, Philip 111–113 Buddhism: resilience and 122–124, 127–133 Bull, Anna Cento 145n.19

210 Index Burkey, Tormod 105 Butchinsky, Chantal 105–106 Butler, Judith 5, 8, 118–119, 172– 173, 188 bystander indifference: homelessness and 118–119 Canada: Hage’s Cockroach 183–190; Indigenous reparations discourse in 192–202; multiculturalism vs. neoliberalism in 183–185; in Thien’s Certainty 173–177 Canadian Constitution: Aboriginal and treaty rights in 24; Haudenosaunee peoples and 30–31 Capcom 60–62 Casco-Solís, Sara 17, 181–190 Cercas, Javier 15–16, 135–143 Certainty (Thien) 16–17, 122, 163–179 Cho, Lily 168–169 Cicitrace writing genre 197–198 Cielos de la tierra (Heavens on Earth) (Boullosa) 156–157 Circle Wampum Teyonnityohkwanhakstha 25, 26, 27 citizenship: maternity and 74–76 civil action: consensual cultural memory and 138–139, 144n.4 Claus, William 29 Cockroach (Hage) 17, 181–190 Cohen, Marcelo 150, 155–157 Coleman, Daniel 5, 7, 13, 21–35, 53n.12, 168 collective memory: critical dystopia and 157–159; cultural identity and 136–139; in social discourse 145n.19 In Intro? collective resilience: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 122–133; Spanish Civil War and 135–143 In Intro? colonization: decolonization of video games development and 65–67; neoliberalism and 6 comics for adults 107, 119n.5 community resilience: collective memory and 157–159 In Intro? compromised-resilience 15 Cook Inlet Tribal Council 62 Cooper, Melinda 4, 21, 23, 182 Corntassel, Jeff 7, 42 Coulthard, Glen 36n.9 counter-systemic thinking 23

Covenant Chain of Friendship 28 Covenant Chain Wampum Belt (Tehontatenentsonterontahkhwa) 25, 27, 27 creative destruction 5 creative resilience: subalternity and 4–5, 17; in Thien’s Certainty 173– 177; video game development and 68n.3 critical dystopias: defined 151; memory as resilience in 148, 154– 157; resilience discourse and 16; science fiction and 149–151 “Critique of Pure Resilience” (Rhegezza-Zit & Rufat) 117–118 Crown-First Nations gathering (2012) 29 Cruz-Suárez, Juan Carlos 15–16, 135–143 “Cuando aparecen Aquellos” (Cohen) 155 Cuder-Domínguez, Pilar 177–178 cultural appropriation: in video game industry 56–59 cultural memory: as consensual memory 136–139; definition of 144n.9; ethics and 140–143; oblivion and 139–140; as resilience 148; resilient identity and 135–143; in Spain 135–136 In Intro? cultural narratology 11–13 cultural relativism: as anodyne 192–193 cultural resilience 6–12; video games development and 59–67 cultural specificity: resilience discourse and 8, 15–16; in video game industry 60–62 Custer’s Revenge video game 59–60 Cyberchamanism 150 cyberpunk 150–151, 159n.5 also in Intro Cyrulink, Boris 3, 40–41, 90, 137, 143n.3 Dahl, Sam 111–113 Darias-Beautell, Eva 16–17, 21, 89, 122, 163–179 Dean, Carolyn J. 119 decolonial resilience: in literary narrative 13–14; resurgence and 7–8; video games development and 65–67 “Delhi Draft, The” and “Amendments” 93

Index  211 democracy: Spanish integration into 136–139, 144n.10 Denny, Keith 21 Derickson, Kate Driscoll 182 Derrida, Jacques 156 Deskaheh (Cayuga chief) 30–31 Deyohahá:ge: Indigenous Knowledge Centre 24 “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature” (Cho) 168–169 Dick, Philip K. 150, 152 Diego Sánchez, Jorge 14–15, 52n.2, 89–100 discourse: resilience thinking and 1–8 Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Boltanski) 103 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick) 152 Dobson, Kit 15, 52n.2, 122–133, 188–190 Doctor and the Saint, The (Roy) 92 Dogen, Eihei 127–131 Donoghue, Emma 14, 73, 77–86 drawings: resilience narratives and 106–108, 119n.2 Drink-Box Studios 63–65 Dutch merchants: Two Row-Covenant Chain Treaty and 25, 27 Dynasty Warriors video game 60–62 dystopian fiction: resilience discourse and 16; in Spanish 148–159 ecological disasters 15, 122–133 ecological resilience: discourse on 2–3; time and 132–133 ecology of knowledges 35n.3; sexual violence and 91–92 economic crises: cultural identity and 137–139 E-Line Media 62 El Sistema (Menéndez Salmón) 155 Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Bennett) 106 empathy: in sexual violence narratives 94 empire of uniformity: Haudenosaunee sovereignty and 30–32 Eng, David L. 168 English colonialism: Two RowCovenant Chain Treaty violations by 27–28 environmental humanities 18n.3

equality of risk: rape victims and 93–94 Escandell-Montiel, Daniel 14, 56–67 ethics: cultural memory and resilience and 140–143; of defeat 148 ethnicity: Indigenous reparations discourse and 192–202 European Union: Spanish integration into 136 Eutopia 149, 151 Evans, Brad 4–6, 182 family-politics trope 74 Faschinger, Petra 124 feminist theory: storytelling in 43 Fernández BEF, Bernardo Fraile-Marcos, Ana María 1–17, 94, 148–159 Focant, Camille Foucault, Michel Franco, Francisco (General) 135–136, 139 Frank, Arthur 41 Freud, Sigmund 167–168 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster 15, 122–133 future: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 130–132 Gaiman, Neil 111 “Gamergate” scandal 68n.1 Gamerro, Carlos 152 Gardner, Jared 107 Garmezy, Norman 76 gender: in video game industry 59–60 “Genealogy of Resilience, A” (Bourbeau) 165–166 generative refusal: resilience and 7–8, 12 Giafrencesco, Angelo 9 Gibson, William 150 glocal narratives of resilience: cultural and literal narratives and 8–10; resistance in 181–190 Goellnicht, Donald 179n.3 Goorden Bernard 150 Grand Theft Auto video game series 57 graphic novel: resilience discourse in 15; visual/written hybridity of 106 Great Law of Peace 25 Great Pacific Garbage Patch 15, 122, 125–133 Greek mythology: in video games 61–62

212 Index grief: intergenerational transmission of 122; as refusal 172–173 Grim Fandango video game 61–62 Guacamelee! video game 60–65 guilt: motherhood and 82–86 Gypsy Goddess, The (Kandasamy) 97 Hage, Rawi 17, 181–190 Halberstam, Judith 172 Halbwachs, Maurice Han, Shinhee 168 Hansen, Hans Lauge 145n.19 Haraway, Donna 1, 149 Hargreaves, Allison 43 Harper, Stephen 29, 52n.1 Haudenosaunee people: American Revolution and 28–30; modes of resilience in 7; relational structures of 34–35; Sky Woman story and 47–49; trans-systemic knowledges in 13; Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement and 22–35; United States formation and 29 healing: in sexual violence narratives 89, 94–100 Heidegger, Martin 128 Henderson, James Youngblood Sákéj 13, 23–24, 30 Henderson, Jennifer 21 Hernáez-Lerena, María Jesús 15, 52n.2, 103–119, 122 heroism: cultural memory and 140– 143 Hill, Rick 24, 36n.12 Hinduism: sexual violence and nationalism 92–94 Hirsch, Marienne 175–176 Hölderlin, Friedrich. Holling, C. S. 2–3, 22–23 Holz, Martin homelessness: in comics and graphic novels 106–108; in resilience discourse 104–106 homeostatic identity: motherhood as 77–78 Hope, Ishmael 62 Horton, Anthony 107, 113–115 humanities: resilience discourse and 9–10, 18n.3 “Hunger Winter” (Netherlands) 199 Hunter’s Legacy video game 63–65 identity: cultural memory and 60–65, 135–143; Indigenous strategies

for 14; memory and 151–153; motherhood and 77–78 immigration: Indigenous reparations discourse and 192–202; neoliberal concept of resilience and 183; resilience refusal and 183–190; in Thuy’s Ru 195–202 imperialism: neoliberalism and 6 Independent Games Festival Award for Excellence in Visual Art 65 India: resilience and oppression in 90–100 Indian Penal Code (IPC) 93 Indigenous peoples: cultural identity through video games for 62; identity-building strategies of 14; narrative traditions of 11–12; reconciliation with 39; reparations discourse and 192–202; resilience discourse and 6–7; resurgence thinking and 7–8; stereotypes in video game industry of 59–60; storytelling models of 39–52; transsystemic resilience and 13; video game industry and 56–57, 68n.2; youth suicide among 43 In Divided Unity (McCarthy) 31 Insomnio (Cohen) 156 institutional oblivion: cultural memory of Spanish Civil War and 139–140 interactive narrative devices: resilient strategies in 56–67 intercommunal empathy: storytelling and 41 intergenerational effects: of grief 122; of trauma 166, 173–174 International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples 32 international institutions: resilience discourse and 2 Iñupiaq community 62, 69n.19, 69n.21 Invisible (Martin) 107, 116–117, 119n.8 Iris (Paz Soldán) 150, 152–153, 158–159 Jameson, Fredric 149 Japan: video game industry and 60–62 Johnson, William (Sir) 28 Joint Review Panel for the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline 44–48 Jordan, Chris 125–126

Index  213 Joseph, Jonathan 182 Juniper, Tony 2 Kabesh, Lisa 175–176 Kamboureli, Smaro 192 Kandasamy, Meena 14–15, 52n.2, 89–100 Kaviraj, Sudipta 92 Kayanere’kówa (Haudenosaunee alliance) 25, 27 Kierkegaard, Soren 141, 144n.18 Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipeline extension 44–45 King, Thomas 13–14, 39–40, 45–52 Koei Tecmo 60–62 Kristeva, Julia 189 labeling: exclusion and inclusion and 103 La ciudad ausente (Piglia) 155–156 La grandeza mexicana (Balbuena) 156 Lalita, K. 91 La mésentente: politique et philosophie (Rancière) 148–149 La mitad del alma (Riera) 138 Landowne, Youme 107, 113–115 land theft: Indigenous reparations discourse and 192–202; Two RowCovenant Chain agreement and 30–31 language: as cultural ecology 10–11 Las islas (Gamerro) 152 La sonámbula (film) 160n.12 Las visiones (Paz Soldán) 150, 152–153 Latin America: science fiction in 150; stereotypical representation in video game industry of 59–60; video game industry and 57–59 Law for the Recovery of Historical Memory (Ley para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica) 139–140 League of Nations: Haudenosaunee petition to 31 Le fil perdu (Rancière) 149 Le temps retrouvé (Proust) 133 L’éthique. Essai sur la conscience du mal (Badiou) 148 Lienzo 63–65 Línea C de Ciencia Ficción 150 literature: consensual cultural memory and 137–139; critical dystopias 148–159; graphic novel and 106–108; imaginative empathy in 94; resilience discourse and 9–10,

90–91; Spanish Civil War in 138, 144n.8 Little, Jason 107, 113–114 Locke, John 151–152 Lutz, John 171 MacKinnon, Danny 182 magical realism: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 131–133 magical realism 2.0 150 Malaise dans l’esthétique (Rancière) 149 Mandelbrot Set 177–179 Maracle, Lee 7 Martin, Jaime 107, 116–117 Mate, Reyes 144n.6 maternity: citizenship and 74–76; control of mother figure and 74–76; resilience and 14, 73–86 McCarthy, Theresa 31, 33–34 McGrattan, Cillian 156 McKay, Daniel 123 McRobbie, Angela 74–77 mediation: consensual cultural memory and 138–139 melancholia: subalternity and resilience and 167–173 Mellor, Anne 74 memorialist narratives: cultural identity and 135–136; ethics and cultural memory in 140–143; identity and 151–153; oblivion and cultural memory and 139–140; resilience in 140–143, 148–159, 154–157 Memory, Politics, and Identity (McGrattan) 156 memory duty 144n.6 Menéndez Salmón, Ricardo 155 Menon, Nivedita 91–93 Mexican culture: in video games 60–65 Midway Island: environmental stress on 125–126 Miguel Fuster: 15 año en la calle 107, 115–117, 119n.8 modern constitutionalism: colonial states and 29–30 Mohawk, John 36n.13 Mohawk people: Two Row-Covenant Chain negotiations and 24–25, 27 Molina, Mauricio 152 Montero, Rosa Moore, Alan 110–111

214 Index Morales, Marisol 77–78 more-than-human associations: Indigenous storytelling and 50–52 Moylan, Tom 149, 151 Mulaka video game 63–65 multiculturalism: Indigenous reparations discourse and 192– 202; neoliberalism vs. 183–185; storytelling and 40–43 multidimensionality: in storytelling 49–50 Muñoz Zapata, Juan Ignacio

O’Brien, Susie 5–6, 13–15, 17, 21–22, 36n.15, 39–52 ocean-borne debris 122–133 Okihiro, Lara 133 One Hundred Million Hearts (Sakamoto) 123 Onondaga Nation 32 oppression: collective resilience against 122–133; critical dystopia dn 152–153; religion and 90–100 oral testimony: storytelling as 44–49 Ozeki, Ruth 15, 52n.2

Nagel, Joane 7 Nam Le 179n.3 narrative medicine 41 narratives of resilience. see also storytelling: collective cultural memory and 135–143; drawings and 106–108, 119n.2; glocal narratives 8–10; graphic novels as 111–113; homelessness and 107– 119; immigration narratives and 194–202; maternal vulnerability and 76–78; Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being as 122–133 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration 125 National Resources Board 44–45 nation building: storytelling and 39–52 natural disasters: resilience and 18n.1 Neighbors of the Onondaga Nation 32 neoliberal ideology: Canadian multiculturalism vs. 183–185; colonization and imperialism and 6; multiculturalism and 40; refusal of resilience and 172–173, 181–190; resilience discourse and 3–6, 21, 89–90 Never Alone (Kisima Innitchuna) video game 62–65, 69n.20 Nguyen, Vinh 196 Nichols, Brian 76 Nishnaabeg storytelling 52n.10 Noguerol, Francisca 16, 148–159 No Mames, Trump video game 66 nostalgia restorative nostalgia154; reflective nostalgia 148 Nünning, Ansgar 11–12 Nussbaum, Martha 137

parenting: resiliency and 78–86 Passmore, Cale 68n.4 past: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 124–127 patriarchy: feminist subversion of 92–94 Paz Soldán, Edmundo 150, 152–153, 157–159 Peacock, Robert 6–7 Piglia, Ricardo 155–156 Pitch Dark: Don’t Be Skerd (Landowne and Horton) 107, 113–115 Place-Thought 47, 49 Plaza de Mayo: mothers of 77 Pledge of the Crown Wampum 29 politics: of cultural memory 139–140; of grief; maternity and 74–76; storytelling and 44–45 Politique de la littérature (Rancière) 149 positionality: resilience discourse and 8 postcolonial postmemory: creative resilience and 175–176 Potter, Beatrix 109–110 power structures: women’s subjugation and 89–100 Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (Butler) 172–173 pre-Columbian cultures: identity through video games 62–65, 70n.30; in video game design 56–67 pregnancy: resiliency and 79–80 presencing: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 127–130; in storytelling 50 present: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 127–130 Promise of Happiness, The (Ahmed) 169–170 Prose, Francine 42

Obama, Barack 18n.1, 29 oblivion: cultural memory and 139– 140

Index  215 Proust, Marcel 123, 131, 133 psychological resilience studies 3; storytelling in 41–42 public/private dichotomy: sexual violence and 92–94 queer theory: resilience and 172–173 Queer Art of Failure, The (Halberstam) 172 racial discrimination: melancholia and 168–169, 179n.2; reparations discourse and 192–202; storytelling and 43; in video game industry 56–57 radical resurgence project 7, 12 Rancière, Jacques 148–149 rape: in Indian culture 93–94 “Rat’s Tail, A” 110 “Recommending Zazen to All People” (Dogen) 128–129 reconciliation: consensual cultural memory and 137–139; with Indigenous peoples 39–42; resilience and 193–202 Red Power activism: resurgence thinking and 7 reflective nostalgia 148 “Refugee Gratitude: Narrating Success and Intersubjectivity in Kim Thúy’s Ru” (Nguyen) 196 refusal, politics of: failure of resilience and 172–173; refugees and 183– 190; victimization and 7–8 Regan, Paulette 42–43 regeneration: Haudenosaunee cultural renewal and 33 Reid, Julian 4–6, 182 religion. see also specific religions, e.g., Hinduism: oppression in 90–100; resilience in 90–100 Resident Evil 4 video game 59 Resident Evil 5 video game 57 Residential School System 7, 33, 39–42, 52n.1 resilience: alternative terms in Indigenous thought 53n.12; antiresilience; Coleman’s definition of 22–23; compromised (broken); creative; cultural memory and ethics of 140–143; discourse and 1–8; Holling’s discussion of 22–23; memory as act of 140–143, 154–157; psycho-social; resistance

against 172–173, 181–190; in sexual violence narratives 89, 94–100; socio-ecological; subalternity and melancholia and 167–173; terminology of 1–2; video games as tool for 62–65; Resilience (Vanistendael) 149 Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities 18n.3 “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems” (Holling) 22–23 resistance: Haudenosaunee autonomy and 33; resilience and 183–190; trauma and 73–74 resurgence: decolonial resistance and 7–8; Haudenosaunee cultural vitality and 33; storytelling and 43–44, 52n.10 “Rethinking Cosmopolitanism through the Figure of the Refugee” (Goellnicht) 179n.3 “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance” (Butler) 188–190 Rhegezza-Zit, Magali 117–118 Rickard, Jolene 36n.11 Ricoeur, Paul 138 risk society 167 Roman Empire: motherhood in 74; in video games 61–62 Room (Donoghue) 14, 73, 78–86 Rorty, Richard 144n.7 Roy, Anuradha 14, 52n.2, 89–100 Roy, Arundhati 92 Ru (Thuy) 17, 122, 194–202 Rufat, Samuel 117–118 Sakamoto, Kerri 123 Sánchez Mazas, Rafael 141–143, 145n.17 Sanchiz, Ramiro 150 Sandberg, Sheryl 41 *Sanderson 197–198 Sargent, Lyman 149 Scandalous Bodies (Kamboureli) 192–193 Schafer, Tim 62 science fiction: critical dystopia and 149–151 Seal, Mike 104–105 self-adaptation: resilience and 181– 182 self-erasure: individuation and 169– 170 Sengoku Basara video game 60–62

216 Index settler colonialism: Indigenous reparations discourse and 192–202; multiculturalism and 40–44; transsystemic resilience and 13; in video game industry 59–60 sexuality: maternity and 73; in video game industry 59–60, 68n.10 sexual violence: contemporary narratives of resilience and healing and 89–100; in graphic novels 110–111; public/private dichotomy and 92–94; storytelling and healing from 52n.2 Shelley, Adrienne 76 Shobogenzo (Dogen) 128–129 “Simple Recipes” (Thien) 169 Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake 7, 12, 43–44, 49, 52n.10 Six Nations Confederacy: Canada and 30–32; Two Row-Covenant Chain agreement and 13, 22–35 Six Nations Confederacy Council: land theft from 30–31 Skins video 69n.20 Slammerkin (Donoghue) 77–78 Sleeping on Jupiter (Roy) 14, 89–90, 94–100 Smith, Ashley 76 social Darwinism: resilience discourse and 21 Socialists Party (PSOE) (Spain) 144n.11 Soldados de Salamina (Cercas) 15–16, 135–143 Somewhere Nowhere: Lives Without Homes 107, 111–113 Sommer, Doris 155 sound: resilience of 170 space: in science fiction 149–151 Spain: cultural memory in 135–136; “The Transition” (1978–1986) period in 136–139 Spanish Civil War: cultural memory and 135–143; novels about 138, 144n.8 Spanish fiction: critical dystopias in 148–159; cultural memory in 135–143 spatial justice: homelessness and 117– 119; in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 123–133 Spectres de Marx (Derrida) 156 Spiegelman, Art 110

Spiner, Fernando spirituality: sexual violence and 91, 94–100 Spivak, Gayatri 4, 8, 22, 179 stability: Holling’s discussion of 22–23; trauma and 73–74 Stark, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik 12, 40 Starr, Marlo 123–124 state prose 159n.2 stereotypical representation: resiliency and 86n.2; in video game industry 59–60 Sterling, Bruce 150 Stockholm Resilience Centre 23 storytelling: resilience and 39–52; trauma and 80–86 Strand, Joyce 6–7 Strange Days Suárez Ojeda, Néstor 157–159 subalternity: creative resilience and 4–5, 17, 21, 90; refusal of resilience and 183–190; resilience and melancholia and 167–173; Spivak’s concept of 8; in video game design 56–67 suicide: Indigenous youth 43 survivance 53n.12; also in Introduction Survivance video game 69n.20 sustainability: cultural ecology and 10–11 Sylva Sylvarum (Bacon) 170 system ecology: resilience and 165– 166 Talbot, Bryan 107, 109–111 Tale for the Time Being, A (Ozeki) 15, 52n.2, 122–133 Tale of One Bad Rat, The (Talbot) 107, 109–111, 116 Tarahumara people 63–65, 69n.23, 70n.27 Tharu, Susie 91 Thien, Madeleine 16–17, 122, 163–179 Thomas, Jacob (Chief) 24–25 Thuy, Kim 17, 122, 194–202 Tiempo Lunar (Molina) 152 time: resilience and 122–133; in Thien’s Certainty 175–176 T’lakwadzi, Chawwin-is 42 Todorov, Tzvetan 137–138 “Transition, The” (1978–1986) (Spain) 136–139

Index  217 traditionalism: Haudenosaunee protocols and ceremonies and 33 trans-systemic resilience 13; Coleman’s definition of 22–23; Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty and 21–35 trashpunk 150 trauma narratives: biomarkers in 173–174; in graphic novels 106– 108; resilience mechanisms and 11–12, 40–41, 76–78; vulnerability and 194 Treaty of Canandaigua 29–30 Troeung, Y-Dang 168, 173–174 Trudeau, Justin 18n.1, 39–42, 50 Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, The (King) Truth and Bright Water (King) Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Canada) 40–42 tsunami: in Ozeki’s Tale for the Time Being 124–127 Tully, James 29 Turtle Island Two Row Wampum Belt (Tekani teyothata’tye kaswenta) 25, 26, 27 Two Row Wampum-Covenant Chain Treaty 13; disappearance of 35n.7; storytelling and 51–52; transsystemic resilience and 21–35 Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign 32 Ty, Eleanor 178 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 7, 31 Understanding and Responding to Homeless Experiences, Identities and Cultures (Seal) 104–105 Ungar, Michael 3 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 7, 31 Unlikely Angel (Smith) 76 Upper One Games 62–63 Usui, Masami 123 Utopian thought: dystopias and 149 van Herk, Aritha 17, 42, 52n.11, 122, 192–202 Vanistendael, Stefan 149

victimization: challenges to concepts of 7–8, 73–86, 122; consensual cultural memory and 137–139; in Donoghue’s Room 78–86 video game industry: cultural appropriation in 56–59; cultural heritage and identity in 60–62; cultural identity projects and 62–65; decolonized development and 65–67; narratives in 14; stereotypical representation in 59–60 Vietnam War: in Thuy’s Ru 195–202 visual media governmentality: homelessness and 104–108; motherhood and 75–76 Vizenor, Gerald 7, 53n.12 vulnerability: agency and 188–189; in graphic novels 107–108; resilience and 5, 73–86; stigmatization of 117–118 Waitress (Shelley) 76 Walker, Jeremy 4, 21, 23, 182 wampum belts: Two Row-Covenant Chain negotiations and 25, 26, 27 Washington, George 29 Watts, Vanessa 47 Welsh, Marc 3 Western culture: in video games 61–62 When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife (Kandasamy) 14–15, 89–90, 97–100 Whispering of Ghost, The: Trauma and Resilience (Cyrulink) 143n.3 “Woman Who Fell from the Sky, The” 47–51 “World Report on Violence and Health” (WHO) 93 xenophobia: in video game industry 56–59 Ygdrasil (Baradit) 152 Zapf, Hubert 10–11 Zen Soto Buddhism 127–130 zombies

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