Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature 9781317818212

Citation preview

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature         This volume combines literary analysis and theoretical approaches to mobility, diasporic identities and the construction of space to explore the different ways in which the notion of return shapes contemporary ethnic writing such as fiction, ethnography, memoir, and film. Through a wide variety of ethnic experiences ranging from the transatlantic, AsianAmerican, Latino/a and Caribbean alongside their corresponding forms of displacement—political exile, war trauma, and economic migration—the essays in this collection connect the intimate experience of the returning subject to multiple locations, historical experiences, inter-subjective relations, and cultural interactions. They challenge the idea of the narrative of return as a journey back to the untouched roots and home that the ethnic subject left behind. Their diacritical approach combines, on the one hand, a sensitivity to the context and structural elements of modern diaspora; and on the other, an analysis of the individual psychological processes inherent to the experience of displacement and return such as nostalgia, memory, and belonging. In the narratives of return analyzed in this volume, space and identity are never static or easily definable; rather, they are “in-process” and subject to change as they are always entangled in the historical and intersubjective relations ensuing from displacement and mobility. This book will interest students and scholars who wish to further explore the role of American literature within current debates on globalization, migration, and ethnicity. Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger is Associate Professor of English in the Department of Humanities at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain.

 

Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature EDITED BY SUSAN CASTILLO, King’s College London       1

New Woman Hybridities

Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880– 1930

Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham

  2

Don DeLillo

The Possibility of Fiction

Peter Boxall

  3

Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Origins

Justine Tally

  4

Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature

Gesa Mackenthun

  5

Mexican American Literature

The Politics of Identity

Elizabeth Jacobs

  6

Native American Literature

Towards a Spatialized Reading

Helen May Dennis

  7

Transnationalism and American

Literature

Literary Translation 1773–1892

Colleen Glenney Boggs

  8

The Quest for Epic in

Contemporary American Fiction

John Updike, Philip Roth and Don DeLillo

Catherine Morley

  9

The Literary Quest for an American National Character

Finn Pollard

10

Asian American Fiction, History and Life Writing

International Encounters

Helena Grice

11

Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature

Stephen Knadler

12

The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner

Myths of the Frontier

Megan Riley McGilchrist

13

The Construction of Irish Identity in American Literature

Christopher Dowd

14

Cities, Borders and Spaces in Intercultural American Literature and Film

Ana Mª Manzanas and Jesús Benito

15

American Utopia and Social Engineering in Literature, Social Thought, and Political History

Peter Swirski

16

Transnationalism and American Serial Fiction

Edited by Patricia Okker

17

Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature

The Country Poor in the Great Depression

Stephen Fender

18

Travel and Dislocation in Contemporary American Fiction

Aliki Varvogli

19

Nabokov, History and the Texture of Time

Will Norman

20

The Transnationalism of American Culture

Literature, Film, and Music

Edited by Rocío G. Davis

21

Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction

Judith Newman

22

Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture

Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment

Ana Mª Manzanas and Jesús Benito

23

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature

Edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger

 

Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature Edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger                                    

 

  First published 2015

by Routledge

711 Third 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 © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger 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. Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature / edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature / edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger.

          pages cm. — (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature ; 23)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.    1. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 3. Return in literature. 4. American literature—Minority authors—History and criticism. 5. Displacement (Psychology) in literature. I. Oliver-Rotger, Maria Antònia, editor of compilation.     PS217.I35I35 2014

    810.9'353—dc23

    2014002888 ISBN: 978-1-315-81888-7 (ebk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-73558-2 (hbk) Typeset in Sabon

by IBT Global.

   

             

To Pau and Dora, my homeland. To our family in Mallorca, to whom we always return.

 

Contents         Acknowledgements Introduction: Roots and Routes in American Literature about Return

MARIA ANTÒNIA OLIVER-ROTGER

  PART I

Return as Memory Reconstructed 1

Migration, Exclusion, and “Home” in Edwidge Danticat’s Narratives of Return

VALERIE KAUSSEN

2

Between Home and Loss: Inscribing Return in Ruth Behar’s An Island Called Home

ROCÍO G. DAVIS

3

Nightmares from My Parents: Return as Recovery in Doan Hòang’s Oh, Saigon

AITOR IBARROLA-ARMENDARIZ

  PART II

Restorative Nostalgias: Return as Emotional Re-Attachment 4

Andrew Lam’s Narratives of Return: From Viet Kieu Nostalgia to Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms

BEGOÑA SIMAL GONZÁLEZ

5

Returning Home: Iranian-American Women’s Memoirs and Reflective Nostalgia

PERSIS KARIM

6

Enacting an Identity by Re-Creating a Home: Eleni Gage’s North of Ithaka

ELEFTHERIA ARAPOGLOU

7

El vaivén de la vida: Musings on Deterritorialized Border Subjects

NORMA E. CANTÚ

  PART III

Impossible Returns 8

Cuban Geographies: The Roots/Routes of Ana Menéndez Narratives

ADA ORTUZAR-YOUNG

9

“The Inextinguishable Longings Impossibility of Return in Junot Díaz

for

Elsewheres”:

The

SANTIAGO VAQUERA-VÁSQUEZ

10

Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek’s Short Stories

TAMAS DOBOZY

  List of Contributors Index

 

Acknowledgements       I am not merely following a standard convention if I say that this edited volume would not have been possible without the help of quite a few colleagues, collaborators, and friends. The idea for this collection of essays stems from my participation in the research project A Critical History of Ethnic American Literature, financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO, Ref. FFI2012-31250, Ref. FFI2009-07450) and directed by Jesús Benito. I am grateful to Jesús for his support and encouragement in carrying out this project. Essential for deciding on the central theme of the book were fruitful conversations with project members and colleagues Rocío G. Davis and Begoña Simal, to whom I am indebted for their generous advice. The anonymous reviewers I consulted during the selection process also deserve very special thanks for their earnest, professional work. I also want to thank all the contributors for their patience during a process that is often longer than one would expect. Last but not least, I thank my friend and colleague James McCullough, on whose meticulous, precise editing work I have been heavily dependent.

 

Introduction Roots and Routes in American Literature about Return1 Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger Maria   No return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that a full return, or repatriation, is impossible. Edward Said, Reflections on Exile, xxxv The very process of constructing a narrative for oneself—of telling a story— imposes a certain linearity and coherence that is never entirely there. But that is the lesson, perhaps, especially for us immigrants and migrants: i.e., that home, community and identity all fall somewhere between the histories and experiences we inherit. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 136 When I admit “there is no limit to returning,” I go back to search what I have not seen before, what I overlooked in fleeing. Ray González, The Underground Heart, 14

 

RETURN IN DIASPORIC AMERICAN LITERATURE In epic poems of Western canonical literature such as Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Inferno, the narrative of homecoming or narrative of return is structured around a venture or descent into an unknown, distant territory that is formative for the epic hero. The physical journey is also a spiritual quest that prepares him for an eventual return to his homeland. The value of the deferred return lies in the hero’s coming to terms with his mortality and with the responsibility he has towards his community during the journey.

Return is significant because the previous journey has changed the hero and made him wiser and more knowledgeable. This narrative pattern has its American variant in those fictional or nonfictional accounts of journeys to distant, foreign lands written during and after the development of cultural discourses about the American nation. Robert T. Tally, Jr., mentions such narratives of return—including Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast, and Herman Melville’s Typee—as having had an effect on the cultural mythology of nationhood by means of their refashioning of the American jeremiad: They included a representative national subject, a characteristic setting, and a characteristic mission akin to the “errand into the Wilderness” (Tally 2007, 84). The “narrative of return,” Tally argues, fits well into the American meta-narrative of nationhood or nation-making in that it may be viewed as re-enacting the myth of origins of the Puritan errand into the wilderness without incorporating its religious overtones. While the reader can enjoy and partake of the narrator’s experiences of foreign places, return provides the comfort of the familiar and a renewed fulfillment of that first moment of Americanness. In this context, returning home may be seen as a kind of “rebirth” of the self, and as a renewal of his national identity based upon the experience, growth, and wisdom acquired after a journey into the unknown. The unknown, Tally says, is incorporated, homogenized, and controlled by a narrative voice that speaks from the safety of home about how the experience of the foreign has changed him. Upon return home, the self incorporates his knowledge into the project of nation-making, for when the tale is told, the foreign is made familiar and known (85). If return in the early American narratives had the “centripetal” effect of bringing the individual experience of the foreign within the nation-making process, in twentieth- and twenty-first-century narratives of return by immigrant, migrant, or exiled authors who feel they have another home elsewhere, return has both a “centripetal” and “centrifugal” effect. As James Clifford contends, diasporic2 cultures “mediate, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place” (1997, 255). As immigrants and exiles often look backwards to the originary home to define themselves, there is always nostalgia, the desire for someplace else, to be away from the host

country in order to see, know again, and fill in the void left by years of geographic and cultural separation. In the narrativization of the migrant experience, the notion of home is frequently permeated by a certain “localism” or idealization of the country far away. Nostalgia, which Milan Kundera described in Ignorance (2000, 5) as “the suffering caused by the unappeased longing to return,” implies a yearning for a lost culture and way of life, for the happy experiences of childhood, for landscapes and sensorial experiences, often-times described as untouched by modernity. The first instances of twentieth-century American immigrant literature show a tendency to regret the alienating forces of modern America and contrast them with nostalgic memories of home. The fictional and nonfictional characters of writers such as Bernardo Vega, Jesús Colón, Henry Roth, and Paule Marshall feel the pressure of economic exploitation, racism, the American ideology of upward mobility, a consumer capitalist culture, and the contradictions of a nation that does not live up to its ideals of opportunity and equality. Home continues to be a nostalgic presence in post-1965 immigrant novels3 such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1977), Oscar Hijuelos’s The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989), Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club (1989), and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1991). This desire for elsewhere brings to the fore two related facts about diasporic experience: that exile, migration, and expatriation involve detachment, losing touch, forgetting, and being forgotten, and that peoples with diasporic histories of various kinds may be “maladjusted” to the American ethos. In the last decades of the twentieth century, economic opportunity, education, and social mobility have ensured the gradual participation of second and third generations of exile and migrant families in the American public ethos as citizens, which in turn has turned them into possible “returnees” to their homes of origin if only as travelers or visitors. In a globalizing world where multiple cultural influences are present within the state and where the ethnic subjects of second and third generations may have not been able to maintain cultural memory related to their place of origin or to develop a “cultural citizenship” within an organic community, it is possible for these ethnic subjects to travel to the countries of their ancestors. Members of diasporic communities travel “in search of their roots and their routes” in order “to (re)assert, reaffirm and perform their

heritage” (Timothy in Coles and Timothy 2004, 12) or to discover “more about themselves, their ancestry, their heritage, their families and their extended communities” (14). Thus, in the late twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury writings by ethnic American authors, mythologies of the original home began to be revisited and challenged through autobio-graphical return narratives or through fictional plots dealing with return where home also proved “foreign” to the returnee. In fictional works such as Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters ([1986] 1992) and Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban (1992) as well as in later works such as Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003), return to the homeland shows characters that can neither adjust to the home culture nor fully embrace the values of the American people as a final solution. Rather, they must come to terms with their feeling displaced, discriminated against, and under the effects of cultural loss in the United States. In these works, return is not definitive, but, like the journey to foreign, unknown, and distant territories in the Odyssey or in the early American narratives, it is a sort of transitional stage that brings knowledge. When these narratives are autobiographical, the structure is analogous to that of travel narratives, for the self always goes back to the place he departed from. These narratives tend to combine self-referential aspects that characterize autobiography or life writing and a concern with how a diasporic collective history has been (mis)represented or silenced. The essays in this volume show that narrating return to the country of origin—whether through fiction or autobiography—has become a way for contemporary writers to understand their collective history as one in between two lands. Memory plays a crucial role in the separation from the usual US environment, as part of the process of introspection that takes place during the journey of return. One of the aims of this volume is to enquire into the uses of memory, experience, and newly acquired knowledge in diasporic literature of return for the (re)constitution of American identities. Memories or ghosts of the past may cause pain and resentment or lucidity, and nostalgia can be put to critical, restorative uses, for, as Edward Said has it, “it is what one remembers of the past and how one remembers it that determine how one sees the future” (2000, xxxv). The future emerging from these return narratives is not necessarily the replacement of an old identity by a new one, but rather the awareness of communities that are complex and contradictory. Clifford contends that

assimilationist national ideologies seek to integrate the immigrant experience by posing loss and nostalgia as felt only “en route” to a new place and a new home (1997, 250). In these meta-narratives, return to the American nation after having been some place else should reinforce a sense of national belonging, but, as the essays in this volume show, this is not always the case in diasporic narratives of return. Werner Sollors’s seminal study Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (1986) could provide us with a methodology for analyzing return narratives in the light of a centripetal, assimilationist narrative of nation-formation. Yet, the presence of the place of origin and the longing to return in American literature is not always and necessarily, as Sollors would have it, a transitional stage, the result of a tension between descent and consent that precedes an eventual “socialization into Americanness” (7), the development of “a characteristic sense of American selfhood” (6), and the adoption of “the central codes of Americanness” (7–8) that weld Americans as “one people” (10). As Paul Lauter has argued in “Canon Theory and Emergent Practice” (1991, 165), it is not possible to study a marginalized culture adequately through the methods of separation and integration. Indeed, ancestral homelands in contemporary diasporic narratives of return are part of symbolic configurations where both centripetal and centrifugal forces are at work and where, rather than stressing consensual American citizenship, what is stressed is the diversity of attitudes towards the home and the host country by immigrants and exiles. Instead of considering consent and descent as categories around which identity is constructed in narratives of return, we should consider a set of binaries which are intertwined in the voice of the returning subject: the home of origin and the borrowed home; the culture one was born or raised in and the adopted culture; the place one lives in but does not fully belong to and the place that one left and that feels at once familiar and strange; here and there; the present and the past; memory and reality; roots (place) and routes (mobility). Return highlights the tension between the elements of these binaries, and it is around these tensions that writers of fiction and life writing about return give us a critical ethnography from within as members and observers of their diasporic communities.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC KNOWLEDGE AND OPPOSITIONAL CONSCIOUSNESS Literature about return to original homelands shows the ways in which the subject is suddenly displaced from the borrowed home ground and psychologically placed in between two cultural and geographical imaginaries. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha (1994) has argued that the integration of the voice of the minority inside the mainstream is a performative force that questions the margins of the nation and the institutionalized pedagogical discourse that creates the fiction of a national culture as being bounded and identified with territorial limits. Literature about return dramatizes a form of hybridity that not only testifies to the conflicted allegiances of culturally hybrid subjects but also accounts for a self-critical position towards several narratives about self, community, nation, place, and culture. The performative power of fictional and autobiographical narratives of return lies in the ethnographic role of the writer as representing subjects juggling and straddling several cultural systems on their journey to the home of origin. Fiction writers may be viewed as ethnographers of this process of identity production, for as Michael Fischer (1986), James Clifford (1986), Mary Louise Pratt (1992), and Alvina E. Quintana (1991) have observed, ethnography is written in someone’s interest, and both objective and subjective discourses intervene in the ways cultures are represented. No longer viewed as objective representation, ethnography is now seen as a “limited way of seeing the world” that mediates between both discourses (Quintana 1991, 72). Literature, just like ethnography, depicts culture both objectively and subjectively, and literary texts generated within minoritized cultures may be seen as manifestations of a critical form of ethnography, one that Mary Louise Pratt terms autoethnography: “If ethnographic texts are a means by which Europeans represent to themselves their (usually subjugated) others, autoethnographic texts are those the others construct in response to or in dialogue with those metropolitan representations” (1992, 7). Thus, literature about return may be seen as a critical form of ethnography in that ethnic subjects who are authorized to represent a culture show an awareness of the fictional character of representations and mechanisms of textual authority.

Fictions about return testify not only to the multiple cultural affiliations of the ethnic subject but also to the psychological processes of alienation, deterritorialization,4 uprootedness, or exclusion involved in geopolitical relations of empire, coloniality, and neo-coloniality.5 Fiction about return understood as autoethnography is, in the first sense of the term “autoethnog-raphy” that I use in this discussion, the critical ethnography produced from within the community that is itself being described, the writer here being the ethnographer, both participant and observer of a diasporic experience, whose fiction responds critically to institutionalized, hegemonic narratives from without by inscribing a differential, oppositional consciousness shaped by diaspora, displacement, and colonization.6 This mode of perception, termed by various critics as “borderlands” or “mestiza” consciousness (Anzaldúa 1987), “border thinking” (Mignolo [2000] 2003), “postcolonial mestizaje” (Pérez-Torres 1995, 2000), and “oppositional consciousness” (Sandoval 2000), resists homogenizing narratives about the nation, articulates the alienation of modernity, and seeks to find a place within a broad, (post)colonial, transnational history.7 The autoethnographic perspective is sometimes reinforced through the presence of characters/narrators from within the community that mediate and interpret other characters’ lives and, thus, as Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez proposes in his essay in this volume, develop “a form of binding to an other,” the reader. Contributions about the narration of return by diasporic authors display what Persis Karim, in her essay in this volume, refers to as a “double consciousness” or “constant bifurcation,” for they face the simultaneity or “doubleness” of similarity and difference. Subjects must return, not so much to the place in search of their “roots” but to that very place “by another route,” to what that place “has become,” and what has been made of it as it has been told and retold in several representations which involve politics, history, myth, memory, and desire (Hall 1990, 232). Essays focusing on fiction—by Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, Valerie Kaussen, Tamas Dobozy, and Ada Ortuzar-Young—look at the ways in which, for authors Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Stuart Dybek, and Ana Menéndez, dream, imagination, and storytelling are ways of counteracting the effects of loss, trauma, exile, or being rooted in multiple locations while at the same time belonging to none. The stories of the impossible or uneasy returns of their fictional characters are grounded in real historical conjunctures of political violence and diaspora, and, as the essays about these works show,

it is only in these conjunctures that one can grasp the characters’ impossible returns as claims for recognition as members of a victimized community. How can one understand Oscar Wao’s idea of fukú (spell), which Yunior realizes his friend would have liked to have replaced by a counterspell of zafa, if not in the context of colonial and neo-colonial relations between the Dominican Republic and the United States impinging upon Oscar’s return to the island? How can one grasp the phenomenon of “phantom limbs” if we are not aware of the internalization of violent US-Haitian relations and the subsequent “social death” of Haitians living in the “Fourth World?” Besides describing with the accuracy of ethnographers the material and psychological effects of return or its impossibility upon diasporic subjects, authors of narratives of return also offer transnational ethnographies of space by charting both geographies of the mind and geographies of everyday life. The essays by Ada Ortuzar-Young, Eleftheria Arapoglou, Norma E. Cantú, and Tamas Dobozy analyze return from the viewpoint of daily practices in space: the way space is transformed, reinterpreted, and appropriated; the effects of space upon subjectivity; as well as the symbolic meaning space has for them. Postmodern approaches to space are useful in understanding the complex engagement of the returning subject with the representations of space that s/he conceives of as “home.” Viewed as a terrain of power and contestation that is actively produced and reproduced by institutions as well as individuals (Lefebvre [1974] 1991), places are not viewed as inert reflections of a culture and a society; they are constantly transformed under the influx of habits that are subject to ideological representations, power, desires, myths, and subjective imaginings. Lefebvre distinguishes between “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived” spaces, three modalities of space that stand in a constant dialectical relationship with each other. The space we perceive and we inhabit, its representations through signs and codes that establish relationships between people and things, and the way we “live,” understand, imagine, and appropriate space, are all interrelated. Social relations become real only when they are represented in space, not merely in time, for space is part of lived experience. Everything that occurs in our lives has to do with mental and social space. Emotions shape space, and space shapes emotions. The body, when considered in spatial terms, is both subject and object, and

cannot be separated into its mental and social aspects (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 204). Lefebvre’s dialectical theory of social space and other theories used by contributors to this volume, such as those of Thomas Gladsky (1992), Yi-Fu Tuan (2007), and Edward Relph (1976), take us directly to one of the main concerns of contemporary theories of subjectivity: how individual experience in society is both ideologically conditioned and can also resist such conditioning through the expression of individual desires. If, as Lefebvre suggests, we participate in the creation of space both individually and collectively, then space also changes as we change. Lefebvre leaves room for individual desire and thus opens up the possibility for human beings to be the creators of mental counter-spaces that resist spatial divisions and respond to normative social representations. The exploration in these essays of the relationship between the way individuals live and how they are affected by space, power, and their representations brings to mind Stuart Hall’s (1990, 222) concept of “identity in process,” which rather than an “accomplished fact” is always seen as being “within representation.”

THE MEMOIR OF RETURN AS AUTOETHNOGRAPHIC TRAVEL NARRATIVE In a recent non-fictional travel book, which is also a narrative of return, Mexican Enough, Stephanie Elizondo Griest recounts her journey to the home of her Mexican ancestors in 2005, a trip motivated by a desire “to learn Spanish and to gain a deeper sense of [her] cultural heritage” at a moment in which she had become an acknowledged writer and public figure and felt the responsibility to communicate with those people of her ethnic group (Elizondo Griest 2008, xi). The journey to Mexico ends up becoming an example of a search for origins where the traveler is confronted several times with her distance from the host culture she is related to and with the impossibility of proving a connection between herself and the country she is visiting. At the same time, Elizondo Griest gains an improved understanding of the reasons for her confusion and alienation from the Mexican culture and people, and of her place in a long history of US-Mexican relations.

The author travels to Mexico, only to find some of her expectations of rootedness and belonging deflated. She says that during her visit to Cruillas, the alleged village of her ancestors, she finds no record of them. They are ghosts. The people who, as she was told, migrated with Richard King to Texas in the 1880s—when the then prospective rancher bought Mexican cattle and presumably took the whole village to the US as labor for his land —are non-existent. Despite Elizondo Griest’s letdown, the trip becomes the occasion to research the history of Mexican migration to US ranches after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was signed and the northern states of Mexico were separated from the rest of the country to become part of the United States. After her findings, Elizondo Griest acknowledges that it does not really matter whether her family connection to the Mexican village of Cruillas can be proven or not. What does matter is that her great-greatgrandfather was one of the first arrivals in the US after the annexation of part of Mexican territory. The connection between her present as a Mexican American from Texas and the past of her maternal grandfather lies in the occupation of Mexico by the US in the nineteenth century and the migratory movement that subsequently began with people like her ancestors and continues today (Elizondo Griest 2008, 113). While at the beginning Stephanie Elizondo Griest seems to belong to what Stuart Hall (1990, 225), quoting Franz Fanon, terms a “race of angels” without an anchor, a color, or a state, her book narrates an internal journey of coming to terms with the material, imaginative, and symbolic effects of history upon individuals, and, in turn, upon herself. If, as Hall (1990, 225) has said, “the inner expropriation of cultural identity cripples and deforms,” what is at stake in Elizondo Griest’s journey is not a “mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity” (225). Rather, it is the search for what Hall calls a “positioning” towards the narratives of the past (and the present, I would add) that the writer is involved in (225). In this case, the writing subject comes to an awareness of her origins’ entanglement with a history of trans-hemispheric relations and empire. Like Elizondo Griest’s travel book, the diasporic memoirs of return, such as those by Ruth Behar, Doan Hòang, Andrew Lam, and Eleni Gage, analyzed in this volume are both spatial and temporal journeys. In all of them, narrating return to the country of origin involves narrating a return to

the past and to the impact of historical events that caused exile, migration, and a diasporic consciousness marked by exclusion here and there, as well as by the often conflictive relationship between the receiving country and the country left behind. The speaking subjects of these memoirs confront what Gloria Anzaldúa terms an “emotional residue” of historical and political tensions upon the individual (1987, 3). Their accounts dramatize the desire to find a lost home as well as the realization that return is a painful encounter with the memories of the living and the dead, and a failed attempt at the reconstruction of wholeness and coherence. They are a descent into the realm of the dead, for the history of the individual and the community is revealed as incomplete: full of gaps, mysteries, ghosts, and painful, impenetrable silences. As implied in the epigraph by Chandra T. Mohanty, the process of narrating return through memoirs or travel narratives is not a linear process but rather a rhizomatic one, where, as shown in the essays by Davis, Ibarrola-Armendariz, Simal, Arapoglou, and Karim, the present and the past are in constant dialogue and what is at stake is not the recovery of a lost identity or culture, but how the self comes to relate to the place of origin on the basis of newly acquired knowledge. In order to understand the textual mechanisms in memoirs of return, I am resorting to a second use of the term “autoethnography,” one related to the aforementioned idea of “a critical ethnography from within,” but more specifically applied to autobiographical writing or life writing. It is “a new genre of contemporary autobiographical texts by writers whose interest and focus are not so much the retrieval of a represented dimension of the private self but the rewriting of their ethnic history, the recreation of a collective identity through the performance of language” (Lionnet 1995, 39). In diasporic memoirs of return, the sense of self is deeply grounded in the experience and observation of an identity that is expressed through other identities, which may be the identity of a place and its everyday dynamics or the details of the life of a community in the present and in the past. Ethnography and autoethnography are mixed in the same text, while, at the same time, there is a distancing from the discursive parameters of both textual practices. In this autobiographical sense, autoethnography is characterized by “open[ing] up a space of resistance between the individual (auto) and the collective (-ethno-) where the writing (-graphy) of resistance cannot be fore-closed” (108). As autobiographies, diasporic narratives of return open an internal dialogue with the groups or collectives to which the

autobiographical subject belongs. Since the selves in these works must come to terms with the ways in which history has affected a community, these narratives call attention to the impossibility of talking about the experience of the returning self in exclusively individualistic terms. In the introduction to Memory, Narrative, and Identity (1994), Amritjit Singh contends that collective memory is not an entity in and of itself, but a function of several discourses that converge in individuals and conform their belonging to a group. The memory of the past conforms a mythology of the everyday that enables the narration of identity; polyphonic narration transmits the message of several voices that are part of experience; the dead occupy the same space as the living in the text, which demonstrates the extent to which the narrative subject is trapped in and by the past (Singh 1994, 16–17). As autoethnographies, memoirs of return validate individual and collective memories as “real facts” that are more relevant for the self and the community than historical accounts of objective facts. Memory and testimony are ways of recovering “emotional residues” left by history upon individuals. As Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz observes in his essay about Doan Hòang’s Oh Saigon in this volume, collective memories produce “multiple histories, selves, and communities.” Diasporic narratives of return are, in the words of Michael J. Fischer (1986), “an art of memory” conferring protection before the homogenizing tendencies of modern cultural industry and against the forgetting imposed by official histories that reinforce cultural and political colonization, expropriation, and the separation between communities of the same origin. The reader is provided with a narrative of encounters, reflections, and memories that occurred upon return and that display the effects upon individuals of the colonial or neocolonial connections between the United States and other places and in turn put forward alternative visions of local histories within global contexts. Since memoirs of return involve separation from a usual environment or “adopted home” to travel to the “distant home” the authors or their families were ripped away from, they fit within the genre of travel writing but do so with the difference that autoethnography confers upon them. This difference causes them to resist and break down the boundaries of the generic codes of travel writing that Debbie Lisle (2006, 263–65) deems necessary for the transformation of the genre. As displaced, exiled, or distant members of a culture affected by empire and colonization, American writers narrating

return may be viewed as travelers who cannot by any means act as “unreconstructed anthropologists” observing and documenting cultures “in the queue of history” (240). The writing subject is not one whose vantage point is “protected” and distant from those s/he observes, but one whose position as writer/narrator is marked and affected by other subjects, spaces, and times (240).8 In these narratives, the space and the time of the colonizer and the colonized interact through an interrogation of the epistemological position of the traveler/narrator, who deliberately engages with otherness and navigates through dominant and dominated consciousnesses and discourses as they manifest themselves in the inner realm of the personal and the outer realm of politics, history, economics, and culture. Unlike other forms of travel writing that claim objective, truthful representation, narratives of return present ambivalent, self-reflexive narrators who become vulnerable in the face of otherness. Narrators such as those in Doan Hòang’s and Ruth Behar’s works are shown to be socially, historically, and culturally self-reflexive through the incorporation of the voices and memories of others that unsettle the self-indulgence and “authorian sureness” that is characteristic of contemporary Western metropolitan travelers (271). The memoirs dealt with in this volume address the notion that all subjects are “constituted in a context of mobility” and, in consequence, all of them foreground the idea of foreignness as a condition that involves questioning perspectives, views of reality, and certainties taken for granted (271). These memoirs of return fit perfectly well into the kind of ethical travel writing that shows the perpetual mobility of the subject “through reflexive subjectsin-formation who recognise the foreignness in themselves just as much they recognise it in others” (271). Precisely because of an implied awareness of mobility as constitutive of the subject and because they inscribe a diasporic, differential consciousness shaped by displacement and colonization, narratives of return can articulate an “ethics of alterity” (Clark 1999, 4) or “ethics of otherness” (Lisle 2006, 260) and engage deliberately with selfother dynamics.

THE ETHICS OF ENYORANÇA

In Spanish añoranza comes from the verb añorar (to feel nostalgia), which comes from the Catalan enyorar, itself derived from the Latin word ignorare (to be unaware of, not know, not experience; to lack or miss). In that etymological light nostalgia seems something like the pain of ignorance, of not knowing. You are far away, and I don’t know what has become of you. My country is far away, and I don’t know what is happening there. (Milan Kundera, Ignorance 6) The narration of return is related to the conflicting relationship with others, be they parents or family from an earlier generation who suffered the immediate consequences of exile or migration, relatives left behind, the deceased and their forgotten culture and history, or the living but now distant members of a supposedly common cultural community. Return involves intersubjective relations and, in consequence, is not only a return home but also a journey to ethical and political concerns that have to do with political justice, (self-)imposed silence, and the pain of rootlessness. Memories are retrieved to illuminate and transform one’s understanding of the present and the past, which often involves dealing with one’s own pain and the pain of others. Likewise, the retrieval of memories may make one feel closer to others in the face of loss, nostalgia, and homelessness. The essays by Simal, Arapoglou, Karim, and Cantú in this volume understand nostalgia, yearning, and longing as “productive”, “transformative”, “reflective”, and healing rather than paralyzing or hindering. Thus, ignorance of what is/was happening in the place of origin turns nostalgia into an emotion that triggers an ethical concern for and a sense of answerability to others. In Tamas Dobozy’s essay about Stuart Dybek, nostalgia is dealt with less as “a state of being” than as “a certain understanding of being” so that returning to the past revitalizes an understanding of identity as an “ethical position” of “openness” and responsiveness to “otherness”. The treatment of nostalgia in literature about return may be looked at in the light of John J. Su’s reflections about yearning and longing in Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (2005). Su challenges commonplace assumptions about nostalgia as the longing for an idealized past and shows the significance of a different understanding of nostalgia for the interpretation of several (post)colonial and American literatures. The narrative reconstruction of the past is, for Su, a way to inquire into ethical ideals “in the face of disappointing circumstances” (4). Su’s understanding

of ethics does not contemplate a philosophical tradition concerned with consensual codes of behavior or representations of virtue, but rather understands ethics as “interactive encounters with individuals” that are always subject to redefinition and negotiation (12). From this concept of ethics there emerges the idea that the understanding of the needs of others is always “person-specific and cannot be universalized” (12). Nostalgia, then, offers the possibility of revisiting a place through the imagination in order to escape and resist an unbearable present of colonial violence, the possibility of recreating a place and a past one never visited that will substitute for non-existent personal and collective memories, as well as the possibility of speculating on historical alternatives. The ethical dimension of nostalgia lies in the chance to reconnect with community and place through storytelling. Most importantly, in the case of national trauma, Su sees the ethical potential of nostalgia when it is used to evoke historical moments that never happened but could have happened. Rather than remaining trapped in the paralysis of traumatic histories, nostalgia enables writers to imagine the past, the present, and the future in alternative terms that cannot be envisioned beyond literature: “Nostalgic longings enable characters to articulate in clear and powerful terms the disappointment that the narratives containing them cannot resolve. Indeed literature haunts readers with precisely those promises that it cannot itself keep” (Su 2005, 179).

THE TRANSNATIONAL SCOPE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE ABOUT RETURN By understanding American literature about return as an important agent in building up a transnational perspective on American literature, each piece in this compilation approaches this literature as resulting from local, personal knowledge and experience, as well as being shaped by relations and possibilities that take place in a global context. In line with anthropologist Jonathan Friedman’s (2002) views, contributors in this volume avoid a systemic approach to globalization, diaspora, or transnationalism where these phenomena are “behaviors” or “attitudes” opposed to the notion of culture as distinct, closed, and bounded. Indeed, as Friedman puts it, “the fact that people occupying a particular place and living and constructing a particular world are in their entirety integrated into a larger system of

relationships does not contradict the fact that they make their world where they are and with the people that are part of their local lives” (31). Since all the essays focus on the ways in which displaced subjects oftentimes move uneasily and painfully between places, representations, and unfamiliar or forgotten cultures and histories, they cannot offer a cheerful approach to transnationalism. For the authors of the contributions in this volume, terms such as “hybrid,” “transnational,” “diasporic,” and “border consciousness” are applied to describe genuine concerns of writers describing people attempting to find ways to belong in a borrowed country, to connect back to the old one, and dealing with eviction from families and national communities. If we frame these narratives within the current debates on the institutionalized “national character” of a literature and within Homi Bhabha’s 1994 assertion that “the very concepts of homogeneous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions or ‘organic’ ethnic communities … are in a profound process of redefinition” (4), then we can consider the works analyzed here to exist as part of several literary systems. The stories narrated do not happen in US territory but elsewhere, and, even though they are written in English, the experiences recounted may have taken place in languages other than English, as their writers oftentimes make a point of asserting. Besides, the cultural and literary baggage of each writer is, in itself, a consequence of exile and migration, which precludes us from establishing the usual one-toone correspondence between culture, literature, and national community. We should also consider that the translation or self-translation of the work of authors such as Junot Díaz, Edwidge Danticat, Doan Hòang, and Norma E. Cantú into the languages of their places of origin (besides often other languages) makes these works transnational in scope, which, as Rebecca Walkowitz (2006, 528) states in a special issue of Contemporary Literature, causes them to exist now in several literary systems through several practices of circulation. Danticat’s work in particular is studied in relation to both US English-speaking “eth-nic” writers and to French-speaking writers still based in Haiti.9 Paul Lauter’s concern about the future of American literature as a viable category of classification, analysis, or study in the “Introduction” to A Companion to American Literature and Culture may sound premature to most of us, but we should not at all dismiss his contention that “what is being written (performed, composed, filmed) in the

United States might most usefully be approached less in terms of its connections to nineteenth- and twentieth-century US texts and more in terms of its connections to Latin-American, Asian, European, and African phenomena” (2010, 4). A distinction must be established, however, between recent American narratives of return and (post)colonial narratives of return. The two narratives expose the historical conditions of their production and a sense of crisis towards both the culture of origin and the adopted culture, but transnational texts about return by ethnic American writers place the nation and the sense of community in the diaspora differently from texts by (post) colonial writers. As Jopi Nyman has already detected in his study Home, Identity, and Mobility, (post)colonial literature builds “political diasporic communities” (Nyman 2009, 231). This has oftentimes resulted in writers’ dealing with physical return as “irrelevant,” as is the case of some (post) colonial Caribbean writers (Mihailovich-Dickman 1994, xi–x). In contrast, Nyman states, US ethnic writers are more concerned with expanding the geographical imaginary of identification (2009, 231). This collection corroborates Nyman’s point and further inquires into it by exploring how recent narratives of return are more concerned with understanding processes of identity construction and intercultural relations than with narratives of communal, national identification, and bonding, or with alternatives to the heritage of global coloniality. Transnational networks and connections between displaced peoples are often implied by ethnic American writers (as testified by the essays by Kaussen, Cantú, Davis, and Vaquera-Vásquez), but, overall, American diasporic narratives of return emphasize the ethnic American subject’s opening up of imaginary geographies, as well as a resistance to assimilation to the still very powerful hold of the American nation-state and its corresponding imaginary constructs. It is beyond the purposes of this introduction to dwell upon the reasons behind the substantial difference between (post)colonial narratives of return and American narratives of return, but the historical circumstances behind the development of (post)colonial literature and literature by ethnic American writers provide us with a plausible explanation. While (post)colonial authors often have or may have had a sustained relationship with the communities in their former colonized and now independent

nations, US writers have only more recently begun to look towards their country of origin and consider the idea of return. The trauma of war and a long process of reconciliation in the case of Vietnam, as well as geopolitical tensions between the US and Cuba, Iran, and Haiti may have impaired return. Return begins to be an issue when the idea of American identity is problematized not only on the streets and in legal institutions during and after the Civil Rights Movement, but also from the ranks of academia. At the beginning of a new millennium, second and third generations of migrants and exiles are looking back to their place of origin with a desire to understand and perhaps even reinterpret or revise the past and the ways they have imagined or constructed their lost homelands. Hence, the narrow focus of the volume on narratives published in the last ten to twenty years. In Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature, texts about return are discussed as bringing ethical issues to the fore either through intersubjective or the subject’s own personal confrontation with the values of different places and communities (ethoi). The three sections that the book is divided into group the ethical and the psychological impact of return together, in very rough lines and for the purposes of thematic organization, around three different realms of experience related to place: the reconstruction of memory, emotional restoration through nostalgia, and the impossibility of return. Although this classification responds to some of the aspects highlighted by contributors in their essays, most of the pieces could very well fit into two or all three of the sections: Nostalgia is also present in those essays that deal with the reconstruction of historical memory. And those pieces dealing with nostalgia as restorative of family affect also engage with changing history although sometimes “without [necessarily] claiming to depict historical reality” (Su 2005, 66). Likewise, those essays focusing on the impossibility of return also engage with issues of history, family memory, affect, and nostalgia. Essays in the first section, “Return as Memory Reconstructed,” deal with the importance of unearthing individual, family, and collective memories not only for the recovery of a cultural heritage but also for dealing with the effects of a history of imperialistic intervention and political oppression (Kaussen), diaspora (Davis), and war trauma (Ibarrola-Armendariz). Valerie Kaussen’s “Migration, Exclusion, and ‘Home’ in Edwidge Danticat’s Narratives of Return” explores the ways in which, for Haitian-American

writer Edwidge Danticat, the narrative of return becomes a process through which subjects, unmade by histories of structural and political violence, seek to repair themselves and reclaim scattered parts of the self. Paradoxically, it is often the process of speaking their traumas that allow the exiled to imagine home and their return. “Between Home and Loss: Inscribing Return in Ruth Behar’s An Island Called Home,” by Rocío G. Davis, examines Behar’s memoir of her journey to the country and people her family left behind and deals with the stories of survival of Jews in Cuba through the lens of Behar’s struggle with her Jewish identity, her exile from the land of her birth, and her ambivalent feelings regarding CubanAmerican political issues, her class privilege, and her position as a “tourist” or “anthropologist.” In “Nightmares from My Parents: Return as Recovery in Doan Hòang’s Oh, Saigon,” Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz deals with the ways in which Oh, Saigon (2007), a documentary by Vietnamese-American writer and filmmaker Doan Hòang, both challenges the biased and incomplete rendition of the Vietnam War throughout the second half of the twentieth century and shows her family’s need for emotional recovery. Besides being looked upon as a possible instance of diasporic rewriting of her country’s and family’s troubled history, the documentary is analyzed as bringing out her family’s emotional recovery. Doan Hòang herself has collaborated with a coda to complement Ibarrola-Armendariz’s academic perspective on her work. Contributions in the section “Restorative Nostalgias: Return as Emotional Re-Attachment” actively engage with various theoretical understandings of nostalgia and apply them to the works at issue. When nostalgia turns into “discrepant cosmopolitanism” (Simal González), a contestation of the prevalent imaginaries (Karim), or the reconstruction of history in personal terms, it proves to be “restorative” (Arapoglou) and enables the individual to reconnect with the home culture and heritage. Begoña Simal González’s “Andrew Lam’s Narratives of Return: From Viet Kieu Nostalgia to Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms,” deals with Lam’s narratives, most notably his collection of essays Perfume Dreams (2005). Simal González shows the ways in which Lam’s filmed and written narratives of return try to clarify the implications of the roots/routes paradox of a diasporic consciousness and traces the narrator’s development and his eventual self-figuration as a cosmopolitan traveler, a position Simal González defines with the terms “flexible citizenship” and “discrepant

cosmopolitanism.” Persis Karim’s work, “Returning Home: IranianAmerican Women’s Memoirs and Reflective Nostalgia,” investigates the ways in which Iranian-American female memoirists of the last decade have reconfigured the space of home in the “in-between” of the cultures of Iran and the United States. In To See and See Again, one of the first memoirs of the post-1979 period, Tara Bahrampour (1999) considers what has been lost in her migration to the United States after the tumultuous events of the Iranian revolution. Similarly, Azadeh Moaveni (2005), whose birth and upbringing in the United States is overshadowed by the difficult and nostalgic memories of her exilic parents, traces her mission first as a journalist and then as a writer to represent and undercut representations of Iran that have saturated the imagination of her American counterparts. Eleftheria Arapoglou’s “Enacting an Identity by Re-Creating a Home: Eleni Gage’s North of Ithaka” is grounded on the premise that the function of the author’s geographical imagination is crucial to understanding the generative role “home” has in the formation of the autobiographical narrator’s cultural identity. The family house is a record of Eleni’s ethnic history that functions both as a node of association that facilitates her personal identification process and as a site of memory that establishes the continuity of her collective identity and her role as a cultural mediator and translator. Norma E. Cantú’s testimonial, poetic, and academic piece, “El vaivén de la vida: Musings on Deterritorialized Border Subjects,” relies on the writings of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1987, 2005) and Emma Pérez (1991, 1999) to uncover these writers’ main concerns in narrating departure from and return to the homeland. Cantú points at the central themes in this movement back and forth and argues that the nepantla, or in-between state, created by the “home,” signified in cultural artifacts and celebrations, becomes the site of both añoranza and completion, the place to go back to, if not geographically at least in spirit. The last section of the volume, “Impossible Returns,” borrows the phrase from Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez’s essay, which, like Ada Ortuzar-Young’s and Tamas Dobozy’s, addresses the effects of historical processes of deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and transculturality upon social geographies and subjects. Always in between spaces and cultures that are mutually influencing and changing each other, subjects in the works dealt with here are defined as open, always from elsewhere, and in a process of constant transformation, not fully belonging to their places of origin, nor to

the new culture that fails to understand them. Ada Ortuzar-Young’s “Cuban Geographies: The Roots/Routes of Ana Menéndez Narratives” explores the notion of return hand in hand with the complexity of passing cultural values on to the next generations. While Menéndez’s characters always return to their roots after having traveled many “routes,” they feel “disembedded” from their social systems and have created transnational geographies that reveal concrete and imagined spatial community practices of survival. Notions of homeland and belonging are marked by generational experiences, conflicting allegiances, and the fact that ethnicity may have an expiration date. Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez also explores the notion of always belonging elsewhere in “‘The Inextinguishable Longings for Elsewheres’: The Impossibility of Return in Junot Díaz.” His reading of return in Junot Díaz’s “Yunior” trilogy, Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and This Is How You Lose Her, examines the enabling condition of storytelling in Díaz’s narratives to see how it creates a space— a ground—upon which to understand the cultural consequences of migration, its forms of departure, and its forms of return. While departure is a concern in Díaz’s narrative, return, or a definitive return, is not; for departures in his stories often imply an uneasy return. And this is so because the arrival, also implied in departure, is an uneasy one. VaqueraVásquez also argues that in Díaz’s fiction the act of telling (and reading) overcomes the narrative that would be imposed upon this Latino/a community as one that does not belong. In the last essay of the collection, “Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek’s Short Stories,” Tamas Dobozy deals with an underrepresented aspect of contemporary ethnic narratives of return: the “return” of second-generation immigrants to ethnic neighborhoods that once served as liminal spaces between the “old country” and the US but which have, in the years since, become either ethnically undifferentiated or destroyed by the effects of globalization, urban blight, and civic policy. Returning to and recalling the quasiutopian space of Chicago’s South Side, his protagonists recall not so much a lost sense of ethnic origins, but, on the contrary, a time when selfhood was conceived outside the absolute binary of strict ethnic affiliation, when it was possible to experience selfhood as “trans-ethnic,” a site of multiple identifications, of openness to various forms of belonging, which in turn helped sustain community.

Taken together, these essays show that by confronting other places, values, and versions of history, the ethnic subject may call into question certain paradigms, histories, and expectations about the place of origin. Real or imagined journeys of return enable going not only physically beyond the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state, but also spiritually beyond its imaginary boundaries. It is through the relation to others upon return that the characters and autobiographical subjects in these texts rescue hidden histories, imagine alternative pasts, attempt to reconcile people at odds with each other, appease feelings of guilt, reinvent American identities based on space and origin, and call into question preexisting ideas about other places, peoples, and historical episodes.

NOTES 1. The title of this introduction uses the binary “roots and routes” made popular by James Clifford in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997). Clifford looks at how both the attachment to place and mobility, and their related meanings and interpretations, intertwine in the understanding of culture in global times. 2. Here I am adopting a very open definition of diasporic communities in keeping with that offered by William Safran (1991) in the first issue of Diaspora and with James Clifford’s supplementary comments. Safran defines them as “expatriate minority communities” (1) that have been dispersed from an original “center”; (2) that retain a collective memory, vision, or myth about their homeland; (3) that feel themselves not fully accepted by their host society; (4) that consider their homeland to be a place to return to eventually; (5) that have the will to commit to the maintenance and restoration of their homeland; and (6) whose relationship with the homeland helps consolidate their consciousness and solidarity (Safran 1991, 83–84). I am also considering, with Clifford, that the diasporic experience involves recreating a culture in different locations, and that there is not an “ideal type” of diaspora, but rather societies which engage in diaspora to greater or lesser degrees at different times in history and depending on the possibilities in the country that has hosted them (Clifford 1997, 249). 3. Immigration legislation became more liberal in 1965 during the Cold War, and immigration hit its peak in the 1980s. 4. In Globalization and Culture John Tomlinson (1999) brings culture to the foreground of the debate about globalization and speaks of “deterritorialization” to refer to the breakdown of the relationship between culture and geographic location and to describe the changing relationship between the ways in which people experience culture while they continue to understand themselves as local. A complex connectivity of various kinds (social and institutional relations across space, transport, technology, flow of goods, and people) results in the transformation the local realm in such a way that it is increasingly difficult to have a sense of local identity, including national identity. 5. Walter Mignolo talks about “coloniality” and the “coloniality of power” in his Historias Locales/Diseños Globales ([2000] 2003), first published in English as Local Histories/Global Designs (2000). The term coloniality involves an understanding of colonial domination as permanent and still present in the modern capitalist world-system even after the end of colonial

administrations. The coloniality of power refers to the ways in which peripheral locations are structurally articulated in the international division of labor within a global racial/ethnic hierarchy. Within this hierarchy, poor, Third World migrants occupy the periphery of metropolitan, global cities, which may also be identified with the areas Valerie Kaussen terms “the Fourth World” in her essay in this volume. Mignolo argues that even if they are no longer under a colonial administration, peripheral zones and peoples live today under the regime of global coloniality imposed by such global institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Pentagon, and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. 6. Chela Sandoval (2000, 105) explains the origins of “oppositional consciousness” as follows: “Under conditions of colonization, poverty, racism, gender or sexual subordination, dominated populations are often held away from the comforts of dominant ideology or ripped out of legitimized social narratives, in a process of power that places such constituencies in a very different position from which to view objects-in-reality than other kinds of citizen subjects” (2000, 105). 7. In this essay I have used Socorro Tabuenca’s (1996) spelling “(post)colonial” to distinguish it from “post-colonial,” a term that for some may imply that the struggle of former colonies is over. 8. In this case I have preferred to emphasize interaction and to use the verbs “marked” and “affected” rather than the more negative “contaminated,” which is the verb Lisle appropriately uses in the case of Western travel writers. 9. Valerie Kaussen, the author of the essay on Edwidge Danticat in this volume, is affiliated with a French Department, and Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez, contributing to this volume with a piece on Junot Díaz, is affiliated with a Spanish Department, which testifies to the fact that the institutional boundaries of the study of “American Literature” have already opened up to departments other than American Studies and English.

REFERENCES Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2005. “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—la sombra y el sueño.” In One Wound for Another/Una herida por otra: Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. through Cyberspace (11 de septiembre de 2001–11 de marzo de 2002), edited by Claire Joysmith and Clara Lomas, 92–103. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México-CISAN / Colorado College / Whittier. Bahrampour, Tara. 1999. To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Castillo, Ana. (1986) 1992. The Mixquiahuala Letters. Binghamton, NY: Bilingual Press / Editorial Bilingüe. 2nd ed., New York: Doubleday. Clark, Steve H. 1999. “Introduction.” In Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, edited by Steve H. Clark, 1–28. London: Zed Books. Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–22. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Coles, Tim, and Dallen J. Timothy. 2004. Tourism, Diasporas and Space. London: Routledge. Colón, Jesús. 1982. A Puerto Rican in New York and Other Sketches. New York: International Publishers. Elizondo Griest, Stephanie. 2008. Mexican Enough: My Life between the Border-lines. New York: Washington Square Press. Fischer, Michael J. 1986. “Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 194–233. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedman, Jonathan. 2002. “From Roots to Routes: Tropes for Trippers.” Anthropological Theory 2 (1): 21–36. Garcia, Cristina. 1992. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine. Gladsky, Thomas S. 1992. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. González, Ray. 2002. The Underground Heart: A Return to a Hidden Landscape. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Hall, Stuart. 1990. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” In Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, 222–37. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Hijuelos, Oscar. 1990. The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. London: Penguin. Hòang, Doan, dir. 2007. Oh, Saigon: A War in the Family. Nuoc Films. Iglesias, César Andreu, ed. 1984. Memoirs of Bernardo Vega. New York: Monthly Review Press. Kincaid, Jamaica. 1991. Lucy. London: Jonathan Cape. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 1977. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. New York: Vintage Books. Kundera, Milan. 2000. Ignorance. New York: Harper Collins. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2003. The Namesake. Orlando, FL: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lauter, Paul. 1991. “Canon Theory and Emergent Practice.” In Canons and Contexts, edited by Paul Lauter, 154–72. New York: Oxford University Press. Lauter, Paul. 2010. “Introduction.” In A Companion to American Literature and Culture, 1–5. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Lionnet, Françoise. 1991. Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lionnet, Françoise. 1995. Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.

Lisle, Debbie. 2006. The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marshall, Paule. (1959) 1986. Brown Girl, Brownstones. New York: Chatham Bookseller. New York: Feminist Press at CUNY. Mignolo, Walter. (2000) 2003. Historias locales, diseños globales: Colonialidad, conocimientos subalternos y pensamiento fronterizo. Translated by Cristina Vega Solís and Juan María López de Sa. Madrid: Akal. Mihailovich-Dickman, Vera. 1994. “Introduction.” In “Return” in Post-Colonial Writing: A Cultural Labyrinth, edited by Vera Mihailovich-Dickman, ix–xv. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Moaveni, Azadeh. 2005. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: Public Affairs. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2006. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nyman, Jopi. 2009. Home, Identity, and Mobility in Contemporary Diasporic Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pérez, Emma. 1991. “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor.” In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, edited by Carla Trujillo, 150–84. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theo-ries of Representation and Difference). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. 1995. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, against Margins. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pérez-Torres, Rafael. 2000. “Ethnicity, Ethics, and Latino Aesthetics.” Journal of American Literary History 12 (3): 534–53. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quintana, Alvina E. 1991. “Ana Castillo’s The Mixquiahuala Letters: The Novel-ist as Ethnographer.” In Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Lit-erature, Culture, and Ideology, edited by Héctor Calderón and José D. Saldívar, 72–83. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited. Roth, Henry. (1934) 2005. Call It Sleep. Reprint, London: Picador. Rutherford, Jonathan. 1990. Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1 (1): 83–99. Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Singh, Amritjit. 1994. “Introduction.” In Memory, Narrative, and Identity: New Essays in Ethnic American Literatures, edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Sker-rett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogan, 3– 25. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Sollors, Werner. 1986. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Cul-ture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Su, John J. 2005. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tabuenca, Socorro. 1996. “Viewing the Border: Perspectives from the Open Wound.” Discourse 18 (1–2): 146–68. Tally, Robert T. 2007. “The Poetics of Descent: Irreversible Narrative in Poe’s ‘MS. Found in a Bottle.’” In Studies in Irreversibility: Texts and Contexts, edited by Benjamin Schreier, 83–98. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Cambridge: Polity Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2007. Coming Home to China. Minneapolis: University of Minne-sota Press. Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2006. “The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer.” In “Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization,” special issue, Contemporary Literature 47 (4): 527–45.

 

Part I

Return as Memory Reconstructed

 

1

Migration, Exclusion, and “Home” in Edwidge Danticat’s Narratives of Return Valerie Kaussen

    Edwidge Danticat’s novels, short stories, essays, and memoires represent the Haitian experience of immigration and exile with almost ethnographic precision. A Haitian American born in Haiti, Danticat writes stories of immigrants, exiles, and their children that inevitably meditate upon the meaning of home and homeland as both a psychic and geographic process which entails the crossing of borders that are at once legal, emotional, ideological, and cultural. The context of Danticat’s stories of Haitian immigration is often the violent geopolitics of Haitian-US relations, the long history of invasions, occupations, economic exploitation, puppet governments, and support of murderous dictators.1 The neocolonialism of Haiti’s relationship with the United States indeed explains why so many Haitians have chosen in the first place to make the journey from their island birthplace to the urban centers of the United States: New York, Boston, and Miami. In this article, though, I will focus on a particular type of migrant, one that I term the “ghostly migrant,” who populates so much of Danticat’s fiction. Deportees, illegal aliens, boat people, perpetrators, and victims of political violence, their stories, as Danticat shows, demonstrate most vividly how the violent relationship between the United States and Haiti is internalized as personal, subjective history.2 It is that very violence, both

structural and political, that turns the migrant subject into a ghost, who searches for home, often in vain. In addition to the ideological, cultural, and linguistic borders that all migrants must negotiate as they move back and forth between the homeland and the adopted home, Danticat’s “ghosts,” while remaining “invisible,” must also cross and re-cross borders that are policed by coast guards, border patrols, and other institutions of surveillance. Psychic and material violence for these wandering ghosts, then, is ongoing. As she shows, the Haitian migrant’s exclusion from “home,” from security and legitimacy, is repeatedly renewed, reproduced and reinforced by technologies of power that are both external and internalized. For the Haitian migrant subject, having a place to call “home,” then, is a sign of social status and legitimacy, inseparable from legal forms of recognition and the right to belong to a nation, a society, a people. The ghostly migrant’s loss and exclusion can be explained as the condition that Orlando Patterson has described as the loss of personhood, or “social death.” In a groundbreaking study on the world history of slavery, Patterson writes an ontology of the enslaved. He argues that the slave is a “socially dead person” because s/he is “alienated from all ‘rights’ or claims of birth” (1985, 7). The slave’s relationship to the master is one of submission, which requires that the slave lose personal status, future aspirations, and communal ties. The slave is thus a “genealogical isolate” (Patterson 1985). In addition to being denied the legitimacy or belonging bestowed through filiation or connections to past and future generations, the slave is also excluded from the institutions that grant rights, personal legitimacy, or official recognition of subjectivity. We can indeed read Haitian history though the category of the slave’s social death, if we apply “social death” metaphorically to refer to the exclusion of whole populations, states, and regions. The nation of Haiti was founded in 1804 on the ashes of the French colony of St. Domingue following the only successful slave revolt in world history. A major blow to both the French colonial project in the Americas and the global slave trade more generally, this example of a population demanding its right to nationhood and freedom did not entail the integration of Haiti as a member of the world community. The United States and Europe, especially France, were slow to grant diplomatic recognition, erecting around the island nation

what Sybille Fischer (2004) has termed a “cordon sanitaire,” as the example of a successful slave revolt and black nation-building threatened existing systems of racialized inequality, including chattel slavery. Diplomatic isolation of this “pariah nation” did not prevent the world powers from exploiting Haiti economically and commercially, resulting in a country that never fully recovered from the destruction wrought by the protracted revolution and war of independence.3 Furthermore, while St. Domingue’s slaves liberated themselves, the colonial organization of social life and capital persisted post-independence: the class of affranchies (free people of color) as well as military leaders took over the plantations and the government. Early leaders made hard labor in the fields mandatory and militarized the labor process. By the midnineteenth century, they permitted the former slaves and their descendants, the majority of the population, to settle into a system of subsistence farming. Nonetheless, the Haitian peasants never escaped the social death of their enslaved ancestors. Separated from the urban elite by religion (vodou / Catholicism), language (Kreyòl / French), and culture (Africanderived / European), for most of its history the peasant majority has existed in a state of quasi-apartheid; required to carry identity papers stamped with their status as “peasants,” a condition of exclusion that was inherited and perpetual, they were excluded from education, legal rights, and other benefits of citizenship. The peasantry’s social death was the condition that allowed the Haitian elite to exploit their productivity, and that elite was, in turn, exploited by the international community, whose trade with Haiti was based on highly unequal terms. With the end of the Spanish-American war, the United States’ long-standing economic exploitation of Haiti culminated in a fullfledged military occupation that lasted for nineteen years (1915–34) and that initiated intimate US involvement in Haitian political and economic affairs. During the Cold War, the United States supported the murderous Duvalier dictatorship—François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and later his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”)—as a bulwark against Cuba, despite the dictatorship’s killing and torture of thousands through its private militia known as the ton-tons macoutes. Haitian history, though, is also a history of resistance, and resistance to the Duvaliers was ongoing. A democratic movement, which gained ground through grassroots organizations and

church groups during the late seventies and early eighties, finally succeeded in toppling Baby Doc in 1986. A series of military dictatorships followed until 1990, when Haiti finally had its first fair and open election, bringing Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the National Palace. What was heralded as a new day in Haiti’s history was short-lived, however: deposed in a military coup nine months after taking office, Aristide went into exile for three years, during which time thousands were killed and tortured under the coup leadership, some of whom were trained by the US military. Aristide was reelected in 2000, deposed again in 2004 by US-backed insurrectionists and members of the army that he had disbanded. Aristide’s supporters were brutally hunted down and killed during the interim government of Gérard Latortue. With the presidency of René Préval beginning in 2006, Haiti settled into some kind of tentative stability, one tragically broken in January of 2010 by the devastating earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince and took the lives of at least 250,000 people. The country is only now beginning to recover. Indeed, the category of social death has continuing relevance in contemporary Haiti, a post-plantation society that is still enmeshed in global “relations of domination” that deny personhood. To supplement Patterson, we can understand the condition of social death in the contemporary global economy through Manuel Castells’ analysis of what he terms the “network society” and the creation of the Fourth World. Castells offers a spatial model of global capitalism in which global “networks of capital, labor, information, and markets [are] linked up through technology, valuable functions, people, and localities around the world” (2000, 368). What I have termed “social death” is defined by Castells in terms of populations and regions that are “socially excluded” from these networks and thus “deprived of value and interest for the dynamics of global capitalism” (Castells 2000). The “Fourth World” is not restricted to areas like sub-Saharan Africa and much of Latin America and the Caribbean, where the socially excluded represent the majority of the population; we also find the Fourth World, according to Castells, in the ghettoized neighborhoods of US inner cities, the banlieues and the enclaves of jobless youth in European capitals, and the shantytowns of Asia’s prosperous cities (168). On the individual level, social exclusion is defined by Castells as a “process,” in which, for a variety of reasons—including mental illness, homelessness, physical disability, illiteracy, etc.—people are unable to work or support their lives. With his

language echoing that of Patterson’s, Castells writes that all of these factors can “send … a person (and his or her family very often) drifting toward the outer regions of society, inhabited by the wreckage of failed humanity” (72). On a spatial level, according to Castells, territories become “locked in” to marginality through a variety of causes, such as oppressive dictatorships, the decision of police forces to abandon neighborhoods to drug traffickers, devaluation of the agricultural products of a particular area, etc. (167). Again evoking the language of social death, Castells terms these outer regions of the world economy “black holes,” which he describes as populated by millions of “homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalized, brutalized, stigmatized, sick and illiterate persons” (168), whose numbers grow as informational capitalism continues to develop and concentrate value in particular zones. Castells’ model of the uneven distribution of informational capitalism and thus the creation of the Fourth World’s socially excluded zones replaces the Cold War binary of First and Third World. Indeed, the weakening of nation-states in the post-Cold War era has meant that the traditional forms of democratic representation, citizenship rights, and welfare state benefits, which were unevenly extended in the past to Third World populations, today offer less and less protection to the global poor. In a legal sense then, too, the socially excluded are also the socially dead. My analysis of Danticat’s ghostly migrants assumes that the spaces through which they migrate do not conform to the traditional ideas of bordered nation-states or the First World vs. the Third World. Indeed, if we apply Castells’ definition of global space to the transnational contexts of her work, then the meanings of migration, border crossing, and homeland appear altered. For example, as Danticat shows, when Haitian migrants leave Haiti to settle in the excluded zones of American inner cities, their movement over national borders does not signal a movement to the center. Rather they remain in the Fourth World, carrying their excluded status with them. Similarly, exile can take place within the borders of nation-states like Haiti. This is the case when Haitian subjects cross the heavily policed borders that separate slums, like Cité Soleil and La Saline, from the hillside enclaves above Port-au-Prince, zones connected to the privileged networks of informational capitalism.

While I base my definition of Danticat’s ghostly migrants and the territories through which they travel on Patterson’s and Castells’ analyses of exclusion, these sociological models do not provide terms for analyzing the subjectivity of the migrant ghost, the ways that subjects psychically internalize the structural violence of being marginalized and exiled. Danticat’s work indeed seeks to represent the life worlds of these subjects and the ways that violent exclusion transforms commonly held notions of individual personhood, home, and security. In order to analyze Danticat’s literary representations of the psychic dimensions of social death, migrancy, and violence, i.e., the loss of personhood as a loss of self, we must turn to theories of trauma. Importantly, trauma theories, in describing how trauma is remembered and narrated, emphasize the blurring of borders between life and death, and thus recall the idea of the ghostly.4 In The Body in Pain, an exploration of the ways torture “unmakes” the subject, Elaine Scarry states that “whenever death can be designated as ‘soon’ the dying has already begun” (1985, 33). Thus, the trauma of torture and physical pain is partly that “one experiences the body that will end … life, the body that can be killed” (33). This brush with non-being, according to Scarry, “disintegrates” language just as it “disintegrates” the self (33); in torture, as in social death, the prisoner and his/her language is “discredited,” and “destroyed” (35). For Scarry the imagination has the capacity to “remake” the world of the disintegrated victim of violence. Similarly, Cathy Caruth, focusing more on language and psychic as well as physical trauma, argues that trauma resists language, and in order to comprehend its narration we must maintain the kernel of unknowability. The latter is related to the traumatized subject’s brush with non-being, and thus stories of trauma “oscillate … between a crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (1996, 6–7). While Scarry cites imagination as the vehicle for remaking the traumatized self, Caruth focuses on the intersubjective scene of narrating and listening, which permits a kind of reintegration of the traumatized: “not as the story of the individual in relation to the events of his own past, but as the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another, the way in which trauma may lead, therefore, to the encounter with another” (8). Danticat’s short story “Ghosts” indeed meditates upon trauma as an experience of death-in-life that renders the subject a ghost, homeless and

haunting the excluded terrain of the Fourth World. “Ghosts” tells the story of a family, the Doriens, who live in a “mid-level” slum of Port-au-Prince called Bel-Air. Despite the increasing violence in their neighborhood, the family continues to serve its new clientele of drug-addled gangsters—the “Ghosts” of the title—because the considerable income they receive allows them to pay for school for their sons, Pascal and Jules. At school, the sons have made contacts that “might one day help them get good jobs and marriages. In order for their children to leave one day without ever having to look back, the Doriens had to stay” (Danticat 2008, 1). Danticat shows social exclusion to indeed be what Castells describes as a “process,” and not a “condition;” a process whose “boundaries shift, and … may vary over time, depending on education, demographic characteristics, social prejudices, business practices, and public policies” (Castells 2000, 72). The Doriens are indeed threatened by this “drift” toward exclusion, and the decision to profit from the chimès’ patronage of their restaurant—they had “[taken] over the entire establishment” (Danticat 2008, 1)—is a desperate attempt to keep their own children from falling into the ranks of the excluded, the ghostly. Escaping that fate means migration to a zone that permits social mobility and economic recognition. Jules migrates to North America, while Pascal attempts to enter into the networks of capitalism that are available to a few lucky souls in Port-au-Prince. Jules leaves Bel-Air sooner than he expects, because he is a wanted man. Having taken a job as a policeman (“the government had overturned again and the United Nations had come to train another police force” [1]), Jules is targeted by the gangs, and he has indeed “never looked back.” The term “Ghosts” is the English translation of the Kreyòl word, chimè, the name that the political opposition gave to the poor young militants (some gangsters) that gained media visibility especially following the US military’s 2004 forced removal of Aristide, who was supported by many chimè. Danticat describes the chimè with economy, precision, and great sensitivity to the political contexts of their infamy: The gang members … were, for the most part, former street children who couldn’t remember ever having lived in a house, boys whose parents had died or been murdered during the dictatorship, leaving them alone in a lawless and overpopulated city. Later, these young men were

joined by deportees from the United States and Canada and by some older men from the neighborhood, aspiring-rap-musician types. The older local men were “connected”—that is, ambitious businessmen and politicians used them to swell the ranks of political demonstrations, giving them guns to shoot when a crisis was needed and having them withdraw when calm was required. (1) Danticat shows here that the so-called chimès were “ghosts” long before the media dubbed them as such; they are part of the criminalized populations of the global Fourth World. The title of her short story, then, does not merely refer to these gang members but to the populations of Haitians who are excluded from the benefits of global capitalism, disempowered and marginalized by poverty and political violence. When not working at his parents’ restaurant, Pascal takes computer courses and works part time at a radio station. He dreams of becoming a radio journalist. As he serves one gangster named Tiye (“kill”), Pascal “eavesdrop[s]” and “wish[es] that he had a video camera, or at least a tape recorder. He wanted the rest of the country to know what makes these men cry. They cannot remain chimès to us forever, he thought” (2). Pascal hits upon the idea of producing a radio program called “Ghosts” devoted to humanizing the ghostly chimès by allowing them to speak, to tell the public “what makes them cry.” He imagines that “a kind of sick voyeurism” would make the show popular with the public, but that it would also feature sociologists, psychologists, and urban planners, and would encourage people “to figure out ways to alleviate the problems” (2). The media, to which Pascal wishes to contribute, indeed fuels a popular culture obsessed with trauma. As Thomas Elsaesser writes, contemporary media has “shaped an entire culture of confession and witnessing, of exposure and selfexposure … it has made trauma theory the recto, and therapeutic television … the verso of democracy’s failure to ‘represent’ its citizens’ personal concern in the public sphere” (2001, 196). Through the radio talk show, then, Pascal tries to link ghostly subjects of the ghetto to those “voyeuristic” populations residing in the Port-au-Prince neighborhoods (and elsewhere) connected to global informational networks. He tries to use the media precisely to represent thechimès as citizen-subjects of a single democratic Haitian public sphere, subjects who can rightfully claim Haiti as home. Danticat’s story demonstrates that, within Haiti at least, speaking publicly

about trauma and seeking to claim legitimate subjectivity in the public sphere can have dangerous repercussions. Pascal imagines that his innovative plan will be a way to escape the precipice of social exclusion upon which his life teeters. The tragedy of the story is that the radio program initiates a series of catastrophes, and Pascal is thoroughly punished for this effort to cross the boundaries that mark inclusion and exclusion, the publicized and the hidden, “real life” and “ghost-liness.” He discovers that such borders are not neutral; in fact they are heavily politicized and even policed. The owner of the radio station steals Pascal’s idea, and when Tiye hears the program (“Homme à Homme”) in the restaurant one night, he jokingly vows to avenge his “friend” Pascal. Indeed, he and his men attack the station and kill a guard. Captured by the police, Tiye names Pascal as the mastermind behind the criminal raid, and Pascal is pulled out of his bed in the middle of the night, arrested, and then paraded in front of TV cameras, as a journalist “in a shrill voice” lists his crimes. Danticat describes his torture in terms that evoke waterboarding. Along with torture, which as Elaine Scarry has argued, serves to “unmake” the self, Pascal’s social death is intensified by the media’s gaze, by the very culture to which he hoped to gain access and which he believed could grant him legitimate subjecthood. Instead, that culture of “exposure and self-exposure” further “unmakes” his subjectivity by consuming him as spectacle in collusion with a state apparatus that dehumanizes and denies subjectivity. He is himself rendered ghostly, a mute object that haunts the media airwaves: “He was simply forced to stand there like a menacing prop, surrounded by the still hooded special-forces team” (3). Eventually, Tiye is freed and he pulls strings to also have Pascal freed, blackmailing the police with information about their drug dealings and threatening to reveal the information to a Miami Herald reporter. Jules has also tried to get Pascal released by working his connections with the police and judicial system, whom he is advised to bribe. He opines that Pascal’s arrest is like “a kidnapping.” Danticat’s story shows that the police and the media, some of whom were trained by the United States and the United Nations, are no different from the gangsters, though they possess the veneer of legitimacy. Pascal’s attempt to give “voice” to the chimès, to recognize them as subjects of their society, of their homeland, threatens to expose the

fictitiousness of official legitimacy: that of the police, the government, and the global military complex of which they form a part. Bel-Air, Pascal’s home, is overtaken by gangs, but they are only the face of a much larger invading force, the corrupt political and economic institutions that no longer even pretend to represent their citizens but instead violently destroy their homes and their security. Reinforcing the fact that Pascal has already lost his “home,” his return from prison is violent, as the police dump his bruised and traumatized body on the sidewalk in front of his parents’ restaurant. Pascal returns home transformed: he is now a member of the shadowy crew that will be used and discarded by the internationally sanctioned local political and media machine. While Jules tries to figure out how to get his parents out of Portau-Prince, stating that “home is not always a place that you have trouble leaving” (5), there is no discussion of getting Pascal out. He has fallen too far, and escape from poverty, criminalization, and violent death is now impossible. His home is no longer his home, and his life, in the hands of the gangsters, is no longer his own but a “conditional commutation,” to quote Patterson. Pascal and his family, with shaky hands and forced smiles, greet Tiye and his gang at the restaurant on the night of Pascal’s release. Pascal realizes that he is now one of them: One day, they would all be shot. Like the night guard at Radio Zòrèy, like Tiye’s predecessor, Piye. Like almost every young man who lived in the slums. One day, it might occur to someone, someone angry and powerful, someone obsessive and maniacal—a police chief or a gang leader, a leader of the opposition or a leader of the nation—that they, and all those who lived like them or near them, would be better offdead. (5) Rendered a ghost, socially dead, Pascal loses the desire to fight for recognition; he has no choice but to join Tiye in the shadowy world of those who have nothing more to lose. The short story closes with Pascal realizing that the “ghosts” are not only the chimè but the entire society of the socially excluded, those who are literally and figuratively homeless. The realization comes as he notices that Tiye is not wearing his prosthetic arm:

Pascal looked again at the space where Tiye’s missing arm would have been. He thought he saw something white, as though a polished piece of bone were protruding. He tilted his head to see it better, while trying not to seem obvious. He almost checked his own body to see if anything was gone. In his dreams, Pascal had imagined beginning his radio program with a segment on lost limbs. Not just Tiye’s but other people’s as well.… Then he would go from lost limbs to souls, to the number of people who had lost family—siblings, parents, children—and friends. These were the real ghosts, he would say, the phantom limbs, phantom minds, phantom loves that haunt us, because they were used, then abandoned, because they were desolate, because they were violent, because they were merciless, because they were out of choices, because they did not want to be driven away, because they were poor. (5) In a literal sense, phantom limbs represent the physicality of loss and the materiality of trauma; they exist in the space in between the conscious and unconscious, presence and absence, and remembering and forgetting. The phantom limb is a ghost that haunts the mind and body (the home) of the living, with its uncanny presence. Danticat, though, develops the trope of the phantom limb to refer to the erasure and abandonment of lives, to the living death of Haitian people existing in a state of social death, victims of structural violence, whose stories haunt larger narratives of history and geopolitics. They are like phantom limbs because they are invisible yet present, “ghosts” that refuse to be “driven away” from home but remain, unseen and unrecognized. In “Ghosts,” Danticat meditates upon the complex ways that the invisible, “ghostly,” and socially dead demand their right to a home by engaging in a violent battle for recognition and legitimacy in the global public sphere of mediatized representation. Her most recent collection of essays, Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work (2010), includes an essay that similarly links together voice, media testimony, and the figure of the phantom limb. The episode describes Danticat’s experience meeting Alèrte Bélance, a young mother and timarchard (market woman) who was tortured by a US-trained paramilitary group during the three-year coup that sent Haiti’s first legitimately elected president, Aristide, into exile.

Members of the paramilitary organization known as FRAPH partially cut out her tongue, chopped off an arm, crushed her skull, and severed several fingers. Bélance had been traveling the United States, telling her story so that the Clinton administration would act to put down the coup leaders. Her severed tongue had been sewn “back together again … ‘it healed,’ she said, ‘so I can tell my story, so people can know what happened to me’” (81). As Danticat listens to Bélance, she cannot help but look at the woman’s severed arm, then remember her own brother who was born with a missing forearm. She recalls that her Vodou-and Santeria-practicing friends believed that when babies are born without limbs, it means a twin had died in utero and had put a “visible mark” on the twin that did live. She translates this aphorism into a narrative in which the phantom limb is given a place in the story of home, deciding that her brother’s “missing forearm had dissolved inside my mother, becoming a part of the tissue, and spirit, that had helped create him. Alèrte’s missing forearm had dissolved in a mass grave, becoming part of the country that had helped create her” (75). The phantom limb, here, is a figure for a memory that, though traumatic, must find a home, and Danticat places it in the collective history of Haitian resistance. Importantly, though, the chapter on Bélance, called “I Speak Out,” also describes how Bélance appeared on the Phil Donahue show, part of an activist effort to encourage the Clinton Administration to act against the coup leaders who were torturing and murdering Haitian people. Danticat states somewhat dryly, “Alèrte didn’t get to speak very much on the show because she had to use a translator, which slowed down the process of telling her story. Instead, Phil Donahue held her arm up in the air; her story was told more visually than in her own voice” (83). While Bélance becomes the “face of the junta’s atrocities in Haiti” and ultimately wins a lawsuit against FRAPH (a largely symbolic victory), comparing her story to the fictional story of Pascal suggests how Bélance, likewise paraded in front of TV cameras, continues to battle for the right to speak in a system that objectifies her wounded body, and would likely prefer to forget it. Alèrte Bélance, however, makes her wounds speak, even though, as Danticat writes, what one first saw when looking at her “were her ‘marks,’ her scars,” i.e., what she was lacking (84). Bélance speaks, then, to fill these absences with presence.

In “I Speak Out,” Danticat emphasizes Bélance’s imperative to tell her story repeatedly. She quotes Bélance’s words as recorded by the activist Beverly Bell, and published in Bell’s collection of Haitian women’s oral histories, Walking on Fire: “I spoke at demonstrations, press conferences, churches, congressional hearings … to say, ‘Here. Here is what I suffered.’” (quoted in Danticat 2010, 85). The trauma that Bélance must repeat over and over again can be read not only as an act of political witnessing and demand, but as the attempt to recover her lost self, and to recover from the trauma of never returning to her homeland. Caruth describes the “mute repetition of suffering” (1996, 9) as motivated by a desire to find a common space in a sense, again “showing how one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (8). The oscillation between the story of life and the story of death, a “double telling,” according to Caruth, is the location of history, i.e., the link between a death “and the ongoing life of the survivor” (8). Bélance’s repetitions of her story in the public forums available to her in the United States can be read as demands that the other who listens attempt to find through her narration of her trauma a common space. In Unclaimed Experience, Caruth (1996) focuses on certain words or figures that recur in trauma narratives: departure, falling, burning, awakening. In Danticat’s own traumatic narratives, the phantom limb is such a recurring figure, one which alludes precisely to the “doubleness” of the traumatic experience, “the crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (Caruth 1996, 7). Bélance’s compulsion to repeat her traumatic story, I would argue, is not just a political act but a process of redefining home by assimilating her own traumatic story into the historical time of her adopted home, the United States. The trauma writ across her body is the trauma of never being able to return to her homeland. Instead, Bélance narrates to a community of listeners in order to integrate herself, to belong. Importantly, Elsaesser describes as “prosthetic memory,” and “prosthetic trauma,” the spectator’s experience of the media’s repetition of traumatic events. He argues that “besides involving repetition and iteration, the traumatic event intimately links several temporalities, making them coexist within the same perceptual or somatic field” (2001, 197). Danticat’s essay implies that Bélance uses this aspect of media—the creation of prosthetic memory in the viewing public—as a means of reclaiming her mediatization and objectification. Through this vehicle of communication, she insists on the inseparability of her history, Haitian history, from the history of her

American spectators. Like Bélance’s severed arm, which Danticat imagines had “dissolved in a mass grave, becoming part of the country that had helped create her,” Bélance seeks to assimilate her traumatic story into the country that she has adopted as her home. It is through speaking out to an American public that her phantoms will find a new resting place. The collection of intertwined stories that make up the novel The Dew Breaker (Danticat 2004) also grapples with the memory and narration of traumas caused by political violence. The Dew Breaker opens with “The Book of the Dead,” a first-person account of a daughter’s discovery that her father was a member of Francois Duvalier’s dreaded tontons macoutes. The novel’s title, another term for these militiamen, refers to this fictive father, whose story and secrets the novel will seek to expose. In The Dew Breaker, this perpetrator bears signs of violence upon his body, a scar on his face that will not permit him to forget the lives that he destroyed. He has always told his daughter that he received the wound during an imprisonment, and thus claims for himself the role of victim. If we assume Caruth’s definition of trauma, then the torturer here, while not a victim exactly, is a traumatized subject, having witnessed the deaths of hundreds and having survived his own. Danticat never reveals the name of this former tonton macoute, but she gives him a story and thus shows that he, like the chimè in “Ghosts,” was once an illiterate, poor, and hungry young man. He was one of the socially excluded masses used by the dictatorship to perpetrate its ugliest crimes. As an exile in the United States, the dew breaker has escaped the social death of the Fourth World, where many of his victims remain. But he has socially excluded himself, living under an assumed identity and in isolation for fear of being recognized by other Haitian members of the Brooklyn community in which he resides but which he cannot call home. Danticat thus legitimates his story, by giving it a home in a shared transnational history of trauma. The dew breaker’s “trauma” is that he lives with the constant knowledge of his past crimes, of his intimate experiences of death. Bearing the weight of the phantoms whose memory he must carry, he is obsessed with the ancient Egyptians, because, as he tells his daughter, “they know how to grieve” (12). He reads to his daughter from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and takes her to the Ancient Egypt section of the Brooklyn museum. But the daughter, Ka, named after the Egyptian spirit that accompanies the dead

in the after-life, is attuned to the forgetting and an unnamed loss which has defined her childhood, the source of her own longing for something “[she] is not sure [she] ever had” (21). She carries with her, then, non-memories that are akin to phantom limbs. At one point, as they looked at statues together in the museum, the father tells Ka that “all you noticed was how there were pieces missing from them, eyes, noses, legs, sometimes even heads. You always noticed more what was not there than what was” (19). As Ka points out, this “way of looking at things” explained why she became a sculptor, whose obsession was to capture these missing parts of her father, to bring the fragments of his life into a coherent whole. To cite Scarry, it is through imagination and the making of art that Ka seeks to “remake” the lost self of the father. But the father rejects these efforts to remake his selfhood. He stages a symbolic suicide by throwing his inanimate likeness into a lake, stating that he does not deserve a statue, “not a whole one at least” (20). Ka believes that what her father feels he does not “deserve” is, in fact, a “permanent marker,” (34), a memorial, a final home, what the ancient Egyptians produced so well “with their crypts and monuments” (34). Rather, this perpetrator feels that he must remain “homeless”: his creation of his own social death and his embrace of his living death, his punishment. Danticat implies that the perpetrators of violence are the link between forgetting and memory, absence and presence; it is their silence that blocks the survivors’ ability to return home. Attending to their words, if possible, would be the first step in a journey of return. The fifth chapter of The Dew Breaker, “Night Talkers,” is a return narrative that identifies in speech and listening the possibility of integrating traumatic pasts. The protagonist, Dany, seeking answers about the death of his parents at the hands of tontons macoutes, returns to Haiti after years of exile in New York. The story opens as Dany struggles to climb the mountain that leads to the ancestral village of his family, Beau Jour, the home of his Aunt Estina, whom he has not seen in a decade. Beau Jour (modeled after and named for the ancestral village of Danticat’s own family) is an idealized homeland, described in bucolic terms that suggest that it is an object of nostalgia for its often traumatized exiled children: Estina Estème lived in a valley between two lime-green mountains and a giant waterfall, which sprayed a fine mist over the banana grove that

surrounded her one-room house and the teal ten-place mausoleum that harbored the bones of many of her forebears. Her nephew recognized the house as soon as he saw it. It had not changed much, the sloped tin roof and the wooden frame intact. His aunt’s banana grove seemed to have flourished; it was greener and denser than he remembered. Her garden was packed with orange and avocado trees—a miracle, given the barren mountain range he’d just traveled through. (93) At the center of Beau Jour lies Estina’s home and especially the teal-colored family mausoleum, the centerpiece of the village and of the novel itself, structurally. The mausoleum is a home for the dead, the kind of “monument” that the dew breaker believes he does not deserve. It is also the resting place that Dany’s own parents were denied, as they were “hastily and secretly buried” following their murder. In the architectonics of The Dew Breaker, “Night Talkers,” the fifth of nine chapters, is the center around which the other chapters, episodes, and characters revolve. Its setting, the lush mountain village in Haiti, is the imagined “home” that binds together the fragmented episodes and characters of The Dew Breaker. The title of the chapter, “Night Talkers,” is a translation of the Kreyòl word palannit, the term given to people who talk in their sleep. Dany has indeed returned to Beau Jour and to the woman who raised him in order to hear her speak, to hear her answers to his urgent questions: having rented a room from the dew breaker, Dany thinks he recognizes the man as his parents’ killer, but at the moment at which he plans to kill the sleeping man, doubt stops his hand. He returns, hoping that Estina will give him firm answers, the knowledge and comprehension that he lacks. Dany manages to tell his aunt the reason for his journey home but the interruptions of villagers bearing gifts and food prevents her from responding: “By the time all the visitors had left and he and his aunt were alone together, it was dark and his aunt showed no interest in hearing what he had to say” (98). Once asleep, though, Estina begins to “conduct entire conversations in her sleep, [and] he realized that aside from blood, she and he shared nocturnal habits. They were both palannits, night talkers, people who wet their beds, not with urine but with words. He too spoke his dreams aloud in the night… Usually he could remember only the very last words he spoke, but remained with a lingering sensation that he had been talking, laughing and at times crying all night long” (98–99). The palannits give voice to their dreams; as they sleep,

they work through the joys and traumas that make up their waking existence. To Dany’s disappointment, though, Estina’s night words are about her daily activities of midwifing, giving compliments and warnings, offering coffee, and offering to make someone a new dress. Estina, blinded during the fire that also killed Dany’s parents, assimilated her trauma through speech long ago or through the return to the village of her birth, Beau Jour. When Dany continues to pester her the following day, she repeats “m pa konnen” (I don’t know), alluding to the impossibility of understanding and knowing another’s trauma. She finally tells him, “There’s a belief that if you kill people, you can take their knowledge, become everything they were. Maybe they wanted to take all that knowledge for themselves” (109). Indeed, such knowledge is the object desired by those traumatized by violent loss. The knowledge and memory of why and how innocent victims were made to disappear is also the weight that the perpetrator, the dew breaker, must bear. The survivors, like Dany, imagine revenge, then, as a way to take back this knowledge that was “stolen” from them, a knowledge which is their birthright, a piece of their social legitimacy. In imagining a possible encounter between the traumatized survivor and the traumatized killer, Danticat’s novel in a sense reveals the limits of Caruth’s model of how trauma is narrated, which she bases on the psychoanalytic scene of the intersubjective processes of speaking and listening. According to Caruth, again, when the traumatized subject speaks to another, his/her story can be assimilated to become “the story of the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (1996, 8). But how can the traumatized share such an encounter, when one subject has not only witnessed but perpetrated the violence? This is, of course, the goal of the truth and reconciliation hearings that take place following genocides and massacres; such encounters, taking place within institutionalized legal spaces, are meant to heal societies beset with traumatic pasts. That such hearings have never taken place in Haiti is another sign of the Haitian population’s exclusion from the international community, as well as of the involvement of global actors and institutions in the political violence that has plagued its history.5 In The Dew Breaker, such encounters are impossible with the ghostly and nameless former tonton macoute; the only encounter that Dany can imagine is one that involves more death, less an act of vengeance than a symbolic taking back of his own past, his birthright.

But “Night Talkers” is a parable about finding other routes of return, and Dany must abandon his quest to gain knowledge about his parents’ killer and about their death. As Caruth writes, he must accept the part of trauma “that resists simple comprehension” (1996, 6). The morning following his conversation with Estina, Dany awakens to find that she has died peacefully in her sleep; there is no one left now to answer Dany’s questions. Thoroughly unmade by what he has endured, Dany lets go of speech and self and allows himself to be a child again, cared for by the villagers, who set about to arrange Estina’s funeral and burial. Dany meets a counterpart whose narrative of return is a double of his own. Their encounter becomes a kind of substitute for the impossible encounter with the dew breaker; instead of a meeting that will allow Dany to take back stolen knowledge (an impossibility), this exchange between speaker and listener contains the “surprise” described by Caruth: that trauma can connect histories, replacing knowledge or certainty with the process of encountering, listening/speaking. The character in question, Claude, is one of Danticat’s ghostly migrants. A returnee, drug addict, and gangster raised in New York, Claude has been deported to Haiti after killing his father in a drug-addled haze. Claude is thus a perpetrator and Dany is at first repulsed by his obsessive speaking, his confessions about his past and present. Like the dew breaker, born into the Fourth World, Claude’s self has been unmade by the structural violence of poverty and lack of recognition: without a US passport he has no claims to its laws, and when returned to Port-au-Prince he is a pariah, unable to speak Kreyòl and entirely cut off from the homeland he has never known. Claude’s self is remade in Beau Jour, by a family that he did not know existed: “It’s like a puzzle, a weirdass kind of puzzle, man, I’m the puzzle and these people are putting me back together, telling me things about myself and my family that I never knew” (102). Claude also remakes himself by repeating his story endlessly, like Alèrte Bélance, making his encounter with death a part of the collective history of his adopted home. Speaking his trauma in the green hills of Beau Jour allows him to escape his isolation, non-being, and the loss of his birthright. Dany, too, is a “puzzle,” and, seeking to remake his personhood or self, he has also returned to Beau Jour. But Dany has returned to find hard answers, a quest that he must learn to abandon and replace with the act of

listening to another’s trauma, the trauma of one who is both a victim and a perpetrator. At the story’s close, Dany and Claude sit atop the teal mausoleum, freshly cleaned and awaiting Estina’s arrival: “The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude was a palannit, a night talker, one of those who spoke their nightmares out loud to themselves” (120). The encounter with Claude shows Dany how his trauma is connected to another’s, and both men will speak their nightmares as a means of escaping isolation, nonbeing, and the loss of their right to a home. The end of “Night Talkers” suggests that Dany has found his way home by leaving what he does not know alone; instead he will speak his own trauma, assimilating his story into the collective history of his homeland. Danticat’s 1998 novel The Farming of Bones likewise features a character searching for home in a landscape of political violence and social exclusion. The novel takes place from the thirties to the fifties in the border region separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Many of the story’s main characters are migrant cane cutters whose existence recalls plantation slavery, and they possess all the qualities of the socially dead. Indeed, the cane plantations or bateys of today’s Dominican Republic have become Fourth World zones par excellence. In the Dominican Republic, where they work as agricultural laborers, maids, and servants, poor Haitians are denied a home by being denied legal citizenship and official recognition. Instead they are wanderers in a legal dead zone, presaging the plight of the global Fourth World’s wandering multitudes, who likewise seek legal recognition6 of their right to belong. In the novel, a woman states, “to them we are always foreigners” (69), and “I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country, … not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border. Still they won’t put our birth papers in our palms” (69). As objects of institutionalized racism and denied legal status or recognition in the Dominican Republic, the poor Haitians of The Farming of Bones are disposable, vulnerable, and ultimately victims to a wave of racialized violence that sweeps the country in 1937. Termed by Haitians as “the Dominican Vespers” and by Dominicans as “el corte” (the cutting), the extermination of the Haitian population of the country was ordered by the dictator, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo. Using a language of biological racism to describe the threat of the “infection” or “contagion” of Haitian blackness,

he used hate radio to rally Dominican citizens and the army to massacre the Haitian population (an estimated 30,000 people perished). The Farming of Bones tells the story of a young Haitian woman, Amabelle. It traces her “return” from a series of traumatic experiences that nearly tip her over the precipice into the black hole of non-being. At the age of eight, Amabelle watches her parents die as they try to cross the Massacre River that forms part of the border between the two nations. Sitting on the shore, a Dominican family discovers her and “gives” her as a servant and playmate to their young daughter, Valencia. Saved from the fate of being a homeless orphan or street child, Amabelle becomes a sort of house slave for the lady of the hacienda, Valencia. Similarly, she survives el corte but loses her lover, Sebastien, his sister, and the place she had temporarily called home. She returns to a Haiti she no longer knows, and she exists in a deathin-life state, following a set of daily routine gestures without any thought about her future. Amabelle returns to her “home” nightly in her dreams, when she returns to her parents but also to the trauma of their loss. Prior to el corte, Sebastian is the living soul whose words have gradually begun to assimilate her traumas and to heal her loss. His words integrate Amabelle back into the world of the living. The novel opens with the words, “His name is Sebastien Onius. He comes most nights to put an end to my nightmare, the one I have all the time, of my parents drowning… ‘Lie still while I take you back.’ ‘Back where?’ ‘I … will take you back into the cave across the river” (1). The novel is punctuated by these dream interludes, which lie outside the temporality of Amabelle’s story. At one point, she dreams that Sebastien replaces her traumatic story with a different narrative: “Let us say the river was still that day … and that her parents died a natural death many years later. When she asks why shame came to that place, he replies, ‘you came here to meet me’” (55). Sebastien reclaims the plight of the placeless wanderer as an origin, a home, a destination: “They say we’re an orphaned people… I say we are a group of vwayajè, wayfarers. This is why you had to travel this far to meet me, because that is what we are” (56). But because Amabelle also loses Sebastien to the violence of the massacre, she can only return to the “home” of his words in her dreams. In the space of the dream, then, Amabelle assumes the voice of another, one that gives her a new story to replace her traumatic losses.

Following the massacre, Amabelle searches in vain for the people who were her “home,” i.e., she searches for something to return to. Her odyssey is to find people to help her remember, to help her go home, to bring her into contact with others who have been fragmented by the massacre, who exist in between life and death and who search, often fruitlessly, for the safety of home. Still hoping to find word about Sebastien, she returns to the river that she crossed to escape the guns of Trujillo’s soldiers and finds on the Haitian side, Father Romain, a Haitian priest that had lived with her in Alegria. The kind priest has lost his memory and his mind. He refuses to return to the family home of Cap Haitian with his sister but stays close to the border, the site of his trauma. Amabelle watches as he tears off pieces of his shirt to make a kite for the children left behind, an acting out of his psychic and physical fragmentation (261). Tenuously holding the fragments of his self together, Father Romain mutters the propaganda that his torturers forced him to say, ironically about the homeland, race, and nation. His interiority taken over by his tormentors, he speaks like a “badly wounded machine” (261). Nonetheless, such words are the only thing that keeps some semblance of his self coherent. Many years later, at a parade celebrating the death of Trujillo, Amabelle once again sees Father Romain, who has returned to the city of his birth. He tells her, “it took more than prayers to heal me after the slaughter … it took holding a pretty and gentle wife and three new lives against my chest” (272). Father Romain has found home in the warm embrace of a new family, but this is a form of healing that Amabelle cannot imagine for herself. Instead, Amabelle lives an existence of routine that allows her to return “home” to her beloved parents and lover each night. Amabelle’s quest, though, is to reclaim and redefine the social death and traumatic survival of death that has been thrust upon her. Insisting on this self-determination, she follows the example of Sebastien and seeks to renarrate her own traumatic story. On her odyssey to assure herself that she has no geographical place to call home, Amabelle makes one final return to the Dominican side of the border and to the town that she once thought of as home. Alegria has become a fortress town, “haciendas behind high walls cemented with metal spikes and broken bottles at the top” (288–89). She gets lost: “I felt as though I was in a place I had never seen before” (289), and in the presence of her former employer, Valencia, who does not recognize her, Amabelle feels that she has ceased to exist. Amabelle’s plight has made her a

genealogical isolate, cut off from claims to birth, ancestry, and home. In Alegria, she is truly a ghost. As she sits in the truck that will take her back over the border and into Haiti, the driver asks her, “Are you dead there? You can’t be dead” (306). But Amabelle is in a sense dead, and claiming this state as her own, she has the driver leave her at the Massacre River that forms the border between the two countries.7 The river is the mise-en-scène of her primary scene of loss—of her parents, but also of Odette, the woman she accidentally suffocated as she tried to hide from Trujillo’s gunmen, and scores of others who fled the machetes and bullets. This is the place that Amabelle calls home, a kind of mass grave like that imagined by Danticat in “I Speak Out.”In returning to that grave, she returns her body to the collective history of her people, the wayfarers and wanderers of Sebastien’s stories. At the river, Amabelle encounters one more survivor of the massacre. Called “the professor” by the market women in the area, he haunts the river’s shores, like Amabelle, searching for something lost, a piece of himself. A double for Amabelle, he is “a ghost with a smile on his face, his cheeks grainy from the red-brown sand, his eyes bright red like the inside of a flame” (309). The professor has become a part of nature, of the ground that took his life. He claims his own exclusion, his destiny as a wayfarer. Amabelle, with the professor as her guide, will do the same: she will remake her “self” at the site of its loss. In a kind of symbolic baptism, she removes her clothes and enters the river, finally returning home to the space “in-between,” a home that is never static but that moves, like a river, between life and death, reality and imagination. Amabelle, like Dany in “Night Talkers,” gives in to her self’s unmaking in order to be born again: the professor looks down at her, “paddling like a newborn in a wash basin.” The novel ends with the words, “he, like me, was looking for the dawn.” Like Amabelle, Danticat’s ghostly migrants are genealogically isolated when violently torn from their families and communities; they are denied their claims of birth and the privilege of having a secure place to call home. Danticat’s work also shows that the genealogical isolation is inherited by second- and third-generation Haitian Americans, thus impeding their own narratives of return. Their explorations into their family pasts in Haiti are not so much identitarian, then, but rather they constitute so many quests to reclaim birthrights, social legitimacy, inclusion, and belonging. The narrative of return, then, for Danticat’s transnational wanderers is never

separable from the demand for recognition, inclusion, and legitimacy in the global spaces that we all desire to call home.

NOTES 1. Nick Nesbitt argues that this aspect of Danticat’s oeuvre constitutes a new form of literary political praxis that “could start to address the contemporary dilemmas of social injustice in this period of expanding global imperialism.” See Nesbitt (2010, 74). For a discussion of the personalization of the political in Danticat’s work, see also, Munro (2007). 2. For a discussion of the subjective internalization of history in Danticat’s work, see, Marxen (2005). 3. For an analysis of how the underdevelopment of the Haitian economy has been linked to colonialism, neocolonialism, and the global economy, see Dupuy (1988). 4. For analyses of representations of trauma in Danticat’s fiction, see for example, Subramanian (2005), Meacham (2005), and Goldblatt (2000). For a critique of this approach, see Kaussen (2008, 191–197). 5. While hearings never took place, in 1996 a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission, formed and supported by the United Nations, delivered its report to President Aristide. A redacted version of their findings about the Human Rights abuses of the 1991–1994 coup period were made public, though names of all victims and perpetrators were removed. The commission was mired in controversy from the time it was established, and the report has never had any formal follow-up. For an analysis of Haiti’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, see Haynor (2001). For a discussion of the ways that the T/R Commission created new “victim” subject positions in the post-coup period, see James (2010). 6. The latest blow to Dominicans of Haitian descent took place in October of 2013 when the Dominican Supreme Court declared that the children of illegal immigrants would no longer be entitled to Dominican citizenship. The court ordered an auditing of all birth records from June 1929 forward to determine who has legal claim to citizenship in the DR. 7. For an analysis of the Massacre River as a symbol of memory and a reclaiming of the lives of the dead, see Subramanian (2005).

REFERENCES Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Castells, Manuel. 2000. End of Millennium. Vol. 3 of The Information Age: Econ-omy, Society, and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996–1998. Danticat, Edwidge. 1998. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho Press. Danticat, Edwidge. 2004. The Dew Breaker. New York: Vintage. Danticat, Edwidge. 2008. “Ghosts.” The New Yorker, November http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2008/11/24/081124fi_fiction_danticat.

24.

Danticat, Edwidge. 2010. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Dupuy, Alex. 1988. Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. 2001. “Postmodernism as Mourning Work.” Screen 42 (2) (Summer): 193–201. doi:10.1093/screen/42.2.193. Fischer, Sybille. 2004. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Goldblatt, Patricia. 2000. “Finding a Voice for the Victimized.” Multicultural Review 9 (3) (September): 40–47. Haynor, Patricia. 2001. Unspeakable Truths: Confronting Terror and Atrocity. New York: Routledge. James, Erica Caple. 2010. Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kaussen, Valerie. 2008. Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization and U.S. Imperialism. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Marxen, Patti. 2005. “The Map Within: Place, Displacement and the Shadow of History in the Work of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies 11 (1) (Spring): 140–55. Meacham, Cherie. 2005. “Traumatic Realism in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat.” Journal of Haitian Studies 11 (1) (Spring): 122–39. Munro, Martin. 2007. Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Lafferière, Danticat. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press. Nesbitt, Nick. 2010. “Diasporic Politics: Danticat’s Short Works.” In Edwidge Danticat: A Reader’s Guide, edited by Martin Munro, 73–85. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Patterson, Orlando. 1985. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press. Subramanian, Sheerekha. 2005. “Blood, Memory and Nation: Massacre and Mourning in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones.” In The Masters and the Slaves: Plantation Relations and Mestisaje in American Imaginaries, edited by Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, 149–61. New York: Palgrave.

 

2

Between Home and Loss Inscribing Return in Ruth Behar’s

An Island Called Home Rocío G. Davis

    Ruth Behar’s 2007 An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba, the memoir of her journey to the country and people her family left behind in 1959, is a particularly interesting version of the narrative of return. The text, a collage of historical data, personal essays, interviews, and photographs, examines the stories of survival of Jews in Cuba through the lens of Behar’s struggle with her Jewish identity and her exile from the land of her birth. In this chapter, I read An Island Called Home as a narrative of return poised at a critical intersection between the desire to find a lost home and the realization that the particular form of home that the author seeks has disappeared. In the context of the notion of “the changing same,” I argue that Behar locates her idea of home in the intersection between a specific place (the island of Cuba) and the diasporic history of the Jews, specifically those who settled in Cuba in the early to mid-twentieth century. Returning, for Behar, not only signifies reconnecting with the place of the past but also with the transitory nature of her ethnic community. Ethnic American narratives of return to countries or continents of origin reveal the complexity of processes of identity construction in America. Though there are numerous reasons for returning “home,” they might be reduced, in general, to two: a sense of displacement in the United States, leading to a need to seek one’s ethnic, racial, religious, or familial “roots;” and an imagined or romanticized idea of the homeland, filtered through immigrant families’ nostalgic memories. Recent narratives of return,

however, often transcend mere travel writing/ethnic appreciation/family bonding approaches more typical of earlier narratives. Yi-Fu Tuan’s Coming Home to China (2007), for example, frames his childhood memories, reflections on human geography, and changing Chinese culture within the story of a lecture trip to his homeland, sixty-four years after leaving it. Eleni Gage’s North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past ([2004] 2005), completes the family and narrative journey her father, Nicholas Gage, began in his award-winning biography of his mother, Eleni ([1983] 1996). Her decision to return to their ancestral Greek village and rebuild their family house was an attempt to “transform my relationship with our shadowy, sorrowful history from ignorance and fear to something I could understand, or even control” (xvii). The place of women in Iran is explored in Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad (2005), which describes the journalist’s two years working in Tehran as she tries to understand her relationship with the country of her parents’ birth. These narratives, as Behar’s does, complicate the straightforward journey narrative by weaving in historical and cultural resonances, shadowed by the narrator’s deep emotional search and response to the experience of the homeland. Because of the multilayered history of the Jewish diaspora, Behar’s text connects in some ways with memoirs by other Jewish writers whose families settled in countries not generally known to have been home to Jews. Marina Benjamin’s Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad (2007) recounts the story of her grandmother’s life in Iraq, before and after the country’s independence, through the history of Arab nationalism and rising anti-Semitism, until the inevitable exodus of the Jewish community. Though the story focuses mainly on her grandmother’s life, Benjamin’s auto/ biographical exercise is framed by the story of her return to Iraq to revisit her family’s history. Jael Silliman’s Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope (2001) recounts the history of the Baghdadi Jews’ settlement and progressive acculturation to India though the story of four generations of women in her family. The text opens with the observation: “There was a thriving Jewish community in Calcutta in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, only a handful of elderly Baghdadi Jews remains. A few matzahs are still made locally by non-Jews (supervised by Jews) for the Jews who are left. Very soon

matzahs will no longer be made in Calcutta” (Silliman 2001, 2–3). The prospect of the disappearance of what was once a lively and influential community leads Silliman to embark on a family memoir that provides important historical information about the arrival, settlement, and eventual departure of the Baghdadi Jews of India, due for the most part to increasing Hindu nationalism in the mid- to late-twentieth century.1 Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones,” the “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (1992, 4), might be usefully deployed in a discussion of Jewish settlements in the Middle East, South Asia, or the Americas. The kind of cultural consciousness enacted in these memoirs, which focus on how families move to other countries yet continue to maintain a strong sense of cultural identification with their originary ethnic group, illustrates the notion of “the changing same,” as deployed by Paul Gilroy (1993) in The Black Atlantic.2 The term has been used in the context of the South Asian diaspora by Sandhya Shukla, who explains that it illuminates the apparent paradox of the amazing persistence of South Asian traditions and forms of expression around the world and the increased visibility of innovative renderings of national, regional, and religious identities under the sign of “South Asianness,” “Indianness,” or even “Islam.” Things stay the same and they change in South Asian as well as other diasporas. To faithfully maintain the duality of that fundamental truism, though, is to resist the reduction of any cultural moment to national or homeland difference. (2001, 552) Further, as Anne-Marie Fortier notes, “the changing same” seizes the ways in which the tension between having been, being, and becoming is negotiated, conjugated, or resolved… Though some collective recollections may be lived as enduring traditions, they result, rather, from the processing and reprocessing of cultural forms… The double process of unforgetting and remembrance stitches together elements of the past in attempts to draw lines of continuity that buttress common grounds of belonging. (2000, 159)

Rituals, particularly storytelling, become the living memory of “the changing same” and become “embodied and lived as expressions of an inherent core and enduring identity that is organically linked to a larger, imagined community. Constructed through memories and duration, spaces of belonging are themselves, to some extent, continually produced as images” (Fortier 2000, 173–74). The notion allows us to understand the relationship between ethnic continuity and discontinuity, sameness and variety. By reading ethnic diasporic memoirs through the notion of “the changing same” we negotiate the paradoxical idea of both stability and transformation, not only in the narratives about these groups but in the persons who tell the stories. The narrators of these memoirs of Jewish diasporas and resettlements stress this reality through their articulation or representation of a past subjected to repeated disruptions even as they insist on processes of ethnic continuity as constitutive of the past. Using the narratives of her family members and other persons of the Jewish community in Cuba, as well as observations gleaned during multiple trips to and around the island, Ruth Behar unravels her evolving selfidentification as a Jew and a Latina, which illustrates the notion of “changing same” within these multilayered contexts. Engaging Behar’s narrative of return in the context of “the changing same” allows us to acknowledge forms of permanence and transitivity on several levels. On one level, the home that one returns to is no longer the place that one left— time and history have inevitably altered previous physical and emotional parameters. On another level, there is a fundamental recurrence of community experience that makes her engagement with the current life of the Jews in Cuba a replication of the history of the diaspora. So, though the march of historical time necessarily results in distinct experiences, Behar’s return to Cuba unveils the ways events of the past are repeated in the present, even as change continues to function as the operative term of Jewish Cuban life. The memoir foregrounds Behar’s obsessive curiosity about the Cuba her family and most of the Jewish community left behind after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. Her compulsion to return is reinforced by the numerous family pictures of life in another time and another world:

I marveled at how beautiful we had been in Cuba—we were beautiful then, because all of us, including my great-grandparents, Abraham and Hannah, were young and our faces shone with hope. In the afterlife, our post-Cuba life, we were traumatized and scarred, but the photographs remained as pristine as the day they were taken… These pictures were a substitute for the Cuba I longed to see with my own eyes but couldn’t. (12) Though she left at the age of five, she admits she has no personal memories of the city of Havana, their home, the synagogue, or the places they visited. “Looking at the photographs of my family in Cuba was how I first saw Cuba again, the Cuba I wanted to remember,” she realizes. “Maybe if I stared at them long enough, I’d remember something of my lost childhood on the island” (13). But the photographs her family preserved only tell part of the story, and, as she continues to travel to Cuba and seek out the Jews who remained there, her project of family connection expands to include her engagement with her Jewish identity. The complications of her palimpsestic identity—including the effort to make people understand that she was both Cuban and a Jew—plagued Behar. In the context of American identity politics, where racial and ethnic affiliation often governs social, political, and even academic structures, she struggled to determine her position, a dilemma that was as much selfimposed as expected by others. Further, because “Latin American” and “Jewish” are not terms generally placed together, the sense of incongruity among people not familiar with Cuban Jews is high.3 For instance, in the course of her early ethnographic research in small communities in Mexico and Spain, Behar, because she was from Cuba and spoke Spanish fluently, was assumed to be Catholic and expected to attend church in the villages. She learned the prayers and participated in the rubrics of the liturgical ceremonies, she explains, as part of her attempt to fit in with the people she was studying. But this deception disturbed her: Being accepted made me afraid to call attention to my Jewish difference. It was cowardly of me, but I chose to keep quiet about my identity. I told myself I wasn’t a religious Jew, that it didn’t matter if now and then, for the sake of anthropology, I crossed-dressed as a conversa, a hidden Jew, a secret Jew. But I wasn’t at peace. (15)

Conversely, in the essay “Folklore and the Search for Home,” Behar describes how she was once “wounded in a classroom” by students who rather belligerently questioned her Latina identity because of her Jewish European blood. Shocked by the students’ attitude and their “indictment” of her as a “privileged white woman” who had exploited her poor subjects of research to make money for herself and unable to make them attend reasonably to arguments that justified her scholarly authority, Behar left the room in tears. Later, upon reflection, she realized that her visit had caused the students “as much pain as it caused me, for I had shattered their assumptions about Latina unity” (Behar 2009, 254). These experiences expose Behar’s liminal position, at the border between what is accepted as a Latina identity and what it meant to be a Jew. Indeed, when she began travelling to Cuba in the 1990s, she did not have an ethnographic project in mind, rather, “I wanted simply to be a Jew in Cuba… I found it reassuring to be among Jews in Cuba who didn’t know what exactly to say or do at Jewish services, to be among Jews who were learning to be Jews. If there was hope for them, there was hope for me” (Behar 2007, 15). Behar, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan– Ann Arbor, was ideally positioned for the project that culminated in An Island Called Home. As a classically trained anthropologist, she needed to arrive at the epistemological shift that would permit her to truly understand the legitimacy of reflexive ethnography. When the classic paradigms were challenged in the 1970s and 1980s by minority and diasporic anthropologists, who, feeling the need to return to “lost, abandoned, imagined, desired, denigrated, or exiled homes” and finding themselves in the position of “ambivalent insiders, rather than absolute outsiders,” realized that they could “conceptualize their work in terms of homecoming —however fraught such homecomings might be,” this led to a reconceptualization of the anthropologist’s purpose as a “politics of love and rescue” (Behar 2009, 256).4 But, it might be argued, the first object of that rescue is the anthropologist herself: Behar’s ambivalence about her Jewishness, her passing as a Catholic in Spain and Mexico, the uneasy juxtaposition of Latinidad and Judaism, appear to be resolved during the trips and through her creative and critical engagement with the history and culture. “In Cuba, I came out as a Jew,” she declares. “I embraced my Jewish identity in a Spanish-speaking country without shame or fear” (258). But the solution is not as easy as it seems: though in Cuba she could openly

admit to her Jewishness and have it understood, her position as a returning American (with dollars) complicated the configuration of identity she sought to project. In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said describes the exilic experience as “the unhealable rift between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home” (1994, 137). This definition rests on the assumption of a seamless convergence between self and place, such that one can be exiled only from a homeland. Behar’s repeated returns suggest that she is, at some level, imagining a home in Cuba, one where both a Cubana (posited on having Spanish as a mother tongue and exercising a blend of African, Spanish, and European customs) and Jewish identity might make sense, in a way it does not elsewhere, even in Spanish-speaking countries like Spain and Mexico or the United States, with its obsessive, and occasionally wounding, attention to racial constructs. So, for those who posit their existence as exilic, as Behar does, the dream of return is powerful and recurring. As Winston James explains, “The importance and value of home is never more appreciated than when one is in exile. And in a hostile land the dream of return becomes a burning desire. And yet strictly speaking, it is never possible to return” (1993, 248). What “returnees” do not always realize or accept is that when they “return,” the consequences of time have acted on both the place and on themselves: they do not only return to a different place but are also no longer the same people who had left (James 1993, 249). In Behar’s case, because of Cuba’s complicated political relationship with the United States and the exilic Cubans’ views about the Castro government, returning cannot be only an emotional homecoming but is always already a political act. Even the very possibility of travelling back, as she explains, was complicated by politics, to the extent that she often did not know she could leave until days or hours before her flight. Thus, her particular form of narrative of return is framed within a complex discourse of ways of being Cuban, of imagining Cuba, of desiring Cuba, that are fundamentally American. The project of An Island Called Home, therefore, responds to these challenges to Behar’s multilayered identity: “What began as a vague desire to find my lost home in Cuba gradually became a more concrete search for the Jews who make their homes in Cuba today,” she explains (2007, 3). By seeking others like her, beyond her own family, she aims to find

explanations, identification, continuity, the “changing same,” and, ultimately, a sense of home. Crucially, though she claims she did not want to turn Cuba into a field site, her position as an American who had left Cuba made returning often difficult. So anthropology became her “passport,” “magic carpet,” and “shield” that allowed her to return as often as she needed and avoid criticism for “breaking with the Cuban exile position which held that no Cuban should set foot again in Cuba until Fidel was gone” (18). Further, Behar’s decision to present herself as an anthropologist protects her from some of the complex issues she has to deal with, most crucially, her class privilege as an American travelling back to Cuba. Engaging in this project therefore requires her complicity in “an institutional rhetoric that commodifies ethnicity,” “translating” individuals into “others” for particular audiences and purposes (Willard-Traub 2003, 515). She also reflects on her internal struggles regarding her economic privilege and freedom to travel, something denied many of her interviewees, using the term “schnorrer” (someone constantly “sponging off others to find tales to tell of our travels”) to describe herself and her task (Behar 2007, 137). Importantly, she critically locates her own work in the context of an “avalanche of attention [that] has turned the Jews of Cuba into an over-studied, over-observed, and over-photographed tribe … by a neverending stream of curious anthropologists, tourists, missionaries, and wellwishers” (31). The book, the result of experiences and research over more than a decade of returns to Cuba, records Behar’s interviews with many Jewish families, visits to synagogues and cemeteries, research in the archives of the Patronato (the Jewish Synagogue in Havana), and records of ceremonies.5 The text, apart from being a narrative of return, might be read as a collage of life-writing genres, including travel writing (as she narrates her exploration of cities, villages, and even cemeteries on the island in search of Jewish communities), the family memoir (as she recounts the history of her family’s immigration, settlement, and exile from Cuba), and personal criticism (based on her deployment of critical theory as a tool through which she examines her own life). As Shari Jacobson explains, Behar’s “deft fore-grounding of her own feelings of longing and displacement, her profound if received trepidation of all things related to Fidel Castro, her economic privilege as a citizen of the United States and ambivalence about tourism, and her acute appreciation for the political stakes of representing

anything or anyone Cuban usefully combine to highlight the complexity of conducting intellectually, emotionally, and politically ethical fieldwork” (2010, 587). Opening with a critical introduction that analyzes the history of the Jews in Cuba through the story of her own family, Behar foregrounds the presence of Jews on the island from 1492. The community grew substantially after World War II, with the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe, mostly Poland, to the point that Cubans use the word polaco to refer to Jews. But the Yiddish-speaking Jews did not see Cuba as their final destination. Conceived as a stepping stone to the United States, they called the island “Akhsanie Kuba, or “Hotel Cuba,” a temporary lodging, not a real home. Cuba was a substitute America” (Behar 2007, 7). But American immigration laws limited Jewish entry and they eventually realized that “an island that had been called a hotel now had to be called a home” (Behar 2007). But they made Jewish Cuba “an island within an island,” developing educational, religious, and cultural institutions (9). The population of American, Ashkenazic, and Sephardic Jews grew to at least 15,000 by 1959, a tight-knit community that flourished in business, education, and culture, yet remained removed from politics. Regarding her family, Behar explains: Marriage within the Jewish sub-community to which a person belonged was the norm for the first generation children of European immigrants. When my parents married in 1956, their union was looked upon as an “intermarriage,” because my mother was Ashkenazic and my father was Sephardic. My Baba and Zayde couldn’t believe there were Jews who didn’t speak Yiddish, while on my father’s side my Abuela and Abuelo viewed Spanish as a Jewish language. If a union among culturally different Jews could produce such intense conflicts, marrying outside the Jewish tribe was simply taboo. And racism among Jews in prerevolutionary Cuba made it unthinkable for black Cubans to be potential marriage partners. (8–9) The Behar family was part of the early-1960s exodus of Jews who fled the island rather than live under Fidel Castro’s communism, emigrating to Israel, Miami, Mexico, and other countries. About 90% of the Jewish population abandoned Cuba, carrying little more than the cherished family

photographs: “When the Jews left Cuba, it was truly an exodus, for they fled quickly and en masse—nearly everyone was gone by 1965. They departed with the urgency of a people who believed the sea had parted only long enough to let them go. The dissolution of the community was swift, intense, like a lit candle snuffed by the wind” (11). Leaving Cuba marked another step in her family’s twentieth-century journey, as they had moved from Poland, Russia, and Turkey to Cuba in the 1920s, and from Cuba to Israel to New York to Miami in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, she notes, “I bore the stigma of being the child of Jewish immigrants who chose exile rather than participate in communist revolutionary change in Cuba” (Behar 2009, 256).6 Finally settled in the United States, her family did not approve of Behar’s insistence on returning to Cuba: “You’re going back to Cuba again? What did you lose in Cuba? / Otra vez a Cuba? ¿Qué se te perdió en Cuba?” her Baba (grandmother) would ask her (Behar 2007, 1). She acknowledges her compulsion to return over and over again: “The more I went to Cuba, the more I needed to go. I had become a Cuba addict. And like any addict, I needed my fix. My Cuba fix. Not even my grandmother’s admonitions, my mother’s paranoia, my father’s disapproval, my husband’s quiet relinquishing of time we might have spent together, my son’s tears, or even my own heartbreak every time I said goodbye was enough to stop me” (17). The answer to her grandmother’s question might simply be that she sought the life and home she had lost, a general formulation that evolves into a search for Jews and Jewish history in Cuba, the context of her own family’s past. She explains that what she found most compelling about her project was “the intrahistory—the relationship people had with the Jewish past and the fierce ways they were holding on to this past, which they had made their own through conversion or the belated recuperation of their heritage” (34). Though Behar experiences no complications when it comes to identifying her origins—her family has records and photographs that document their migration from Poland, Russia, and Turkey to Cuba—she consciously engages in the kind of thinking that privileges the claiming of those origins, imagining her home as and in Cuba in order to embrace her chosen beginnings. But the process is as much about construction as it is about repossession for, as she admits herself, “I worried that I no longer knew how to be a Jew anywhere in the world, at home or away from home” (15).

Behar articulates the notion of home through a conceptualization of “home” as a physical place and as a symbolic belonging to that place, which includes markers of religious and cultural meaning, hence her incorporation of pictures of herself as a child in front of the synagogue and the new photographs of Jewish objects in her book. Emphasis on the actuality of “the changing same” then validates her reconstruction of “home” in the context of the Cuba she encounters as an adult, producing through her interaction with the place and the people meanings that provide her with a sense of belonging. Locating herself within the Jewish, Cuban, and JewishCuban diaspora, her journey evolves into a cultural expedition beyond spatial belonging, one that privileges what has not changed rather than what has. As she admits at the end of the memoir, the community of Jews in Cuba continues to be part of a diaspora, one that she understands even as she mourns. For Behar, Cuba and, more specifically, Jewish Cuba, is much more than a location: it is where her diasporic Jewish family re-rooted, and she seeks, more than merely the place they lived in, the community they belonged to. Indeed, one might argue that because the diaspora has become a form of Jewish homeland, Behar wants to locate herself in the people in that place, more than merely in the place. In this context, the notion of “the changing same” becomes, perhaps unconsciously, the frame the author uses to view, judge, classify, and comprehend her discovery and engagement with the Jews who remained in Cuba. Behar travels to and around the island: from Havana to Camaguey, Cienfuegos, Guantanamo, Santa Clara, Santiago de Cuba, and Palma Soriano, among others, interviewing the remaining Jews, mostly elderly people, now living alone after most of their families have left, but also young and vibrant groups that keep Jewish customs alive. She visits abandoned Jewish cemeteries, renovated synagogues, old houses, attends a Hanukkah party where Fidel Castro drops by, kosher butcher shops, to find Cuban Jews, examine their artifacts, and document their version of a Jewish life. Accompanied by the award-winning Cuban photographer, Humberto Mayol, who takes pictures as Behar interviews the subjects, she reproduces these conversations in the text, presenting a multifarious community of unforgettable characters, including, as the chapter titles state, “The Dancing Turk,” “The Jewish Communist,” “The Whispering Writer,” “Einstein in Havana,” and “Salomón the Schnorrer.” She acknowledges the fact of the Cuban Jews’ continually shifting community and refrains from making any

of these characters represent the quintessential Cuban Jew, as she unravels the complexity of their survival. Importantly, she remarks that “in contrast [to the clannish Cuban Jews in Miami], the Jewish community in Cuba looks a lot like the rest of Cuba: a mix of white, black, and everything in between” (27). This observation ostensibly highlights the difference in the midst of similarity but actually emphasizes the fact of the continuity of Jewish identification in shifting contexts. The revival of Jewish life on the island, supported by American, Latin American, and Canadian Jews, complicated the process of identity for many Cuban Jews, raising questions about religious identity as a commodity: “Word has gotten around that being Jewish in Cuba brings benefits— besides the chicken dinners on Friday night and Saturday midday, there is access to alternative information, a well-stocked pharmacy, a lively set of social events, and the possibility of leaving Cuba via Israel. For practical and sentimental reasons, Cubans want to learn whether a strange family surname, or the memory of a grandmother who didn’t eat pork, might be sufficient evidence of their Jewish heritage” (64). Her ambivalence about the Jewish organizations that send students on immersion trips to “help” the Jews in Cuba or the generosity of Jews from the United States who travel periodically to distribute shoes and other basic necessities to the Cuba Jews lies partly in her own complicity with this scheme: she, too, travels to Cuba laden with gifts. Tensions in the book lie in the accounts of giving and receiving, of arrivals and departures: she describes the “anguish” on the face of a woman who has just received a gift of underwear, deodorant, and toothpaste from an American benefactor (143) and the “crazy outpouring of emotion and charity” as visiting Jews give pearl earrings and all the money they have to a family who has told them their story (190). Gifts and travel, markers of American privilege, become a commodity that Jewish identification confers. Though most of the people she speaks to have experienced the Jewish revival of the last fifteen years, which allowed them to practice openly, celebrate festivals, learn Hebrew, and benefit from the generosity of overseas Jews committed to the revival, Behar resists representing them as a uniform or unified group, stressing the diverse personal, racial, cultural, social, economic, and spiritual aspects of Jewish life in Cuba as these shift at different moments for the people. Indeed, Behar, who might

unconsciously have been seeking either the community her family left behind in 1959 or a form of mainstream Jewish practice, actually encounters a group that challenges many defining categories. She calls this group the “lost generation,” people who downplayed or hid their Jewish identities during the early decades of the Castro regime. In general terms, the Jewish community she finds is one that, throughout their lives in Cuba, have disobeyed two of the Jewish prohibitions: marrying outside the group, and not being buried in Jewish cemeteries. She finds a group that is as racially diverse as Cuba itself and that was reborn when Cuba became an officially secular country. So the sui generis community of Jews she encounters, as Jacobson points out, includes “Jews with a singular Jewish grandfather; Jews who are converts from Catholicism; Jews who hadn’t picked up a prayer book in 40 years; Jews who find Jewishness in physics, literature, socialism, and sugar cane; Jews who were circumcised at the age of 69; Jews who arrive late to an interview because they were tracking down a leg of pork for lunch” (2010, 588). Her insights into Jewish subject formation—the actual paradigms of “the changing same”—therefore, become one of the key elements of her text: like her, they were “learning to be Jews,” negotiating a position that, in the context of Cuban politics, carried serious implications (Behar 2007, 15). Crucially, as well, she teases out the consequences of juxtaposed Jewish and Cuban identifications and their implications in relation to the United States. History led Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews from Eastern Europe and Turkey to the island, where they became Cuban. Had they remained there, Behar explains, “my mother would have remained a polaca, and my father a turco; at the very least, they would always have been the children of polacos and turcos. It is in the United States that they have settled into their Cubanness. In this America that is not theirs, they are viewed as Latinos, quirky Latinos, to be sure, but Latinos nonetheless” (Behar 1995, 161). About herself, therefore, she realizes that “I am cubana because I am Jewish. I am cubana because my grandparents were unwanted cargo that could not be delivered to the United States” (157). For the Jews who remained, their nationality prevented them from practicing their religion until Castro’s reclassification of Cuba as a “secular” rather than an “atheist” state. The Jewish revival of the 1990s made the community consider leaving, not because they had difficulties living a full Jewish life, but because of the problems associated with being Cuban. Those who left “had

their passports stamped repatriados, or ‘repatriated,’ which implied that Jewish Cubans were trading their Cuban patria for the Jewish homeland that corresponded to them” (Behar 2007, 13). But Behar believes that very few of these new Israelis actually settle there, because of difficulties in adapting, “so inevitably the Jewish promised land becomes a stepping-stone to reach Miami, the Cuban promised land” (237). Choice of location hinges therefore on a complicated web of cultural contingencies, national affiliation, and economic possibilities. The book’s fifth section, “Shalom to Cuba,” gives An Island Called Home an ending that connects with its beginning. Behar returned to Cuba to seek the community her family left behind, only to find that the Jews of Cuba continue to leave, extending the history of the diaspora. The reenergizing of the community in Cuba actually appears to have contributed to a new exodus, as Behar’s chapter entitled “Departures” catalogues. Many of the people she interviewed between 2002 and 2006 had already left when her book was published or were waiting for departure papers for Israel, as a stepping stone to the United States, in an ironic revival of the plans that the Jews of the 1920s had enacted. Among them is Danayda Levy, the daughter of a black Catholic mother and a Jewish father, who had previously said she would not leave without her father. Now, married at seventeen to her neighborhood sweetheart, she prepares to leave her father and Cuba, “Hopefully not forever. Hopefully he will follow. Hopefully. As she waits for her plane ticket out of the island, clouds of other places fill her eyes and she imagines it will not be so terrible to say goodbye” (244). The community Behar has described throughout the book is disappearing, through death or emigration, leading her to rethink her project and, consequently, her own position: “But are they still Jews of Cuba if they’ve recently said goodbye to the island? Should I erase them from this story because they’re no longer standing on Cuban soil? Did they trick us into thinking they were there—body and soul—when they really weren’t? When does a Jew of Cuba stop being a Jew of Cuba?” (238). Paradoxically, then, the photographs taken as evidence of the Jewish presence in Cuba now record its absence, becoming “fugitive documents of loss … a testimony to how quickly the seen can be transformed into the unseen” (238). Further, the woman who sought the home and community she had lost through her family’s exile becomes the anthropologist who documents

a second exodus from the island. But this reality gives the book’s existence added value: the community she found only exists within its pages, as she unwittingly also narrated its recent disappearance. In one of her last visits, Behar stays at the Hotel Raquel, built to accommodate the numerous visiting Jews, complete with rooms with biblical names and a pastel mural of the eponymous biblical heroine. Her discomfort at “so much seductively marketed Jewishness” makes her realize that she has arrived at “an uncanny replica of what I’m longing to find, a bizarre Jewish Cuban Diasporaland,” and wonders if this is all that is left for people like her, those who always look back (252–53). Thinking about this hotel, she acknowledges a kind of cruel poetic justice: her ancestors, aiming to reach America, stopped at “Hotel Cuba,” where they made a home for themselves. Now, she says, “history had led me to return to Cuba to seek that lost home. And what had I found? A hotel. A hotel on Bitterness Street” (253). The memoir’s conclusion privileges Behar’s ambivalence toward the home and the history she sought to repossess. The text’s meta-literary quality, where the reader ultimately experiences what Paul John Eakin calls “the story of the story” (1999, 59), the process of harnessing personal and collected or unearthed memories, actually structures the narrative. So, Behar’s need to settle what she considered a form of unfinished business, her lost past, marks the impulse and the shape of the text. Nonetheless, though this well researched and documented project reveals information far beyond her own personal memory, a sense of accomplishment eludes her. What Behar discovers may perhaps become a form of haunting greater than the impulse that led her to Cuba in the first place. Indeed, her narrative of return, which foregrounded a search for a lost home, only establishes the elusive reality of “home,” as it confirms the impossibility of return. As she notes at the end of the text, “It’s strange that there isn’t a Kaddish a Jew can recite for a lost home. If there were, I’d utter that prayer. Without fear. Finally letting go in order to believe that the only true home is the one we have searched for inconsolably” (Behar 2007, 255). The memoir’s value lies in its articulation of this impossibility, in Behar’s deployment of the narrative of return, to chronicle layers of historical, cultural, religious, and personal loss.

NOTES

1. Silliman’s mother, Flower Elias (in collaboration with Judy Elias Cooper [1974]), also published a book about the Baghdadi Jews entitled The Jews of Calcutta: The Autobiography of a Community, 1798–1972. 2. The notion of “the changing same” was first used by LeRoi Jones (Amiri Bakara), describing the continuities in the black musical tradition, which, he argues, is rooted in African religion and spirit worship. Though the music has changed in both vocal and instrumental forms, its basic patterns and impulses have remained the same, though some aspects have been “Christianized” in America. See Jones (1971). 3. Nonetheless, Behar notes that, “in the Cuban-Jewish case, there is a composite word, ‘Juban,’ which gets at a sense of mestizaje rooted in a creative amalgam that is different from assimilation. Such an amalgam is possible because of the criollism at the center of Cuban culture” (Behar 1995, 164). 4. See Behar’s The Vulnerable Observer (1996) for a discussion of her evolving perspectives on the role of the personal in anthropology. 5. In 2001, Behar produced Adio Kerida. Goodbye Dear Love, a documentary about the Sephardic Jews in Cuba. Many of the images and stories from the film are reproduced in An Island Called Home (2007). 6. In her essay, “Juban América,” Behar (1995) explores in detail her family’s ethnic past and the way identities were modified in Cuba and how these were subsequently revised in the United States.

REFERENCES Behar, Ruth. 1995. “Juban América.” Poetics Today 16 (1): 151–70. Behar, Ruth. 1996. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Behar, Ruth, dir. 2001. Adio Kerida. http://www.ruthbehar.com/AKAboutEnglish.htm.

Goodbye

Dear

Love

(documentary).

Behar, Ruth. 2007. An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba. Photo-graphs by Humberto Mayol. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Behar, Ruth. 2009. “Folklore and the Search for Home (American Folklore Society Presidential Invited Plenary Address, October 2008).” Journal of American Folklore 122 (485) (Summer): 251–66. Benjamin, Marina. 2007. Last Days in Babylon: The Story of the Jews of Baghdad. London: Bloomsbury. Eakin, Paul John. 1999. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Elias, Flower, and Judy Elias Cooper. 1974. The Jews of Calcutta: The Autobi-ography of a Community, 1798–1972. Calcutta: The Jewish Association of Calcutta. Fortier, Anne-Marie. 2000. Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Gage, Eleni. (2004) 2005. North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gage, Nicholas. (1983) 1996. Eleni. New York: Ballantine Books.

Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Jacobson, Shari. 2010. “An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba by Ruth Behar.” American Ethnologist 37 (3) (August): 587–88. James, Winston. 1993. “Migration, Racism and Identity Formation: The Caribbean Experience in Britain.” In Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, edited by Winston James and Clive Harris, 231–87. London and New York: Verso. Jones, LeRoi (Amiri Baraka). 1971. “The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music).” In The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr., 112–25. New York: Anchor/Doubleday. Moaveni, Azadeh. 2005. Lipstick Jihad. New York: Public Affairs. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Said, Edward. 1994. “Reflections on Exile.” In Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson, 137–49. Boston: Faber & Faber. Shukla, Sandhya. 2001. “Locations for South Asian Diaspora.” Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 551–72. Silliman, Jael. 2001. Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames: Women’s Narratives from a Diaspora of Hope. Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England/Seagull Books. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2007. Coming Home to China. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Willard-Traub, Margaret K. 2003. “Rhetorics of Gender and Ethnicity in Scholarly Memoir: Notes on a Material Genre.” College English 65 (5) (May): 511–25.

 

3

Nightmares from My Parents* Return as Recovery in Doan Hòang’s Oh, Saigon Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz

  I had a dream in my childhood that returning here [to Vietnam] would bring my family back together … but it was naïve to think that the wounds of war could be undone. Doan Hòang, Oh, Saigon The goal of recounting the trauma story is integration, not exorcism. In the process of reconstruction, the trauma story does undergo a transformation, but only in the sense of becoming more present and more real. The fundamental premise of the psychotherapeutic work is a belief in the restorative power of truth-telling. Judith L. Herman, Trauma and Recovery

 

INTRODUCTION The title of this article intentionally echoes that of President Obama’s 1995 best-selling memoir, since in that volume and Doan Hòang’s documentary two young writers decide to revisit their family’s past in search of a workable meaning to their experiences as hyphenated Americans. Apart from beginning to create their narratives in their late twenties, when they already knew which parts of their identities might need further consolidation, the two also share a confrontation with some bitter truths about their progenitors and the intention to rethink aspects of their heritage they had not properly understood before. Like Dreams from My Father,

Hòang’s Oh, Saigon (2007) can also be described as an inner, highly emotional journey throughout which the director retraces her parents’ forced exile from their land of origin and the deep wounds that this sudden departure left in their psyches. Hòang’s documentary is, therefore, a micronarrative in which the narrator is trying to reconstruct the cruel circumstances that caused her family to end up fractured and resentful, and completely alienated her parents from their homeland. In Edward Said’s memorable description of the experience, exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a nativeplace, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted… The achievements of exile [in the arts] are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. (2000, 173) No wonder, then, that I should have decided to change the term “dreams” for the much less pleasant “nightmares,” which, as Hòang notes, in the first epigraph to this article, are likely to keep torturing her parents even after their family has finally been reunited. In a way, their own trauma is so closely linked to the country’s harrowing history that it is difficult to believe that their strenuous endeavors to come to grips with their past are going to be enough to appease all the ghosts disturbing them. Their efforts to pacify those ghosts and to assimilate the original events that kept coming back to haunt them proved particularly difficult in a context that constantly reminded them of their defeat and loss. As numerous historians have noted, the Vietnam War was one of the historical events that received most media attention in the United States throughout the second half of the twentieth century (Wiest 2002, 85–92). Either in films, fiction, documentaries, or TV series, Americans have gone back to the violent conflict in an attempt to figure out what went wrong and transformed them from a well-meaning, “exceptional” nation into an international bully. In Wiest’s opinion, “the controversial defeat in Vietnam caused a painful, national catharsis in American society, which represented a sea change in American cultural history” (2002, 88). No doubt, this period of societal criticism and distrust in the government must have had a profound impact on Hòang’s and her family’s own uncertainties regarding the forces that had pushed them out of their land. Of course, most of the representations of the

conflict that Americans were shown were plagued by simplified and brutalized versions of the events that neither helped to explain the nature of the intervention nor really managed to soothe the pain of the defeated contender. Marita Sturken concluded in her classic study of national traumas, Tangled Memories, that, although “American culture is not amnesiac but rather replete with memory”, those memories are so thoroughly mixed up with myth and popular hearsay “about what happened that the pure experience is no longer there” (1997, 2). In a way, then, this collective and symbolic myth-making was so saturated with images and memorials that tried to sweep away the injurious trauma that it pushed very much in the same direction as Hòang’s parents’ willful forgetting of their family past. We are aware, of course, that this is a common way in which traumatized collectives try to live with painful and guilt-ridden memories of experiences that they prefer not to confront. However, as most trauma scholars have been contending for over a decade now, if survivors and witnesses wish to restore that part of their identity that they feel has been damaged—or lost—they must eventually face their role in those distressing stories: Through the notion of trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not. (Caruth 1996, 11; emphases in original) This task is especially demanding for communities, such as the Vietnamese refugees and their descendents in the United States, who have been physically and psychologically estranged from that site in their memories where their identity problems originated. If, as Herman notes in the second epigraph to this article, one needs to make “more present and more real” the key decisions that have marked a group’s life story, then perhaps a return journey to those places proves necessary. Not only that but, in Herman’s view, the process of piecing together the memories will not suffice if it “does not address the social and relational dimension of the traumatic experience” (1992, 183). Doan Hòang’s documentary, Oh, Saigon, seeks precisely to delve into those memories that have been troubling her family—and especially her

parents—for over twenty-five years and to examine the impact that they have had on their relationships with their closest kin. Although the film was seven years in the making, the result is a surprisingly short (57 min.) and compact documentary account in which the writer and filmmaker manages to condense all the critical moments of her family’s odyssey from Saigon to Louisville, Kentucky—and back. Needless to say, this account has very little to do with the iconography that has prevailed in the American memorialization of the Vietnam War, as it focuses on the anonymous lives of the refugees, revolutionaries, renegades, children, and other victims of the conflict. While it is true that the author’s father and his older brother, Hai, played an active role as members of the contending armies, their fiery mutual accusations constitute just one of the several strands of the narrative. Following Carroll, it could be argued that Hòang’s rendition of her family’s trying experiences becomes one of those “small narratives” that intend to supplement—or even subvert—the more conventional, and usually biased, accounts of the traumatic events (1987, 77–78). Antze and Lambek have underscored the importance that the representation of these “subaltern perspectives” have in our current efforts to transcend the limits that nation and essentialized identities usually impose on our understanding of history. As these specialists note, although there is always the risk of obscuring the richness and moral complexity of these personal stories by “reinscribing them into the public discourses,” they also show the capacity of empowering the author and restoring the balance within the collective (1996, xxiii–xxiv). No doubt, these were two of the main goals that Hòang pursued by immersing her parents in a self-scrutinizing project that, ideally, would serve to heal their psychic wounds and reconcile the different factions in the family. As the director saw it, a return to their homeland was a necessary step in the process of recovery, not only because of the many ties that had been severed by the conflict, but also because her parents still felt deeply rooted in the Vietnamese culture. Long and Ricard have described the difficult predicament of first-generation refugees in America as they typically remain ill-adapted to the cultural rules and standards of the receiving society, while they also strive to see their offspring fully integrated (1996, 82–84). As will be shown below, although Hòang’s main aim is to see her parents finally come to terms with their torturous past, something of a “diasporic consciousness” can be said to emerge in that

process of recovery and reconciliation as “lateral connections with the homeland” seem quite inevitable (Clifford 1994, 306).

THE VIETNAM WAR REVISITED Early in the documentary, the narrator, Doan Hòang, explains to the audience that “if I could put my finger on the moment my family fell apart, it would be April 30, 1975, the end of the Vietnam War.” This statement is crucial for at least two important reasons. On the one hand, we learn that the closure of the violent conflict in their homeland was not experienced as a moment of hope or relief by the Hòangs—quite the opposite. On the other, we are also informed that the family was completely torn apart and thus made dysfunctional by the imperialist war. It could be said that the traumatic experiences of the Hòangs were both quite common and, yet, exceptional. We know that the fall of Saigon in late April 1975 caused the first large-scale migration from Vietnam, with well over 100,000 people who had ties with the US government or the army fleeing the country for fear of communist reprisals. Most of these exiles were, like Hòang’s parents, well-educated, upper middle-class individuals who were convinced that their country would fall into chaos and poverty under communist rule. Thai notes that the majority of these early exiles were helped by the US government to leave the country by sea or by air in organized groups in the spring of 1975 (1999, 54). The case of the Hòangs was rather unique in the sense that they were the last family to be airlifted out of Saigon in a military helicopter on the very last day of the conflict. The fact that their decision to abandon the country was a “split-second choice” and that, probably as a result, Hòang’s half sister, Van, was tragically left behind, added a great deal of drama to the shock of being uprooted from their native surroundings. Despite the singularity of the Hòangs’ circumstances upon departure, one only needs to read Bich Minh Nguyen’s much-acclaimed memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner (2007) to realize that they were not the only family torn apart, nor the only Vietnamese Americans who had to struggle hard to reconstruct their identity. Said has rightly remarked that becoming an exile invariably produces a “discontinuous state of being”: “Exiles are cut off from their roots, their land, their past” (2000, 177). But if this unbearable condition is further aggravated by unexpected separation

from some of the loved ones, as was the case with Hòang’s and Nguyen’s families, the consequences are likely to be even more traumatic. Bearing in mind that Hòang was only three years old when her father pulled them out of Vietnam on that last military transport, it is only natural that, like Nguyen, she should rely on the testimony of others to reconstruct their narrow escape from the new regime. She states, however, that she vaguely remembers leaving their house and being flown to a refugee camp in Arkansas. In any case, it is from her parents that the narrator learns most of the excruciating details of the last moments in their homeland and the anxiety they experienced. As the author explained in an interview with NERDSociety, she initially met with great reluctance on the part of her parents to have their stories told in front of the camera-eye (Spartan 2009). Still, Hòang managed to begin filming interviews with them and her older brother in 2000 and kept her camera rolling for several years as they started to reveal things they had never told her before. Of course, the author soon realized that her parents’ secrecy derived from their need to protect their children from information about their brutal past and also from their fear that the family’s reputation might be damaged in society by some of their earlier mistakes or failures. Cheung has tried to unsettle the deeply-rooted belief among Euro-Americans that reticence and silence are typically Asian traits, but she also admits that silences can often become very meaningful, since they are always indicative of “all too scrutable motivations” (1993, 20). Doan Hòang proves truly skillful in detecting those moments in her parents’ mental life in which she can gain access to those episodes of their past that they seem unwilling to face and uncover. Although her father, Nam, is a very taciturn man, rarely given to conversation, even with his children, and her mother is a workaholic, continually taking care of her family, the author succeeds in getting them involved in her project by using quite astute strategies. About her mother, for instance, Hòang tells us: “The only time she wasn’t doing that [taking care of the family] was when we were on vacation elsewhere, and that’s when I managed to film some more expressive interviews with her” (Spartan 2009). Her parents’ revelations about their past during the interviews are juxtaposed with motion-graphic-animated family snapshots, generally in black and white, thus producing a clear contrast between past and present. The filmmaker is also intent on highlighting the differences between the

calm, open landscapes of American suburbs and the crowded, vibrant streets of Saigon, somehow conveying the radical change in surroundings experienced by her progenitors upon arriving in the United States. Although it is true that the first part of the documentary centers mostly on the personal memories of Hòang’s parents’ last days in Saigon, the filmmaker combines them with archival footage of Operation Frequent Wind, which contributes greatly to the verisimilitude and the moving quality of the work. In most instances, the images of the conflict that the director retrieves capture civilians horrified by the bombings and desperate women trying to protect their children in a city under siege. As pointed out above, it soon transpires that Hòang is trying to build a counter-narrative to that which we have seen represented on the screen, in which soldiers, rebels, prisoners, and casualties always take center stage. At no point does the director imply, though, that her reconstruction of the events is more accurate or legitimate than those that had preceded it; but her “small narrative” does make us aware of the limited scope and interested purpose of the various discourses on the conflict (cf. Carroll 1987, 85). Viewers are likely to be surprised, for example, by the scenes of a peaceful Vietnam—even at the time of the conflict—in which fishermen, merchants, or their wives went about their daily business, showing little concern for the increasing turmoil. It could safely be stated that by having her parents’ traumatic memories paired off with these unusual images of Saigon and other South Vietnamese locations, the filmmaker is trying to humanize a conflict-ridden context that has most often been represented in docudramas as a Dantesque setting in which the United States lost its innocence (Sturken 1997). In addition, the fact that Hòang presents a richer and more complex rendition of her country of birth makes her parents’ (in)decision to leave until the very last split-second much more convincing. Something that becomes very evident from early on in the documentary is that, as the narrator declares at one point, “my family still carries the wounds of the war.” It is sometimes said that time has the power to heal all sorts of wounds, but this hardly seems to be the case with the Hòangs, who, after twenty-five years, show symptoms similar to those suffering from PTSD. This psychological disorder is most apparent in the fact that while both parents have worked hard to bury their past and connections back in Vietnam, they show little interest in adapting and rebuilding their lives in the new country. Unlike Hòang’s older brother or Bich Nguyen’s siblings,

who seem to have unburdened themselves of the ghosts from the past and have overcome the obstacles initially placed in front of them by the host society, her parents are indelibly marked by the extreme horror of having to abandon their homeland and of becoming “ghostly presences” in the host country. Caruth has defined trauma as “the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (1996, 90). This is an accurate description of what has happened to the narrator’s parents, who have never quite understood what impelled them to jump into that last helicopter—other than their instinct for self-preservation—and who have continued to be tormented by images of the bleeding country they left behind. As Hòang’s father explains to her, the country he had loved “did not exist anymore as I had known it! We lost everything.” Several experts in conflict studies have argued that the political violence occurring in the context of military invasions, civil wars, or dictatorships often extends its ramifications into the “dark interiors” of family life, which see previous differences exacerbated by the greater tensions (Scheper-Hughes 1993). Probably, when the author’s father, Nam, claims that they had lost everything and that the place they were fleeing “was not our home,” he is not so much thinking of the material losses occasioned by the war, but rather the social and family relations that were being dissolved. As the documentary develops, the audience becomes aware that what is torturing the narrator’s parents is the realization that they can no longer look back on their country of origin as a source of identity and solidarity, since their last experiences there alienated them completely from their people and ideology. In William Safran’s terminology, they do not enjoy the possibility of “continu[ing] to relate, personally or vicariously, to the homeland” in a way that would significantly shape their identity and sense of belonging (1991, 83–84). Nam graphically compares their sudden departure from the country of origin to the severance of their umbilical cord —a sentence not devoid of some Freudian undertones. Nguyen’s case in Stealing Buddha’s Dinner seems slightly different because she can count on her wise, caring grandmother, Noi, as a link to her heritage and homeland.

A WAR IN THE FAMILY

As has been stated earlier, the traumatizing event of having to flee their country has mostly been repressed by Hòang’s parents for long years, since they were so distressed by the harrowing experience that direct cognition and gradual assimilation became quite impossible (cf. Caruth 1996, 6–7). Instead, their efforts to accept responsibility and to develop a healing response were undermined by what is known in psychoanalytic parlance as “displacement.” Although the author’s interviews with them reveal that they have not forgotten the truth about their experience, it is also clear that their anxiety as a result of keeping it repressed has somehow transformed their memories and prevented any real confrontation with their responsibility. Both Nam and Anne, Hòang’s parents, insist over and over that circumstances forced them to leave their country and that they “could not even think” when they were caught in the torrent of events. The documentary gradually makes it clear that it is not just the life opportunities and hopes of the narrator’s parents that have been harmed by the violent conflict but, more broadly, their very sense of a collective identity. In this regard, it is not surprising that the director should have chosen the phrase, “A War in the Family,” as a subtitle for her film, since it was the emotional and social connections providing individuals with a sense of security and stability that were seriously damaged by the war. As Alexander and others have argued, when the social ties and shared practices of a collective are abruptly dislodged, the traumatic nature of certain events becomes much more evident—in their representation: Trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the collectivity’s sense of its own identity. Collective actors “decide” to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go. (Alexander 2004, 10) Undoubtedly, exiles and refugees are especially prone to experiencing this threat because, in their case, a massive social disruption is rapidly transformed into a cultural crisis that tends to include an existential component (cf. Ainslie 1998). In this sense, it can hardly be denied that had the narrator’s progenitors maintained some connections with their motherland, their representation of the dramatic experiences would have been rather different. In the case of Nguyen’s memoir, these connections

could be said to be partly maintained via the food they cook and some religious practices. As most diaspora and exile scholars have contended, the absence of these dense social relationships and of any active exchanges with the homeland are likely to deeply affect the sense of community and the treatment they give to their memories (see Cohen 1997, 24). My analysis of Doan Hòang’s narrative below will show that her parents’ recollections of the traumatic event frequently turn into “claims” or symbolic projections concerning the chaotic social reality they left behind and also into subtle justifications for actions that they still have difficulty in assimilating. Most often their words reveal not only the fundamental injury that the social upheaval and subsequent cultural crisis left in their psyches, but also the need to construct a new story that will hopefully allow them “to engage in successful meaning work” (Alexander 2004, 12). In all probability, the person that was most deeply wounded by the war is Hòang’s father, who had been a major in the South Vietnamese Air Force and had to accept a job washing planes in the United States. No doubt, his loss of social status and the fact that he could not do what he most liked in life—to fly—contributed decisively to his sadness and alienation in the new country. He admits that he has never adapted to the American ways and states that, anyway, he has always wanted to preserve his country’s traditions. Hien Do, a son of Vietnamese refugees himself, has studied in some depth the mental disorders afflicting this group in the United States, who, besides having to deal with displacement and separation, often felt unwelcome in the host country (1999, 70–75). Nam’s story proves quite paradigmatic because he found it very hard raising a family in America without the assistance of his extended family, and often having to put pressure on his children to retain some of their cultural values and traditions. It is interesting to note, for example, that he kept hoping for a change of tide at home that would allow them to return—although he always knew that the likelihood of that happening was almost non-existent. Like Nguyen, whose father grows too fond of gambling and drinking, Hòang places a great deal of emphasis on her father’s misery and loneliness, as he feels that there has been no real achievement in his life. Apart from the humiliating defeat in the war, he also seems to resent the fact that he has not been able to develop a sense of belonging in the new country: he has no friends, no interests, and “no home here.” In a way, he is stranded between the impossibility of returning to the land he loves and his

unwillingness to integrate into a society that he has never felt as his own. Not only that but, as his reluctant participation in some of the veterans reunions shows, he has not sought out his compatriots abroad either, to try to form an alternative community in which he could feel more comfortable. The audience’s impression, as Hòang struggles to get to her father’s innermost secrets, is that he has preferred to bury his possible errors or inadvertences in the past, rather than trying to figure out how they could be mended. In fact, it is only his daughter’s constant prodding that activates in him the need to come to some sort of reconciliation with his brothers and to change his attitude toward Van, his stepdaughter. As is also the case with other family members, Hòang manages to give us intimate access into her father’s memories and feelings by preparing him to face the key questions about his personal choices, the losses he has suffered, and even his conflicted identity. A second important subplot in the documentary concerns the filmmaker’s half sister, whom she had hardly seen for seventeen years when she began to record the interviews. In a way, Hòang wants to have her half sister’s story also represented in the film because she does not wish to suffer from the same kind of willful amnesia that she has witnessed in her parents. She explains at one point in the film that “my father’s disconnection from his brothers makes me seek out my own half sister, Van.” In addition, Van’s migratory story is radically different from the rest of the family’s, as she was part of the second wave of Vietnamese refugees—often referred to as “the boat people”—who left the country hurriedly between the late 1970s and the mid-1980s. Santoli has compiled forty-eight stories from war veterans, refugees, and war prisoners in which we hear of the horrendous experiences of incarceration and abuse that many Vietnamese went through in the Communists’ “reeducation camps” in the south of the country (1999). Van herself was sent to prison while still a teenager for “trying to sneak out of the country” after she had learned that her family had left, the government had fallen, and most of her friends had died in the fight. A few years later, she became one of the approximately two million people who fled Vietnam in old, fragile, unsafe boats that were frequently attacked and captured by Thai pirates. One can easily imagine that her resentment toward her mother and stepfather for abandoning her in the old country only increased after she had gone through the shame and pain of these misfortunes. Every time Hòang approaches her half sister in the film,

wanting to learn a bit more about her years on her own in Vietnam, Van immediately begins to weep and eventually retorts, “Stop asking!” Van only came into the United States six years after the rest of the family, and although she stayed with them for about a year, she finally decided to run off to California because she was unable to cope with her parents’ high expectations. Again, like most second-generation Vietnamese children, Hòang and her brother also felt that Anne and Nam were making excessive demands on them (Zhou and Bankston 1998); yet, of course, they had not gone through the kind of anguish and humiliation that their half sister had suffered. Van’s resentment toward her parents, and especially toward her mother, is evident throughout the whole documentary, and at times she can become quite outspoken, as when she states that her mother “loves herself more than she loves me” or that “I would never leave Dylan [her son] … The thing is, I want him.” Although it is evident that Van cannot be really objective about her parents’ behavior in the past, it is also true that some of the light she casts on her progenitors’ decisions makes it easier for the audience to understand why they are so reluctant to face particular aspects of that past. For example, when she explains that Nam “would have preferred his wife to have been single” and that she was probably perceived by him as “a reminder of that earlier marriage,” she is probably partly correct. The fact that Nam declares himself not guilty of having abandoned his step-daughter and tries to justify his decision is evidence of his different feelings toward his off spring: I didn’t have any other roads to choose. I could have been imprisoned by the Communists. I could have been killed right there. Or I could leave to some foreign land. I thought that if I died, my whole family would be harmed. There was no other way but to take my wife and children out of the country to live in a place, a place that was not our home. (Hòang 2007) Despite the remarkable differences in character between stepdaughter and father, it is obvious that both have been severely wounded by the war. While Van seems to be slowly recovering thanks to the new responsibilities she has to face, her stepfather seems to be too old and tired to provide his life with new meanings. Still, both of them can be seen to contribute very definitely to the “war in the family” going on long after the end of the

terrible conflict that caused it. Douglass and Vogler note that traumatic experiences often have this effect of producing an ongoing “process of imitation” in the victims, who feel compelled to act out the painful event anew in their daily lives: “There is a widespread view that witness/survivors are by definition traumatized by their experience, and that they exhibit the effects of trauma in the broken, incoherent nature of their acts” (2003, 11). There are several moments in the documentary in which it becomes clear that Van and Nam are easy prey to some distressing memories that make them react in uncontrolled ways. This happens to Nam, for example, every time he is asked about the reasons for abandoning his country, and to Van when inquiries are made about the years she spent on her own. Paradoxically, however, these reactions can be read as authenticating evidence that their testimonies are honest and that they are still struggling to come to terms with these painful incidents from their past. Something in the same line could be stated about Nguyen’s mother, who only returns to the family more than ten years after their departure and finally also tells them about the choices made—and often regretted. To some extent, Hòang’s camera functioned as some sort of catalyst that helped her family to come out with views and feelings they had long repressed and that were evidently hurting them. As the filmmaker has explained, “in some cases, the camera emboldened them to speak or do things that they might not otherwise have done. I don’t think my sister would have challenged my mother the way she did without the presence of the camera” (Spartan 2009). There is little doubt that the overarching story that the audience follows throughout the documentary is Hòang’s own narrative of self-discovery as she presents in front of our eyes the divided parts of her family: those who escaped to America and those who stayed behind in Vietnam. As has been mentioned before, both halves of the family have been deeply marked by the war, and their relationship still needs to be interpreted in the light of the results of the conflict. Thus, her father, who has always been pro-capitalist and anti-communist, can hardly understand his older brother’s decision early in his life to join the revolution. Nevertheless, when she meets her uncle, Hai, she is profoundly shocked because, apart from learning that she had “a communist [relative] in the family who fought against [her] father and the rest,” she also realizes that her uncle seems to love freedom and justice as much as her father does. Even when Nam is accused by his siblings of being a “viet kieu”—that is, according to her younger uncle,

Dzung, one of those “who left and are now foreigners [or even traitors] in our own land”—she tries to look into her father’s behavior from the point of view of her relatives. The same could be said of Van’s revelations about their parents’ marriage and the consequences it had for the other members of the family. Although the filmmaker does not get much camera time during the documentary, the fact that it is her voice-over that we hear throughout the reconstruction of her family’s past makes the audience aware of her deep involvement and emotional investment in the project. Her journey back to Vietnam, like Nguyen’s in 1997, could well be described as autoethnography in which the narrator is trying “to describe and systematically analyze” the cultural experience of her relatives from her own perspective as a Vietnamese American. Ellis has remarked that, although the eye and feelings of the researcher are critical in this kind of project, the focus is not so much on her own experience, but rather on the way in which it can inform the others’ stories (2004). In this regard, it is impossible to think of Oh, Saigon and Stealing Buddha’s Dinner as “navelgazing” or self-preoccupied works in which the authors indulge in their problems to define their own identities, leaving aside everybody else’s concerns and tribulations. In fact, quite the opposite is true as it soon transpires that the director and the memoirist possess a consciously social and historical reflexivity (see Reed-Danahay 2005, 125–26). It is this ability that Hòang and Nguyen possess to look deeply and analytically into the family’s history that allows them to discover where their major dysfunctions lie and to try to figure out how they could be successfully dealt with. In the following section, it will be noted that a trip back to the motherland seems a condition sine qua non for the “American” family members to begin to heal their psychic wounds and to mend the ties with their country and its people that had been severed by the conflict.

RETURN AND RECONNECTION AS RECOVERY The first epigraph to this article already made it clear that the dream of returning to her parents’ homeland had been present in the author’s mind almost from the very moment she first arrived in America. Likewise, Nguyen also mentions at several points in her memoir how cold Grand Rapids, Michigan, feels in comparison with Vietnam and how deeply convinced she is that people are always happier “out on the coasts.” There

were probably two facts that fed Hòang’s childhood dream and that made it more urgent the more the writer and filmmaker learned about her family’s past. On the one hand, we have seen that Nam and Anne always insisted that their children should preserve some features that identified them as Vietnamese and that they should take pride in those traditions. On the other hand, Hòang’s growing up as an American was also accompanied by images and talk about the country’s intervention in Southeast Asia, which of course must have contributed to arousing her interest in the changes that her native country had undergone after the communist takeover. Mitchell Hall describes in some detail the impact that the end of the conflict had on both sides of the Pacific and the relentless attempts in the United States to find an explanation for the military failure ([2000] 2008, 80–86). Being a sensitive and reflective child, Hòang must have sensed from the start that her parents’ abrupt departure had caused a breach in their relationship with the country that could only be repaired after they returned to see how the place had been changed and the nature of their new situation regarding their former “home.” In a sense, one could talk about the emergence of some kind of “diaspora consciousness” in the artist, since it is clear that Hòang’s memories and perception of Vietnam combine similar doses of “loss and hope as a defining tension” (Clifford 1994, 312). As is the case with Bich Nguyen and Andrew Lam in another chapter in this collection (see Simal González 2014), Doan Hòang’s sense of identity and state of mind is very much defined by the “contradictory drives” that arise in individuals who are conscious of their decentered attachments, of being simultaneously “home away from home.” In Clifford’s words, this diaspora consciousness— although sometimes disconcerting—may bear “the empowering paradox … that dwelling here assumes a solidarity and connection there. [While it is] the connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here)” (1994, 322). It will be seen below that it is this “awareness of multi-locality” that demonstrates the narrator’s need to reconnect herself with others, and that her two trips to the country of origin are triggered by her efforts to restore the fractured archaeology of her family. It could be argued, too, that Bich Nguyen’s visit to Vietnam at the end of the book, to see her parents’ house and meet a significant part of her extended family, partly pursues a similar aim. In spite of the presence of that traditional experiential pattern among diasporic groups, involving a traumatic exile from their homeland and a

dispersal throughout other countries—hence suffering from loss, displacement, and alienation—, it would be difficult to think of the Hòangs as participants in the “social forms” usually generated among these groups (Vertovec 1997, 278–80). Apart from the process of becoming scattered and maintaining memories—or myths—of the homeland, another essential aspect of diaspora communities is that they maintain a number of explicit and implicit ties with their homelands, often establishing networks of communication and exchange (see Alonso and Oiarzabal 2010). Vertovec has maintained that because diasporic families habitually develop solidarity networks with their co-ethnics, they are likely to play a key role in transstate political organizations and in the economic strategies of transnational groups (1997, 279). However, as we see in Hòang’s documentary, neither her parents nor her siblings could be said to have taken a real interest in the political plight of their country of origin, nor have they built any economic relations with their co-ethnics in the United States or their relatives back in Vietnam. Unlike other compatriots, who have become very active political lobbyists or have invested capital in businesses in Little Saigons and Chinatowns that do commerce with the homeland (Do 1999, 119–20), the Hòangs seem to have had enough with adapting to the host country and tending to the psychic wounds that they had received in the war. In fact, the object of the filmmaker’s organization of the return trips to Vietnam is primarily to fulfill her parents’ wish to revisit the places where they had enjoyed the happiest years of their lives and to give them a chance to reconcile with their kin. Appadurai and Breckenridge have explained that diasporic groups often maintain collective memories about “another place and time,” although they also recreate them to satisfy their current concerns and desires. In most instances, however, these collective memories and “renewed maps” produce multiple histories, selves, and communities: These collective recollections, often built on the harsh play of memory and desire over time, have many trajectories and fissures which sometimes correspond to generational politics. Even for apparently well-settled diasporic groups, the macro-politics of reproduction translates into a micro-politics of memory, among friends, relatives and generations. (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1989, ii)

Hòang’s film and Nguyen’s memoir make it clear that the aforementioned multiplicity exists both between those who left Vietnam and those who stayed, and also between the two different generations of Vietnamese living in America. Still, as we will see below, that multiplicity, if properly used, may be turned into a source of readapting strength for everybody. It is interesting to note that both Hòang’s father and her half sister refused to go on the first family journey back to Vietnam at the beginning of the new millennium. We have seen in the previous section that they are probably the ones who carry the deepest wounds from the war, and so, to some extent, their fears of confronting the old country are well justified. Nevertheless, the first thing that strikes the narrator and her mother as soon as they reach Saigon is how much the country has changed over the last twenty-five years. In this regard, the filmmaker has explained that “when I returned at first, I expected to feel at home but then realized that I wasn’t one of them. I wasn’t a ‘regular’ American either, more like something inbetween” (Spartan 2009). The strangeness is even greater for her mother, who cannot feel at home, either, although she had spent the best part of her life in these same surroundings. But, of course, her friends and relatives are mostly gone, and she discovers that their house has been converted into a store. Although she briefly revisits in her mind those happy years as a wealthy Saigon socialite—we, again, see photographs from that period—, she soon comprehends that those memories should be significantly revised as a result of her own shifting views as a Vietnamese American. In Alexander’s opinion, this identity revision means that there will be a searching reremembering of the collective past, for memory is not only social and fluid but deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self. Identities are continuously constructed and secured not only by facing the present and future but also by reconstructing the collectivity’s earlier life. (2004, 22) Doan Hòang and her mother, like Bich Nguyen herself, realize that their views of Vietnam need to be radically changed because their traumatic departure had prevented them from having the assimilating process properly played out and worked through. This conviction is even stronger when they visit Nam’s two brothers and the grave of his deceased sister. Although

Hòang’s father had not managed to gather the courage to return to his homeland, he did want his wife and daughter to make contact with his broken family. As mentioned earlier on, their meetings with Dzung and Hai reveal that they also had their own histories of anxiety and struggle during the conflict, and that their disapproval of their departed brother was somehow understandable. They also seem to be right when they claim that “Nam does not understand the country … and what the country is like now.” Again, Hòang’s in-depth interviews with her uncles and the footage she uses of the ordinary lives of present-day Vietnamese reinforce the message that first-generation viet kieus are usually prisoners of misapprehensions regarding their homeland. When the director is taken to her aunt’s grave—“she was the first war casualty in the family”—Hòang’s tears and grief are not just for her father’s sister, Tuyet, but, more broadly, for the harmful consequences that the conflict had on the whole family. Nevertheless, a note of hope is introduced in the film before the narrator and her mother leave Vietnam, as Nam’s brothers insist that he should not be afraid of returning to his homeland, where, in fact, he will be welcomed by his family now. The audience notes that, at this stage, a partial catharsis is already well underway among the different factions of the family that had been separated for so long. In Chapter 10 of her book—fittingly entitled “Reconnection”—Judith Herman compares the situation of survivors whose personality has been deeply transformed by traumatic events to that of “refugees entering a new country” (1992, 196). From her point of view, survivors must not only come to terms with the loss of their old self—thus, their mourning—, but they also have to develop a new self based on relationships they can trust: “They speak of losing and regaining the world” (Herman 1992). Being exiles, the Hòangs are not unfamiliar with the experience of having to build a new life within a radically different context from that place they left behind. What seems paradoxical in their case is that their reconnection is not so much with the people in the country where they have settled, but rather with their own kin back “home.” At this stage of the recovery process, it is crucial that the traumatized person “incorporates the lessons of her traumatic experience into her life” and deepens her alliances with “those whom she has finally learnt to trust” (Herman 1992, 197). When Hòang was preparing their second trip to Vietnam, she confides to the audience that she has “high hopes for our first family reunion in Vietnam” because it is to be held

during “Tet,” a period of the year when family harmony is supposed to prevail. Nguyen’s return to Saigon is also looked forward to with all kinds of great expectations. More importantly, though, Hòang’s father and half sister have finally realized that this may be their last chance to reconcile with other family members, something that shows that at least they have managed to understand that they were victimized by circumstances, and were deeply changed by them. But the challenge of creating a new future is not an easy task, since, of course, the ghosts from their respective pasts are still likely to interfere. This fact becomes particularly apparent when the tension builds up between Van and her parents as they travel across Vietnam, and eventually her stepfather scolds her severely for delaying them all the time. It is difficult to say whether the explosion of resentful feelings and emotions that ensues is caused by Nam’s anxiety about seeing his brothers after more than thirty years or Van’s own uncertainties about her mother’s feelings toward her. The whole “reconnecting project” falls into a crisis when most of the family members declare that “they did not want to come on this trip!” Once again, Hòang needs to employ her best peace-making arts to convince all of them that coming out with those bottled-up feelings from the past may be a healthy exercise for all of them, if correctly orchestrated. In the Coda to her book, Articulate Silences, Cheung also refers to the mastery of the three women writers she has discussed in being able to transport the reader to interior landscapes of reserved characters, even if it is often by means of those “articulate—and articulations of—silences” (1993, 168–72). In Herman’s words, family confrontations or disclosures can be highly empowering when they are properly timed and well planned. They should not be undertaken until the survivor feels ready to speak the truth as she knows it, without the need for confirmation and without fear of consequences. The power of the disclosure rests in the act of telling the truth; how the family responds is immaterial. (1992, 200) While it is true that the exercise of truth-telling may have a restorative power in itself for the survivor, there is no question that its force is multiplied if it is validated by other family members. Thus, when Nam confesses that he had told nobody about Van before he married because he was aware that courting a woman with a child was not acceptable socially,

he is not only recognizing that his attitude toward his stepdaughter has not been fair from the start, but also asking the others to show some sympathy for his failure. Likewise, Van’s open exposition of her resentment toward her mother gives the latter an opportunity to demonstrate that she understands there are reasons in the past that, at least partly, may explain her daughter’s behavior. In a similar vein, Bich Nguyen has to come to terms with the rules set by her Latina stepmother, Rosa, before she can really deal with the “missingness” left by her real mother’s disappearance. In Herman’s opinion, “resolution of the trauma is never final; recovery is never complete” (1992, 211). As Hòang admits, despite the positive effect of these disclosures on the part of different family members, she knows that “the wounds of war could [hardly] be undone.” The impact of traumatic events will continue to reverberate throughout their lifetimes because recovery at one stage does not necessarily mean that the ghosts may not be reawakened at another. Yet, it must also be said that the final stretch of the documentary proves very hopeful, as it is clear that by sharing their experiences most of the protagonists manage to restore the links that had been long dislodged. After his visit to his dead sister’s tomb by the sea and his realization that he has not been the only one in pain, Nam’s visit to his two brothers turns into an emotional occasion, as he is received as the biblical “prodigal son,” who, after long years separated from his kin, has finally “returned home” to his true family. Hai tells his “estranged” younger sibling that, “in their hearts,” they are brothers again, since what had happened before “does not count” any more. As the narrator explains, although “nothing can take away what has already happened,” this trip has forced her family to acknowledge the brutal and chaotic past that “divided us.” All of them recognize that it is illogical and unfair to judge others for actions that were undertaken under great pressure, and often without thinking of the consequences. Even Van, who had been particularly distant and sad during the trip, seems eventually to be integrated into the family, as she observes all the others making gestures and “retrieving” their stories to get back a sense of solidarity and belonging. Hòang explains near the end of the film that “the wall of silence, the secrets that we had kept so long begin to crumble as my mother introduces Van as her daughter.” Nguyen also feels very much integrated into the Vietnamese side of her family during the fare-well party that is held for her, where she realizes that although she is perceived as different—the “American girl”—she is still accepted. Antze

and Lambek have remarked that “people emerge from and as the products of their stories about themselves as much as their stories emerge from their lives. Through acts of memory they strive to render their lives in meaningful terms” (1996, xviii). No doubt, encouraged by Doan’s efforts, the Hòangs prove throughout Oh, Saigon to have a capacity to bear and integrate their traumatic experiences so as to promote a strong bonding with other survivors.

CLOSING REMARKS This article has tried to show that a return to the country of origin may become an integral part of the trauma process undergone by exiles and refugees who were forced to abandon their homeland under very distressing circumstances. Although much of the recent research on return migrations has centered on “alternative understandings of individual and collective identities that transcend static notions of bounded affiliations to nationstates” (Christou 2006, 16), there may be other, more specific reasons driving people to return—even if only temporarily—to their progenitors’ homeland. Among those other possible reasons, there are of course those of people who left some of their closest kin behind and wish to know whether they have finally been forgiven and have not been totally forgotten. Grinberg and Grinberg have studied the anxieties of exiles who feel that they would still be persecuted in their homeland, who mourn for the parts of themselves that they left behind, and who have a hard time trying to imagine how their country may have changed—or degenerated altogether— in the present times (2004, 181). Doan Hòang’s documentary, Oh, Saigon, presents us with a family portrait in which we discover that her parents suffer from many of the anxieties described by the Grinbergs. The directornarrator leads us down the dark tunnels of her progenitors’ past to show us how they were emotionally and psychologically wounded by the war and their sudden departure from Vietnam. As has been noted above, the fact that the receiving society was constantly reminding them of the humiliating defeat did not help much in terms of soothing their pain or appeasing the ghosts that haunted them. Confronted with this difficult situation, Hòang decided to embark on an autoethnographic project meant to help her parents and other family members who had seen their relationships torn apart by the fratricidal conflict.

In Oh, Saigon, the writer and filmmaker uses her closeness with her family and her interest in the family’s history to grant the audience privileged access to certain secrets that her kin had never revealed before. In King-Kok Cheung’s opinion, many Asian-American works of literature trace this development from silence and secrets to voice and knowledge (1993, 79–83). The interviews that Hòang recorded over a period of seven years have been edited and interspersed with other images from the past— photographs, archival footage, etc.—which provide the film with a cinéma vérité style that increases the emotional temperature of the work. Although we can often hear the narrator’s voice glossing over the views and feelings that the interviewees express, the director manages to hit a perfect balance between her inevitable involvement in the family history and a more analytical attitude that prevents her from taking sides (see Behar 1997; Ellis 2004). There is no doubt that Hòang was learning a great deal about her own roots and “new routes” as a Vietnamese American throughout the whole project, but, more important than that, she felt that she was helping her parents and other refugees come to terms with a past that they had repressed for too long. As the director explained when she was asked about her second trip with her parents: I feel healed in a way that I didn’t feel before. I think as a Vietnamese child, I felt a strong desire to help my parents. Many people feel the need to do that financially. I did do that to some extent, but I also felt a stronger need to help my family emotionally. I feel like it was one of the finest accomplishments in my life to have my family address the war and their pasts, and help them on a path to heal. (Spartan 2009) It seems clear, then, that the documentary is not just a narcissistic and selfgratifying exercise in which the author is trying to define her own position regarding the schism that divided her family. More than anything else, she is interested in the recovery of all the survivors in the family—mainly her parents—who were separated and traumatized by a conflict that made them face unjust situations and choices. The fact that Doan Hòang dedicated her documentary to Uncle Hai—who died soon after the film was completed— and “to the people of Vietnam and Iraq and all those whose homelands are battlegrounds” clearly speaks of a commitment on the part of the artist that transcends the boundaries of her own family.

CODA (BY DOAN HÒANG) I began my work on Oh, Saigon with the mentality of a victim. As I heard the stories from my family, I gained perspective on how each of us has our own thread, our own journey in life, and that each of us who has ever suffered has a choice in how we approach past pains and conflicts. One may choose a continuation of conflict, fear, separation, judgment, isolation, resentment, anger, darkness, or simply hate; or one may decide to address, acknowledge, resolve, move forward with forgiveness, healing, and love. I hope that my work encourages the latter. I am also grateful to those in academia and the media who have written about my work with insight. As I work on my new project, the follow-up to Oh, Saigon, a work without a title yet, I reconsider my motivation for making such revealing and intimate films. My new film, the shooting of which I am nearly done with, is about the women in my family who are survivors of rape and their damaged relationships with each other. It delves deeper into the continuing conflict between my mother, Anne, and half sister, Van, and like Oh, Saigon, this film is about traumatic events in history—the exodus from war, the particular ways that women suffer and cope in the process, societal influences, and the relationships of trauma survivors with each other and with the perpetrators of violent acts against them. This film is even more personal to me, as I am also a victim of rape, but one who has sought her own healing via therapeutic processes and community. I see here that my role as an artist is, again, to show the memories and interpretations of those who have experienced or taken part in upheaval and violence without judgment—in the film I interview a man who raped me—and to encourage further healing and offer understanding to viewers about a sad, taboo, and uncomfortable subject that affects so much of the population worldwide as victims and perpetrators. Again, I use personal experience to throw light upon a greater topic.

REFERENCES Ainslie, Ricardo. 1998. “Cultural Mourning, Immigration, and Engagement: Vignettes from the Mexican Experience.” In Crossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspective, edited by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, 207–18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma.” In Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen, and Neil J.

Smelser, 1–30. Berkeley: University of California Press. Alonso, Andoni, and Pedro J. Oiarzabal, eds. 2010. Diasporas in the New Media Age: Identity, Politics and Community. Reno: University of Nevada Press. Antze, Paul, and Michael Lambek. 1996. “Introduction.” Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, xi–xxxviii. New York and London: Routledge. Appadurai, Arjun, and Carol A. Breckenridge. 1989. “On Moving Targets.” Public Culture 2: i–iv. Behar, Ruth. 1997. The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks your Heart. Boston: Beacon Press. Carroll, David. 1987. “Narrative, Heterogeneity, and the Question of the Political: Bakhtin and Lyotard.” In The Aims of Representation: Subject / Text / History, edited by Murray Krieger, 69– 106. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Cheung, King-Kok. 1993. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, Joy Kogawa. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Christou, Anastasia. 2006. Narratives of Place, Culture and Identity: Second-Generation GreekAmericans Return ‘Home.’ Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3) (August): 302–38. Cohen, Robin. 1997. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Do, Hien D. 1999. The Vietnamese Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Douglass, Ana, and Thomas A. Vogler, eds. 2003. Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma. New York and London: Routledge. Ellis, Carolyn. 2004. The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Auto-ethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Grinberg, León, and Rebeca Grinberg. 2004. Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Migration and Exile. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hall, Mitchell K. (2000) 2008. The Vietnam War. Revised 2nd ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education. Herman, Judith L. 1992. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books. Hòang, Doan, dir. 2007. Oh, Saigon: A War in the Family. Nuoc Films. Long, Patrick D. P., and Laura Ricard. 1996. The Dream Shattered: Vietnamese Gangs in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Nguyen, Bich Minh. 2007. Stealing Buddha’s Dinner: A Memoir. New York: Viking Penguin. Obama, Barack. (1995) 2004. Dreams from My Father. New York: Three Rivers Press. Reed-Danahay, Deborah. 2005. Locating Bourdieu. New Anthropologies of Europe Series. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1 (1): 83–99. Said, Edward W. 2000. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, 173–86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Santoli, Al. 1999. To Bear Any Burden: The Vietnam War and Its Aftermath in the Words of Americans and Southeast Asians. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. Simal González, Begoña. 2014. “Andrew Lam’s Narratives of Return: From Viet Kieu Nostalgia to Discrepant Cosmopolitanism.” In Identity, Diaspora and Return in American Literature, edited by Maria Antònia Oliver-Rotger, 81–102. New York and London: Routledge. Spartan, John. 2009. “Interview with Filmmaker Doan Hòang: Oh, Saigon—Life after the Vietnam War,” NERDSociety, May 11, 2009. http://www.nerdsociety.om/interview-with-filmmaker-doanhoang-oh-saigon-life-after-vietnam-war/. Sturken, Marita. 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press. Thai, Hung C. 1999. “‘Splitting Things in Half Is So White!’: Conceptions of Family Life and Friendship and the Formation of Ethnic Identity among Second-Generation VietnameseAmericans.” Amerasia Journal 25 (1): 53–88. Vertovec, Steven. 1997. “Three Meanings of ‘Diaspora’, Exemplified among South Asian Religions,” Diaspora 6 (3): 277–99. Wiest, Andrew. 2002. The Vietnam War 1956–1975. Botley, UK: Osprey Publishing. Zhou, Min, and Carl L. Bankston III. 1998. Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the U.S. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

  * The research carried out for the writing of this chapter has been partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (code: CSO 2011-24804).

 

Part II

Restorative Nostalgias

Return as Emotional ReAttachment

 

4

Andrew Lam’s Narratives of Return From Viet Kieu Nostalgia to Discrepant Cosmopolitanism Begoña Simal González

  It is now easy to return, but impossible to go home. Andrew Lam, “Viet Kieu”

  When, as a child, Andrew Lam had to hurriedly pack a few things and flee the country, he left his “homework undone,” lying open on some table in his old house in Da Lat (WETA 2004a). In much of his creative work as an adult, Andrew Lam seems to want to go back and finish that unfinished task. An American journalist and writer, Lam is also a member of the Vietnamese diaspora. Commonly known as viet kieu (“Vietnamese sojourners”) or, less often, as nguoi viet hai ngoai (“overseas Vietnamese”), the members of the Vietnamese diaspora currently amount to an estimated three million people, spread all over the world but with a size-able number living in the United States.1 As a viet kieu, Lam is very much engaged with the apparently contradictory drives that shape his diasporic community. In his filmed and written narratives of return, Lam attempts to tease out the implications of the roots/routes paradox inherent in diasporic consciousness. This chapter will focus on the multiple ways in which Lam’s work explores such tension between stasis and mobility in the life of many viet kieu.

As Lam himself acknowledges, his writing is prompted by the need to understand and ultimately reconcile that apparent dichotomy: “What story could I possibly tell that would convey the transformational experience of a people who were once land bound but have become instead mobile?” (2004, sec. 5). The story he can (and does) tell is that of coming to terms with his childhood memories of his old house in Da Lat, confronting that “land-boundedness” as embodied in an old woman in Hue, and finally exploring critical cosmopolitanism in a tentative manner. Despite the emphasis on synchronic descriptions, especially in Perfume Dreams (2005), I would argue that Lam’s narratives can and should be read diachronically. In tracing the narrator’s development and his eventual self-figuration as a cosmopolitan traveler, I contend that Lam’s particular “diasporic consciousness” as a free, mobile, American citizen of Vietnamese origin can best be defined through the terms of “flexible citizenship” and “discrepant cosmopolitanism.”

A DIASPORIC APPROACH TO THE VIET KIEU Asian-American immigrants, in Elaine Kim’s words, have been shaped by “racialization in the United States and colonialism, neocolonial capitalism, and imperialist wars in Asia. Their memories, histories, and experiences tell us a story quite different from the Hollywood versions of US heroism that saved their homelands and adopted their orphans” (Kim 2004, xii). This is an apt description of the very origin of the Vietnamese-American community. Although the presence of the Vietnamese in the United States has a much longer history than we may imagine, and it is not fair to reduce them to a post-1975 phenomenon (Vo 2003, xiii), it is equally true that Vietnamese Americans became visible and recognizable as an ethnic group only after the Vietnam War, especially when the numerous contingent of the sadly famous “boat people” placed the new arrivals within the interpretative frame of “the refugee others.”2 Andrew Lam belongs to what came to be known as the first wave of refugees, who left before or just after the “fall of Saigon” and the reunification of the country. He is also part of the “1.5” viet kieu generation, which includes all those who arrived in the new country as children or teenagers. Although not born in the United States, these 1.5-generation Vietnamese Americans would attend American schools and, in some cases,

universities; they would live and work in the new country, thus combining childhood memories of Vietnamese life with the imprint left by the subsequent American socialization process. As we shall see, this dichotomy (United States/Vietnam) will condition Lam’s understanding of his life and of the “viet kieu plight” in general, even if, at the same time, the writer himself struggles to move beyond such a binary approach to identity. It remains contentious whether overseas Vietnamese, or, more specifically, Vietnamese Americans, can really be approached as a diasporic community. Generally speaking, the older generation of viet kieu tend to see themselves as part of a worldwide Vietnamese diaspora, but can Lam, who left Vietnam when he was eleven, be equally considered a member of the Vietnamese diaspora? Do foreign-born viet kieu qualify as diasporic subjects? Do these younger generations maintain the diasporic consciousness that is still commonly found among their elders? If we follow William Safran’s (1991) taxonomic theory, we could claim that the American viet kieu display many of the features associated with diasporic communities. To start with, many viet kieu maintain a “collective memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland,” from which they were displaced, and most members of the first generation “believe they are not— and perhaps cannot be—fully accepted by their host country” (Safran 1991, 83). In addition, it can be safely argued that Vietnamese in the diaspora “continue to relate, personally or vicariously” to Vietnam, and that “their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity,” at least in the United States, are still determined by such a persistent bond (Safran 1991, 84). As Isabelle Thuy Pelaud puts it, even several decades after their exile, and precisely due to “the specific conditions of forced (rather than voluntary) departure” from Vietnam, many viet kieus in the United States have managed to maintain “strong familial and emotional ties that span national borders;” their “transnationalism” especially shows in the way “they make decisions in the United States on the basis of their memories of Vietnam” (Pelaud 2011, 17). We cannot forget that, for Vietnamese Americans, as for other “racially marked” communities in the United States, as James Clifford cogently argues, the immigrant script of assimilation is clearly subverted or “interrupted by relations of border crossing, by diasporic attachments ‘elsewhere’” (Clifford 1997, 331). In other words, Vietnamese Americans do not just constitute one more ethnic minority, because, for several decades, their sense of belonging has been complicated by “the structural

tensions between a territorially based nation and a ‘deterritorialized’ one” (Ong 1999, 11). While Vietnamese Americans exhibit some of the characteristics described in Safran’s (1991) foundational essay, it is true that not all of the six features he enumerates can be so easily ascribed to all of the viet kieu. Some of the elements central to the “diasporic consciousness,” in Safran’s restricted definition,3 seem to apply only to the first generation of Vietnamese exiles and increasingly less to young, 1.5-, or secondgeneration viet kieu. For one thing, time and prosperity gradually render the bittersweet memories of Vietnam dimmer and dimmer: It is difficult … to keep grief and nostalgia in their prime as the years go by. The pangs of longing dulled by the necessities of living and the glory of the new found status and wealth. And the refugee turned immigrant (a psychological transition) turned naturalized U.S. citizen (more or less a transition of convenience) finds that the insistence of memories insists a little less as he zooms down the freeway toward a glorious cityscape of chimerical high-rises to work each morning. (Lam 2004, sec. 4) And yet, several decades after their departure, many overseas Vietnamese not only cling to those memories of the homeland, but, more importantly, they still expect the “liberation” of Vietnam from the communist regime. The old viet kieu, especially political exiles and refugees of deep anticommunist sentiment, consider Vietnam as the country they aspire to return to, “when conditions are appropriate,” as diasporic subjects should, according to Safran (1991, 83–84). Interviews with old Vietnamese Americans like Lam’s father—a former general with the South Vietnamese Army—confirm that this is still the case among the first generation.4 Lam notes how he would need a specific category of viet kieu to define his father: “viet kieu yeu nyoc khong ve,” that is, “those who are truly patriotic but who will never return as long as communism reigns—Viet Kieus who only dream of going home” (Lam 2005, 127). It can be concluded, then, that the ongoing bond with the original homeland and the desire to go back there to die, two characteristics which Safran deemed essential for a diasporic consciousness to emerge and endure, can

be perceived not only in Lam’s father, but also in many old members of the Vietnamese-American community. However, such a desire and hope to return to Vietnam has waxed and waned among the American viet kieu, with a relative eclipse in the post-doi moi period and after the rapprochement of the United States and Vietnam in the mid-1990s.5 When the two countries normalized their diplomatic relations, that is, when the economic embargo was lifted and Vietnamese Americans were finally allowed to travel “home” unimpeded, very few “old-timers” actually went back to Vietnam, or if they did, it was just a temporary visit.6 In much the same way, for a long time, most 1.5- and second-generation viet kieu merely regarded Vietnam as a good destination for “back-to-the-roots” tourism, but not as a place to stay “for good.” In the last few years, however, the trend has started to change: more and more viet kieu are now attracted by the improved opportunities offered by Vietnamese authorities, so they have chosen to set up businesses in Vietnam and even settle there (Bainbridge 2005; Shenon 1993; Tran 1992). It is this new generation of viet kieu, who are not only highly mobile but also less politically prejudiced, that are most visibly contributing to bridging the gap between the two countries and their peoples. Apparently then, the twenty-first century has witnessed how the link of the young Vietnamese Americans to the original homeland is timidly starting to be re-established, while the older viet kieu still cling to old ideals of “recovering” the country in both literal and metaphorical terms. It must be noted, however, that the different viet kieu communities existing throughout the world have developed in diverse ways. Historical and national peculiarities have contributed to emphasizing or, alternatively, diluting their diasporic consciousness. In a recent comparative analysis of Vietnamese communities in Canada and the United States, Louis-Jacques Dorais (2010) contends that the awareness of a diasporic identity, which has completely died out among Vietnamese Canadians, is still very much alive among Vietnamese Americans. While I have argued for the co-existence of diasporic and non-diasporic consciousness among US viet kieus, a phenomenon usually coincidental with and distributed along generational lines, Dorais prefers to stress and delineate chronological shifts, specifically by tracing the existence of “diasporic moments,” which, in the case of Vietnamese Canadians, have been superseded by the current “ethnic” moment (2010, 98–105). This, he contends, is not the case among Vietnamese Americans, who continue to live in a “diasporic moment” that

started with the “fall of Saigon” in 1975. The reasons for such disparity, according to Dorais, lie in the different historical circumstances encountered by the Vietnamese in Canada and the United States; in the latter, especially in Southern California, three factors concur which do not appear in the Canadian context: “a large concentration of refugees and refugee off spring, a strong presence of individuals who had been directly involved in the war against Hà Nôi, and the political salience of anticommunism” (102). Vietnamese Canadians do not share these factors that contribute to the maintenance and consolidation of diasporic ties with the original homeland. However, as I have just explained, we can no longer take for granted the cohesion and homogeneity of the community of Vietnamese Americans, and the recent geopolitical and social changes in both Vietnam and the United States have also affected the manner in which the American viet kieu currently approach the “Vietnamese connection.” It is in this context that we should place and understand Lam’s work, since most of his stories, essays, and documentary pieces were written or produced in the late 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, when the diasporic consciousness was starting to fade. Caught between his own need to build a free, independent subject position—very much shaped by his American socialization and by contemporary globalizing forces—and the older generation’s desire for the lost homeland, epitomized by his father’s adamant nostalgia, Lam’s narratives try to negotiate the dual allegiance (United States/Vietnam) at the same time that they open up a new venue for the viet kieu: critical cosmopolitanism.

VIETNAMESE-AMERICAN “TRANSNATIONAL TALES” Lam’s work needs to be contextualized not only in socio-historical terms, but also within the specific cultural and literary tradition it is contributing to building. The question of what constitutes Vietnamese-American literature has proved problematic from the very outset (Janette 2003, 267–68; Jason 1997; Pelaud 2011, 22ff), with most scholars including fiction together with non-fiction, covering songs and oral “her/histories” (Truong 1997), biographies, and books in Vietnamese (Tran 1992), etc. Likewise, there is some controversy regarding the features (if any) shared by VietnameseAmerican texts, although some critics argue that, at least until the 1990s,

Vietnamese-American authors shared a common didactic purpose: “literature with a mission” (Janette 2003, 269). In her recent survey of Vietnamese-American literature, Pelaud is more specific and claims that such literary production often becomes “deeply entangled with national dissemination of images of America as a successful multicultural society and fighter for the free world”; thus “gloss[ing] over racial inequalities and tensions,” as befits a neocolonial agenda (Pelaud 2011, 20–21). Still others believe that, contrary to what happens in most Asian-American literary traditions, Vietnamese-American books should be read as “exile” (Tran 1992, 272) or refugee literature rather than immigrant literature. In a useful taxonomic article, Michele Janette describes the range of texts written by Vietnamese Americans up to 1994 as belonging to three “categories:” Tales of Witness, Tales of Education, and Tales of Life in America (Janette 2003, 271–77).7 Vietnamese-American books published since the mid-1990s have broadened this literary tradition by adding a new category, which I have called “Transnational Tales.” Texts such as Lam’s Perfume Dreams (2005); Andrew Pham’s travelogue, Catfish and Mandala ([1999] 2000); and Aimee Phan’s collection of short stories, We Should Never Meet (2004), would qualify as transnational tales, in that they all share a common concern with building a “Vietnamese-American identity” in an increasingly transnational context. The new transnational configurations complicate the already ambivalent construction of the “homeland,” which becomes as fluid as the very ambiguity of the Vietnamese term suggests.8 Also, these transnational tales include or primarily constitute narratives of return, a subgenre which became especially “fashionable” around 2000, when newspapers and television companies commissioned viet kieus to write about their “journeys back home” to Vietnam, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the war (Pelaud 2011, 36). Among those narratives, we find Lam’s autobiographical essay, “Child of Two Worlds,” later included in Perfume Dreams (2005, 3–18), and the documentary piece featuring him, My Journey Home (Lam 2004; WETA 2004a, b), commissioned by the PBS. Lam’s Perfume Dreams is a collection of essays ranging from nostalgic memoirs (e.g. “Lost Photos”) to more typical journalistic pieces (e.g. “Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge”), and tracing the author’s personal development (a happy childhood, a fractured childhood, the formation of a

bicultural identity, the movement towards a “critical transnationalism”), although not in a linear manner. Despite the fact that many of the essays in Perfume Dreams include scenes set in Vietnam or in refugee camps, the one titled “Viet Kieu” constitutes the best example of a narrative of return. Originally written in 2000, “Viet Kieu” is a mixture of autobiographical reminiscence and journalistic realism, especially in its detailed, bittersweet description of the different types of viet kieu as seen through Vietnamese eyes (Lam 2005, 115–23). At the same time, reading this text side by side with another essay, Salman Rushdie’s seminal “Imaginary Homelands” ([1982] 1991), throws some light onto apparently trivial phenomena. In coreading and comparing these texts, I will juxtapose and contrast two different ways of approaching the recovery of that emotionally charged “place”: the notion of “the homeland of the mind” (“Indias of the mind” for Rushdie, “Vietnams of the mind” for Lam), on the one hand, and the stark experience of sensorial memory or “skin memory” of the lost home-land, on the other.9

VIETNAM OF THE MIND, VIETNAM OF THE SENSES In “Viet Kieu,” Lam (2005, 115–30) recounts his visit to Vietnam through an autodiegetic narrator whom we shall henceforth call “Andrew.” The protagonist in Lam’s essay apparently engages in what I earlier called “back-to-the-roots” tourism.10 Some critics disparagingly describe this phenomenon as an absurd fashion. In “Postmarked Calcutta, India,” for instance, Gayatri Spivak (1990, 93) maintains the following: “If there’s one thing I totally distrust, in fact, more than distrust, despise and have contempt for, it is people looking for roots. Because anyone who can conceive of looking for roots, should, already … be growing rutabagas… Everyone has roots. Why look for them?” Understandable though these suspicions are, in a historical moment, the late 1980s, when identity politics had started to be scrutinized and essentialism had (rightfully) come under attack by post-structuralists like Spivak herself, it remains nonetheless crucial to explore the insights provided by nuanced, sophisticated accounts of that experience of “looking for roots,” or, in Lam’s case, “coming back to one’s roots.”11

In “Imaginary Homelands,” Salman Rushdie describes the plight of diasporic writers who are “haunted by some sense of loss” caused by their physical distance or “alienation” from their original homeland, a distance that not only pushes them towards an agonizing recreation of those lost homelands, but towards the very creation of “fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” ([1982] 1991, 10). Driven by a similar sense of loss that Lam (2005, 125) continues to mourn even as an adult, in “Viet Kieu” Andrew describes his journey back to Vietnam, a country that, despite the ongoing emotional ties, he does not consider his real “home” any more (115). Rushdie opens ”Imaginary Homelands” by describing a black and white photograph of his old house in Bombay and offering the reader a brief narrative of return;12 in other words, he juxtaposes the documented visual memory of his childhood past and a recent visit to that same house in India, a journey where the aforementioned “physical” distance is necessarily neutralized. Similarly, in “Viet Kieu” Andrew recounts how he travels to two of his “lost homes” in his “lost homeland,” one in Da Lat (Dalat) and the other in Hue, although it is in the first narrative of return that one can witness the tension between the “homeland of the mind” and the tangible presence of such a place. In Da Lat, Andrew revisits the dilapidated villa where he used to live as a child, a house that is now being reclaimed by the Vietnamese natural environment. The “quaint” villa bespeaks not only European colonialism but also class privilege, just as Rushdie’s house—“a three-storeyed gabled affair with tiled roofs and round towers in two corners, each wearing a pointy tiled hat” (9)—attests to the British colonial heritage and is redolent of social elitism. If Rushdie stresses the expatriate writers’ need to “look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt” ([1982] 1991, 10) in “Imaginary Homelands,” the narrator in “Viet Kieu” struggles with similarly ambivalent emotions. In an explicit “confession,” Andrew owns up to having been “coaxed by an American television crew into revisiting” the house where he had spent his childhood years (Lam 2005, 123), that is, he admittedly wavers between an intense desire and a certain unwillingness to go back to that lost past. The fact that it is an American crew that “forces” the narrator to tell the story and that “forcefully” enters the house by breaking the door not only brings back memories of the violence of an

imperialist war, but also echoes the problematic situation of the native “informant,” in both the anthropological and the political sense of the word. Equally relevant is the fact that the story will be told to a camera, a supposedly objective “eye,” but, we cannot forget, an “eye” that is manipulated by the American crew (who also constitute the ear/audience). What follows, accordingly, is a “cinematic” description of what Andrew does and experiences through the senses. The autobiographical storytelling framed in Lam’s essay starts by making further, mise-en-abîme references to storytelling: “Here’s the living room where I spent my childhood listening to my parents telling ghost stories” (123). The narrative proceeds by means of such deceivingly simple descriptive gestures, at the same time that it lets Western cultural colonialism transpire: “and there’s the dining room where my brother and I played… Beyond is the sunroom where my father spent his early evenings listening to the BBC while sipping his Johnnie Walker whiskey and soda” (123). However, once upstairs, in what used to be his bedroom, the narrator attempts to demonstrate, in front of the camera, how to open the window shutters. Here, telling is combined with doing, the act of narration is accompanied by the action of touching, and something unexpected happens: “When my palm touches the wooden shutter, however, I suddenly stop talking. There is confusion among the film crew. I am no longer an American adult narrating his past. The sensation of the wood’s rough, flaked-off paint against my skin feels exactly the same after three decades” (124). What Andrew experiences in his old house in Da Lat can be literally described as “skin memory,” an overpowering sensorial memory that fleetingly reconnects him with the lost homeland, as well as with his lost childhood. But sensorial memory does not only work by making tangible what was only remembrance of the past. It is not just touching objects that brings back vivid memories; by opening the window and letting in fresh air, other senses are simultaneously stimulated, in a recreation of past scenes full of perfume, sound, and color: The shutter makes a little creaking noise as it swings open to let in the morning air—and with it a flood of unexpected memories.

I am a Vietnamese child again, preparing for school. I hear my mother’s lilting voice calling from downstairs to hurry up. And I smell again that particular odor of burnt pinewood from the kitchen wafting in the cool air. Outside in my mother’s garden, dawn lights up leaves and roses, and the world pulses with birdsongs. Morning dew on blades of grass. A self-contained world. (124; emphasis added) The skin memory that first conjured up Andrew’s vivid memories now becomes “body memory,” as he himself realizes: “There are memories, and there are memories… what the mind forgets, the body might hold dear” (124; emphasis in the original). In contrast, Rushdie’s juxtaposition of the imaginary house/homeland and the physically experienced house is described exclusively in visual terms: I went to visit the house in the photograph and stood outside it… I was overwhelmed. The photograph had naturally been taken in black and white; and my memory, feeding on such images as this, had begun to see my childhood in the same way, monochromatically. The colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness of the red tiles, the yellowedged green of cactus-leaves, the brilliance of bougainvillaea creeper. (Rushdie [1982] 1991, 9; emphasis added) Andrew’s multisensorial memories, those “memories hidden in the body” (Lam 2005, 124), are here synecdochically simplified and conflated by Rushdie into the pair of seeing eyes, an organ antithetically combined with the homonymous metaphor for human memory or imagination: “the mind’s eye.” The effect, however, does not entirely diverge from that obtained by Lam’s deployment of sensorial memory: in “Imaginary Homelands” the multidimensional reality of Rushdie’s colorful house contrasts with his “monochromatic” memories, a chasm that the writer wants to bridge by writing a novel (Midnight’s Children), the only available instrument for the “restoration” of that past to himself ([1982] 1991, 9–10). And yet, in the remainder of the essay, Rushdie will privilege the “broken mirrors” of memory and imagination (over sensorial data) in his (re)creation and reclaiming of the past.

The narrator in “Viet Kieu” also attempts “to recover [him]self” (Lam 2005, 123) by recovering the memories of the past. However, the tension between “tangible” and imaginary homelands is resolved differently in his essay. Clearly, Da Lat—the village the narrator was most “sentimental about”—is not just “the Da Lat or the Vietnam of the mind,” an awareness likewise present in Rushdie’s text. In Lam’s essay, as in Rushdie’s, the very material, physical “reality” of the house in Da Lat battles with the notion of “the imaginary homeland,” and the two co-exist in productive friction. Just like Rushdie’s narrator, the narrative voice in Lam’s text is aware that Vietnam “was once my home but is no longer. The country I remember and still yearn for [the Vietnam of the mind] is not the country I visit. Still, like a weaning addict, I go back, from time to time, to look and measure my losses, and, slowly, in my own way, to let go” (115). This excerpt unequivocally reveals the underlying script of a mother/land from which you need to “wean” yourself and yet cannot, a naturalized mother/land that is lost forever, because childhood is a country you grow up and away from.13 It is touch and go, literally. Once the narrator touches, once Andrew experiences the tangible reality of those walls, he gets reconciled with that lifelong yearning and can finally “take leave.” The childhood house that used to haunt his American dreams finally disappears: I supposed, in my own way, I never ceased to mourn its loss. But no more. I re-enter a childhood home on a windblown hill one cloudy day with a television crew and emerge now with an unexpected gift—a fragment of my childhood left in an airy room upstairs. I feel oddly blessed. Having touched once more the place where I used to live, I can finally say what I had always wanted to say after all these many years: goodbye. (125) It is at this stage that the sentence which had opened Lam’s essay—and which had looked suggestively oxymoronic—acquires full sense, capturing the two connotations of permission and movement: “We return in order to take leave” (115).

ROOTS AND ROUTES The intriguing possibilities and transformational nature of the prefix trans-, which we can find in different neologisms, have been explored by diverse critics in several fields (“trans-ethnic,” “trans-natural,” etc.), but it is the preference of the term “trans-national” over alternative ones that interests us here. In contrast with “globalization,” transnationality captures, in Aihwa Ong’s words, “the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space … intensified under late capitalism” (1999, 4). As Lam himself recognizes, the transnational condition, “once a peculiar space,” is nowadays “shared by much of humanity” (2005, 47). Paradoxically enough, the preceding analysis of Lam’s “transnational tale” has focused more on the perceived roots, origins, or homeland of the “diasporic” viet kieu than on the “trans-,” that is, on the movement implied in the very label “transnational.” Indeed, the emphasis on the diasporic attachment to “roots” tends to obscure the fact that, as Clifford famously phrased it, “diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes” (1994, 308), and Lam’s case is no exception. As an adolescent, Lam traveled away from his roots, his original Vietnamese homeland, and such a journey/route marked the emergence of his diasporic consciousness. Already as a viet kieu, another significant route has contributed to shaping him: the journey “back” to his roots. Furthermore, as the initial sentence and the ending of the autobiographical essay corroborate, this return route will apparently reconcile him to his roots and enable him to be a guiltless— if not rootless—traveler. Both dwelling and movement, therefore, are constitutive of the viet kieu’s fluid diasporic identity, although, apparently, such an identity is now increasingly defined “in terms of movement” (Pelaud 2011, 36).14 If the revisiting of the old house in Da Lat had become the privileged site where place and memory were negotiated, the narrator’s self-figuration in increasingly transnational, cosmopolitan terms can be most fruitfully discussed by focusing on his visit to his other childhood house, in Hue, and by reading it side by side with other moments scattered throughout the entire Perfume Dreams collection. The narrative of return to the imperial city of Hue, where Andrew’s father had been stationed for a year when he was nine, is structured around the confrontation between two worldviews, the narrator’s and an

anonymous old woman’s, respectively epitomizing “those who move and those who do not” (Lam 2005, 127).15 In spatial terms, such a psychological and emotional distance is metaphorized by the table lying between them during their conversation, “an old, tea-stained wooden table” which “might as well be an ocean” separating the two subjects (127). The scene opens with the narrator’s memories of his time in the imperial city and his family boat trips on the Perfume River. Significantly, stasis and mobility are intertwined in these early memories. Andrew remembers listening to his father’s “snow stories,” set in faraway countries like France, Japan, and the United States, and being fascinated by the prospect of traveling there even as a nine-year-old: “I remember wishing for America with all my heart then, wishing for wings or for the boat to drift on down river and away from the crazy war until we find ourselves under the Golden Gate Bridge” (126).16 It is no coincidence that the narrator links imagination, “the mind’s eye,” with sensorial stimulation, as he had done when revisiting Da Lat: “After hearing his stories, I remember standing on tiptoe on top of a chair next to our opened fridge, my hands in the freezer compartment scraping and scraping at the frost until my fingers were numb. Even then, with eyes closed and a modest snowball in my palm, I had begun to travel” (126). Resorting once more to that productive juxtaposition which we had encountered in the first narrative of return (to his old house in Da Lat), in this scene Lam convincingly shows the reader how the icy sensations produced by the rudimentary snowball allow the young Andrew to embark on a literal flight of fancy.17 In contrast, the old woman he meets in Hue has opted for staying on her small farm. She has crossed the Perfume River only once to visit the imperial city, barely two kilometers away: “For her, crossing the nearby river is a journey, whereas for me Paris or Bangkok or New York is a matter of scheduling” (127). The reason why the old lady has never left her house is indirectly given. “Whatever for?” (125), she answers to the narrator’s queries, obliquely pointing at her garden, her chickens, and the playful great-grandchildren surrounding her. The old lady’s “little universe” (128) of family and a simple livelihood mirrors young Andrew’s “self-contained world,” “that sense of insularity, of being loved,” a feeling irretrievably lost once he left for America (124). Similarly, the woman’s garden is reminiscent of the Edenic garden of childhood that the narrator had

nostalgically recreated in his Da Lat narrative (124). And yet, while the old lady’s garden has the flavor of eternal permanence, Andrew’s “sentimental garden has long been trampled underfoot” (Lam 2004; Lam 2005, 128; cf. WETA 2004a, b). The emblematically “immobile” or, rather, “nonmobile” old woman is also literally “unmoved” (Lam 2005, 125) by political events like the end of the (Vietnam) war, an attitude, we would surmise, which she adopts out of sheer indifference: “Wars are waged, generations come and go, the last emperor is long gone, yet the old lady stays in her little garden” (127).18 History, for the old woman, is the continuation of the centuries-old family line, as the numerous photographs of ancestors in the living room attest to.19 The land, synecdochically present through the old lady’s garden, and the continuance of the past, as signified by the immobile gaze of the dead ancestors, configure the main parameters of this woman’s existence. In every sense, then, the old lady acts as Andrew’s symbolic foil. If he embodies the contemporary “cosmopolitan condition,” she stands for “roots” and “rootedness”; if he epitomizes the restless traveler, she represents those who choose not to move in an increasingly mobile world. Surprisingly enough, Andrew, the cosmopolitan traveler who had so earnestly wanted to emulate his “worldly” father, now envies the “worldless” woman who chooses to “stay put” and is content with a life “connected to the tiny plot of land and with the dead and the past” (127). Her sedentary existence is predicated on the certainty of emplacement and belonging: she belongs there, that is her true homeland. The narrator, on the other hand, feels he no longer has a “home” to go to (127). Vietnam may have been the “homeland” which initially “shaped” Andrew, but he has “been reshaped elsewhere,” and, in the meantime, he has accumulated “many additional homelands” (127; cf. p. 46). He seeps in and out of the “porous” borders of an unevenly globalized world, and in his mobile life he negotiates “multiple anchorages” (Alexander 1996), a fluid multiplicity that enhances life and selfhood (Lam 2005, 46–47).

DISCREPANT COSMOPOLITANISMS Both narratives of return, the one we have just analyzed (Hue) and the one discussed previously (Da Lat), seem to echo the misleadingly stable

roots/routes dichotomy. More importantly, these narratives present the two options, mobility and immobility, as two timeless positions. The narratives of return we encounter in “Viet Kieu” fuse time and space, so that the journey back to Vietnam becomes a journey back to the past. However, this momentary return to the past is narrativized as an eternally synchronic moment, powered by movement but mired in nostalgic stasis. In contrast to this synchronic approach to the roots/routes dialectics, I would argue for approaching Lam’s texts diachronically, as a patchwork of synchronic moments that, seen from above, constitute the very history of the development of many Vietnamese Americans. As argued above, Lam’s work is concerned with describing the diasporic consciousness of the viet kieu, young and old.20 Throughout Perfume Dreams and My Journey Home, Lam depicts and at times resents his father’s stubborn clinging to the past, or rather to a country that signifies the past: “My father could never allow himself the luxury of returning, even as he talks of Vietnam almost daily… He longs for Vietnam but he remains forever an exile” (2005, 127; see also his “Notes of a Warrior’s Son,” 2005, 23–50). In imagining his father as a permanent exile, Lam confirms Clifford’s argument that diaspora communities “mediate, in a lived tension, the experiences of separation and entanglement, of living here and remembering/desiring another place”; therefore, diasporic subjects are “nothere to stay” (Clifford 1997, 255). At the same time, however, Lam notes how such a diasporic sentiment has changed over time and, wittingly or unwittingly, Vietnamese Americans have become more American than Vietnamese: And so a community that previously saw itself as exiles, as survivors of some historical tragedy, as a people who were prepared to return to their homeland to tend their abandoned ancestral graves and to face their oppressors, slowly changes its mind. Soon enough houses are bought, jobs are had, children are born, old folks are buried, and businesses and malls are opened. That is to say our roots sink, slowly but deeply, into the American loam. Soon enough Little Saigons, up and down the Californian coast as well as elsewhere began to blossom and sprout. And the stories of the horrible war and terrifying escape over the highseas slowly gave way to gossips of new found successes in the Golden Land. (2004, sec. 3)

And yet, the options described above, feeling permanently exiled or getting “grounded” in a specific country, seem to do nothing but re-inscribe the traditional Asian/American dichotomy which Lam’s latest work questions and ultimately dismantles. The privileged position of the mythology of “roots” both in the traditional diasporic consciousness and in an equally traditional understanding of ethnic communities—keeping old roots or forging new ones, respectively—is undermined by the growing relevance of fluid, mutable transnationality. In this respect, Lam’s texts increasingly point toward cosmopolitanism as his own personal answer to the travel/dwelling dichotomy, but also as the most convenient path for contemporary diasporic subjects. Interestingly enough, Lam sees this trend not only among Vietnamese Americans but also among the young Vietnamese themselves: The new Vietnamese? I’ve seen him. He’s my little cousin surfing the web and watching Chinese martial art videos dubbed in Vietnamese while talking to his friends on his cell phone in English. Above him the ancestral altar still wafts incense. On the computer screen, images shift and flow, and this too is his new home. He seems to be at ease with all these conflicting ideas, dissimilar languages. He seems both grounded and mobile, and his imagination, his sense of himself is transgeographical. Ask what he wants to do when he grows up and he shrugs. “Astronaut,” he answers matter-of-factly, as if it’s the simplest thing in the world. Yet going back three generations and he stands knee deep in mud in his rice fields gawking at the stars. But no more. The stars may very well be possible. His energy is free from the arduous grip of landbound imagination, and it is growing and reconstituting in new and marvelous ways. (2004, sec. 6) If we look at the whole collection, Perfume Dreams, we observe how the narrator’s schizophrenic self-figuration as bicultural, most obvious in earlier essays such as “Child of Two Worlds” (Lam 2005, 3–18) and “My Vietnam, My America” (2005, 93–98), inexorably moves towards what Ong (1999) describes as transnational or “flexible citizenship.” Transnational beings, “unique and rounded,” “refute simplification” (Lam 2005, 47); they do not

comfortably fit into the either/or binary paradigms. Cosmopolitanism appears not just as the unavoidable condition of postmodern identity, but also as highly desirable. As we shall soon see, such a bland version of cosmopolitanism has come under attack for its simplifying, de-historicizing nature. One of the elements or tropes that most visibly encapsulates the new cosmopolitan condition is the passport.21 Construed as either a metaphor of “flexible citizenship” or a metonymy of global, transnational mobility, the passport, in practical terms, identifies you at the same time as it allows you to cross “national” frontiers, to satisfy what Maxine Hong Kingston (2011) has recently called the human “right to curiosity.” As would be expected, passports have been put to different narrative uses in Vietnamese-American literature. In contrast with the desperate strategies associated with the issuing and possession of passports (or similar documents) in war and refugee narratives written by Vietnamese Americans,22 the existence of passports is usually taken for granted by viet kieus in their narratives of return. Vietnamese Americans who travel back to Vietnam as tourists are in possession of US passports that allow them to move freely,23 in sharp contrast with the Vietnamese nationals, whose mobility is more limited if not severely curtailed. The presence of the passport becomes especially significant in two of the essays included in Perfume Dreams, “Two Passports” (Lam 2005, 139–42) and the aforementioned “Viet Kieu” (115– 30). In these texts, passports provide documentary evidence of the Vietnamese Americans’ increasingly cosmopolitan condition. Passports as “thick as a novel” (115) transmute life into life writing, identity into narrative. In this sense, they not only function as metonymic reminders of one’s own transnational life, but also stand for the very narrative of viet kieu mobility. “Two passports—one new, the other old—arrived yesterday,” (139) Lam states at the beginning of the last essay in Perfume Dreams. The passports do not stand for Vietnam and the United States, as one might imagine when first reading the title, but for young and old Andrew: for the “young man on a quest,” “full of trusting optimism,” on the one hand; and for the older man with “a receding hairline” and “a sad smile” (139). The old passport figuratively tells of the narrator’s many journeys, to France, Nepal, Mexico, or Vietnam. The “entry and exit stamps” (139) can also be construed as a

palimpsest of signs that mark Andrew’s own body, not as (stamped) tattoos but in the form of fine wrinkles and “a knowing smile”: I “look at the photo in the new passport once again. I now see that it’s not a sad smile. It’s a knowing smile. After all, mine is what it should be: a traveler’s face” (140). Other essays in Perfume Dreams similarly explore the tension between roots and routes in an increasingly globalized world “where traditions not only coexist but often commingle,” where “Indian writers becom[e] American men and women of letters,” “feng shui becom[es] a household word” and sushi can be found in American high school cafeterias (46). In “My Journey Home,” not included in Perfume Dreams, Lam had explicitly outlined the main aim of his autobiographical narratives. In his writings, even those nostalgically looking back to his Vietnamese life before exile, his primary objective was to delve into the viet kieus’ new cosmopolitan condition: I am not, of course, unaware that my innocence was gone the moment I crossed the Pacific Ocean to the American shore. Nor am I so sentimental as to suggest, in this age of mobility and information flow, of global economy and hybrid identities, that the return from city to land is possible, especially when the contrary has become de facto world wide. What intrigues me simply is this: what story could I possibly tell that would convey the transformational experience of a people who were once land bound but have become instead mobile? For it seems to me that if ritual and storytelling is a way for a people to partake in a shared vision of themselves, then the Vietnamese abroad must find new ways to reconcile between his agrarian past and his cosmopolitan future, between, that is, his laptop and his memories of ghosts. (Lam 2004, sec. 5) However much Lam is interested in exploring that “cosmopolitan future” and present, he seems to do so from a critical perspective. His is a critical transnationalism. If we read between the lines, we can perceive Lam’s doubts regarding the facile equation of transnational mobility and equalitarian freedom. To start with, for those who are not voluntary immigrants, diasporic consciousness is “handed down” to them, not initially chosen; what poses as new cosmopolitanism is the result of compensatory

necessity, not a joyous, glamorous choice. In “Notes of a Warrior’s Son,” the narrator confesses that, when he holds on tightly to the labels “transnational” or “citizen of the world” as signs or harbingers “of a bright and enlightened age of a post-cold war era, a world of freedom and openness,” he does so in order to escape the haunting images of “exile, refugee, minority … war’s loser” (Lam 2005, 44). At the end of the day, Lam concedes, such “multi-lingual, sophisticated cosmopolitan[ism] is but a salve, a compensation to the unhealed wounds of exile, a veil over immense losses” (44). Although Lam admittedly adopts cosmopolitanism as a compensatory strategy, at least initially, he eventually learns to accept it as consensual and desirable. He convinces himself that the politics of mobility have proved to be more valuable and beneficial than the immobility of roots. Indeed, as we have just seen, by the end of Perfume Dreams the narrator manages to leave behind, while still partly envying (127), the mythology of rootedness, in order to full-heartedly embrace the “mythology of migrancy,” to echo Krishnaswamy’s (1995) homonymous article. After all, his is “a traveler’s face.” Routes rather than roots. The routes/roots dichotomy brings us back to Clifford and his emphasis on the fact that even those who do not literally move are part of the new “traveling cultures,” a thesis that is corroborated by the very figure that had represented stasis versus change, immobility versus mobility in Lam’s work: the Hue woman. The phenomena of diaspora and globalization—and the more general human drive to mobility, some would argue—have become so pervasive that not even the unmoving/unmoved woman can escape their influence. As Andrew finally confesses in Perfume Dreams, “the old lady is not untouched by the exodus,” as “one of her sons now lives in America” and, true to the traditional filial duty, sends her remittances on a regular basis (Lam 2005, 127). Even as the narrator continues to look back, nostalgically, to the past of simple certainties, and continues to regard old women who “stay put” as the “genuine” Vietnam, the very binary that seemed to structure Lam’s and the other viet kieus’ lives, roots/ routes, is being eroded.24 “It is now easy to return, but impossible to go home,” Lam concludes (2005, 115), not only because home no longer exists as we imagined it to be, but also because in a culture where everyone has become, literally or

metaphorically, a traveler, the safe haven of a single locale, a single country to belong to, is no longer an option: “Vietnam, its language, its memories, are reduced to a kind of lullaby, … visceral and yet out of the quotidian of my life” (Lam 2010, 1). Fearing the void of becoming a homeless drifter, but at the same time being unable to go back to the certainties of roots, Lam is finally won over by the fluidity of cosmopolitanism and the multiplicity of homes: “To have many homes. To belong to many places all at once. To keep traveling… Born in Vietnam, remade elsewhere, the world suddenly shrinks to a village… [viet kieus] have turned into some of the first global villagers” (2005, 123). In his second book, East Eats West (2010), Lam once more underscores that, in our globalized world, “cosmopolitanism” has become “the norm” (2). And yet, the elitist connotations accruing to cosmopolitanism, despite theorization to the contrary (Beck and Sznaider 2006; Robbins 1992), cannot be disregarded. Relatively affluent viet kieus, like Lam, may have opted for the new, rootless, or multiply-rooted cosmopolitanism. They have learned to make a virtue out of the misfortune of exile and now seem to enjoy the idea of multiple homes, of multiple belonging (Lam 2005, 123). However, even in this case, even if the viet kieu grow to like and finally embrace the diasporic situation they are “thrown into,” their contextual conditions differ greatly from those who “shop for cosmopolitanism”: initial choice versus initial necessity. They also differ from those (some of them viet kieus, too) who cannot afford such a luxury as “opting” for glamorous cosmopolitanism, those who continue to be “thrown into” the transnational nightmares of uneven globalization: borderless labor exploitation, “illegal” immigration, transnational outsourcing, etc. Class, economic inequalities, social displacement … , in a word, history, intervenes to complicate the picture. Insofar as Lam indirectly points at the problematic nature of celebrating just one (bland) version of cosmopolitanism or a certain a-historical transnationalism, he is actually hinting at what Clifford and Robbins have called “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”: Unresolved historical dialogues between continuity and disruption, essence and positionality, homogeneity and differences (cross-cutting “us” and “them”) characterize diasporic articulations. Such cultures of

displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific, often violent, histories of economic, political, and cultural interaction— histories that generate what might be called discrepant cosmopolitanisms. In this emphasis we avoid, at least, the excessive localism of particularist cultural relativism, as well as the overly global vision of a capitalist or technocratic monoculture. And in this perspective the notion that certain classes of people are cosmopolitan (travelers) while the rest are local (natives) appears as the ideology of one (very powerful) traveling culture. (Clifford 1997, 36; cf. Robbins 1992, 181–83)25 The concept of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” becomes remarkably useful when dealing with the effects of an uneven globalization. In Michael Davidson’s words, “the cosmopolitanism produced through globalization yokes together the elite and the abject, the globe trotting business man or wealthy tourist, as well as the migrant laborer, sex worker, and political exile” (quoted in McCann 2010, 135; cf. Robbins 1992, 171). It goes without saying that equating such disparate realities under the label “cosmopolitan” does very little for the eradication not only of specific abuses but of the inherently unfair system underlying such phenomena. Despite Lam’s obvious preference for the “cosmopolitan condition” in his more recent essays, ambiguity persistently haunts his most relevant texts, specifically his narratives of return. Lam’s metaphorical and literal excursions into the homeland might be read as politically disengaged, the narrator merely indulging in a more sophisticated type of nostalgia than that displayed by the viet kieu old-timers. Conversely—and more productively, I would argue—, Lam’s self-figuration as a cosmopolitan traveler can be interpreted within the framework of “discrepant cosmopolitanism” or “minor transnationalism.” This new, “discrepant” cosmopolitanism would then endow the writer with a critical eye that observes—and a mouth/pen that denounces—the continuing history of collective dislocations and disregard for human rights, even if both the author’s and the narrator’s subject position as the “traditional traveler” is still a privileged one.26 This, I argue, constitutes the most adequate perspective from which to explore Lam’s work, including his latest books.27 Never explicitly renouncing his “Vietnamese” connection, as befits a diasporic subject, Lam nonetheless focuses more and more on his position and role as a global citizen, or at

least as one “straddling” two hemispheres: “Once communal and bound by a common sense of geography, we are now part of a global tribe” (2010, 3). But global citizenship entails global accountability. It remains to be seen whether a critical transnationalism will become pivotal to Lam’s work, whether discrepant cosmopolitanisms will seep into his new narratives and, through them, into our own lives.

NOTES   1. 1,642,950 in 2007 (Dorais 2010, 127).   2. The refugee paradigm is not without its problems: it can simplistically stress overseas Vietnamese as passive victims (Vo 2003, ix), while it contributes to fossilizing the Vietnam War (and its aftermath) as the master narrative for Vietnamese Americans. However, as Pelaud (2011, 2) rightly wonders, to what extent “can the term ‘Vietnamese American,’ so freighted with memories of the Viet Nam War and national guilt, be disassociated from the systems of representation and history of that event without eradicating its legacy?” Like it or not, the war continues to be the underlying narrative for those who, like Lam, lived through it or had to flee because of it.   3. Louis-Jacques Dorais distinguishes between “inclusive” and “exclusive” (or narrow) approaches to diaspora (2010, 92–93), and Safran’s description would clearly qualify as the best example of the latter. In “Diasporas” (1994), and later in Routes (1997), Clifford opts for a broader understanding of the concept.   4. See the father-son dialogue in Vietnam and its Diaspora (New California Media TV 2000) as well as the story, “Birds of Paradise Lost,” in Lam’s (2013) homonymous collection.   5. The doi moi or “renovation” policy was endorsed by the Sixth Congress of the Vietnamese Communist Party in 1986, with the aim of rendering the Vietnamese economic system more flexible and opening Vietnam to foreign investment, which also meant “fostering relations with Vietnamese in the diaspora” (Vo 2003, x). For a detailed explanation of the economic consequences of doi moi, see Freeman (1996).   6. Despite the older generation’s reluctance to go back to a communist Vietnam (cf. Lam 2005, 126–27), most viet kieu continue to be concerned about and committed to the country they see as their motherland, a concern that shows in the increasing importance of viet kieu remittances in the Vietnamese economy.   7. Pelaud’s recent overview organizes the literature along generational and thematic lines while also devoting some space to anthologies and collaborative projects (2011, 22–43).   8. “Nuoc,” the term for one’s homeland, can also mean “water” and “sauce” in Vietnamese.   9. For a phenomenological approach to space, especially the connections between senses, imagination, and our understanding of space, see Gaston Bachelard’s La poétique de l’espace (1958). For a nuanced exploration of the differences between the concept of “space” and the emotionally charged “place,” see Tuan (2002), who also explores the ways in which our sensorial experience determines whether we build “places” out of “spaces.” 10. These apparently frivolous journeys have more to do with forced movement like exile than is usually acknowledged (Kaplan 1996, 27–28).

11. To be fair, this conscious exercise of looking back and going back to Vietnam, especially as pertains to the commissioned essays and documentary, can also be construed as the effect of “imperialist nostalgia,” insofar as it responds not so much to the emergence of the VietnameseAmerican interest as to the American (mainstream) obsession with the war. In this sense, the numerous events organized to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War would necessarily be read as oblique acknowledgement of the continuing sense of guilt on the part of the American population. 12. It is no coincidence that the power of memory is similarly symbolized by visual documents in Lam’s “Lost Photos,” also collected in Perfume Dreams (2005, 1–2). 13. Trying to relive his life as a child, indulging in his memories of his old house, Andrew is in fact conveying the human desire for stasis and protection. As Bachelard insightfully puts it, the childhood house conjures up memories of protection, because each human life “commence enfermée, protégée, toute tiède dans le giron de la maison” (1958, 26). 14. The Vietnamese concept of di-ve, “going out and coming back” (Jellema, quoted in Dorais 2010, 111) proves particularly useful in this context. 15. Lam also contrasts the mobility of the younger viet kieu with the diasporic, anti-communist loyalty of his father’s generation: “I go back but he would not. Could not. I visit but he only dreams. I go now to Vietnam with the ease of someone for whom the borders are porous but it is not the same with my father… He longs for Vietnam but he remains forever an exile” (Lam 2005, 126–27). In addition, the old lady embodies the Vietnamese who stayed behind, in contrast with the upwardly and multi-directionally mobile viet kieu (Lam 2004, sec. 3). 16. It is significant that, as happened to most immigrants/refugees hailing from Asia, it is the Golden Gate Bridge and not the Statue of Liberty that metonymically stands for America as the land of opportunities. 17. At the end of this second narrative of return, the effects of sensorial memory will become even more obvious, as the familiar scent of Vietnamese jasmine brings tears to the narrator’s eyes (Lam 2005, 128). Again, one cannot help but wonder whether Andrew is missing just his original homeland, Vietnam, or the childhood innocence he also lost when he left the country. Significantly, the last thing he hears during his visit is children’s laughter. 18. Gardens, however, are less central to Vietnamese peasant life than rice-fields. The rice-field continues to be a metaphor for the Vietnamese land and identity, and Lam resorts to such an evocative image even in his descriptions of modern viet kieu: “And recently I read about a farmer who escaped Vietnam to become a well-known, successful businessman in the hightech industry… I could almost see the farmer turned high-tech entrepreneur as a character in some epic global novel. In his high-rise, he sits staring down into the microchip on his finger and smiles: from certain angles at least, the tiny thing with its grids and lines that combines his ambition and memories, appears like the green rich rice field writ very small” (2004, sec. 6). 19. For an interesting discussion of ancestor worship in connection with the Vietnamese diaspora, see Dorais (2010, 113–19). 20. The transformation that Lam ascribes to his community as a whole, he also finds in his own life. Lam’s visit to his childhood house and garden would then respond to his initial preoccupation with roots, as seen in his first essays: “I have grown intrigued about my own inheritance, the old land-bound ethos, the archaic rituals, and my childhood vision in my mother’s garden of long ago, that first sense of wonder and awe” (2004, sec. 4). 21. See Ong’s reading of the “multiple-passport holder” in Flexible Citizenship (1999, 1–3). Cf. Kumar (2000); Spivak (1990).

22. The most extreme case can be encountered in the last Kafkaesque chapters of Kien Nguyen’s The Unwanted (2001). 23. For instance, the traveling characters in Dinh’s and Phan’s fiction, as well as the narrators in Pham’s and Lam’s memoirs. 24. Even when talking about cosmopolitan travelers, roots are never too far away, as Lam himself seems to concede when he describes cosmopolitanism as the sense of “being rooted in the depths of several layers of memory, in numerous particularities” (2010, 2). 25. The critical attitude conjured up by “discrepant cosmopolitanism” similarly underwrites the concept of “minor transnationalism,” as put forward by Lionnet and Shih (2005) in their introduction to the homonymous book. It is also present in Paul Rabinow’s (1986) earlier theorization of “critical cosmopolitanism” or in the more recent “subaltern cosmopolitanism” proposed by Jamil Khader (2003). 26. “The traveler, by definition, is someone who has the security and privilege to move about in relatively unconstrained ways” (Clifford 1997, 34). 27. As I am editing the final version of this essay, Lam’s first collection of short stories, Birds from Paradise Lost (2013), has been published. This book may be viewed as endorsing the different types of cosmopolitanism, from “yuppies” to refugees, as exemplified by stories like “Everything Must Go” or “Hunger.”

REFERENCES Alexander, Meena. 1996. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1958. La poétique de l’espace. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Bainbridge, Bill. 2005. “Once Cursed, Vietnamese Welcomed Home.” New York Times, March 18. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/world/asia/17iht-viet.html?pagewanted=all. Beck, Ulrich, and Natan Sznaider. 2006. “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism or the Social Sciences.” British Journal of Sociology 57 (1): 1–23. Clifford, James. 1994. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 302–38. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Dinh, Lingh. 2010. Love Like Hate. New York: Seven Stories Press. Dorais, Louis-Jacques. 2010. “Politics, Kinship, and Ancestors: Some Diasporic Dimensions of the Vietnamese Experience in North America.” Journal of Viet-namese Studies 5 (2): 91–132. Freeman, Donald B. 1996. “Doi Moi Policy and the Small-Enterprise Boom in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.” Geographical Review 86 (2): 178–97. Janette, Michele. 2003. “Vietnamese American Literature in English, 1963–1994.” Amerasia Journal 29 (1): 267–86. Jason, Philip K. 1997. “Vietnamese in America: Literary Representations.” Journal of American Culture 20 (3): 43–50. Kaplan, Caren. 1996. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press.

Khader, Jamil. 2003. “Subaltern Cosmopolitanism: Community and Transnational Mobility in Caribbean Postcolonial Feminist Writings.” Feminist Studies 29 (1): 63–81. Kim, Elaine. 2004. Preface to Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World, edited by Jessica Hagedorn, vii–xix. New York: Penguin. Kingston, Maxine Hong. 2011. I Love a Broad Margin to My Life. New York: Alfred Knopf. Krishnaswamy, Revathi. 1995. “Mythologies of Migrancy: Postcolonialism, Post-modernism and the Politics of (Dis)Location.” Ariel 26 (1): 125–46. Kumar, Amitava. 2000. Passport Photos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lam, Andrew. 2004. “Vietnamese Diaspora.” On My Journey Home web page, produced by WETA (Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association). pbs.org. http://www.pbs.org/weta/myjourneyhome/andrew/andrew_diaspora.html. Lam, Andrew. 2005. Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Lam, Andrew. 2010. East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Lam, Andrew. 2013. Birds of Paradise Lost: Stories. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press. Lionnet, Françoise, and Shu-mei Shih, eds. 2005. Minor Transnationalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. McCann, Andrew. 2010. “Discrepant Cosmopolitanism and the Contemporary Novel: Reading the Inhuman in Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.” Antipodes 24 (2): 135– 41. New California Media TV. 2000. Vietnam and its Diaspora. http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=Vyp8dx40qdc. Nguyen, Kien. 2001. The Unwanted. Boston: Little, Brown. Ong, Aihwa. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pelaud, Isabelle Thuy. 2011. This Is All I Choose to Tell: History and Hybridity in Vietnamese American Literature. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pham, Andrew. (1999) 2000. Catfish and Mandala: A Vietnamese Odyssey. London: Flamingo. Phan, Aimee. 2004. We Should Never Meet: Stories. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Rabinow, Paul. 1986. “Representations are Social Facts. Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 234–61. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robbins, Bruce. 1992. “Comparative Cosmopolitanism.” Social Theory 31/32: 169–86. Rushdie, Salman. (1982) 1991. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. 1981–1991, 9–21. London: Granta and Viking. Safran, William. 1991. “Diasporas in Modern Society: Myths of Homeland and Return.” Diaspora 1 (1): 83–99. Shenon, Philip. 1993. “Ho Chi Minh City Journal; The Boat People Fly Back, With Riches to Invest.” New York Times, November 3. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/world. Spivak, Gayatri C. 1990. “Postmarked Calcutta, India.” In The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, edited by Sara Harasym, 75–94. New York: Routledge.

Tran, Qui-Phiet. 1992. “From Isolation to Integration: Vietnamese Americans in Tran Dieu Hang’s Fiction.” In Reading the Literatures of Asian America, edited by Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, 271–84. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Truong, Monique T. D. 1997. “Vietnamese American Literature.” In An Intereth-nic Companion to Asian American Literature, edited by King-Kok Cheung, 219–47. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 2002. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vo, Linda Trinh. 2003. “Vietnamese American Trajectories: Dimensions of Diaspora.” Amerasia Journal 29 (1): ix–xviii. WETA (Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association). 2004a. My Journey Home, 2-hour documentary, produced and directed by Renee Tajima-Peña and Lourdes Portillo. Washington, DC: WETA. http://www.pbs.org/weta/myjourneyhome/index_flash.html. WETA (Greater Washington Educational Telecommunications Association). 2004b. “My Journey Home.” pbs.org. http://www.pbs.org/weta/myjourneyhome/about/index.html.

 

5

Returning Home Iranian-American Women’s Memoirs and Reflective Nostalgia Persis Karim

    It is impossible to read the now abundant body of Iranian-American memoirs produced during the 1990s and the mid-2000s without contextualizing the rise and popularity of this genre as an outgrowth of two important impulses among writers of the Iranian diaspora. The first of these impulses is driven by a desire to account for the dizzying and often tumultuous history of immigration and exile following the 1979 revolution in Iran; and secondly, to offer some corrective for those images and perceptions of Iran that have dominated US media headlines since then. As the editor of three anthologies of Iranian diaspora literature, I have had the unique opportunity to help shape the conversation about Iran and Iranian Americans by gathering and publishing literature of the Iranian diaspora which was unavailable to American and other English-speaking readers fifteen years ago. While Iran’s literary heritage was predominately defined by its masterful poetic tradition, only in the 1930s and 1940s did Iranian writers begin to explore and fashion a significant corpus of serious fiction. Few women writers were published in the early- to mid-twentieth century, and when they were, they were often subjected to far greater scrutiny and criticism than their male counterparts. Autobiography and life writing was almost non-existent in Iran, with the rare exception of a few travel narratives or life writing by members of the elite and royal classes. Because Iranian culture has historically discouraged the notion of an autobiographical self, and in

the particular case of women, such an act of self-revelation was seen as counter to socially-defined notions of womanhood such as modesty, humility, and virtue (read as silence), women’s autobiographical writing was a rare occurrence. The departure and emigration of more than three million Iranians to the West helped foster a new interest in life writing and memoir by Iranian women, who were recording their experiences for English- and Frenchspeaking audiences for the first time. In Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (2006), I attribute the publication of the larger number of women’s narratives to two major factors: 1) Iranian male immigrants are under greater pressure than women to excel in professions that require education and that command more generous salaries, such as medicine, engineering, and law; and 2) women are for the first time freed from the burden of a long writing tradition that has often excluded female voices. More importantly, however, the “dramatic increase in the number of women writing and publishing outside of Iran” is “an outgrowth of Iranian women’s specific experiences; they have felt compelled to respond to the view of Iranian women purveyed by both the Islamic Republic and the Western media and have found themselves having to reshape their identities to fit the new reality of their lives” (Karim 2006, xxi). These Iranian-American women’s memoirs contribute to knowledge about women’s specific experiences in migration, exile, and displacement and also move beyond some of the pervasive images and stereotypes about Iran and Iranian women which have been the centerpiece of US media representations. Those images, often linked to the perception that Iranian women lack any agency, or are veiled and therefore silent and invisible, are part and parcel of a long-standing representation of Iran and Iranian women against which these women also write. Because of this, we can comfortably assert that genre and gender are intimately linked in this project—both for the writers themselves and, in many instances, for the publishers of these books. Although many of the earlier memoirs written by women document exile and the losses associated with an abrupt departure from Iran, some of the memoirs published in the second decade after the revolution included memoirs of return to Iran. Tara Bahrampour’s To See and See Again: A Life

in Iran and America (1999) and Azadeh Moaveni’s Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005) are two of the most popular and widely-read of the return narratives by Iranian-American writers. In this essay, I consider the nostalgia and disconnection that plagues their experience as diasporic Iranians as key in their motivation for returning to Iran and in their subsequent efforts to resolve their identities as hyphenated “Iranian-Americans.” Prior to 1999, “Iranian-American” lacked currency as an identifying label, and, in fact, most Iranian immigrants hid their identity by referring to themselves as “Persians.” But like many who utilized the label “Persian” to identify themselves in the aftermath of the revolution and the hostage crisis, these authors convey an ambivalent identity precisely because of the emotional and cultural “haunting” of their Iranian heritage. Avery Gordon’s use of the term “haunting,” which she defines as “how that which appears to be not there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-forgranted realities” (2008, 8), is a useful way to understand how many Iranian Americans responded to their displacement and sense of exile after 1979. In the case of these Iranian-American memoirists, the “ghost” of Iran (rather than any dead or missing person) is rendered inaccessible, undesirable, or ambivalent because of the author’s circumstances of arrival in the United States or the specific challenges of adjustment to life there after immigrating. Both Bahrampour’s and Moaveni’s experiences as children growing up in the shadow of the hostage crisis were punctuated with a kind of “double-exile”—not being able to fully integrate their Iranian experience of childhood (as in the case of Bahrampour) or their parents’ nostalgia and alienation as post-revolution immigrants in a country that had great enmity for their homeland (as is the case with Moaveni). Tara Bahrampour and Azadeh Moaveni thus wrestle in their memoirs with their families’ abrupt and difficult departure from Iran and the lingering memories of their childhood or the inheritance of their parents’ nostalgia for Iran. Gordon’s notion of the “ghost,” represented for these authors by a tenuous, and even seemingly lost relationship with Iran, is one form by which these authors are “haunted.” And, as Gordon offers, this experience of being “haunted” draws the authors “affectively, sometimes against [our] will and always a bit magically into the structure of feeling of

a reality [we] come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition” (2008, 8). For these Iranian-American women memoirists, writing becomes part of the process of what Svetlana Boym calls “reflective nostalgia,” which “dwells on the ambivalence of longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity” (2001, xviii). This essay considers some of the effects of that reflective nostalgia and the ways that these memoirs become a transformative moment in the fragmented subjectivities of these Iranian-American authors. Because a number of Iranian-American memoirists left Iran in the period immediately after the 1979 revolution or during the long, eight-year war with Iraq, those who go back to Iran and write about it in their “return narratives” are challenged by both their estrangement and familiarity with Iran and its resonant cultural impact. In many cases, these authors’ encounters with Iran are both emotional and ambivalent and provide the occasion for exploring both a sense of “belonging” and “non-belonging” in Iran and the United States. It is interesting to note that in the subtitles of both Bahrampour’s and Moaveni’s memoirs, Iran and America are included; this suggests not only the traversing of these countries across time and space, but also the impossibility of accounting for a life fully lived, or fully understood, in one culture and one country alone. The popularity of the memoir genre reflects a larger anxiety about incorporating the traumas and losses of the Iranian revolution and the subsequent emigration of nearly three million people out of Iran to nations in the West, the largest number of which now reside in North America or Europe. The most popular and widely-read of the memoirs may be Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. This memoir has been critically analyzed and extensively written about, both for its contribution to the genre of memoirs about Iran and for its potency as a critique of gender, reading, and the politics of life in the Islamic Republic. I have, however, elected to focus instead on two other memoirs that are representative of a younger generation of Iranian-American writers whose identity is more definitively “divided” between Iran and America. These memoirists articulate a much more self-reflexive and intimate portrait of the return narrative as well as a confrontation with historical memory based on their complex identities as Iranian Americans. Additionally, the subtle and important differences between their respective biographies, their places of

birth, and their complex processes of return to Iran are part of what adds up to what I call the “kaleidoscope effect” of Irani-an-American experience. Iranian Americans are by no means a homogeneous group. Because they represent distinctive moments of migration, with some migrating to the West well before the 1979 revolution and some afterwards, it is important to understand the many iterations and distinctions within this community. Among the now approximately two-plus million Iranian Americans, there are also significant variations of identity. Many who identify as Iranian American have one Iranian and one American (or other nationality) parent. Some were born in the United States, and some were born and spent their childhoods in Iran. Some speak Persian fluently, and some speak little or no Persian. Some are Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or Baha’i. Some have Persian surnames, and some do not. These distinctions make for a diverse group and accounts for the kaleidoscope effect that makes the term “Iranian American” useful for many within this ethnic group, but, ultimately, a term that not all are comfortable using. It is only in the last decade that the term “Iranian American” has attained currency among a broad cross section of North Americans. Moaveni and Bahrampour represent aspects of this kaleidoscope effect: Bahrampour was born in the United States to an Iranian-born father and an American mother, and she immigrated with her family to Iran at the age of four. They later moved back to the United States after the 1979 revolution, fleeing, like millions of others, the uncertainty and violence of revolution, a new government, and later, the Iran-Iraq War. Moaveni, on the other hand, was born in Palo Alto, California, to post-1979 immigrants who left Iran after the revolution, and she was raised in northern California; she did not go to Iran until she was college-age. Moreover, and not so surprisingly, Bahrampour and Moaveni both worked at various times as journalists for American news outlets,1 and in different ways they embody many aspects of the Iranian immigrant experience but offer different conclusions about what it means to return to Iran and the ways that that return complicates rather than “resolves” their identities. In an essential way, Bahrampour and Moaveni write from a “reflective nostalgic” stance because “they see everywhere the imperfect mirror images of home, and try to cohabit with doubles and ghosts” (Boym 2001, 251).

Because the return narrative is a confrontation with the past, these authors are engaged with the hope of liberation from a past that haunts them and, in many ways, keeps them tied to an exilic and diasporic consciousness that is suggestive of their outsider status, and one that has repeatedly been tainted by the negative depictions of Iran and the tense relations between the two countries2 to which these authors have family and national ties. Indeed, Bahrampour and Moaveni employ a process of life writing in Amy Motlagh’s analysis “in which the narrating American self-exploits crises of personal trauma through the technologies of postmodern narrative to claim a unique diasporic identity, resolving crises of self being negotiated by the society on a broader scale” (2008, 19–20). Further, these narratives work to resolve, however ambivalently, what Manijeh Nasrabadi identifies as the melancholic process of emigration and diaspora and thus enables the process of working through the memory and the physical return to place to construct hybridized and consciously “transformative” (2011, 491) “strategies of belonging for ‘diasporic citizenship”” (2011, 488). Tara Bahrampour’s memoir, To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America (1999), was among the earliest Iranian-American memoirs to be published and signaled the arrival of Iranian-American women’s memoir writing. Previously only one other memoir, Daughter of Persia, by Sattareh Farman-Farmaian, an Iranian exile of royal Qajar heritage, had been published, in 1992.3To See and See Again represents Bahrampour’s biography as a half-Iranian, half-American who, although born in the United States, spent her formative childhood years in Iran. As the child of a nationally- and culturally-mixed marriage between an American woman and an Iranian man, Bahrampour charts some of the memories of that childhood and her Iranian family, as well as her return to Iran much later. Bahrampour’s family fled the tumult of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis at the US Embassy in Tehran, transplanting themselves to Portland, Oregon, when Bahrampour was a teenager. Because Bahrampour’s parents met at the University of California in Berkeley in the 1960s and later went to Iran, Bahrampour has a unique position as an “insider-outsider,” spending many of her childhood years in that country as well as returning regularly to the United States to visit her mother’s American family. Her perspective of growing up in Iran is colored by her American mother’s culture and choices, as well as by the ways that Iran and the United States then maintained cultural and political ties, allowing

Bahrampour and her mother to return to the United States for family visits. Bahrampour remembers her childhood through the unique lens of her bicultural life in Iran, one particularly punctuated by the free choices of her American mother: Baba doesn’t know much about American music and he can’t really sing on key, but he wants Mama to do what she likes, even if it’s different from what Iranian women do. I hear that when we first moved to Iran, Aziz came downstairs and asked Baba why his wife let the house get so messy, but Baba just took her gently by the arm, led her to the door, and told her that this was our house and we wanted to be comfortable in it. By now the relatives are used to Mama doing strange things, and they don’t ask why she sits with a guitar on her bed, and sends tapes of her voice to America. My cousin Niki only asks, “Don’t you get sad being all alone in your room like that?”—because Niki hates being all alone. (1999, 54) Bahrampour’s childhood in Iran is marked by the negotiation of American and Iranian values and customs, and her mother becomes the symbol of “otherness” in Iran, an otherness that she later revisits in herself as a teenager and young adult in America. After her family hurriedly flees the chaos of the revolution, however, Bahrampour seeks a way to recover those memories of Iran in the aftermath of the traumatic events of such an abrupt departure from the country. In the final scene, in which the door shuts on her childhood in Iran, Bahrampour finds herself at the airport looking at the horizon of Tehran, searching for some emblem of the life she will soon leave behind: I strained to look past the airport building at the gray swath of smog hanging below the charcoal sky—another day beginning over Tehran. This was my home. It was in trouble and I was leaving it. At that moment, Iran in all its shakiness became more precious to me than any safe country could ever be. I looked hard at the horizon casting out for some building or mountain peak to keep with me while I was gone. There was nothing. So I forced myself to take in the nothingness, to memorize the hazy sky over Tehran, and I kept the picture burning into

my mind’s eye long after I walked down the aisle and took my seat. (116) After her family’s arrival in Portland, Bahrampour undergoes an unsettling transition to remember her life in Iran. And, due to the fact that the taking of the fifty-two American hostages has occurred by the time she starts middle school, most of what she can narrate to her American peers is about the revolution through her perspective as a child. Because she senses that Iran has only become visible to Americans through the events of the revolution, she narrates not what is personally dear to her, but what gives her the greatest attention and sense of inclusion from her new schoolmates. Prompted by their questions, Bahrampour narrates the excitement of the revolution when “the streets were full of rioting and people yelling and starting fires, and our bus driver made us close the curtains and get down” (125). When Bahrampour is asked, she tells the story of the revolution “as if it were some holy legend” (125). But inside, Bahrampour feels a troubling sense of fear that is akin to a kind of deep haunting: It scares me to think that I am the only one in my class to have seen these things, the only one to whom Iran is real. A whole country, a whole life of streets and shops and shopkeepers and bus routes that only I know. With my classmates gathered around, I search my mind for every shred of it that I can remember, like the old ladies in Iran who include in their stories facts like what plates Khanoum So-and-So served lunch on thirty years ago, or what color the walls of the women’s quarters were in Haji So-and-So’s house in the village. Now I see why the old ladies do this. Repeating each detail, no matter how small, is a way to keep alive something that only they remember, something that would disappear forever if they did not repeat it. And it works. (125) The “scariness” that Bahrampour expresses is a feature of exile that Boym describes as “a double conscience, a double exposure of different times and spaces, a constant bifurcation” (2001, 256). At the moment when Bahrampour narrates her stories about the revolution in Iran at the request of the students, she becomes marked by the ghostly specter of exile, in which she is desperate to save herself “from forgetting” (1999, 125). Against this fear of forgetting is the difficult and sometimes ambivalent

prospect of trying not to be implicated in the larger historical narratives of violence and hegemony that swirl around her as she adjusts to life in the United States. At the moment when the fifty-two American hostages are taken at the US Embassy, Bahrampour observes the sudden conflation of the terms “Iranians” and “terrorists” in the daily news reports on television. At one point, a boy in her class tells her to “Go home, Iranian” (132). But Bahrampour’s response internally is to feel a kind of secret pride, “seeing what Iran can do” (133). Without a full understanding of the situation in Iran or in the United States, she recognizes how the hostage crisis, “can scare Americans so badly that they flood into their own streets and shout slogans, just like the Iranians” (133). Rather than fully claiming her Iranian or American nationality, she feels how the vexing historical events or her life make a complete identification with either country or culture impossible. To See and See Again not only chronicles Bahrampour’s arrival in the United States and her challenges in navigating her teenage and young adult years but also her awakening from the “haunting” memories which reveal themselves in full force after she starts college at UC Berkeley. After a number of encounters with other Iranian Americans, she begins to feel that she “is discovering a lost part of myself” (183). Her narrative, which moves from childhood to adolescence to young adulthood when she decides to go back to Iran, chronicles not only those lost memories which were part of the fabric of her Iranian upbringing, but also “remembering” those lost parts anew as she confronts them upon her return to Iran. Bahrampour’s return to Iran is both satisfying and challenging, and it forces her to rethink her nostalgic memories of her idyllic childhood, growing up in cosmopolitan Tehran, where she attended an international school and could navigate her binational identity with fluidity. As the plane readies for its landing in Tehran on her first return visit, she must put on a hijab (the required head covering for women in Iran), something that was not required when she left. She pulls out the black square of fabric and drapes it over her head, feeling the scrutinizing eyes of fellow passengers and hearing the mocking comments of regular returnees to Iran, including one man who says, “Look it’s her first time back. Look at what a big scarf she has brought” (214). Her arrival in the airport only augments her alienation and sense of foreignness, when, at the customs booth, after she

declares in her “clearest, strongest Farsi,” that “I am Iranian. I have come with travel documents” the officer rejects her travel documents and asks, “Why don’t you have a passport?” (215). When another passenger translates for her to the customs officer that she has been away and is returning to Iran for the first time, the customs officer asks, “Why is her Farsi so bad?” (215). Thus begins Bahrampour’s long journey back to the Iran of her memory, where she realizes how much the country has changed and how much she has missed. While she wants to move beyond the frozen, almost mythical memory of her childhood experience of Iran, she struggles to integrate what was lost of herself into the Iran of the present and to understand how it is that the Iran she remembers is no longer that same Iran today. She cannot fully address her longing for what is lost. In one of the most poignant scenes in the memoir, Bahrampour writes about her visit to the women’s bath, where she remembers what she likes about her life in Iran: I like the slightly bawdy banter among women in my family; I like the touching. It reminds me of the way I used to touch my friends and cousins before the sixth grader in America warned me not to. Once in America, I forgot the pleasure of casually entwined fingers, of arms linked together in friendship. I strictly followed the rules of American adolescence and made it clear to my family that kissing me was no longer acceptable. (342) But Bahrampour weighs such acts of her Iranian kinship and intimate bonds against other opportunities and experiences no longer available to women in Iran. She notes how her sense of belonging in Iran would also fade the longer she stayed there, saying, “but being away from America, I might also start to feel more American, more trapped. I might become impatient with the old ladies’ talk of marriages and deaths and old property squabbles, and start missing the other kind of old lady—the book-reading, hiking, and swimming woman that I imagine my mother will be and that I want to be, too” (342). For Bahrampour, the return to Iran provides partial satisfaction, not because she feels she can access some parts of her idyllic childhood, but rather because by visiting Iran and seeing it for herself, she confronts what Boym calls the “unbridgeable gap” that reveals the “incommensurability of what is lost and what is found” (2001, 256). She can accept what is there

now, and what she has become, and is thus able to choose her identity. In a moment free of both the nostalgia and the loss that was deeply embedded in her memories, she seems more resigned to simply understanding her displacement as one shared by others: Now, on the Web site (iranian.com) and everywhere else I find Iranians, I see a similar sense of displacement. Strangely, it seems strongest in Iranians my own age. Those young enough to have adjusted to America but old enough to still remember Iran seem to have the most difficulty choosing their cultural allegiances, perhaps because they were too young to have made their own decisions about staying in Iran or leaving. Their personal essays are particularly wrenching, and their entries on the Web site’s “lost and found” corner make plaintive appeals to their pre-revolution ghosts. (Bahrampour 1999, 348) The ghosts to which Bahrampour refers are the small personal ads on the website where Iranians are looking for former classmates from particular schools or towns from whom they were abruptly separated when millions of Iranians dispersed after the revolution. Strangely, the power of the internet and the website on which she reads these entries seem to both express the displacement and the possibility of moving beyond the haunting. Azadeh Moaveni’s memoir, Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (2005), shares some of the same haunting sensibilities expressed in Bahrampour’s memoir, but it operates almost in the inverse because Moaveni’s childhood in San Jose, California, is punctuated with the longing and nostalgia of her immigrant parents, which she inherits even as an American-born-and-raised girl. The first line of Lipstick Jihad tells us her origin immediately: “I was born in Palo Alto, California, into the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away” (Moaveni 2005, ix). However, the subtitle of Moaveni’s memoir takes its lead from Bahrampour’s subtitle, “a life in Iran and America,” but essentially names what many Iranian Americans actually feel: that identity is not static and that hers is configured differently in the two locations, Iran and the United States. Moaveni articulates the idea that her “growing up” was not yet complete until she also went to Iran and had to feel like an outsider there as well as in the United States. The title “lipstick jihad” is suggestive of a

struggle for female liberation in both contexts and is part of the larger narrative of being female and Iranian-American. Moaveni is perhaps, at least initially, more deeply-rooted in the United States than Bahrampour because she was born three years before the revolution and raised in Northern California, spending her entire childhood in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her education was entirely in American schools in the United States up through her university education at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the first sentence of her memoir, Moaveni also characterizes her birth as being in “the lap of an Iranian diaspora community awash in nostalgia and longing for an Iran many thousands of miles away” (ix). She is aware that she was raised on the “distorting myths of exile” (vii) and that her particular myth was based on a notion of “Persia” characterized by carpets, poetry, and nightingales, and thus she was not directly engaged with the physical and cultural reality of Iran. In the shadow of the country of her parents’ birth and exile, she turns away from the Iran of the media, where one encountered the “bad news” of revolution, war, and hostagetaking. Moaveni identifies her own tendency to erase parts of herself by avoiding “any mention of my Iranianness” (9) almost as an act of survival; she notes how Iranians of her mother’s generation are paralyzed by the nostalgia and myths about Iran and thus unable to move forward. For second-generation Iranian Americans like Moaveni, however, “parents’ biographies, autobiographies—veiled or revealed—autobiographical fictions, testimonies, and memoirs become the restorative institution of personal and group memory” (Seyhan 2001, 17). Moaveni’s childhood, steeped in the complexity of a bifurcated sensibility that often made her feel conflicted and ambivalent, is another version of what Bahrampour expresses: Sometimes the intricacies and exoticness of this inner Iranian world made me feel lucky, as though I’d been granted an extra life. There was Azadeh at school, who managed to look and sound like the other kids, barring the occasional lunchbox oddity; and there was Azadeh at home, who lived in a separate world, with its own special language and rituals. More often though, living between cultures just made me long for refuge in one. Maman’s attempts to fuse both worlds, instead of

compartmentalizing them, complicated everything. She didn’t want to sacrifice anything: neither her Iranian values, nor her American independence. She refused to abdicate one side for the other, not even for a time, and it made our life together harrowing and unruly. (Moaveni 2005, 19) Like Bahrampour, Moaveni seems to understand that her experiences in the United States as a child are directly related to the often hostile and at times violent antipathy of Americans toward Iran. Moaveni experiences her Iranianness as an outgrowth of “living perpetually in the shadow of the hostage crisis” and the constant preoccupation and endless questions that dominated the lives of the Iranian diaspora community. She identifies all these questions as leading to the “most important one of all: who had managed to maintain their dignity, keep their way of life intact, and who had been forced, either by financial ruin or mental weakness, to dignify the revolution by allowing it to determine all that was to come?” (11). For Moaveni, answering those questions about her future was beyond her grasp as a child, but as she grows up, she begins to see the possibilities available to her. She embraces the legacy of her parents’ decision to leave Iran as a quiet reminder that, unlike them, she can determine her own future as an American girl. So, rather than sinking into the kind of melancholic trance that plagues her mother and other relatives of her parents’ generation, who continue to harbor a vague notion that they will eventually return to Iran after the dust settles, she chooses to grow up Iranian in America by internalizing her connections and interests in Iran. It is when she is at the university, steeped in the culture of ethnic self-discovery and when she and other Iranian Americans are the beneficiaries of a much more positive image of Iran,4 that Moaveni begins to explore her background and realizes that “being Iranian didn’t have to be about silly emotional culture clashes with my mother, but a sense of self anchored in history” (27). This new pride in her heritage gives her the boldness to “assume, with reckless confidence that since I was Iranian, I would feel at home in the one place I was meant to belong—Iran” (28). In this bold act of seeking to belong in Iran, Moaveni sets out to return to Iran for only the second time in her life. As a five-year old, she visited Iran with her mother for a short time; however, her decision to travel to Iran as

an adult woman nearly two and a half decades after her birth in California was to “see whether the ties that bound me were real, or flimsy threads of inherited nostalgia” (33). The impetus for her return was galvanized during the year she spent studying Arabic at the American University in Cairo, when she witnessed through the computer screen a student revolt that was unprecedented in the two decades of the Iranian revolution. She recounts watching these protests, thinking, “the last time mass riots over-ran Tehran, a revolution followed. Could it be happening all over again without me? How could there be another revolution when I still hadn’t understood the first one?” (35). Almost immediately, Moaveni packed a bag and headed for Tehran, determined to “witness history, if only as a tourist-spectator” (35). Moaveni’s trip to Iran becomes both a quest for personal and familial connection and the beginning of her journalistic claim to Iran, both of which leave her disappointed. Rather than discovering a seamless and easy sense of belonging in Iran, which she assumed “with reckless confidence” that she would attain since she felt “Iranian” in the United States, she felt out of place. She assumed that she would feel at home in the one place she was “meant to belong—Iran” but instead has to contend with feelings of a second displacement (28). Her naïve expectations of belonging and claiming Iran are quickly shattered on her first visit there, when she feels the poignancy of her own nostalgia challenged by the reality on the ground. Like many of her compatriots, and particularly those of her parents’ generation, Iran was held in a kind of stasis with the hope that they could one day return to an Iran that was in a similar condition to the country they had left behind decades ago. After observing a student-led demonstration in her first days there, she comes to understand just how much of an outsider she is: As the demonstrations breathed life into my conception of Iran, I saw that the expatriate view—Iran as a static, failed state in unchanging decline—had little to do with the country itself, and everything to do with the psychology of exile. It was an emotional trick to ease the pain of absence, the guilt of being the ones who left, or chose to stay outside. It was a delusion that deferred a mournful truth: that we would never regain the Iran of before 1979, that we would never go back. (37)

It is in her “homecoming” that Moaveni finds herself feeling more American in Iran than she ever did in the United States. Moaveni’s efforts to document and analyze the student rebellion and share with the outside world the underground Iranian youth culture (the “lipstick jihad” of her title) brewing beneath the surface of a rigid and restrictive Muslim society lead her to a different conclusion about her Iranian self. Instead, she spends more time writing about her alienation from Iran and about all the ways she does not fit in there. Her great disappointment is that not being able to move easily in Iran, even under the cover of being a journalist, thwarts her mission to shatter the nostalgic cloud of her upbringing and discover the “real” Iran of her heritage. Instead, Moaveni must contend with feelings of not belonging and the distortions of her own myths about Iran. Rather than recognizing the limits of her affiliation through name, blood, and biography, she instead condemns herself, writing, “there must be something wrong with me” and adding, “I put myself on trial and ruled myself guilty as an American” (153). This guilt for being an American is the mirror of her childhood, when she worked so efficiently to maintain an outward ease with her American identity so as to avoid her Iranianness, while also not forgetting that America did not like her kind. By the end of the book, Moaveni has moved from a full-on embrace of Iran before she arrived there to a kind of psychological exploration of what is wrong with that nation and why she cannot possibly fit in. At one point she confronts just how American she is: “The more I tried to superimpose my Iranian identity on Iran, on the distresses and contours of my life there, the more I saw that it did not match up. In unguarded moments, the knowledge worked its way into me, until finally it became shiningly obvious: Of course I was partly American. It was strange, how this question of once agonizing importance became unremarkable” (135). In the chapter titled “My Country Is Sick,” she identifies some of the illfated aspects of the revolution such as its overly rigid interpretation of Islam, its policing of gender, its repression of youth culture, and the many contradictions that Iranians live with on a daily basis, such as a lack of personal freedom, corruption, and inability to speak freely. These facts led her to feel that “Iran had disappointed me horribly” (212). Rather than this trip leaving her with a healing sense of her identity, Moaveni writes that

“Iran was slowly making me sick” (212). As she becomes both depressed and exhausted due to excessive overwork, she is fearful that she must confront another haunting reality, that “I would probably feel out of place everywhere, always, that my family would be divided forever, between America and Iran; that I would always feel alone” (212). Moaveni’s return to Iran thus initiates a kind of melancholy sickness that is both psychological and physical and in which she concludes her “relationship to Iran was bilateral, not negotiated through a third party (my mother) and at the mercy of our turbulent relationship. Before I came to Iran, my mother essentially was Iran to me” (212). While these two Iranian-American memoirists confront the complexity of their Iranian and American identities, their return to present-day Iran (not the Iran of their childhood or the nostalgic memories of Moaveni’s parents of Iran before the revolution) causes an inevitable confrontation with the ghostly elements of nostalgia. Both Bahrampour and Moaveni imbue that “return” visit with a different set of significations and meanings that ultimately lead them to confront the impossibility of ever fully belonging in Iran. Through their engagement with a reflective nostalgia, these two authors deal with the aspects of Iran’s haunting presence in their lives, and they are thus able to transform themselves. They invoke Boym’s notion of reflective nostalgia, which “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity” (2001, xvii). Rather, the return journey for each of these authors compels them to reconsider what constitutes the experience of being Iranian American and to seek out new affinities of national and cultural connectedness to Iran based on criteria other than those imposed by others or the random acts of history that haunt them. Rather than concluding that Iran is simply a foil against which these authors can redefine their American identity, each memoirist makes a crucial move toward understanding her personal dilemmas and angst of belonging in the larger schema of diaspora. They participate in what Gordon (2008, 202) suggests is a kind of transformation which is motivated by a troubled state but which leads these writers to resolve their diasporic identity in their relentless pursuit to belong; and yet, they also understand that they can never fully belong to neither Iran nor America. As a result, each author finds new grounds for building solidarity with Iran and Iranian

culture outside the realm of the political stalemate that has characterized US-Iranian relations. Instead, they each come to see their personal healing and transformation not in an easy relationship to one place, one culture over another, but through the prism of negotiation. This more fluid, more forgiving identity gives way to other possibilities and other affiliations which focus less on the individual and more on the collective experiences of diaspora. Indeed, later writers who define themselves as Iranian American begin to move away from the memoir, as a genre of literature that seems to have encapsulated the traumas and despair of exile and diaspora, and toward other representations, including fiction. In a strange way, the movement toward memoir, toward using memoir to resolve some of these anxieties of belonging, has liberated these authors, and many more after them, from the idea that one must choose one culture over another. Instead, we witness how the positive aspects of the “between” creates a rich narrative landscape from which writers, whether memoirists, poets, or fiction writers, continue to explore and thus move beyond a singularizing diaspora consciousness.

NOTES 1. Tara Bahrampour has worked for The Washington Post since 2004. Prior to that, she worked for The New York Times for nearly three years as a freelance reporter. For three years, Azadeh Moaveni worked across the Middle East as a reporter for Time magazine before joining the Los Angeles Times to cover the war in Iraq. She currently lives in London and writes for a variety of publications including The Guardian, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times. 2. While the United States and Iran had had a relationship in the late nine-teenth and twentieth century, several significant events contributed to a series of mistrustful encounters that eventually led to the breaking off of formal diplomatic relations after the 1979 revolution, when the then-Shah of Iran was deposed by a popular uprising. The 1953 CIA-backed coup d’état that toppled the Iranian government’s democratically-elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh inaugurated the beginning of tense US-Iranian relations. After the taking of fifty-two American hostages in the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979, in which those hostages were held for 444 days, US-Iranian relations deteriorated. For over three decades, the United States and Iran have had no formal relations, with each government periodically accusing the other of behaving in a way that is incompatible with the international community. Under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013), US-Iranian relations were at an all-time low. US President George W. Bush identified Iran as one of the countries in “The Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks. This speech implicated Iran indirectly in acts of terrorism, and, in a sense, cast a second shadow over the Iranian-American community. Today, Iran and the United States have made overtures toward diplomacy in the P5+1 Agreement, signed in November 2013, whereby Iran and the United States have agreed to enter into a series of agreements to ease economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for Iran curbing its nuclear ambitions.

3. Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from her Father’s Harem Through the Islamic Revolution was co-authored with American writer Dona Munker. This memoir chronicles Farman-Farmaian’s life as the daughter of a family of the deposed Qajar monarchy that, until the early twentieth century, had ruled Iran and had maintained great wealth and landholdings, with large extended family networks and harems, until the revolution in 1979. Her memoir weaves together her own personal and family narrative with the twentieth-century history of Iran, often blurring the categories of life writing and history, particularly a history of trauma that she suggests is at once personal and national. 4. This period in the mid-1990s was defined by Mohammad Khatami’s more liberal and reformminded politics. Under Khatami, the fifth president of Iran, who advocated freedom of expression, greater civil society, and more openness with the West, many Iranians in the United States took this period as a hopeful indicator that they could self-identify without some of the shame and judgment that resulted in the immediate aftermath of the hostage crisis.

REFERENCES Bahrampour, Tara. 1999. To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Farman-Farmaian, Sattareh. 1992. Daughter of Persia: A Woman’s Journey from Her Father’s Harem through the Islamic Revolution. New York: Crown Publishers. Gordon, Avery. 2008. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Karim, Persis, ed. 2006. Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press. Moaveni, Azadeh. 2005. Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran. New York: Public Affairs. Motlagh, Amy. 2008. “Towards a Theory of Iranian American Life Writing.” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States 33 (2) (Summer): 17–33. Nafisi, Azar. 2003. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House. Nasrabadi, Manijeh. 2011. “In Search of Iran: Resistant Melancholia in Iranian American Memoirs of Return.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 31 (2) (Special Issue): 487–97. Seyhan, Azade. 2001. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

 

6

Enacting an Identity by Re-Creating a Home

Eleni Gage’s North of Ithaka Eleftheria Arapoglou

  The self is to be understood as constituted only through the complex unity of actions and attitudes that are themselves constituted in terms of their relations to one another and, most importantly, through their relation to objects and persons in the world, and so through being tied to certain locations and operations within that world. J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience1

 

INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING AND THEORIZING “HOME” Since the emergence of cultural geography as a distinct discipline in the 1970s, numerous scholars in the fields of architecture, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and literary studies have turned their attention to the meaning and significance of “home.” As a result, the question of whether or not “home” is a space, a place, a feeling, a state of being, or a practice has emerged on the scholarly agenda, thus adding another dimension to the above-mentioned disciplines. Yi-Fu Tuan, whose work on the creation of place illustrates how existential philosophies inspired the development of “new” human geographies, has claimed that hearth, shelter, “home,” or “home base” are intimate places to human beings everywhere (1977, 136–48) and has subsequently unearthed the ways in which the construction of “home” impinges on the process of selfidentification. Tuan’s books, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental

Perception, Attitudes, and Values (1974) and Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977), have elaborated on the idea that human identity is structured through the individual experience of “space” and “place,” hence his work has shifted the focus of geography to the importance of people’s feelings and meanings. Calling into question the significance of “space,” “place,” and “home” as inescapable dimensions of human life and experience, Edward Relph, another important scholar in the field of human geography, has argued that the sense of “home” itself is a feeling, that of inclusion. In his seminal Place and Placelessness (1976), he has extensively discussed the human affectionate attachment to “home,” making the claim that the sense of “home” as a place of belonging is a universal concept, which, he acknowledges, is mediated by cultural differences (49). Ideas of “home” are integral to the modern and post-modern literary imaginary. In the Prologue to The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (1996), which is tellingly entitled “All Fiction is Homesickness,” Rosemary Marangoly George observes that, over the course of the last century, “the concept of home (and of home-country) has been re-rooted and re-routed in fiction written in English by colonizers, the colonized, newly independent peoples and immigrants” (1; emphasis added). George argues that “home,” as a concept imagined in fiction, is a desire that is either fulfilled or denied, at varying degrees, to the subjects—both the fictional characters and the readers constructed by the narrative (2). What Georges’s argument suggests is that “home” is a place—a dwelling place, a place of origin and return—but also a space, sometimes extending beyond the walls of a house to the neighborhood, city, country, or nation. It is a space inhabited by “family,” people, things, and belongings; a space where activities take place, relationships are built, and identities are enacted. Ultimately, “home” is a virtual place, “a repository for memories of the lived spaces” that locates lived, particularly intimate, time and space (Mallett 2004, 63). Although “home” is usually represented as fixed, rooted, and stable, we cannot overlook the fact that the idea of “home” has been destabilized as a result of population shifts, global travel, and communications (George 1996, 2). As spatio-temporal frontiers and borders have progressively eroded away in the post-colonial, post-industrial, post-modern, global

world, “home” often constitutes an impossibility as a result of dissolving boundaries and expanding horizons. Salman Rushdie’s poignant observation in “Imaginary Homelands” ([1982] 1992, 9–21) that writers who are exiles, emigrants, or expatriates are forced to create “imaginary homelands” illustrates their predicament: their diasporic status urges them to strengthen their sense of self by revisiting their past—both in terms of space as well as time—and by imagining “homes.” Such an urge is not unjustifiable if we interpret it as a need to establish an expressive relationship to the past by identifying territorial locations—what Rushdie calls “imaginary homelands”—that function as nodes of association and continuity. This paper is an attempt to articulate the critical dimensions of the landscape of “home” that Eleni N. Gage evokes in North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past ([2004] 2005), a tale of homecoming and reconciliation that opens as a travel memoir, crosses over to a do-it-yourself manual, follows the conventions of the “relocation narrative” genre, offers a rich ethnography of the village of Lia, and ultimately evolves into a family saga that proves the regenerative powers of “home.” In my view, Gage’s work charts the complex course of an ethnic literary aesthetic sensibility that redefines traditional notions of spatiotemporal shifts, self-representation, and identity formation, by assigning “memory” and “invention” a powerful role in imposing order on the confusing dynamics of past, present, and future, memory, the living and ghosts, loss and gain, and cultural identity and difference. Informed by the cultural-geographical approach to literary studies, I address the central geographic question of how the landscape, space, and place of “home” both defines and provides the context for human experience in Gage’s North of Ithaka. Viewing the “geography of home” in US ethnic narratives of return as a dynamic and fluid contested terrain, I ground my discussion of the novel on the premise that the function of the author’s geographical imagination is crucial and yields interesting insights. Hence, one of the central questions this paper explores is the generative role of “home” in the formation of the autobiographical narrator’s cultural identity. Specifically, my discussion interrogates the ways in which the “place of home” as it is evoked in North of Ithaka impinges on the process of the autobiographical narrator’s self-identification.

Influenced by the theories of human geographers such as Tuan and Relph, I argue that the concept of cultural identity which underlies North of Ithaka is structured through the individual experience of the “place of home” as “an irreplaceable center of significance” (Relph 1976, 39). More specifically, by considering the connection between identity and a sense of “insideness,” I make the claim that in North of Ithaka the sense of “home” is imbued with both personal and collective meaning. As I illustrate, for the book’s autobiographical narrator, the family house is not simply a material construction, but, rather, a record of her ethnic history. Thus, on the one hand, the house in Lia functions as a site of memory that can establish the continuity of Gage’s collective identity, while on the other hand the house also functions as a personal node of association that facilitates her identification process. Hence, North of Ithaka can best be read both as a personal and as a family narrative constructed around the “myth of return” and the process of social adjustment in the original homeland. As such, it probes the related issues of identity construction, place-making, and cultural mediation and translation, and thus constitutes an important socio-cultural resource on the subject of emotional attachment to the family homeland.

HOME, MEMORY, IDENTITY IN ELENI GAGE’S NORTH OF ITHAKA In North of Ithaka, Eleni—the autobiographical narrator, who is a secondgeneration Greek American—leaves her Manhattan life as a successful young journalist and embarks on a personal “odyssey” to the remote Greek village of Lia: the birthplace of her father and the execution site of her grandmother by communist guerillas during the Greek Civil War that followed World War II (circa 1944–1949). Eleni’s goal is to reconstruct the ruined ancestral home and, in the process, come to terms with her family’s tragic history. The narrative, which follows the ten-month reconstruction of the former family home, not only constitutes Eleni’s uplifting story of selfdiscovery but, more importantly, unearths an interesting saga of immigration, belonging, and community. The book’s full title—North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through A Family’s Extraordinary Past—foregrounds the importance of spatiality as a charged figure that alludes to more than a physical, geographic location, or a topographic reality. More specifically, the spatial figure of the island of

Ithaka does not merely identify a specific place on a map, but also alludes to an imaginary geography to the extent that “Ithaka” is associated with a figurative ground and a literary commonplace—the topos of homecoming. In my view, the suggestion underlying the book’s title is that Eleni’s narration constitutes an act of geographic orientation: a very personal process of spatial configuration and construction that aims to conjure up a “home” and a family’s history. Both the reference to the island of Ithaka as well as the evocation of “journey” and “home” in the title point to the trope of the rite of passage/quest in search of one’s roots. In fact, in the book’s opening chapter, the autobiographical narrator insists on the parallels between Odysseus’s and her journey when she admits: “Just as Ithaka provided a psychological home for Odysseus even though he spent most of his adulthood away from it, so Lia loomed in my mind: as a home from long ago that would require much effort to be reached” (Gage [2004] 2005, 15). The allusion to the classical Greek epic The Odyssey—centering on Odysseus’s journey to Ithaka following the Trojan War to reclaim his home and kingdom—highlights the ethnic narrator’s concept of identity formation as an arduous journey to the past in search of a home that is not easily accessible. Furthermore, the book’s subtitle, with its emphasis on the “family’s extraordinary past,” reinforces a sense of continuity with the tale of a family and a place which the author’s father, Nicholas Gage, made famous almost thirty years ago with his international bestseller, Eleni (1983). Interestingly, the Gatzoyiannis’ (as is the family name in Greek) family saga is not a typical Greek immigrant story. Despite its popularity and critical acclaim in the United States, Nicholas Gage’s Eleni—a product of his investigation into the events that led to his mother’s execution by the communist guerillas during the Greek Civil War2—fueled heated debates between the right and left in Greece in the context of the social history of the Greek Civil War.3 Hence, the lionization of Eleni as the paradigmatic US immigrant narrative as well as the criticism Gage’s work provoked in Greece loom large over North of Ithaka, despite Eleni Gage’s surprising confession in the opening pages of the book that she had never read her father’s book before embarking on her personal “odyssey” to Lia. The politics surrounding Eleni Gage’s literary construction of “home” are fraught with controversy. In his article “Where Does ‘Diaspora’ Belong?” Yiorgos Anagnostou questions the ways in which Gage’s narrative utilizes a discourse of roots while “bracketing the politics that have already signified

the family’s roots in the national imagination” (2010, 101). Anagnostou is critical toward the autobiographical narrator’s claim not to have read her father’s Eleni and argues that the quest for diaspora roots cannot lose sight of four essential parameters: a) the ways the US nation invests ethnic texts with value; b) the US national discourse on ethnic heritage and identity; c) the marketing of ethnic texts; and d) the transnational links that these processes set in motion (2010, 101). Also, in her review of North of Ithaka, Martha Klironomos is aligned with Anagnostou when she contends that Gage’s account “does not probe into the deeper issues at hand that may have contributed to the violence—both ideological and otherwise” (2008, 492) and turmoil wrought by the Greek Civil War. Although I agree with both critics that one cannot overlook the rich literature surrounding the controversial social history of the Greek Civil War,4 I think it is important to read Eleni Gage’s narrative primarily as an individual self-conceptualization that curtails the controversy surrounding the Greek Civil War and the cultural appropriation of Nicholas Gage’s narrative by the assimilative US socio-cultural establishment because of a certain “generational consciousness”5 that allows the autobiographical narrator to negotiate the nexus of ethnicity and personal history on her own terms. More specifically, it is my contention that Eleni’s individual conceptualization as this surfaces in the narrative of North of Ithaka depends on her emotional and narrative distance from the historical and political context of the Greek Civil War—the same controversial context that marked the reception of Nicholas Gage’s Eleni. In my view, the autobiographical narrator in North of Ithaka appears fully cognizant of her liminal position between two generations and two cultures, and hence labors for a particular kind of identity of location that is highly personal. In Eleni’s words: I knew that this place was integral to the emotional history my family shared. It was a place where my aunts, father, grandparents and all who had come before them belonged, and I wanted to make space for myself there, too. When I waxed philosophical, I reasoned that this was the essential dilemma of immigrants and their children, who shuttle back and forth between two homes, feeling disloyal about belonging to one more than the other. My need to go to Lia seemed unnatural to my aunts. The generation that leaves a country always wants to assimilate

and move forward, while those of us in the new homeland can’t resist looking back, like Orpheus, to see from where we came. (Gage [2004] 2005, 10–11; emphasis added) As the quoted excerpt reveals, Eleni, as the autobiographical narrator in North of Ithaka, struggles to inscribe a space for herself in the present-day village of Lia while still paying homage to her family’s tragic past. Nevertheless, she purposefully does not allow her recovery of the past and the controversial politics that this past involves to pose an “obstacle” to her path to self-discovery. In this sense, Eleni self-consciously distances herself from the narrative strategy that bell hooks would term “politicized nostalgia” (hooks 1990, 147)—a narrative gesture that critics such as Anagnostou have found problematic in North of Ithaka—opting, instead, for a kind of “restorative nostalgia” (Boym 2001, xvi) that enables her to resurrect and recover her collective history on personal terms. A corollary of the immigrant, migrant, and exile experiences and identities, “nostalgia”6—the painful, bittersweet longing for home and the past—has stirred up much controversy among contemporary cultural and social critics. For example, bell hooks, in her seminal essay “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” has pointed out that nostalgia is a “useless act,” different from “a politicization of memory” “that serves to illuminate and transform the present” (hooks 1990, 147). Although I agree with hooks and other theorists of nostalgia that such a conceptualization of the past and subsequent attitude toward the present runs counter to historical development, I find that scholarship on ethnic autobiographies cannot dismiss the discourse of longing and yearning for home and/or the past unproblematically. In the specific case of North of Ithaka, the discourse of nostos features prominently because Eleni explicitly associates her reconstruction of the ancestral house in Lia with her urge to “look back” on her family’s painful history and imagine a set of origins that have to a large extent been problematized by the politicization of the discourse and rhetoric of her family’s ethnic identity. This is why I propose the theoretical frame of nostalgia that Svetlana Boym has detailed in The Future of Nostalgia (2001) as a useful frame of reference for Gage’s autobiographical narrative. More specifically, Boym has differentiated between two kinds of nostalgia: “restorative nostalgia” and “reflective nostalgia.” Reflective nostalgia “dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of

remembrance” (41). By contrast, restorative nostalgia places emphasis on nostos and “proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps” (41). As the critic suggests, for the “restorative nostalgic,” distance from the past can be compensated for by intimate and personalized experiences of reconstructing the lost home transhistorically (50). In my view, Eleni’s “need to go to Lia,” if interpreted as a “restorative nostalgic” practice, constitutes an act of transhistorical reconstruction and lays the foundation for the subsequent enactment of the autobiographical narrator’s ethnic subjectivity in the course of the narrative. The importance of the “restorative nostalgia” that is evidenced by Eleni Gage’s return to her ancestral homeland as it is narrativized in North of Ithaka acquires additional significance if interpreted in the context of Stuart Hall’s discussion of “new ethnicities” (Hall 1989, 1996). For Hall, the question of ethnicity is inextricably related with the question of positionality: unless people come from some place, from some history, unless they are positioned somewhere, which is connoted by their ethnicity, they cannot say anything at all (1989, 18; emphasis in original). In that sense, as the sociologist argues, “the past is not only a position from which to speak, but it is also an absolutely necessary resource in what one has to say” (18–19). What is interesting in Hall’s discourse on the past as a resource for the articulation and enactment of ethnicity is that he acknowledges that people’s relationship to the past is a complex one: “We can’t pluck it [the past] up out of where it was and simply restore it to ourselves” (19). Indeed, since the past is not an essence, but, rather, a narrative constructed in history and politics, it necessitates a personal process of interrogation, interpretation, and investment that takes place partly through memory, partly through narrative (19). Hall terms this reconstitution of the past—and of the subsequently emergent ethnic self —“cultural recovery” and argues that it is “complexly mediated and transformed by memory, fantasy and desire” (1996, 448). Considering Hall’s contestation over the question of ethnicity, it can be argued that the Lia home provides Eleni with the raw material that is necessary for “cultural recovery.” More specifically, taking as a starting point Hall’s observation that recovery of a cultural past can be done in many ways and through many discourses, since there is no single discourse or narrative about the past, in the rest of this paper I will trace Eleni’s

process of “cultural recovery” as a process of not simply discovering the past, but of making use of the past in the present, and of giving it literary life. As I will illustrate, being engaged in “cultural recovery,” the autobiographical narrator in North of Ithaka effectively evokes the past as a productive means of grounding her present and venturing into her future. The autobiographical narrator’s process of unearthing the past essentially begins with the family’s summer trips to Greece and the “pilgrimage” (Gage [2004] 2005, 2) to Lia every year of her childhood. As Eleni confesses in the book’s Prologue, “the ruins [of the family house] scared me when I visited the village as a child and haunted my dreams once I left— crumbling piles of rock whose decaying misshapen forms seemed to represent my family’s tragedy” (xvii). For Eleni, the raw material of the house ruins and their association with a tragic family past induce nightmares in the present. The significance of those nightmares becomes evident in the book’s first chapter, where the autobiographical narrator further elaborates on the “anxiety” the family visits to “the lost home” caused her: Our visits to the lost home made me anxious, because when the wind blew over the toppled stones, rustling the branches of my grandmother’s mulberry tree, I wasn’t sure if the house wanted me there. I knew that people had been tortured and killed in the house and buried in the yard. But it wasn’t just the knowledge of this fact that made the grounds seem ominous. It was the appearance of the fallen house itself. The ruins were forbidding, especially when seen through the arched frame of the exoporta, the outer door to the courtyard in front of the house. The wood of the door had rotted away, so I could step through the stone frame and onto a path to nothing. (2–3; emphasis added) Eleni suggests that her agonizing confrontation with the family’s tragedy in the past is prompted by her visual encounter with the fallen house in the present and the association of the house’s spatial signifier with a forbidding omen. More specifically, she sees the rotten outer door to the courtyard as a blank signifier that can lead her nowhere—neither to the past, nor to the future. The autobiographical narrator’s confession of agony and emptiness every time she is confronted with the ruins of the family home acquire significant dimensions if interpreted in the context of the theories

articulated by cultural geographers on the association between home, self, identity, and family. For many researchers—such as Graham Crow (1989), Ann Oakley (1974), Jon Bernandes (1987), Carole Després (1991), and Anthony Giddens (1990)—the relationship between home and identity, as well as that between home and family, is so strong that the terms are interchangeable. More specifically, home can function as an inalienable source of identity that can bring a self into being or existence. Also, when conceived as interrelated terms, home symbolizes the birth family or family of origin, and the family relationships enacted within its spaces. In Eleni’s case, the “fallen house” with its “stone frame” leading to “nothing” compromises her ontological security by linking her subjectivity to the absence of a specific architectural structure—a family house. Furthermore, the autobiographical narrator’s confrontations with the ruins of the family house—steeped as they are in agony/anxiety and unwelcoming emotions— trigger the recognition that the “forbidding ruins” cannot function as the foundation of her identity, because they prevent the formation of a meaningful and emotionally fulfilling connection with the family’s past. As a result, impossibility of “home attachment” signifies that the continuity of the autobiographical narrator’s identity is broken, since her present is disengaged from her inaccessible past. Eleni’s response to the challenge that the spatial blankness evoked by the ruins of the family house poses to her identity is her determination to undertake the renovation of the house. Even in the face of the threats of her aunts that she will be killed by Albanians, eaten by wolves, and stung by scorpions, Eleni resolves: “I was determined to rebuild the house both as a monument to my grandmother and, for myself, as a tangible link to my family’s past and our village. I wanted to transform my relationship with our shadowy, sorrowful history from ignorance and fear to something I could understand, or even control” (Gage [2004] 2005, xvii; emphasis added). By means of the reconstruction of the house that she undertakes, Eleni aspires to work through the effects of trauma, loss, rupture, and disorientation on her family history, so as to establish an expressive personal relationship with the family’s past as something to which she can relate as an individual and over which she can have power. Considering the excerpt quoted above, the autobiographical narrator’s enactment of identity and her association with the family’s history appears to rely on the significance of the rebuilt house for the identification process at present.

From a geographic point of view, objects—such as houses or mementos— function as nodes of association and spatial agents ensuring continuity. By embodying human feelings, thoughts, and images, such objects give space a geometric personality and, subsequently, establish selfhood on solid ground. As Tuan contends, “objects anchor time … [which is why] we can try to reconstruct our past with brief visits to our old neighborhood and the birthplaces of our parents” (1977, 187). For Tuan, the childhood home conventionally functions as “an archive of fond memories and splendid achievements that inspire the present,” as a permanent place that is reassuring for the modern man who sees “frailty in himself and chance and flux everywhere” (154). Placed within such an interpretive context, Eleni’s envisioning of the rebuilt house as a “monument” to her grandmother and a “tangible link” that will strengthen her connection with her family acquires additional significance as an act of spatial reconfiguration related to identity enactment. Throughout the narrative, Eleni showcases awareness of the conflict between her personal need to relate to the Lia house as a meaningful node of association—a locus of selfhood—and the house’s association with her family’s “sorrowful history.” For example, although the “home histories” that Eleni’s aunts share with her are crucial to her understanding and imaginative reconstruction of “home,” they pose the threat of hindering her effort to discover and connect with her roots on a personal level because of their associations with the violence, suffering, and conflict of two wars. As she relates: The house I wanted to rebuild had been the scene of musical summer nights, but it was also the site of the violence that shattered their family forever. My aunts remembered suffering in Lia during the German and Italian invasions of World War II, the years of starvation and conflict culminating in the arrival of Greek Communist guerrillas who occupied the village during the civil war immediately following WWII. (Gage [2004] 2005, 7) In this instance, as in many others, the autobiographical narrator admits that for her aunts the Lia home is not a place of ontological security and freedom, a safe haven, or a regenerative place, but rather a site of fear and suffering, a prison. This is because in the recollections of Eleni’s aunts the

family home is represented as a space of persecution, suffering, and torture. However, because the relationship between “home” and memory is complex and highly dependent on the nature of individual experiences, Eleni resolves not to allow her connection to the family home to be mediated by family stories. Instead, she engages in a process of distinguishing the multiple layers of stories that make up her family’s memory-scape, as she “reclaim[s] … herself from [her] fears, and the much sharper fears, sorrow, and memories of [her] aunts and father” (9). Eleni’s struggle to dissociate the landscape of Lia from the sorrowful memoryscape of her family reveals her recognition that “there are as many identities of place as there are people” (Nairn 1965, 78), for identity is in the experience, eye, mind, and intention of the beholder as much as in the physical appearance of the landscape. In this sense, the autobiographical narrator aspires to position herself in relation to a past that she has little access to except through the memories of her family—which are emotionally charged and sometimes conflicting—and her own snapshots of family summer holiday trips. Eleni’s need to experience Lia through the lens of her own attitudes, experiences, and intentions, and from her own circumstances—rather than the circumstances of her family—illustrates the important human need to be attached to places and have profound ties with them. As Simone Weil wrote in The Need for Roots, “to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular expectations for the future” (1955, 53). Weil’s suggestion is that the need for roots and for a distinctively personal and profoundly significant encounter with place is a need of the soul; it is an essential aspect of human nature to want and to struggle for roots, for a sense of belonging to a place that is identified as deeply personal. As Relph has argued, “to have roots in a place is to have a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of one’s own position in the order of things, and a significant spiritual and psychological attachment to somewhere in particular” (1976, 38). In Eleni’s case, the house in Lia emerges as such a point of departure from which she seeks to orient herself and take possession of the world.

To exorcise the ghosts of the past and claim a place for herself within the present landscape of Lia, Eleni legitimates her reconstruction of “home.” The discourse she employs in articulating her strong desire for a place and attendant culture that is easily identifiable in the scheme of things illustrates the symbolic potency of the “ideal” or “idealized” home. In fact, Eleni’s discourse echoes Aviezer Tucker’s (1994, 186) argument that most people spend their lives in search of an ideal home where they would be fully fulfilled: Having spent my girlhood living among my family’s ghosts, and my adulthood trying to avoid them, I felt driven to return to the site of my ancestors’ home to seek out the shadows of my past and turn them into protective spirits for my future. I wanted control over a past I couldn’t change. And I hoped to integrate the American and the Greek sides of my self into one well-adjusted whole. (Gage [2004] 2005, 15; emphasis added) The autobiographical narrator associates the reconstruction of the house with a transformation process as she invests herself with the power to transform past shadows into future protective spirits. What Eleni’s undertaking foregrounds is that the identity and meaning of “home” is constructed and negotiated on a personal level through a process of remembering that “illuminates and transforms the present” (Massey 1992, 14). More importantly, though, the construction and negotiation of “home” in the case of the specific autobiographical narrator is interrelated with identity enactment; namely, the integration of her ethnic “selfhood” and subsequent reconstitution of a fulfilled identity. In a highly emotive passage, Eleni elaborates on the effects of such a reconstitution: Perhaps living in the village where my grandmother had spent her whole life would help me feel as if I knew this woman I had never met. I carried her name, but I’d never known her. Living among my grandmother’s neighbors might help me understand my name-sake, my father, my aunts, and even the Greek side of myself better.” (Gage [2004] 2005, 3; emphasis added) Cultural studies and anthropology, as well as sociological and psychological research into the experience of immigrants and ethnic subjects, have shown

that the construction and representation of “home” is an integral aspect of their family and identity formation. “Home,” be it defined as a dwelling, a homeland, or even a constellation of relationships, is represented as a spatial and relational realm from which those people venture into the world. For them, it is a place of origin (however recent or relative), as well as a point of destination. As Tucker has stated, “home-searching is a basic trait of human nature” (1994, 186), one which arises out of the propensity of humans to migrate as a means of ensuring their continuity of identity. Also, Mary Douglas has illustrated that for ethnic subjects “home starts by bringing some space under control” (1991, 289), thus home and being at home is a matter, at least to some extent, of affect or feeling that involves the immersion of a self in a locality. Eleni’s emotional discourse above reveals a specific practice—the intentional production of a “home”—that transforms a spatial construct and physical location into a lived experience which facilitates the expression of her integrated identity: one that reconciles her American and Greek “sides.” The narrator’s reference to her two “sides” acknowledges identity as a structure that is split and qualified by an inherent ambivalence. As Eleni admits, living in Lia and rebuilding the Gatzoyiannis house gradually changes her conception of herself, forcing her to think about her identity in relation to the village people around her. Seen from this perspective, the autobiographical narrator’s mode of “home” experience appears both instinctive and cerebral, grounded in her direct and immediate experience of “living among [her] grandmother’s neighbors,” as well as in her ideal experience of a sociocultural identity that integrates her ethnic with her American “self.” Such a double fracturing speaks for a different kind of identity politics that is predicated on difference and diversity and is complexly mediated and transformed by imagination as well as memory. Ultimately, the intricate Greek-American subjectivity that Eleni, as the autobiographical speaker in North of Ithaka, enacts manifests a new configuration in the grounding of the ethnic self, beyond the inflexible boundaries of a national community, outside the ideological trajectory of the familial “home,” and within an imaginatively (and physically) reconstructed transitive geography.

CONCLUSION

Acknowledging that “home” can be defined in a number of ways, as it is a complex and fundamentally contested concept, this essay has focused on how the concept of “home” is evoked in Eleni N. Gage’s North of Ithaka and, more specifically, on how its imaginative reconstruction and narrative representation are interconnected with concerns about memory and identity enactment. The essay is based on the premise that “home” is the foundation of individual and collective identity, the dwelling place of “being.” Hence, in North of Ithaka, the politics of “home,” belonging, memory, and imagination provide an important frame of reference for the enactment of self-identity. More specifically, as has become clear by now, Eleni, as the autobiographical narrator in North of Ithaka, gradually comes to an understanding of her past, her roots, her history, and her identity by engaging in an act of “cultural recovery”—partly through memory, but mostly through narrative figuration (Hall 1989, 19). The reconstruction of the ancestral house in Lia plays a catalytic role in this process as it forces Eleni to reconsider her connection to her roots and subsequently revalue her cultural inheritances. In one of the final chapters, entitled “The Future Imperfect” (Gage [2004] 2005, 217–44), the autobiographical narrator makes the following realization about her stay in Lia and experience of rebuilding the ancestral home: I was in a place I loved, and it kept handing me gifts and inheritances, from friends to fireplaces. People die and even videotapes get erased, but memory persists and the places where we met and lived and loved remain. No matter where I went, or whom or if I married, Lia would always be there, a place to which I could return, as it had been all along, even before I realized it. It must have been predestined. (243–44; emphasis added) Eleni’s concluding realization points to a specific discourse of representation underlying her construction of “home” in the course of the narrative. More specifically, in arguing for the persistence of memory and the endurance of “the places where we met and lived and loved,” the autobiographical narrator suggests that home is a matter of lived experiences and feelings, but it is also the product of cognition and intellectual construction. As the narrator admits, Lia had always been there,

“even before [she] realized it,” but she had to discover it first before she could get to know that part of herself that had an investment in the culture of Lia. Throughout the narrative of North of Ithaka, Eleni lays claim to her own sense of “home” in Lia, even though she has no prior experience or memory of it. And, even though the “home” she reconstructs constitutes a palimpsest of the painful histories of various family members, Eleni succeeds in etching her own “geography of home” into the present-day village by means of the degree of attachment, involvement, and concern that she as a person experiences for the particular place. For cultural geographers, this “insideness” that Eleni achieves is the crux of the “lived meaning” that the concept of “home” holds for humans. As Relph has argued, “the essence of place lies not so much in [the major components of the identity of place— physical features, activities, meanings] as in the experience of an ‘inside’ that is distinct from an ‘outside’” (1976, 49). In the geographer’s words, “to be inside a place is to belong to it and identify with it… From the outside you look upon a place as a traveller might look upon a town from a distance; from the inside, you experience a place, are surrounded by it and part of it” (49). In North of Ithaka, the more profoundly “inside” the house in Lia Eleni feels, the stronger her sense of self-identity becomes, thus ensuring a sense of continuity, heredity, and belonging. Ultimately, the psychological and sentimental affiliation that the Lia home inspires in Eleni emotively mediates and underpins her discovery of her “fulfilled and integrated self” as a relational being-in-the world inspired by her spatial and social surroundings.

NOTES 1. J. E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999) p. 152. 2. Eleni was triumphantly reviewed in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Review of Books. The book not only attracted a large readership, but was also appropriated by the Reagan administration for political purposes. In his televised address to the nation following his summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, former US President Ronald Reagan admitted that the tragic mother’s final plea, “My children,” in the movie version of the book moved him to support an agreement on disarmament that would ensure peace for all the children of the world. 3. The Greek Civil War (1944–1949) broke out as a result of the power vacuum that followed the end of the German-Italian occupation of Greece during World War II, but had its origins in the

highly polarized struggle between leftists and rightists in the country that started in 1943. During the war, two armies fought to gain control of the country: the Democratic Army of Greece, under the control of the Greek Communist Party, and the Greek National Army, supported by the exiled government of King George II and foreign allies, mostly Great Britain and the United States. At the end of the war, the country was left in ruins. The Westernsupported government that rose to power determined Greece’s membership in NATO as well as the balance of power in the Aegean Sea in the course of the Cold War. The final result of the war also consolidated the anti-communist security establishment in Greece, which ultimately led to the establishment of the Greek military junta of 1967–1974. 4. Consider, for example, Yiorgos Margaritis’s Iστoρία τoυ ελληνικoύ εμφυλίoυ πoλέμoυ, 1946– 1949 [History of the Greek Civil War, 1946–1949], Andre Gerolymatos’s Red Acropolis, Black Terror, and Stathis Kalyvas’s The Logic of Violence in Civil War. 5. For a discussion of the two conceptualizations of “generation”—generations in the family versus generations as cultural identities—see Karl Mannheim’s The Problem of Generations, especially p. 292. 6. The word “nostalgia” was coined in 1678 by a Swiss medical student, Johannes Hofer, to describe an illness that was characterized by such symptoms as insomnia, anorexia, palpitations, stupor, fever, and especially persistent thinking of home. The etymology of the word is traced to the Greek nostos, meaning “home” and “the return home,” and algos, meaning “pain” and “suffering.”

REFERENCES Anagnostou, Yiorgos. 2010. “Where Does ‘Diaspora’ Belong?” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 28: 78–119. Bernandes, Jon. 1987. “‘Doing Things with Words’: Sociology and ‘Family Policy’ Debates.” Sociological Review 35: 679–702. Boym, Svetlana. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Crow, Graham. 1989. “The Post-war Development of the Modern Domestic Ideal.” In Home and Family: Creating the Domestic Sphere, edited by Graham Allan and Graham Crow, 14–32. London: Macmillan. Després, Carole. 1991. “The Meaning of Home: Literature Review and Directions for Future Research and Theoretical Development.” Journal of Architectural Planning and Research 8 (2): 96–115. Douglas, Mary. 1991. “The Idea of a Home: A Kind of Space.” Social Research 58 (1): 287–307. Gage, Eleni. (2004) 2005. North of Ithaka: A Journey Home Through a Family’s Extraordinary Past. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Gage, Nicholas. 1983. Eleni. New York: Ballantine Books. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 1996. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and TwentiethCentury Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gerolymatos, Andre. 2004. Red Acropolis, Black Terror: The Greek Civil War and the Origins of the Soviet-American Rivalry, 1943–1949. New York: Basic Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Hall, Stuart. 1989. “Ethnicity: Identity and Difference.” Radical America 23 (4) (October): 9–20. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “New Ethnicities.” In Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan Hsing Chen, 441–449. New York and London: Routledge. hooks, bell. 1990. “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness.” Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, 145–154. Boston: South End. Kalyvas, Stathis N. 2006. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Klironomos, Martha. 2008. “Book Review of Eleni N. Gage’s North of Ithaka.” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 26 (2): 491–494. Mallett, Shelley. 2004. “Understanding Home: A Critical Review of the Litera-ture.” The Sociological Review 52 (1) (February): 62–89. Malpas, J. E. 1999. Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mannheim, Karl. 1952. The Problem of Generations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Margaritis, Yiorgos. 2001. Iστoρία τoυ ελληνικoύ εμφυλίoυ πoλέμoυ, 1946–1949 [History of the Greek Civil War, 1946–1949]. 2 vols. Athens: Vivliorama. Massey, Doreen. 1992. “A Place Called Home?” In The Question of “Home”: New Formations, edited by Angelika Bammer, 3–15. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Nairn, Ian. 1965. The American Landscape: A Critical View. New York: Random House. Oakley, Ann. 1974. The Sociology of Housework. London: Martin Robertson. Relph, Edward. 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion Limited. Rushdie, Salman. (1982) 1991. “Imaginary Homelands.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism. 1981–1991, 9–21. London: Granta and Viking. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Englewood Cliffs, CA: Prentice-Hall. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Tucker, Aviezer. 1994. “In Search of Home.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 11 (2): 181–187. Weil, Simone. 1955. The Need for Roots. Boston: Beacon Press.

 

7

El vaivén de la vida Musings on Deterritorialized Border Subjects Norma E. Cantú

  I am a turtle, wherever I go I carry “home” on my back. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

  As I write this, I am in the process of packing up my belongings once more; I have not moved often, but each time, it feels as if I am uprooting my life. This time I am moving to a job in the Midwest, to Kansas City more specifically, and I am reminded of Anzaldúa’s metaphor, for I, too, carry my home with me. It was the late 1940. when I came as a child with my parents —Florentino Cantú and Virginia Ramón—Florentino Cantú and Virginia Ramón—my maternal grandmother, Celia Becerra Ramón, and our dog, Chirinola, to live in the United States. Like the thousands who move from Mexico and Central and South America to come to the United States, we brought with us hopes and dreams. But, unlike these recent immigrants, we came with papers, even the dog! It is a refrain I have heard often from immigrants who oppose or who question the presence of undocumented immigrants. Our story, however, is not unique for that time and place. My grandmother had moved earlier from Monterrey, Nuevo León, married to my grandfather, Maurilio Ramón, to start a new life in the United States. Life had forced my maternal grandparents to move back to Mexico in the 30s, but now with baby in tow, my parents were moving to the United States. My mother was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, so when she married my father and they decided to come live in the United States, it was relatively easy for them. If in 1948 it was easy to relocate with papers, in the 1920. when Celia and Maurilio settled in South Texas, it was even

easier. But this is not the place for me to recount the entire US-Mexico border and immigration debate of the last century. I cherish my childhood memories of our pilgrimages to my paternal grandparents’ home for Christmas holidays and for summer vacations. This ir y venir, this coming and going, taught me to exist in two cultures; thus, I have two homes, two languages, two allegiances. As I ponder this most recent move, I acknowledge that I chose this path, and made the decision, yet I still question why I am choosing to move, to pull up roots and re-establish my life elsewhere. Why do people leave their homes and loved ones and move to places where they may not know anyone, where they have to re-establish a social network? Why go where they may not be wanted, expecting, perhaps even knowing, they will ultimately return to their place of origin, go home again? Over the last two centuries, Latino/a migration to the United States has been influenced by a number of factors, mostly economic. However, violence and war have also figured prominently. Migrant workers from the 1940. on in the United States come to mind, as do the emigrations from Puerto Rico in the 1950s, from South America in the 1970s, and from Central America in the 1980s, due to political and economic unrest. More recently, the migrations of people from other parts of the world as well as from Mexico to various points in the United States impels me to work through some ideas about diasporic movements, especially in Latina/o communities. One film from the 50s keeps coming to mind, Espaldas Mojadas with David Silva; the film was an obvious tactic by the Mexican government to try to dissuade migration from Mexico. In the final scene of the movie, Silva’s character returns to Mexico with the love interest, a Chicana from the border. It was a propaganda film with the explicit message that Mexicans should not emigrate but stay in their home country, and if they had left, they should come back to Mexico, back to their homeland. Along with transnational movement, there is internal migration to consider, as well. Often it, too, occurs for the same reasons: to find better jobs, to get away from violence, to follow family. Certain members of my family have had to leave south Texas to go to the Midwest—Wisconsin, Ohio, Nebraska—to work in the fields, cherry picking, cotton picking, tending to delicate strawberry plants, or to labor in factories and industrial job sites, such as my mother’s cousins, who relocated their families from

Laredo to Gary, Indiana, in the 50s to work in the auto industry, or my Dad’s cousin and her family, who moved from west Texas to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, and subsequently to Omaha. Pondering the many movements of people on the continent, indeed in the world, I am drawn to consider the consequences of such moves, and returns. These moves appeared permanent, but they were not necessarily so; los primos from Indiana returned to Laredo upon retirement and then it was their kids’ turn to travel south to visit with the grandparents. My father’s sister, Carmen, and her husband, Tío Juan, had established a bakery in Chicago, only to return to Laredo along with their children upon retirement. Yet, some never did return: the family in Nebraska, for example, stayed. As a scholar of Latina/o literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I turn to the narratives of deterritorialized subjects, the lives of immigrants and migrants who move away from their homes and to their moves back to the place of origin. I feel it is imperative that we attend to the diasporic reality of communities of US Latinas/os whose lives change drastically when they cross the border, or when they relocate from Texas or Arizona to big cities like Chicago or Dallas; lives that changed again as they returned to their communities. I begin this braided essay with a poem, told with the voice drawn from many interviews conducted in Idaho when I worked on a study of Latina/o traditional arts in the southeast part of the state. Delving into the works of literature and gleaning some observations on the consequences of such moves, I rely on Emma Pérez (1991, 1999), Norma Alarcón (2013), and Gloria Anzaldúa’s work (1987, 2005. as I weave through my own personal recollections, observations, and anecdotes. I see Anzaldúa’s work functioning, ultimately, as a testimonio of a Tejana who “carried her home with her,” exiled as she was to other parts of the United States, a Tejana who came home to be buried after her self-imposed exile; Pérez offers a historical approach; and Alarcón offers theoretical framings through which we can explore the “disposable subjects” she talks about in her most recent work. I intersperse such poems, drawn from my observations and my experiences, as well as my need to reflect on the many family members and friends who did not necessarily stay in one location but who moved con el ir y venir, el vaivén de cada vida, life’s comings and goings.

Part of my interrogation of how Anzaldúa’s coining or reclaiming of certain terms like mestizaje laid the groundwork for later work, as she delineated a path for spiritual activism, is also grounded on the idea that Borderlands shifts epistemological and ontological frameworks. Functioning as a paradigm shift as described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ([1962] 1996), the adjustment or a paradigm shift needed by those coming to the United States as they navigate nepantla, that Anzaldúan use of the Nahua concept for existing in a liminal space, can be daunting. I find this concept useful for the analysis of narratives of migration and return, since it is often that liminal space where the return occurs, where the traveler, the emigrant, the diasporic subject returns to find that indeed you cannot go home again “to the escapes of time and memory,” as Thomas Wolfe famously posited in his novel ([1934] 1998). A poem: De Nuevo León a Idaho We left our land, our people, our costumbres norteñas To come to alien lands where we started from scratch. No había ni que comer, so we invented tweaked ancient recipes, substituting, replacing spices, growing chiles and tomatillo, pero it was not the same. we treasured comino sent by friends and family kept this essential spice in an empty jar of baby food; piloncillo was nowhere to be had, so we used brown sugar, pero it was not the same; el molcajete de la abuela came with us, weighed us down, but Mamá would not leave it behind she carried it herself across the desert, left the metate behind; she still cries when she remembers that it was given to her when her grandmother died. Las comidas, las costumbres, los nombres— Todo cambió when we left our land when we settled and made this our home.

We danced our dances, Foclórico, danzón, Sang our songs, Las mañanitas, Los laureles No, we will not forget, although our children forget our language, Learn to dislike our food, prefer pizza to enchiladas, They will not forget. We will not forget. In our hearts and minds, our history, our historia. Our story! Forget? ¡Jamás! As we entered the new century, various signals of the way transitory populations as well as indigenous peoples navigate their movements surfaced, particularly in terms of nation-states’ designations for such subjects. These movements highlighted the fact that we live in a time of transition, politically and socially, as our globalized world sees tremendous movements of people for various reasons; it is fitting, then, that in 2013. we look at the phenomenon of migration and return to explode some myths about the experience but also speak from the heart about the consequences of such migrations. Reyna Grande’s recent memoir The Distance between Us (2012) is a case in point, as she tells of her being left behind by her parents, who came to the United States from Mexico to work. It is a raw and heart-wrenching book, an immigrant testimonio attesting to the importance of family and of self-reliance at the same time. The children left first with the mother and then, when the mother leaves to join the father in the United States, with the grandmothers, one of whom is anything but grandmotherly. Grande awaits her parents’ return, to build the promised house that instigated her father’s decision to go al norte to begin with. It is not until the father returns to retrieve the children that the family is reunited. His return, as it is for many others, is not permanent, and they return to the U.S., where Grande proceeds to go through school and ends up a writer thanks to a teacher’s mentoring. Grande’s story, as so many others,

remains a testament to the immigrant’s power of survival and exemplifies the trajectory of many families and lives torn apart by such migrations. Because I use the Anzaldúan concept of writing and of knowledge formation as autohistoria, or life writing, this paper is a testimonio as well, that is, I insert my voice, my story, throughout the narrative. The poetry included is also part of the work, as I aim to use a mestizaje of genres, that is, a hybrid genre where poetry weaves in and out of narrative and of literary criticism. In framing this paper, I sought key concepts of what it means to move. I know that as I move to Kansas City, I leave behind the roses lovingly planted five years ago in my garden in Texas, when I moved into the house in San Antonio, just as I had left my roses in Laredo when I relocated to San Antonio. I leave behind family, my elderly mother, who, at 87, refuses to travel and will more than likely die while I am away. I leave behind dear friends and family—my sister-neighbor who is my closest friend, my colleagues and community folks, who, for the past twelve years in San Antonio, have become my San Antonio family. Two years ago when I walked the Camino de Santiago, I walked away from all of that was my life in San Antonio, Texas, but I knew it was short-term—perhaps it was a practice run for my move to the Midwest. On the Camino, I carried very little with me, and left behind a life I resumed almost imperceptibly after a two-month absence. As I packed for my move to Kansas City, I realized that what is left behind and what comes with us as we move from one location to another ultimately depends on our willingness to part with an object; on a symbolic level, these objects represent who we are, and leaving them behind means we leave the person we are in that particular place behind. For my family coming to the United States in 1948. it meant leaving behind family and friends, but it also meant coming to other family and friends, as south Texas and northern Mexico are but one regional culture zone, as cultural geographer Daniel Arreola (2002) so ably demonstrates in his work. My family chose to stay in south Texas precisely because of that—the language, food, and customs of their northern Mexico home were almost identical to those of south Texas. But what about those who kept going north? The many families who settled away from the border? Are they not of two countries? I shift here to a poem I wrote in the mid-1990s that appears on the wall of a laundromat in San Antonio, part of a mural honoring women from the community.

The Gift I’m a gift designed to subvert, Submerge. Sublet the house and pretend no more. A gift that bears the power of triumphant entry; the gift that rescued Helen or Malinche, Ya ni sé! Solo sé que yo no soy ni una ni la otra, But she who beyond beauty and betrayal Can change the world Change her skin Change her cover. Still. The gift is not for all and not for always Not forever Ni le hace si sí o si no Just take my skeletal hand Look into the eyes of night then Come into the blinding light Storm the fortress Rescue those who need rescuing Offer that which needs offering From DC or DF. Nolehace. Nilehace. The subtlest gifts come uninvited; The strongest love is unrequited. Gloria Anzaldúa’s landmark book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, first published in 1987, tells of her diasporic migration to various parts of the United States culturally, geographically, and I would even say spiritually. I contend that this path-breaking book, which redefined Chicana/o studies and other area studies such as women’s and border studies, even as it impacted on numerous disciplines from geography and political science to literary studies and philosophy, is at essence a testimonio-like narrative of displacement and recovery, a story of movement away from and return to the Valley, the south Texas region that

informs Anzaldúa’s worldview. The borderlands, then, shape Anzaldúa and offer a lens for defining the movements to and from as well as providing a locus for the analysis of these movements. Ultimately, Anzaldúa came home, as it were, as she lies buried in her hometown cemetery in Hargill, Texas. At the time of her death, she was still living in self-imposed exile in California. Her work resonates for many in our globalized world that still insists on borders, still castigates those who cross those borders, defying shibboleths. The essays gathered in the “Comparative Perspectives Symposium” in Signs (Cantú 2011. attest to the power of Borderlands beyond the geopolitical location of the US-Mexico borderlands. Chicana historian Emma Pérez uses a difrasismo, sitio y lengua, to define the border culture where one is indeed bound to place and language; she presents us with an approach we can use to analyze the reality of border subjects and migrant subjects who traverse the land and language of locations. For Anzaldúa, that sitio y lengua was strongly rooted in the languages of the border and the place where she came of age, where she comes to consciousness and later in her writing articulates how her epistemological formation of writing from the flesh relies on lived experience. As Norma Alarcón claims: “From the beginning of her published work Anzaldúa launches a testimonial and anecdotal inquiry of the Self in the flesh, for example in Bridge ‘La Prieta’ where she first speaks of her vision of El Mundo Zurdo (pp. 208–209) for transcending her agonistic life formation” (2013, 190). While Pérez in her essay uses the phrase sitio y lengua to discuss culture, appropriation, and empowerment for women of color, the difrasismo is arguably well-suited to discussing the push for assimilation of the dislocated subjectivity of migrant subjects faced with a white-supremacist, heterosexist reality as they move to the U.S. or farther away from culturally Mexican south Texas. I contend that it is essential for diasporic and immigrant communities who are displaced and who must survive in an alien sitio where an alien lengua dominates to preserve a cultural practice that reshapes, or constructs, the alien sitio y lengua into a safe space, a space resplendent with the foods, music, and celebrations of home, of the sitio y lengua of origin. Thus, spices like cumin and music like norteño and celebrations like quinceañeras become the sitio y lengua of survival and of resistance. Elsewhere (Cantú, 2002. 2009), I have explored the quincea-

ñera and matachines celebrations and their role in the community as a social glue and as resistance to white hegemonic cultural practices, and I am convinced that these diasporic communities do indeed survive because of their allegiance to cultural practices. These subjects carry home with them, like turtles. When I was living in Washington, DC, in the mid-1990s, I was pleasantly surprised by the many cultural manifestations of resistance to assimilation I saw in the Latina/o community in the area. Many restaurants specialized in and served various foods from the various Latinidades: Salvadorean pupusas, empanadas argentinas, Spanish tapas, Mexican mole, etc. I was also struck by the annual Festival Latino/Fiesta DC, complete with parade, food, music, and a very public display of Latinidades. Olivia Cadaval’s (1998) study of the fiesta explains how Fiesta DC has for over 40 years played a role in maintaining unity among the myriad Latinidades that are found in the area. Indeed Fiesta DC bring them together. The in-between spaces or nepantlas that the subject inhabits led me to write another poem on the idea of the goings and comings, el ir y venir, el vaivén, of life. Entre Malinche y Guadalupe En el vaivén de la vida La Chicana es a veces Malinche, A veces Guadalupe, Siempre Tonantzin Siempre De la tierra ¿Qué más da? La Chicana es siempre Nepantlera. The movement to and fro relies on various factors; economic, cultural, and personal reasons impel migrants to return to their homes. Once they have earned the money they set out to make, some will return to the community of origin—build the house they dreamed of, buy the cow or horse, start the small business, or simply live for a while. But most return only to come back. A contract worker to Canada signs up and goes every year for six months to work, and returns to his wife and children. Twenty times he has

traveled by plane to Canada. He is not alone. Thousands travel legally to work, and return to their homes with gifts, with hope. Most movement south (and back north) happens from November to January, as thousands of Mexican (im)migrants go home loaded with gifts for their families in Mexico and points south, only to return to the United States loaded with foods not found en el norte, with hearts heavy, añorando and dreaming of the next trip back. Reminiscent of other patterns of migration, such as the migrant workers in the United States, who travel north in the summer and early fall following the crops, los paisanos who have papers, and some who do not, go back home for the winter holidays and summer vacation each year. Too quickly, though, they must return al norte to work, to live. The paisano phenomenon taxes the resources of communities along the border, which must deal with the increase in crossers, first to Mexico and then back to the United States. Sandra Cisneros’s protagonist in her novel Caramelo is a case in point, as her family’s annual trip from Chicago to Mexico City to visit the paternal family home is central and sets the tone of movement back and forth. My Mom’s cousins and my Dad’s sister’s family, too, would come back to Laredo for the Christmas holidays; now it is their children who come down to the valley or to Laredo to visit family. Where is home, then, for the immigrant family? It depends. The children consider home to be the United States; the parents think of home as the place where they come from, where the family’s roots lie: Mexico, or Ecuador, or Honduras, or Texas. Now, in the grand scheme of things, deterritorialized subjects are not uncommon; people have been moving for various reasons for millennia. But in the contemporary world, the migrations have taken center stage; the phenomenon of return, however, has remained relatively unstudied. Debra Lattanzi Shutika’s Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico (2011) explores the complete circle of migration, as she follows families who have resettled in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, and return to their hometown of Textitlan, Guanajuato, Mexico. Chapter 6, “There and Back Again: The Pilgrimage of Return Migration,” especially impressed me with her analysis of how the paisanos return to their hometown for the town’s fiesta in honor of their saint, el Señor de Esquipulitas (166–202). It is these transient, globalized subjects that I locate in what could be called a nepantla on various levels. First there is the

political, as they are often caught between nation-states, participating in the political life of neither country, e.g. not voting in elections in Mexico or the United States (although recent policies have allowed Mexican citizens living abroad to cast ballots in Mexican general elections). Additionally, they are in a state of nepantla more akin to what Anzaldúa articulated. This in-between-ness places these subjects at the crux of a dilemma. For Anzaldúa, the return was always problematic. By using a unifying trope of mestizaje, and in the way she appropriates the term, she deals with the “messiness” of that return. It is at the border, in that mestizaje of space, where a new sense of Emma Pérez’s decolonial imaginary emerges, where one, even a queer person of color, can find a home. It may not be a geopolitical space, but it exists in the imagined landscape of what home is and what that place you go back to can be. Anzaldúa’s idea of returning home is overlaid with a sense of fear, as she half-jokingly declares that she thought “homophobia” referred to fear of going home. Perhaps it is not just the homophobia of the place that renders it a fearful place, but the idea of turning back, of coming full circle, of not having grown, advanced, in other words succeeded in becoming someone else. Explaining the concept in Anzaldúa’s thought, Alarcón says, Nepantla is an “in-between” space through which a “third critical space” is seized and pivoted to encompass diverse situations and worlds. Caught between multiple sociopolitical and cultural worlds, the interfaces of lifeworlds are a consistent current and undercurrent in Anzaldúa’s development and hermeneutic of the self. Though initially Nepantla is a “liminal state between worlds, between realities, between systems of knowledge, between symbology” (Interview with Andrea Lumsford, p. 268) thus elaborating the praxis of self-healing creating an “in-between” space that facilitates self-transformation (Entrevistas, p. 5). (2013, 205 n4) Another concept that surfaces, then, is the return to the home, to that which is familiar, or to remain elsewhere in an alien place that is slowly becoming home. To explore this conundrum a bit more, I venture into a discussion of how such a transnational life also pivots on three key concepts: labor, love, and land. In the next section of this essay, I expand on the ways these “L” words impel movements to and from, as these deterritorialized subjects

navigate the troubled waters of early twenty-first-century realities for work (that is, labor), for an añoranza or querencia (that is, love), or for land, that is, the attachment to a place or the yearning to have a place. Labor is a beloved word of capitalism, especially labor exploited to increase the coffers of those multinational or global companies, small businesses, farms, meat packing companies, fábricas where the immigrant may work ten or fourteen hours a day for minimal wages, or salaries that turn out even lower if overtime is no longer paid. The waves of workers immigrating, whether legally through guest worker programs or not, remains constant; the ebb and flow tends to mirror economic highs and lows in both countries, the United States and the country of origin. The recent economic crises of 2008 spawned the current phenomenon of negative migration, as more migrants were returning to their countries of origin than were coming into the United States. Labor is the engine that most often drives the migration of the twenty-first century. So, when jobs are scarce the immigrant returns to the home country, albeit often not happily but driven by necessity. In some ways, such a movement of people is inherently tied to the second point, love, although, as Chela Sandoval (2000) posits, love can be a solution in many cases, it becomes a more tenuous link between the home country and the United States. This powerful emotion is also at the core of many migrations, as people either leave home to secure a better life for their loved ones or return home to reunite with family and loved ones. The querencia for home and the añoranza such love elicits create a strong pull, a tie that often remains for years, even while “home” is no longer that place that remains mythical in the imagined space of memory. Furthermore, when it is not about the place but about people, the situation is more complex and complicated, as often those who find themselves in a new place find romantic liaisons in that new place, displacing the beloved back home with a new love; alas, the illusion of fulfillment of desire, of finding the one and only may also impact such decisions. Many narratives tell of multiple households—here and there—of abandoned families in the place of origin, and somewhat rare, but still true, an abandonment of the new family in the United States, left behind as the (im)migrant returns home. The phenomenon is not new. I have heard of many such instances. In my own family, one of my uncles, my father’s oldest brother, had such an

arrangement. At his funeral in Mexico, where his widow and his children were mourning, his US family showed up, to my grandmother’s consternation and embarrassment. My cousin, who was a child of five at the time, remembers the funeral. In some cases, such liaisons occur as the search for footing in the new place, a way of establishing an identity, is easily achieved through marriage to a citizen. One Salvadorean woman who came during the ugly wars of the 80s told me the story of how she married the son of the family where she worked as a domestic, fully aware that it was a shortcut to securing legal status. Love had nothing to do with it. She remains married to the man, and her five children, all born in the United States, constitute her identity now. Women who come alone are at the mercy of the coyote and of their employers. Abuse is rampant. Love? Not always. Still it is a powerful pull whether it is for love of a person or the añoranza or querencia for a place that many feel. Land, not just the physical very real sitio, the site, the soil of the homeland, but the idea of, the simulacrum of, the place that is one’s land centers many a migrant’s life. In similar fashion, the dream of owning a piece of land for those who are landless is a strong driving force, a motivator for staying or for returning. In the imagined ideal life that the socalled American Dream purports to fulfill, owning one’s piece of land comes to signify stability, wealth, and security. But, the dream is more elusive, as the land of one’s birth no longer has the same hold as it once did. The practice of burying a baby’s ombligo, umbilical cord, and placenta in the back yard of one’s home was a powerful signifier, tying one to the land. When I was born, at home, of course, my family lived in an urban area, but even there my grandmother buried my ombligo and reminded me often, although we had moved away, that I was bound to Mexico. But even in rural places, births now happen in clinics or hospitals—not at home with a midwife—and there is little tolerance for such folk ways. The very visceral and physical tie to the land is no more, diminished by new practices. It is easier, then, to move away, to find one’s place in the world without the belief that it must be tied to a particular piece of land; instead, I hold, it is the cultural memes that hold the power to ground the individual to a place. Thus, the very specific cultural practices of certain lifecycle rituals exert the same powerful hold—the land is where one is, where one lives one’s life, and where one practices and creates rituals of being. As mentioned earlier, it is in celebrations like the quinceañera, or in foods that one finds “home.”

It is no accident that tortilla factories have sprung up in as unlikely places as Lee’s Summit, Missouri, near Kansas City, or in Nampa, Idaho, near Boise. So, the concepts of labor, love, and land form a troika for the (im)migrant experience. Notwithstanding the various factors that push and pull human beings from one place to another, these three establish a web of relationships that circumscribe their movement even as they highlight the elements that may impel such movement. The solution to stop the movement? A wall. But no wall can stem the tide, the movement that has been and will be. El muro/ The Wall No one believed it would happen here En el Valle Where the birders find such joy In spotting rare unique exotic birds. No one believed they would build it. Just talk someone said, “Puro pedo” “Not to worry, they’ll never get the money,” But it did happen, And hardly anyone noticed The way the land was ripped Apart, The way the sky Above seemed bluer against the brown metal Jutting up and up and up Like soldiers saluting a distant god; Sentinels silently guarding … what? Perhaps a way of life Incongruent with their dreams, A pastiche of broken people Cross their quotidian desires From one side to the other All legal and safe Sipping margaritas en el Mercado

Or shopping at Wal-mart Best of both worlds, A friend tells me. But you gotta be legal to live it What a life! Not everyone sees the wall. While fences may make good neighbors, Walls create enemies: suspicious, defensive, Fearful, who hide behind a wall solid as fear. In the past, Walled cities died, made way for open space Open commerce. Open lives. Spilling beyond restrictive walls. Why are we closing it all up again? The whole world will be walled again. Porqué? Pos no sé, comadre. Seguro que Ni ellos mismos lo saben. I wrote this poem on May 15, 2009. while on a visit to the Rio Grande Valley; we had visited Hargill, Texas, Anzaldúa’s tomb, with the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa conference attendees and then taken a short trip to Nuevo Progreso, Tamaulipas, Méjico. I was haunted by an image of the newly-built wall, made of rusted, corrugated tin or some such metal running along the US river bank, like a scar that is bloodied and is trying to heal. Depressing as the sight was and abhorrent as the ideas that instigated the building of such a wall were, I could not help but feel hope as I spied a bird fly overhead from one side to the other, free and without papers.

CONCLUSION As I draw my comments to an end, I frame the above discussion with an anecdote. When I first came to the Midwest to go to graduate school, I knew it was temporary, that I would return home. Such knowledge made it more bearable to live away from family, to live in a cold climate so unlike the warm El vaivén de la vida 145

South Texas climate I knew. And I did return. But only to move away time and again for work-related relocations. Moving to the Midwest, this time, I know I will once again wallow in my añoranza for the familiar, yearning to return to my homeland, that land that lies in between, the border between the U.S. and Mexico that is geopolitically “the wound that will not heal,” as Anzaldúa (2007, 25) wrote in Borderlands. But, we must be the healing of the wound, as she writes reacting to the 9/11 attacks in the last published essay of her life (2005, 92–103). She thus places the onus of the healing action on the individuals who are aware, who have come to consciousness of the wound; they must work to heal it. Such an enterprise becomes ever more difficult as the added pressures of violence and drugs are added to the equation. Thus, I wring my hands and look skyward, seeking a solution, an answer. Alas, we must also look down at the land where we stand and roll up our proverbial sleeves to do the work that will render meaningful work for immigrants who, even in the land of plenty, will go without food, without shelter, without living wages. The challenge is there. Policies must catch up with the reality of lives lived “amid the shadows” as José ángel N. calls it in his book, Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant (2014); policies must offer substantive and real solutions to the millions who are in the U.S. without legal status as well as to those who seek to return home without jeopardizing their place in the U.S. The agony of not being able to go home for a mother’s funeral, to see a child or spouse who is ill, to go celebrate a beloved niece’s quinceañera, or to bury a beloved cousin eat away at the displaced person. The reasons the immigrant may want to go home are many. But without legal status such a journey home is impossible. The cost is too high to go home and come back. Sangre en el desierto The strange fruit of the desert Lies rotting in the sands of time A shoe, a scarf, a thimble full of faith Remains. The only trail worth dying for Forgotten. From El Salvador, to México to Texas

the dream deferred lies still los restos finally at rest. At home.

REFERENCES Alarcón, Norma. 2013. “Anzalduan Textualities: A Hermeneutic of the Self and the Coyolxauhqui Imperative.” In El Mundo Zurdo 3, edited by A. Castañeda, L. Mercado-López, and S. SaldívarHull, 189–206. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 2005. “Let us be the healing of the wound: The Coyolxauhqui Imperative—la sombra y el sueño.” In One Wound for Another/Una herida por otra: Testimonios de Latin@s in the U.S. through Cyberspace (11 de septiembre de 2001–11 de marzo de 2002), edited by Claire Joysmith and Clara Lomas, 92–103. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de México-CISAN / Colorado College / Whittier. Arreola, Daniel D. (2002). Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (Jack and Doris Smothers Series in Texas History, Life and Culture, 5). Austin: University of Texas Press. Cadaval, Olivia. 1998. Creating a Latino Identity in the Nation’s Capital: The Latino Festival (Latino Communities: Emerging Voices—Political, Social, Cultural and Legal Issues). New York: Garland Publishing. Cantú, Norma E. 2002. “Chicana Life-Cycle Rituals.” In Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change, edited by Norma E. Cantú and Olga Nájera-Rámirez, 15–34. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Cantú, Norma E. 2009. “The Semiotics of Land and Place: Matachines Dancing in Laredo, Texas.” In Dancing across Borders, edited by Olga Nájera Ramírez, Norma E. Cantú, and Brenda M. Romero, 97–115. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Cantú, Norma E. (ed.). 2011. “Comparative Perspectives Symposium: Gloria E. Anzaldúa, an International Perspective.” Signs: Journal of Women and Society 37 (1) (Autumn): 1–52. Cisneros, Sandra. 2003. Caramelo. New York: Vintage. Grande, Reyna. 2012. The Distance between Us: A Memoir. New York: Atria. Kuhn, Thomas. (1962) 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolution. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. N., Jose ángel. (2014) Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant. Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Pérez, Emma. 1991. “Sexuality and Discourse: Notes from a Chicana Survivor.” In Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, edited by Carla Trujillo, 150–184. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Theories of Representation and Difference). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed (Theory Out of Bounds, 18). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Shutika, Debra Lattanzi. 2011. Beyond the Borderlands: Migration and Belonging in the United States and Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolfe, Thomas. (1940) 1998. You Can’t Go Home Again. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.

 

Part III

Impossible Returns

 

8

Cuban Geographies The Roots/Routes of Ana Menéndez Narratives Ada Ortuzar-Young

  Our roots can be anywhere and we can survive, because if you think about it, we take our roots with us. Gertrude Stein, in Linda Simon, Gertrude Stein Remembered And there’s only my imagination where our history should be. Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban

  In “The Shunting Trains Trace Iron Labyrinths,” the closing story in Adios, Happy Homeland! (Menéndez 2011, 251–60), the unnamed protagonist meets a passenger. “Everyone here is an emigrant,” the stranger tells her. After a time, she asks the question she “feared the most”: “When will we be arriving?” … “It is up to the conductor.” “Who is the conductor?” “No one knows,” she replies. Before falling asleep the passenger adds, “Some of us have been traveling for years and we still don’t know” (254). Ana Menéndez’s characters are always from elsewhere. Regardless of the routes they travel, they always carry their roots with them and hope to return to them. Like other diasporic, deterritorialized peoples, their presence in foreign lands has contributed to the emergence of transnational geographies and identities, unfixed communities in a constant state of flux, as they negotiate and adapt to their new surroundings, in a constant struggle to claim a social space and reconstruct their lives. Identities and notions of home are shaped both by their current lived experiences—the present—and by their longing for a lost place, which in turn is reclaimed in their

memories. Their roots are portable and translatable, and as such, a site of sustenance and comfort. James Clifford posits in Routes. Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century: “In diaspora experience, the copresence of ‘here’ and ‘there’ is articulated with an anti-teleological (sometimes messianic) temporality. Linear history is broken, the present is constantly shadowed by a past that is also a desired, but obstructed, future: a renewed, painful yearning.” (1997, 264) And he asks further: “How is this connection (elsewhere) that makes a difference (here) remembered and rearticulated?” (269). The characters in three of Ana Menéndez’s works, In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001), Loving Che (2003), and Adios, Happy Homeland! (2011), always return to their roots through the reconstruction of metaphorical and imaginary spaces. Two of her characters—young women like the author herself—actually travel to Havana. In her latest novel, The Last War (2009), which takes place mostly in Turkey, the author focuses on the general uprootedness and displacement caused by war, exile, and travel, thus suggesting that the Cuban condition is not unique. It is, however, part of larger global and historical forces. These works focus on the processes or moments that articulate cultural difference. They are people in transit who are constantly remaking their identities. Their identities are unfixed. Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space ([1974] 1991) has addressed the geography of spatial imagination. For him, there is no unspatialized social reality. It is a terrain of power and contestation. In his trialectics of spatiality (dialectique de la triplicité) Lefebvre connects the spatial, the historical, and the social. He distinguishes three connected spaces: spatial practices, representations of space, and representational spaces (espace perçu, espace conçu, espace vécu). This space is simultaneously objective and subjective, material and abstract, and embraces representations of power as well as the power of representations. From the production of these spaces other positions emerge, as we will see in the works of Ana Menéndez. The title story in the collection In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd (2001, 1–30) takes place in Domino Park, in the heart of Little Havana in Miami. Since their arrival starting in 1959, the immigrants have created spaces of their own. In one such communal location, mature men—many retirees— gather regularly in the park to challenge each other to domino games, an old

tradition from the island now institutionalized by them. It is an appropriated space, and due to its use, it satisfies specific spatial community practices. It is a site of encounters and translations: “The men came each morning to sit under the shifting shade of a banyan tree, and sometimes the way the wind moved through the leaves reminded them of home” (4). Máximo, who has been living in the area for years, finds himself an empty-nester widower. In his old age, alone, and with more time on his hands to reflect and fantasize, the site of birth—Cuba, the womb—acquires more importance. He alternates the shuffling of dominos with the telling of stories and jokes. They usually begin with “In Cuba I remember,” and describe an Edenic place where life “was good and pure” (7). As discussed by John Tomlinson (1999), one important characteristic of diasporic discourse is the ability to place itself in the past as well as in the present, in a Janus-like fashion (after Janus, the Roman god of the threshold who faced two ways). Memory is a skill for survival, but memory is constructive and is nurtured by present needs and desires as well as by actual events in the past. The humorous tone of the conversation and the jokes is misleading as it reveals a deep sense of loss. It also uncovers traits emblematic of the Cuban psychology, long hidden by the experience of deterritorialization. According to the prominent Cuban intellectual, Jorge Mañach, in Indagación del choteo, his 1928 seminal essay on his nation’s culture, the choteo (poking fun) is a strategy adopted by Cubans to cope with adversity. This almost unconscious attitude, with its peculiar form of wit and humor, is a subterfuge and also a form of solace. In the comfort of the park, their imagined Cuba, Máximo and his friends assume their Cuban personae, suggesting the struggle and instability of an identity that is not yet resolved despite their long-time residency in Miami. Furthermore, this discursive strategy on the part of Menéndez reflects tendencies often found in ethnic writers who simultaneously situate themselves in two cultural traditions at once. This is an ambivalent site, where identity negotiations take place and evolve. The most revealing among the humorous stories is the one about Juanito, the little dog who “gets off the boat from Cuba and decides to take a little stroll down [the elegant] Brickell Avenue” (21). Feeling happy to be in America, he offers a piropo (a compliment) to a fancy white poodle who walks by, just to feel the rejection of the American dog: “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to? I am a refined breed of considerable class and you are nothing but a short, insignificant mutt” (28). Juanito, his pride hurt,

in pain, reacts: “Here in America, I may be a short, insignificant mutt, but in Cuba I was a German shepherd” (28). His fellow players understand and share his sentiments of loss and the diminishing of his status resulting from abandoning his homeland and having to start a new life from the bottom. As a former university professor with a standing in his community, Máximo feels crushed by the weight of years away from home (Cuba). He turns his face away from his friends so they cannot see his tears. Máximo Gómez Park (named after a patriot of Cuban’s independence from Spain) is better known as Domino Park. It was built in 1976 by the city of Miami to replace the improvised site where émigrés had set up temporary tables to play dominos. The structure is fenced in, and architecturally it is full of nostalgic features, such as a bust of the Cuban patriot. Its presence sends a message to users and non-users alike. According to Henri Lefebvre, “(social) space is a (social) product” ([1974] 1991, 26), and the outcome of a process with many contributing currents. And he further explains: “Granted, then, that a social relationship cannot exist without an underpinning, we still have to ask how that underpinning ‘functions.’ … What, it may be asked, is the relationship of the ‘underpinning’ to the relationship that it supports and bears?” (400). Lefebvre concludes: “Social relations, which are concrete abstractions, have no real existence save in and through space. Their underpinning is spatial” (404; italics in the original). Domino Park—the place and the social relations it facilitates—is the underpinning expressed by Lefebvre. It is both a concrete and an imagined place. As a concrete space, built by local authorities, it recognizes and validates the presence of the migrant community and their spatial needs. It is prominently located in an enclave community, which maintains similarities with and differences from other ethnic neighborhoods in the United States; it is not mainstream America. As such, it has no counterpart in other American cities, or in Cuba, since it evolved locally to satisfy the needs of a particular ethnic group. It is a place in-between, a frontier, where the immigrant can set foot on either side of the border. As a lived space, its mere existence and the interactions that take place there—the players, conversations, and games—are conducive to transporting the participants to Havana. Uprooted from their natural environments, the men had felt disembedded from their social system, in the sense expressed by Anthony Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity (1990). This separation of time and space, the distancing from

their natural environment, has resulted in their displacement. The park is a special location where they can be re-embedded into their (now distant in both time and geography) social space, and feel part of a social system—an imagined one, with roots in the past, but validated daily through the resistance of the old men to forget it. They return to it; they relive their Havana pasts. Yet, the park is not Havana. And especially, not Havana as it exists today—which has evolved and taken its own course in history, and which the players have not seen since their departure. Havana has turned into an imaginary and metaphorical space, and although it is transformed by nostalgia, it satisfies the men as if it were the real one. While the domino players are transplants from Havana, they are not the same individuals that left decades earlier. They have been living in what they consider a borrowed place. They are the product of an experience lived in exile, its duality reflected in the constant looking to the past as well as the future, and their longing to return to a place that has rejected them. For Máximo, Havana is frozen in time. His fellow players still call him “professor.” Throughout the story, he reminisces about his life there with his wife—now deceased—his old home, and how he had to rebuild it in exile. Family rituals have a special place, such as the Nochebuena (Christmas Eve) celebrations, with family and his small children. His memory is tinged by nostalgia for a vanished world. He has not seen his daughters in years, now successful professionals, although they call “more often than most children”(Menéndez 2001, 15). His family now is his fellow domino players. The park is a contested place. As a new landmark, it is included in tourist books and in the itineraries of guided tours of the city. At first, Máximo had hesitated about coming to the park: “It had been Raúl’s idea to go down to Domino Park that first time. Máximo protested. He had seen the rows of tourists pressed up against the fence, gawking at the colorful old guys playing dominos. ‘I’m not going to be the sad spectacle in someone’s vacation slide show,’ he’d said.” (9) Now, it is another Christmas season, and as Máximo and his friends settle in for their regular game, a ritual of a different kind begins. They notice the arrival of the tourists, two groups of families: mothers, fathers, and kids, with their cameras. Later in the afternoon, the tour groups arrive. An open trolley pulls up and parks at the curb. A blond tour guide wearing a guayabera (a type of shirt worn by men

in Cuba) and with microphone in hand leads the group. The two groups— the old men and the tourists—are separated by the fence. The actions of the young guide and his ethnic guayabera reveal his effort to fit in. However, it is of no avail since he is clearly an outsider. His amplified voice in English and Spanish and his explanations of the activities in the park convey his perception of the old men and a folkloric rendering of a Cuba long bygone. Máximo objects to being caricaturized and reacts, the sound of the microphone piercing his ears. “He stood and made a fist at the trolley” and almost automatically he made a lunge at the fence. “‘Mierda!’ he shouted. ‘Mierda! That’s the biggest bullshit I’ve ever heard’” (26). The tourists, caught in the middle, could have easily interpreted the exchange as part of a show, a more “authentic” dimension of their encounter with the other. The telling of the story about Juanito, the dog, has alternated with the visit of the tourists and is triggered by it. By doing so, Menéndez emphasizes the fact that Máximo’s reactions towards the visitors are conditioned by his own sense displacement, even though he has spent a large part of his life in Miami. The story concludes by returning to the tourists: “‘Tell them to go away,’ Máximo said, ‘Tell them, no pictures’” (29). By identifying himself with Juanito, the dog, Máximo stills experiences what Meena Alexander has called “the shock of arrival”: The shock of arrival forces us to new knowledge. What the immigrant must work with is what she [or he] must invent in order to live. Race, ethnicity, the fluid truths of gender are all cast afresh. Nationality, too, that emptiest and yet most contested of signs, marks us. The old question “Who am I?” returns—I am what others see me as, but I am also my longings, my desires, my speech. But how is that speech formed, when what they see me as cuts against the grain of what I sense myself to be? (Alexander 1996, 1) Like Juanito the dog, Máximo is confronted with his own identity as an immigrant because others still see him as an outsider. As a result, he confronts a new knowledge, something he would have never faced in his native country. Issues of “race” or “ethnicity”—the birthmarks of the foreigner—also surface: he is being seen as a mutt, inferior to the elegant, well-kept, and, above all, white poodle. He is more than what others see

him as because unbeknownst to the tourists are his deep feelings of displacement and his nostalgia for a lost way of living. They fail to see the complexities of his existence. On the other hand, Máximo’s daily visits to the park to play dominos have led him to recognize who he is. Time is compressed. Despite having resided in Miami for most of his life, he still feels the shock of arrival as he tries to come to terms with an identity that is largely unresolved. Metaphorically, he is still shuffling the dominos of his life, hoping to settle in a place that would feel like his own. For outsiders, the men in the park are a commodity (an experience appropriated by the tourist industry for lucrative purposes) and, for these tourists specifically, an encounter with the exotic, the tropical other. The transitory nature of their encounter satisfies them sufficiently, since there is no expectation of understanding, or even less, belonging on their part. James Clifford (1997, 192) cites Mary Louise Pratt where she defines “contact zones” as “the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (1992, 6–7). And he continues with Pratt’s explanation, in which she says that a “contact zone” is an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term “contact” I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A “contact” perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. [It stresses] copresence, interaction, interlocking understanding and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (Clifford 1997, 192) This social space described by Pratt uncovers discursive inventions of colonial encounters, where, in this case, the north (the colonial power) and the exotic tropics (the colonized peoples) find their place in the imperial imaginary. In the colonial meaning-making of the contact zone, the real-life domino players are mere characters in a travel book. Although Menéndez makes no reference in her story to the US-Cuban relationship over time, her

story uncovers traces of well-established, historical (and some would say unequal) interactions. The old men recognize the imperial gaze of the tourists, which evokes the co-presence of the past and the present; the reenactment of history and the actions of the moment interlock in an asymmetrical relationship. The men try to grapple with it in the only way they can, in an effort to protect their identities and their uniqueness as a people. For Pratt, the contact zone is often synonymous with a frontier, and the old Cuban men have recognized it as such. For them, the fenced-in structure is an “island”—just like Cuba—with clearly demarcated territorial lines; it is their private space. As such, it is a site of retreat and comfort, a place to dream in and travel back to the past. It is a site “to maintain, revive, invent” their connections to home in Havana and reinforce their sense of difference; it asserts “this sense of being a ‘people’ with historical roots and destinies outside the time/space of the host nation” (Clifford 1997, 255). The clearly established borders recognize the process of othering as well as the entangled tensions that exist between diasporic and native subjects. By insisting on not being photographed, Máximo is making the rules—exerting his power—over his appropriated space, establishing the lines that separate the relations between the two groups. As is often the case with the ethnic self, a concrete but inhospitable place is transformed into an imaginary one because it provides a retreat where cultural practices can be relived in a safe, non-threatening environment. In another story in this collection (“Story of a Parrot,” Menéndez 2001, 87–102), the reader is introduced to Hortencia, a woman with almost forgotten roots. Now approaching her sixtieth birthday and settled into a new home, an unexpected event takes place which forces her to confront her lived experience and returns her to the past. A parrot flies into the house through an open door: “Miami had lately been overrun by wild parrots, descendants of freed pets” (90). This situation parallels the “invasion” of immigrants, a sizeable presence in the city today, and in many parts of the United States. Their presence provokes reactions of rejection and victimization accompanied by offensive epithets on the part of the natives. Hortencia, like the native residents who feel their space violated, reacts negatively towards the parrot. Echoing the fears toward immigration in public and private spheres often seen and heard in America today, she is

repulsed by the invader (the parrot), who she thinks is full of diseases and spreads germs: “‘Do something before it kills us!’—she implores her husband. ‘It’s a ball of microbes and wormy ugliness under all that fancy plumage’” (91), and insists her husband let the bird out. The animal responds to the offense by looking straight at her, as equals, as if recognizing her condition. It “tilted its head to one side. It stared at Hortencia with first the left eye and then the right” (91). This confrontation with her own otherness deeply disturbs her. As her ghostly counterpart, this doppelganger reminds her of her past life—she is an intruder, just like the bird. The narrator places the situation into perspective and adds: “Man, woman, bird: a modern allegory in feather and flesh” (94). They are all migrants, living in a borrowed land, who have invaded foreign spaces, thereby sharing similar experiences and forming part of the plight of modernity and globalization resulting in the movement of peoples around the world. The immigrants, like the bird, have been victims of derogatory epithets and fear on the part of the native residents: they are seen as wild, primitive, and uncivilized. Once the parrot (her ghostly counterpart) is expelled, Hortencia feels discomfort and guilt, and leaves the back door unlatched in the hope the bird will return. It never does. As a result, she is unable to sleep and starts to notice things she had forgotten. “But on the fourth night, Hortencia finally slept and dreamed. She awoke with an unsettled feeling, as if she’d been through a nightmare so terrible that memory, too, had rejected it. She was in the middle of her life, in the middle of Miami, and halfway through a story whose ending she could almost touch. From the bed, Hortencia could hear the click-clack clatter of Felipe’s [her husband] typewriter” (95). The unexpected intrusion of the bird has awakened almost forgotten wounds, the trauma of migration and resettlement. In dreams, she returns home. The dull sound of the typewriter is transformed into a musical melody that transports her to the illusions of her youth and how she wanted to be a famous actress in Havana, an illusion that was truncated by her marriage to Felipe and exile. She relives her youth, her aspirations. But Menéndez is quick to point out the unreliability of memory, as indicated in the dialogue between Hortencia and her husband two months after the incident of the parrot. In her imagination she has transformed the bird into a beautiful singing creature with blue plumage (98).

Memory is subjective, and it is constructive. It tells us more about the present than about what actually happened in the past. As Hortencia watches her husband writing on his typewriter, she returns to her youth and evokes (actually relives) a past as she would have liked it to have been, whirling onstage in a pink tulle dress. Her husband understands, and joins her in her make-believe: Felipe imagines how she begins to run before she leaps, flying into her night stage. In his mind, on the tattered canvas of the past he still carries, he paints a bird with great wings moving to embrace him. He hears the beating of blue feathers in his chest and turns from the window and the moon shadow that is already gliding away from him. The typewriter is music. His long fingers find the keys like a lover in the dark. Hortencia de la Cruz was an imposing, beautiful woman. (102) On his mental canvas, he, too, has transformed the intrusive wild bird (at first seen as filthy and full of microbes) into a beautiful, domesticated animal, worthy of occupying the stage of a civilized community. In this make-believe, embraced by the great wings of this illusory bird, the “imposing, beautiful woman” (Hortencia) is able to fly home, to the place of her youth, where she (or the bird) will not feel like an intruder. Migration was a turning point in her life and she cannot undo it. However, in dreams she can return to what it could have been. The stories of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd are interconnected. A main character in one story may reappear as a secondary one in another, as Menéndez switches her focus to different experiences. “The Perfect Fruit” (49–74) and “The Last Rescue” (141–62) present two diasporic perspectives based on two generations. Demographers and social scientists have focused on the transition into adulthood of young immigrant children, who bring the characteristics of their places of origin with them and, once in the United States, face a process of assimilation and transformation. Gustavo Pérez Firmat, in Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way (1994), explains by quoting Cuban sociologist Rubén Rumbaut:

Children who were born abroad but are being educated and come of age in the United States form what may be called the “1.5” generation. These refugee youth must cope with two crisis-producing and identitydefining transitions: (1) adolescence and the task of managing the transition from childhood to adulthood, and (2) acculturation and the task of managing the transition from one sociocultural environment to another. The “first” generation of their parents, who are fully part of the “old” world, face only the latter; the “second” generation of children now being born and reared in the United States, who, as such, become part of the “new” world, will need to confront only the former. But members of the “1.5” generation form a distinctive cohort in that in many ways they are marginal to both the old and the new worlds, and are fully part of neither of them. (4) Matilde and Raúl, the elderly couple in “The Perfect Fruit,” know who they are: they are part of the “old” world left behind. Their daily lives and values have not felt the influence of American society. She followed her husband to Miami with their small child, Anselmo, who has grown up in the United States. He has grown up in a double environment, part Cuban and part American. His experience growing up indicates that ethnicity is not a final process; it is a road traveled. Having reached adulthood, their son occupies a liminal space on the threshold of two cultures, gradually shifting away from his parents’. “The Last Rescue”—the story of Anselmo’s confrontation with his identity and the sequel to “The Perfect Fruit”—focuses on one of those inbetween spaces where the character must choose and forge new strategies that will redefine him. Clifford has pointed out that the “language of diaspora is increasingly invoked by displaced peoples who feel (maintain, revive, invent) a connection with a prior home. This sense of connection must be strong enough to resist erasure through the normalizing process of forgetting, assimilating, and distancing” (1997, 255). Anselmo’s parents, having arrived in the United States as adults, still maintain a strong sense of attachment to their roots. In “The Last Rescue,” Anselmo’s connections to his past are slipping away in a gradual process of adaptation and negotiation of his ethnic self. Unable to return to a past unknown to him because he does not remember it, he projects instead towards the future. He makes a pragmatic decision. Home is here, and there is nowhere to go back to.

An event takes place in “The Last Fruit” that shakes Matilde and opens up old wounds. Her son is engaged to Meegan, an American woman, and will bring her to dinner. The consequences of his son marrying into another culture confuse Matilde, and she does not know how to respond to such an unexpected development. The event brings to light long hidden insecurities and discomforts that she had faced as a result of leaving her motherland. In an almost delirious reaction, the past and the present alternate in the narration. The present: what to cook? After much consideration she settles on bananas, “the perfect fruit” coming from trees her husband had planted in their backyard. She transforms the fruit into every possible recipe. The kitchen is full of them. These actions transport her to the past, and this involves a return home, to Cuba: “All these years, what had she been waiting for? Oh Raúl. She looked at her husband and when he looked away she felt the years peel back” (Menéndez 2001, 71). She is transported to the birth of her son in Cuba, coming to America, and the suspicions of her husband’s infidelity. Anselmo is now an adult, and moving away from his parents not just physically, but more importantly culturally, given the implications of marrying “an American woman.” His mother has the premonition of losing what attaches her to her roots again: “‘Everything was going away from me again,’—Matilde finally said” (73; emphasis added). Matilde alternates cooking the bananas with reviewing her past since she left Cuba. She reflects on her life, her displacement, and her instability, in an effort to search for meaning. There is an emphasis on loss and the passing of time, the loss of her home in Cuba and, more importantly, the loss of her only son, as he gradually moves away from his Cuban family and becomes more fully integrated into American society. He is no longer Cuban like his parents. In “The Last Rescue,” Anselmo lies in bed next to his American wife, Meegan, unable to sleep; it is a nightmarish evening. He finds himself at a crossroads and must make a choice. “His mother had said nothing when he brought her home. When she left she had sighed and said, ‘Una Americana.’ Before they were married, his father took him to dinner. A Cuban man can never marry an Americana, he explained. An American man with a Cuban woman, this was possible… But an Americana would never understand a Cuban man” (145). As a Cuban-American man, Anselmo has been participating in the flights that search for rafters adrift in the Straits of Florida to rescue them: “When you are Cuban, you never

sleep well. You have suffered more than most people” (145). This reveals his understanding of the exile experience that his parents identify with and is an act of solidarity with the plight of those abandoning the island—it identifies him as Cuban. In almost a feverish state, Anselmo reviews recent events with Meegan that question—according to him—her acceptance of his Cubanness. He recalls overhearing the conversation in a social gathering with her family: “He’d been a little dismayed to learn they were discussing politics. Worse was Meegan’s talking in a way Anselmo had never heard. She used to laugh at the way he talked with his hands and once, at one of her family reunions in Maine, she imitated his gestures, exaggerating them in a pantomime that even he found amusing. They’re all like that, she said, all the Carrillos” (149). It disturbs him that she questions his commitment to the economic embargo on Cuba, favored by his parents’ generation. As a result, issues of allegiance and belonging are brought to the surface. Anselmo looks at potential threats to his relationship with Meegan. He starts feeling jealous at the way she looks at their American friend, Mark, a potential rival. What will happen the next morning while Anselmo goes up in the small airplane to rescue stranded rafters? He is presented with a renegotiation of his identity in order to “rescue” his marriage. By doing so, he is turning away from his previous commitment with his Cuban community and moving in a direction towards assimilating into the American culture. Feeling the body of his wife next to him in bed, he chooses to integrate into the American cultural body. His identity in flux, he is starting a process of forgetting and distancing. There is a conscious and carefully negotiated choice and ultimately the realization of the conflicting nature of having two allegiances, to both Cuba and America. There will be no return home because the only home he knows is here. Ethnicity may have an expiration date. In “Her Mother’s House” (the closing story of In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd) and in the novel Loving Che (2003), Menéndez uses a motherdaughter plot to explore the process of passing cultural values and notions of home and belonging on to a new generation of women who were either born in Cuba and came as babies, or were born in the United States of Cuban parents. The two young females in these narratives are the only characters in Menéndez’s works who actually return to Cuba, and there is

ample evidence to suggest that their decision to do so is motivated by the actions of their mothers. Ultimately, the concept of motherhood here is understood both in biological and cultural terms, and the return of the daughters to the mothers’ homeland represents an effort to re-attach themselves to the maternal matrix. The journey of identity formation is a long one and starts in childhood. For Lisette (the daughter in “Her Mother’s House”), the social space where she grew up is marked by her mother’s anguish over the loss of her home in Cuba: That house. Always in the air, behind every reproach. Her mother half mad with longing. And that winter morning when Lisette thought she began to know her mother. Twelve years old. Reading alone in her room, she heard the sobbing…”When the soldiers came for the house, I walked straight, not turning once to look at the stained-glass windows,” she cried softly now. “Not even the white columns that climbed to the second floor.” And the iron railing on the balcony where the rattan furniture was laid out for company, the clink of glasses. Lisette began to remember all of it too. (Menéndez 2001, 206–207; emphasis added) The mother’s utopian memories become the daughter’s; her identity is being shaped by a place both real and imagined. The mother shares with other immigrants what Meena Alexander (2009, 5) has called the “rooted errantry” and “the paradox of memory that is continually returning to an impossible place.” She faces a crisis of belonging and fails to adjust to life in Miami; she is in a state of limbo. Despite the mother’s nostalgic recollections, which reach the point of becoming dysfunctional at times, she cannot (or will not) return to visit her old home. Her attitude reflects personal and community sentiments typical of the first generation of Cuban exiles. This family narrative (which is also a collective one) is problematized by generational differences and individual lived experiences. The mother’s actions reflect the process of growing up as part of the exile community in Miami. With time, the mother’s subjective manifestations of uprootedness are transferred to the daughter, who gradually internalizes them. For the younger generation of the daughter, who has not lived in

Cuba like her mother, the return to the island to visit the mythical place of her birth is a matter of necessity—which becomes reality as she, now a journalist, is sent to Havana. The mother—the older generation and part of the first exile group—does not approve of her daughter’s desire to return to Cuba. This reflects deeper tensions resulting from differences in age and life experiences. The first exiled generation, still traumatized from being torn apart from their homeland, is blinded by the dual and conflicting feelings of nostalgia (a pull towards the past) and resentment (the need to distance themselves ideologically) from the island. Her mother had shut her eyes when Lisette told her she was going to Cuba. It was a simple reporting trip, a stroke of luck. She wasn’t going to explain to her mother things she could barely explain to herself. How every story needed a beginning. How the past had come to seem like a blank page, waiting for the truth to darken it. (Menéndez 2001, 210) Feeling the desire to fill a void in her life and complete her “life story,” Lisette proceeds to travel without her mother’s blessing. At first the mother ignores the daughter’s request to give her a map to the old house, until they reach the airport when, with a “puffy face,” she presses a note into her hand. If they let her, Lisette would take pictures [of the house] for her father. Show him the lost space from where his wife had emerged, naked except for her stories. The first years of their marriage, all her mother did was talk about her lost plantation. Her father told Lisette how she used to lie in bed giving him imaginary tours of the house. The graceful stairway laced with gardenias in the summer, the marble fireplace her father had installed on a whim after visiting the States, the long white-shuttered windows that looked out over the gardenias. (214) Once in Cuba, the disparities between the utopic discourse of the mother and the dystopic face-to-face encounter with reality shake Lisette. Both in Havana and later as she approaches the place of her mother’s birth, the locals do not recognize her as Cuban and attempt to address her in English, doubting whether she would understand Spanish. It is shocking to realize that unbeknownst to her she has tattooed over her body the marks that identify her with her hyphenated/ethnic identity. She now realizes that she lacks authenticity and is not a Cuban like the ones on the island. This confusion is deepened as the new residents of the house tell

her they are taking care of it in case she “ever wanted to return”: “Lisette shook her head. ‘First time,’ she began. ‘What I mean is, if this is my first time here, how could I return?’” (222). The “return” accentuates the ambivalence she has felt since arriving on the island, which forces her to confront and redefine her identity: is she Cuban or an American ethnic? These questions are the result of her visit to her mother’s ancestral home. In a walk through the house—the encounter with reality—once again utopia is transformed into dystopia: “Lisette saw that it was a house, but it could not be the house she had come all this way to see. This was a house with small windows carved high on the uneven walls. A flat, pitted roof of red tile. A single front door, wooden and cracked. An iron latch that hung open. A house with small windows. Uneven walls. Red tiles. Iron latches. The house of someone else’s imaginings, a different story” (218–19). This is not what she had come to see: “Lisette closed her eyes to shut out the truth that sat with its arms crossed in front of her. And what of it! she wanted to shout. So she [her mother] lied for years. So she lied! If only Lisette could get up now and return to the hotel in Havana, the men dancing on the Malecón, back to the Cuba she could talk about later, the simple stories of the rafters, the plain facts of their sadness” (220–21). This other Cuba—the Havana of the tourists—light and feisty, does not require her to touch deep into her soul. As Lisette leaves her mother’s house, she presses a bill into the hand of one of the current residents: “Gratitude and reproach, the small space between knowing and forgetting” (224). As is often the case in this first collection of stories, there are events that lead the characters to confront their lived experiences and send them back to their roots. “Her Mother’s House” is told retrospectively, where the spaces of her mother’s childhood—always made real through her continuous reminiscences—and the present alternate. The house (the space) where Lisette grew up in Miami is not just a house. It is the repository of memories and family stories—just like the home in Cuba was for her mother. More than a concrete place, it is an affective one. Now, after her parent’s sickness, Lisette returns to the home where she grew up; it is in a state of disrepair and disintegration. She confronts the place of her childhood, and, just as had occurred with her mother, imagination conquers reality. She begins to write: “Beautiful Coral Gables home, five bedrooms, three baths, vaulted ceilings in the dining room. Balcony with wrought-iron

railings overlooking large pool. Entrance flanked by royal palms. She paused and added, The house of your dreams” (227). It was in this house (now both concrete and imagined) that she had faced her mother after her return from Cuba. Cognizant of her mother’s silence, and as the children gather around her to find out what the mother’s home in Cuba was like, Lisette replies: “Everything was the same,” Lisette said after a moment. “The stair way, the balconies. Even the marble fireplace. Somehow, it all made it through the revolution.” She faced her mother. Held her chin in her hands. “And the long white-shuttered windows that looked over the rose garden still let in the very brightest sunshine.” (228) Lisette establishes a complicity with her mother by corroborating her lies, thus passing along to the next generations the idyllic fabrications of the now grandmother. To justify not bringing pictures, which would have provided objective evidence, she invents a story that soldiers took away her camera. The process of returning to Cuba and witnessing the truth followed by the disintegration of her childhood home leads to a better understanding of the mother’s emotional state and the role of memory and nostalgia in narratives of return. For William Boelhower, in “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States,” the essential way in which the ethnic autobiographer interrogates American reality is by drawing facts into a system of ethnic interpretations through a politics of memory. In this way facts become what they actually are: constructions… Here “return” often implies an ethnic savoirfaire that is faced with a disestablished ancestral world and a deterritorialized ethnic community… Not contents, but ethnic framing and intention are what counts. (1991, 136–37) At the center of this system of ethnic interpretations is the ethnic home— the same home—where different stories evolve. In “Her Mother’s House” the need to actually see the ancestral home is of paramount importance to the young woman. For others, like Puerto Rican Judith Ortiz Cofer in Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood (1990), the

cadences of a silent home movie where characters come in and out of focus trigger the retelling of the stories learned from her grandmother and the preservation of the past. For Sandra Cisneros, the smells of the home, the dark hair of her mother, and the dynamics of growing up in a MexicanAmerican home determine who she is. Oscar Hijuelos’s Our House in the Last World also focuses on issues of perspective and identity in a tender coming-of-age story in New York City. One story—the American ethnic story—with new plots and new sets of characters. The search for her ancestral roots is also the focus of Menendez’s first novel, Loving Che (2003). The unnamed young woman in the novel was presumably sent away by her mother as a baby and grew up in Miami under the care of her grandfather. An aura of mystery shrouds her origins. Her childhood memories are limited—her grandfather does not give her details of her family in Cuba, but she remembers the echoes of his shortwave radio as she was falling asleep at night. Cuba is both present and absent, and this conditions her existence. Confronted about the lack of tangible evidence about her mother, her grandfather provides her with a piece of paper he found pinned on her sweater when they first arrived in Miami. Her mother, he claims, had clipped three lines of Pablo Neruda’s “Letter on the Road,” the closing poem of The Captain’s Verses ([1952] 2004): “Farewell, but you will be / with me, you will go within / a drop of blood circulating in my veins” (quoted in Menéndez 2003, 9). This bit of knowledge and the everincreasing burden of the obscurity of her origins send the young woman adrift. She drops out of college and begins to travel: “As the months and then years passed, I traveled farther and wider, my desire to keep moving always outpacing my small terror of planes, my fear of leaving. I was in India when I got word that my grandfather had died … I stayed with friends for a few days before returning to my grandfather’s house to sort his things … The house was filled with a new silence that seem to muffle even my attempt to mourn. Unable to sleep, I sat all night in his chair, reading one of his books.” (9–10) Shortly after she returns to Cuba for the first time, the protagonist acknowledges: “I knew I had returned to find my mother” (10). Her travels now have a purpose. The return is an attempt to fill a void in her life. She makes other unsuccessful trips where she meets people and passes out her

address, but there is no trace of her mother: “Eventually, I stopped traveling to Havana, the trips leaving me more and more exhausted, not only from the uncertainty but from the sadness that I came to understand more clearly with each visit. Havana, so lovely at first glance, was really a city of dashed hopes, and everywhere I walked I was reminded that all in life tends to decay and destruction” (10). And so do her roots. As the young woman tries to settle in Miami, she receives a mysterious package postmarked in Spain with no return address. It contains tattered photographs of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Cuban revolutionary, and a long letter in the form of a memoir apparently written by her mother. In it she gives an account of her—imagined, as it becomes evident later—love affair with the revolutionary hero, thus suggesting the possibility that the daughter is the product of her extramarital relationship. This section of the book with the photographs—entitled “Loving Che”—constitutes the bulk of the novel. It is preceded by the daughter’s brief commentaries about her current state of disorientation and is followed by her account (entitled “Letter on the Road”) of her return to Havana and unsuccessful efforts to find her mother. The mother, Teresa, is an elusive figure and her dreamlike story is hard to corroborate. The daughter consults experts in the field. A history professor (Dr. Caraballo) finds her story impossible, and this confrontation disturbs the daughter: “I wonder if she was accusing me of having written Teresa’s account myself, but not wishing to seem paranoid and thereby magnify the perception of guilt, I only nodded as if I agreed” (173). The visit to an art historian proves equally unproductive. Despite the clouds that surround her mother’s existence—and because of them—the daughter considers traveling to Cuba again: “Often I wondered if it was really necessary for me to press forward with these delusory investigations into Teresa’s life. But I had embarked on a quest that I now had to see through to its finish. And finally I knew that I must travel to Cuba again” (171). Her quest adds confusion to her mother’s story: discrepancies over her real name, her whereabouts, and doubts about her mental instability—a woman who lived in an imagined country. As a result, the daughter leaves Cuba abruptly, and the period that follows is one of intense exhaustion, but not of defeat, as she makes “plans for another trip to Cuba. It would be an official one, and I would try to look up my birth certificate” (220).

Teresa’s story is interspersed with well-known photographs of Che Guevara, taken from the public domain. Most notable are Alberto Korda’s iconic photograph known worldwide and Che’s image circulated in newspapers upon his death. These visual texts complement the written one. They constitute a repository of history and memory, and serve as a road map to decode the past. Like all maps, it tends to be simplified and leaves room for recording new geographies—in this case, those of the daughter. These photographs at once enrich and impoverish reality. Teresa’s written text betrays her emotional state of mind; it is unreliable. It is balanced by these concrete artifacts (the photographs), objective evidence of the past, but even the combination of the two does not provide the complete story. These snapshots have to be supplemented, and the daughter does that by filling in the gaps between them with desire and imagination. A process of doubling begins to take place, as the daughter develops a fascination—as her mother had—with the public figure of the revolutionary hero. The Guevara photos sent by the mother are public ones—thus failing to objectively document any private relationship with the mother—but they initiate a dialogue between the daughter and the historical circumstances that caused her expulsion from the maternal (biological and cultural) matrix. Robert L. Sims posits that this novel “brings into conflict two concepts of history” and emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between “official history” (about leaders and national events) and “felt history” (as they are registered by individuals who feel the pressure of these events). And he further clarifies: “Nostalgia aligns itself much more closely with felt history in that both are transemotive, transhistorical and temporal” (2010, 104). The daughter (and the author herself in comments about her personal travels to Havana) is experiencing the iconic transformation of the hero through time and myth. Guevara (simplified as “Che” for popular consumption) has become a pliable commodity in Cuban hotels and tourist souvenir shops, as well as an ideological abstraction in many parts of the world. Che is no longer Cuban property. The daughter becomes fascinated with this multifaceted image and feels haunted by it, but this is not the result of her becoming more Cuban, since the attraction of the myth and lore that surrounds the enigmatic figure transcends the local.

Critic Isabel Alvarez Borland has studied the role of photographs as a text of memory in heritage writers—those who have received their memories from their parents and have not experienced them first-hand. For them, “the photograph functions as a point in time that, because it is frozen, allows for its appropriation and for a different framing of the experience of inherited exile … use the photograph as a bridge to a past that was not theirs” (Alvarez Borland 2009, 12). By using the present participle “loving,” the title of the novel calls attention to a process that points to the mother calling for the daughter to return, and ultimately the binding of the two. This is an abstract and emotional bond, which is never materialized in a face-to-face meeting of the two characters, but that transforms the daughter nevertheless. Like her mother, the daughter feels haunted by Che’s persona. The third section of the novel—the story of the quest of the young woman and the resulting disenchantment after failing to find her mother— documents the nomadic daughter’s habit of looking for old photographs in bookstores whenever she is away from home. On one occasion, in Manhattan, she seems to find the familiar face (of Che): “When I willed myself to stop examining people’s faces for traces of him, I began to recognize him in the graceful arc of a palm, in a stone face set high on a wall. As I began to see him in unlikelier and unlikelier places, I came to believe that in a secret way he was seeking me out; I began to wonder if the dead, too, had memory” (Menéndez 2003, 221). Again, when traveling in Paris, she enters another bookstore, and inadvertently (as if predestined) she greets the storekeeper in Spanish. He comes back with a packet of photos, including one of Che as a young soldier holding a camera: “And to come upon this photo now, so far from home. Surely I walked with ghosts” (226). Thus, the story of the mother’s imagined love affair with Guevara—her attraction for him—is reproduced in the daughter, but it is not a replica of hers. It cannot be due to lived circumstances of time and space. Each finds herself at either end of a time scale—the mother in the early 1960s in contrast to the daughter at the present time—where the essence of her dream-like story (“loving Che”) is transferred to the next generation, that of the daughter. In this way, through the mythology of Che, she appropriates the past of her lost mother and re-attaches herself to her roots.

The title of Menéndez’s latest work, Adios, Happy Homeland, highlights the complexities of national identity for the ethnic self. Is it a “farewell,” a “hello,” or something in between? The bilingual title (although adios is anglicized, losing the accent required in Spanish) seems to pledge allegiance to two cultures. The author’s return to Cuba, the “homeland,” is an emotional and abstract one where she recalls—therefore reclaims—the cultural heritage of her parents. In terms of substance and style, this is her most experimental work. The frequent reliance on apocryphal writers, the motif of the labyrinth and the dizzying effects of illusion and reality show her debt to the magical realist techniques of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer. This should not mislead the reader. Adios, Happy Homeland is a return to the Cuban cultural tradition: its culture, its lore, its literature. But above all, despite the camouflage used by the writer, there is an emphasis on the efforts to escape the island, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. This will perpetuate an endless cycle of departures followed by longings to return—in the imagination or in reality—for many generations of Cubans. “The others were an illusion. We were only passing through a wilderness of mirrors, startling ourselves on the way back to the beginning” (Menéndez 2011, 260), concludes the closing story of the collection. This route to her roots (her origins) is in fact the one taken by the author herself, thus perpetuating an endless cycle of departures and returns that has distinguished the Cuban nation over time. This collection is the author’s spiritual and intellectual return to Cuba. The title makes a clear reference to the poem “Al partir” (“The Breaking”— included in the collection) by nineteenth-century Romantic poet, Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (“La Avellaneda”). Her poetry, written abroad, anguished about her motherland and always returned to it either in spirit or in person. The collection opens with two epigraphs—one from Jorge Luis Borges (who inspires her literary style), and the other one from José Martí (signaling content and substance), the apostle of Cuban’s independence from Spain, whose literary and political career was spent abroad and who returned to die fighting for Cuba’s independence. In a twist of irony, Cuba’s main airport is named after José Martí—the sites of departures and returns. This serves as a reminder to those returning to Cuba—such as the author— of the quasi-nomadic Cuban condition over the last two centuries, due to exile or migrations.

In this collection, the references to Martí and La Avellaneda point to the recurrent theme of living physically abroad but spiritually on the island. Readers knowledgeable about Cuban history will recognize that although presented under the guise of semi-fictional characters, these stories present a clear blending of fiction and history. References to more recent escapes— during the author’s generation—abound: the young men who hid in the landing gear of airplanes or in cargo containers, the northern fishing village of Cojimar from where many rafters departed, and Elián González, the boy rescued from the sea and later returned to Cuba. From Cuban lore, Menéndez takes Matías Pérez, who in the early days of balloon navigation was lost in the skies. Among allusions to literary figures is a story written by Celestino d’Alba, a character in one of Reinaldo Arenas’s novels. A story by apocryphal writer Nitza Pol-Villa is a clear reference to the famed Cuban chef. Menéndez uses the voice of the Borgesian character, Heberto Quain, in the first story to warn the readers that “though I may not be Cuban, I have learned to speak the language of escape” (11). In effect, she (Menéndez) has learned to be Cuban. She fears the loss of cultural memory. The story, “Journey Back to the Seed (¿Qué Quieres, Vieja?),” by the apocryphal Alex Carpenter, is inspired by Alejo Carpentier’s “Viaje a la semilla” from the surrealist collection, War of Time ([1958] 1970). In her adaptation, the main character—a senile woman in Miami—returns in dreams to the island of her birth and feels she is surrounded by strangers “without a face to recognize, or a memory to soothe her” (156). She has lost her identity: “Nameless now she goes, tearing stars into time’s shroud, cleansed and purified for the journey’s return”(156). Meena Alexander has asserted that “in order to belong you need a past” (2009, 126). And she asks further: “How can I make a durable past in art, a past that is not merely nostalgic, but stands in vibrant relation to the present? … It forces me back in to the present forged through multiple anchorages” (127). Alexander is dealing with the larger question of what it means to be an ethnic writer in America today As much as anything, I am a poet writing in America. But an American poet? What sort? Surely not of the Robert Frost or Wallace Stevens variety. An Asian-American poet then? Clearly that sounds better. But poet tout court. Just poet. Will it fit? Not at all. There is very little that I

can be tout court in America. Except perhaps a woman, mother. But even there I wonder. Everything that comes to me is hyphenated: a woman-poet, a womanpoet-of-color, a South-Indian-woman-poet who makes up lines in English, a postcolonial language. (127) In this process of unselving, Alexander is cognizant that her work, like that of many other ethnic writers in the United States today, is part of a historical moment. In her multiple ethnicities as an Asian American, alliances are constantly being made, both within and outside her community: In order to make up my ethnic identity as an Indian American, I learn from Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Chinese Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans, Arab Americans. And these images that slip and slide out of my own mind jostle against a larger, shared truth. And my artwork refracts these lines of sense, these multiple anchorages. … And perhaps this is precisely what writing in America gives me: a rich, vivid sense of space, a welter of experience that cannot be easily held together in a single language. And only though acknowledging this shifting, coruscating present can I create a durable past in art. (128–29) The narratives of Ana Menéndez share with Meena Alexander and many ethnic writers the need to belong, to create a “durable past” in the American literary scene. These new hyphenated Americans have “multiple anchorages.” They inhabit an ambivalent space where they are haunted by the past and maintain connections in their ancestral lands as well as in the United States. For Alexander, they are creating their own space (“Writing Space”) where they share the experience of displacement: “A migrant life lived through continents, across waterways and islands creates the space where I write—a space that unfolds memory, making whorl upon whorl of time, mutating palimpsests I have learned to reckon with” (2009, 177). Ethnic autobiographical writing is also explored by William Boelhower who, not unlike Alexander, sees it as fitting a common model. These writers tell a single story, and he elaborates: More precisely, the common language

is the immigrant autobiographic microtext, the single story. Its narrative logic is the logic of the collective experience of the immigrants isomorphically translated into autobiographical code. Certainly, an infinite variety of plots can be derived from its basic fabula—there are as many varieties as there are ethnic groups—and in no way does the macrotext exhaust the individual variants (the microtext) pertaining to it. (Boelhower 1991, 7) Through her stories, Ana Menéndez is carving a Cuban space within American soil, thus repeating—re-enacting—the many immigrant stories that have existed before her. These stories are unique and representative at the same time. They portray the arrival of the immigrants, their travails and their vicissitudes. In doing so, they must recognize two cultural systems that may be at odds with each other, and the eventual transformation or Americanization. The ethnic self gradually dissolves—in a long and arduous process—and blends into the larger American canvas. Her characters carry—or inherit—ethnic roots, which in turn are transplanted into a new soil. For Menéndez, as for many ethnic writers, the younger generations are the stewards of their own ancestry. The return happens at crucial moments in their lives where multiple and conflicting identities contend with each other. The urgency of this return is depicted by another Cuban-American writer, Cristina Garcia, whose novels share similar experiences. Pilar, the young character in Dreaming in Cuban (1992), finds herself at a crossroads, which is resolved in the land of her parents. At the end, Pilar tells us: “I have started dreaming in Spanish, which has never happened before. I wake up feeling different, like something inside me is changing, something chemical and irreversible. There’s a magic here working its way through my veins … I’m afraid to lose all this, to lose Abuela Celia again. But sooner or later I’d have to return to New York. I know now it’s where I belong—not instead of here, but more than here” (235–36). Pilar—like the characters in Ana Menéndez’s works—reaffirms her ethnic identity through the return (real or imagined) to the ancestral homeland.

REFERENCES Alexander, Meena. 1996. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on the Postcolonial Experience. Boston: South End Press.

Alexander, Meena. 2009. Poetics of Dislocation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Alvarez Borland, Isabel. 2009. “The Memories of Others: Ana Menéndez and Alberto Rey.” Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 42 (1): 11–20. Boelhower, William. 1991. “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States.” In American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, edited by Paul John Eakin, 123–141. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Carpentier, Alejo. (1958) 1970. War of Time. Translated by Francis Partridge. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cisneros, Sandra. 1991. The House on Mango Street. New York: Vintage. Clifford, James. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garcia, Cristina. 1992. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine Books. Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hijuelos, Oscar. 1983. Our House in the Last World. New York: Persea. Lefebvre, Henri. (1974) 1991. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Mañach, Jorge. 1928. “Indagación del choteo” (lecture). Revista de Avance. Menéndez, Ana. 2001. In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd. New York: Grove Press. Menéndez, Ana. 2003. Loving Che. New York: Grove Press. Menéndez, Ana. 2009. The Last War. New York: Harper Collins.Publishers. Menéndez, Ana. 2011. Adios, Happy Homeland! New York: Grove.Atlantic. Neruda, Pablo. (1952) 2004. The Captain’s Verses. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. New York: New Directions. Ortiz Cofer, Judith. 1990. Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood. Houston: Arte Público Press. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. 1994. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: University of Texas Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge. Simon, Linda. 1994. Gertrude Stein Remembered. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sims, Robert L. 2010. “Che Guevara, Nostalgia, Photography, Felt History and Narrative Discourse in Ana Menéndez’s Loving Che.” Hipertexto 11: 103–116. Tomlinson, John. 1999. Globalization and Culture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

 

9

“The Inextinguishable Longings for Elsewheres” The Impossibility of Return in Junot Díaz Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez

   

MIGRATION IS THE STORY OF MY BODY I left, I saw, I returned: everything had changed. The story of migration in nine words. This is how these stories are often told. For years I grew up in a household with a mother who often said: next year we return to Mexico. My parents crossed the US/Mexico border a few months before I was born. And after their marriage fell apart, my mother began to talk about returning to Mexicali, on the Mexican side of the California/Baja California border. For us, her children born on the US side of the line, such talk was crazy. Though we frequently traveled to Mexicali to visit family, and my sister and I spent every summer there as children, we never fathomed the idea of moving there permanently: our relationship to Mexico was one based on summer vacation visits. To return return, meaning to return to stay, was not how we imagined it. “Next year we return to Mexico.” This statement became a constant refrain in our household. Mexicali was home for my mother. Unmoored by the divorce and the subsequent cancer of my sister, the idea of returning home must have been compelling for my mother: it was her way of reaching back and seeking anchorage. At the same time, it was part of the

same migrant refrain: the dream of return. But it was not until after all my siblings had moved out of the house and I had graduated and started on my second teaching job, that my mother did return to Mexico. Her return did not take: she lived on the Mexican side of the border for a few months before she started working again in San Diego. She soon began to spend more and more time in California. My mother is the classic transnational, the border girl with one half of her life on the Mexican side of la línea—the border—and the other half on the other side. When she returned to Mexico—returning to what she thought was home—everything had changed. And so she resumed her transnational identity as a bordercrosser. Perhaps the story of migration can also be told this way: I left, I saw, I returned, I left. This is not an uncommon story for those who have left their homes behind—due to exile, or to migration—to then find that their pasts cling to their fingers while trying find a place for themselves in another city, region, or country. This sense of a past that clings to one’s fingers becomes one of the identifying marks of the migrant, the transnational, or the displaced: the figure who has left and has tried to return. In the following essay I examine this figure of the displaced individual in the narrative of Junot Díaz. In exploring the question of diasporic identity in Junot Díaz’s “Yunior” trilogy —Drown (1996), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), and This Is How You Lose Her (2012)1—my aim is to arrive at the cultural consequences of migration through its forms of departure and of arrival. My argument will be that while departure is a concern in Yunior’s stories, return, or a definitive return, is not, for departures in his stories often imply an uneasy return. And this is so because the arrival, also implied in departure, is an uneasy one. To do this, what I investigate here is the enabling condition of storytelling in Junot Díaz’s narratives to see how it creates a space—a ground—upon which to understand the cultural consequences of migration, its forms of departure, and its forms of return. I argue that Yunior, through storytelling, uses narrative as a form of entreatment to an other, the reader. I also argue that this use of storytelling functions as a type of what Chicano cultural theorist José David Saldívar calls “pensamiento fronterizo” or

“border thinking,” a practice that emerges from the “critical Reflections of (undocumented) immigrants, migrants, bracero/a workers, refugees, campesinos, women and children on the major structures of dominance and subordination of our times” (2012, 1). That is, this type of border thinking works to expose and undermine the “coloniality of power” that structures hegemonic control upon different communities. As Saldívar argues, “the coloniality of power can help us trace the continuous forms of hegemonic dominance produced by colonial cultures and structures” (2). Storytelling as border thinking can lay bare the discourses which impose hegemonic control and open a space for critical awareness and understanding.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT JUNOT DÍAZ One our most lauded Latino/a authors, Junot Díaz has won a number of prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for his novel The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and, in 2012, a Macarthur Award, the so-called “Genius” Award. Given that he is the author of two collections of short stories, Drown, and This Is How You Lose Her, as well as the aforementioned novel, his literary accolades are astonishing. Much has been written on his work, in particular on the themes of identity, masculinity, migration, and the traumatic history of the Dominican Republic under the Trujillato, the dictatorship of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo Molina. As Yunior, the protagonist of the novel, notes in one of the plentiful footnotes in The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Trujillo was “our Sauron, our Arawn, our Darkside, our Once and Future Dictator, a personaje so outlandish, so perverse, so dreadful that not even a sci-fi writer could have made his ass up” (Díaz 2007, 2). This description is telling, for, as readers of this story of Dominican diaspora, we are reminded again of the matrix of influences that structure the novel: the genres of sci-fi, fantasy, and comic books. His most recent book was published in September 2012, and in the following months, numerous interviews with Díaz were published in newspapers, journals, online, and aired on the radio. I had many friends, colleagues, and students telling me about hearing him on the radio talking about This Is How You Lose Her. The most common reaction from these

listeners was one of transfixion. They have remained stopped on the street with their headphones on, parked in their driveways with their heads bowed towards the radio, standing at the kitchen counter with a cup of coffee in their hands, listening to Junot talk about his new book, about his influences, about the search for love, about race and class. In other words: the things that we talk about when we talk about Junot Díaz. Because this is what we talk about when we talk about Junot Díaz, all those things that make him one of the finest of our Latino storytellers, whether that story is about a tired immigrant hospital worker training other new immigrants in the job while also helping her lover find a house or a pool table installer who wanders the homes of the rich and often takes and/or leaves a little surprise; or whether it is about his primary narrator, Yunior, recollecting a fiesta in his youth and how he carried a family secret that bears on him so much that he vomits every time he has to ride in his father’s car. Narrating the story of Oscar, a grossly overweight Dominican nerd who fails at love, Yunior as an adult is faced with a lifetime of cheating and the destruction that this has caused. Stories that effortlessly blend tragedy and humor and always lay bare the scars that run through family, departures, and migration. And in their telling, there is a form of confession, an attempt at a connection, a lifeline that is sought for someone who is lost. There is also a return to the past, for the past is important in understanding the present.

CONTAR CUENTOS Storytelling acts as a form of entreatment, a petition to another, a binding through story of one to another. Storytelling in US Latino/a literature, and our own process of reading that story, serves to impose itself over the fixed, that which is said about this community: that is, the act of telling (and our reading) overcomes the narrative that would be imposed upon this community as one that does not belong. In Díaz’s narratives, storytelling is presented in a number of ways: in the first-person accounts of Yunior where he makes asides to an unnamed reader/listener, a narrative voice which is used in the three books; in the footnotes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; and in the use of the second-person narrative voice, employed in a couple of sections of Oscar

Wao and in the stories “Nilda,” “Miss Lora,” and “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” in This is How You Lose Her. Dalia Kandiyoti states that “displaced subjects carry with them the narratives of their originary places, stories of eviction from place often constitute the core of their cultural and literary identities” (2009, 4). In these Reflections on migration, on forms of departure and of return, I focus on the characters of Yunior’s father, Ramón de las Casas, his friend, Oscar de León, aka Oscar Wao, and on Yunior as narrator to show how each represents a different position of diaspora, and story.2 Though the texts that I examine are “Negocios” from Drown, the novel, and “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars” from This is How You Lose Her, I will also mention other stories to discuss this question of return that is less a return than a constant crossing and recrossing.

HOW TO CREATE A MIGRANT, TOURIST, UNDOCUMENTED ALIEN, OR TRANSNATIONAL The assassination of Trujillo in May 1961 brought about a period of rapid change for the Dominican Republic, including a mass migration out of the country. As Ernesto Sagás and Sintia Molina point out, the migration that began after the end of the Trujillato has led to hundreds of thousands of Dominicans living outside of the Dominican Republic. It is, as they note, “a massive migration of diasporic proportions” (2004, 1). The flow of people away from the island also constructs a Dominican identity that is connected to a larger transnational, globalizing flow, in the process making a community that is at ease with border crossing. As Sagás and Molina point out: “For Dominicans to cross borders is to find a solution to their own social, political, and cultural reality” (8). But what is the cost of migration? The cost of crossing borders? Or, more specifically, what are the cultural consequences of migration? The South African poet Breyten Breytenbach has spoken of a space that he calls the “Middle World,” a world between the first and the third, a liminal space conditioned by migration and wandering. Breytenbach’s model of the Middle World is helpful for understanding the consequences of mass movements across borders. For him the Middle World is a world between nations and populated by migrants. Its citizens—“uncitizens” as he calls

them—are in constant migration. He further emphasizes that though the Middle World is everywhere, “belonging and not belonging,” it is not “of the Center … since it is by definition and vocation peripheral; it is other, living in the margins, the live edges” (Breytenbach 2001, 14).3 Crossing a border is always a crossing, if only briefly, into the Middle World. But sometimes, in the case of migrants who are forced to leave their countries—because of exile, because of economic conditions—the passage through the Middle World can be longer, as they adjust to the new social realities. In some cases, as will be argued here, there is no adjustment, no acculturation, and no nostalgia for the home left behind but rather a permanent state of suspension. Ramón, Oscar, and Yunior, like many of the other characters in Díaz’s narratives, have passed through the Middle World and been transformed in the process. Theirs is a transnational existence, living in one world while being connected to another, that becomes, as Janira Bonilla states, one where “‘home’ is no longer a fixed geographical point but multiple spaces that take root in a transnational consciousness” (2004, 201). This notion of home being made up of multiple spaces creates an idea of transnationalism that is, as Torres-Saillant and Hernández have defined it, “a cultural state of mind that permits [Dominicans] to remain actively linked to life in the native land while becoming acclimated to the values and norms of the receiving society” (1998, 156). This cultural state of mind, of being inbetween, is represented through the use of a fragmentary narrative in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and in the informal use of language in Diaz’s narrative, one that shifts registers from English through Spanish through urban slang. And it is here in the use of language that Diaz’s style shines; for, as Kumar reminds us, it is in language that “all immigrants are defined and in which we all struggle for an identity” (2000, 17).

DIASPORA AS QUEST: RAMÓN Yunior’s life story is never told chronologically, or completely; there are gaps, absences, ellipses. Some of the gaps are filled in over the course of the three books, some events—the death of Rafa, Yunior’s older brother— are repeated over and over, traumatic echoes that shape the life of this narrator. The story of his parents, Ramón and Virta, is built up in this way,

though often their life stories are told separately: Virta’s is the focus in the stories “Aguantando” (Drown) and “Invierno” (This is How You Lose Her); Ramón is the focus in “Negocios” (Drown) and “Otravida, Otravez” (This is How You Lose Her). What is interesting in the case of Ramón is the ways in which each story, while focusing on the hardships of his first years as an economic migrant in the United States, changes in its retelling; as if in the return to the story of arrival the point is being made that the past is uncertain. “My father, Ramón de las Casas, left Santo Domingo just before my fourth birthday” (Díaz 1996, 163). This is how Yunior begins the narration of his father’s departure in the story “Negocios.” The story is told simply, with little of Yunior’s profane, urban slang narrative voice. It begins with the simple declarative sentence quoted above, and then follows a fairly linear narrative line that moves from Ramón’s departure from Santo Domingo to years later after he has left not just his family but the other family that he started in New Jersey. What we read in the first section— Ramón’s plans to leave—is how much a hustler he is: moving from place to place as he tries to gain back the trust of his wife, Virta, who has caught him cheating with another woman in another neighborhood; and also hustling to get the hoped-for money from his father-in-law so that he can leave the island. When the money arrives, Ramón leaves the island and flies to Miami. This next section, covering the period of his arrival in Miami as an economic migrant up to his subsequent arrival in New Jersey, can be read as his trip through the Middle World, with its systems of control that impose stratification and hierarchy.4 While New York calls to him, as it has called to other Caribbean communities, he stops in Miami, as it is a cheaper flight to the United States. Once he makes it through the airport terminal, he steps out to get his first glimpse of North America. “A vast stretch of cars, distant palms and a highway that reminded him of Máximo Gómez. The air was not as hot as home and the city was well lit but he didn’t feel as if he had crossed an ocean and a world” (167). It is telling that Yunior describes it as crossing a world. This notion of world crossing is a common trope in Díaz’s narrative and goes far in explaining the feeling of displacement caused by migration and diaspora.

By touching upon the familiar—the highway that reminds Ramón of one on the island—we see that he still has contact with home. This is another characteristic of diaspora fiction: the tie with the place left behind. As Kandiyoti points out, “diaspora stories are about the possibilities and impossibilities of being in place” (2009, 25). The anchor to the place left behind illustrates this impossibility. The journey through the Middle World is one of transformation. In traveling through the airport, into the taxicab, and to the cheap hotel— places where the predominant act is that of passing through—Ramón is slowly being transformed from the Dominican islander into the diasporic, transnational Dominican. While the story does not state it, the sense of elsewhere is added to Ramón’s identity. As the story progresses, we are offered an all-too familiar tale of an economic migrant struggling to gain a foothold in a new country: from working too many jobs to precarious living situations to trying to gain a green card through marriage. In each of these situations he faces obstacles, in particular the last one, as he does not make enough money and what little he has he gives to an intermediary who promises to help him get a green card marriage. This middleman ends up never contacting Ramón and disappears with his money. With this setback, Ramón writes down his story and leaves it as a cautionary tale for the next undocumented migrant. This writing of the story is important, for here we have another example of how storytelling runs through Díaz’s narrative: his characters are also all storytellers. Things start to look up for Ramón after he meets a fellow Dominicana who has legal residency: Nilda. After a short courtship, they marry and his legal status improves and he is able to find a better-paying job. Ramón’s trip through the Middle World continues from his arrival in Miami through his arrival in New York and ends after he meets Nilda. Up until then, the narrative follows a traditional quest structure, as Ramón is able to overcome every obstacle and hardship he faces, and he moves forward. In many ways, this particular story of migration is itself a quest tale. The narrative impulse begins with Ramón’s crossing a threshold, leaving Santo Domingo for the United States, and continues with a series of obstacles that he must overcome: earning money, improving his English, making it to New York, and gaining citizenship. The step after citizenship

would be arrival or acculturation into the receiving country, but, as we learn, arrival becomes the most difficult of tasks. With Nilda, Ramón begins to construct a new life, but he is still reminded of his first family in Santo Domingo: “With the hum of his new life Papi should have found it easy to bury the memory of us but neither his conscience, nor the letter from home that found him wherever he went, would allow it. Mami’s letters, as regular as the months themselves, were corrosive slaps in the face” (191). The story, following a quest narrative, shifts to a circular one: Ramón looks forward, but he is reminded of his past. In fact, at this point, Díaz mirrors the beginning of the story: Ramón out of the house, living with another woman. But instead of Ramón returning to Virta and his children, he continues building a life with Nilda. They have a child, the “third Ramón,” but their marriage does not improve. Ramón, with the aid of one of his friends, begins to plot his escape: slowly he begins to move his clothes and stuff out of the house and prepare a new home for his first family in the neighborhood of London Terrace. In this way, the symmetry with the beginning of the story continues, with Ramón moving his clothes from one house to another. In the final section, Yunior, now an adult, goes to visit Nilda. They have café con leche and they talk about Ramón’s leaving; how he got up one morning, had coffee, and then walked out. Yunior imagines how he would have taken a subway to the airport that would fly him back to his family. But, as we know, Ramón’s return is temporary, as he eventually abandons his family again and remains, then, an absence in Yunior’s family history. With this ending—Yunior as an adult going to visit Nilda—we as readers are denied the intervening years. At the same time, some of those intervening years have already been filled in by other stories in Drown and later in This Is How You Lose Her. This plays into one of the facets of Díaz as a writer: his method of constructing narrative out of fragments that are strewn like clues throughout the three books, and it is our task as readers to put them back together.5 Ramón as a diasporic Dominican disappears from the story and becomes what he was in Yunior’s childhood: an absence. In the search for the father, we can read a search for understanding: an understanding of cheating, an understanding of loss, and above all, an understanding of diaspora. Ramón

does not return, but in his absence he does not leave either, and he becomes an echo in Yunior’s life stories. With Ramón’s departure and return and departure, we see not just a diasporic identity where arrival is not a possibility, but also one where diaspora is aguante, a bearing, a withstanding of all the things that can weigh upon a migrant, a bordercrosser, a transnational who has left but has not arrived.

DIASPORA AS CURSE: OSCAR WAO The echo of a lost figure is also present in Díaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. That character is Oscar de León. If Ramón represents the economic migrant, Oscar is representative of the consequences of diaspora, of migration. Born in the United States to a Dominican mother who is forced to flee the island because her life is in danger, Oscar and his older sister, Lola, are products of the diaspora brought about by the fall of Trujillo. The novel shifts in narrative voice and perspective. The binding story is a telling of the brief life of Oscar de León and his failure at finding love. Interspersed with this narrative are: second-person Reflections by Lola de León on her fraught relationship with her mother; and the story of Oscar and Lola’s mother, Hypatía Belicia Cabral, her failures at love, and the traumatic history of her family, which eventually forces her to leave the island. There are also numerous footnotes discussing Dominican history under the rule of Trujillo, and the entire novel is rife with references to scifi, fantasy, Caribbean folklore, and comic book culture. The end result is a novel that is enclosed by twentieth-century Dominican history, localized in the history of one family, the de Leóns, unbound by the effects of diaspora through one character in particular—Oscar Wao—and contained or held together by one narrator, Yunior, who does not identify himself until more than a hundred pages into the book, and who at times appears to refer to other potential narrators, other “Watchers.” The novel begins, not with the story of Oscar, but with the narrator, a “Watcher,” writing about a curse that has afflicted the New World and the Caribbean: fukú, a form of doom that some say came to the Caribbean with the slave ships and the arrival of Columbus. This preliminary chapter serves to establish one of the overall themes of the novel: a curse or form of doom

that emanates from the Caribbean and whose ground zero is the Dominican Republic. The way to overcome the curse is by issuing a counter spell, zafa. From there the narrator explains his reason for writing the book: he has a story to tell, a story that he hopes will serve as a counter-spell, his own zafa to fukú. That story is the story of Oscar Wao.6 Though the narrator offers to tell the story of the brief, wondrous life of his friend Oscar, the fact that he begins with Columbus is telling: this is a book about a curse that affects a family, but it is also a curse that has affected a nation and a region for more than five hundred years. The curse then is woven into the fabric of the novel, affecting not just the history of the Caribbean, but also the recent history of the Dominican Republic; there are numerous footnotes that fill in the historical context. There is also the way in which the curse afflicts the personal histories of the Cabral family: from the downfall of the patriarch, Dr. Abelardo Luis Cabral, a respected member of Dominican society, to the loss of his family and his name. The breakdown of the family begins with the father’s imprisonment and torture by Trujillo’s secret police—he is charged with and arrested for supposedly making a joke about the administration, though as the novel unfolds, his real crime may be in keeping his beautiful daughter out of Trujillo’s hands. At the same time, the narrator offers another theory: Abelardo is imprisoned because he was writing a book detailing the crimes of Trujillo, a book that has never been found. Following the fall of the father comes another series of ruinous events: the loss of his properties; the suicide of his wife soon after giving birth to her third daughter, Hypatía; and the final separation of his daughters, Jackie and Astrid, to different family members’ homes. These two daughters subsequently die, Jackie though suicide by drowning, and Astrid from a stray bullet that struck her while praying in church. In sum, the curse erases that particular line of the Cabral family, leaving only one survivor: Hypatía, who will, after a traumatic childhood, be found by La Inca—her father’s cousin—, who will protect her as much as she can until—after a series of falls—the only surviving daughter of Dr. Abelardo Cabral is forced to flee the island. The curse will then be passed on to her children, Lola and Oscar. Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always going on about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or a fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock. And except for one period early

in his life, dude never had much luck with the females (how very unDominican of him). He was seven then. (Díaz 2007, 11) This is how the story of Oscar de León is presented to us, through an omniscient narrator who speaks in a very informal, urban voice. The novel traces his life, beginning with his one moment in youth when he has luck with women, but then he fails and continues to fail with them. As he grows older, he also grows in size, to the point that by high school he is a large, overweight, introverted nerd. His lack of success with women results in a series of frustrated relationships that drive him deeper into a downward spiral. He is convinced that he is a victim of a curse, but he does not realize the extent until he starts to learn more about his family’s history in the Dominican Republic. His bad luck continues to plague him until a visit to the Dominican Republic helps lift him up. He loses weight, and he falls in love with a woman who does not turn him away: Ybón, an exotic dancer and prostitute. But this, too, is short-lived, as he runs afoul of her boyfriend, a police officer. The brief, wondrous life of Oscar Wao comes to a tragic end when the police beat and kill him out in the canefields. There are a number of Middle World spaces in the novel, including the Dominican neighborhoods in Patterson, New Jersey, where Oscar grows up. The barrio as a marginalized site within a city has a long tradition as a site of representation in writing from the Caribbean diaspora, as Kandiyoti argues in her description of Puerto Rican and African-American writers writing about barrios or ghettoes, “they point to marginalization within cities and make a claim on urban life and literature” (2009, 155). For many immigrants, the city has no history for them outside of certain neighborhoods that keep them enclosed. By claiming a place, the urban Caribbean writers are adding their own stories to the city while also pointing out their own marginalized status. In Díaz, the New Jersey neighborhoods that he describes in his work function in a similar way, but also the characters’ in-betweenness is heightened. Oscar’s trip through the Middle World, however, is not in New Jersey, rather it is in his first return to the Dominican Republic as an adult. He is unprepared for Santo Domingo and all that it has to offer. It is out in the campo, when he is taken out of the city and into the canefields—where he is beaten the first time—that he experiences the disorientation and fear of

displacement. This is his trip through the Middle World, a space not just of crossing but one that can also carry danger. Whereas Ramón returns to the island to retrieve his family, which he will eventually leave, Oscar returns knowing that he will die. After his first trip to the canefields where he is mercilessly punched, kicked, and beaten by the police, he dreams of a mongoose that demands a response from him: “More or less?” (301). At first he considers responding less, but then remembers his family and responds, “More” (301). With this response, Oscar’s fate is sealed. He will recover, but he also knows that he will not back down from his love for Ybón. Due to the insistence of his mother and la Inca, he is sent back to New Jersey, where he recovers and begins to plan his return. When he returns to the island, he is fully aware of what must happen. In that period between his return to the island and his eventual death, Oscar spends his time researching his family history, writing, and trying to get Ybón’s attention. At one point they manage to leave the city together, where Oscar loses his virginity. Yunior finds out about this in a letter that he receives after Oscar has been killed. In the end, Oscar has stood up to his fear, remaining calm when he is taken out again into the cane and going so far as to lecture to his killers on the power of love and how it has made him strong and brave. He has also, in losing his virginity, appeared to return to a heteronormative state, one in which it would be, as Yunior once tells Oscar, “against the laws of nature for a dominicano to die without fucking at least once” (174). At its core, the novel appears to be about an introverted Dominican nerd, Oscar, and his lack of being able to score with women. But this hypermasculinist reading is misleading, as the novel is more than that of a young Dominican male’s journey to heteronormativity: rather, the novel is about trauma and loss brought upon the Caribbean by colonial power and which results in displacement, migration, and diaspora. The novel also attempts— through its elliptical and fragmented structure—to offer a path for moving beyond these colonial power structures that have led the island to be, in the eyes of Yunior, ground zero in the history of diaspora. The island, in the conception of the novel, is doomed because of conquest and colonization— the arrival of Columbus is likened to the arrival of Galactus, the devourer of worlds from The Fantastic Four—,7 and this doom continues to repeat itself, with often tragic consequences.

Though the novel contains many stories, it is Oscar’s that is favored because he is the one who comes to understand and believe in the curse, and with his death—a death that he accepts—he hopes to close the circle and move beyond the coloniality of power. In many ways the book itself is like a poster-covered bulletin board that is slowly being stripped: each removed layer exposing earlier, and deeper, layers, until the board is left clean. There are multiple references in the novel to a blank book that appears in Oscar’s dreams, and later, years after his death, Yunior begins to dream about Oscar holding a blank book. “Dude is holding up a book, waving for me to take a closer look… It takes me a while before I notice that Oscar’s hands are seamless and the book’s pages are blank. And that behind his mask his eyes are smiling” (325). While the blank book—and Oscar’s seamless hands in Yunior’s dream— can be read as a call for a book that needs to be written, it can also be interpreted as a book that, free of a curse that is written into it, is now ready to be filled in again with another story: one that replaces that which has been said—fukú—with a saying—zafa—, its counterstory. The conclusion of Díaz’s vast, hybrid novel suggests how much historical knowledge is involved in Yunior and Oscar’s experiences with the Dominican diaspora and with the island itself as a space of violence and rape. Their own changing relationship, from unwilling roommates to friends, is based on a shared (though hidden in the case of Yunior) love of comic books and sci-fi, but also a deeper connection of displacement that Yunior is never able to fully articulate: theirs is a shared connection with the brutality of rape—brought on by the fukú that opens the novel, the rape of the New World by the Old, and whose traumatic consequences echo throughout history—and the need to decolonize the power that has colonized them and turned them into diasporic subjects. Fukú structures this novel, and in the course of finding a counterspell to this curse, the disclosure of a secret is needed. It is this disclosure that propels the novel forward and, as organized by Yunior, gives the work the feeling of a research investigation, hence the use of footnotes. The secret that appears to be at the core of this novel, where fukú came from, is alluded to in the opening sentence of the book: “They say it came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a

demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles” (1). Rather, I argue, the secret is not where the fukú came from, but rather how it has affected the characters, in particular Yunior. We know through the course of the book that its effect on Oscar is that it has given him terrible luck with women. Yet this, too, is Yunior’s story. And, as I will argue below, his attempt at a zafa for the curse on Oscar’s family is also meant for himself.

DIASPORA AS SUSPENSION: YUNIOR The end of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao appears to offer hope: Díaz ends the novel with Yunior reflecting on a letter that he received from Oscar, where he mentions that he and Ybón had sex: “The beauty, the beauty” (335) the novel ends, echoing in a way the final line of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, “the horror, the horror” (Conrad, [1899] 2010). In reality, though, the hopeful ending is also uncertain. Oscar has been killed. Yunior and Lola’s relationship has ended. And so Yunior keeps Oscar’s writings together, saving them for the day when Lola’s daughter arrives looking for the story of her uncle. And while Yunior claims that he has collected the story of Oscar for her sake, as a way to fill in the pages of the blank book and leave his story for his niece, there is also a sense that Yunior is also trying to come to terms with his own history. In The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, we are presented with a narrator who is a serial cheater and who embodies the total Latino macho player stereotype. This characterization also appears in a few of the stories in Drown, but the character who embodies the negative characterization the most is Yunior’s older brother, Rafa, who, by the time Yunior enters the university, has passed away. In his junior year at Rutgers University, Oscar rooms with Yunior. The two roommates appear to be mismatched: Oscar, the grossly overweight, unlucky-with-women Dominican, and Yunior, the buff, weightlifting, Dominican player. But they are, in many ways, made for each other. Aside from being products of the Dominican diaspora, they grew up in homes without strong father figures, they are both writers and avid readers, and they both have problems with women: Oscar has no luck in getting into a

relationship, while Yunior has many physical relationships but no “true” love. In short, they both seek love, but love eludes them. And yet love, in fact, is what brings them together: the love of Lola. Oscar needs a roommate because no one else wants to be his, and Yunior, in part out of selfishness because he knows he will end up with a terrible number in the residence hall lottery, and in part because he is in love with Lola, agrees to be the roommate. In this part of the novel, after Yunior outs himself as the narrator, we are constantly reminded that he is helping Oscar for Lola: his act is not selfless. And yet, just as he cannot remain faithful to anyone, not even to Lola, who becomes his great love in the novel, he cannot help but want to be friends with Oscar, especially after Oscar’s second fall, when he attempts suicide after yet another relationship has gone sour. That’s all it should have been. Just some fat kid I roomed with my junior year. Nothing more, nothing more. But then Oscar, the dumb-ass, decided to fall in love. And instead of getting him for a year, I got the motherfucker for the rest of my life. (181) After Oscar fails at killing himself, he is destined to room alone in his senior year at the university. It is Yunior, surprising even himself, who steps in to be his roommate again. It is in these small acts that we are offered glimpses of Yunior as more than the hyper macho. Later in the novel, before Oscar returns to the island to die, Yunior mentions how Lola and he are living in separate apartments and how they are not doing that great as a couple. “All my fault, of course. Couldn’t keep my rabo in my pants, even though she was the most beautiful fucking girl in the world” (311). The overwhelming feeling of loss that permeates the final section of the novel—following Oscar’s death—is not simply the grieving over the lost friend, but also over the lost relationship. The book, the blank book in the dreams, must be filled in, but first it must be accepted. Yunior hopes to pass the material that Oscar leaves behind—his “books, his games, his manuscript, his comic books, his papers” (330)—to Lola’s daughter, in the hopes that she’ll “take all we’ve done and all we’ve learned and add her own insights and she’ll put an end to it” (331).

But first, Yunior has to put his version of the story together, which is what he does with his tale of the brief, wondrous life of Oscar Wao. In gathering the material, he recognizes that it might not be the tale that interests Oscar, being that he was more into sci-fi and fantasy. But for Yunior, the story is about the curse of fukú, but it is also about unraveling patterns and secrets of history that in the end he is unable decode: how to keep his rabo in his pants and accept love. This exploration of cheating continues in Díaz’s most recent work, This is How You Lose Her. A collection of short stories published in the fall of 2012, the book consists of nine stories, seven of which had been previously published. The collection continues with Yunior as narrator, with most of the stories focusing on his post-college life, save for “Otravida, Otravez,” which appears to rewrite the history of Ramón, and “Invierno,” which is a story of arrival, the arrival of Yunior, his older brother Rafa, and his mother in New Jersey. The stories, however, all deal with love and cheating, with forms of arrival and departure. The book opens with the story “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” which begins with Yunior making an emotional appeal to his readers, “I’m not a bad guy, I know how that sounds—defensive, unscrupulous—but it’s true. I’m like everybody else: weak, full of mistakes, but basically good” (Díaz 2012, 3). Once he establishes this, he then points out that Magdalena, the ex-girlfriend in this story of a ruined relationship, does not agree, that she would say that he was “a typical Dominican man: a sucio, and an asshole” (3). The story is told from the perspective of the present but reflecting upon the past. This is a fairly common strategy in Díaz’s work: a turn back to the past, not with nostalgia but with a sense of loss. Oscar’s problem is that he can only look forward, and it is this sense of being pushed continually forward that leads him to make the same mistakes in relationships: he speaks without inhibitions. Yunior’s problem is that he is always looking back, and he continues to fail in relationships because he has not learned anything from the past and he can only bear witness to the ruins of the past as they pile up. In “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” Yunior reflects upon another failed relationship: he has been caught cheating, the proof being in a letter that

Magdalena—his “Bergenline original” Cuban girlfriend—receives from the other woman. He manages, he believes, to diffuse the situation, but he knows that the relationship is stalled. In a last-ditch attempt to move it forward, he suggests a vacation in the Dominican Republic, a trip that they had planned and bought when their relationship was fine. If this was another kind of story, I’d tell you about the sea. What it looks like after it’s been forced into the sky through a blowhole. How when I’m driving in from the airport and see it like this, like shredded silver, I know I’m back for real … And I’d tell you about the traffic: the entire history of late-twentieth century automobiles swarming across every flat stretch of ground, a cosmology of battered cars, battered motorcycles, battered trucks, and battered buses, and an unequal number of repair shops, run by any fool with a wrench… I’d tell you about the street where I was born, Calle XXI, how it hasn’t decided yet if it wants to be a slum or not and how it’s been in this state of indecision for years. But that would make it another kind of story, and I’m having enough trouble with this one as it is. You’ll have to take my word for it. (9–10) The story that Yunior wants to tell is one about return to a city of uncertainty, of suspension—a beautiful sky of shredded silver, traffic that is battered but running, a neighborhood that is in-between—and at the same time the story that he will tell is not about a city of the in-between but about a relationship that has passed into the in-between, a relationship in suspension, a relationship battered but running. During their trip, Magdalena refuses to continue to visit the places familiar to Yunior: they end up going to a resort, Casa de Campo. As Yunior tells it, it is “The Resort That Shame Forgot … Chill here too long and you’ll be sure to have your ghetto pass revoked, no questions asked” (13– 14). At this point, the return to the island, with its promise of reconciliation and renewal, shifts because now the playing field has been moved. Whereas before Yunior could hope that he would have the support of the familiar— his family, the places where he is most comfortable, the city he knows—, by ending up in an exclusive resort he is in an in-between space where the gulf between the social classes becomes a chasm. In going to the resort, the gulf between Yunior and Magdalena also widens, where all he can do is

watch her gain the attention of the local males, who ignore the presence of the immigrant boyfriend. While Magdalena is well received by the island, Yunior is left marginalized and displaced. Lost in place, he meets two men in the hotel bar, one of whom claims to be Vice-President and the other, his bodyguard, Bárbaro. The two lend a sympathetic ear to Yunior’s plight. One night when Magda insists on going out alone, Yunior heads to the bar, where he sees the two males. The Vice-President offers to show him a sight: the birthplace of the nation. Following the two men outside, Yunior sees a woman he had briefly spoken with a few nights earlier. She is Lucy, an immigrant like himself: “She’s alone at the edge of the bar in a fly black dress” (22). He considers staying, but heads out instead into the night. Soon the three are out of Casa de Campo and La Romana and are in the canefields. “Everything starts smelling of processed cane. The roads are dark—I’m talking no fucking lights—and in our beams the bugs swarm like a biblical plague” (22–23). Driving deeper into the canefields and into the darkness, the Vice-President talks about how he wanted to be an engineer, build schools, and help the pueblo, while Yunior can only think about Magda and how he will “probably never taste her chocha again” (23). They park out in the cane and walk through the bush, being eaten by mosquitoes while the bodyguard lights their way with a flashlight. Yunior then notices that Bárbaro is carrying a machine gun. Yunior tries to make conversation to ease the disquiet, when the VicePresident calls out that they have arrived: he is standing over a hole in the earth. He announces that it is the Cave of the Jagua, the mythical birthplace of the Taínos. When Yunior expresses doubt, by saying “I thought they were South American” (24), the response is short, “We’re speaking mythically here” (24). After being asked if he wants to see inside, he is given the flashlight and the two men grab Yunior by the ankles and lower him into the hole: This is the perfect place for insight, for a person to become somebody better. The Vice-President probably saw his future self hanging in this darkness, bulldozing the poor out of their shanties, and Bárbaro, too— buying a concrete house for his mother, showing her how to work the

air conditioner—but, me, all I can manage is a memory of the first time me and Magda talked. Back at Rutgers. We were waiting for the E bus together on George Street and she was wearing purple. All sorts of purple. And that’s how I know it’s over. As soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end. (24) Yunior starts to cry with this vision. Soon after, the relationship ends and Magda becomes another relationship lost in his history as a cheater. Diaspora, as Kandiyoti (2009) points out, is bound by place. It is also shaped by history and memory. In being inserted headfirst into the earth, Yunior is suspended in place and time. The displacement that he feels in the resort is further magnified in his suspension, staring into the darkness and remembering the beginnings of his relationship with Magda. At the same time, the metaphorical insertion of Yunior into a hole in the earth can also be read as a penetration: Yunior penetrates the island and is rewarded with a vision of Magda at the beginning, when their relationship was a wealth of possibilities and not a sad ending because he was “unable to keep his rabo in his pants.” In his piercing of the earth, he is literally inserted into a wound where he is confronted, once again, with the past. At the end of the story, Yunior is, once again, lost in place, suspended in Diaspora.

THE YOUNG AND THE PLACELESS Through Yunior’s telling, Ramón and Oscar are both lost in place, as is the narrator himself. As he tells their stories, he performs their instability, for this act of storytelling is an act of reaching out to another in a play for stability. Yunior, in stories like “Negocios,” “The Sun, the Moon, the Stars,” “The Cheater’s Guide to Love,” and to a great extent in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, reclaims his life by telling it, purging his personal trauma and repossessing himself in the process. As Oscar bears witness to the curse of fukú, Yunior does, too: he bears witness to trauma of a past that has disconnected him. And though that past is at times mythical— suspended in the cave of the Jagua, the fukú that arrives with Columbus— and shaped by nostalgia, memory, and loss, when he returns to the island, he is bound by it.

Return, then, becomes almost an impossibility. Ramón’s return is brief, he returns to the family and soon after leaves again. Oscar Wao returns, but he returns to fulfill the curse that he knows he bears. Yunior’s return is that of the transnational migrant: one of constant departures and returns.

FORMS OF DEPARTURE, FORMS OF RETURN Yunior uses narrative storytelling as a form of binding to an other, the reader, which then creates the armature of the story he tells: that is, his story constructs an intersubjective relationship between narrator and reader. In this way we, as readers, are bound to the story and its particular narrative of departure and return. Through telling his story, Yunior confesses his placelessness and asks us to understand the trauma that he himself cannot name:8 the trauma of displacement caused by diaspora; the trauma of a metaphorical rape that lies beneath many of his narratives and is structured within The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao; a trauma that shapes his forms of departure as well as his forms of return. There are many forms of departure, but each is also a form of return. The stories commented on here each map out a space at the heart of which lies the unmentionable exposed by the Middle World: an area where referential codes clash and narratives of nation are put into question. As Díaz’s storytelling reveals, our memories as Latin Americans or Latinos are also memories of migration: of movements and wanderings across different countries. The pasts that he lays bare are memories of elsewhere. Where, then, is our home, when we have homes in different places? Or, as so often is the case in the writing of Díaz, in which the migrant condition is almost sci-fi, a condition of simultaneity, of being in two places at the same time, where can we place ourselves when our places are separated by thousands of miles? As a strategy of border thinking, storytelling in Díaz functions as a necessary tool for articulating the difficult realities of diasporic identity and the question of return. It can also serve as a way to conceive of a diasporic thinking as a critical project for understanding identities where arrival and return are always elsewhere.

NOTES

1. While never having been officially termed a “trilogy,” I am calling it thus because taken in tandem, the three books follow the life of Díaz’s main narrator, Yunior, from childhood through middle age. This is done not in a linear fashion, as the stories from Drown and This is How You Lose Her shift back and forth between stories of childhood and adulthood, while the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao covers Yunior’s college years and, at the end, a part of his adult years as a college professor. 2. Related to the act of storytelling is that of reading. If this were a different essay, I would have focused on reading in Junot Díaz, since one of the characteristics that bind the characters of Yunior, Ramón, and Oscar is that the three are readers: Ramón, Yunior’s father, is a fan of westerns and pulp fiction, while Yunior and Oscar lean towards fantasy and sci-fi. 3. For Breytenbach, those who are from there are “defined by what they are not, or no longer, and so much by what they oppose or even reject … To be of the Middle World is to have broken away from the parochial, to have left ‘home’ for good (or for worse) whilst carrying all of it with you, and to have arrived on foreign shores (at the onset you thought of it as ‘destination’, but not for long), feeling at ease there without ever being ‘at home’” (2001, 14). We must recognize, too, that Breytenbach speaks to various levels of middle worldness: from the trauma of exile to the economies of migration to the tragedy of being a refugee to the possibilities of being an expatriate. The Middle World posits a counter-narrative to the flows of power that would attempt to control, to impose limits. 4. Borderlands and contact zones—the Middle World—are often seen as dangerous for the ways that they can undermine hierarchies of control: contact zones tend toward de-stratification, which is why nations often impose systems of control—fences, border guards, gatekeepers— that are aimed at organizing, stratifying, space. The logic of the Middle World, the logic of borderlands, is, to use the language of Deleuze and Guattari, the logic of the rhizome: since it escapes stratification due to its being a system of lines of flight, the rhizome constitutes a multiplicity that is “no longer subordinated to the One, but takes on a consistency of its own” ([1980] 1987, 505). 5. Another facet of his form of storytelling is the return to certain moments and the retelling of those moments, sometimes with major changes. For example, in the story “Otravida, Otravez,” from This Is How You Lose Her, he appears to rewrite the story of Ramón, who is now a worker in a different job than in “Negocios” and is also living with a woman who is not Nilda. While one may think that this is a different moment from Ramón’s life as an economic migrant depicted in “Negocios,” or that this is a different Ramón, there are clues in the story that this is the same absent father; in particular, the wife that he left in Santo Domingo is named Virta and works in a chocolate factory. One way to read the differences between “Negocios” and “Otravida, Otravez” is by recalling that as a writer, Yunior can dictate the shape of the story he wants to tell, changing details and events as he pleases. With this, we are constantly reminded that this is a story, a telling, a fiction. 6. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was originally published as a novella in The New Yorker. In it, the narrator only tells the story of Oscar. The subsequent novel, published seven years later, fleshes out the story with other storylines. 7. The first epigraph of the novel is from The Fantastic Four. “Of what import are brief, nameless lives … to Galactus??” (emphasis in original) 8. As Stanley Cavell notes, “a first person account is, after all, a confession; and the one who has something to confess has something to conceal. And the one who has the word ‘I’ at his or her disposal has the quickest device for concealing himself” (quoted in Newton [1997, 243]).

REFERENCES Bonilla, Janira. 2004. “Transnational Consciousness: Negotiating Identity in the Works of Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz.” In Dominican Migration. Transnational Perspectives, edited by Ernesto Sagas and Sintia E. Molina, 200–229. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Breytenbach, Breyten. 2001. “Notes from the Middle World.” Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Attempt 6: 13–23. Conrad, Joseph. (1899) 2010. Heart of Darkness. New York: Tribeca Books. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Díaz, Junot. 1996. Drown. New York: Riverhead. Díaz, Junot. 2007. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead. Díaz, Junot. 2012. This Is How You Lose Her. New York: Riverhead. Kandiyoti, Dalia. 2009. Migrant Sites. America, Place, and Diaspora Literatures. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press. Kumar, Amitava. 2000. Passport Photos. Berkeley: University of California Press. Newton, Adam Zachary. 1997. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sagás, Ernesto, and Sintia E. Molina. 2004. Dominican Migration. Transnational Perspectives. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. Saldívar, José David. 2012. Trans-Americanity. Subaltern Modernities, Global Coloniality, and the Cultures of Greater Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Torres-Saillant, Silvio, and Ramona Hernández. 1998. The Dominican Americans. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

 

10 Returning to Places of No Return in Stuart Dybek’s Short Stories Tamas Dobozy    

INTRODUCTION: THE OPEN SPACES OF THE CLOSED NEIGHBORHOOD This paper will examine a critically neglected aspect of contemporary ethnic narratives of return: namely, the “return” of second-generation immigrants to ethnic neighborhoods that once served as liminal spaces between the “old country” and the United States, but which have, in the years since, lost this character and become either ethnically undifferentiated or transformed into “other spaces” by the effects of globalization, urban blight, civic policy, and changes to immigration demographics. In undertaking this study, I will examine two short stories by the PolishAmerican writer, Stuart Dybek, which trace the “transformation of innercity urbanism in the 1950s and early 1960s, as the old European immigrant ethnic-dominated neighborhood order begins to break up and migrants from other places—Mexico and the American South, especially—establish a new order” (Rotella 2004, 3). This terrain and these kinds of spaces are crucial to Dybek, whose three collections of stories—Childhood and Other Neighborhoods ([1971] 2003), The Coast of Chicago ([1981] 1990), and I Sailed with Magellan (2003)—deal with South Side Chicago as a locus of Central European (especially Polish), Hispanic, and African-American diasporas. Dybek’s collections frequently meditate on how the liminal space of the South Side enables what critic Thomas Gladsky (1995, 117) calls a

“trans-ethnic” subjectivity, one whose open-endedness (poised, like the South Side itself, between the home country and America) created an openness to ethnic otherness (115), as if the situating of the self in a neither/nor position vis-à-vis ethnic identity positively disposed that same self toward multiple ethnic, racial, and national identifications (even, I will argue, in a utopian sense). The split or multiple subjectivity of Dybek’s characters, in other words, permitted an ethical position toward the openendedness of subjectivity in general, accepting otherness as otherness even within the structure of the self. Along with Gladsky, Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan has written of how “processes of transculturation are treated narratively in [Dybek’s] short stories, exploring societies in which diverse ethnicities and cultures coexist” (2002, 170). Like Gladsky and Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, I contend that interculturation, or “the intercourse between two radically different societies” (Rodríguez GuerreroStrachan 2002, 170) enables an awareness of “the margins and gaps of society, i.e. in non-regulated zones” (170) in which it is in fact immigration that “plays a … decisive role” (170) in creating a kind of subjectivity that is liminal in the best sense—joined to mainstream American culture (even if only as a mythical construct) but also apart from it, operating at a critical distance not only from that culture but from the kind of subjectivity that culture demands: categorical identification of self and other on the one hand, and “the loss of ethnicity in a rapidly changing society” (Gladsky 1992, 256), i.e. becoming an assimilated American, on the other hand. Instead, his characters resist the choice of either side and come to appreciate the advantages of dwelling on the threshold. The South Side during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s—the period Dybek typically writes about—therefore has repercussions for selfhood that in turn has ramifications for community, as if an indeterminacy of ethnic identification (at the same time as ethnicity was an important constituent of day-to-day life) helped bridge ethnic differences, and thus sustained community. Put another way, being simultaneously same (ethnic) and other (not-ethnic) made his characters capable of identifying with and crossing ethnic lines. In charting his characters’ return to the South Side, Dybek inverts the return motif, in that these characters are revisiting not an originary place from which the ethnic self has migrated, and, along the way, lost or endangered its ethnic character, but, on the contrary, a scene in which ethnicity was, for a time, a means of both having and transcending

identification, or, in a more peculiar fashion, a means of grasping the diasporic itself, the movement of dispersal that is at once linked to ethnic origins insofar as it has departed from them, but at the same time is already something else, something not quite ethnic. As Gladsky tells us, “Dybek’s protagonists constantly assess themselves within the context of place. Even when they have left childhood and other neighborhoods behind, place remains with them as it does with … those ethnic outsiders who continue to look to their … origins despite their long separation” (1992, 256). Thinking origin and separation simultaneously, Dybek’s characters revisit not a time and place where the self was definitive, but where selfhood was anything but. In this regard, the entire corpus of Dybek’s work can be thought of as a “return” narrative, since so much of his work is openly an investigation of cultural memory. In the story, “Blood Soup,” for instance, an ethnic butcher says, “We don’t sell fresh blood no more … It’s against health regulations” (Dybek [1971] 2003, 30). The stories continually remind us that we are going back to a time and place slowly being eroded by the institutional forces of modernity, whether health board regulations, urban renewal policies issued by civic institutions, or a prison system that systematically preys upon and in the end destroys ethnic enclaves. In thinking through the subjectivity posed by Dybek, I will first delimit the neighborhood that is the “home” his characters “return” to; consider— via the stories “Sauerkraut Soup” ([1971] 2003, 122–138) and “Qué Quieres” (2003, 247–276)—the relationship between the diasporic condition of his first-generation characters and the transnational condition of their second- and third-generation descendants, and how this informs the liminal space the stories “return” to; and finally I will turn to a work by the Italian theorist, Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community ([1990] 1993), to theorize this subjectivity and the utopian implications it bears for readings of Dybek’s work and his treatment of ethnic communities.

DYBEK’S SOUTH SIDE Dybek’s South Side “defies traditional national boundaries.… The multicultural society that surfaces is, in fact, trans-ethnicity in the making” (Gladsky 1994, 134). It is a place, as Gladsky tells us, that is always “in the making,” always becoming, rather than defined, bounded, and stable. Dybek himself describes this place and the tenor it lends his writing as one

poised between competing ethnic concerns (which naturally includes issues of social class): Given the setting of many of my stories and poems: an inner-city, working-class enclave whose population is predominantly Hispanic with a mix of Eastern Europeans and Italians not far removed from immigrant stock, surrounded by the sprawling African-American community on Chicago’s South Side, it would be nearly impossible for me to ignore subjects such as race, ethnicity, assimilation, and class. (Dybek 1999, 249) On the South Side, then, place, ethnicity, and class come together to depict characters “not far removed from immigrant stock,” and whose other defining characteristic is proximity to ethnic “enclaves” of considerable difference. Dybek conflates community with place, suggesting an inseparability between the South Side of his stories and its various, mingled, ethnic populations. It is precisely the disappearance of this kind of ethnic “mix” that characters experience when they return to the old neighborhood, and, with that, experience a sense of dislocation quite similar to that of immigrants who, after a long time in exile, return to find that their country has long since ceased to be the place it once was, the place they carried inside, and that continued to define their relations even in the absence of its actual presence. Dybek’s moments of return characterize an experience in which the apparently organic unity of self and cultural origin is broken, and selfhood emerges as irreducibly social, derived from political and cultural circumstance, and in which culture becomes contextual rather than definitive. However, what Dybek’s characters recall is less the loss of some mythical wholeness of self in which culture, and place, and self were seamlessly fused, but, on the contrary, a time when selfhood was, like the neighborhood, informed by multiple cultures, and within this liminal space, freed from the idea of wholeness as the ultimate end or realization of selfhood: “We [the children of the South Side of Dybek’s time] shared the same religion, though there otherwise was not a lot of assimilation in this so-called melting pot. There were also a lot of kids—so there was this huge tribal sense that transcended ethnic lines” (Kirch 2003, 49). As this quote demonstrates, Dybek’s characters are not yet anonymously American (“not a lot of assimilation”), but also no longer Polish, Czech, Russian, or

Mexican (involved in a tribe that “transcended ethnic lines”). What the characters “mourn” upon their return is the liberty of a selfhood that was linked to and freed from ethnicity, that was universal and singular at once. Dybek’s “return” narratives always feature scenes in which definitive origins are always absent, or at least problematized. What I stress is Dybek’s interest in process and disposition over definitive condition, a way of continually defining and redefining selfhood as both essential and contingent, and whose most important quality is its ability to cope with and enter into multiple realities: “So it seemed that easy to cross the line between different levels of reality. A religious background permits one to realize that there is a collection of realities, and depending on which one you step into you can totally change your perception of the world. In our ordinary walking around states, we’re juggling them all the time” (Shapiro and Shigekuni 1991, 51). While Dybek is talking about the religious character of the South Side (firmly linked to Polish-American religious practices), what he derives from it is less fealty to a particular dogma than a capacity to engage multiple truths. This attitude, this openness to the process of continually negotiating reality, is another legacy of the South Side, in which place is never singular, never definitive, but a series of possibilities. This, I argue, is also the result of the situation of various ethnicities within Dybek’s milieu, and his second-generation protagonists’ maturation in its liminal spaces. Dybek’s representations of the South Side thus offer an important contribution to diaspora studies as defined by Russell King and Anastasia Christou: “historically embedded migrations, dispersing from an original source territory, to a usually wide range of locations” (2011, 456). Because Dybek’s neighborhood is a place of multiple realities, it becomes an emblem of the “range of locations” in the diasporic imaginary. It thus serves to highlight the process of diaspora itself rather than being one particular scene of migration. The South Side, then, is at once a particular part of Chicago at a particular time but, by virtue of its particular ethnic mix, also a conceptual apparatus through which Dybek traces diaspora as movement, as experience. For King and Christou (2011), the diaspora studies approach is differentiated from the “mobilities paradigm” and “the transnational approach” in studies of human migration, dislocation, and national identification by being defined by its distance from home, either physically

or temporally, since the other two approaches more frequently involve travel back and forth between the exilic location and the country of origin (or, in many cases, the preceding country, since in the mobilities paradigm it is less a case of origin and destination than of multiple sites of habitation, and no longer in the exilic sense). The diasporic is defined by three fundamental features … These are, firstly, a “scattering” from an earlier “homeland” territory provoked sometimes by a tragic event (war, famine, ethnic cleansing, etc.), sometimes by other forces (poverty, trade networks, labour recruitment, etc.); secondly, a sense of boundedness which preserves the group’s distinctive ethnic identity in its various exilic locations; and, finally, the strong salience of the homeland, often expressed via a desire for return or for some kind of restoration of the homeland. (King and Christou 2011, 457) These three aspects certainly feature in Dybek’s work. Tragic events in the country of origin are frequently alluded to, as in the desertion of the Russian, Babo, to the British during World War II in “Farwell” (Dybek [1981] 1990, 5); or the escape of Dzia-Dzia from service in the Prussian Army in “Chopin in Winter” (10). There are other stories, such as “Blood Soup,” that hint at political persecution ( [1971] 2003, 43), or the pressures of being migrant labor, as in “Sauerkraut Soup” (128–29). For the most part, Dybek’s work focuses on characters of a central or eastern European background, and their stories of migration are often linked with communist persecution, working-class poverty, war, and material hardship. There are no stories addressing any kind of return to the home country or country of origin, though many of them are marked, at least in the case of firstgeneration immigrants, with a kind of stewardship of cultural practices and rituals, and the passing on of cultural memory. Thus, his work very much takes on the issue of “dispersal,” of distance from ethnic and cultural origins. However, the stories are told not from the perspective of these diasporic subjects, but from that of the succeeding generation, their children and grandchildren, and it is here that his work examines how subjectivity transforms between generations of immigrants, and how the notion of “origin” becomes displaced from the more easily conceptualized home/ exile paradigm that figures in narratives of diaspora, to a paradigm of displacement itself, of always being simultaneously at home and in exile—

or exile as home. The South Side is a place where the originary and the exilic fuse without ever becoming one, somehow occupying the same space without either side predominating. Dybek’s stories are thus—in King and Christou’s (2011) description— engaged in playing the diasporic against the transnational. In stories such as “Sauerkraut Soup,” for instance, the exilic location of Chicago becomes for the second generation a cipher of their parents’ country of origin, defined as it is by imported features such as building styles, social practices, domestic rituals, and even residues of foreign languages. Within Dybek’s neighborhood, we see a dialogue not just between different cultures (Polish-, Mexican-, and African-American), but also between different generations of hyphenated ethnicity. This dialogue features in the early story, “Blood Soup,” where the protagonist notes of his Busha or grandmother: “It was the kind of love he thought must have come from the Old Country—instinctive, unquestioning—like her strength, something foreign that he couldn’t find in himself, that hadn’t even been transmitted to his mother or any of Busha’s other children” ([1971] 2003, 26). As this suggests, the first generation remains irrevocably tied to a cultural reality that is somehow supra-biological, to which the second generation is connected but only through a sense of absence and incomprehension. Busha’s love is a lived reality that cannot be replicated or carried forward, trapped forever in a particular moment in the history of a particular time and place. To some degree—and this is nowhere more true than in Dybek’s stories that deal with meetings between second- and first-generation characters, where the first generation is fleeing political persecution— Dybek’s work betrays what the scholar Marianne Hirsch discusses in her work on “postmemory.” While she is speaking of the Holocaust, she nonetheless admits that this term is useful also for “the second-generation memory of other cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences” (Hirsch 1998, 420). For Hirsch, the term postmemory informs a condition wherein memory continues to hold sway without the direct experience in which it was formed: “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor recreated” (420). Certainly, Busha’s “strength,” her capacity to endure, is beyond anything her second-generation grandson can comprehend and is

the remnant of a story, one of extreme hardship, that directly informs their relationship, and also his sense of himself, and his own story, within the Chicago of his time. Like Hirsch, Gladsky indicates that the mysteries of postmemory, the sense of trauma, are the absent heart of Dybek’s secondgeneration characters’ sense of ethnicity: “[Dybek’s] ‘Poles,’ unable to resist these changes and yet part of them, sense that something has vanished: the old neighborhood, cultural promises, the assurance of heritage. Alienation, exile and anonymity, new passwords for ethnicity, govern [their] lives” (Gladsky 1992, 259). The unknowing posited in relation to Busha becomes an unknowing at the heart of the secondgeneration subject him- or herself. In this sense, trauma continues to inform not just individual characters but the very structuring of subjectivity itself. And like the second-generation characters, Dybek’s neighborhood thus becomes simultaneously tied to and external to ethnic origin, within and without America at the same time. In the transnational approach to studying immigration, King and Christou suggest that “transnational identities are often expressed not from the standpoint of being immigrants, but rather of being ‘transmigrants’ or ‘floaters’ whose simultaneous living in two (or more) worlds subverts the rhetoric, policy and scholarly concentration on integration/assimilation” (2011, 455). This inability to neatly categorize Dybek’s characters into the integration/assimilation model is precisely where his work opens on a subjectivity continually mediating between different cultures, and whose defining characteristic is less the cultures it mediates for than the act of mediation itself.

“SAUERKRAUT SOUP” This act of mediation features in the early story “Sauerkraut Soup” (Dybek [1971] 2003, 122–38). The main character, Frank, develops a stomach ailment that is ultimately cured by the titular meal, which serves as a mysterious restorative insofar as it connects him to a place that is somewhere between the “old country” and America, and whose existence cannot be defined, only experienced: “I’d never had sauerkraut soup before. I’d been thinking of zupa, but of something more medicinal, like chicken rice. ‘Homemade’ sounded good. How could sauerkraut soup be otherwise, I thought. Who would can it?” (137). Frank finds the soup that he is served in an out-of-the-way ethnic restaurant to be indefinable, surprising in its

appearance, but ultimately restorative. It is also outside the standard economy he has come to associate with America—not “canned,” as is the food he now eats, but “homemade,” originating in folkways markedly different from those of the US mainstream. In the South Side of the time period Frank is revisiting here (the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s), the terms “restaurant” and “homemade” are not mutually exclusive but rather suggestive of a link between the private and public that has all but disappeared, and in which the local came most strongly to the fore, manifest in the particularity of an ethnic way of doing things unique to the South Side. The understanding is that America has become more homogenous, dominated by restaurant chains, types of pre-packaged foods, and culinary tastes that stretch undifferentiated across the entire country. Dybek has commented on this difference: “I value that foreignness to such a degree because it’s opposite what I would consider ‘All-American,’ depending on how it’s defined, could almost be a pejorative term, at least in the way that America digests and homogenizes everything and spits it back out into these McDonald’s-like portions” (Nickel and Smith 1997, 92). For Dybek, what is “least interesting” ([1971] 2003, 92) about America is defined by the homogeneity of a mass-produced society, emblematized, appropriately enough, by a McDonald’s franchise. It is precisely this homogenized America that occasions Frank’s contemplation of the possibility of a return to a time and place he knows has disappeared: Sometimes I wonder if that place is still there on the corner of fortyseventh. I like to think it is—hidden away like a hole card. I daydream I could go back. Drive all night, then take the bus to the factory. Open my old locker and my coveralls with steve stitched over the pocket would be hanging on the handle of the push broom. Walk in the grass down Western Boulevard. Sit at the counter sipping soup. (137) For Frank, memory permits a return to a place otherwise inaccessible. It is his “hole card,” a hidden resource that he can draw upon in places and situations far removed temporally and physically from the South Side. It is more than mere nostalgia that underlies this recollection, however, since what is recalled is the wisdom observed through evanescence, the return less to a state of being than a certain understanding of being that remains with Frank up to the day he writes the story:

I was never happier than in the next two years after I’d eaten those bowls of soup. Perhaps I was receiving a year of happiness per bowl. There are certain mystical connections to these things. Only forty cents a bowl. With my paycheck in my pocket, I could have ordered more, maybe enough for years, for a lifetime perhaps, but I thought I’d better stop while I was feeling good. (138) Frank’s lesson is precisely one that goes against trying to sustain a particular state of being, to create a permanent condition of selfhood, one that is buttressed by the cultural experience he partakes in at the restaurant. Instead, it is in observing the duration of that experience, in not seeking to prolong it, that he finds value. In a sense, what he comes to appreciate is the importance of not trying to hang on to, or monumentalize, a particular condition, but to accept evanescence itself as the possible precondition for a more proactive subjectivity. What his return to the South Side offers is an ethical position, one of openness to the possibilities borne out of the historical moment and the particularity of context, and that shifts or changes with necessity. Happiness is linked not to a condition, a set of inalterable circumstances, but to duration and process. This responsiveness to evanescence as the basis of a proactive selfhood likewise informs and in turn emerges from his responsiveness to “otherness.” Frank’s appreciation of difference is spelled out earlier in the story in relation to the mix of ethnicities he encounters at his job with an ice-cream company. But ethnicity is more than just a salient feature at work, for it defines life in the community as a whole: Finally, I regressed to [calling myself] what they’d called me in the neighborhood: Marzek. Nobody used first names there, where every last name could be spit out like an insult. There was no melodrama in a last name. People are starving in this world, Marzek, and you aren’t eating. Famine. War. Madness. What right do you have to suffer? Trying to hold your guts together on the Western Avenue bus riding to work. At your age Casey was taking flak over Germany. (124) Dybek’s choice of language is instructive. Frank “regresses” to his old neighborhood name, “Marzek,” rather than fully adopt his given name, “Franklin,” which he dislikes, possibly because his father christened him

with it because it sounded like “a good business name” (124). Since naming features as a way of connecting future to past, it is clear that the second generation are oriented by their parents toward precisely that business culture that Frank finds relief from in visiting the ethnic diner and eating sauerkraut soup, which cures him of the stomach ailment that upsets him throughout the course of the story. Here, that ailment is evinced by lack of appetite, an inability to properly consume, which in turn causes reflection upon family history, specifically the uncle after whom Frank received his middle name, Anthony (but whose nickname was “Casey,” and who suffered war trauma as a result of bombing missions over Germany in World War II). The story, then, is about sustenance, specifically in the context of ethnic roots. Family names offer continuity with the dead, recall history, and provide ethical context in the present. They also permit personal anonymity, escape from “melodrama,” and a refuge from the bewildering maturation into adulthood and the mythical nation beyond the South Side. Once again, then, the neighborhood provides an escape from definitive selfhood, at the same time as it provides definite connection, context, and history, which are in turn constitutive of self. (Note in the earlier quote that the name on Frank’s coveralls, “Steve,” implicates the workplace in a different kind of anonymity, one that, rather than being a shelter, rather than allowing for escape, threatens Frank with an enforced but false identity, an alien “place” made definitive, or absorption into the faceless workers of America, which is perhaps the greatest threat facing his immigrant forebears.) This notion of names as a kind of constantly shifting ground that provides both security and escape is carried on throughout the story when Frank discusses his interest in Dostoevsky: “Anyone who spells his name in so many different ways has got to be great,” one of his friends, Harry, tells him (126). What gradually emerges from this recollection, then, is not so much the importance of names and naming, but, on the contrary, the importance of being able to continually rename oneself, to be able to adopt multiple positions vis-à-vis identity, and to dwell in the kind of community that authorizes and sustains this practice. The story, then, is about ethnicity without specific ethnic identification, and this is key to the lessons Frank takes from his neighborhood: “I could never exactly identify where in Eastern Europe any of them were from” (128). He knows that his coworkers in the ice cream factory are indeed from somewhere in Eastern

Europe, but the lack of an exact origin means that their identities remain an open question. That this predisposition of openness is ultimately linked to authorship, to the vocation of writer, is of further importance, since this is presumably what Frank becomes. Like Dybek, he understands the power that is grasped when one takes control of the means of language rather than language controlling the subject (as in the case of the “Steve” coveralls). In this sense, then, returning to the old neighborhood is simultaneously a departure, since within that return lies the power of narration, accounting for the time gone by, an instrument that is simultaneously return and escape, enclosure and reconfiguration, a movement that brings together oppositions, that couches one inside the other, and in which the old neighborhood continues to serve as a resource in the present. In this sense I disagree with Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, who argues that Frank is “unable to articulate an intelligible and coherent language” (Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 2002, 174). On the contrary, as Frank tells us, it is his father who cannot articulate “the way time was surrendered” (Dybek [1971] 2003, 131) both to the workplace but also to history, whereas it is Frank who ultimately reclaims time by mastering the language required to write this story. Like many of Dybek’s works, this one ends on a note of ecstasy, though in this case it is more muted than the almost orgasmic physicality of stories such as “Song” (Dybek, 2003, 3–24) or “Qué Quieres” (247–76). Dybek has suggested that the “ecstatic moment” is frequently what his characters are looking for in the midst of the changes that have occurred on the South Side, and that the key to obtaining this moment is imaginative engagement that creates a “portal into other realms” or the multiple realities invoked by his work (Seaman 2005, 217). Thus, what Dybek’s second-generation characters experience in the midst of their return to the old neighborhood is an ecstatic joy as a result of a reawakened sense of what that old neighborhood made possible: “Dybek’s characters, like his Chicago stories, are syncretic—older orders in contraction make room for new material gathered by his characters from the layered social landscape in which they move. The play of persistence and succession opens the way to ecstatic experience, the search for which forms one of Dybek’s principal literary purposes” (Rotella 2004, 8). As Carlo Rotella demonstrates—in examining yet another of Dybek’s “return” narratives, namely the story, “Blight” (Dybek [1981] 1990, 42–71)—the South Side is a place “charged with possibility” (Rotella 2004, 9). As in “Sauerkraut Soup,” this “possibility”

exists in the experience of a process, not a certifiable content. This is to say that like Frank, Dave (the narrator of “Blight”) becomes a kind of “authorfigure” (10), whose ecstasy arises from being able to inhabit two positions at once, “the fall of the old neighborhood and the rise of new cultural possibilities” (10). Being neither ethnic nor not-ethnic, or, to presage my discussion of Agamben, being able to “not not-be” ethnic, in the midst of a selfhood constantly emerging from the ethnic without as yet departing from it, Dybek’s characters grasp a kind of being that is ecstatic: not confined to an either/ or position, liberated from subject positions, an experience of unbounded release. What is glimpsed is the co-existence of multiple even mutually exclusive realities.

“QUÉ QUIERES” Perhaps the most overt example of a “return” narrative that brings together mutually exclusive realities in Dybek is the story, “Qué Quieres,” from the sequence, I Sailed With Magellan (2003, 247–276). This features the return of the protagonist’s brother, Mick, to the South Side neighborhood where he grew up, only to find its old character absolutely altered. Stopping “before the old apartment on Washtenaw” (247) he finds, instead of the old firstand second-generation central Europeans of his childhood, “five chicos— teenagers wearing gang colors” (247). The neighborhood has been transformed into hostile territory, ruled by Hispanic gangs who no longer recognize him as a local. The story, however, is told at a double remove, from the first-person point of view of the protagonist of the sequence as a whole, Perry, who recalls his brother’s visit to the old tenement, which is itself intercut with extended flashbacks dealing with family history on the South Side. Thus, memory becomes multivalent, folded on itself, to the point where we witness a kind of double return: Perry returning to Mick, who returns to Chicago and the past. The effect of this is a meditation on the motif of return itself, specifically the distance between what remains and what has been lost. Mick becomes the figure, for Perry, who embodies the rewards and considerable dangers of attempting to reclaim the past as it was, because to do so, as Mick discovers, is to turn the present into a place of threat, represented by the “five chicos” sitting on the steps of the tenement who continually interrupt Mick’s nostalgia with the question, “Qué tú quieres?—What do you want?” (247). Once again we are reminded

that there is no intrinsic link between setting and community; this relationship is always mediated by desire. The chicos’ question becomes more and more persistent, asked with an increasing threat of violence, and the story ends with Mick literally fleeing from the gang along Twenty-Fifth Street to the strains of music and the visual imagery of spray-painted murals. The question of individual desire vis-à-vis place, as the italicized “you” indicates, is expressed in an ethnic context. The “you” spoken in the opening paragraphs by the first chico emphasizes that Mick is now an outsider to the neighborhood, an ethnic other, an alien. Dybek’s point is that ethnicity, belonging, and place become contingent, and Mick comes to understand that the relation of selfhood to community, and of community in turn to place, is aestheticized, the product of arrangement and accommodation that, like music, exists only in process itself, the movement in and because of time that both accomplishes and deletes it. As the end of the story tells us, Mick’s flight from the chicos corresponds to a wish not so much for transformation—that is, to be something else—as it is for the speed and state of transformation itself, without origin, without end. This is indicated in a statement made by Mirza, one of Mick’s girlfriends: “I don’t know what he’s looking for or running from” (266). The return story of “Qué Quieres,” then, ultimately becomes less about capturing a lost reality or definitive condition, much less gaining a new one, than about a demonstration of a certain kind of subjectivity, similar to that of “Sauerkraut Soup,” where ecstasy arrives in the form of flight, motion itself, dwelling in a process without either origin or end, and that its realization is itself a kind of transcendence. It is no accident that the ending of the story dwells on music, painting, and writing, since, as in “Sauerkraut Soup,” the idea of subjectivity as motion, and motion as ecstasy, becomes resolved in the aesthetic, where the experience of return that occupies Mick becomes the experience of the story. Writing about another of Dybek’s short stories, “Hot Ice” (itself a story that dwells on immigration and a desire for “return” to the ethnic neighborhood) (Dybek [1981] 1990, 123–164), Debra Spark illuminates an aspect of Dybek’s writing that is apropos for “Qué Quieres” as well: “‘Hot Ice’ is ultimately a tribute to imagination itself. I find the story—on a line by line level and taken as a whole—completely surprising. Not in the ‘Oh

ho! I never knew that would happen’ way, but because I never know where the story, or, indeed, any given sentence, is going. The terms of ‘Hot Ice’ are constantly being revealed and then rerevealed to me” (Spark 2005, 110). The last of these points is especially significant since it suggests that the reading of the story is one of constant transition, in which loss of origin and destination are continually re-experienced. In effect, the reader is placed into that liminal state occupied by so many of Dybek’s second-generation characters, who are never quite connected to cultural origins, nor never so far away from them as to be assimilated into the host culture. They are suspended between, like the feet of a runner who has left one foot without landing on another. We, too, are involved in what Mick is involved in: not so much what is remembered as the action of memory, suspended in the action of one revelation falling away and a new one coming on. Throughout the story, Dybek calls attention to the way in which memory is also dreaming, as much invented as actual. In fact, one of the epigraphs to the collection as a whole is from Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie: “In memory everything seems to happen to music” ([1945] 1999, 5). This line is repeated within the story itself (Dybek 2003, 274), along with the fact that Williams is Mick’s “lucky playwright” (263), so that the play becomes one of Dybek’s intertexts, and, as such, reinforces the parallels between return, memory, and artistry. Like Williams’s progatonist in the play, Tom, Perry, the actual narrator of “Qué Quieres,” is looking back on the life of a sibling, and, like Tom, materializing that gaze in an aesthetic object, in this case a short story rather than a play—and by doing so attempts to redeem loss. Like Williams, Dybek is also concerned with arguing for memory as an act of invention, a dreaming, which, like music, is less important for what it dreams than for the activity of dreaming and redreaming itself—for this is the power that provides the capacity for transformation and accommodation. The power of art, then, is less in the objects it creates than in its capacity to continually transform experience. Dreaming is at once the recollection of the past but also reality-building with the past as its instrument. When Perry and Mick argue over events of the past, Mick says, “By any chance you familiar with the term ‘repressed memory,’” to which Perry responds, “You’re not talking about memory. You’re talking about half-empty water glasses and dreams.” Perry’s final word on this argument is instructive: “You don’t think dreaming is a kind of remembering? And if it is, then why wouldn’t memory be a kind of

dream?” (251). Thus, both memory and dream become implicated in indeterminacy, both equally partaking of the recovery of the past, of “repressed memory,” but also in some way adjusting that past in light of present pressures, since the repressed is as much a function of the present as the past, or, better, is the fusion of past and present. This is where Mick dwells, on a borderland between past and present, between recollection and creation, between actuality and artifice. More appropriately, his return to the South Side demonstrates the inseparability of these. The threat posed to him by the chicos is precisely the loss of this indeterminacy. In other words, their xenophobia and territorialism threaten Perry with a return to a definitive subjectivity, one given rather than provisionally assumed, which in turn reminds him of the past in a neighborhood in which identity was not questioned: Shadows familiar enough to be recognized by their smell, the smell of a past that sometimes seems more real than the present, a childhood in which degrees of reality were never a consideration, when reality and the sense of identity that went with it were taken for granted. That unquestioned conviction as to who they are is the advantage the Disciples on the front steps have over him. (272) Only in the return narrative is Mick able to grasp the enabling possibility that exists for him in the present: the dissolution of reality, and with it a contained or definitive self. It is this very possibility that the threat of violence from the Disciples seems to curtail. Their “advantage” over him is both existential and material—knowing who they are permits them to have both literal and figurative power, but at the cost of freedom. The word “disciples” suggests a self-annihilating group mentality, fealty to a single social vision, which Mick’s liminal second-generation upbringing managed to foil. “Unquestioned conviction as to who they are” is precisely what Perry and Mick did not have, though again it is not until they return to the neighborhood that they see in this a benefit rather than a drawback, for with it comes a power to continually transform social reality through the power of memory, dreams, and art. By returning to the scene of their childhoods— one mediated by ethnicity—they realize the promise of release that their liminal status gave them. Thus, Perry comes to understand that Mick

felt most alive when crossing borders, most at ease in the foreign outposts of America. Our father was an immigrant, but Mick was the one who seemed to feel foreign—foreign in the church and Catholic schools we went to as children; foreign in Memphis, Tennessee; foreign in the face of My-Country-Right-or-Wrong and the government that jailed him for refusing to fight a war [the Vietnam War] he believed was a crime against humanity. (267) Mick thus grasps his subjectivity, and his relation to the state, by appropriating the foreignness of his father’s relation to America. Notably he is “most alive when crossing borders,” when he is neither here nor there, in a state of transition, bound to no specific jurisdiction and its attendant demands on belonging and “unquestioned conviction.” In other words, he has become a free citizen precisely by refusing to accede to becoming a “disciple.” Like Frank in “Sauerkraut Soup,” his return to the old neighborhood gives him a sense of liberation from the necessity of fixed subject positions, while at the same time still permitting him a community to cling to.

CONCLUSION: THE COMING COMMUNITY The subject positions narrated by Dybek find a theoretical corollary in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben’s 1990 work, translated as The Coming Community, theorizes a new kind of subjectivity in which “the coming being is whatever being … singularity not in its indifference with respect to a common property … but only in its being such as it is … thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility of the universal” (Agamben [1990] 1993, 1). For Agamben, this “whatever being,” is understood neither as a singularity so unique as to be impossible to speak about (since descriptive language inevitably erases uniqueness through common terms), nor a universal subject only to be understood in blanket categories (in the case of Dybek’s protagonists these would be, “PolishAmerican,” or “second-generation,” or “resident of the South Side of Chicago”). Agamben’s notion of subjectivity exists neither in silence (the ineffable) nor in the name (the universal), but in a kind of pure potentiality, in the power of relation as such (Wall 1999, 162). By “relation” I mean the

capacity of naming itself, the power to manifest being via the word. This power, by necessity, means that the subject is defined neither by an ability to withhold any given name, nor by an ability to produce it, but by the potential to choose between the two. Agamben describes this as: “Not a potentiality to be that is opposed to a potentiality to not-be (who would decide between these two?); it is a potentiality to not not-be. The contingent is not simply the non-necessary, that which can not-be, but that which, being the thus, being only its mode of being, is capable of the rather, can not not-be” ([1990] 1993, 105). In this rather opaque sentence, Agamben expounds on a subjectivity that has ramifications for our understanding of Dybek’s second-generation characters. For Agamben, the capacity to choose between the extremes of being and not-being (to give or not give presence in language) can only be the provenance of a subject who is, properly speaking, at home in both (as he says “who would decide between these two” if they were locked into one or the other side?). Only the subject who dwells in both would be able to “choose” either side. Any given appearance of this subject, any moment of being, would thus only ever be a “mode,” a given manifestation among many options. But modality would also be the only possible manifestation, since the subject, defined as capable of the “rather,” of contingency, could always appear otherwise. The true potentiality of such a subject is thus to “not not-be,” to negate non-being without at the same time entering an irremediable or definitive state of being. This is the liminal state of Agamben’s “whatever being,” capable of refusing both being and not-being, and therefore having its “place” somewhere between the two, neither entirely given over to “contingency” (the power to not-be) nor necessity (the power to be). This subject must appear one way or another but that appearance always preserves within itself the power to not-be insofar as it might be otherwise. Modality itself (rather than any given mode) is its definitive way of being. “Whatever being” can and must only ever appear as a “mode.” This notion is utopian because in freeing us from the “false dilemma” of determining subjectivity along absolute lines it permits us to glimpse a world in which subjects are appreciated “as such,” rather than via their nearness to a perceived category or ideal. “The taking-place of things does not take place in the world. Utopia is the very topia of things” (103). For Agamben, utopia is a world appreciated in its “taking-place,” not its subordination to ideal meanings or frameworks, which always provide the

“true place” of the subject elsewhere, within an ideology or program. Witnessed in its potentiality, this world must be taken on its own terms, as the continual revelation and re-revelation of modality, rather than what it should be. Agamben articulates a disposition toward the world that accepts the “irreparability” of material existence rather than trying to “redeem” it through programs of social or religious improvement that bring the subject “in line” with ideal projections (39). This is significant for Dybek’s stories because his second-generation protagonists come to appreciate subjectivity in exactly this sense: as a mode, pure potentiality as such, always in the midst of negotiation that is never settled, each moment of identity understood as the particular outcome of endless and always ongoing possibilities. When Frank and Mick (and by extension Perry) return to their neighborhoods, what they grasp is precisely this potentiality to “not not-be,” to enter into the relation that is language and knowing without having to permanently settle on any set of terms, whether it be “Polish-American,” or “Working-Class,” or “Assimilated Americans.” Thus Mick is described as being most himself when he is “crossing borders,” always in a state of transition, never entirely to one side or the other, exhibiting process rather than identity. It is why Frank understands the importance of not prolonging any given state, even happiness, for it is precisely in avoiding such prolonging that happiness might occur again. This awareness refreshes their sense of the community they once belonged to, or the community this notion of subjectivity made possible, one of negotiation, a degree of openness, a constant working-out of relationships in the midst of material contingency—one in which the second generation understood how partial, how incomplete, though serviceable, ethnic labeling was, but also how impoverished the world would be if such labels were lost. What they return to is not a definitive selfhood but rather a disposition toward selfhood that helped sustain individuals and the neighborhoods in which they lived. Here, then, is a selfhood that sustains community not because of what it irrevocably is, but on the contrary because instead of identity there is identification, what Agamben calls singularities “expropriated of all identity, so as to appropriate belonging itself” (11), to go from being named to actively naming and renaming. Without being subordinated to an identity, without being able to definitively claim an identity, Dybek’s characters remain in

control of belonging as an action. They are the irreparable and must be taken as such rather than displaced by third terms. This exposed irreparability is the peculiar power of Dybek’s secondgeneration characters, who return to their old neighborhoods in order to recover what they never lost: communities in which constant accommodation of past to present, old to new, alien to familiar enabled a glimpse of selfhood as a singularity separated from and yet manifested in and by universal terms that served rather than curtailed identity and agency. These characters thus manifest a liminality that serves as the condition of belonging, and it is this that unites them and makes a myriad of community identifications possible. As Mick says, “No, not corny, dream is a beautiful word—sueño, träumen, marzeni—a word we’d die without. You can’t let cheeseballs fuck it up for you” (Dybek 2003, 265). The power of dreaming is the power of language itself, an empty relation striving toward translation, and then striving again, never permanently settling into a given configuration and thereby always moving toward the world on its own terms. This is the utopia Dybek’s characters uncover, the world they “return” to whenever they come back to the South Side.

REFERENCES Agamben, Giorgio. (1990) 1993. The Coming Community. Translated by Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dybek, Stuart. (1971) 2003. Childhood and Other Neighborhoods. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dybek, Stuart. (1981) 1990. The Coast of Chicago. New York: Picador (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Dybek, Stuart. 1999. “Stuart Dybek.” In “The Situation of American Writing 1999,” edited by Gordon Hutner. American Literary History 11 (2): 249–254. Dybek, Stuart. 2003. I Sailed with Magellan. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Gladsky, Thomas S. 1992. Princes, Peasants, and Other Polish Selves: Ethnicity in American Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gladsky, Thomas S. 1994. “Mr. Dybek’s Neighborhood: Toward a New Paradigm for Ethnic Literature.” In The Polish Diaspora: Proceedings from the Fiftieth Anniversary International Congress of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America. Volume II, edited by James S. Pula and M. B. Biskupski, 129–135. New York: Columbia University Press. Gladsky, Thomas S. 1995. “From Ethnicity to Multiculturalism: The Fiction of Stuart Dybek.” MELUS 20 (2): 105–118. Hirsch, Marianne. 1998. “Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile.” In Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances, edited by Susan Rubin Suleiman, 418–446. Durham, NC:

Duke University Press. King, Russell, and Anastasia Christou. 2011. “Of Counter-Diaspora and Reverse Transnationalism: Return Mobilities to and from the Ancestral Homeland.” Mobilities 6 (4): 451–466. Kirch, Claire. 2003. “Stuart Dybek: Windy City Oracle.” Publishers Weekly, November 3: 49–50. Nickel, Mike, and Adrian Smith. 1997. “An Interview with Stuart Dybek.” Chicago Review 43 (1): 87–101. Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Santiago. 2002. “Creating an Identity by Means of Culture: Stuart Dybek’s Short Stories.” In Evolving Origins, Transplanting Cultures, edited by Laura P. Alonso and Antonia Dominguez Miguela, 169–176. Huelva, Spain: Universidad de Huelva. Rotella, Carlo. 2004. “As If to Say ‘Jeez!’: Blight and Ecstasy in the Old Neighborhood.” U.S. Catholic Historian 22 (2): 1–11. Seaman, Donna. 2005. Writers on the Air: Conversations about Books. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books. Shapiro, Dani, and Julie Shigekuni. 1991. “An Interview with Stuart Dybek.” One Meadway 1: 49– 58. Spark, Debra. 2005. Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wall, Thomas Carl. 1999. Radical Passivity: Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben. New York: State University of New York Press. Williams, Tennessee. (1945) 1999. The Glass Menagerie. New York: New Directions.

 

Contributors     Eleftheria Arapoglou teaches in the Department of English at the University of California at Davis. She has co-edited five volumes: Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration, and Transculturation (Routledge, 2013); Ex-Centric Narratives: Identity, Multivocality and Cross-Culturalism (Academica Press, 2012); Re-inventing/Re-presenting Identities in a Global World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012); Transcultural Localisms: Responding to Ethnicity in a Globalized World (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006); [City in (Culture] in City) (Ege University Press, 2005). She has also contributed as an assistant editor to two special issues of the journal GRAMMA entitled “Revisiting Crisis/Reflecting on Conflict: American Literary Interpretations from World War II to Ground Zero” (2008) and “Comparative Literature and Global Studies: Histories and Trajectories” (2005). Her book A Bridge over the Balkans: Demetra Vaka Brown and the Tradition of “Women’s Orients” was published by Gorgias Press (2011). Her research interests include the cultural production of space in the modernist tradition, literary sociology, and cultural studies. Norma E. Cantú currently serves as a Professor of English and U.S. Latina/o Literatures at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She received her PhD from the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. As editor of a book series, Rio Grande/Rio Bravo: Borderlands Culture and Tradition, published by Texas A&M University Press, she promotes the publication of research on borderlands culture. Author of the award-winning Canícula Snap-shots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, and co-editor of Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change (University of Illinois Press, 2002), Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios (Duke University Press, 2001), Dancing across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos (University of Illinois Press, 2009), Inside the Latin@ Experience: A Latin@ Studies Reader (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and El Mundo Zurdo: Selected Works from the Meetings of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa 2007 & 2009 (Aunt Lute Books, 2010), she is currently working on a novel tentatively titled Champú, or Hair Matters / Champú: Asuntos de pelos, and an ethnography of the Matachines de la Santa Cruz, a religious dance drama from Laredo, Texas. She is the founder and Director of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa and co-founder of the group of Latina/o poets CantoMundo, as well as a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop. Rocío G. Davis has research interests that include Asian-North American writing, academic autobiography, life writing and history, and children’s literature. She has published The Transnationalism of American Culture: Literature, Film and Music (Routledge, 2013), Relative Histories: Mediating History in Asian American Family Memoirs (University of Hawaii Press, 2011), Begin Here: Reading Asian North American Autobiographies of Childhood (University of Hawaii Press, 2007), and Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short Story Cycles (TSAR, 2001). Tamas Dobozy is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has published articles on selected topics in American Literature and Culture

—specifically on jazz, postwar American fiction, and realism—in journals such as Genre, Modern Fiction Studies, and Mosaic, among others. He has also published three books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, and Siege 13: Stories, the last of which won the 2012 Rogers’ Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the 2012 Governor General’s Award for Fiction. He has published over fifty stories in North American and British journals, including Fiction, Agni, One Story, and Granta, and won an O. Henry Prize in 2011. Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Deusto, Bilbao, where he teaches courses on migrant fiction, interethnic relations, and film adaptation. He completed his graduate degree at Deusto and did post-graduate work on 19thcentury naturalism at the University of Pittsburgh. He has published articles on minority narratives, the pedagogy of literature and cinema, and processes of cultural cross-fertilization. He has also translated several works of American fiction and poetry into Spanish and Basque. Currently, Ibarrola-Armendariz is the Director of the MA Program in Migrations and Social Cohesion and Head of the Modern Languages and Basque Studies Department at the University of Deusto. He has taught at the University of Middlesex, the University of Manchester, and the University of Pittsburgh. He has also edited several volumes: Fiction and Ethnicity in North America (1995), Entre dos mundos (2004), and Migrations in a Global Context (2007). Persis Karim is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University. She is the co-editor of Tremors: New Fiction by Iranian American Writers (University of Arkansas Press, 2013) and editor of Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora (University of Arkansas Press, 2006). She has written numerous articles about Iranian diaspora literature and has guest co-edited issues of MELUS, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, and Iranian Studies on Iranian diaspora literature and culture. Valerie Kaussen is an Associate Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Missouri, where she teaches courses in French Caribbean literature, world cinema, and visual studies. She is the author of Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization, and U.S. Imperialism (Lexington Books, 2008). Her articles have appeared in The Monthly Review, Research in African Literatures, The Berlin School Glossary: An ABC of New German Cinema (2013), and other collected volumes and journals. Ada Ortuzar-Young is a Professor of Spanish at Drew University, New Jersey. She holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin and New York University and has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at Yale University and Princeton University. As a diasporic subject herself, her research interests and publications center on historical and current processes of migration and transculturation. Her recent work has dealt with Latino/a playwrights, such as Dolores Prida and the Cuban-American theatre on the east coast of the United States, and ethnic writers such as Esmeralda Santiago and Junot Díaz. She has written on the postcolonial representations of Caribbean women in recent Spanish films, and how these undocumented immigrants are reconfiguring private and public spaces. Begoña Simal González is an Associate Professor at the Universidade da Coruña (University of A Coruña, Spain). She has published extensively on Asian-American literature, contributing articles to collections and journals such as MELUS, the Journal of Transnational American Studies, and Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos. Her book-length publications include Identidad étnica y género en la narrativa de escritoras chinoamericanas (SPUC 2000), the first book in Spanish to focus on Asian-American literature, and the comparative volume Uncertain Mirrors: Magic Realism in US Ethnic Literatures, co-written with Jesús Benito and Ana Manzanas (Rodopi 2009). She has also co-edited Transnational, National and Personal Voices: Asian American and Asian Diasporic Women Writers (LIT Verlag 2004), with Elisabetta Marino. More recently, she has

edited Selves in Dialogue: A Transethnic Approach to American Life Writing (Rodopi 2011). Hers is the only translation of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior into Spanish (Ediciones El Cobre, 2009). Santiago Vaquera-Vásquez is a writer, ex-DJ, and academic. He is the author of the collection of stories Algún día te cuento las cosas que he visto and has published stories in international literary journals (Paralelo sur, Etiqueta Negra, The Barcelona Review) as well as in anthologies (Líneas aéreas; Se habla español, voces latinas en USA; Pequeñas resistencias 4: Antología del nuevo cuento norteamericano y Caribeño; En la frontera: I migliori raconti della letteratura chicana; and Malos elementos: Relatos sobre la corrupción social). Currently an Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico, he has also taught at the University of Iowa, Penn State, Texas A&M, Universidad de Salamanca, and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, and a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College. His academic work on U.S./ Mexico border cultures has been published in journals and anthologies in Mexico and the United States.

 

Index     9/11 attacks, 116n2, 145

A acculturation, 45, 157, 174, 176 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 116n2 Alarcón, Norma, 135, 139, 141, 145 “disposable subjects”, 135 “Self in the flesh”, 139 Alexander, Jeffrey, 64–65, 71, 76 Alexander, Meena, 92, 100, 153, 159, 167–68, 169 alienation, 2, 5–6, 8, 58–59, 64, 65–66, 70, 87, 105, 109–10, 114, 194 ambivalence, 10, 15, 48, 50, 53, 55, 87, 104, 105, 107, 109, 112, 115, 128, 151, 161, 168 Americanness, 2 in Werner Sollors, 4 ancestry, 3, 4, 7–8, 26, 36, 41, 44, 55, 92, 93, 94, 120, 123, 127, 129, 161–62, 168 anthropology, 47, 48, 56, 118, 128 anthropologist, 10, 12, 15, 48, 49, 55 anti-Semitism, 45 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 6, 9, 16, 19, 133, 135, 137, 138–39, 141, 144, 145, 146, 209 autohistoria, 137 Borderlands/ La Frontera: 19, 133, 138, 145 “mestiza consciousness” 6, 135, 138, 141 This Bridge Called My Back: “La Prieta”, 139 añoranza, 11, 16, 141, 142, 145. See also enyorança, elsewhere (desire for), nostalgia, melancholia Appadurai, Arjun, 70, 76 archival footage, 62, 75 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 27, 30, 33, 42 arrival/s, 17, 45, 53, 82, 104, 108, 109, 150, 152, 168, 171, 174, 175, 176, 177, 182, 186”shock of arrival” (M. Alexander), 153, 169 assimilation, 4, 14, 34–35, 38, 39, 56, 83, 122, 139, 156–59, 190, 191–92, 195, 200, 204 autobiography, 3, 5, 9, 16, 17, 45, 55, 86, 88, 90, 95, 103–7, 112, 120–29, 162, 168, 207. See also life writing autoethnography, 5–7, 9–10, 68, 75. See also ethnography as critical critical ethnography (Mary Louise Pratt), 5 as life writing (Françoise Lionnet), 9 autohistoria (G. Anzaldúa), 137

B Bahrampour, Tara To See and See Again 16, 19, 104–12, 115 Behar, Ruth 8, 10, 15, 44–56, 75, 77 “Folklore and the Search for Home”, 47–48, 56 Bel-Air (Port-au-Prince), 29–33 Bélance, Alèrte 33–35, 39 Bell, Beverly Walking on Fire 34 Benjamin, Marina Last Days in Babylon 45, 56 Bhabha, Homi 5, 13, 19 pedagogical discourse, 5, 13 performative (the), 5 The Location of Culture, 19 birthrights, 26, 31, 38, 42 Boelhower, William, 162, 168, 169 border “border consciousness”, 13 “border thinking” (W. Mignolo), 6, 171 “border thinking” (W. Mignolo in J.D. Saldívar), 186 borderland/s, 6, 19, 21, 133, 135, 138, 140, 145, 146, 201 boundary/ies, 17, 29, 31, 119, 129, 191 crossing, 28, 83, 134, 138, 146, 170, 173, 174, 177, 202 Haiti-Dominican Republic, 39, 40, 41 of identity, 6, 19, 20, 133, 138, 141, 152, 154 national, 1, 8, 28, 31, 48, 83, 92, 97, 138 spatio-temporal, 119 urban, 28, 29 US-Mexico, 21, 133, 134, 137, 138, 140, 145, 170 Borges, Jorge Luis, 166 Boym, Svetlana, 105, 106, 109, 110, 115, 116n3, 123, 131 Bush, George W., 116n1

C Calcutta, 45, 55, 56, 87, 102 Cantú, Norma “De Nuevo León a Idaho” (poem), 135–36 “El muro/The Wall” (poem), 143–44 “Entre Malinche y Guadalupe” (poem), 139–40 “Sangre en el desierto” (poem), 145 “The Gift” (poem), 137–38 capitalism, 2, 18, 27, 28, 30, 31, 68, 82, 90, 97, 141 global, 27, 30, 31, 141 Carpentier, Alejo, 167, 169 Caruth, Cathy 29, 34, 35, 38, 43, 60, 63, 64, 77 Unclaimed Experience, 34, 43, 77 Castells, Manuel, 27–29, 43 Castillo, Ana The Mixquiahuala Letters, 3, 19 Castro, Fidel, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54

Catholicism, 26, 41, 47–48, 49, 53, 54, 202 celebrations, 16, 139, 140–41, 72, 133, 143, 152 Central America, 134 “changing same (the)” (P. Gilroy), 44, 45–46, 49, 51–52, 53, 56n1, 57 Chicago, 17, 134, 140, 189–204 South Side, 17, 189–204 Chicana/o Studies, 138, 171 choteo (J. Mañach), 150–51 cinéma verité, 75 Cisneros, Sandra, 162, 169 Caramelo, 140, 146 citizenhip, 19, 26, 28, 31, 32, 39, 40, 107, 141, 173, 202 American, 3, 4, 50, 81, 83, 142, 176 cultural, 3 diasporic, 107 flexible (A. Ong), 100n21, 101 flexible 16, 81, 94, 96, 98, 100 global, 97, 98, 141, 173 Clark, Steve, 11, 19 class, 15, 26, 49, 61, 97, 103, 151, 172, 184, 191, 193, 204 economic inequalities, 26, 97 elitism, 97, 103, 151, 184 privilege, 15, 49, 87 Clifford, James, 2, 4, 5, 19, 61, 69–70, 77, 83, 90, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100n21, 101, 149, 154, 157, 169 diaspora, 2, 18n1, 19, 77, 83, 98n3, 101, 149, 154, 157 “diasporic consciousness”, 61, 69–70 “dwelling” , 90, 93 “discrepant cosmopolitanism”, 15–16, 81, 92, 97–98, 100n25 “roots/routes”, 1, 3, 4, 6, 16, 17, 18n1, 20, 81, 90, 92, 93, 96, 149, 166 “traveling cultures”, 96–98 Cohen, Robin, 65, 77 Cold War, 18, 27, 28, 96, 130–31 Coles, Tim, 3, 19 Colón, Jesús 2, 19

colonialism, 26, 42, 82, 87–88 coloniality (W. Mignolo), 5, 6–11, 12, 14, 18, 19, 119, 154, 171, 180, 188 colonization, 180 colonized (the), 10, 154 colonizer (the), 10 “decolonial imaginary”, (E. Pérez) 141, 146 decolonization,180 neo-coloniality (W. Mignolo), 5, 6, 10 neo-colonialism, 10, 25, 42, 82, 85 communism, 51, 61, 68, 83, 85, 98, 99n6, 120, 121, 126, 130, 193 anti-communism, 68, 83, 85, 99n13, 131 communist guerrillas (in Greek Civil War), 126 communists, 52, 66–69 community, 1, 3, 5, 6, 9–12 diasporic, 3, 4, 14. See also diaspora

disappearance, 45, 51, 54–55, 191–92 ethnic, 44, 162. See also ethnicity imagined, 46 multiple, 4, 10 national community,13, 129 “contact zone” (M. L. Pratt), 45, 154, 187 cosmopolitanism, 16, 81, 91, 92, 93, 94–96, 97, 98, 100n24, 109 critical 81, 85, 100n25 “discrepant cosmopolitanism” (J. Clifford), 15–16, 81, 92 97–98, 100n25 coup d’état, 27, 33, 34, 42, 43n5, 116n1 Cuba, 3, 14, 15, 17, 27, 44–56, 149–69 as mythical place, 150, 153, 159–62, 164 Cuban revolution, 47, 49, 50, 51, 53, 54, 162, 163–65 relationship to the US, 14, 15, 27, 49, 154, 158 Cuban Cubanness 54, 158 rafters, 158, 166 1.5 generation, 156–57 Cuban Jews identity, 15, 44, 47–49, 50–55, 56n6

D Dana, Richard Henry Two Years Before the Mast, 1 Danticat, Edwidge, 6, 13, 15, 19, 25–43 Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work “I Speak Out”, 33–35 The Dew Breaker “Night Talkers”, 36–39 “The Book of the Dead”, 35–36 The Farming of Bones, 39–42 “Ghosts” (short story), 29–33 dead (the), 9, 10, 35–36, 37, 42, 43n6, 73, 92, 165, 197 departure/s, 16, 17, 28–30, 32, 34, 44, 45, 51, 53, 54, 61–64, 67–69, 75, 90, 103, 104, 108, 111, 112, 134, 136, 137, 142, 152, 164, 171, 173–177, 182, 185, 186, 190, 198 deterritorialization, 5, 16, 18, 83, 133, 134, 140, 141, 149, 150, 162 (J. Tomlinson) 18, 150–51 diaspora, 6, 12, 14, 15, 19, 20, 78, 96, 98n3, 115, 193 cultures, communities, experience, of diasporic peoples, 2, 3, 5, 14, 18, 44, 56, 70, 76, 77, 81, 82, 97, 107, 115, 122, 134, 139, 156 in Chicago’s South Side, 180 Dominican, 172, 173 in ethnic American writers (as opposed to post-colonial writers), 14 for Gloria Anzaldúa, 138 Iranian, 103–4, 106, 110–11, 112, 117, 208 in J. Clifford’s work, 2, 18, 19, 77, 83, 98n3, 101, 149, 154, 157 Jewish, 44, 45, 46, 52, 54 Jewish-Cuban, “Diasporaland” 55 in Junot Díaz’s fiction, 173, 174–186 Latino/a, 134, 138

in S. Vertovec, 70, 78 South Asian, 45–46, 57 in Stuart Dybek’s fiction, 190–191, 192, 205 in W. Safran, 18n1, 21, 77, 98n3, 102 Vietnamese, 81, 82–83, 99n5, 100n19, 101, 102 diasporic anthropologists, 48 author(s), 6, 87, 119 citizenship, 107 consciousness, 9, 11, 13, 16, 81, 93, 95–96, 106, 115 “diasporic consciousness” (J. Clifford), 61, 69–70 “diasporic consciousness” (W. Safran), 82–85 identity, 84, 91, 107, 115, 171 literature (D. Kandiyoti), 173, 175, 179, 185, 188 literature of return,1, 4, 5, 8, 9–10, 14, 15, 20, 46 “diasporic moments”(J. Dorais), 84, 101 subject(s), 6, 82, 83, 90, 98, 134, 155, 193 ties with homeland, 65, 85 90 Díaz, Junot, 6, 13, 17, 19, 170–88, 209 Drown, 17, 171, 173, 174, 176, 181, 186, 188 The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, 17, 171, 172, 173, 174, 177–82, 185, 186, 187n1, 188 This is How You Lose Her, 17, 171–174, 176, 182–85, 186–188 disembedding (A. Giddens), 17, 152 displacement physical/social, 6, 11, 44, 50, 65, 70, 97, 104, 110–11, 113, 138, 150, 168, 152, 153, 158, 175, 179, 180, 185, 186, 193 in psychoanalisis, 64 “disposable subjects” (N. Alarcón), 135 documentary, 15, 56, 58–78, 86, 99n11, 102 docudrama, 63 Dominican Republic, 6, 39–41, 171–72, 173, 177–81, 183–85 1930s to 1950s, 39–41 “double consciousness”, (W. E. B. Du Bois) 6, 109 Douglas, Mary, 128, 131 Douglass, Ana, 67, 77 drugs, 28, 29, 31, 38, 145 Dupuy, Alex, 42, 43n3 Duvalier, François (“Papa Doc”), 27, 35 Duvalier, Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), 27 Dybek, Stuart, 6, 11, 17, 189–205

E Elizondo Griest, Stephanie Mexican Enough, 7–8, 19 Ellis, Carolyn, 68, 75, 77 Elsaesser, Thomas, 31, 35, 43

elsewhere/s, 3, 17, 70, 83, 92, 96, 133, 141, 149, 175, 186, 203 desire for, 3, 170. See also añoranza, enyorança, nostalgia, melancholia emigration. See immigrants Iranian, 103–4, 105, 107 empire, 5, 8, 10. See also imperialism enyorança, 11. See also añoranza, elsewhere/s (desire for) nostalgia, melancholia escape psychological, 12, 39, 96, 135, 166, 197, 198 physical, economical, 26, 31, 32, 35, 41, 62, 68, 93, 100n18, 166, 176, 193, 198 essentialism, 60, 87 ethics, 11, 12. See also nostalgia (and ethics) ethnicity, 4, 17, 82, 122, 123, 124, 153, 157, 159, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 199, 202 co-ethnics, 70 ethnic affiliation, 5, 7–8, 17, 47, 49, 83, 112–13, 199, 204 continuity and discontinuity, 44, 46, 84 heritage, 16, 44, 56, 120, 122, 168, 197 identity, 45, 122, 123 128, 157, 160–61, 165, 167, 168, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198 writers, 3, 8, 9, 13, 14, 151, 162, 167, 168, 209 writing, 5, 9, 13, 17, 44, 46, 19–20, 120, 122, 123, 162, 168, 189 “new ethnicities”, (S. Hall) 123–24 “trans-ethnicity”, 17, 90, 189, 191 ethnography, 4–6, 9, 19, 21, 25, 48, 77, 102, 119. See also autoethnography ethnographer the writer as, 5, 6, 25 as objective ans subjective discourse, 5 reflexive, 48, 68 exile, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 25, 27, 28, 33, 36, 44, 48–49, 50, 51, 53, 58–59 65, 70, 109, 111, 113, 115, 123, 135, 138, 150, 152, 156, 158, 160, 165, 166, 171, 174, 187, 191, 193, 194 Cuban, first-generation, 49, 150–55, 155–56, 156–59, 159–62 exiled authors, 2, 10, 35, 61–62, 65, 72, 74–75, 83, 93, 96, 97, 99, 107, 119 “double-exile”, 105 exilic consciousness, 106 Vietnamese, 83, 85, 96, 97, 99n10, 99n15, 103, 104–5 exodus, 45, 51, 54–55, 76, 96 exotic (the), 112, 154 expatriation, 3, 18, 87, 118, 119, 187

F family abandonment, 66–67, 68, 73, 142, 174–75, 176, 179, 185 confrontations, 67, 68, 72–73 establishment of a new family, 41, 175, 175–76 extended family, 65, 68, 70, 71–72, 73–74, 91, 110, 122, 134, 135, 137, 140, 142, 158, 170, 178, 197 fracture, 33, 40, 58, 60, 61, 63–64, 64–66, 66–67, 68–69, 71, 74, 114, 136, 140, 144–45, 152, 158, 176, 178 history, 7–8, 15, 42, 45, 50, 53, 56, 58, 59, 61, 69, 75, 116, 119–27, 133–34, 135–36, 137, 176, 177– 78, 179, 197, 199 home / hometown / homeland, 36–39, 128–30, 143, 152, 158

house, 16, 44, 71, 81, 87–90, 91–92, 118–32, 159–62 multiple households 142 journey, 44, 45, 50, 51, 60, 66–67, 71, 107–8, 133–34, 135–36, 136, 137, 170 memory, 15, 36–37, 126–27, 161 pictures / mementos / memorials, 36–37, 47, 51, 62, 71, 75, 86, 87, 89, 92, 99n12, 100n18, 124–26, 127, 160, 162, 164 recovery / rebonding / reuniting, etc., 15, 36–39, 44, 47, 58–78, 125–29, 136, 142 reputation, 62, 67, 68, 73, 178 saga, 45, 92, 119, 121 stories, 38–39, 46, 76, 126, 161 traditions / rituals, etc. 152 Fanon, Franz, 8 Farman-Farmaian, Sattareh, 107, 116 fiesta, 139 First World, 28 Fischer, Michael J., 5, 10, 19 Fischer, Sybille, 26, 43 food, 65, 135–36, 137, 139, 140, 143, 145, 195 foreign (the), 2, 3, 202 foreigness, 11, 110, 194, 195, 202 foreigner, 39, 68, 153, 155 Fortier, Anne-Marie, 46, 56 Fourth World, 6, 18, 27–28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 38, 39 Friedman, Jonathan, 12–13, 20

G Gage, Eleni 8, 121 North of Ithaka, 16, 44, 56, 118–32 controversy, 121–123, 131 Gage, Nicholas, 44, 56, 121, 131 Eleni, 44, 56, 121, 122, 131 reception of 44, 121, 130 Garcia, Cristina, 168 Dreaming in Cuban, 3, 20, 149, 168, 169 geography/ies of every day life, 6 imaginary, 7, 14, 16, 17, 99, 120, 121, 129, 141, 150, 151–52, 155, 159, 164 ghost chime, 29–32, 35 of the dead, 119–20, 127, 165 the disappeared, 8, 9, 111 genealogical isolate, 26, 41, 42 migrants and exiles as “ghosts”, 25, 28–33, 35–36, 38, 41–42, 63, 111 of the past, 4, 59, 63, 72–73, 74–75, 95, 106, 127, 155 place of origin as a ghost (Iran), 104–5, 115 Giddens, Anthony, 125, 131, 152, 169 Gilroy, Paul 45, 56 Gladsky, Thomas, 7, 20, 189–90, 191, 194, 205 global (the), 10, 12, 18, 92, 95, 97, 119, 136, 138, 207, 208 imperialism, 14, 18, 38, 42

space (M. Castells), 28 globalization, 3, 12, 17, 18, 85, 90, 96, 97, 155, 189, 207 of economy, 27, 42, 95 military-industrial complex, 32 social injustice caused by, 18, 27, 28, 30, 39 Goldblatt, Patricia, 42, 43 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis 166 González, Ray, 1, 20 Gordon, Avery, 104–5, 115, 116 Grande, Reyna The Distance Between Us, 136, 146 Greece, 119–32 Greek Civil War, 120–22, 126, 130–31 Greek Americans, 120, 123, 127–29 second generation, 120, 122 Guevara, Ernesto (“Che”) as myth, 164–65 guilt, 18, 59, 67, 90, 98n1, 99, 113, 114, 155, 164

H Haiti, 6, 13, 14, 15, 25–43, 207 Haitian-US relations, 6, 14, 25, 26, 27, 35 history, 26–27, 35 political resistance in, 34 US military occupation of, 27 US-trained groups in, 27, 31–32, 33 Hall, Mitchell, 69, 77 Hall, Stuart, 6, 7, 8, 20, 123–24, 129, 131 “haunting” (A. Gordon), 104–5, 116 Havana, 47, 50, 52, 150, 152, 154, 156, 160, 161, 163, 164 Haynor, Patricia, 42, 43 healing, 11, 41, 64, 76, 114, 115, 141, 145 heritage, 3, 7, 14, 15, 16, 51, 53, 58, 64, 87, 103, 104, 107, 113, 114, 122, 165, 194 Herman, Judith L., 58, 60, 72–73, 77 Hijuelos, Oscar 2, 20, 162, 169 history, 6, 8, 9, 10, 15, 18, 25, 26, 45, 46, 48, 50–51, 53–55, 59, 76, 82, 92, 97, 98, 103, 113, 115, 120, 123, 124, 138, 149, 152, 154, 163–164, 166, 171, 183, 192, 194 authistoria (G. Angzaldúa), 137 and belonging, (Meena Alexander) 167–168 diasporic history/histories, 3, 39, 41, 44, 46, 50–51, 53–55, 82, 93, 97–98, 103, 123, 135–36, 179, 180, 185 emotional, 122 forgotten, 11, 13, 94, 97, 149 “home histories”, 126 inherited, 1 intertwining of subjective history with national/world history, 6, 8–9, 10, 15, 16, 25, 33, 34–35, 38, 42, 44–45, 50–51, 53–54, 59, 60, 82, 97, 105–6, 116, 120–23, 125–26, 129–30, 164, 177–81, 197–98. See also narrative (micro-narrative), memory (micro-politics) official, 10

“official” versus “felt” (R.L Sims) history, 164, 169 oral her/histories, 34, 85 reconstruction and repossession of, 16, 45, 55, 123 rewriting of / alternative versions of, 9, 10, 12, 15, 17–18, 26–27, 33–34, 60, 70, 82 Hòang, Doan, 8, 10, 13, 15, 59, 60–61, 61–62, 67, 68, 69, 71, 75, 77 Coda to Ibarrola Armendariz’s essay, 76 Oh Saigon, 10, 15, 20, 58–78 Hollywood, 82 “home” (theorized), 118–120 hooks, bell, 123, 131 host country, nation, land, 2, 4, 18, 49, 63, 65, 70, 82, 154, 193 culture, society, 8, 18, 63, 200 hybridity, 13, 95, 107 in Homi Bhabha, 5

I identity, 1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9–10, 11–12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 42, 44, 45–49, 52–53, 56, 58, 59–60, 61–62, 64–65, 66, 68, 69, 71, 74, 82, 84, 86, 87, 91, 94, 95, 104, 105–7, 109–15, 116, 118–20, 121–23, 125–27, 128–30, 131, 142, 149–51, 153–54, 157–61, 162, 165, 167, 168, 170–71, 173–74, 175, 177, 186, 189–93, 195, 197, 201, 203–4. See also ethnicity,

identity politics, 87 American, 4, 14, 18, 104, 114–15, 161, 167 collective, 9, 14, 16, 18, 64, 74, 84, 86, 91, 120, 129, 165 commodification of, 49, 52, 53, 154 in process (Stuart Hall), 7, 71 imaginary cultural and geographical, 5, 14 immigrants, 1, 2, 4, 44, 50, 83, 95, 119, 122, 139, 143, 153, 155, 159. See also arrivals, departures, mobility, movement, travel, vaivén Asian-American, 82, 99n16 assimilation, 83 Central and South American, 133 children, 156 Cuban, 152 first-generation 50, 122, 150 second-generation 157 documented, 142 Greek, 121 Haitian, 25, 28, 30, 32 migrant workers in the Dominican Republic, 39 immigrant labor, 134, 141, 142, 143 literature, 2, 21, 33, 43, 85, 119, 121, 122, 123, 128, 134, 136, 168 immigration laws, 18, 38, 39, 50, 133, 142, 143–44, 145, 176 Iranian, 103, 104, 105, 106, 111 Jewish, 51 Mexican, 8, 76, 134 , 140–42, 145, 170–71, 194 migrant ghostly migrant, 25, 28, 38 undocumented, 97, 133 Vietnamese

“boat people”, 66, 82, 102 first-generation, 66, 72, 82, 83 second-generation, 72, 83 imperialism, 15, 21, 57, 61, 82, 88, 154, 169 imperial gaze, 154 imperialist nostalgia, 99n11 in-betweenness, 3, 5, 16, 42, 71, 98, 139, 141, 145, 151, 157, 165, 183, 184, 189, 190, 202, 203. See also border (borderlands), liminality, “Middle World”, Nepantla interviews, 44, 50, 52, 53, 62, 64, 66, 71–72, 75, 83, 134–35, 172 interviewees, 49, 54, 75, 76 Iran, 14, 16, 45, 103, 107, 108, 109–10, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116 as “ghost”, 104–5, 115 diaspora, 103–4, 106, 110–11, 112, 208 literature, 16, 103–17, 208 hostage crisis, 107, 108, 109, 111–112, 116n2 image of in the US, 6, 112, 113, 116n2 Iranianness, 112, 114 literary heritage, 103 myths of, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114 Persia as myth, 111. See also Iran (myths of) relations with US, 115, 116n2 return to, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109–110, 111, 112, 113 Revolution, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 111, 113, 116n2 student revolt, 113 view of in US media, 103, 104, 106, 108, 111 women, 45, 107, 108–110, 111 memoirs, 103–17 memoirists,16, 103, 104, 105, 107, 116n3. See also Bahrampour and Moaveni view of, 104 youth culture, 114 Iranian Americans, 103, 106 and “Persian” label, 104 identity, 104, 105–6, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116n2 mixed marriages, 106, 107–8 relationship with Iran, 45 second-generation, 112 Islam, 46, 104, 105, 106, 114 Israel, 51, 53, 54 Ithaka (island of), 119, 121, 122, 130

J Jacobson, Shari, 50, 53, 56 James, Erica Caple, 43 James, Winston, 49, 56 Jews American, 50, 52, 167 Ashkenazic, 50, 53 Bhaghdadi, 45–46, 56, 57 Canadian, 52 Jewish

-Cubans, 15, 44, 47–48, 49, 51, 52–55

in post-revolutionary Cuba, 51, 52, 53, 54

in pre-revolutionary Cuba, 47, 50, 53

incongruence of term, 47–48

integration in Cuba, 50, 52, 53–54

perceptions of Cuba, 50, 54, 55 diaspora, 45, 46, 50, 51, 52, 53–54 identity, 15, 44, 46, 47, 48–49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56 settlements, 44, 45–46, 50, 53–54, 55 Jewishness, 48, 53, 55 “lost generation”, 53 Latin American, 52 Sephardic, 50, 53, 56

K Karim, Persis Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been, 103–4, 117 Khatami, Mohammad, 116n2 Kim, Elaine, 82, 101 Kincaid, Jamaica, 3, 20 Kingston, Maxine Hong, 2, 20, 94, 101, 208 The Woman Warrior 2, 20, 208 Kuhn, Thomas, 135, 146 Kundera, Milan 2, 11, 20

L “Labor, Love and Land” (N. Cantú), 42–43 labyrinth (as motif), 149, 166 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 3, 20 The Namesake, 3, 20 Lam, Andrew, 8, 16, 69, 81–102 “Viet Kieu”, 81, 86–90, 92, 94 “Vietnam and its Diaspora”, 98, 101 Birds of Paradise Lost, 98, 100n27, 102 East Eats West, 96, 97–98, 102 My Journey Home, 83, 86, 92, 93, 10027, 101, 102 Perfume Dreams, 16, 83, 86, 91–97, 99n12, 101 “Child of Two Worlds”, 86, 94 “Lost Photos”, 86, 99n12 “Love, Money, Prison, Sin, Revenge”, 86 “My Vietnam, My America”, 94 “Notes of a Warrior Son”, 93, 94, 96 “Two Passports”, 94–95 “Viet Kieu”, 86–90, 94 language, 9, 13, 25, 29, 94, 112, 133, 136–39, 157, 166, 167, 168, 174, 194, 197, 198, 202–3, 204 English, 13, 94, 103, 119, 153, 160, 167, 174, 176 Farsi/Persian, 106, 110, 112 French, 13, 103 Kréyol, 26, 30, 37, 38

Spanish, 19, 27, 48, 50, 133, 136, 137, 139, 153, 160, 174 Vietnamese, 81, 83, 94, 96, 99n8 Yiddish, 50 Latin American/s, 13, 47, 52, 186 Latinidad(es), 48, 139 Latinos/as, 17, 54, 134, 139, 171, 172, 181, 186, 209 Lauter, Paul, 4, 13, 20 Lefebvre, Henri, 7, 20, 150, 151, 169 Lia, 119–30 life-writing, 4, 9, 50, 95, 103, 106–7, 116n3, 137, 207, 208. See also autoethnography, autobiography, memoir, travel writing liminality, 48, 135, 141, 157, 173. See also border (borderlands), in-betweenness, “Middle World”, Nepantla liminal physical spaces, 17, 189 Lionnet, Françoise, 9, 20, 100n25, 101 Lisle, Debbie, 10, 11, 19, 20 literature American, 1, 4, 12–18, 19, 85, 94, 209, 210 diasporic, 1, 4, 5, 8, 9–10, 14, 15, 20, 46, 173, 175, 179, 185, 188. See also immigrants (literature) as political praxis, 42 local (the), 10, 12, 13, 18, 96, 97, 152, 165, 195. See also global (the) locality, location, 5, 6, 18, 27, 34, 52, 54, 70, 111, 118, 119, 121, 122, 128, 135, 137, 138–39, 150, 152, 192, 193 localism 2, 97

M Malpas, J. E., 118, 130n1, 132 Marangoly George, Rosemary M., 119, 131 Marshall, Paule, 2, 20 Marxen, Patti, 42, 43 Massey, Doreen, 128, 132 matachines, 139, 209 Meacham, Cherie, 42, 43 media naming groups, 30 role in spreading violence, 39–40 role in trauma, 31–32, 33, 35, 76 US, 33–34 mediation cultural, 2, 5, 93, 118, 120, 124, 128, 195, 199, 202 narrator (as mediator), 6, 16, 130 melancholia, 107, 112, 114, 117. See also añoranza; elsewhere (desire for) enyorança; nostalgia Melville, Herman Typee, 1 memoir, 25. See also also autobiography, life writing, travel writing family, 44, 45 Iranian-American women’s memoirs, 16, 103–117 Jewish 15, 44–57 of immigration, 136 of return, 8–11, 15, 16, 44–7, 58–78, 86–102, 103–117, 118–132 travel, 118

memory/ies, 2–4, 6, 9, 10, 16, 19, 21, 46, 47, 53, 55, 56, 83, 105, 107, 108–110, 115, 119, 120, 123, 124, 150, 164, 167. See also añoranza, elsewhere (desire for) enyorança, melancholia, nostalgia childhood, 2, 35–36, 44, 47, 81, 82, 87–90, 92, 99n13, 100nn17, 20, 105, 107–11, 112, 124, 126, 133, 161, 162, 199, 202 collective, 10, 11, 18, 33–34, 43n6, 70, 82, 112 cultural, 167, 190, 193–205 and diaspora, (D. Kandiyoti), 185 family, 15, 36–37, 126–27, 161 haunting by, 108 historical, 106 and “home”, 127–130, 133, 142, 149, 156, 161, 161 of migration, 186 and photographs, 165 politization of or politics of memory, 123, 161 micro-politics of, 70 “postmemory” (M. Hirsch), 194, 195 “prosthetic” (T. Elsaesser), 35 reconstruction of, 15 sensorial or “body memory” 89, 99n17 site of, 16, 120 “skin memory”, 86 and trauma, 33–43; 59–78 Menéndez, Ana 6, 17, 149–69 Adios, Happy Homeland!, 149, 50, 165–67, 169 “The Shunting Trains Trace Iron Labyrinths”, 149 “Journey Back to the Seed (¿Qué Quieres, Vieja?)”, 167 In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, 149–50, 156, 169 “In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd”, 150–55 “In Her Mother’s House”, 159–62 “Story of a Parrot”, 155–56 “The Last Rescue”, 156–59 “The Perfect Fruit”, 156–58 Loving Che, 149–50, 159, 162–65, 169 The Last War, 150, 169 mental disorders, 28, 65, 164 mestizaje, 6, 56, 135, 137, 141. See also Anzaldúa, Gloria (“mestiza consciousness”) “postcolonial mestizaje” (R. Pérez-Torres), 6 Mexico, 7–8, 47, 48, 49, 51, 95, 133–34, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140–41, 142, 143, 145, 170, 208 Miami, 25, 31, 51, 52, 54, 150–55, 157, 159–61, 162–63, 167, 175–76 “Middle World” (B. Breytenbach), 173–175, 179, 180, 186, 187. See also border (borderlands), inbetweenness, liminality, Nepantla Mignolo, Walter, 6, 18, 20 Moaveni, Azadeh, 16, 104–5, 106–7, 111, 115 Lipstick Jihad, 16, 20, 45, 57, 104–5, 111–14, 117 mobility, 4, 11, 18, 81, 84, 90–92, 94–95, 96, 99n15, 192–93. See also arrivals, departures, immigrants, movement, travel, vaivén modernity, 2, 6, 105, 115, 155, 190 Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, 1, 9, 20 Mossadegh, Mohammad, 116n1 Motlagh, Amy, 107, 117

movement, 8, 16, 28, 90–91, 93, 99n15, 134, 136, 138, 140–43, 155, 173, 186, 190, 192, 198, 199. See also arrivals, departures, immigrants, mobility, travel, vaivén Munro, Martin, 42, 43

N N., José ángel, Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant 145, 146 Nafisi, Azar Reading Lolita in Tehran, 105, 117 narrative counter-narrative, 63 polyphonic, 9–10 “relocation”, 119 of return, 1–18 American versus post-colonial, 13–14 autobiographical, 5, 8–11, 15, 16, 17, 44–7, 58–78, 86–102, 103–117, 118–132 fictional, 5, 149–169, 170–188, 189–206 of self-discovery, 68 small or micro-narrative, 58, 121 Nasrabadi, Manijeh, 107, 117 nation meta-narrative about, 2, 4 nation formation, 4 nation-state,14, 17, 28, 136, 141 national culture, (H. Bhabha) 5, 13 nationalism Arab, 45 Hindu, 45 nationality, 54, 106, 109, 153 native (adj.), 48, 58–59, 61, 69, 153, 174 native/s (person), 88, 97, 155, 167 Nepantla, 16, 135, 139, 141. See also border (borderlands), in-between-ness, liminality, “Middle World” Nepantlera, 140 Nguyen, Bich Minh, 61–65, 68–74, 77 norteño music, 139 nostalgia, 2, 4, 11, 12, 15. See also añoranza, elsewhere (desire for) enyorança, melancholia and ethics, 11–12, 21 imperialist, 99n11 “politicized” (b. hooks), 123 “productive”, 11 “reflective” (S. Boym), 103, 105, 106, 115 restorative (S. Boym), 11, 15, 16, 123 Nyman, Jopi, 14, 20

O Obama, Barack, 58, 77 Dreams from my Father, 58, 77 Odysseus, 121

Odyssey, The, 1, 3, 121 Ong, Aihwa, 83, 90, 94, 100n21, 101 “oppositional consciusness” (C. Sandoval), 6, 19, 21, 142, 146 Ortiz Cofer, Judith, 162, 169 otherness (“others”), 5, 10–12, 49, 82, 108, 153–55, 173, 189–90, 196, 199

P paradigm shift (Kuhn), 135 passport, 38, 49, 54, 94–95, 100n21, 110 Patterson, Orlando, 26–27, 28, 43 Pérez, Emma, 16, 20, 135, 138–39, 141, 146 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 156, 169 Pérez Torres, Rafael, 6, 20–21 phantom limbs (E. Danticat), 6, 32–35, 36 photographs, 44, 47, 51, 52, 55, 62, 71, 75, 87, 89 92, 99n12, 127, 160, 162–64, 165 position (subject), 85, 98 positionality (S Hall), 123–24 postcolonial (the), 6, 12, 13–14, 101, 102, 119, 131, 167, 169 (post)colonial (S. Tabuenca), 19n7 “postcolonial mestizaje” (R. Pérez Torres), 6 postmodernity, 7, 94, 107, 119 literary imaginary, 119 Pratt, Mary Louise, 5, 21, 45, 57, 154, 169 Préval, René, 27 privilege, 15, 28, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 87, 98, 100n21 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), 63 Puerto Rico, 134, 162

Q quest, 1, 38–39, 41, 42, 95, 113, 121, 122, 164, 165, 174–77 quinceañeras, 139, 143, 145 Quintana, Alvina E., 5, 21

R reconciliation, 14, 17, 60, 61, 66, 70, 72, 90, 95, 119, 128 Haitian National Truth and Recon-ciliation Commission, 42–43 truth and reconciliation hearings, 38 recovery cultural 9, 15, 124, 129 refugee/s, 65, 74, 83, 96, 99n1, 100n27, 157, 171, 187 camps, 62, 86 from Vietnam (first-generation), 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65–68, 74–75, 83, 84–85, 99n1. See also Viet Kieu (First generation); Vitenamese Americans (first generation), Vietnamese Canadians literature/narratives, 85, 94. See also immigrants (literature)

paradigm, 98n2 Vietnamese first-generation, 61, 82 second wave (boat people), 66–68, 71, 82 religion, 2, 44, 45–46, 47, 50, 51, 52–53, 55, 56, 65, 192, 192, 203 Catholic, 47–48, 54, 202 Catholicism, 26, 41, 53 Islam, 46, 104, 105, 106, 114 Judaism, 45, 47–48, 50, 51, 52–54, 55, 56 Santería, 33 Vodou, 26, 33 Relph, Edward, 7, 21, 118, 120, 127, 130, 132 repatriation, 1, 54 return. See also narrative (of return) myth of, 120 rite of passage, 121 ritual(s), 46, 95, 100n20, 112, 143, 152–53, 193–94 “roots/routes” (J. Clifford), 1, 3, 4, 6, 16, 17, 18n1, 20, 81, 90, 92, 93, 96, 149, 166 Roth, Henry, 2, 21 Rowlandson, Mary, 1 Rushdie, Salman “Imaginary Homelands”, 86–87, 89, 102, 119, 132

S Safran, William E., 18, 21, 64, 77, 82–84, 98n3, 102 Said, Edward “Reflections on Exile”, 1, 4, 21, 48, 57, 58–59, 61, 77 Saigon, 60, 62–63, 71, 72 fall of, 61, 82, 84 Sandoval, Chela, 6, 19, 21, 142, 146 Scarry, Elaine, 29, 31, 36, 43 “schnorrer”, 49, 52 “Self in the flesh”, (N. Alarcón) 139 self-discovery, 68, 121, 123 silence, 3, 9, 11, 36, 62, 73–75, 92, 103–4, 144, 161, 162, 163, 202 Silliman, Jael, 55, 57 Jewish Portraits, Indian Frames, 45, 57 Silva, David Espaldas Mojadas 134 Singh, Amritjit, 9–10, 21 sitio y lengua (E. Pérez, place and language of origin), 138–39 slave, 26, 39–40, 177, 181 Haitian slave revolt, 26 slave trade, 26, 177 “social death” (O. Patterson), 6, 26–41 Sollors, Werner Beyond Ethnicity, 4, 21 South America, 133, 134, 184 space “locked in” territories or “black holes” (M. Castells), 28 “of belonging” (J.M. Fortier), 46, 51, 52, 56 phenomenological approach

(G. Bachelard), 99n9, 100 phenomenological approach (Y.F. Tuan), 7, 99n9, 102, 119–120, 126, 132 place (E. Relph), 7, 118–120, 121, 127, 130, 137 social (H. Lefebvre), 7, 150, 151, 169 Spain, 47–49, 151, 163, 166 Spanish, 19, 27, 48, 50, 133, 136, 137, 139, 153, 160, 174 Spivak, Gayatry “Postmarked Cacutta”, 87, 102 Stein, Gertrude, 149 storytelling, 29, 33, 34, 39, 40, 47, 53, 58, 65, 66, 81, 82, 88, 137, 142, 171, 172, 173, 175, 177–180, 181–185, 185–186, 186 Sturken, Marita Tangled Memories, 59, 63, 77 Su, John J. Ethics and Nostalgia, 12, 15, 21 subaltern, 60, 100n25 Subramanian, Sheerekha, 42, 43

T Tabuenca, Socorro, 19, 21 Tally, Robert T., 1–2, 21 Tan, Amy, 3, 21 Tehran, 45, 107, 108, 109, 113, 116n1 testimony, 10 testimonio, 135, 136, 137, 138, 146 Texas, 8, 133–34, 137–39, 140, 144, 145 Third World, 18, 28 Timothy, Dallen J. 3, 19 Tomlinson, John, 18, 21, 150, 169 “topography” (J.E. Malpas), 121, 130n1 torture, 27, 29, 31, 33–34, 35, 41, 124, 126, 178 tourism, 50 back-to-the-roots tourism, 84, 87 tourist, 49, 94, 97, 152–54, 161, 164, 173 tourist-spectator, 113 versus anthropologist, 15 translation, 13, 30, 37, 150, 204, 208 cultural, 120 transnational (the), 6, 12, 13, 14, 17, 28, 42, 70, 83, 86, 90–97, 122, 149, 170, 171, 173–175, 177, 185, 187, 188, 191, 195 “critical transnationalism”, 86, 94 “minor transnationalism” (F. Lionnet and S. Shih), 98, 100n25, 101 “transnational tales” (Vietnamese-American), 83, 86, 90 “transnationalism” (S. Torres-Saillant and R. Hernández), 174 trauma, 6, 12, 14, 15, 26, 30, 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 41, 47, 59, 60–64, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 105, 107, 108, 115, 116n3, 126, 156, 160, 171, 174, 177, 178, 180, 185–187, 194, 197 definition, 63, 65 physical, 29, 32, 33

“prosthetic”, (T. Elsaesser) 35 psychological, 29, 41, 60, 69, 70 role of narrating and listening in recovery, 29, 34, 36, 37–39, 58 theories 29, 31, 35, 60, 63, 65 ,67, 72, 73, 76, 77 travel, 3, 10, 28, 33, 36, 40, 47–49, 52, 53, 57, 72, 84, 87, 90, 91, 96, 101, 113, 134, 137, 140, 149, 150, 154, 157, 160, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 175, 193, 205 See also immigrants, mobility, movement, vaivén back-to-the-roots, 90 traveler, 3, 8, 95, 96, 130, 135 cosmopolitan, 81, 92, 97, 98, 100n24 freedom of, 49, 92, 94, 100n34, 110. See also passport “traveling cultures” (J. Clifford), 96–98 writing (book, narrative, travelogue), 3, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 19, 21, 44, 45 50, 86, 103, 118, 119, 154 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 40, 41, 171–72, 173, 177–78 truth-telling, 30–32, 38, 42–43, 58, 64, 73, 160–62, 180 Tuan, Yi Fu 7, 99n9, 102, 118, 120, 126, 132 Coming Home to China, 7, 21, 57, 44

U US government, 61 Clinton administration, 33–34 utopian, 17, 159–62, 189, 191, 203–4

V vaivén (comings and goings), 135, 138–141, 143 Vega, Bernardo, 2 verisimilitude, 62 Vertovec, Steven 70, 78 Vietnam War, 15, 58, 59, 61–65, 68, 69, 70–73, 75, 76, 81, 84–100 “boat people”, 66–68, 82, 102 communist takeover of, 61, 83 discourses on, 63 Vietnamese Americans Viet Kieu, 68, 81–102 1.5 generation, 63, 81, 82–84, 93–94, 96, 98, 99n6 cosmopolitanism of, 85, 93–100n18 diasporic consciousness of, 93, 95–96 documentaries by, 15, 58–78, 69, 81, 86, 87–89, 98 first-generation, 61, 72, 81, 82–84, 87, 93–94, 98, 99n6, 100 literature, 16, 61, 63–64, 65, 68–69, 71, 73, 74, 81, 85–86, 86–90, 94, 95, 99n7 transnational tales, 85–86 second-generation, 83–84, 93–94, 99n6 in the United States, 81, 82–85 Vietnamese Canadians, 84–85

W Walkowitz, Rebecca, 13, 21 Weil, Simone, 127, 132 World War II, 50, 126, 130, 193, 197